Suicide increasing among American workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p1115-Suicide-american-workers.html <comment><USER2> I know we're collectively no fans of anecdata but I get a strong feeling that attitudes to typical work are changing, that jobs are making more people miserable. I get asked a lot by people seeking to do something different; I guess they're bombarded by successful side hustle stories and never by "I love my 9-5 day job, it's so rewarding" stories.

<comment><USER3> >I know we're collectively no fans of anecdata but I get a strong feeling that attitudes to typical work are changing, that jobs are making more people miserable

I tend to agree. My parents have completely different stories about their experiences with work 40 years ago. Much less stress, better pay, more mentorship, less competition, and lower demands generally. I'm sure part of that's nostalgia, but nearly everyone I talk to seems to be miserable at their job anymore. There are rarely people who say they enjoy their job and want to do that exact thing until they retire.

<comment><USER4> Older family friend made $30/hr in the 60-70s with pension and benefits working in a meat packing plant with a high school education. Same job today pays $15/hr with no benefits thanks to illegal immigration. There's a reason people like the Koch brothers spend millions in support of illegal immigration, they wanted to drive down the labor cost for jobs like the above.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0)

Offshoring and illegal immigration has killed low skill jobs and given billion dollar multinational corporations the ability to demand whatever they want from workers because they have unlimited labor supply.

This doesn't just effect low skill labor either, it forces more people to go to college and take on debt which then drives down the wages of high skill work as well. It's a scam and the american people should be angry

<comment><USER5> The root cause is the destruction of unions and worker's rights. It has nothing to do with legal or illegal immigration.

<comment><USER6> For a limited number of positions, if you have a bigger pool of people to hire from, the wages will automatically go down. This is simple economics.

While the union effect might also be playing a role, it's curious that you rush to deny the big obvious factor while propping up a relatively minor reasoning factor as a primary one.

<comment><USER7> Probably because it seems doubtful that ten million people (the estimated number of illegal aliens in the US), tanked wages for everyone in a country of 330 million.

It's curious you immediately point to illegal immigration as the big obvious factor with no citations to support your claims.

The fact is wages have been stagnating since the seventies and most people attribute that to the weakening of unions, offshoring, and automation before illegal immigration.

The US is producing twice as much today as it was in 1984 with a third less workers. That seems like it'd have a much bigger impact to me. And painting immigrants as the reason American's qualities of life has dropped off seems disingenuous, simplistic, and prejudiced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with the pay discrepancy between CEOs, investors and us wage slaves.

<comment><USER9> Interestingly the states with the lowest suicide rates (Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, New York, and other relatively wealthy blue states) also have some of the highest income inequality [1]. Another counterintuitive thing about suicide in the US is that demographics that tend to earn less (e.g. young people, Blacks) tens to commit suicide at lower rates than wealthy demographics (Whites, Asians, older people).

Pointing to income inequality as cause of a high suicide rate does not seem particularly convincing.

1\. [https://www.zippia.com/advice/states-highest-lowest- income-i...](https://www.zippia.com/advice/states-highest-lowest-income- inequality/)

<comment><USER10> If the point you're trying to make is that suicide isn't correlated with low income, you shouldn't look at broad demographics, you should look for studies about suicide that focus on financial status. Like this study, which found that low income was correlated with high suicides on a group of a million people after adjusting for other factors:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463019/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463019/)

<comment><USER11> Low income is not inequality. Also, if you even bother to look at your google search result, it says "socioeconomic positions" proxied by insurance premium.

<comment><USER10> > Low income is not inequality

I never said the word inequality, and I don't understand why you're bringing it up in a discussion about suicide risk factors.

> if you even bother to look ... proxied by insurance premium

I did look, and that's why I saw this:

"Medicaid recipients had the highest suicide hazard ratio (2.28; 95% CI, 1.87–2.77)."

Medicaid is about low income or low assets

<comment><USER12> > I never said the word inequality, and I don't understand why you're bringing > it up in a discussion about suicide risk factors.

Then why did you respond to a comment that mentioned inequality to begin with.

<comment><USER10> Why did I respond to a comment that drew conclusions using the wrong statistics? It's pretty simple. I was teaching someone a small lesson about drawing conclusions from the wrong statistics, and backing myself up with a link to a study to show them what statistics you should use to draw such conclusions. As the HN Guidelines say, "Eschew flamebait [...] unless you have something genuinely new to say" \- I don't have anything genuinely new to say about inequality and suicide, and I don't see you or the other person who responded to me saying anything genuinely new either.

Also "Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle" \- please stop making my comment (about drawing conclusions from the wrong dataset) about your own political interests, unless you have something genuinely new to say, in which case I'm all ears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Whoa, Men kill themselves many times more than women. I thought this number would be closer.

<comment><USER14> It's simple, generally it's more common in men that they don't ask for help, don't reconcile with their own true feelings, don't allow for their own full self expression, don't hug, don't cry, don't share emotions with naked confidentiality, and macho culture preys on any signs of weakness, to their own detriment. This carries on to the kinds of hobbies, interests and all that puts men further away from a simple emotional comfort than women. It took me two decades before it didn't feel awkward hugging my brother in earnest, and I consider myself a very sensitive person, so take that for what you will. Maybe it just takes longer for boys to become emotionally mature men. It varies culturally a lot for men and women by city and country, of course.

<comment><USER15> This isn't why. This is what feminism tells men, that their problems stem from them not being able to handle and process their emotions correctly. That's propaganda. The real reason is more along of the lines of their being less of a safety net for men, less people willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and no attraction from women for men in the bottom 10%.

<comment><USER16> >This is what feminism tells men, that their problems stem from them not being able to handle and process their emotions correctly.

What "feminism" would probably say is that masculine culture doesn't allow men to display emotions as openly as women, especially when those emotions betray a sense of physical or emotional vulnerability.

The common term for this is "toxic masculinity," which is often confused by persons like yourself to mean that masculinity itself is toxic, whereas it really means that masculinity _can be_ toxic, and can manifest in negative ways, such as an inability to express one's emotions for fear of being seen as weak, effeminate or possibly gay.

This isn't propaganda, it's an obvious and self-evident sociological and cultural phenomenon, a flaw in society, not in men themselves.

>and no attraction from women for men in the bottom 10%.

Oh. I see you've fallen down the rabbithole.

It's unfortunate that the lunatic fringe of redpillers and incels seem to taken over and undermined any legitimate credibility the mens' rights movement might have. Women aren't evil, and feminists aren't entirely wrong, and no, aren't driving men to mass suicide because they don't find them attractive.

<comment><USER17> >>The common term for this is "toxic masculinity," which is often confused by persons like yourself to mean that masculinity itself is toxic, whereas it really means that masculinity can be toxic, and can manifest in negative ways

And what modern feminists like yourself struggle with is that men are inately predisposed more toward certain personality traits than women. You want to talk about obviousness and self evidence? Look at evolutionary pressure. Look at our closest related primates (and most mammals) and how much more agressive males tend to be, and how with, for example, gorillas, few males will mate with many females, while less dominant males go mateless. Yet you do not even consider the possibility that humans are hard wired towards certain average behaviors, that men are almost certainly predisposed towards agression, that females may very well be attracted to dominance (hell, it's all over our culture if you look with an open mind).

Instead, you deny biology, hand waving away all discrepancies and differences with words like "toxic masculinity" and "patriarchy." You deny the pain and loneliness that unnatractive men experience daily because of factors beyond their control - height, build, facial structure, social difficulty.

You cannot fix society by ignoring biology, and you are only alienating these men, who are human beings like you and me, by slandering them as incels for having the same desires for companionship and affirmation unfulfilled while simultaneously blaming them for the problems in society.

Pride, agression, drives for achievement and competition, these natural, "toxic" masculine traits BUILT the modern world. Yes, there was plenty of bad along the way, but one cannot ignore all of the good that has resulted from these drives, and in truth, modern society cannot exist without them. Nor should it.

