Anil Dash's analysis of Sam Altman's free speach essay - <AUTHOR> https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/941431220952584196.html <comment><USER2> I had a lot of issues with Sam Altman's post-

* He really doesn't seem to understand the difference between free speech and being free of consequences, and as a result he's in danger of suppressing free speech. He wants people to be able to say controversial things without there being blowback, but the only possible way to accomplish that is by suppressing the free speech of people who disagree. You're either for free speech- which includes the right to criticize ideas- or he's arguing that specific people's speech (the person with the "novel physics idea" for example) are more important than others.

* His example of China, one of the worst human rights violators who has been known for violently suppressing free speech, is just a continuation of that. He's happy because as a privileged person with money China is super excited to hear his ideas, but he's also ignoring the fact that China literally jails and kills people who speak out with ideas that their government doesn't like.

* He completely ignores the damage done by hate speech. Just completely ignores it. If you were to read this blog as is it seems like he thinks people being driven out of companies, schools, education programs, and development communities by bigotry and sexism were never going to contribute or that their losses aren't as important as the ideas being lost to people uncomfortable being called out for bigotry.

* The blog seems to put a higher value on innovation and corporations than it does people.

<comment><USER3> 1) Restriction of speech, as he put it, is not equal to the ability to criticize ideas.

"When we move from strenuous debate about ideas to casting the people behind the ideas as heretics, we gradually stop debate on all controversial ideas."

It's the ability to even discuss them without being branded a heretic that he desires, rather than a lack of criticism.

2) He's saying that the people he knows in China were more willing to hear about his ideas than the people he knows in SF. He did not mention anything about privilege, nor do I think it is fair to assume that the Chinese are only more willing to accept his ideas based on his money. Many people do that, not just the Chinese. He's mentioning (anecdotally) that the people he spoke with in China were more open-minded than the people of SF. Perhaps we should take it as a wakeup call rather than an indication of Altman's privilege.

3) Hate speech != "driven out of companies, schools, education programs, and development communities by bigotry and sexism". How can you equate what is strictly speech with that of hateful action?

4) Would you like to pick a quote as an example for why you might feel that way? The common refrain in this essay to me seems to be "we can't just call the person a heretic", which seems very focused on the individual rather than a theoretical corporation.

<comment><USER2> 1) I don't see people getting arrested for having ideas in the bay area. At worst they don't get funding, but that doesn't seem to be the topic here. Perhaps Sam needs to widen his social and professional circle a bit- there are 7.5 million people here, and I can't imagine I'm the only one who has found open minded ones. If anything he should be encouraging more diversity if he wants to bring in more ideas, not arguing for policies that will drive people away.

2) It is entirely anecdotal, and it completely skips over the _fact_ that China does not have free speech. You know those NFL protests that are happening here? In china that would get you three years in prison[1]. Being an American in China alone is enough to grant privileges that don't exist to the people born there. Shoppinglifting is an offense that carries a minimum sentence of three years, maximum of ten, and the American college students caught there were let go.[2] It's naive to think that his experience was typical in any way.

3) If speech didn't have consequences we wouldn't be having this discussion. If the "anti gay" physicist wasn't hurt by the words directed at him then he would just ignore them and keep doing his thing. If the founders working on life extension weren't upset at being told there are environmental consequences to this then maybe the blog post would never have been written.

If someone who is gay walks into a company and is told by another employee that they are deviants in the eyes of god then the gay person is likely to leave. If a woman is told to "go make us sandwiches", even in a joking way, she's not going to feel respected. Bigots who are given free reign drive away the minorities they target.

4) The simple fact that this blog did not discuss any of the consequences of the hate speech shows that he doesn't think they are legitimate. He argues that we need to be more lenient in allowing bigotry if it means that we also get more innovation.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/04/china- disrespe...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/04/china-disrespect- national-anthem-criminal-offence-xi-jinping) [2] [https://newsone.com/3757629/china-shoplifting-laws- liangelo-...](https://newsone.com/3757629/china-shoplifting-laws-liangelo- ball-arrested-punishment/)

<comment><USER4> I think getting arrested is only one way in which these consequences can occur. Remember, government is at least in theory a formalized reflection of social arrangements.

Think more about what it was like during McCarthyism. If you were accused of being Communist, you became an outcast. You would no longer get invitations to events. If you were applying for a job, it would suddenly be filled already. If you wanted to get coffee with a friend, they would suddenly be busy.

As a more recent example of this, look at what happened to Rachel Dolezal, the "trans-racial" woman who was born white and claimed she identifies as black. After the media fiasco, she couldn't get a job, and most recently I saw an article about her struggling to get by on food stamps, and about to be homeless. There was no government action against her, and yet, nobody would say she hasn't felt the consequences of what she did.

Note: I'm not suggesting that Dolezal and Communism are related, just using them as two separate examples to support the larger point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Disagree with Anil.

(Writing this with an expectation of backlash) (irony?)

Everyone expects the judgement of their peers for their controversial opinions, which is one reason why people tend to have like-minded friends (as much as possible). Or at least friends open to a discussion.

The issue is judgements on controversial opinions turn into all-too-public smears on a person's character and that character is conflated with (over-the- top) negativity, which misrepresents the original context (sliding). Naming any such example bears the risk of the same thing happening to yourself (you know what I mean).

Anil is guilty of it himself, calling Sam's position "actually dangerous". When in fact, that labeling is the exact thing Sam is arguing against. Perhaps Sam isn't dangerous, but just opinionated?

TLDR: Controversial opinions lead to ad hominem attacks that use conflation with extremely negative topics to attack even the possibility that the position is debatable.

</comment><comment><USER4> 'First, the rhetoric of some of the most wealthy & powerful people in the history of the world being "unable to say" things is ridiculous.'

I read this first line and already knew I disagreed with this essay. Speech is the one thing that can equalize rich and poor, and has the ability to evaporate decades of work and reputation.

I generally don't like much coming out of the Bay Area right now, and have an especial distate for YC's contributions to this mess, but I am impressed with Sam Altman's essay. He's going to get a lot of backlash for it, but I believe he is correct.

<comment><USER6> > Speech is the one thing that can equalize rich and poor, and has the ability > to evaporate decades of work and reputation.

I feel like this is a bit of a passive way of saying this.

If someone says something, _they said it_. It evaporates their reputation because _they did something_.

And when saying things, it's to communicate the idea to others. I don't really think that speech exists in a vacuum. If you know saying something to somebody could offend them, you're kinda signing up to the criticism.

It feels like a lot of the essay is trying to say "we should listen to other people with controversial opinions." We were doing this in another domain for a while, with sexism.

A lot of us have just nodded and grimaced when our coworkers would make "those comments". When we'd see the berating of female colleagues. Even the words already had such an obvious effect.

I'm not saying "ban bad speech", but I do think as society we should be reinforcing the fact that words _are_ important, especially in this political climate. And that people are responsible for what they say. And... you can always apologize and change! And the world will be better for it.

<comment><USER4> That's not entirely true. What if you get misquoted in a newspaper? By the time the newspaper prints the correction, the damage has already been done.

<comment><USER6> Sure, some damage might have been done. But this feels pretty orthogonal, more of a problem of newspaper interests or simply the difficulty of cutting down text into smaller pieces.

We all should be making sure we're hearing stuff properly. I don't think many of these things are _really_ about misunderstanding, but it has happened.

Inversely, just because the speaker says "I meant X, but I didn't mean for it to offend" doesn't completely absolve the person. The words have meanings, and if you want to share you ideas, it's important to do it properly (just like you should know how to drive before going out there with your car).

<comment><USER4> I was more using that as an example to separate speech from the person saying it.

In terms of speech that offends, we can only control what we say, not what people think about it, nor whether their thought is reasonable. Therefore, punishing someone for what they say because it offended someone seems pretty illogical, unless you can make a damned good case, based on context, that it was probably going to offend.

A simple way to resolve that question is to ask the person who said it, "Why did you say that?" If they have a response that is not "because I wanted to offend" that is also reasonable, then I'd suggest the onus falls at least equally on the person who claims offense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the heart of the issue Sam is trying to address is that in today's society you can excel at one field and yet be hindered from success in it because you make a generalized statement that the majority of society disagrees with, in a field completely unrelated to the one you participate in.

If a Nobel prize winning physicist speaks about the inferiority of gay people, he is not necessarily a "threat to their safety". You don't have to like him, you don't have to be friends with him -- hell I wouldn't. But he has a right to not be fired as a physics researcher, because he is good at it. If he was a student counselor you can bet he should be fired.

If he actively discriminates against a gay physics student should he be fired? Absolutely. But I don't think he should be fired for simply holding the opinion. But he would be in todays world.

That's the problem I have with the politics of today -- it's that people get fired or disregarded if they make even a statement that makes other people feel bad, and disaligns with the majority opinion.

<comment><USER8> Such a physicist would hold tenure and would not summarily be fired for simply holding that opinion. From a random school somewhere on the web:

> gross professional misconduct or serious failure of a faculty member to > discharge his or her obligations

<comment><USER9> Tim Hunt, a Nobel winning biochemist with tenure, was fired for making sexist comments. It certainly happens.

