We are complicit in our employer's deeds - <AUTHOR> https://drewdevault.com/2020/05/05/We-are-complicit-in-our-employers-deeds.html <comment> spaced-out We technologists like to pretend we're powerful, that we could bring these giant megacorps to their knees because those fancy suits need us, right?

No. They need an engineer, not any one specific engineer. Companies like Amazon reject many candidates that could probably do the job they applied for, but were rejected because they can afford to be picky. If anything changes at Amazon it not be because of the loss of that guy's engineering skills.

What would actually make the world a better place is if we recognized that we're really just well paid technicians, and that the true power in society is held by a relatively small number of people who hold a massive amount of capital. We need to give up the fantasy that we can change things with individual action, and start looking towards _collective_ , society-level solutions to the problems today.

<comment><USER3> Engineers should begin to understand that they are not some enlightened beings that have somehow grown beyond the need for workplace organization. They are still cogs in the machine that can be replaced at any time; pricey cogs for sure, and replacing them may take some time, but they are still cogs.

<comment><USER4> That's why you have to learn to live for your own "selfish" good as opposed to giving yourself to your company. You use them like they use you. That's why I have worked for an assortment of companies that HN would turn their noses up to. I would never work with an "evil"company per se, but companies that don't do "life changing" or "socially aware" software is perfectly okay with me. Software is just a tool in my tool box to live the life that I want to live. Let go of the rat race and find out who you are. A yacht, a sports-car, a superb algorithm, a vapid partner on your arm, will never make you happy or feel like you're living your best life. Don't let work become your life. Otherwise you'll just be a burnt out programmer, salesperson, businessperson, or whatever, it's not a field that's doing it to you, it's yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think there is one morally solid reason to stay at bad acting employer: if you are actively driving change of the behavior you consider bad. I pick this quote from Brays post:

> I escalated through the proper channels and by the book.

He only left after he felt he had exhausted his options of influence (This being my interpretation).

Leaving just as a knee jerk reaction without making effort to change would be bad, to me personally almost worse than remaining. Of course quitting can be in many cases feel easier/more attractive than trying to navigate through the office politics. But if you manage to flip even small corner of Google or whatever to not do evil (as they used to say) that probably has more influence to the wider society than you quitting.

Counterpoint being that you need to recognize if you are making that change or not, and if you are not able to do so then quitting might be the right choice

<comment><USER6> That's a reasonable point of view, but I think your obligation extends primarily to saving your own soul, as it were. It's not your responsibility to make others do the right thing. If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

<comment><USER7> > If you think the organization is engaged in an enterprise that is > fundamentally wrong, helping them to further their aims in a slightly less > bad way doesn't change the moral calculus.

That reminds me of this article ([https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz- bystand...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/opinion/auschwitz-bystander- theory.html)):

> Some people unwittingly help atrocities occur by cooperating in an attempt > to mitigate a monstrous situation. History demonstrates that this is nearly > always a miscalculation. During the Holocaust, Jewish councils organized > life in the ghetto and compiled lists of Jews for deportation, often > thinking that they were helping Jews manage a nightmare. Ultimately, they > helped the Nazis murder Jews by maintaining order and providing the Gestapo > with the names of people to be deported and murdered. In his memoir, > "Legislating the Holocaust," Bernhard Lösener, a lawyer in the Third Reich's > Ministry of the Interior, relays how he hurriedly traveled through the night > to get to Nuremberg in time to write the Nuremberg race laws so that the > rule of law would be preserved, and how he fought to have the race laws > written to count as Jewish those with three Jewish grandparents rather than > those with one drop of Jewish blood. He too made the mistake of > participating in the atrocity in an attempt to minimize the damages caused > by its perpetrators.

> Lösener remains the lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg race laws, lending a > veneer of legality to a crime. Maybe someone else would have ignored the > rule of law or written more draconian laws if he hadn't, but maybe not. What > we can decide is whether we will be a participant in terrible things done by > terrible people. It never works to participate in the terrible thing in > order to try to make it less bad. It's tempting, and can seem like the right > thing to do: Lösener's race laws included fewer people than a one-drop rule > would (though that had negligible effect). Adolf Eichmann reasoned > similarly: "If this thing had to be done at all, it was better that it be > done in good order." History shows that when you participate in an atrocity > together with the perpetrators, in an attempt to make it somehow a little > less horrible, in the end you're still participating in the atrocity — and > it is no less horrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I agree with this, _but also_ think that working for an employer that is "making a negative impact on the world" might _sometimes_ be the right choice. Specifically, it could be justified for two reasons:

First: you might have more impact on the organization from the inside than from the outside (this is most relevant to people joining at a high/senior level). For example, Google seems to be making privacy far, far worse. Yet there are some people on the inside fighting to limit the privacy violations, which leads to decisions like banning GPS tracking in their contact tracing app[0]. Would the world be better or worse off if the _only_ people working at Google were people who don't care at all about user privacy? I'm honestly not sure, but I can at least see an argument that it might be even worse off.

Second: you might get something from the organization that lets you do good that outweighs any harm you contribute to (this is more relevant to junior employees). Many employers provide something (training, future job opportunities, or a high enough income to open your own small business/non- profit). A thoughtful employee can go into a "negative impact" employer with eyes wide open and a plan to get something, and get out.

However, in either case, self awareness and a definite exit plan are _key_. As Drew writes, once you are working at a "negative impact" employer,

> Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive > dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you > once swore never to be.

The way to avoid that sort of conative dissonance is 1) know that you'll experience it and be on guard against it, and 2) know all along that you're there temporarily and should never get too comfortable. Even then, you should be realistic about how long you can maintain your personal values in face of a very different culture. For a junior employee, I'd say two, maybe three years should be the absolute limit before you get out.

[0]: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa- ap...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-apps- idUSKBN22G28W)

<comment><USER9> I agree that we have a moral line we can decide to cross at work or not. We can step in and say "this isn't right". We all have our own limits. If a company passes our line, we can decide to stay and be a dissenting voice in a sea of "yes men" or we can move on.

The one thing that bugs me about a post like this is where does our complicity end? Did Drew also change all his investments to divest from Amazon or Facebook or other company that is making the world worse? Nestle is one of the most evil companies in the world. Are we all boycotting all their products and not investing in their companies? We can all do more to make the world a better place but each individual has to decide their own thresholds. It is impossible for each of us to stand against all the evils in the world. Most of us have been very happy with 30% returns in our retirement even though we secretly know it is driven by the same companies we claim must be stopped. Most people just want to provide for their family and live their life. Not everyone can (or wants to) be a social justice warrior. It is a very complicated issue and I think we paint it too black and white at times.

<comment><USER10> >Did Drew also change all his investments to divest from Amazon or Facebook or other company that is making the world worse?

Yes.

>Nestle is one of the most evil companies in the world. Are we all boycotting all their products and not investing in their companies?

Yes.

>Most of us have been very happy with 30% returns in our retirement even though we secretly know it is driven by the same companies we claim must be stopped.

Not me. I don't think this is right, and I don't appreciate the attempts at the normalization this idea. Don't be the 'Good German'.

<comment><USER9> I'm sorry if you took this as an attack. That is not my intention or point. I'm not being a "Good German". I'm not saying we can't fight all evil so don't fight any.

I'm merely discussing that we too often we make a stand against one "evil" and not against others that are even easier. For a lot of people the line is what becomes inconvenient. People are posting comments that Amazon should treat people better while they spin up a new instance and order next day toilet paper. This is important stuff to talk about. I doubt that most people who agree with your actions and are posting support are also divesting the same way you are. We can all do more and take more action against what is wrong. I applaud your actions. The hard part is taking actions by a few and turning it into a movement that causes rippling change.

<comment><USER11> He's not taking it as an attack, he's pointing out that you are assuming that everyone goes through life in this sort of 'morals-lite' way.

Many people actually do try as hard as possible, wherever practicable to do the right thing, and restrict themselves in the process.

The distinctions then become whether they agree on the set of 'bad things', not whether they do them or not.

If you think something is bad, like really bad, just stop doing it, you are not some poverty-level sharecropping farmer, you have that choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tech has a tendency to view the world in isolation.

You can't work in fashion because it uses child labor. Rare metals used in electronics are mined in places with terrible work conditions. Don't even get me started on petroleum dependent industries.

What does that leave us with ?

Even companies that build apps or SAAS make their money from clients in these industries or consumers who are as a majority employed by them. Just because we establish a few degrees of separation from the problem, doesn't mean we stop being complicit in it.

Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop.

Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).

It seems that the political left (which usually drives these movements) would rather put the onus on the companies to change while taking millions in lobbying money, than hold them accountable for their actions.

I recognize that the systemic favoring of republicans in the electoral system, might force the left to keep appearances, lest be viewed as hostile to businesses and lose the vital 5% of the swing electorate. But, that still means, that the problem is lack of electoral reform and not 'Amazon being a greedy company'.