<comment><USER16> >And what modern feminists like yourself struggle with is that men are inately predisposed more toward certain personality traits than women.

Yes, but what traits society allows men to express while still being considered "proper men" differs depending on culture, and mediates whatever biological imperatives might exist. Ancient cultures considered sex between men to be a perfectly reasonable thing for a masculine man to do, since the concepts of "hetero" and "homo" sexuality didn't really exist at the time. Men in Elizabethan times were far more free to express emotions than now - consider that many of Shakespeare's sonnets, including the famous Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day...") were addressed _to a man._

>Yet you do not even consider the possibility that humans are hard wired towards certain average behaviors, that men are almost certainly predisposed towards agression, that females may very well be attracted to dominance (hell, it's all over our culture if you look with an open mind).

Also, innate predisposition doesn't justify all expressions of those dispositions. One may say that men are predisposed towards physical aggression due to their increased musculature relative to women and testosterone, but that doesn't mean every act of violence is healthy. Females may be attracted to dominance, but that doesn't mean all means of dominating women are justifiable.

We may be apes, but that doesn't mean we get to rape any female we find attractive and murder the offspring of rival males because, you know, we're trying to have a civilization here.

>You deny the pain and loneliness that unnatractive men experience daily because of factors beyond their control - height, build, facial structure, social difficulty.

Plenty of unattractive, facially asymmetrical and socially awkward men are able to meet with women, date, have sex, all over the world, every day. Believe me, if women didn't have low standards in that regard, our species would probably have died out long ago.

>Pride, agression, drives for achievement and competition, these natural, "toxic" masculine traits BUILT the modern world.

You see... I literally said that wasn't what "toxic masculinity" meant and that people automatically confuse the term for an attack on masculinity itself... you literally _quoted the part of my comment where I said that and then you went and did exactly that._

At least _try_ to approach this on an intellectual level and not be so triggered by feminist jargon.

<comment><USER18> > At least try to approach this on an intellectual level and not be so > triggered by feminist jargon.

Maybe this is why men don't feel like speaking up so often. If you can't fully conceptualise every concept thought up by feminist sociologists then your just not "on our level" and "so triggered".

<comment><USER16> >If you can't fully conceptualise every concept thought up by feminist sociologists then your just not "on our level" and "so triggered".

The concept that masculinity can have negative effects while not itself being negative isn't something that should take a great deal of effort to comprehend. There are entire _male created_ social complexes like "gentlemanly behavior" and "chivalry" built around the pretense that inherent male traits have both positive and negative aspects.

The problem here is not that "feminist sociologists" are talking down to men and making them quail in fear -- men have no problems whatsoever speaking their mind in regards to criticising women or feminism. The problem is that men who oppose feminism often don't even bother to approach its concepts on their own terms at all. The feminism they oppose mostly doesn't even exist, or at best they're attacking the fringe and not the mainstream.

If you have a problem with the concept of toxic masculinity, for example, all I and the "feminist sociological agenda" (or whatever) ask is that you bother to find out what the term actually refers to. Cribbing from Wikipedia:

        stereotypically masculine gender roles that restrict the kinds of emotions
        allowable for boys and men to express, including social expectations that
        men seek to be dominant (the "alpha male") and limit their emotional range
        primarily to expressions of anger.

...that's not an attack on men, masculinity in general or on any healthy masculine traits.

<comment><USER19> Toxic masculinity get judged based on the meaning it express as words. Languages in the end is all about expressing meaning.

If we talk about toxic Muslims, we could define it to only be about terrorists or other narrow defined subgroup of criminals, but if you use those words then the meaning being expressed is a generalization that invoke a expression of racisms and hate. Lumping together all Muslims, only to then say "technically, I only meant this small subgroup" don't work. Does not work for racism, and it does not work for sexism either. The term toxic masculinity will always seem like veiled hatred against men, and no amount of "wait, I only mean ..." will change that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Yesterday we found out we're not having sex.

Today we find out suicide is increasing.

I wonder if the two are linked.

<comment><USER21> Probably, and I can make an educated guess how: modern society eschews the value of human relationships in favor of status and wealth seeking.

People find they are not happy, so they search for a path to happiness and our culture tells them that it is through being wealthy, famous, and successful. They search for a path to those things and find that it often involves long hours, greed, and psychopathic behavior. Human relationships are a risk, and risks are to be minimized. They put this knowledge into practice and find that it doesn't work.

My own theory of how depression works is that it involves an inescapable realization that your model of reality is broken and can't be used to make predictions that allow you to effect the change you want to see in your life. You wanted to be happy, society gave you a bad model to work from, and the mind's reaction to discovering that this model doesn't work is depression.

<comment> rv-de Where does the sex come in?

<comment><USER2> Part of (some) human relationships. Being ignored at the expense of working towards success or building a brand towards status.

<comment><USER21> It's worse than that, it's active avoidance of human relationships because they're a liability. Not just because they create dependencies but because in order to form connections we need to make ourselves vulnerable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How are they making these categories of workers?

> Farmers, Ranchers, and Other Occupational Managers category (a sub-group of > the Management major group)

> Agricultural Workers category (a sub-group of the Farming, Fishing, and > Forestry major group)

Farmers aren't in the Farming major group? I'd like to see a little more detail here

<comment><USER23> Farm workers are classified as agricultural workers. farm managers / owners are classified separately.

There was a whole redacted study because of managers being accidentally lumped in with workers.

[https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc- study/](https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc-study/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media group features for both men and women. I wonder if 'hustle culture' has anything to do with this... [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381605](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381605)

Separately this is a huge HR problem that just isn't addressed properly in the USA. If the suicides are due to work pressures that employer has a direct responsibility for that situation.

Echoing what others have said here, if you are contemplating suicide talk to people about it. Don't suffer in isolation. Get out of your bubble of despair and try to see your life in perspective - get help that's what we are all here for, each other...

</comment><comment><USER25> Quick PSA: If you are contemplating suicide you should reach out to professionals for help. You are not alone in this struggle and deserve to be happy and live a fruitful life. What do you have to lose by talking with a professional?

<comment><USER26> Why can't suicide be noble? Why can't we respect a decision to not participate in this experience that none of us asked for in the first place? Why is the answer more pills or shrink sessions just to keep on to the next day? Please tell me one actual down side of suicide for suffering person. It's selfishness ultimately; we want them to stick around for us, not for them.

<comment><USER27> I suppose I could respect it, but many survivors of suicide attempts decide not to repeat their attempts. IMO this suggests that some of them believe that they might be better off alive.

<comment><USER28> To be fair, this is survivor bias in the purest sense. There is an elegance in respecting one's choice, but most suicidal people are instead in need of sincere help and understanding, the ideal policy is likely to assume it would be regretted in the scheme of possible futures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd like to mention as someone who's mother committed suicide when I was a young child that if you choose to take your life you're harming your family and friends In ways they'll never fully recover from. So I request people think about that before making a decision to go through with commmiting suicide.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is an interesting discussion on this topic in the last Sam Harris podcast, based on established connection between depression and suicide and the current political context in US. [https://samharris.org/podcasts/142-addiction-depression- mean...](https://samharris.org/podcasts/142-addiction-depression-meaningful- life/)

</comment><comment><USER31> They should do a study on suicide among all workers who are forced to use Slack. #notkidding

</comment><comment><USER12> Lack of religion: [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/atheism-has-a- suicide-p...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/atheism-has-a-suicide- problem_us_5a2a902ee4b022ec613b812b)

<comment><USER32> Seriously, that article is a joke...

      You get three atheists in a room together and it won't be
      long before there is some minor issue that divides them.</comment></comment>


Digg, Inc. Lays off 10% of Company Staff - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidethewebb.com/2010/05/digg-inc-lays-off-company-staff/

<comment><USER2> So that means Digg employed over 100 people prior to this? With Reddit doing a similar job and they employing 7? Theories on what the extra 93 people are doing?