[https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/11/nobel- laur...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/11/nobel-laureate-sir- tim-hunt-resigns-trouble-with-girls-comments)

<comment><USER8> He actually resigned (rather quickly) but you have a point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think Altman is afraid of hearing criticism of his ideas. I think he objects to orthodoxy: political positions that are so sacred that people react with slurs and rhetoric instead of rational rebuttal when they are called into question.

Especially pernicious is the idea that even entertaining rational discussion on these topics is harmful. When some things are too sacred to even discuss rationally, we are really lost in our ability to discern the truth about the world.

<comment><USER11> Dash is equating rational argument with violence. On average, gay people are more creative. Is that hate speech? Obviously not. On average, gay men have more sex than straight men. Hate speech? On average, more sex is worse than less sex. Hate speech? Dash thinks he can draw the line where rational argument becomes unacceptable. It's his line but he gets to draw it for other people. This is not simply criticism. By equating a type of speech with violence, it implies legal consequences, whether those consequences are currently in place. It implies a physical enforcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Dash doesn't address the content of Altman's post.

Dash falsely equates the "lives" of gay people, with "disparaging things" about them.

Link is a wonderful example of exactly the type of conversation suppressing blowharding that the Bay Area is encumbered by.

<comment><USER13> Let's be honest: both the original post and this rebuttal are basically long form tweets, not intellectually convincing arguments. They are so vague that you can read almost whatever you want into them

<comment><USER12> I'll concede the rebuttal is literally a long form tweet.

<comment><USER14> Sorry to be pedantic, this reply hadn't appeared when I posted my response yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> hi-im-mi-ih Remember that a lead dev for Node was attacked not too long ago for discussing the potential downsides of CoC's.

[https://twitter.com/rvagg/status/887652116524707841](https://twitter.com/rvagg/status/887652116524707841) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073022)

This is the kind of thing Sam is talking about - we should be able to discuss things that are controversial without getting mobbed for it.

<comment><USER15> I agree with you and with the general thrust of Sam's essay. This kind of knee-jerk heretic-branding of anyone who questions the status quo is toxic. But Sam should've used something like the Node dev as an example, rather than the less salient one he provided:

>This is uncomfortable, but it's possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics. [1] Of course we can and should say that ideas are mistaken, but we can't just call the person a heretic. We need to debate the actual idea.

>[1] I am less worried that letting some people on the internet say things like "gay people are evil" is going to convince reasonable people that such a statement is true than I fear losing the opposite—we needed people to be free to say "gay people are ok" to make the progress we've made, even though it was not a generally acceptable thought several decades ago.

Of course Sam doesn't actually think it's acceptable for people to say these things (he's gay himself, but even if he weren't I'm sure he still wouldn't find it acceptable). But this leaves a lot of questions. If you're gay and in a work environment where your boss incessantly makes disparaging comments gay people and homosexuality - even if none of them are directed at you or anyone else there - you could still feel very uncomfortable and hurt. Does this boss really deserve a debate and an exchange of open ideas? If you tell them you disagree and they just continue mocking gay people, what are you supposed to say or do? In a scenario like this, it kind of makes sense to brand this boss as a heretic.

This kind of situation is far away from your example (discussing potential downsides of CoC). There's a spectrum of hurtful speech and ideas, and while most Americans would agree these things should be legal to say, many would also agree that the worst of them should result in ostracization (in a very extreme example: self-identifying as a neo-Nazi). So should we really "allow" people to make disparaging remarks about gay people beyond physically letting them say it? Do we also need to allow them into our social circles and workplaces?

<comment><USER5> > But Sam should've used something like the Node dev as an example, rather > than the less salient one he provided

In my opinion, Sam wanted to share this with the least possible likelihood that it would blowback (in a big way) on YC.

He did this by picking examples that would stimulate thought without a large possibility of himself being branded in some way regarding a controversial topic.

<comment><USER2> If he honestly thinks that writing a blog post about how we should allow people to make hateful comments about gays (and presumably other minorities) and not have it blow back on the companies he helps finance and run then he really isn't thinking clearly. This isn't something I say because I want it to be true, but something I've learned from direct experience.

Last year while hiring people I gave was going to give someone an offer but before I could they dropped out of the process. The reason they cited was that we got funding from Peter Thiel, who helped Trump get elected, and that this person could not work at a company that ultimately helped profit Theil.

There are always consequences to speech. If you advocate for allowing hate speech then people will assume that you won't take hate speech against them seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's amazing how quickly this goes from tolerating someone who says disparaging things about gay people, to emboldening those people, to actual violence to the conclusion that Sam's essay is DANGEROUS. It's the thinnest of arguments but this seems to be how a lot of people think about speech today. I find it to be very off kilter with reality, I don't think that anyone is preventing violence by branding someone a heretic, quite the opposite in fact.

<comment><USER5> > I don't think that anyone is preventing violence by branding someone a > heretic, quite the opposite in fact.

This is very interesting and I believe I tend to agree.

When a person is branded as a "heretic" for their ideas, doesn't it increase the division between those two groups? The winning group (the one doing the branding) begins to dehumanize and rage towards the losing group. The losing group has to find other ways to fight back or remain in insolent silence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anil makes the classic mistake of this cloistered coastal elite which is to paint everyone on the other side as murderers, rapists, Nazis and misogynists -- his own take on Hillary's "basket of deplorables." If the world was everything Anil thinks it is then he would be right: we would be best off limiting speech because everyone is a violent maniac just waiting to be activated.

In reality however, racist murderers rapists and Nazis are a minority, and the majority of people who hold views in opposition to Anil's are not criminals. They're people who support same-sex marriage but don't want any gays living on their block. They're people who don't go to Nazi rallies (yet) but think it's dangerous that no one's talking about how most crime is committed by blacks.

The quickest way to turn these people into real extremists is to bar them from public discourse. Because they value their opinions as much as you value yours, and they're not going to stop talking about these things -- if they're not allowed to discuss their ideas in public, _they 're going to discuss them with a Nazi instead,_ which will lead to their radicalization.

When they're part of the public sphere you have the opportunity to engage them, entertain their ideas, present counterpoints, and generally treat them like a human being with whom you merely have differences of opinion -- this is the path to changing hearts and minds, or at least getting them to peacefully coexist.

When they're not their speech goes underground into an echo chamber and being cut off from the rest of society really does foment extremism.

Unless Anil plans on running for governor of CA and seceding from the Union, he _needs_ their hearts and minds -- otherwise they'll keep on voting for guys like Trump, who's President in no small part merely because he was willing to tell sanctimonious guys like Anil to go f*ck themselves.

One of the original long reads on this matter is Federalist No. 10 and it's just as relevant today.

</comment><comment><USER18> Isn't Altman's argument ultimately about free speech? Surely my right to criticize Altman or Dash is the point Altman is making, and which Dash is exercising in his rebuttal?

<comment><USER19> Altman's original essay is about how there is too much criticism of ideas in San Francisco right now. That people are saying things and then having other people mock them, or complain about them, so much that they are going silent.

The reason that his essay sucked was that this isn't about free speech. Free speech protects you from the government restricting you from saying something, and he never once cites anything about an American government[1], it's always complaints from other regular old people. Other people judging you and finding you an asshole[2] is totally consistent with free speech.

If someone says something bad about gay people (or women, or black people, or...), then by all means make them feel bad for saying something like that. Try to make sure that they never say something like that again, because they are so socially embarrassed and isolated. One of the lessons I've learned over the past two years is that people feel emboldened when they hear other people say something bad about some minority, and so if you make a big deal about one person doing it, you prevent other people from even trying to say something similar.

1: Other than starting out in China, where the government actually _does_ limit your ability to say things, and does not have free speech.

2: Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/1357/](https://xkcd.com/1357/)

<comment><USER20> Yes, sigh, there is a constitutional right to freedom of speech. That is not the only meaning of freedom of speech. "Try to make sure that they never say something like that again." Do you agree that this would restrict that person's freedom of speech? Again, we're not talking about whether First Amendment rights are being violated. We're talking about whether you are restricting that person's freedom of speech.

If you're OK with your self-appointed right to restrict others' freedom of speech, then you also have to be OK with _me_ suppressing _your_ speech. And you'd better believe that _this will be speech you care about_. You have to be OK with the 1950s version of me ostracizing you for saying the positive things you believe about the protected groups you enumerate in your post.

It does you no good to claim that you're one of the good guys. Freedom of speech means _everyone_ is a good guy when it comes to expression of ideas. You don't get to pick which speech is free.

Do you honestly want to live in a society where ideas you disagree with are withheld from expression because those who hold them are "so socially embarrassed and isolated"? Is that _really_ your idea of a free society? Again, assume that the person being ostracized is _you_ because of what you believe today.

If you do want a genuinely free society, don't ostracize the bigots. Instead, respect them. Debate them. Change their minds if you're right. Nobody is saying you have to have them over for dinner or be friends; ignoring them is perfectly fine, as well. The price -- and in the long term the benefit -- of a free society is that people get to live normal, ordinary lives even if they have despicable, reprehensible, _even dangerous_ beliefs.

<comment><USER19> The way that society is set up, of course most of the pressure is on minorities to be silent and just take abuse. That's why all of the "MeToo" movement was pent-up and then just now exploded, because so many women were afraid of saying something for fear of the response for so long. That is what is happening every single day, and has for millennia. What is happening now, for the first time in US History, is that the dominant group (meaning, in this particular case, white men who are good with computers and very well off) have to worry about what members of the non-dominant group thinks of them.