<comment><USER7> > Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize > profit. Every legal avenue there is to do, will be used by these companies. > If Amazon stops doing so, someone else will and eventually they will have > enough of the market that the responsible company will have to close shop.

> Take the example of a multiplayer game. It should not be the responsibility > of the player to not exploit the rules of the games to their fullest. It > should be the responsibility of the developers to fix exploits and > ban/punish gamers who outright attempt to break the system (cheat).

Those aren't mutually exclusive, IMHO. Instead or in-addition to patching the "exploits," the law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations _besides_ solely delivering "value" to their shareholders (IIRC that understanding of companies is actually pretty _recent_ ). Obviously it'd take more work to figure out how to do that than an internet comment warrants, but I'm not convinced it's impossible.

<comment><USER12> > law could be changed to make it clear that companies have obligations > besides solely delivering "value" to their shareholders

There in lies the problem. 'Making clear' means codifying it in law and speaking of it in explicit terms rather than being abstract moral concepts.

But few want to talk policy. Because policy is hard. Really really hard. Moralizing on the other hand is easy. Similarly, calling a certain policy bad is a lot easier than suggesting a concrete alternative.

If for one, would love to ground all moral arguments in policy, instead of talking about things in thin air. Sure, it will make discussions more laborious, but at least at the end of them we will have gone somewhere.

<comment><USER13> And yet you seem to be happy with "Public companies have a responsibility to their share holders to maximize profit." being nominally "codified in law".

(I say nominally because it's not actually clear that this is codified in law, just that there have been a number of lawsuits that have been decided as if it is).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Everyone will always prioritize the wellbeing of their own family VS some random people in the company you work in.

Well-off devs like the guy who quit Amazon don't have $$$ issues, so he can afford to do that.

Others don't, and that doesn't make them bad.

That makes them care for their family first.

<comment><USER15> That was sort of the entire point of the writing. Because tech folks are in a privileged class, they have the ability to move jobs based on morals. And therefore they should. Not doing that, when you are making as much as you are as a programmer at BIGCORP means you are complicit in the bad behavior.

That was the entire point. He addressed your concern in the first two paragraphs.

<comment><USER16> If you were to ask my circle of friends and family, even bigcorp programmer money isn't sufficient to feel secure due to future economic volatility. Especially if your goal is to make sure your kids get to live in the richer neighborhoods and go to the richer schools, and so on and so forth.

And it's not just a perceived fear. The data shows that if you're not in the portion of people increasing their rate of income/wealth growth, then you're in the portion that is decreasing in income/wealth growth, and that compounds for your kids.

I would want a few hundred thousand in passive income before I would say I had FU money, which also means a few million in diversified assets other than my house. Especially in the US, where quality healthcare is a minimum $20k per year for a family in insurance premiums alone plus a few ten thousands in out of pocket costs.

<comment><USER10> The level of hubris shown here is obscene. The median household income in the United States was $63,179 in 2018. Richer neighborhoods? Richer schools? Give me a break. This is wanton greed on plain display, and blatant disregard for the systemmic suppression of the poor that you are _directly enabling_ by working at bigcorp.

<comment><USER17> Do people that make the median household income in the USA feel secure? If they don't, your statistic is irrelevant. And in my experience they don't, especially if they live in higher cost of living areas where most of the tech jobs are.

<comment><USER10> No, you're not understanding my point. I'm contrasting this income with the one the OP says they want. The median household works hard for 60K, but the OP is suspending their ethical judgement until they have "a few hundred thousand in passive income". You don't need 6x the median income to feel secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Apple builds walled gardens and makes targeted attacks on open standards,

This is where the article lost me. There is a saying called "keeping your powder dry". If you express outrage at everything, soon your outrage has no meaning. Whatever your position on open source, I think you would admit that this behavior is in a whole other category than having poor worker safety, retaliating against whistleblowers, or conducting mass surveillance.

I do think that one of the reasons we are so ineffective in our protest is that they devolve into a diffuse rage against the machine where we protest a dozen different behaviors. One of the reasons the NRA is so effective is that they focus on one thing: gun rights. If you really want to influence politics, you need to be laser focused on an issue. See also prohibition.

</comment><comment><USER19> The answer to employer abuse is not isolated people refusing to work at big tech companies. You have very little power alone and while refusing to work for a company you find objectionable may ease your conscience, it does little to affect change (unless you're in a position with a lot of power like Tim). The solution is organization —- forming a union, or banding together behind a political organization or political campaign to affect change. Both of these run very counter to many tech workers' individualist mindsets but ate much more effective than individual refusal.

<comment><USER20> We need a combination of individual refusal and collective organization. With organization across the industry, we can achieve global purposes, while individual refusal can still make important marginal improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Politicians, and by extension, the people that voted for them, have been creating this environment for decades. Only mega corporations can survive. The reasons are many, and they include low tariffs, high domestic regulation (ever try to start a business and deal with tax law, incorporating, etc), exploitative visa programs, binding arbitration employment agreements, free unlimited capital to the banking class (Discount Window access, NIRP and ZIRP, outright monetizing private debt by the central banks), most importantly, patents and copyrights enforced by the state.

I mean, the list is endless. Every facet of our society is built to protect the largest businesses, creating an environment that smaller, ethical companies simply can't compete in.

Every election cycle it's the same thing. They divide people across their little pet issues, keep the two party system in place through ballot access, overturning ranked choice, while waging wars in foreign lands and extracting all the wealth they can.

Stop voting for the same stuff. Get over yourself and your fickle positions. Vote for real change.

</comment><comment><USER22> The industrial revolution was a period of unprecedented growth for our country and the world as a whole. It ushered in a new era, built immense fortunes, and led to the creation of critical infrastructure that we still use hundreds of years later. But with the great achievements came the unparalleled exploitation of the poor, minorities and even children, resulting in some of the most progressive labor laws ever developed. History rightly criticizes the robber barons and clearly illuminates the miseries they inflicted upon mankind for their wealth.

Software engineers are going to be faced with the same moral reckoning that the industrialists of the past faced, it's inevitable. So it's worth wondering if this time we will take some moral leadership and actually build a world that benefits humanity, or merely profit from it.

</comment><comment><USER23> If BIGCORP is acting outside of labor laws, then there should be legal action.

If the law doesn't explicitly outlaw BIGCORP's actions (yet), and we all kinda know that it should, then opposing BIGCORP is the correct thing to do.

If Amazon is acting legally, yet in an ugly way, to suppress workers organizing, it seems hard to complain.

Now, if Amazon workers exercise the right of free association in their spare time to stick it to JeffB, well, it sounds like he's got a problem.

<comment><USER10> BIGCORP writes the labor laws.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/federal- lobbying/clients/summary...](https://www.opensecrets.org/federal- lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2019&id=D000023883)

<comment><USER23> Well, if our political system is worth much, then it behooves us to elect some people who can, you know, write laws.

Past the flippancy, this is a huge undertaking.

Half the political battle is showing up; the other half is staying engaged.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Morality isn't a binary thing.

If we adopt consequentialism, how do we quantify all the good things amongst the bad ones?

Please note that just because the bad ones are most vocal, doesn't mean they will outweigh the good ones.

<comment><USER25> >> Morality isn't a binary thing.

It is when you're young and know everything

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Nobody makes enough money to pay multiple-six-figures developer salaries without people being exploited somewhere, and any $bigcorp is generally incapable of acting in a way that doesn't maximize shareholder value (except as needed to comply with laws). If you want to quit $bigcorp in protest, $bigcorp2 across the street has its own ethical problems.

There is a lot of important software work to be done for the world that doesn't enable mass surveillance, doesn't exploit addictive behavior, and doesn't degrade worker protections or evade taxes. It also doesn't pay multiple-six-figures. You'll just have to live like all of your non-tech friends.

</comment><comment><USER27> Things aren't so black and white. By some people's standards, Amazon has been exploiting warehouse workers for quite a while now (unpaid bathroom breaks and so on). By others', Amazon warehouses provide jobs to poor communities.

Facebook may be bad for privacy, but communities of all sorts get together and old friends reconnect on their platforms. Instagram brings beauty to lots of people. Remember how things were before that? I do. It was much worse. Is it worth the price? That's for everyone to decide for themselves (and for lawmakers to enforce).

But saying that all bigcorps are evil and nobody should work for them is a VERY simplistic view of the world.

</comment><comment><USER28> Thanks for writing this out, there's no disputing the truth in your words. Individual courage can also be found from others, like in the case of Tim's sendoff, no doubt he inspired others to stand up for what they believe in.

</comment><comment><USER29> Debt and healthcare are used to ensure that you don't have the freedom to walk away from immorality.