<comment><USER3> Infrastructure to support Digg's more aggressive media and business initiatives.

Digg also has to run its own administration infrastructure while Reedit gets the benefit of being a subsidiary of Conde Nast.

Plus, of course, Digg got more funding and you have to do something with all that money :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reddit really knows how to run a company</comment>


HTTP/2 push is tougher than I thought (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://jakearchibald.com/2017/h2-push-tougher-than-i-thought/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's amazing how many things can go wrong with http2 push</comment>


Go Rocks – How Can We Avoid Something This Bad in the Future? (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.acooke.org/cute/GoRocksHow0.html <comment><USER2> > Sure, I'd prefer Haskell, ML, or even a decently typed Scheme, but they've > already lost.

That's... an interesting take.

I think he's not saying that Haskell won't grow. I think he's saying that Haskell will never take over the world in the C/C++/Java way. He also seems to be at least assuming that Go will.

And he seems to be saying that this will happen, not because Go has better ideas, but because it lets you write more stylish code, and because it has more clout behind it. I'm not sure that I agree. C took over the world, but not because it had so much clout behind it (it had AT&T/Bell Labs, but they didn't do much to promote it). Was C stylish? Perhaps, especially compared to the alternatives for doing the same thing.

But that was a long time ago. Java was heavily backed by Sun. C# of course was heavily backed by the clout of Microsoft. Can a language these days take over the world without massive backing behind it?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My curiosity is piqued:

Do any of you gophers out there feel that the situation has changed in the 4 years since this was discussed on HN?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746698)</comment>


Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/top-scientists-just-ruled-out-best-case-global-warming-scenarios <comment><USER2> I don't understand why these articles don't link or at least provide a full title of the paper.

The paper itself:

An assessment of Earth's climate sensitivity using multiple lines of evidence, Sherwood et al., Reviews of Geophysics, 2020, doi: 10.1029/2019RG000678

[https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019...](https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2019RG000678)

preprint manuscript: [https://climateextremes.org.au/wp- content/uploads/2020/07/WC...](https://climateextremes.org.au/wp- content/uploads/2020/07/WCRP_ECS_Final_manuscript_2019RG000678R_FINAL_200720.pdf)

another mainstream article on the subject [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200722112648.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200722112648.htm) > Four years of research confidently narrows range of 1.5°C-4.5°C down to 2.3°C-3.9°C

</comment><comment><USER3> They also ruled out the worst case scenario, but this doesn't sell equally well...

<comment><USER4> It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

<comment><USER5> >It makes sense to phrase it like that

No, it's lying by omission.

<comment><USER6> Especially given that the media has been pushing a narrative that the worst- case scenarioes are our actual reality (or even worse-than-worst-case ones), so ruling them out is in fact incredibly significant - it's effectively ruling out what readers of articles like this one are likely to expect to actually happen. (To be fair, it looks like Bloomberg are slightly better than some of the rest of the press in that they seem to have rejected stuff like RCP8.5 that has already been falsified by what's actually happened, rather than pretending it matches reality.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It makes sense to phrase it like that when politics worldwilde neglected the issue presumably hoping for best case scenarios.

<comment><USER7> Saying this is asserting the "by any means necessary" doctrine whereby manipulation and misrepresentation are the first spots on the decent into outright propaganda and tyranny.

Why not disconnect your internet abs unplug from everything yourself if genuinely so concerned? At least prove your principled instead of just power hungry for control</comment></comment>


Apple iCloud – please stop bugging me - <AUTHOR> https://lovettchris.github.io/posts/apple_upsell/ <comment><USER2> can't you just uninstall it? I have an iPhone but no software installed from Apple on my windows pc as it is not needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> This iCloud reminder came with iTunes I think which I still use.

<comment><USER2> I think apple software updater can be uninstalled independent of itunes. Check add/remove programs

You might also be able to prevent it from running is you open task manager > startup

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> lets face it itunes in general is a pretty bloody awful piece of software, especially on windows

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone else tired of all the popups we get from iCloud every day?</comment>


How to Open a Public-Restroom Door - <AUTHOR> http://www.freakonomicsmedia.com/2011/03/10/how-to-open-a-public-restroom-door/ <comment><USER2> "Touching a doorknob or push-plate means you take a chance of picking up a lot of terms."

Really? Is "hypochondria" one of them?

<comment><USER3> I believe you are looking for "Mysophobia"[1] not "Hypochondria" </pedantry>

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysophobia>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice idea, but trying to look at this from a facility manager's perspective (their primary customer), I'm concerned about product durability. How will such a long lever arm survive in the hostile environment known as a public restroom? "Hey bro, push open the door while I stand on that thing, hehehe."

As it is, their site is primarily focused on the idea of the product, but does not discuss its engineering, durability, installation, etc. What alloy are they using, and is it cast or welded? This type of information is very important to the facility managers and architects who would be specifying this thing. There are also potential benefits they've forgotten to discuss if indeed this product solves the problem of people's reluctance to touch restroom doors: Decrease in restroom floor litter and savings on paper towels and extra trash cans.

From a use point of view, have they tested the product to see what percentage of people will actually use their feet to pull open a door? Some doors are big and heavy, and some people aren't. I doubt anyone in heels is going to want to use the Toepener.

The idea seems like a good possible stopgap for an unfortunate design pattern on many school campuses: Narrow hallways best suited to in-swinging doors (where allowed by code). But a better solution to avoiding the transmission of germs on restroom doors is more fundamental: Design the doorway to swing outwards, with push and kick plates, and use anti-microbial stainless steel on the former.

Regarding the toepener.com visual design, I find the blinking Step-Pull-Walk image animation quite jarring to the eye. Should have a fade or dissolve transition between images; Who of the twelve is in charge of UX? ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> wow the new freakonomics blog design is really cluttered- front page feels almost unusable.

this toepener is not terrible idea given how much people buy hand sanitizers, but their site is basically devoid of information- you'd think out of 12 people it'd be easy to put up some content about why people should be afraid of the big bad germs...

speaking of public restroom innovation: how can it be 2011 and automatic toilets still don't work correctly most of the time? so annoying when it flushes prior to your opening the stall door and you then end up double- flushing with the supposedly eco-friendly toilet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because every surface from the bathroom to your desk isn't covered in the germs of everyone else?

Personally, I look at exiting the bathroom as a chance to strengthen my immune system.

</comment><comment><USER7> Have you ever had a situation where you are pulling to open the door from one side and another person, unknowingly, pushing it from the other (happens often for me). I wonder what awkward position the guy on the inside would end up in in this case.

</comment><comment><USER8> It took 12 people to develop this concept?

<http://www.toepener.com/aboutus.html>

<comment><USER9> From your link: "Forge, LLC was formed in 2010 by group of students at the University of Minnesota's Carlson _School of Management_ with the intent of developing simple solutions for everyday problems." (Emphasis mine.)

They don't train you to actually develop concepts at a management school, they train you how to tell others to develop concepts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why even have a door? I like how restrooms at the airport are set up. You just walk in.

<comment><USER11> it is a good concept, but you don't always have the luxury of enough space for a curved foyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or, owners that have public facilities can re-install the doors so that they open outward from the inside. That way, you can use any part of the forearm to push any part of the door.

Or they could pay a bit extra and install double hinge doors like the ones you see for wait staff at restauraunts.

Either way, it's not expensive, nor are there needs of a toe opener.</comment>


Why 3D doesn't work and never will (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/why-3d-doesnt-work-and-never-will-case-closed <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of Clarke's first law: "When a distinguished but elderly [engineer] states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right. When they state that something is impossible, they are very probably wrong."

I am sad to Ebert go, his reviews defined the industry, but towards the end of his career he became increasingly hostile toward anything that wasn't "classic" cinema as defined by films which he reviewed during the peak of his career.