As for your ideas on how to win over bigots, I've lived my entire life surrounded by them, and I have to say that respecting them does not work. Debating them and treating them as equals just encourages others that it's all okay. Forcing them to hide in the darkness does work, because it makes them less likely to express their ideas at other times, when you aren't around, and other people will then hear it and be more likely to say it themselves.

Bigotry is a communicable disease.

<comment><USER20> Do you see the nearly perfect asymmetry between the first two paragraphs in your reply?

Why is it that Paragraph 1's suppression leads to an explosion of progress, but Paragraph 2's suppression is the only way to exterminate ideas you don't like?

<comment><USER19> P1 is about suppression that has worked, very well, for pretty much all of human history. It is only losing a little bit of its effectiveness now.

Which is why I'm so sure that P2 is an effective strategy- because I've observed how well it works.

<comment><USER20> I think you overestimate your understanding of human history. I am especially sure of this because you think something just changed.

I don't think you want a fairer game. You just want to win the current one.

Best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For me, the example of a physicist who dislikes gay people is particularly worrying, because it involves setting very arbitrary lines in the sand of what is acceptable and what is not. What if it was a biologist that dislikes gay people? Or a doctor? Or, say, the person in control of the CDC, as happened today? Those lines, moved once, are as good as gone.

What if Trump was the same Muslim-hating, gay-hating person he is, but also a brilliant physicist? Would he than be OK in Sam's book?

<comment><USER9> Do you have a link for the CDC thing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats- no...](https://medium.com/message/the-tech-diversity-story-thats-not-being- told-9a36fb40530f)

I believe Anil Dash is propagating hate speech when he accuses Asian men as a group of being responsible/complicit in the exclusion of minorities and women from tech.

There are many dangerous stereotypes about Asians and he promotes harmful stereotypes. An Indian man was even murdered in Kansas because of Asian stereotypes.

Because of his embracing of hate speech, I urge that he either step down as CEO of FogCreek or he be fired. We cannot tolerate such hate speech.

</comment><comment><USER23> Quoting Anil Dash's tweet:

 _" Maybe not today, but sometime we're gonna have that conversation about Christian supremacy in this country, too."_

[https://twitter.com/anildash/status/928800919810117632](https://twitter.com/anildash/status/928800919810117632)

Kind of reminds me of a drunk in the neighborhood where I grew up who always wanted to have "that conversation" about Jewish control of the banking system.

Anil Dash is the CEO of Fog Creek Software, BTW.

</comment><comment><USER24> It seems weird to turn over responsibility for policing hate speech and intolerance to VCs. They are not public servants by any stretch of the imagination.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anil Dash thinks that "Trumpists" support terrorist violence against Muslims:

[https://twitter.com/anildash/status/942040324645572609](https://twitter.com/anildash/status/942040324645572609)

As a Trump supporter, I feel that Anil Dash has placed my life in danger.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's interesting that this post was flagged by the mods but Sam's original essay was not.

<comment><USER25> This post wasn't touched by moderators, and it also wasn't flagged (that has a specific meaning on Hacker News). What makes you think that it was?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is ironic that we are complaining about how polarized our discourse has become, when we created the social networks and the dopamine-drip feedback loops that genrate mutually disjoint echo chambers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Anil Dash's main point appears to be that allowing hate speech will embolden racists/bigots to commit violence against minorities.

My question to him is: what if a proper study was done and it found that suppression of hate speech actually emboldened racists and bigots to commit more violence against minorities? Would he advocate then Altman's proposal?

It appears that his entire thesis is based on his own conjecture. I would love to know if there are any studies that support his theory.

<comment><USER28> There are plenty of natural experiments showing how hate speech leads to violence.

Look up the history of the Rwanda genocide for one of the clearest studies.

<comment><USER12> hmmm... wikipedia doesn't support your claim, tho [1].

it seems like a lot of folks were encouraged to go out and kill, given machetes and told to kill, and in the end there's one study that suggests 10% of the violence could be attributed to the radio station (which was created to broadcast racist propaganda and obscene jokes).

specifically, I take issue with the notion that "hate speech" is a meaningful descriptor of a way of talking. racism, bigotry, etc... are more specific.

tangentially, I did find this:

> On March 20, 2017, Pope Francis acknowledged that while some Catholic nuns > and priests in the country were killed during the genocide, others were > complicit with it and took part in preparing and executing the genocide.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Preparation_f...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide#Preparation_for_genocide)

<comment><USER28> _one study that suggests 10% of the violence could be attributed to the radio station_

I'm not sure what you are expecting here. Social sciences aren't clean, you can't go back in time and setup control groups etc, and being able to clearly show a causal link like that is pretty decisive.

Put it another way: 10% of the violence is at least 60,000 deaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _If SpaceX started in San Francisco in 2017, I assume they would have been attacked for focusing on problems of the 1%, or for doing something the government had already decided was too hard._ \-- from Sam Altman's essay.

First, SpaceX _wasn 't_ founded in SF because SF would have been a lousy place for it to start. It was founded in El Segundo because of the talent base there working for companies like TRW.

Second, if the success or failure of SpaceX or any other company is dependent on the mean things people say when checking their iPhones at morning coffee then that's more a judgment of the weak backbone of the startup founders + employees. Blow it off and get back to work. I personally think the vast majority of BitCoin and Ethereum work ranges from crap to fraud. I doubt that anyone cares about that opinion and it's such an important opinion.

Anil is wrong. That essay wasn't dangerous. It was drivel. If what you do has merit it will come out regardless of what people say. This isn't high school.

</comment><comment><USER29> We're thinkers and makers. We move fast and break things.

We break laws and social conventions to disrupt entire industries.

We dictate how billions of people interact and transact.

But don't dare criticize us, we're so fragile we can't take it.

<comment> nv-vn It's not about criticism. It's about harassment and smear campaigns. The thing is, most people want criticism because they want to have conversations. Sama is saying that when you have a controversial opinion, you shouldn't feel so threatened and alienated from society that you must relocate. I'm sure he'd like to hear true arguments against his positions, but that's different than labeling him as evil and trying to enrage people so that he can no longer be respected at all.

<comment><USER30> What if your "controversial opinion" harasses and alienates other people? According to his logic that pain is collateral damage. And any innovation from the people who would have been productive except for that collateral alienation / harassment is now lost -- and this is a story as old as time in the valley particularly from women and PoC.

But his writing indicates that he's only thought from the perspective of some innovator he's perceived to have been unfairly branded a heretic.

<comment> hi-im-mi-ih > What if your "controversial opinion" harasses and alienates other people?

So then, as the victim, are you cleared to harass and smear whoever you please?

> he's only thought from the perspective of some innovator he's perceived to > have been unfairly branded a heretic

Ah, so his identity as a wealthy man invalidates his opinion, and his writing should be disregarded?

<comment><USER30> > So then, as the victim, are you cleared to harass and smear whoever you > please?

No, and that was not any part of what I wrote.

However as a victim you ARE entitled to share your story. You are entitled to tell people "hey this person did something bad and it hurt me." And people can choose to respond to that. That's OK.

> Ah, so his identity as a wealthy man invalidates his opinion, and his > writing should be disregarded?

Nowhere did I mention wealth or that it would invalidate his opinion. The quoted sentence merely indicates that the argument he made failed to consider other sides and nuances.

<comment> hi-im-mi-ih > What if your "controversial opinion" harasses and alienates other people?

> as a victim you ARE entitled to share your story. You are entitled to tell > people "hey this person did something bad and it hurt me."

An employee at a SV company writes on a forum that he's not a fan of diversity quotas and equity. Then, someone reads it, and claims that they feel harassed and alienated by that quote. They tweet an angry message accompanied by a screenshot of the forum post. Then, a twitter mob forms, calling the employee a Nazi. He's conflated with real racism now, though he originally was talking about diversity quotas and equity. Because his language was "harmful", the victims have their justification; by any means necessary they must remove this hateful Nazi.

The employee gets fired for PR reasons. Other employees stay away from those topics, self-silencing for fear of retaliation like the 1st employee received. Ideas are stifled; democracy is weakened.

Can you see how your chain of logic leads to this?

<comment><USER9> The part that bothers and even scares me is that people (perhaps OP) do see how their chain of logic follows through your example. But they agree with and don't find it morally wrong.

It's like there's this bro-Catholicism where everyone has original sin of racism or whatnot and must be punished through ex-communication. And the whole moral system is understood and agreed to.

I only hope that some sort of racism/redeemer emerges who can wash away the sins of bigotry and allow the excommunicated to no longer cause racism and be allowed to work again within society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Unfortunately, I am so afraid of the professional and social repercussions of sharing my opinions, that I've decided not to express an opinion about Sam's essay. I hope this reckless act on non-expression doesn't come back to haunt me.

<comment><USER5> So many who agree with you will stay silent.

<comment><USER31> Maybe the best response is not to stay silent, but rather to craft a non- opinion that looks like an opinion of agreement no matter who comes across it. But maybe not.

<comment><USER9> You have to walk a fine line and post some material, but not offensive. No response at all can be judged poorly. I've been in multiple situations where "silence = supporting the perp" so statements must be made.