If you're in debt for your (or your kids' and/or partner's) house or education, or depend upon your employer for healthcare, you are not free to walk away. You might be able to switch jobs for something less objectionable, but so long as "not doing the immoral thing" means "my kid might not get treated for their cancer" just walking away is an option for a vanishingly small number of people.

<comment><USER10> Author here. I did not say "just walk away". This is what I said:

>A good software engineer with only a couple of years of experience under their belt can expect to have an offer within 1 or 2 months of starting their search.

<comment><USER29> A fair point, leaving with a job offer is much different. For what it's worth I still found it easiest to speak out when young, debt free, and single.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly._

Distribute your attention and effort as a function of how effective your effort can be. How meaningful is my indirect effect? That's often a function of how many nodes are between you and the thing on the big whopping graph of interconnectedness, but not every time.

Figuring out your allocations is a lifelong optimization process. Sometimes it is extremely obvious, usually it's not.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been trying desperately to avoid working for big corporations because they are against my personal beliefs. So far I have mostly succeeded. I only worked for corporations for 1 year out of 12 in total in my career. It's been really tough to avoid and getting tougher.

I think if I'm faced with the prospect of not being able to retire, I will have to join one. I will have to knowingly participate in making the world a worse place but at least I will have tried.

</comment><comment><USER32> This really got me thinking... of course, what Amazon is doing is bad, I don't want to deny that - OTOH, for a tech company, they _are_ an easy target - <USER2> example, Google doesn't have as many low-paid workers, so we don't know if they would treat them more fairly. How about the contractors hired by Facebook to weed out the worst posts by extremists, terrorists and other lunatics so our sensitive eyeballs aren't confronted with them? Is that better because they aren't directly employed by Facebook? Maybe Amazon should divest its warehouses so they're not so much in the public eye anymore? If you start to think about these things, where do you stop? Tax evasion? I guess every tech company is guilty of that, because shareholders _expect_ them to find and exploit every possible loophole. In the end, probably the only companies you can morally work for are non-profits like Mozilla et al. - which is probably easier to do after raking in half a million per year for some years at a less morally sound company...

<comment><USER33> A company which automated away all the menial jobs and work would probably get better publicity than one that paid people to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> We are also complicit in our governments' deeds.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but much less so. We are coerced into participating in society on our governments terms, under threat of violence.

<comment><USER5> US citizens have excellent mobility also internationally. Valley engineers certainly can find jobs in e.g. Europe or other parts of the world (if they accept the cut in paycheck). Immigration is not a thing only for poor third world people.

<comment><USER10> I almost agree with you... but it's not always that simple. I personally have little faith left in America, and would love to move somewhere else, but I have one fatal problem: I don't have a degree. Hardly any countries with better political prospects than America are interested in giving visas to anyone without one.

But even for those who do, a change of nationality is much more traumatic than a change of career. You risk leaving basically all of your family and friends behind, spending years integrating into a culture where you may not speak the language, and abnormally large expenses for moving and establishing yourself there... while I don't entirely disagree with you, it's not really on the same level as the arguments I'm presenting about career choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive > dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you > once swore never to be.

Engineers in Canada are awarded an iron ring on graduation. It is worn on the writing hand's pinkey and meant to remind the engineer of their ethical obligations any time they sign a document.

I rarely wear mine because of exactly these kinds of mental gymnastics you describe. One never thinks they are being unethical because one changes their definition of ethical over time.

Instead of the ring, I kept the small slip of paper they give you at graduation. The symbol of the ring changes, but the words on that page never do. Here are a couple example sections: "my care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability, and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand." And "in the hour of my temptations, weakness, and weariness, the memory of this, my obligation".

</comment><comment><USER36> What if everyone with a sense of morality dropped out of big corps and government, leaving only the apathetic and evil? Is that more likely to turn the big corps and gov into forces of good, or evil?

</comment><comment><USER37> Well written, I agree.

I've been thinking a lot lately about two different aspects of this same problem.

We are complicit in our vendor's deeds. If businesses stopped buying ads and server time from these companies, the situation would change rapidly.

We are complicit in our entertainer's deeds. If individuals stopped viewing or engaging with content on these platforms, especially paid content, the situation would change rapidly.

What's someone with a 7-digit annual ad spend to do? (Avoiding social ads is easy, search ads are harder to replace.)

</comment><comment><USER38> Screening for cultural fit is a common strategy by many of these companies - FAANG companies especially. Culture includes morals and the actions you are willing to take or not take to do what is right or wrong. If you've been screened out for cultural fit, it may not be your age or race or other demographic. It may be because you will not be compatible with the value system at the company. Who you hire today dictates what your culture will be in 1-2 years.

</comment><comment><USER39> John Carmack and Yann LeCun really need to explain themselves for working for a data collection firm that aids the GOP.

<comment><USER40> Why? More specifically, why should they care about your opinion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> More accurately your parents are complicit in your employer's deeds :) . If you were born rich you don't have to stick to any employer.

</comment><comment><USER42> We need more developers start companies and not sell out.

<comment><USER26> I agree but I've seen this not work long-term. Entrepreneurs are inherently curious, distractible, and prone to move on to other projects. Any leader is prone to burnout.

I know a small company with a great founder who wanted to support clients, employees, and community as best he could. He did this for a decade, really well, then he got involved in other things which eventually consumed most of his time. For a few years he tried to hand the reins to his leadership team, but that didn't work very well so he sold the company. Now it's becoming just like everywhere else.

<comment><USER37> A decade of it working is a success! It doesn't have to last forever to have been a great benefit to many people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > _This is why I hold my peers accountable for working at companies which are > making a negative impact on the world around them._

Oh these are the rules now? Judging other people is easy. You can look at almost anyone and find something you don't like about them: sweatshop sneakers, ignorance of their history, consumer waste, eating meat from commercial farms... don't you know people around the world are starving and you're throwing out food?

Finding faults in others is easy and helps change exactly nothing. Turning it inward in self examination is the hard part.

<comment><USER10> There's a pretty damn big difference between throwing out $5 of food while someone across the Earth starves, and in directly making the software which opresses millions of people, raising millions of dollars for the people responsible, and pocketing huge salaries for yourself.

>As a general rule, it costs a business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given the overhead of benefits, HR, training, and so on. When you're making a cool half-million annual salary from $bigcorp, it's because they expect to make at least ¾ of a million that they wouldn't be making without you. It does not make economic sense for them to hire you if this weren't the case.

<comment><USER44> Oppresses millions? Please, if you are going to try to make that argument, spare us the hyperbole.

<comment><USER10> The extensive use of lobbying to disenfranchise voters in favor of corporate agendas alone oppresses millions of people. This is no hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> So much virtue signaling and holier-than-thou in this article. Really embarrassing to read. We make ethical judgements everyday, from eating an apple to driving a car. Does the author use a smartphone built by low-income folks across the ocean? How about other tech, using rare earth minerals mined in horrific conditions?

The hypocrisy is astounding.

</comment><comment><USER45> when every single company seems to have some flaw (like the FAANG examples the article gives), now, the techies might have less choices to work for.

</comment><comment><USER46> If you eat vegetables in the US, they were probably picked by farmworkers paid below minimum wage who are probably do not have legal work authorization. If you eat meat, in addition to having killed an animal (which isn't an ethical issue for everyone) meat processing plants continue to be the source of endless health and safety violations and which also exploit immigrants, both legal and illegal.

There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. And by extension, there is no ethical employment under capitalism.

The notion that you can get a single job that somehow places you outside society and the economy and puts you above other workers morally or ethically is fiction. By all means, seek to minimize your impact or make your own ethical choices, but there is no choice without some sort of ethical compromise.

<comment><USER47> You can choose fair trade products over the alternatives, you can forgo meat entirely or mostly and be selective about where you source it, you can choose not to put money in Nestlé's pocket and you can choose not to work for Google.

You don't have to be perfect in order to make better, more ethical, choices.

Yes, you're entirely correct that living a perfectly ethical life is nearly impossible.

That's still no excuse for not putting in the effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> The Tim Bray blog post, while well written and respectable, was still in my mind contentious and arguable. I unfortunately can't make that same call here. It's taken me a while to realize this, but I have begun to filter out reading thoughts that aren't fully formed, and I think this is one of them.

The author brings up the Nuremberg defense[1] as an example of complicity which is indefensible, but this is rhetorically quite hollow. If you go a little bit further into political theory and consider Arendt's conception of the banality of evil[2], and furthermore the idea of a panopticon[3], you very quickly come to the philosophical impasse between individual culpability and agency and systematic mechanisms and the political.

What is this impasse? Plainly, I think it is that the individual has nearly zero agency alone, and only has power when effectively organizing into groups. That makes arguments like these functionally useless (or even "usefully idiotic"[5]), because they fundamentally misattribute the locus of value production, capture of capital and political clout onto the individual, in what Marx would call the petite bourgeoisie[4].