By his definition, films were art. New narrative vehicles such as 3D, VR, and even video games were not films and therefor not art.

In this guest post by Walter Murch, he complains that 3D films force the brain to converge focus at objects at unnatural depth of fields - this inability to switch depth of field quickly prevents 3D films from working. It's an uncrossable technological chasm.

I would counter that this argument is flawed on two critical elements.

First, the first film to make use of shifting depth of field was famously Citizen Kane in 1941 - before this, the ability to rack focus just wasn't a thing. Yet films 'worked' before Citizen Kane. To posit that films need this ability to 'work' is to discredit the first 40 odd years of film.

The second is the argument rests on our inability to solve this technological problem - a dangerous and often repeated statement in the history of film. Just as other old men were critical of the viability of sound or color given the enormous challenges the first versions of these technologies had, Ebert/Murch here were critical of 3D at the time when companies like Magic Leap and Lytro were just showing the first signs of promise in crossing this chasm.

"3D doesn't work and never will" is an interesting predication along the lines of "locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches are palpably absurd".

<comment><USER3> The third counter is that I've seen a bunch of 3D movies and it works just fine.

<comment><USER4> I hated 3D movies at first. Then I watched Edge of Tomorrow twice: first in 3D and then in 2D. I stopped noticing that it was in 3D partway through the first time. When I watched the second time, I noticed a significantly muted emotional response when viewed in 2d.

<comment><USER5> or maybe it was cause you were watching it a 2nd time and you knew what was coming. it's not really a scientific experiment after all. Nothing wrong with opinion tho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think one of the main issues with 3D is that you are forced to focus on what the director intended you to focus on. This is not true in 2D, you can focus your eyes on a blurry area over the characters shoulder without a problem. It will be blurry but your eyes can focus on it. In 3D, your eyes try to bring that unfocused bit into focus like they can in regular 3D space and that's what causes the headaches/vertigo/eye strain.

</comment><comment><USER7> The reason why 3D doesn't work is that it is not 3D. Instead it is some strange kind of 2.5D where you have what is essentially a topologically 2D manifold embedded in 3D space.

This means that you cannot look around things, or change occlusion by moving your head around. As others have mentioned, you also cannot change your focus. Until 3D becomes actual 3D, it will always ring hollow.

It's possible that Oculus may be the platform that achieves true 3D, but I suspect until we arrive at a place where the "holodeck" is a fully functional universe, we won't get there.

</comment><comment><USER8> The question today is not whether 3D movies are viable, the question is whether the feature-film format is viable (90 minute three-act structure). Honestly I enjoy very few movies recently. We know exactly what's coming next, and when. Usually a big fistfight where good triumphs over evil.

Media is evolving (look at games, TV, youtube, and instagram). 3D will find it's place within the evolution of media.

<comment><USER9> Being predictable isn't necessarily a bad thing in storytelling. Being completely predictable is boring, so is being completely random and good stories have to find a balance. At a high level you probably know how every movie is going to end from the onset but that doesn't make them boring. There are a lot of uninteresting tales of heroism but it's not because you know that the hero is going to ultimately prevail.

<comment><USER10> I mean, look at Greco-Roman myth, right? You didn't really wonder how the story ended, yet the masters managed to say something distinct in each take on the same characters doing the same things.

<comment><USER11> Look at theater. Most people going to the theater know the story they're about see very well. They may very well have seen it several times before and perhaps even read the script. And yet they still go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Despite the fact that I generally agree that 3D distracts more from a film experience than it contributes, I have to recommend that if you ever get the opportunity to see Werner Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams' in 3D that you do so.

The 3D video captures qualities of the cave paintings you'd never realize in 2D.

And virtually no person alive is going to get to see these paintings in person so it's the closest you'll ever get.

<comment><USER13> I just hope that some day someone gets the chance to make a documentary about these cave paintings that focuses more on the paintings and less on the filmmaker's emotional reactions.

<comment><USER12> Hehe, yeah even for a auteur director Herzog is pretty self involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One counterexample to this argument are current VR headsets which work fine despite the vergence accommodation conflict. Sure there are a few people who claim that the mismatch causes them discomfort (though it's hard to separate that from other causes of sim sickness) but it's clearly better than no 3d.

Not that I'm a fan of 3D films anyway, but that's an artistic rather than technical preference.

<comment><USER15> For me it's artistic and technical. VR headsets are cool and fun to try, but I just gone ever see myself using them significantly for entertainment. I've seen half a dozen 3D films and it was aware of the extra ticket money.

I'm not saying VR will have no role, or that it's impossible to make a great 3D movie, I just think they're niche technologies and will have niche roles to play for a long time to come. Never say never, but anyone who thinks either is on the cusp of massive mainstream adoption or changing the ways we make and consume media is fooling themselves.

<comment><USER16> This sentiment occurs often, relating to VR, and I can appreciate it because I've had it as well. But there have since been moments during my experience playing VR games where there was an absolutely visceral feeling of how profound the potential is. Currently because of the early state of the tech, that feeling only occurs on fairly rare occasions when the perfect storm of comfort and perception line up to deliver the sort of experience which is the end goal.

I've seen others experience that visceral reaction as well, and generally they tend to pivot and become a bit of a believer in the tech. But we'd all be crazy to think it's temporally just around the corner. The tech hurdles are significant. But definitely not insurmountable IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A few years ago I built a home theater in a dedicated room. 135" screen, 3d-capable projector, etc. I built it to watch Avatar, and it succeeded very well at that. I can absolutely say that 3D worked _very_ well in that specific instance.

Saying "good 3d is hard" is very different from saying "it doesn't work and never will". I'm sad to see good 3D on the decline. When done well it's rather spectacular.

Can't comment on 3d on a TV -- never done that. Avatar is the only 3D movie I can remember seeing in a commercial theater. There may have been others, but they weren't worth remembering.

</comment><comment><USER18> The #1 reason I see movies in 3D: 3D glasses are like blinders to the other people in the theater and they usually don't talk through the whole movie.

It could make my eyes cross and I'd still pay that premium to keep people quiet more often than not.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've only ever seen a few 3D films - Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Gravity, Dial M for Murder - but I greatly appreciated the experience in all cases.

</comment><comment><USER20> As has been stated, the problem is that the eye is focused on a 2D surface, but the brain has to interpret stereoscopic data.

In real life you can normally look round a scene, focusing on objects of different distances as desired. But with a 3D film you can't. You can't look at an object which seems to be nearby and have it come into focus, as the camera may be focused elsewhere. And by trying to focus on something which isn't there, everything else goes out of focus as well, confusing the brain and causing the migraines and nausea some people have.

Also the 3D glasses don't fit over my normal glasses, leading to a really awkward experience.

I don't think 3D films will be truly successful until we have light field or holographic displays, where you can focus on anything at will.

It will also mean developing a new visual language for this kind of film, where the viewer can decide where to look, rather than be guided by the filmmakers.

It'll be exciting, and these kind of films will hopefully look quite different to what we see now.

</comment><comment><USER21> I really wish there was a 3D release of "Captain Eo" \- but sadly it seems to be locked in a vault somewhere.

<comment><USER22> You and me both! But apparently the IP is tangled in such a mess (Jackson Estate, Lucasfilm etc.) that it'd never be worth Disney's while to bother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have always been curious if all the people saying they don't like 3D actually experience the discomfort they describe or just want to look fancy like old wine geeks. I myself have watched just 2 movies in 3D: Avatar and Resident Evil: Afterlife - both of them looked visually awesome and caused absolutely no discomfort to me. I would certainly love to watch Interstellar and Blade Runner 2049 in 3D, that's a huge pity that's not possible.