If you're completely off the grid it can be difficult to get jobs in tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Wow, I just checked out Dash's twitter feed, and he has a deranged hatred for Trump supporters. I'm going to be calling Fog Creek Monday morning to find out if the company has as low an opinion of me as he obviously does.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a thought experiment: If someone makes a disparaging remark about Christians, as a monolithic group, it the workplace, should they be fired for it?

</comment><comment><USER32> Sam Altman was headed in the right direction but his point is completely malformed.

He shouldn't have used the term "Political Correctness." He also shouldn't have provided the examples he used because they distracted from what he was trying to say.

I am sad that he took an opportunity to have this conversation (finally) and gave the people who are actually ruining Silicon Valley more ammunition to push their agenda.

What Sam is talking about is the insane level of unidirectional groupthink that has invaded Silicon Valley and turned everyone against one another under the guise of protecting minorities and other victims.

Proponents of this approach - which, frankly, overwhelmingly demonizes and targets white men - will point to the endless list of infractions that keep surfacing in the media.

They have a great point. There is abundant evidence that minorities and women are being unfairly treated in Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, the constant warring against this unfairness has gutted Silicon Valley and now no one trusts one another. Everyone looks at white people as the enemy and the level of discourse has become so toxic that everyone is fleeing the state.

I have experienced this myself in interacting with my Bay Area colleagues. I feel that every word I say is being policed for content, that I have to walk on eggshells constantly with certain people or risk getting drawn and quartered on Twitter the next day.

So Liberals can have this version of safety. People focused on building things aren't willing to live in a cultural police state.

The biggest problem in attempting to argue against this trend is that it is an argument of degree. These are the hardest Arguments to have because your opppnent automatically rounds everything up to the "nearest Hitler."

Example:

You: Hey we shouldn't focus so much attention on gender diversity.

Them: you hate women.

You: Maybe your theories on diversity and privilege re not entirely true or accurate.

Them: You hate minorities.

You: Maybe we shouldn't excommunicate this person because he tried to hit on someone at a company party while drunk, men do stupid things and are motivated by sex genetically.

Them: You hate women. Don't give bad men a pass, you are enabling rape culture.

You: I am really sick of having 80% of conferences focus exclusively on diversity topics, I can't stand being lectured to constantly.

Them:You are Hitler.

So I don't see a resolution. It is impossible to push back on what has happened to Silicon Valley's culture without being labeled a bigot.

Arguments of degree are the hardest to have, and at this point I think only a severe economic downturn and reset is going to fix it.

The culture of the Bay Area is dead, it was caused by having the culture of our educational institutes teach these ways of viewing the world.

I have no hope that will change. We are living in the most privileged country in the world but we have taught all our kids that they are oppressed. It's a lie.

</comment><comment><USER33> Speach?

<comment><USER34> There's a typo in the title, in case anyone is confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's the same old nonsense, with people conflating their right to expression with their right to expression free from judgement, or censure. The latter has never and will never exist at the level of billions of different people.

<comment><USER36> The whole point is to judge the ideas presented not just attack the person and say "you're a ___ist and I'm going to do everything I can to ruin your life because I feel morally superior"</comment></comment>


Student Debt Payback Far Worse Than Believed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/student-debt-payback-far-worse-than-believed-1484777880?mod=e2fb <comment><USER2> I never went to college, I'm too dumb, poor, and undisciplined, but whenever I would visit friends at UCI, UCLA, UCR, etc, I would often be shocked at how nice many of the housing and general facilities were. Even the dorms, which I had always imagined as being run down were actually very pleasant. Some of the common facilities were down right luxurious, I imagine some high end resorts would be jealous.

I certainly don't think students should be living and studying in squalor or unsafe conditions but I wonder how much of the increased costs in education are a result of the kind of spending that goes into some of these facilities. Have universities, particularly public universities, always spent this lavishly on their campuses or is this a more recent thing?

And have any studies been done on how much of the increased costs are due to increased administration numbers and nicer buildings?

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I work for a large and pretty prestigious University that has been undergoing major work in the last decade to update facilities and add buildings.

Almost all of the building budget has been paid for through our endowment and donations from wealthy families so all the building activity hasn't really touched our bottom line at all. However, year after year the state has cut our funding which has directly led to the rise in tuition. The University already runs as lean as possible with staff-our total compensation is a joke (even factoring in generous retirement bonuses) because of this many years long death by a thousand cuts that the federal and state government has pushed on us. EVERYONE has to justify their jobs every year-and this includes faculty. If a faculty member isn't publishing, teaching, and doing community outreach on behalf of the University they won't be getting tenured.

<comment><USER4> These endowments and donations might be covering the capitol costs of all this building, but are they also funding operational and maintenance costs?

Also, that money would, in theory, be available for scholarships or other programs if it wasn't being wasted on unnecessary things.

<comment><USER3> These buildings are replacing elderly buildings/adding capacity so we can serve more students. So the operation/maintenance costs should fall dramatically for the buildings that are being replaced, and new revenue from more students pay for the new buildings maintenance/operations.

<comment><USER4> But if the building is much 'fancier' than needed, it becomes a lot more to maintain than a simpler design/finish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't surprise me at all. I'm not in the US, but the picture I get from abroad is that Americans are pushed to go to college, without really making sure that this is actually what they want to do or is in their best interests. And once they get to school, many will party and play video games instead of studying, ending up either dropping out or with a low GPA and a general degree of no real use. Neither of these is going to help the college-goer get a job that helps them repay their debts.

I remember reading shortly after the start of the Great Recession how student debt was going to be the next big ball to drop. I wonder how far we are from that.

<comment><USER6> In the U.S. it is mostly assumed that students go straight to college, if that is an option. I think it's very shortsighted.

Four-year colleges are far to expensive to use it to figure out what you want to do. I think it would be much more valuable to try and find internships/shadowing opportunities with different businesses and people. That's what I would do, if I were going to do everything again.

For those who do want to go straight to college, taking random classes at a community college is the right way to go. Typography, Geology, Pre-law—use those classes to get an idea for what you want to study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is going to be a problem. Student debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, debtors simply garnish wages.

Terrible things will happen with a young overburdened workforce slaving away for their debt. Politicians are already trying to figure out how to squeeze more social security taxes out of them.

This is bad for the economy, likely to cause extreme class warfare and social upheaval.

<comment><USER8> Actually, as long as they don't revolt, it's _great_ for the economy. (It's unethical to dupe a whole generation into indentured servitude ... but great for the economy).

These people will have to work. No sabbaticals to find themselves, or time off to spend with a newborn. They'll have to put up with every pointy haired boss and dysfunctional workplace they encounter (at least until they can find another job).

Every day of their lives will boost the GDP. (But it sure sucks for them that their culture didn't steer them down a smarter road when they were 18 and didn't know better).

<comment><USER9> It's not that great for the economy.

Economies go great when people are spending money. If a large part of your discretionary income goes to paying off student loans instead of spending on other things, and you put off buying a house or having children due to financial insecurity caused by student loans, then the economy suffers.

<comment><USER10> Your comment is full of assertions, but not evidence or explanation.

My own assertions:

(1) GDP measures production. If debtors are incentived to produce more, GDP rises.

(2) The spending of debtors doesn't fall. It is just directed toward different sectors (education and financial products instead of housing, etc.).

(3) Every dollar lost by a debtor is a dollar earned by a creditor. These dollars don't disappear from the system. And even if creditors tend to churn money less than debtors, inflation targeting by the Fed should fully counter any changes in the aggregate velocity of money.

Now, it's possible you're right and I'm wrong. But I think it takes a much more sophisticated (and justified) argument than what you are asserting.

<comment><USER11> I agree that a sophisticated argument would take longer.

Regarding (3): The money does not disappear, but what is done with it? Already excess money in the hands of the 1% is just going into real estate, the stock market and stupid VC companies. All this is not particularly good for the real economy.

<comment><USER10> FYI, this is a fallacy. Money cannot "go into" an asset, in aggregate. Every buyer is always matched with a seller. For example, I have heard people say that in the crash of 2008 there was more selling of stock than buying of stock. But that would have been impossible. Each time a dollar was collected from selling a stock, there was a dollar spent buying that stock. They exactly equal. Money cannot go into assets, in aggregate.

This is of course different from personal experience, where exchanges are essentially one-sided, not two-sided. An individual can exchange money for property. But a closed economy cannot.

<comment><USER12> True. But that only describe the private actors in an economy. In the same way that money come from the state it can disappear there. The state can decide that "running deficits" is bad and start to destroy money running a surplus, frequently, when what you need is the opposite, like currently in the Euro- zone.

<comment><USER10> Running a budget surplus doesn't mean that money is destroyed. Also, the claim that the Euro-zone needs deficits is a highly contentious point, and not at all obvious or a consensus. Asserting it rather than arguing it does a disservice to the subtleties.

<comment><USER12> "Running a budget surplus doesn't mean that money is destroyed."

What it means, then?

<comment><USER10> It means the government takes in more money than it spends.

Depending on the policy of the Fed (or other issuer of fiat currency), the money supply may be increasing or decreasing at the same time.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, you are right. I forgot that the central bank in the States is not part of 'the government'.