This misattribution misses the asymmetric distribution of power towards the top of organizational hierarchies, especially within the size of large mega- corporations. If this author were correct and engineers were truly accountable for the work of their employers, what is the unique labor that managers and executives contribute to the corporation that ICs do not provide? And who has the power to make and override decisions at a corporate policy level? It's transparently obvious that corporations are intentionally set up divide labor such that decision making agency is allocated towards executive leadership and management, and that line level ICs serve to execute on those decisions but do not have the agency to veto decisions they disagree with.

This is obvious to anyone who has ever worked at a mega-corporation, enough so that I wonder if the author has. If they have not, then the post amounts merely to speculation about something the author doesn't have enough firsthand experience with to credibly analyze. That doesn't mean it should have never been written, but I certainly got no value from it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_banality_of_evil)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Criticism_and_use_as_metaphor)

[4][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petite_bourgeoisie)

[5][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot)

</comment><comment><USER49> As usual, someone suggests that _other people_ change their way of life because it's bad, without any impact on himself of course.

It's really easy to preach without having any skin in the game isn't it ?

</comment><comment><USER50> Uggghhhh, the entitlement of well paid and under qualified developers is loathsome. To everybody else who doesn't share that entitlement it looks like gross ethnocentricity.

Look, if you want all your crying and personal opinions to actually mean something start someplace rational. Start by asking (demanding) for a uniform of code of ethics. Every other professional industry has this, but not software.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism)

<comment><USER51> [https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics](https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics)

[https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html](https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html)

<comment><USER50> Sigh, did you declare an oath to those when you were hired? No, these were never mentioned during your hiring process or ever provided to you by your employer? Then that is just some animal's shit on a wall as irrelevant as wealthy software engineers quitting their jobs in protest.

Honestly, what happens you violate those? What are the actual repercussions to you? Then they aren't a code of ethics that applies to you.

As a medical doctor if you violate the Hippocratic Oath you will certainly lose your license to practice medicine and probably go to jail. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath)

<comment><USER52> I think whatever valid points you might have are getting lost in your attempts at rhetoric.

You may want to reconsider the relevance of the article you linked yourself, given that it contains the phrase

> The Hippocratic Oath has been eclipsed as a document of professional ethics > by more extensive, regularly updated ethical codes issued by national > medical associations

and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding.

In fact, you could consider it as similar to the ACM Code of Ethics, as both are not legally binding and yet they both do a pretty good job of mentioning a list of commonly made mistakes that people make that could get them in trouble (legally or morally or ethically) as well as processes for avoiding such mistakes.

<comment><USER50> > and that, to my knowledge, it's not considered legally binding.

Violating the oath is grounds for immediate revocation of license which eliminates lawful practice forever whether or not professional. The actions that produced that violation may not be a lawful violation, but they typically are.

What in software is of similar consequence?

<comment><USER52> From your previously linked article:

> There is no direct punishment for breaking the Hippocratic Oath, although an > arguable equivalent in modern times is medical malpractice

and from "The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and Medicine"[1]

> Still today, the Oath continues to demand that physicians maintain ethics > higher than those expected of society in general,[18] and it remains a code > of professional identity that marks off "proper" medicine from various forms > of alternative healing practices.'[19]

Later,

> This Part examines judicial opinions that allow doctors to perform [a > lengthy list of acts and the cases in which they were allowed]. These > opinions directly contradict specific portions of the Hippocratic Oath.

(that section later goes on to discuss that the oath is inextricably tied to the analysis of medical ethics, and so it retains its share of social/moral/ethical relevance even if it is not always legally relevant... which in my opinion is not incomparable to how we should approach the ACM Code of Ethics.)

I personally don't understand where you see a difference.

1: Lisa R. Hasday, The Hippocratic Oath as Literary Text: A Dialogue Between Law and Medicine, 2 Yale J. Health Pol'y L. & Ethics (2002). Available at: [https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjhple/vol2/iss2/4](https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjhple/vol2/iss2/4)

<comment><USER50> > I personally don't understand where you see a difference.

It doesn't matter what difference I see or what my opinions are. It only matters in how you practice your profession. In practical terms this difference is distinguished with one word: _licensing_.

If you wish to be taken seriously have credentials that certify credibility. This is a solved problem... just not in software. As an unlicensed unaccredited software developer you shouldn't take my opinions too seriously as I won't take yours.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gay marriage legalized in England and Wales - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/mar/29/gay-couples-wed-same-sex-marriage

<comment><USER2> Not trying to be nitpicky, but the HN title is not correct. The laws are only in effect in England and Wales. Scotland will only come in later this year. All three are part of Britain.

Great news nonetheless. It's amazing it took this long.

No news on when Northern Ireland will do the same as the rest of the UK though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I now pronounce you _Nation_ and _21st Century_.

<comment><USER4> Yes! If only our nation could get its act together and get with the times! I live in Michigan, and it's been a mixed up mess for gay couples here.</comment></comment>


Motorists are using video cams to avoid disputed accident claims - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21662646-dash-cams-small-video-cameras-film-road-ahead-are-being-used-motorists <comment><USER2> I've been driving with a camera for over a year now. While I haven't needed it for evidence of any sort, I do enjoy being able to create movies of enjoyable drives and idiot drivers from time to time :)

I worry less about people in front of me doing idiotic things now. I know that even if there's an accident, I'll have proof that I (hopefully) wasn't to blame.

<comment><USER3> What camera do you use? Any recommendations?

<comment><USER4> I like the G1W-C models for cheap and works, and the BlackVue DR* (I have a DR650-GW) models for "really nice."

The BlackVue models have GPS, which is nice because it provides a speed readout overlaid on the video. They also have WiFi (mostly useless IMO) and run Linux, which means there are a few interesting hacks for them.

Two often-overlooked things to look for are:

* A capacitor for power-off storage (this is what keeps the camera on while the video is finalized and buffers flushed) instead of a LiPo, which is ill-suited to use in a hot, sunny area like the windshield.

* A discrete design without flashy chrome bits and blinky lights everywhere. The last think you want is someone breaking in and stealing your dashcam itself.

<comment><USER5> I'd avoid anything with a speed written on the screen. I can't see an insurance company passing up the opportunity to screw you for going 5-over

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure new cars are storing this information anyway.

<comment><USER7> If you have Progressive Snapshot or a similar device, that's storing driving data, but which cars do so by themselves?

<comment><USER4> Almost all modern cars have an Event Data Recorder as part of the SRS/Airbag system which records snapshot data in the event of a deployment. Here are some NHTSA standards for EDR storage:

[http://www.nhtsa.gov/DOT/NHTSA/Rulemaking/Rules/Associated%2...](http://www.nhtsa.gov/DOT/NHTSA/Rulemaking/Rules/Associated%20Files/EDRFinalRule_Aug2006.pdf)

Here's a list of vehicles supported by one consultant's forensics software:

[http://www.rimkus.com/uploads/pdfs/Event_Data_Recorder.pdf](http://www.rimkus.com/uploads/pdfs/Event_Data_Recorder.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't see it being very long until all vehicles will be required to have a 'black-box' like aircraft.

Basically, in the event of an accident that is serious, both black boxes from each vehicle can be submitted to ...somebody, and the the account of what happened will be recorded in perfect detail. This would probably be able to settle fault in a high percentage of cases.

Now for the case of people jumping out in front of vehicles like they do in Russia...many vehicles will have cameras and lasers on board which will be used both as safety features (automatic collision avoidance) and autonomous driving. Every bit of data from these will also be recorded.

There will come a point in the future, (< 10 years), where most vehicles on the road will have all of these features and disputed accident claims, fraud, people suing the driver after they intentionally jump in front of a vehicle, will all be the past. Data storage is cheap.

It will also change all statistics about insurance and driving. New models will come about, including the insurance per mile, etc. And How much of the time is spent under fully autonomous driving versus driving yourself. If you are fully autonomous on most streets all the time, I can imagine a very low insurance premium.

<comment><USER9> This isn't as far as away as one might think.

2016 vehicles are already shipping either as options or as standard in some trims, safety features which can detect obstructions and take automated action (collision avoidance systems). Some are aimed only at detecting other vehicles ahead, but some are specifically designed to detect and avoid pedestrians/cyclists.

These systems utilise lasers and cameras. They aren't currently being used as a black box but it is practically turn-key, no additional hardware would be required except maybe an SD card and encoder to add a built in car-cam.

I agree that it may take ten years for this stuff to become standard in all new cars, but in the next two or three years if someone wants this in their new car they may very well be able to buy it.

Toyota are adding many of these features to their 2016 cars as a $500 option (lane departure, collision avoidance, etc) on all trims as far as I know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, we're becoming Russia!

Seriously, the Russians have been doing this for years, for more or less the same reasons.

This all suggests that the rule of law is tenuous and getting more so in the west.