</comment><comment><USER24> That's of course total nonsense, as everybody should experienced a good 3D movie or immersive VR games can testify. Of course some parts are true, the rules are totally different in 3D. Immersion totally trumps everything else, edges, movement, depth. Too fast is deadly, but reaction time is everything, in VR. 3D is by far more immersive than 2D. It's not like good VR, but still much better than conventional 2D.

</comment><comment><USER25> TLDR; _The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" \-- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what. But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another._

While I agree with this, I've to say I generally prefer 3D versions of the movies for that extra oomph. There is no particular reason left to visit theaters otherwise. Especially it's just super cool on IMAX (I mean "real" IMAX). Movies like Space Station 3D would miss out on too much fun without being 3D.

</comment><comment><USER26> But doesnt this also hold true for 2d? Doesnt our brain already jump through hoops to realize that the little man _on_ the tv isnt actually _in_ the tv? None of media is natural. The human brain adapts.

<comment><USER27> The difference is that in 2D your focus and vergence are to the same place. In 3D you change vergence as you look around the image but the focus remains nearly constant, which never happens in real life. You're doing a sort of Magic Eye visualization over and over again: you hunt for the right vergence while keeping focus fixed.

<comment><USER28> Doesn't that also happen when a 2D camera image changes focus? your eyes dart around at the new point: [https://tadleckman.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/trooper_rack....](https://tadleckman.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/trooper_rack.gif?w=950)

Maybe the 2D shifting depth of field is easier because you're more used to it.

<comment><USER27> No. You need to focus only on the TV screen. The camera operator focuses on the scene for you.

It may be that as you look from the foreground trooper to the out of focus background troopers your brain attempts to refocus but fails, which feels funny. But if the camera operator and editor correctly anticipate your attention and focus on the right thing, you don't need to refocus or re-verge.

<comment><USER28> but i do need to refocus because i can't anticipate what the camera operator's next focus will be. It's still uncomfortable.

As for 3d, i think its comfort is for the next generation of movie goers to decide on.

<comment><USER29> You don't need to refocus. You're focusing on the screen which isn't moving.

<comment><USER28> the screen isn't moving but the observable portion is. This change causes you to try to refocus but you know you're watching a movie on a 2D plane where you don't control the depth of field, so you let the change "guide" your attention on the screen. It's something some people are more used to than others. I don't like it and I feel like it pulls me out of a scene. Looking around in a well done 3D movie feels more natural because my eyes DO change where they converge which is a better approximation of real life when compared to 2D where none of that happens.

Ultimately your brain adapts to what you expose to it the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wish everyone would have tried 3D on a home TV, because in my experience it's far more immersive and special than in a cinema. It's really disappointing to me that 3D TVs aren't being made anymore.

<comment><USER31> I have a 3D TV and a handful of films that are both decent films and use 3D effectively. It's a good experience but I'm not sure I'd describe it as _better_ than seeing it in Imax 3D. Most of the films that really nail 3D are "big screen" experiences like Avatar that, for me, tend to have more impact on the big screen.

<comment><USER30> Maybe it's the settings on my TV, or maybe it's due to my expectations, but I'm more consistently blown away at home than in a cinema. In a cinema I adjust to the 3D more quickly.

To name drop another movie, I'd highly recommend Dredd to anybody that has a 3D TV available.

<comment><USER32> curious, what's your TV? and do you know of any specific settings you tweaked?

<comment><USER30> It's whatever the last generation of 3D LG Smart TVs was, don't know what model, sorry. But there are settings for depth of 3D and smart 3d object detection and so on (I don't use that). Either way, it feels way more 3D than anything I've seen in a cinema.

At the very very least, it has never distracted me from the the viewing experience. So I don't understand the widespread revulsion for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've tried different virtual reality glasses on different occasions and using different interactive simulations and it never feels real to me. I can see that everything is in 3D but I really don't feel like I'm there. I don't find it more immersive than if I was playing it on a normal screen.

The strange thing is that it seems that different people can have different opinions about how immersive the experience is; even when trying the same simulation with the same VR gear.

</comment><comment><USER34> I really think (and hope) that VR will be the medium for watching 3D movies. They don't solve the IPD issue, but when I have found 3d bluray movies that work for me without issue, the comfort level is great, the immersion is great. Once VR hmd's get really high resolution and start to look very sharp, it'll be a next level experience i think and everyone will want movies in 3D (hopefully)

</comment><comment><USER35> One variable here might be that people have very different levels of sensitivity to motion sicknesses. I'm hyper sensitive. Most carnival rides will disable me for hours. While others can't get enough.

So the issue Murdoch is discussing would be relative to the viewer. This is obviously a problem in a mass medium, where making accessible films, and films accessible, requires mind boggling effort.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm blind in one eye so 3D is lost on me. Looking forward to when the films can be beamed directly to the brain!

<comment><USER37> I'm short sighted in one eye, so my brain doesn't really resolve the different images into a cohesive feeling of solidity, so 3D is wasted on me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> For folks who prefer video to articles, Steve Mould released a video yesterday on the same topic - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNzuzssl4eU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNzuzssl4eU)

</comment><comment><USER39> This is like saying the human visual cortex will never be stimulatable by exterior means. Oh wait, there are certain drugs that do this already (even though more or less uncontrollably... for now)... Never say never.

</comment><comment><USER10> I agree. Three-dimensional movies just are not very good. Ticket sales are falling and 3D televisions have disappeared (I have one; the effect is just as good, and nausea-inducing, as the theater's, but like most people who own one I've used the feature for about 15 minutes).

</comment><comment><USER40> This is more "why fixed camera stereoscopy doesn't work and never will". If you have enough data to re-pose both eyes and track focus, then suddenly all of these concerns dissolve.

<comment><USER41> Stwreoscopy is designed to work for a single viewer in a sweet spot. If that setup is correct, it works beautifully. VR headsets master that aspect perfectly. However, a cinema must accommodate many viewers and this means that most of them must content with a less than optimal setup. Actually, I find it a little bit curious that the human brain can cope with the resulting distorted perceived disparity as well as it does.

Someone would need to come up with a true light field display. This would make steroscopy work for the whole area in front of the display. Paul Debevecs team made a daring proposal a couple of years ago to build a light field display from an array of Pico projectors, each one acting as a single pixel of the display. The viewer would need to look directly into the projectors. It seems that this project never got off the ground, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Went to a 3D movie once,

3D effect was so small, seemed like to size of a foot ball in front of my face, with a 2D backdrop on the main screen.

Seemed like they had filmed with the cameras too far apart.

Very disapointing.

</comment><comment><USER43> imax 3d movies are really cool. Avatar 3d was the first movie where I thought the 3d really worked.

<comment><USER44> Funny, it was actually so awful for me, it's the only movie I ever walked out of and asked my money back for.

Between the absolutely paper-thin plot, and the 3D itself, I lasted about 15 minutes, well within my theatre's 30-minute money back limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I have no interest in 3D that requires me to wear glasses. Couldn't they do the same thing with contact lenses?

<comment><USER44> I don't know about yourself, but I personally am extremely adverse to putting anything in my eyes...I'm sure a lot of people are the same...</comment></comment>


A Small EC2 Instance Can Handle HN Front Page - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/bitario/a-small-ec2-instance-can-handle-hn-frontpage <comment><USER2> `Oh, and that small server you're worried about? You'll be fine.`

yeah.....only if you didn't write shitty code, have 5 layers of "oh, lets use XYZ feature and service!".

Not hating, just pointing out this cannot be universally true. You're lucky because you wrote a reasonable service. Many are not.</comment>


How we use big data can reinforce our worst biases, or help fix them - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/are-algorithms-building-the-new-infrastructure-of-racism <comment><USER4> > Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused of manipulating > for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an ingenious way of > disclaiming responsibility for anything. _Machine learning is like money > laundering for bias_. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the > status quo the aura of logical inevitability. The numbers don't lie.

[http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm)

<comment><USER5> >Machine learning is like money laundering for bias

A potent analogy.