The 'other issue of fiat currency' sounds mysterious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _The new analysis shows that at more than 1,000 colleges and trade schools, or about a quarter of the total, at least half the students had defaulted or failed to pay down at least $1 on their debt within seven years._

I think this might be a matter of framing -- "failed to pay down at least $1 on their debt" might include students with a deferment who are planning on having the debt forgiven. That is, for better or worse, public policy of the United States; it seems weird to conflate that with default.

For example, if you have a Perkins Loan, you can defer during a period of service at any employer where 10+ years would get you loan forgiveness. That list is... rather expansive?

[https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness- cancell...](https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness- cancellation/public-service)

Would I expect people graduating from e.g. a teaching college to largely make principle-decreasing loan payments given that this is our policy? No, I would not; it would require that they receive terrible financial advice.

<comment><USER14> In order to qualify for those deferals you still need to pay 10% of your income. This means factually that all of those people cannot cover their interest with 10% of their income. In my opinion, that should be considered a loan in default.

They can get out from under the loan in 10 years, we still have to pay for it.

It is failed policy to allow college to get to expensive due to inflation of prices through loose lending. IMO, that is the real bubble.

<comment><USER15> It's 10% of discretionary income, which is the amount that excess 150% of the federal poverty level. Nonetheless, the law also allows for hardship forbearances that allow people to stop paying without defaulting. Personally, I think the law is a backdoor subsidy done in the worst way. It increases stress on families who can't afford the tuition for 20 years to give a subsidy to the university. It incentivizes high tuition and keeping students on the treadmill, with no concern for quality. I don't particularly mind if tax money helps pay for an esoteric major, but I expect it to produce a capable scholar in that field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a technical programming error."

I would love to get the story behind this. The cynic in me wants to say it was an Excel screw-up.

<comment><USER8> Probably an Access database that was used waaay beyond when it should have been put out to pasture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finally paying off loans this year, I really feel sorry for anyone who didn't land a good paying job right after school.

<comment><USER17> That's great.

The school I was going to closed the new branch I was going to after one quarter. They paid for most of that, and offered a tuition-free ride at the main campus across the country. Suddenly my ~$100,000 college bill was about $25,000. Graduated 2009, fully repaid December 2014.

<comment><USER16> I'm jealous!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's always the option of sucide - pretty tragic, but dept ammounts to all kinds of additional pressures.

<comment><USER19> That won't work. The majority of student loans are taken out with a parent or a relative as co-signers. So if you die, your co-signer will be responsible to pay off the loan. It will not be forgiven.

The correct way to do this is to first consolidate your loan under your own name, so your parent, loved ones, or whomever the co-signer won't be ones trapped with the debt.

However, in order to place the loan under your own name, you'd have to first make consecutive payments to show you are able to pay off the loan w/o the co- signer. This means you'd need to have a job with steady income first; something difficult to do for the debt-laden grads in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really dont understand a society forcing 18 year olds to sit in classrooms for 4 years at 6 figure cost for a 50/50 shot at a 5 figure job. Theres gotta be a better system.

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/changelog/](https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/changelog/)

"After identifying an error in the code that generates repayment rates, the Department fixed the error and recalculated all repayment rates and replaced the previously published repayment rate data values with revised values. The error was a technical one in the coding that caused undercounting of some borrowers who had not reduced their balances, and therefore inflated repayment rates for almost all schools. This revision includes all repayment rate data values in all of the merged data files and all versions of repayment rates including repayment rates for each repayment rate cohort, the 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-year repayment rates, and all repayment rates disaggregated by demographic category (e.g. first-generation status, gender, etc.). The relative difference—that is, whether schools fall above, about, or below average— is modest; over 90 percent of institutions on the College Scorecard tool do not change categories from the previously published to the new rates. However, in some cases, the nominal differences are significant."

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash A couple reforms I think would genuinely fix this system:

1: Cap interest rates, especially for private loans. Education pays itself back several times over to society when people have good jobs and disposable income.

2: Federal student loans should not be serviced by private corporations. Way too many redundant services add unnecessary cost and nobody in society benefits from this system but the loan companies. If I have a federal loan I should pay the federal government. Simple as that.

3: Expand the earned income tax credit to subsidize apprenticeships. Whether you're a welder or a programmer, it would be a lot easier for your employer to get a wage subsidy and train you into the role, instead of gambling on each prospective employee to be "the best" without them leaving in a few years to a higher paying job so they can pay off their student loans.

My only concern is the people like me who have loans - not too much but a lot - who are capable of paying them back and see those who got useless degrees with 6 figure debt being bailed out. What will the reaction be? If the Obama Administration's history with Wall St is any indication, it won't be pretty.

</comment><comment><USER22> I really do not understand what this fuss is all about.

I started working as a software engineer back in 2001. It was a no-brainer to steer to higher-paying areas (from Perl to Java, and then to software engineering in banking, then to quant finance). I didn't get my diploma until 2014 (when I thought it would be a good idea to eventually get a PhD).

For all these years and career steering, I've been asked about my degree _once_. When applying at a position in a huge telecom company, not even my first (or second) choice. The rest of employers were happily ignoring the lack of degree.

Ironically, I was never good in managing personal finances. However, if someone told me back when I was 18 that I had to spend tens of thousands dollars to get my degree, only to get zero work experience and start with a junior position, repaying my debt for many years — I would have laughed in their faces.

<comment><USER23> Not to be a jerk, but I have trouble understanding how someone obviously intelligent can make such an oblivious statement. To be a successful self- taught software engineer and quant you likely have a IQ a couple standard deviations above average and work in one of the few fields where someone can succeed through intelligence and hard work with little need for credentials.

"Quit school and become software engineer" is good advice for probably about 1-3% of the population. Granted the alternative shouldn't be dropping $200k on a humanities degree, but what is your "no brainer" solution for everyone else? A degree has long been a pathway to the middle class / white collar work.

<comment><USER24> Trades? I'm a self-taught programmer who started getting paid at "market rate" for mid-level dev a year before my colleagues graduated. For me coding is pretty much a "trade" and boot camps are like "mass apprenticeships".

I'd imagine other trades have similar avenues of employment as well. Maybe if we stop trying to convince people that a 4 year college is the only prestigious career path (even 2 years of community college + 2 years of a 4 year gets a stink eye sometimes!) they'll stop trying to force themselves into inescapable debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Besides the initial cost of tuition,books,room and board, etc.,the money borrowed has to be paid back eventually. No matter how nice thw college campuses are,I feel for those, like myself, who were taught to get an education, then start a career and life won't be hard. However, I never saw a future of working not only without using my degrees costing into six figures, but working a job that only requires a high school diploma, pays more than the few job placements I had that required a degree and still having to pay back a debt that I am not using and that is putting a strain on my income/finances. GOING TO COLLEGE WAS THE WORSE DECISION I EVER MADE!

</comment><comment><USER26> great, now that we've identified the problem, let's get some robust public spending on loan forgiveness in order to stimulate the economy be removing a substantial debt burden from people who are in their prime earning years.

this isn't rocket science. people keep more money after their essential bills = people spending more money

the alternative is that we let this debt continue until the students eventually riot or kill themselves-- to be clear, i believe this is the most likely outcome

<comment><USER27> I'd feel a bit cheated. I really wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon or U. of Illinois, but I didn't because it was too expensive, so I went to U. of Arizona.

If the government gives a big subsidy to people who made what I consider to be a serious financial mistake by buying an outrageously overpriced luxury good, why don't I get a subsidy too? I'm left with no debt, but also no outrageously overpriced luxury.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm an advocate for simplifying and flattening the tax code, but with what we've got would it make sense for some sort tax insensitives? Like funds to repay student loans could be tax free like 401k contributions or maybe employers could get a tax break for helping to repay the loans. Gosh, assuming this stuff doesn't already exist.

<comment><USER17> Interest on student loans is tax deductible. Can't say the same for the loan principal.

[https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc456.html](https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc456.html)

<comment><USER16> Tax deductible, until a certain tax bracket. There definitely became a point where I no longer received deductions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Atleast for Software Engineers/ CS Majors...what was your out of school loan? (I'm curious - I'm a 2016 SE grad from Canada, and it cost me ~70k total - which includes tuition, dorms etc.).

I didn't go to UW or UofT, but I'm sure their total cost is ± 30k at most.

So I'm just curious how students manage to have loans of around 35k/yr.

</comment><comment><USER30> Yeah, no shit. Who at the WSJ actually believed that students were by and large capable of paying back enormous student loans on time?

<comment><USER31> Implicitly, everyone with a pension fund.

<comment><USER32> You misspelled "the taxpayers". Student loans are almost exclusively federal affairs these days.

As this WSJ piece from December on the matter of the GAO estimating $108 billion in writedowns (probably a low figure, as they admit their accounting on the matter is crap) puts it:

"To help pay for ObamaCare, Democrats simultaneously federalized the student loan market and projected fictitious savings, all while adding more than $1.2 trillion to the federal balance sheet... then cited the government "savings" to peddle the fallacy that the feds make money off student loans—a pretext they then used to sweeten debt forgiveness plans that have helped keep default rates artificially low."

[http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-giant-student-loan- con-14...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-giant-student-loan- con-1480640259)

<comment><USER15> Things may be changing, but the recovery rates on defaulted student loans used to be 120%, meaning that the government was collecting an additional 20¢ on each dollar in default. This is in comparison to programs like SBA that have recovery rates around 50%. When you factor in an already high interest rate, this state of affairs is profitable.