<comment><USER11> An alternative possibility is that the prices are getting cheap enough to be cost effective for problems which have always existed; fraudulent claims, and ambiguity when settling insurance claims.

<comment><USER12> Reportedly, fraudulent claims are so common in Russia that there are many video compilations of Russian pedestrians sprinting to ram themselves into slow-driving cars.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSYT6V825gE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSYT6V825gE)

<comment><USER11> Or as this Economist article puts it, "Indeed, thousands of Russian videos of horrific crashes, remarkable near misses and blatant attempts at insurance fraud by drivers and pedestrians have become a staple on YouTube and other websites."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I had the spare cash for 2 cams, I'd set them up on my motorcycle for insurance purposes. I've heard too many stories about motorcyclists getting hit and being blamed for the accidents. Or even worse, hit and runs. In the age of cell phones, distracted driving is the norm. I almost get hit by someone almost weekly. I really need some cameras soon :(

<comment><USER14> Depending how long you ride for and how frequently, and if it's just for backup purposes, you could potentially use the Spy Gear Panosphere with a large MicroSD card.

[http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Gear-Panosphere-360-Degree- Cam/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Spy-Gear-Panosphere-360-Degree- Cam/dp/B00E4H1586)

I have two of them and while the native recording is very fish-eye, the software that comes with the unit functions fine in focusing on a specific point.

With a 32 GB card and full charge, I think I've gotten about 45 minutes of recording. Might not be good for daily use, but for recreational outings it might be usable with some customization (e.g. super glue a mount to it). I've got one mounted on a swivel clip from a clip-on guitar tuner that broke and it's been a neat tool.

Edit: Example footage of using the camera: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBpEGw3tTZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBpEGw3tTZ8)

<comment><USER13> I'd imagine you'd want something good enough to be able to read license plates in case of a hit and run.

<comment><USER14> You're correct that it's not a true HD unit. It doesn't do well in low light either. I think if mounted in the right place though, it could potentially get that info in one of the frames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Honest question: Has anybody used telemetry from a personal wearable device in the context of using it as proof of testimony, or something akin to that?

<comment><USER15> I've seen a cyclist's helmet cam video that was used by someone to catch a careless car driver

\- the car did not yield in a crossing though it had a "yield" triangle

\- the cyclist had to break hard and went over the bar; the car drove away

\- cyclist made a crime report at police and gave video as evidence

\- car driver was fined for negligence

<comment><USER16> negligence, wow, hit and run is a crime

<comment><USER17> "Went over the bar" doesn't mean a collision. It just means the cyclist went over his handlebar.

<comment><USER15> Right. There was no collision, the cyclist fell because he had to break hard to avoid it, but the car driver did not even notice what happened. The license plate number was visible in the video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Question for those of you with dash cams: What do you use and why?

Seems like a ton of options available. Some expensive and some not. Many features to consider like storage limits, power source, integrated rear-view cams, etc.

<comment><USER5> I've got a G1W. I use it because I don't want to get screwed over by an idiot in front of me. I also drive a POS in a nice place and get frequently bothered by law enforcement (stopped for under 5-over...or really?) and if you bring an umbrella it usually won't rain.

The most common close call I have in my truck is slowing down to stop in a right or left turn lane and having someone cut me off to get in the lane while I'm stopping. I've only ever seen close calls but if more than one or two people do that when pulling up to one turn then it's gonna be hard for everyone to have enough space to come to a stop without rear ending someone.

When driving my 90s compact (not my DD) in traffic I've had two very close calls where people blast through one lane of dense traffic in order to pull out onto the road and cut me off (I assume because they don't see me). Both times I went jumping over curbs to avoid T-boning or rear-ending them.

<comment><USER18> How did you manage the wiring?

<comment><USER5> I took a 12v outlet from the junkyard, wired it in parallel with the stock one (hot in run) and located it under the dash. The camera is powered by a USB plug so I just used an adapter I had lying around. I drilled a hole through the trim for the cord and used a grommet to keep it clean looking and prevent the cord from wearing out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> See also: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Roadcam/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Roadcam/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The Economist will be following up this exposé with another one next month showing how people use seat belts in cars so they avoid injuries.</comment>


Ask HN: Cap table is a mess - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Will keep it simple: - 16% of our Cap Table is owned by people no longer involved in the company - We have $2M in the bank - We are pivoting to something completely different - The $2M is from note holders (so they currently are not on the cap table)
What is the best way to get that equity back? - Buy out the owners - Start new company and refund investors - Do a recapitalization - Other idea?
Thanks <comment><USER2> IANAL, and this depends on many many factors, and probably many more than you currently have on your radar given the way you've phrased your question.

Best way forward here is likely to sit down with a great lawyer and talk through the _technical_ options you have, which will vary based on jurisdiction and setup.

If you have a good relationship with the 16%, there is probably a way to readjust the ownership levels in good faith - they will want you to be properly incentivized. You will have to make a good case for this and explain how the readjustment will work best on a technical level, and why this is going to be win-win.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sadly, this question cannot be answered based on this information.

When you say "pivoting to something completely different," are you going to be using IP developed as part of the current company? If so, starting a new company will be very difficult.

And the note holders don't want their money back, most likely. I mean, if you dissolve, they'll have no choice but to take it. But they were investing to get equity down the road. Query how you raised $2M and apparently haven't spent any of it. How long ago did you enter into these notes? I would have to imagine it was pretty recent. And you didn't know about the pivot then? That's possible, of course. But it's a concern the noteholders may have.

There are lots of strategies to move forward. But it's pretty fact specific. I think fab1an's advice is really the best.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't know what your goals are here, but if you have $2M banked then you're presumably shooting for a relatively large ~$100M+ market valuation. At this point, your primary focus should be the success of your pivot, and nothing is more valuable than cash.

If the extra 16% equity is necessary to ensure your ability to fundraise and retain talent, then it is a fatal condition. You must find a way to show the equity holders that their 16% will be worth zero unless they give some back.

If the extra 16% is _extremely annoying_, and you really wish you could get it back because you think this new venture will be HUGE... then I'd advise you to consider leaving it alone as "dead equity". Yeah it sucks, but your options here are Victory or Zero. Giving up cash (or time, and mental anguish) for a slightly larger Victory doesn't really help you, and increases the probability of Zero by a non-trivial amount. Check your ego and be wise here.

IANAL. Your Mileage My Vary.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know that HN can give a satisfactory answer with the information provided. For instance, does the traction of the business indicate the value will continue to increase (i.e., is buying out worthwhile to you)? Is the outside ownership shares or options; if options, do they have expiration? Are there opportunities to fundraise or sell? Is the outside ownership a problem to potential investors? etc

</comment><comment><USER6> No longer involved, but provided something of value in the past?</comment>


Ask HN: Whats the best way to learn networks (in particular VPNs)? - <AUTHOR> My last few attempts at setting up a VPN has make me realise that 1) This stuff is pretty complicated and 2) I have no idea what I am doing!
I really need to sit down and learn how to setup a secure and reliable network / VPN. What are the recommended books/sites/techniques?
Also by definition networks involve >1 machines. Is there an easy way to learn without having to rent a load of VPS boxes? <comment><USER2> I don't know whether my approach would work for you. I got a job at a systems integration firm based on my *nix OS skills and then learnt VPNs on the job. I agree reading isn't that helpful. Getting your hands dirty is good but you really need a mentor.</comment>


Masks Simulate How You Look to Facial Detection Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/en_uk/blog/facial-recognition-sees-you-as-a-pattern-not-a-person <comment><AUTHOR> I think these look kind of creepy. I wonder if I wore a mask of what the computer thought I looked like, would the computer still be able to detect who I was.</comment>


Microsoft's new future vision 10 years ahead - <AUTHOR> http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-unveils-amazing-new-vision-of-the-future-video/Rumors%29

<comment><USER2> Amazing video. Stupid thing is that someone other than Microsoft will do all of this.</comment>


Specialising Dynamic Techniques for Implementing The Ruby Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://chrisseaton.com/phd/ <comment><USER2> I end up reading a few theses a year, I'm already 40 pages in. Congratulations for not only completing what must have been a rigorous course at one of the finest institutions in the world, but also having what seems to be a very high quality product of half a decade of work. If Guy Steele is still working on Fortress and he's in the same location as you, you should definitely float on over and have a chat. Then head out to Cambridge to work at MSR ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been excited about this for a while, any word when this becomes part of the default in jruby?

<comment><USER4> It's available in 188.8.131.52 today, but I wouldn't advise using it yet. We hope to be running Rails in 2016 though.

<comment><USER5> My words are not enough to express how grateful I am as a Ruby user to you and your work! Amazing results! Hats off and may you have a bright career.

What I wanted to ask is, excluding Rails and big projects which understandably aren't the target yet, is 126.96.36.199 already theoretically able to achieve the said "up to an an order of magnitude" speed increase?