The cycle is truly terrifying:

1\. deep institutional racism compromises training data

2\. data classified through that lens

3\. ML insights and patterns inform institutional policy

4\. goto 1

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The book _Weapons of Math Destruction_ raises similar questions - not just perpetuating racism, but also other discrimination (such as against the poor). There was a previous discussion on HN regarding an interview with the author: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12642432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12642432)

<comment><USER7> The writer of this book did a great 99 Percent Invisible interview, well worth the 15 minutes.

[https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the- algori...](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/)

<comment><USER8> She also did over an hour on econtalk

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.ht...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/10/cathy_oneil_on_1.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem is that algorithms are like a 5y old child. They know no such thing as politeness, political correctness or politically charged environment unless that is implemented with additional code. So they will do the equivalent of a 5y old child saying "you smell bad" to the old aunt, which might be true nevertheless. The question then becomes should we write politically correct code or bias data so that it doesn't offend our sensitivity? Or on the other hand should we not anthropomorphize a mere algorithm and not interpret as racist what is the mechanical reflection of our own problems (in the article example, poor neighborhoods in the US don't order much on amazon, poor neighborhoods tend to be non white, non white neighborhoods end up being less served by amazon's algorithms).

<comment><USER10> Also, just like a 5 year old child, the bias of the parents is coded into the algorithm. So the 'bad smell' of the old aunt may not be bad to many people's standard of smell but the algorithm still identified it as bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> /offtopic

Are Algorithms Building the New Infrastructure of Racism? Possibly. But what I find even more worrying: One day algorithms may take so many factors into account that they can discriminate against minorities so small that they neither have a name nor a voice. If an algorithm like that affects you your life could turn quite Kafkaesque.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a crucial question, especially anywhere that algorithms will be applied to areas where there are laws against discrimination.

If you want to use algorithms in these areas you will eventually have to prove that they don't illegally discriminate.

<comment><USER13> It is impossible for an algorithm to "illegally" discriminate, as it's a machine devoid of the human concept of "intent"; It doesn't know what "race" even means.

So this narrows to these basic outcomes if we assume any given algorithm isn't purpose built to always have a discriminatory output:

1\. The input data is junk data, so the output is junk data.

2\. The input data is fine and humans don't like the output for human reasons.

The problem I'm hitting on here is that if we assume any sort of "discrimination" based on a data set is "bad", then we don't really care what the outcome of a given algo is, and we're just trying to massage data sets into an "acceptable" output. Seems like the opposite of good science to just throw away results that we don't like, because reasons.

<comment><USER14> This is nonsense.

It's quite possible for an algorithm that doesn't know what race is to be biased despite ignoring race if the real world is full of racism, and that racism manifests in dependent variables that the algorithm bases its decision on.

This concept isn't even a little novel. Google the phrase "previous servitude" for an example of just such a dependent variable in action.

<comment><USER13> In this case, you seem to be implying garbage in/ garbage out.

My point is that when you get a good input dataset and there is still some sort of bias in the output, you have to start asking questions on why the results are biased towards one group by examining the variables pertaining to that group.

The position you're starting with seems to be that the output should never be biased, which means you're not really approaching this scientifically and won't stop messing with input sets until you get the output you agree with; not the output which is necessarily true but you disagree with for personal reasons.

You can't just claim "bad data" every time you get a result that doesn't jive with your politics.

<comment><USER14> What I am saying is much simpler. You said that the machine can't discriminate because the machine doesn't know what race is.

I'm just pointing out that the machine doesn't know what _anything at all_ is. All it can do is work with what humans are telling it. If the real world is biased it can then itself be biased.

There are many feedback loops in societies. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and those subjected to discrimination often have objectively worse outcomes. An algorithm can very easily be susceptible to just recursively documenting actual bias that exists in the real world and giving it the veneer of objectivity.

It's an actual hard problem that is the topic of this thread, hand waving isn't going to fix it.

<comment><USER13> I think the problem is that you're looking at "bias" as a dirty word.

> If the real world is biased it can then itself be biased.

And if said algorithm corroborates that bias, then is reality somehow "bad" as a result, or do you just not like the outcome because it "feels bad"?

There is a difference between truth and an idealized outcome that you desperately want to be true.

<comment><USER14> Imagine a world ruled by blue people, who control all the roads. Every time a green person tries to drive a blue person will throw rocks at their car, pour oil in front of the wheels, etc.

Also for historical reasons all the green people live in certain neighborhoods.

Now imagine creating bureau that would review driving and accident data and attempt to answer the question "How good at driving is this person?" The idea being that we are going to try to keep the worst drivers off the road.

People scream hey wait a second that's not fair at all. So you take steps to address this whole system instead and solve the real problem. You try to crack down on all the rock throwing, and not prejudge someone without knowing the circumstances.

Until one day an algorithm comes along to answer the question. But wait, we thought of that, we make it so the algorithm can't take into account what color the driver is. It can only rely on other things.

See the problem yet?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This same article keeps popping up about once a week, with the words slightly switched around and in a different magazine. A couple of weeks ago it was the NYT ([https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/intelligen...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/opinion/sunday/intelligent- policing-and-my-innocent-children.html)), before that in the Atlantic, Politico, ProPublica, etc.

The error they make is always the same. I highly recommend this piece: AI 'Bias' Doesn't Mean What Journalists Say it Means [https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean- what...](https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what- journalists-want-you-to-think-it-means/)

<comment><USER16> The majority of that article seems to report on the same stories as the Nautilus article. The meat of the disagreement is in the conclusion section.

> However, there is a significant cost to forcing algorithm outputs to reflect > wishful thinking. If we are issuing loans, we will issue more loans to > people who do not pay them back. If we are making parole/sentencing > decisions for convicted criminals, we will release more dangerous criminals > who go on to commit new crimes.

> This may not be a concern for the journalist, but it should be a concern for > the rest of us.

I agree that this is the heart of the issue but by leaving this to the conclusion, I think the author didn't end up arguing for _why_ we should optimize for objective cost instead of for our ideal reality. It might be financially profitable for a bank to use a racist lending policy but as a society we think that it is wrong so we passed regulations forbidding the banks to do so. Similarly, the criminal justice system is supposed to serve society and follow our ideal sense of justice and shouldnt be blindly optimizing recidivism rate. As the Nautilus article said, "What gets chosen is usually whatever is easiest to quantify, rather than the fairest".

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is catnip for the HN community. Talk of algorithms _and_ institutional bias? And a way to improve humanity using Silicon Valley machine learning technology? Many of you probably needed a change of pants.

This article is trying real hard to find victim's anywhere and everywhere. Not that long ago there were many people talking about how wonderful the future was going to be with algorithms and big data to make unbiased decisions. Now we are basically there and they still find a problem with it because of "calibration issues" which were mentioned to be due to mathematical incompatibility. You'll also note the wording about the improved algorithm being "independent" of race. Not that the results were more fair or accurate, just "independent".

Then there's the ever popular gender pronouns that were mentioned. Guess what. In nearly every country in the world doctors are majority male and nurses are majority female. Funny that we never hear these "gender biases" mentioned with things like "___ is a construction worker" or "___ is a bus driver", isn't it? Those are male dominated fields as well yet no one ever talks about gender imbalance or discrimination. It's only ever with the higher status/income jobs that you see this talk of imbalance. Many of these aren't "biases" but rather statistical probabilities.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish we stopped looking downstream, at this incident level data (arrests, recidivism, criminality in general) and more upstream. How does criminality play out as a function of the make up congress, historical generations, political leans of the administration, etc, etc?

</comment><comment><USER19> Computers aren't racist, algorithms aren't racist, data aren't racist. Computers are inanimate objects, algorithms are instructions and data are bytes. None of those things can possibly be racist.