<comment><USER33> Do you have a source for that? A 120% recovery on defaulted loans seems insane.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure what year I read that, or what article it was in, but after some cursory searching, in 2014, the recovery rate was 103-111%. Recovery rates are much higher in student loans because they cannot be discharged. So 120% is certainly not out of the question some years.

[https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget14/justifica...](https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget14/justifications/s-loansoverview.pdf)

In FY 2016: 100-112% [https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget16/justifica...](https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/budget16/justifications/r-sloverview.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Could early man only see three colors? - <AUTHOR> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/449/could-early-man-only-see-three-colors

<comment><USER2> Anyone who has studied a non-European language will be familiar with this concept. Color names is strongly linked to culture. I'm Cambodian and the colors "green" and "blue" are the exact same word. Context decides which hue one actually means, for example a blue sky versus a green apple. Japanese also has a similar conundrum with blue and green.

When a foreign color is introduced, often times the physical object most associated with that color is used as the color word. Purple in Cambodian is the fruit "plum", and pink translates to literally "pig color". In Japanese, pink is literally "peach color". Even in English there is an example of this phenomenon. Which came first? The color orange or the discovery fruit orange?

The title of the article is a misnomer. Other cultures see colors just fine. They just don't have a name for it.

<comment><USER3> "Which came first? The color orange or the discovery fruit orange?"

It seems the fruit came first, as it is mentioned in documents three centuries before the color. The old English name for the color is "geoluhread" (yellow- red).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(word)>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wadda ya mean thousands of years ago? I thought as recently as the 1930's everything was black and white and colour was discovered sometime during WWII.

Interesting article, I had never thought about early societies having limited colour descriptors. I found the last part to be intriguing as the colour progression somewhat follows the importance of environmental elements. White/Black... day/night. Red: sun/fire. Green/Yellow: foliage/plants/food Blue: sky Brown: earth. As stated in the article the definitions increase with the ability to describe their environment and those items would be top of the list.

<comment><USER5> You surely mean this ?

      Calvin:  Dad, how come old photographs are always black
               and white? Didn't they have color film back then?
      Dad:     Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs
               are in color. It's just the world was black and white then.
      Calvin:  Really?
      Dad:     Yep. The world didn't turn color until sometime
               in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
      Calvin:  That's really weird.
      Dad:     Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
      Calvin:  But then why are old paintings in color?! If
               their world was black and white, wouldn't artists have painted it that way?
      Dad:     Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were
               insane.
      Calvin:  But... but how could they have painted in color
               anyway? Wouldn't their paints have been shades of gray back then?
      Dad:     Of course, but they turned colors like
               everything else did in the '30s.
      Calvin:  So why didn't old black and white photos turn
               color too?
      Dad:     Because they were color pictures of black and
               white, remember?
      Calvin:  The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.

But that aside, don't we still only see 3 colors. We have only three types of color receptors and any color gets resolved, if at all, into varying responses from three of them. To our color interpreter in the brain there are only those 3 axes. To us and other trichromats any color is a mixture of those three.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromat#Humans_and_other_ani...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromat#Humans_and_other_animals_that_are_trichromats)

Maybe the interesting question is when did we start naming the different mixtures. There's another hypothetical question that has fascinated me: say I perceive the color red as yellow, and it is some one to one map. But since I learn the names of colors from people, I or anybody else will not realize that I perceive them differently, I just happen to label them alike.

<comment><USER4> Your latter question has always fascinated me as well. How do I know my 'red' is your 'red'. My father was colour blind and I used to enjoy trying to explain the missing colours to him and for him to explain what things looked like. I quickly learned it's hard to describe colours someone else can't see.

I read an interesting article on colour perception once and about how the physiology makes it pretty likely we all perceive 'red' to be 'red'. I will have to try to find it.

<comment><USER5> What I find quite ironic is that traffic lights happen to lie right in the centre of the most common form of color blindness: red-green color blindness.

<comment><USER6> What I find quite ironic is that the UK's effort to combat this problem, by adding a blue tint to their green lights, actually makes it more dangerous for people with my form of colour blindness (protan, which is not the commonest form of red-green blindness but is still significantly represented (2% of males according to Wikipedia)).

That's because having little red vision, at night I mistake cyan ("green") go lights for white street lights. Having street lights suddenly turn to yellow stop lights is unnerving, to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So what about cave paintings? They have color. Take a look at the paintings in the Acacus Mountains (southern Libya) at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadrart_Acacus>.

and

<http://www.ewpnet.com/libya/acacus/index.htm>

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought the Greeks were painting in very vivid colors? [http://io9.com/5616498/ultraviolet-light-reveals-how- ancient...](http://io9.com/5616498/ultraviolet-light-reveals-how-ancient- greek-statues-really-looked)

</comment><comment><USER9> We still argue about color names today--- no longer about the basic 7 or 8, but over what to call the ones we can easily display on the screen. Even if we limit it to say 256, it is hard to find universal agreement on what to call them. If we expand that to what is possible to display on a high end device we are essentially shit out luck with the taxonomy. And it is not just the web. I can visualize the difference between Hooker's Green and Viridian Green and so can most art directors I might run into. Can the average user? No--- unless they've taken a class or to in water color or oils at the local art college.

<comment><USER10> _what to call the ones we can easily display on the screen_

Things like RGB and CMYK, or even Pantone, are much less ambiguous than any names than Crayola or Benjamin Moore comes up with. If the spectrum of color is ordered in any given way, any point on it is uniquely and unambiguously identifiable.

But you're still left with differences in perception (I actually perceive the same object as slightly different colors in the same light with each of my eyes, an optometrist told me this was common).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This kind of question is made absurd by our current understanding of evolution and eye physiology. The ability to see a spectrum of colors was developed millions of years ago. Ancient Greeks being able to only see 3 colors would require a sudden and complete change in eye physiology, followed by its miraculous recovery a few centuries later.

</comment><comment><USER12> The 'fact' that ancient Greeks may not have included blues in their work does not surprise me a whole lot. As I understand it, blue has always been one of the most difficult and expensive dyes to make out of natural substances.

</comment><comment><USER13> There has been a significant amount of recent scholarship on this topic since this Straight Dope article was published (in 1986):

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate#Recent_scholarship)

</comment><comment><USER14> Another factor that led to the original hypothesis of color deficienty, disappointingly unaddressed here, is that the Greeks had habits of making color comparisons that moderns would find quite loose indeed—for instance, the sea was the color of wine, and sheep the color of bronze.

<comment><USER15> Dirty sheep can look yellowish no? And bronze is Yellowish.

<comment><USER16> I found shorn sheep that look almost bronze. :)

[http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://photography.nat...](http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/staticfiles/NGS/Shared/StaticFiles/Photography/Images/POD/s/shorn- sheep- california-462896-sw.jpg&imgrefurl=http://ngmchina.com.cn/bbs/viewthread.php%3Faction%3Dprintable%26tid%3D1562&usg=__h4lKQutbOMHW- Vb2I4P8BP0Myos=&h=600&w=800&sz=148&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=gYnjqa7jK5LmUM:&tbnh=138&tbnw=211&ei=SEg7TYDvO4iAhAftn7yKCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dshorn%2Bsheep%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en- GB:official%26biw%3D1304%26bih%3D887%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=1005&vpy=111&dur=741&hovh=194&hovw=259&tx=130&ty=79&oei=SEg7TYDvO4iAhAftn7yKCg&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=30&ved=1t:429,r:5,s:0)

I've assumed things like the description of colours in these texts are an attempt to produce an idolised version in the minds eye of the listener. That is, an effect similar to watching a cartoon, or observing a caricature. The use of bronze is clever in that it gives a heightened image of something that is already somewhat observable to the viewer. But at times, perhaps there could be loaded meaaning in the colours that we don't appreciate easily, e.g. colour of wine and tyranian purple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure the ancient Greek's had some pretty good colour sense. Beyond the whole painting all their temples in garish colours, they knew of (and loved) Phoenician purple. If you can love a certain dye, then you can probably tell it apart from say... plain old red or blue.

<comment><USER2> The article talks about the cultural differences between colour names, not the ability to see colours themselves. According the article, what we call "Phoenician purple", the ancient Greeks probably called "Phoenician red".</comment></comment>


Google warns webmasters Chrome will mark http pages with forms as 'not secure' - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/google-emails-warnings-webmasters-chrome-will-mark-http-pages-forms-not-secure-280907 <comment><USER2> That's gonna freak out the masses and cause all kinds of headaches for smaller homespun websites.</comment>


GNU Compiler Collection Internals [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint.pdf <comment><USER2> As I believe that there are a lot of compiler people around at HN, I would like to ask:

What would be a good starting point to learn about writing compilers? I have written a small tree-walk language (and is following the byte-code based language) following Crafting Interpreters[0], but I would like some more learning resources.

I would ideally like some online book (I prefer readable resources) that are similar style with Crafting Interpreters, but more focusing on compilers & optimizing. I have heard about the Dragon book, but it was too big and pricey :-(, I'm not sure if I can go through the entire book.