Again, thanks! This will be probably contemplated among the most important milestones ever in the Ruby language history!

<comment><USER4> Across the 63 benchmarks we track we are on average over 30x faster than MRI, over 22x faster than JRuby, over 30x faster than Rubinius, and over 16x faster than Topaz (Ruby using PyPy).

These are our benchmarks - some classic VM research benchmarks and some kernels from real Ruby applications (like Chunky PNG and PSD.rb) - you may care about different benchmarks and want to measure in a different way to us etc etc etc

[http://jruby.org/bench9000/](http://jruby.org/bench9000/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Chris: what happens now? Will you continue the work or go to something else?

<comment><USER4> I'm continuing the project full-time at Oracle Labs, where the project started as an internship. I'm leading a small team working on it now, and we hope to be running Rails by the end of 2016.</comment></comment>


US Oil Boom: Soon to Be Top Producer? - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/10/us-oil-boom-soon-to-be-top-producer/

<comment><USER2> Something for everybody to keep in mind: The US is a huge IMPORTER of crude oil, but a net EXPORTER of refined petroleum products! The amount of crude we make will have an impact on petroleum prices, but not as large as one would think.

Oil's a bit like diamonds. It's artificial scarcity in the US to keep the price high.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder if we'll end up joining OPEC? Could there actually be advantages in that?

<comment><USER4> OPEC is a cartel intended to maintain a high price for oil.

The US has been the second or third largest oil producer for decades, well ahead of all other OPEC countries except Saudi Arabia. See: <http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=oil_where>

In addition to being one of the largest oil producers for decades, it has also been the largest oil consumer. Therefore it has not been in the US's interest to join OPEC. The US would prefer lower oil prices. There's no reason to expect this will change if the US moves from number 2 or 3 producer to number 1.</comment></comment>


Jane Manchun Wong: The Woman Scooping Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47630849 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://wongmjane.com/](https://wongmjane.com/) lists Wong's writeups of apps features, uncovered by reverse engineering.</comment>


Ask HN: Any Hackers in Middle America? - <AUTHOR>

I understand the advantages of being on either coast for hackers looking to get involved in a startup but which hackers reside in Middle America and why?<p>Note: I recently moved to Indianapolis and have found it much worse than expected (which was pretty terrible) for anyone interested in web app startup. <comment><USER2> Ignoring the first 14 years of life, I've lived in

1) Kansas City for high school

2) Annapolis for college

3) Rhode Island for six months

4) San Diego for four years

5) Annapolis for two and a half years

6) New Orleans for 5 weeks to start medical school

7a) Lived with my parents for one year in College Station, Texas after Katrina

7b) Attended classes in Houston for that year

8) Back to New Orleans with trips to San Antonio, Houston, College Station, Washington, DC, Norfolk, Virginia, and New Haven, Connecticut.

If I were going to move to one of those places for the purpose of starting a start up, first, I wouldn't. Second, I'd prioritize the list like so

1) College Station (couldn't study for all the people talking about setting up this or that, whether they had set up their S corp, when the fiber would be laid down, etc). These people are definitely still engineers.

2) San Diego

3) Washington, DC, including Annapolis (home of Wonkette)

4) New Haven (mainly due to proximity to both Boston and NY)

5) Norfolk, VA (lots of military contracts)

6) San Antonio

7) Rhode Island

8) Houston

9) Kansas City

10) New Orleans

Why is New Orleans last? I mean, I'm here, and clearly I've learned more about programming and system admin here than anywhere. I can't believe I'm saying it, but there really is an element of old world culture down here that I will miss when I leave. And it's sort of a city within a city: you meet the people you know all over the place. And really, I've learned more from the programmers I've met here than from anyone (except my brother, who lives in San Antonio). But there are two overwhelming factors working against ever trying to do a start up here: 1) Who would ever put a server in New Orleans? 2) Tulane dismissed their entire engineering college after the storm. No hacker I know is here because it's a good place for hacking. In some ways, it awesome. But there's virtually no one here. I think I've identified all the XOs in the city, and it adds up to about 6 (it was 5 until someone in Texas mailed me a spare).

Why would I rank Houston below San Antonio? Houston is much larger, 4th largest city in the US. Surely there is a greater absolute number of hackers in Houston. But having lived in Houston, you would be hard-pressed to get me to move back. It's so huge and spread out and the public transit system is so non-existent that you end up spending your life in a car. And I get the sense that most people would rather live in Austin or, if they want to stay close to the engineering, they go to College Station.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a student at BYU in Provo, UT. There are a lot of good hackers out here, about half of the students stay after they graduate. There are lots of startups in the area, with top-rated universities around the state; and more VC's (<http://vSpring.com>, for 1 example) are being formed as the tech startup environment continues to mature

Provo is "the country's second largest software center," according to Kiplinger,featuring top employers Novell, Micron Technology and Omniture."

[http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/2008/05/2008-best...](http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/2008/05/2008-best- cities-provo.html)

Some of my friends work for <http://EnticeLabs.com> (a software startup in the HR space), <http://InsideSales.com> is out here, <http://Omniture.com> of course (founded by BYU students), and there's a growing list of tech bloggers to keep track of it all (<http://connectblogs.com>)

</comment><comment><USER4> Middle America: Even people who "support" you kind of pat you on the head "oh that's nice" because they don't really get it.

Get Lucky: You might find a friend or two, and that's all you need to stay motivated, but don't anything beyond that.

The Wasteland: I lived in Nashville for far too long. People just don't give a damn about ideas. They don't even think about ideas. They just want to make some money and hang out. They don't value work and ideas for their own sake, but only in terms of the financial benefits they bring. That is what slayed me. Not having people with any kind of vision.

Get out: I would be curious which city you came from before Indy? If you haven't spent a couple months in sf/seattle/austin/boston/nyc, give it a shot, you'll never want to go back.

<comment><USER5> _Middle America: Even people who "support" you kind of pat you on the head "oh that's nice" because they don't really get it._

Even my parents reacted like this. For a while my Dad thought it was little more than a pipe dream. I'm sure he secretly thought "What the hell is this boy doing? He gets back from Afghanistan, decides not to finish college, and instead moves out to Boston for some Internet... thing? WHERE DID I GO WRONG?!?!" ;)

He now understands things better and though my parents still don't _really_ understand the entire idea of a "web business" and "venture capitalists" (which obviously aren't a web-only thing, but they are from Ohio after all...) and all that rot, they are now more realistic about it and "get" why I did this... why I _had_ to, even.

The 13 hour stretch from Cincinnati to Boston was easily one of the best days of my life. Shedding the shackles of mid-western suburbia to embark on an adventure, having no idea how or when it would end or where it would take me. I'd never felt so... _free_. Where I came from exhibits quite the contrast; a society content to live firmly within the lines of what is considered proper, reasonable and safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Welcome to Indy. It is pretty bad here. So much so that I'm moving away.

There are lots of companies that call themselves startups around here, perhaps 10% truly are. The most notable one in all the media is ChaCha, and its a fucking joke if you ask me.

There are good developers/hackers around here, but its not the same as the west coast.

Either way, welcome to Indy... It can be an OK city if you like Insurance, Transportation, Conventions and Basketball. :p

<comment><USER7> I'm in Indy, also. I haven't lived here long. I think that part of the problem is that there are more startup-oriented people than one would think, but everyone thinks there are no startup oriented people. (A couple weeks ago I found out my neighbor in the apartment above me had applied to YC, and is a HackerNews reader. Tim?)

Perhaps we should have an Indy HN meetup sometime. In what part of Indy are you (you being anyone in Indy reading this) located?

If you like Ruby, there is a monthly Ruby group meeting at the downtown library (which is pretty awesome, in my opinion). Search meetup.com for Ruby and Indianapolis.

Complaining is useless. Maybe we can improve the city's startup scene ourselves, huh? Who else is going to do it?

 __Edit __: To clarify: the library is awesome. I've only been to last month's Ruby meeting, so far. I get the feeling many of these sorts of groups are in their infancy. The Ruby group is sponsored by DealerFlow (<http://dealerflow.com/>), which is a startup of sorts. The Indianapolis Star (newspaper) employs some Ruby hackers (Indy.com is currently Rails, for now). I work at a data center (ChaCha is a customer) writing our custom intranet apps using Ruby/Rails. There are bright spots in Indy, you just have to dig.

<comment><USER6> I Would be down to do a HN meetup as well. I had no idea about the ruby meeting... which is awesome.

I know at least 2-3 people which might come to either/both depending on timing/schedules.

Anyone have a good idea for organizing this? Not to re-invent the 'meetup.com' wheel, but perhaps we could create a mini "HN Fans Meetup" web app, that would benefit not only people in Indy but also any other state that isnt CA or MA..