<comment><USER16> This comment is missing the point. The problem is that the algorithms can reinforce the disadvantaged situation of some groups of people, instead of help improve it. And the thin veneer of objectivity that the algorithms provide can legitimize something that might be effectively a racist policy.

<comment><USER19> Then they're shitty algorithms that don't work properly or your data is incomplete. If your data is showing biases it's because they exist in the world not because the data is racist.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the problem has always been about what we do with the data instead of the data itself. The issue now is that people currently put a lot of blind trust on machine learning, even if the input data is garbage or the output doesn't have the intended result.

<comment><USER19> Not just machine learning. I remember learning in ecology that if the computer models didn't match with reality. Reality was probably wrong the model just needed better variables. I remember thinking how incredibly stupid that was at the time. Now I realize that's the way it works with everything and has for a while.

The problem with modelling real world systems is there are too many variables and we have no way of knowing just how many their are and what effects they all actually have on a system. We can never make a complete model yet we act and make decisions as a society as though our models are complete and infallible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, slick. Looks like a really well put together kit. Is he happy with the manufacturing quality? How much allowances is there for variations in router diameter?

<comment><USER21> Nautilus _is_ a US website. At the same time, to imagine that every Jewish person is somehow required to criticise Israel with every second breath - <USER2> matter who or what else is actually being discussed - echoes the "Jew second" obsession of anti-semitic nationalists. Is it possible that the writer is Jewish and has no interest in writing about Israel in the article, accusingly or defensively?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Finally someone addressing real issues.

</comment><comment><USER23> No, they aren't. They are the one chance we have to escape it.

You see humans are terribly biased. Racial bias isn't even anywhere near the strongest bias we have. Unattractive people get sentences twice as long as attractive people. Judges give far harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungriest. Socially awkward people seem to be pretty strongly discriminated against. Studies have found people discriminate by politics even more than race. Job interviews have actually been shown to degrade performance over just judging resumes. Before statistics and credit ratings, getting a good loan required being an old friend of the banker.

It's not just that humans are unfair. We are objectively terrible. Very simple statistical algorithms beat human "experts" in almost every domain they get tried on. Way back in the 1920s, a statistician came up with a formula that was better at predicting recidivism than a group of 3 prison psychologists.

Simple linear regression has predicted the success of medical treatments better than doctors, diagnosed psychoticism better than trained psychiatrists, predicted academic success much better than admissions officers, predicted loan risk better than bank officers, etc, etc. To say nothing of modern machine learning methods on modern computers. It's insane we allow humans to continue doing these tasks at all.

But there has been huge resistance to algorithms in every domain. From people who stand to lose their jobs and be put to shame by them of course. But also even outsiders tend to reject algorithms. And overly trust humans. Psychologists have actually studied this. They call it a bias labelled "Algorithm Aversion". ([http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-Algort...](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-AlgorthimAversion- Dietvorst-Simmons-Massey.pdf)) The study showed that humans were willing to forgive the mistakes of humans far more than those of algorithms, even when the algorithm made far fewer of them.

This is why they aren't everywhere already. The last thing we need is fear mongering articles like this. As shown, humans are far worse. If an algorithm shouldn't do it, then a human certainly should not.

A big part of the case this article makes is a reference to a propublica study that found a slight bias against race in an algorithm once. Yet that study wasn't peer reviewed. The findings weren't statistically significant, which is a pretty low bar to begin with. And yet it always comes up as the main reference in these discussions. It's the only piece of evidence they can find of this nonissue ever happening. Stop. You are just making the problems you claim to care about worse.

<comment><USER21> The bigger issue raised in the article is the idea that, even when algorithms are an "improvement" on human bias, the public is willing to accept that they express no bias at all. That level of trust in technology is unfair, and it doesn't exist for human judgement - if people are more confident in exercising oversight, that's at least one reason to not switch over to purely algorithmic decision-making.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> No, they're not[0]. Correlation is not causation, and this article makes many such correlations. It also appeals heavily to fairness. Business is not about fairness, it is about profit. I don't see the potential profits in racism - <USER3> it is possible to provide services to people profitably, it will be done.

Arbitrary clusterings such as zip codes, while certainly statistically significant, do not translate to intent by algorithms or algorithm makers.

Fairness is somewhat subjective, and I think it's fair for companies to pursue profits such as "same day shipping", even if that cannot be simultaneously rolled out to all markets. If it is profitable, eventually, it will be.

[0] Invoking Betteridge's Law of Headlines ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines) )

<comment><USER25> "At the center of Northpointe's argument was an essentialist fallacy: Because persons that police classified as Afro-Americans were re-arrested more often in the training dataset, they claimed, COMPAS is justified in predicting that other persons classified as Afro-Americans by police—even in a different city, state, and time period—are more likely to be re-arrested. The cycling of classification into data then back into classification echoes W.E.B. Dubois' 1923 definition, "the black man is the man who has to ride Jim Crow in Georgia.""

Sounds like the answer is yes.

<comment><USER26> Then I would not say they are building new infrastructure of racism. They are getting garbage input and returning garbage output.

<comment><USER27> The accusation here is that they're maintaining the status quo, in a way, instead of working on making things better.

<comment><USER26> True, but the research they are doing - "improving" language to reduce bias, reeks to me of 1984's Doublespeak.

What are the chances this won't be co-opted by the other side, to enhance divisions?

<comment><USER28> You're right, let's just do nothing and let the problem get even worse as we push blame onto an algorithm rather than deeply ingrained societal issues

<comment><USER26> I think you are misinterpreting my statement. I never said blame algorithm. I just said, what happens if algorithm (for eliminating some thought patterns using language inference) is used by the other side?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does self promotion cause heart disease? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2010/04/does-self-promotion-cause-heart-disease.html

<comment><USER3> Like most Gladwell related information, there's an anecdotal relationship between a town that doesn't have much heart disease and a subjective observation about its inhabitants' lifestyle.

However, I would suspect that self promotion is correlated with heart disease in general because people who have to self promote are under stressful conditions. They're trying to change things which they really have little control over: other people's minds.

I try to avoid that stress by looking for ways to succeed that don't require much self promotion. Part of that involves finding areas where you have enough edge that the benefit of other parties working with you is obvious. Admittedly not a very generalizable route, but I believe I'd be happy just trying as long as I don't have to bend to others' whims.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true about Gladwell. But I've picked up the original research too by Wolf and his book. It was Wolf's observation about what made Roseto like it is. Gladwell just restated it.

[http://www.amazon.com/Power-Clan-Influence-Relationships- Dis...](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Clan-Influence-Relationships- Disease/dp/1560000430/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1270750637&sr=8-2)

And as for the heart disease premise, you are totally right about there being a correlation that way. Which makes me curious though what would happen if we all just all stopped self promoting like you are trying to do. Would we all be just so much happier. On the blog right now someone brought up the example of Warren Buffet and how he doesn't do much self promotion. His results speak for themselves. And his website remains very stark.

I also thought of <http://instapaper.com>. A very popular and useful tool, and I can't find a review or testimonial on the entire stark, grey site. People just find out they need this tool and sign up. Even the itunes sales page - <http://www.instapaper.com/iphone> has nothing on it. No "Techcrunch calls it the best thing ever".

<comment><USER4> I use <http://toread.cc/> for the same purpose, plus I can always search in Gmail for my articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Funny. I went there and found this:

"Sounds very handy - Lifehacker.com This is much quicker and cleaner - <USER2> Wings I came across toread.cc and I immediately fell in love with it - Winston's Attic"

Again, totally admitting we do this too. But this is so interesting to me that instapaper gets away without having to do this, and still commands quite an audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> With 25,000 towns in the US, is there any surprise that you can find one with an unexpectedly {low,high} incidence of {heart disease,cancer} by pure chance?

This was particularly telling: "... But also leads to stress, ills, and unhappiness that didn't exist in Roseto. Well, until Roseto became just like every other town years later."