[0]: [http://craftinginterpreters.com](http://craftinginterpreters.com)

<comment><USER3> My humble opinion: _do not_ get the Dragon book - it puts too much focus on parser theory and implementation which is in my opinion not the hard part of compiler construction.

Most modern languages use a handwritten recursive descent parser anyway and the interesting part starts after you have the AST (code generation and register allocation).

<comment><USER4> > My humble opinion: do not get the Dragon book - it puts too much focus on > parser theory and implementation

This is my strong opinion as well. Almost everyone fixates on parsing.

I've been working on an interpreter/compiler full time since 2013, so coming up for eight years. I think I've spent maybe three or four days working on the parser. It's a vanishingly small part of the job.

I wish compiler courses started with an AST, and then parsing was a separate course unrelated to compilers.

<comment><USER5> Yes. A lot of one semester compiler classes spend way too much time on lexing and parsing. Amusingly, their coverage of parsing is limited to LALR. It almost seems as if profs are thinking, if I had to suffer through LALR(1) table generation then you're going to have suffer through it as well.

By comparison, at Berkeley they recreate 61C Machine Structures every few years. Out goes the unimportant, in comes the new.

Lexing and parsing isn't even a vanishingly small part of the job. It's usually someone else's job. Someone who works on LLVM code generation for the XYZ processor is the wrong person to keep the Clang front end up to date with the latest C++ committee's standard iteration.

They should push DFAs and grammars into theory classes. That said, I do like the 2nd edition of the Dragon book, particularly the later chapters.

<comment><USER6> In my experience, compilers are taught over three semesters or so: lexing/parsing is one course (or rolled into a prerequisite), the standard compilers is the second, and advanced (graduate-level) compilers is the third course.

<comment><USER5> Berkeley just has CS164 [1] which is all in one. They haven't taught a graduate compiler section in years (decades?). Stanford is on the quarter system. They have an even more compressed single quarter compiler class, CS143 [2], but they also have a graduate advanced topics class, CS243 [3] as well. Moreover, CS243 _doesn 't_ require 143 as a prerequisite. As an aside, Berkeley is very strong at computer architecture (RISC, RISC-V, ...) while Stanford is very strong at compilers (Aiken, Lam, Ullman, Hennessy, ...)

[http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/sp19/](http://www- inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs164/sp19/) [https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs143/index2018.html](https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs143/index2018.html) [https://suif.stanford.edu/~courses/cs243/](https://suif.stanford.edu/~courses/cs243/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this document under source control? I'm curious to see what's changed.

<comment><USER8> In case you're worried this is outdated, note this is for version 10 of gcc (pdf is a pre-release) as stated on the frontpage of the document. I am curious how they plan to keep this updated, I could not easily find the repository for this.

<comment><USER9> [https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=gcc/doc/gccint.t...](https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob;f=gcc/doc/gccint.texi;h=99ec005e96734f4793b9a9921541fffcb34990ac;hb=1265aa8f7e935bb506fded0a080bae5dfa2eb4c7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What were RMS contributions in the last decade or so? It seems wrong that his name is on the frontpage of the documentation and nobody elses.

<comment><USER7> Other contributors are listed near the end of the document, under "Contributors to GCC".</comment></comment>


Google Delivers Accurate 3D Scene Reconstruction of Complex Outdoor Environment - <AUTHOR> https://syncedreview.com/2020/08/10/tour-the-world-from-your-couch-google-nerf-w-delivers-accurate-3d-scene-reconstruction-of-complex-outdoor-environments/ <comment><USER2> Your photos have been NERF'ed. ;)</comment>


Steve Blank: Why Governments Don't Get Startups - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/05/why-governments-don't-get-startups/

<comment><USER2> I largely agree with some of Steve's points but disagree on others: As detailed here <http://ht.ly/6n5Ox> about my experience of UK programmes</comment>


Advice for Y Combinator Interviewees (from Sumon, Snaptalent, YC W08) - <AUTHOR> http://sharpshoot.blogspot.com/2009/04/so-you-got-y-combinator-interview-now.html

<comment><USER2> I've been wanting to say the same thing for a while now: "In a few years, people won't just talk about the PayPal mafia, they will talk about the YC mafia. This is a phenomenon and you want to be part of it!"</comment>


List of free nonfiction Kindle books, updated daily - <AUTHOR> http://nonfiction.fkb.me/

<comment><USER2> Amazon affiliate links.

Aren't those free ebooks easy enough to find directly on Amazon?

<comment><USER3> Do affiliate links bring any money if they lead to free content? Actual question. Does not make much sense if they do.

<comment><USER4> Not if you buy the free book, but you might end up buying another book instead (e.g. from recommendations). One still gets a (smaller) cut if the customer buys anything else within the current session.</comment></comment></comment>


A comparison of programming languages in economics - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/07/a-comparison-of-programming-languages-in-economics.html

<comment><USER2> Their code is on github [1]. I am a C++ programmer so I'm happy that C++ came out on top, but the comparison is obviously flawed (as these sorts of comparisons always are). The problem is that the implementers don't have the same level of skill in each language and who knows how much time they spent analyzing and refining each version. See Russ Cox's response [2] to a Google paper [3] of a similar nature comparing C++, Go, Java, Scala for an example of a similar boondoggle.

The R code, for instance, is obviously unidiomatic. If you have a four levels deep nested loop in R, you're doing it wrong, and it's taking every ounce of willpower to keep from spending the rest of the afternoon trying to fix up their code and make it faster.

1\. [https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-Programming- Languages-...](https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-Programming-Languages- Economics)

2\. [http://blog.golang.org/profiling-go- programs](http://blog.golang.org/profiling-go-programs)

3\. [http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37122.html](http://research.google.com/pubs/pub37122.html)

<comment><USER3> It is unfortunate that the authors of this paper didn't reach out to experts in each programming language in order to write high-quality code against which they could have run the analysis. This seems like the perfect use-case for open-source: academic study, subject-matter experts in one area who are stepping outside their areas of expertise and an interesting subject matter.

They should have crowd-sourced the code for this study with a Top Coder-like contest.

<comment><USER4> From the paper...

 _Second, to make the comparison as unbiased as possible, we coded the same algorithm in each language without adapting it to the peculiarities of each language (which could reflect more about our knowledge of each language than of its objective virtues)._

They have invited others to fork the code on github and write the fastest possible for each language.

<comment><USER5> This is not "as unbiased as possible" \-- it is biased towards the initial form of algorithm description.

To make the comparison "as unbiased as possible" would be to code the same algorithm but adapt it to the peculiarities of each language implementation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used to be gung-ho about convincing economists to use Python (started econpy.org in the 1st year of my PhD in economics, stopped updating it after 2 years). But now I just don't care. The vast majority of economists are horrible programmers, however most know how to script in at least 1 language, and a small number of them are actually really good at scripting. An extremely small number of economists know they're way around at least 1 entire general purpose programming language.

It seems that every time this gets brought up online a sea of infamous Fortran-programming-economists always tell you how fast Fortran is compared to everything else, signing it with "Fortran or GTFO". I've met hundreds/thousands of economists and econ grad students at schools ranked from 1 to 200, and I don't recall a single one that actually used Fortran (I'm sure there is a non-zero quantity -- I probably just haven't cared to talk with them b/c they are most likely macro theorists).

The fact of the matter is that in economics graduate school, your professors could care less what language you use. It isn't an algorithm competition, it's a story telling competition. But the type of story telling economists do is no less noble than writing elegant algos. Writing a story based on economic mechanisms and behaviors and supporting it with quality data, sound statistics, and logical/exact theories is no simple task.

<comment><USER7> "The vast majority of economists are horrible programmers, however most know how to script in at least 1 language, and a small number of them are actually really good at scripting. An extremely small number of economists know they're way around at least 1 entire general purpose programming language."

As an economist whose hobby is the study of programming languages, you can imagine the frustration that I feel. What I have found works best is to make grad students use basic functional programming techniques. Everything they do is just a few lines long. As opposed to a 250-line heap of garbage with three nested for loops.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, but that it's a wasted emotion. Economists are not software developers. They do the minimal they need and nothing more. It's like complaining that a masseur has poor baking skills.

Get over it! It's a support tool for them and until they demand that you take their code as a perfect example, developed have no need to complain.

<comment><USER9> It's more like saying a masseur doesn't have a deep knowledge of anatomy. For most healthy people it wouldn't be an issue if the masseur just did what they were taught, but they'll consistently be suboptimal and will occasionally do some real damage. See the recent high profile errors with economists using excel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Two economists judge the relative suitability of a bunch of programming languages.

I have to wonder how it would be received if two computer scientists wrote an article judging the relative merits of a bunch of economic models.

</comment><comment><USER11> Direct download link of the original paper:

[http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/comparison_languages...](http://economics.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/comparison_languages.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> This seems more a survey of compilers than programming languages. Python is represented by 3 different compilers, spanning 2 orders of magnitude in performance: CPython (155x), PyPy (44x), Numba (1.57x). It's hinted that C++ similarly depends on compiler choice:

> although one needs to be careful with the choice of compiler [for C++ and > Fortran]

</comment><comment><USER13> In case anyone missed the Java results, I do think it is worth mentioning that it is very competitive:

"Our fourth result is that Java imposes a speed penalty of 110 to 169 percent. Given the similarity between Java and C++ syntax, there does not seem to be an obvious advantage for choosing Java unless portability across platforms or the wide availability of Java programmers is an important factor."