Edit: I live near Broad Ripple, so pretty much anywhere that isnt Greenwood or Westfield is game. Even then, I'll probably come. :)

Brian

<comment><USER8> Wow. Awesome thread. This is really encouraging to read given that I also thought I was all alone out here in Indiana. I gotta about one year left to get my degree at IUPUI, which honestly just feels like a waste of time and money, but would loved to involved in something local like this. Maybe we can start a news-letter or something for starters? I dunno, you tell me, just lemme in. BTW, I'm in Fishers. =/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Django (currently the best Python web framework) originated in an innovative local newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. A number of other Django hackers reside there: <http://djangopeople.net/us/ks/>

<comment><USER10> Yeah, but Adrian did it while he was living in Chicago - he never actually lived in Lawrence.

Of course, Chicago is in middle America.

<comment><USER11> And Chicago rocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a student at U of I in Champaign, IL. Because of the school, there are a lot of good hackers here. But they all move far away when they graduate.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was born, raised, and still live in Iowa and I've worked for several startups for many years now - they are just all based elsewhere. One was European, one from the valley, one in Florida, etc. I haven't found a need to move just for the sake of working in this industry. The Internet is a wonderful thing. Coffee shops are my office. Total freedom.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm from the Grand Rapids, MI area, and develop for a small-ish company involved with the furniture industry (which is big, locally). There are a couple tech startups that have come out of here (but I don't particularly care about startups at the moment, so I can't name them offhand). The area seems to be culturally favorable toward startups in a way that e.g. the twin cities area supposedly isn't, though; there are some local businesses such as Amway that gently encourage an entrepreneurial outlook, and there has been a lot of money lately going into medical research / biotech stuff here. There are also several colleges in the area. The Ann Arbor area (East side of the state, by Detroit) might be good for startups, too.

This ask.metafilter post is about the Kalamazoo, MI area, which is about 50 miles South of here: [http://ask.metafilter.com/105668/Growing-up-no-one- thinks-th...](http://ask.metafilter.com/105668/Growing-up-no-one-thinks- theyll-end-up-in-Kalamazoo-do-they) Much of it applies to Southwest Michigan in general. Not the greatest area tech-wise, but it's quite pretty if you're outdoorsy (particularly for fishing and kayaking - there are lakes and rivers all over), the farmer's markets are nice, housing / office space is is not terribly expensive, etc.

It's also an easy (and cheap!) train ride to Chicago from here, FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER15> Bought a company out of Purdue. Worked one year with it in West Lafayette. Moved to Palo Alto for 2.5 years. Moved back to Lafayette, IN. Opened office in Buenos Aires. Commuted there quarterly. Consulted for a venture firm in Ann Arbor. And in August I moved to Indianapolis. Why?

Because it is not about starting it or where you start it. Its about finishing. What do you need to finish? Does Indy have the resources available and accessible for budding entrepreneurs to close the loop on an idea and create a business?

I'm looking for help. Yes, I miss the hustle and bustle and wondering if every person at Starbucks in Palo Alto or Mt View just bagged $1 million from VC. But at the same time I know where I want to raise my family, where I want to vacation and where my access to top notch stable talen is - and that is Indianapolis.

I've built one company. Sold it. Working on another. Have a 9 to 5 that pays bills and pays health insurance, but my "idle" mind perpetuates. I need help - did I mention that?

Not sure where the next finish line is, but I'm willing to run the race with you.

ideas: manufacturing kanban software, logistically distribution AI, virtual pharmaceutical testing, quick hit web apps, SEO consulting, beer brewing (just seeing if you are still reading).

<comment><USER16> avcetim, you didn't happen to buy spare parts for manufacturing space shuttle heat panels? or maybe i'm thinking of something else.

anyway, i'm a grizzled 4.5 year indy tech veteran, work at software company that went from 70-400 in my tenure and an idea man. i'm seasoned working in a pressure cooker. interested in talking more if you are - looking to make a leap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've got a company in Chicago; we're in the process of outgrowing our third office in 2 years. I can (have, in fact) given a litany of reasons why Chicago can be a better choice than the bay area, where my last company ran out of.

(Half my company is in Manhattan, but our revenue isn't 50/50).

I have friends in Indy with a thriving, well-funded company in the telephony space; I'll try to get one of them to chime in with why they moved their company from NYC metro to Indiana.

Prior to Matasano, I spent 4 years at a VC-funded startup in Ann Arbor, MI --- Arbor Networks. Being in the middle of nowhere is great for the company and crappy for the employees; Arbor was the only credible option for a developer with a mortgage in Ann Arbor, so most of the team was stuck.

<comment><USER18> Why was Ann Arbor "crappy for the employees"? I think it would be a pretty nice place to live.

<comment><USER17> Ann Arbor is actually a pretty excellent place to live, especially if you have kids. They get what I perceive to be a better than average share of touring bands, both in Ann Arbor and in Detroit. The quality of restaurants is fairly high. Lots of good cafes. The city and central campus is walkable. Leopold's and Old Town are good bars, as is Ashley's on the off season. And you get Zingermans, which is a force of nature.

Housing costs are higher than average (lots of people move to Dexter and Ypsi to get around this, but then you lose "walkable"), and there isn't a huge amount of capacity, and you have to deal with students and avoid student housing.

Great school system. Good parks. Lots of kids.

It's a fine place live. But it's a crappy place to relocate to: if your job starts to suck, or god forbid you lose it, where else are you going to work? The University, for 40% of your current salary?

When you're 20, this is not a big deal. You lose your job, you move somewhere else. When you're 30, you start wanting to own a home. If you have a mortgage, and you don't have a lot of cushion in your bank account (young people with houses often don't), you need 3-6 months warning to relocate.

If you have kids, regardless of whether you rent or own, moving is A Big Deal. I moved back to Chicago instead of NYC because I needed to commit to my family that I wasn't going to uproot them again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From Wisconsin. I colo my servers out of Chicago. Wisconsin (And indeed most of middle America) has a pretty cheap cost of living which allowed me to bootstrap my own startup. Living an hour from my servers for that once-every- few-months trip for hardware maintenance isn't really a problem.

Overall, it's quite pleasant, aside from Wisconsin being rather boring in the overall. I'd rather live in Chicago, but my wife's job is here. It's not an intellectual hot-spot or anything, but it's sufficient for running a business.

And it's a pretty peasant place to raise children whenever we decide to start squeezing a few out.

*The property taxes such HARD in Wisconsin (particularly the Milwaukee Area).

<comment><USER20> Sounds like you must be in the Milwaukee area. The tech market there looks like a dream from where I am (live in Appleton, work in Green Bay). All a matter of perspective, I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the primary benefit, if you have a solid team, is the much-reduced cost of living possible in those areas. This is going to be a competitive advantage for small startups who increasingly are going to have to get profitable on their own.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why did you move to Indy?

On a separate note, I think hackers who make it big should try to go back to their small towns or non-silicon valley places, especially if it has a good university and try to sow the seeds so that that these other places become hacker friendly. I really admire that Italian guy behind Balsalmiq for going back to Italy and doing his thing. He is not that big yet, but hackers there have a reason to stick around and try to make it.

</comment><comment><USER23> There are hackers by the ton here and no worries about where you live. You could find someone here and do a quick project together to see how it goes and take it from there!

It's cheaper to live out there then in San Fran, NYC or Boston.

Don't let location and the old adage of having to be in the valley stop you from innovating! IF you make something interesting or that has perceived value your work will get noticed!

</comment><comment><USER24> <http://www.startupwarrior.com> can map some of the Middle America startups.

</comment><comment><USER25> I went to school at Rose Hulman in Terre Haute, IN, where an impressive concentration of hackers attend. They've even got Rose Ventures (<http://www.rhventures.org/>), a start up friendly organization (using appropriately educated students as cheap labor for small companies).

</comment><comment><USER26> There are two hot beds in the "middle" where you can find strong activity. Austin, TX and Boulder, CO... I live in Austin for it's low cost of living, Univ of Texas resources, Texas' strong economy, and no state income tax. The only thing that bothers is me is that we're in the bible belt... :)

<comment><USER10> Austin is a fantastic place to start - and SXSW coming in town every year is huge.

<comment><USER17> I'm going to call you on that and ask for details on how SXSW is really huge for a startup. Got an anecdote?

<comment><USER27> I got one. I started a consulting business (for the purpose of bootstrapping a startup) just before SXSW last this past year. My partners and I were looking for a product to build around that time when we were approached by another business savvy startup that needed a strong development team. We immediately started working together and now have our first version of the product rolling out to select Hooters restaurants tomorrow. If we had not gone to SXSW we would have never run into this other group of guys and stumbled into a really, really strong product with an amazing business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm from Dayton OH and I work as a freelance programmer. The worst part is that it is very hard to find any kind of freelance work that doesn't involve using Microsoft products. I would love to do some Django projects, but everyone is hooked on asp.net or php.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm in Spokane, WA for a while and would like to meet up and talk startups. Anybody else here here?

</comment><comment><USER30> St Louis, MO

Well, sort of. I'm really in O'Fallon, MO, but STL isn't very far away.

<comment><USER31> Des Peres... a suburb of St. Louis. The few people I knew who got VC ended up moving west. I hope Slicehost stays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Southwestern Ohio. HN is a remarkable service for me.

</comment><comment><USER33> I live in Pittsburgh, which is dangerously close.</comment>


Assessment of life on Earth reveals humanity's disproportionate impact - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study <comment><USER2> That title distills a reasonably non-contradictory article down into something nonsensical. Oddly, the URL seems to be coherent and reflective of the article.

"human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals- study"

This suggests the title "Human race just 0.01% of all life but has destroyed over 80% of wild mammals" might be a better one.

<comment><USER3> It would still be deceptive, connecting proportions of two different groups, and implying a moral value which would not be implied by a more honest comparison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article doesn't make it clear whether it's 83% of biomass that went extinct, 83% of individual animals, or 73% of species.

</comment><comment><USER5> >Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals >70% of birds are chickens and other poultry

The articles fails to mention the obvious fact that these ratios are shifted because we breed more livestock animals, not because we kill wild ones.

>All life on Earth is made up of 82% plants and found in 86% on land 1% in the oceans

Which is also a completely wrong statement. Anyone with a highschool diploma knows that the ocean contains a huge amount of biomass, probably larger than all terrestrial life combined.

The article seems to be taking the position that we should only have an effect on the environment proportional to our biomass ratio with other mammals. I don't understand this idea. Are they saying more humans should die, or that more animals should die? What kind of ratio are they optimizing for?</comment>


Show HN: SeriesF – The Onion for Startup News - <AUTHOR> http://seriesf.com <comment><USER2> Ironical satire news site raises $100 million to disrupt the satire industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, that's not a bad article idea ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just take a look at the front page of HN right now. Reality in the tech bubble is pretty much beyond satire. Nobody would know the difference.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even calling yourselves the Onion for Startup News is hilarious. The whole 'we're like uber but for ... ' has become meaningless. The pieces on your tumblr so far have been pretty funny.

This industry needs more social commentary along the lines of Silicon Valley on HBO and sites like this. Silicon Valley nails our industry almost every week. It's brutal, but it's reasonably accurate satire.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's yet meaningless. Saying "appear.in is like etherpad for videochat" still has meaning even if making similes for startups is now cliche.

<comment><USER6> From the appear.in website:

What People Say: "It's so easy it almost hurts" \- Kate Russell, BBC Click

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also [https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion](https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion) and [https://twitter.com/TechCrunchOnion](https://twitter.com/TechCrunchOnion).

</comment><comment><USER8> Not bad, not bad... And I like the domain name too. Also, reminds me of my own idea years back when domain name POOMA NEWS.com was available...

POOMA of course meant "Pulled Out Of", and I could not help with some double-"O" animated logo ideas either... Realized that constantly being funny is such a strain on your creativity, decided to use that towards solving serious problems :)

</comment><comment><USER9> This violates the HN policy against sarcasm/satire. Please report your link and burn your computer.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://seriesf.com/post/116747678376/peter-thiel-has- change-...](http://seriesf.com/post/116747678376/peter-thiel-has-change-of- heart-pays-founders-1m) was pretty good!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That one was my favorite too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice. You will never run out of material. That's for sure!

A few off the top of my head:

Uber for Facebook: on demand outsourced upkeep on your boring but essential social media presences

Snapchat in talks with Twitter: merger could set new valuation record of over 17 trillion dollars!

</comment><comment><USER12> This is hilarious. Reminds me of Bored Elon Musk: it is so funny exactly because it is so close to believable reality. I, for one, could certainly see the viability of the idea of giving startups office space for equity, Airbnb or not.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd sign up on Facebook, if that option was there. I don't know if you can make a living from this, but I like this idea a lot as a consumer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just set up a Twitter (@SeriesF_News) I'll look into a Facebook next :) Thanks!</comment></comment>


Scan Uncovers Thousands of Copycat Scientific Articles - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=thousands-of-copycat-articles A growing number of professors use Turnitin.com to catch students submitting plagiarized papers.
Now the professors themselves are being scrutinized for plagiarism when submitting papers to scientific journals:
From "Science": Déjà vu, an online database that bills itself as "a study of scientific publication ethics," has prompted discussions with journal editors and at least 48 retractions of suspicious papers. Some journals now run accepted papers through eTBLAST, the freely available software behind the database, to hunt for duplications prior to publication.
links:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/324/5930/1004
http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/etblast.shtml <comment><USER2> This is the worst bit:

      He added that he was being singled out for a paper that
      was a chore to write and brought him no added prestige.
      "Who cares? This is a review article," he says. "I'm
      never going to write another one, because of this
      bullshit."

Review articles are invaluable, at least in my field. Collecting results that are disparate in time and space not only saves other researchers time, but the process of arranging the article often clarifies the presentation. (N.B. this probably only applies to theory-oriented fields.)

And it "brought him no added prestige"? It must have been pretty bad if no one noticed...

<comment><USER3> From the description it sounds like it was a copy & paste of the original articles without citation, that's pretty much the definition of plagarism. The review author should either summarize the findings in their own words, or copy it and give an appropriate citation.</comment></comment>


Django 1.2 on Google App Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.deck.cc/django_1.2_on_google_app_engine.html

<comment><USER2> Careful with the zipimport approach to running Django: you may see very high response times for "cold" requests to App Engine. If you can wait, it is likely that GOOG will eventually support Django 1.2 via the use_library() call, which seems to give far better performance.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right, thank you for the advice. I am going to update the article as soon as django 1.2 is supported via use_library() to reflect this. Cold startup time really is a bummer for low traffic apps.

<comment><USER2> Yep, cold hits are a pain. They're bad for low traffic apps because App Engine will deallocate all resources if your app hasn't been hit in a while. Interestingly, cold hits are bad for apps with spiking traffic, too: as your load spikes, App Engine tasks new machines each of which _may_ experience a cold hit. (It depends on their caching internals, subject to change.)

As for use_library() vs App Engine Patch: for me, the perf issue is primary. On the other hand, AEP offers a lot of functionality out-of-box that you don't get with raw use_library() django.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I always was sceptical about the suitability of Google's App Engine for 'real' Web Apps. It just seemed that too many features where missing.

But after Google IO 2010 I have reconsidered. Google obviously has placed a firm commitment behind GAE.

<comment><USER4> I run www.thathigh.com on google appengine and I can say it handles extremely well under some pretty high loads.

Every once in awhile Django will barf but it always dies and restarts nearly instantly. If you know how to optimize your app for appengine, it's a very sustainable solution.

<comment><USER5> I have a pretty good grasp on SQL+.NET and use those for AJAX backend. Would you recommend switching to app engine? Any particular advice?

<comment><USER4> Sorry, just now saw this.

I've only used Python on appengine, so I can't really comment on your particular experience. It supports Java, and it's super-important to realize that you won't be working with a database, you'll be working with a dataSTORE (which is comprised of hash tables, sorta).

give it a shot. if you hate it, quit!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for this. I was literally searching for this information yesterday and you are all too right in saying this how-to information is scarce. Kudos. :)</comment>


The Strangers in Your Brain - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-strangers-in-your-brain <comment><USER2> We're now discovering, something the article does not address and that's how epigentics play such a significant role in how we are shaped that it's rewriting how we think about natural selection and the power of nurture/environment over nature.

This epigentic scientist gives a stunning example here: [https://youtu.be/9DAcJSAM_BA?t=1764](https://youtu.be/9DAcJSAM_BA?t=1764)

<comment><USER3> Fascinating video, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great article! And this is beautiful:

> According to Gage's theory, transposons may make such transformations > possible; they may generate novelty, and therefore complexity, in a way that > our genes alone cannot. If this is, indeed, why they are unsilenced during > neural development, then our brains can be thought of as hosting a kind of > evolution in miniature. Just as the beaks of Darwin's finches are suited to > different food sources, each neuron may develop its own specialty in the > ecosystem of the brain. (Immune cells make use of transposons for similar > reasons, exploiting them in order to generate a large range of antibodies to > tag new intruders.)

But there's a key bit of missing context, selection via programmed cell death:[0]

> The importance of programmed cell death (PCD) during vertebrate development > has been well established. During the development of the nervous system in > particular, neurotrophic cell death in innervating neurons matches the > number of neurons to the size of their target field. However, PCD also > occurs during earlier stages of neural development, within populations of > proliferating neural precursors and newly postmitotic neuroblasts, all of > which are not yet fully differentiated.

[0] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001216060...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160604005020)</comment>