<comment><USER14> In my professional life I have rarely (if ever?) seen a language chosen on the basis of it's syntax.

<comment><USER15> It's true, most good programmers won't choose a language based on just syntax. And even though most economists aren't good programmers (in my experience), they're still smart people who can see past the syntax.

The paper is probably misusing the term syntax though. C++ and java really are quite similar in many ways, far beyond just syntax, java just letting the programmer forget about some annoying things like memory management and portability. If most of what they're doing in the language is numeric analysis, then there probably isn't much of a difference at all, and they will probably get slightly better performance from C++.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about Excel?

I know, I'm also horrified of how economists use excel. But it does tend to be their go-to tool, and they are all comfortable in it. It'd be nice to show them just how poor the performance is in excel, to tempt them into learning scripting languages if they have an excel workbook that will barely refresh.

</comment><comment><USER17> There are two glaring problems with this paper:

1\. The algorithm is just a bunch of arrays and loops in one giant block. This is the easiest possible case for compilers that optimize through specialization. Even a bad specializing compiler will be good at this but will blow up when faced with a big piece of code with lots of functions and data structures.

2\. The runtimes are only ~2s, which is not long enough for the JIT-compiled languages to "warm up". I suspect Java in particular would have had the exact same runtime after warming up, because in an easy example like this Hotspot will generate the exact same instructions as the C program.

EDIT: I stand corrected. I downloaded his examples off Github and ran them the same way as the paper. I get 1.87s for C, and for Java... also exactly 1.87s.

<comment><USER18> > EDIT: I stand corrected. I downloaded his examples off Github and ran them > the same way as the paper. I get 1.87s for C, and for Java... also exactly > 1.87s.

Your code probably got JIT'ed... which essentially makes your java code into native C... So... it's no surprise they perform around or exactly the same (given the JVM is allowed time to warm up, discover "hot spots", and then perform the JITing)

<comment><USER17> True though oddly I compiled and ran them exactly the same way he described in the paper -- one time through, no warm-up time.

<comment><USER19> I think the command-line option -XX:+PrintCompilation should show you if/when the JIT kicks in for a method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems like this is a comparison of speed. Not a comparison of languages. Each language has their own pro's and con's. For instance, I use R on a daily basis. I don't require speed to do my job because I'm analyzing data and drawing inferences to help make business decisions. I like the fact that there is a huge library and an active community that can help me implement solutions. Perhaps if a solution/product I come up with needs speed then I'll implement a tool that will do that job well. But my "toolbox" requires fast prototyping and development.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the paper should be called "A comparison of programming language run times in economics." It's not obvious to me that run time is an important quality of a programming language for economic research.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's important to note that the available libraries for each language varies a lot, and the best performing ones are proprietary for the most part. Fortran, for example, has a set of proprietary libraries that many employers buy that have been continually optimized for nearly 50 years. Both C and Python can readily bind to Fortran libraries, but for other languages like R, Matlab, Mathematica, etc. this is a major disadvantage.

<comment><USER7> Not only is it easy to call Fortran functions from R, the inline package actually allows you to embed Fortran functions inside your R program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Economic is a large, diverse field and it would be reasonable to assume, for instance, that R is used in very different ways than C++, so this study is already of limited use. Furthermore, they claim to be comparing the "strength and weakness of each language" yet only analyze the performance of naively- written, unoptimized code.

<comment><USER6> You bring up a good point in that the use cases for each language varies. R is a good example because one of the main reasons it is chosen is due to the fact that it already has the largest set of drop in econometrics operations for tons of extremely specific situations. In any other language, you'd often have to code a bunch of complex linear algebra by hand, which would totally negate any marginal benefits due to computation time.

In terms of econometrics, Python is going to surpass closed source software packages like SPSS, SAS, eViews, etc soon simply because the rate at which econometric procedures are being implemented in Python is growing steadily (e.g. via a statsmodels/pandas/numpy/scipy based stack). I don't think Python will ever pass R in this respect though as R has a large share of the statisticians helping add the implementations relative to Python.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Another interesting comparison from the github repo[1] is the proportions of lines that it took in each language.

[1] [https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-Programming- Languages-...](https://github.com/jesusfv/Comparison-Programming-Languages- Economics)

<comment><USER5> Programs for some languages are tall and narrow, while comparable programs for other languages are short and wide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It would be cool that people from different areas of expertise (whether C++, Rust, Go, etc...) committed their most idiomatic implementation for the benchmark.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wasted time on a wasted subject. The person that compiled it had nothing better to do... Economists are not developers and should not imagine to be ones. It takes a lot of time and effort to be one.</comment>


Pop Nihilism: Advertising Eats Itself - <AUTHOR> http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/84/pop_nihilism_adverting_eats_itself.html <comment><USER2> This article displays a complete misunderstanding of advertising and an intellectual arrogance that I've come to expect from AdBusters. They are disgusted by the _"proletariat"_ and his need to buy the latest bauble even while claiming to be fighting for him. Maybe, just maybe, the average consumer knows what he wants better than a bunch of pseudo-intellectual hipsters.

</comment><comment><USER3> An excellent example of both faux-deconstruction <http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html> and intellectual impostors as described by Dawkins <http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html>, also seen on Hacker News :-D

Seriously, read both those articles and compare with this if you think I'm trolling.

Anti-consumerists dancing on capitalists' graves are getting jiggy too soon. Eyeballs still equals sales, there just isn't quite as much money swirling around the system right now.

[Edited for clarity]

<comment><USER2> For a second there I thought that your second link going to say that _Richard Dawkins_ was an intellectual imposter!

<comment><USER3> Most definitely not, I should have worded that better, I've edited it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now regardless of the lack of meaningful content, I would like to urge writers to learn how to write a proper introduction and conclusion on long articles, which together summarize its contents. See it as a service to your reader.

</comment><comment><USER5> For a second I read that as Pop Will Eat Itself. Gimme big mac gimme fries to go!</comment>


Build Your Own Google - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=9027&tag=nl.e622

<comment><USER2> Misleading title... You need more then a database system to index all the web.</comment>


On transitioning from Pyhon 2.7.x to 3.x - <AUTHOR>

As someone who is just starting to move into using Python extensively it is a bit disconcerting and maybe even bordering on confusing to see that the language seems to be stuck in this 2.7.x era.
The only sane decision seems to be to avoid 3.x and join all those who seem to be doing the same.  Everything I see out there is 2.7.x -based:  books, tutorials, online courses, frameworks, libraries, OSS, etc.  In that context it is only smart to stick with the older version.
Because of this, looking mostly from the outside, it seems virtually impossible to imagine Python making a mass transition to the "next generation".  I'm sure I'm wrong.  I am far from being an expert in the language and it's related ecosystem at this point.  I must be missing something fundamental in helping me understand this issue.
What say you? <comment><USER2> The pain is worth it.

There is a lot of confusion over what its all about, the arguments dont matter.

A simple exercise to show you why 3.0 is better.

Compare the printing of a concatenated set of strings without wanting to print each segment on a newline. In python 2 you need to do silly things like this.

        import sys
        sys.stdout.write('.')

In python 3 its just an argument on the print function, clean, easy to read, powerful once you grasp other ways it can be used.

        print('.', end="")

This is just the start. It may seem small, but sometimes the smallest thing can be the biggest reason.</comment>


Ask YC: Just launched. Need traffic. Any suggestions on getafreelancer, elance, odesk, etc. - <AUTHOR>

Here begins the life of a twitter-like online dating site. www.TalkAboutADate.com. I've thought about using the above for classified ads submissions, forum postings, etc., to promote the site. However, I think this is borderline spam, so I'm phrasing the ads carefully. Suggestions would be gratefully received. Thank you. <comment><USER3> Uh, not borderline, friend. Posting announcements like this on elance.com and the like would most definitely be spam, and most definitely unwelcome.

Why not announce to various blogs and tech-news aggregators? TechCrunch, TechMeme, Slashdot, Webware, AppScout might all be good places to announce a new app.

Buy an ad on Facebook. Start a group on facebook. Get your friends to sign up and promise to invite at least 2 other friends that don't know anyone else already signed up.

But don't, under any circumstances, post your announcement where it will be OT - that's what makes the internet suck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. That's what I thought. Thank you. I did say _whitehat_ only in the project I posted on getafreelancer. By the way what's OT?

<comment><USER3> Whitehat? Maybe I misunderstand what you're asking. I thought you were just trying to find places to announce a new online dating app - am I wrong?

OT = Off Topic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to announce a new dating app. It's just that when I first posted the project yesterday at getafreelancer.com the bids I got seemed to be the spam kind. So, today I added 'whitehat only' to the project description. I also added the requirement to 'write new ads around the basic template - <USER2> good english - and post to around 5 - 10 cities a day.' I'm trying to make it a legit promotional project. Here's the url: <https://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/269701.html>. This is what I meant when I said 'borderline' in my original post. Thanks, again.

<comment><USER3> AH, ok. The postings to elance.com, etc, are for people to write ads for you.

Gotcha. That's no problem. I think Elance even has a category for writers and marketing-type stuff.

You might also try Craigslist job postings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks again. That's good to know.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>