Ignoring this, let's look at the structure of this "case/control" setup. The "cases" with unexpectedly low heart disease are all from the same geographic region and environment. Many are related (up to 3 generations living in the same town).

The controls are... well, the rest of America, dispersed across hundreds of millions of acres in diverse environments and with a more diverse genetic background.

In other words, they inadequately controlled this experiment, so any assertions about the results are suspect.

<comment><USER6> What you say about the experiment results is true. I don't know if this one is any better, but the guy who gave this TED talk found similar results when looking for communities having people with the longest life spans:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100....](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html)

One of the places with a lot of centenarians was a place near Okinawa, Japan, where people form life long friendships. They also eat healthy and I'm sure other variables are different. I find the correlations interesting even if they are not conclusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe focus on what you're doing instead of what you've done. Be nice to people and find ways to help them out with their problems. Instead of listing out your credentials express your willingness to help.

This seems to be the approach that Richard Feynman took. He says in the BBC series "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" that he hates the concept of awards, and he did things for the pleasure of doing it and having it used by others, not to earn some sort of recognition.

</comment><comment><USER7> _People cooking for neighbors. Everyone chatting with everyone else on the street. 3 generations of family living under one roof. And an "egalitarian ethos"._

With 3 generations living together and everyone taking turns cooking for each other on an egalitarian basis, I'd expect to see more people eating home- cooked meals and less fast food and processed food products.</comment>


Show HN: Hey Meta – Quickly check, improve and generate your website's meta tags - <AUTHOR> http://www.heymeta.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hackers

I delayed posting this here for more than a month, because I was kinda discouraged by my own mind as I'm not really an experienced developer (or "hacker" for that matter). But since I'm proud of what I made, here goes:

I'd like to introduce my recent web project, Hey Meta. I made this because I didn't find a tool (other than Facebook Developer Tools and Twitter Card Validator), that would show me how my website would look like after I've shared it to social media and searching for it on Google. While there were some tools that would show me the meta tags from my website, I needed something visual and a way to see changes in real time. There's still stuff I have to work on (and fix), but I wanted to put it out there for you to use/check/test. Let me know if you find it useful to you ;)

Cheers, Igor

<comment><USER2> Nice work!

Thank your for sharing this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great tool! Definitely easier to use and find than whatever tool Facebook created. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that was what I was going after :D Thanks for checking it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great work, useful little tool!</comment>


"Instagram's Million Dollar Bug": Case Study for Defense - <AUTHOR> https://summitroute.com/blog/2015/12/24/instagram_bounty_case_study_for_defense/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a very good basic guideline. I have actually been meaning to do some additional security review of various personal projects after reading the Instagram bounty article. This will be very helpful, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER3> Really excellent write up. Required reading for anyone who was seriously interested in the fundamental technical / architectural issues behind what the bounty hunter brought up.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd recommend checking out their "Weekly Infosec News Recap".

[https://summitroute.com/blog/2015/12/27/downclimb/](https://summitroute.com/blog/2015/12/27/downclimb/)</comment>


Why Are Your Gut Microbes Different from Mine? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/why-are-your-gut-microbes-different-from-mine/480207/?single_page=true <comment><AUTHOR> From the article: "The microbiome field is negotiating the same cycle of hype, backlash, and introspection [other preliminary medical findings have experienced]. Thousands of studies have linked the microbiome to almost every condition you can imagine, but many of these correlations are likely to be illusory. 'A lot of people have been annoyed by the hype surrounding our area, and I think they were probably right,' says Raes. 'It's time that, from within the field, we look critically at what we're doing ourselves. We tried to do that with our paper. Yes, we've had the hype. Now, it's time for the consolidation.'"

Here on Hacker News, I have seen repeated articles become greeted by comments that assume we already know all about how to regulate what microbes are in our guts and how that influences health. In fact, we have no idea about such things and don't have nearly enough data yet to make any definite statements about how gut microbes really to human health, or even if they influence human health at all for most people.</comment>


Federal Judge: Albuquerque's Asset Forfeiture is Unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/30/federal-judge-rules-albuquerques-asset-f <comment><USER2> The whole point of a taxpayer funded police force is so that police operations are not biased because of where the money comes from. Having the police profit from police operations completely subverts that.

<comment><USER3> agreed, I'm inclined to think that "electing" your police force also subverts it.

Douglas Adams was bang on the nail when he said something to the tune of "that the only beings that can and should be trusted with power is those that dont want it, or aren't aware they have it"

<comment><USER4> > I'm inclined to think that "electing" your police force also subverts it.

Then you'll end up with a bunch of charismatic police folks who want it, and can swoon voters to give it, but are generally ineffective at doing it. Source: politics in the US above the municipal level.

<comment><USER5> that already happens, county judges and sheriffs.

<comment><USER4> Right.. I would consider crap at the county level to be above the municipal level...

<comment><USER5> Not in every context. There are quite a few city-county conglomerates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "New Mexico essentially banned civil asset forfeiture in 2015, but Albuquerque argued the state law didn't apply to its own city codes and continued to seize cars."

How the fuck is a _city_ able to just decide to ignore state laws? I don't understand...

The officials in charge at the city level and in the police department need to see some jail time for breaking the very laws they are sworn to uphold.

<comment><USER7> Typically the concept of Home Rule is used.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is huge for justice. Protection for personal property is one of the most fundamental tenets of our society. Don't know why it takes so long for the wheel of justice to get going.

</comment><comment><USER9> These injustices will never cease until those who order and execute them face personal consequences for their illegal conduct.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's about time a federal judge applies common sense to a forfeiture case. It really is amazing how little logic and common sense our judicial system has. How are we the people supposed to trust an illogical system that steals from people, murders innocent people, and that a third grader can see is unconstitutional? How can one even explain such madness to children who wonder if the cops killed the black guy just to take his car and house? Of course they did.

<comment><USER11> To quote Tom Swift (from Gulliver's Travels):

Judges are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.</comment></comment>


Death in the clouds: The problem of bodies on Everest (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151008-the-graveyard-in-the-clouds-everests-200-dead-bodies <comment><USER2> I don't like how the first graphic splits into "climbers" and "Sherpas". If anything, the Sherpas are the true climbers, as they do that all their life, and their physical abilities are probably up to olympic athlete level in most cases. The "climbers" should be labelled "western tourists" (except for the mountain guides).

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't the label "western tourists" be wildly inaccurate though?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbing_Mount_Everest)

<comment><USER2> "Rich tourists" would be more appropriate, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The ITBP, however, says that Paljor's body is hopelessly stuck, and that > anyway, they can't guarantee that it actually belongs to Paljor – or even to > an Indian for that matter

Looking at the pictures it appears that someone has rolled Paljor over as you can see him resting on both sides with his jacket less faded on the most recently exposed side. Clearly not that stuck.

<comment><USER5> The article goes on to say that he's since been removed altogether so, yeah, not that stuck at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like such an obvious use for robots, and given the explosion of robots in delivery and other fields now, I'm curious if anyone has tried it ? Why can't battery powered robots, with sleds, controlled from base camp, clean up the mountain - picking up the dead and perhaps some trash too ?

<comment><USER7> 1) You are underestimating how difficult the terrain is. The only types of robot that'd have a chance would be some of the legged ones from Boston Dynamics, and even they probably wouldn't be up to the challenge.

2) Lithium-ion batteries perform poorly at low temperatures. And there's very little electricity available on the mountain at all, let alone near the summit where a lot of the bodies are.

<comment><USER8> We can make robots that work in space. We can surely make things which work in this environment. Either heat them, or use thermal batteries for power when needed. Also might be an interesting application for compressed air.

<comment><USER9> > We can make robots that work in space. We can surely make things which work > in this environment.

Space is a way less challenging environment than mountains for robots, which are well equipped to handle, say, lack of air and gravity, but poorly equipped to handle rough and rocky terrain and lots of gravity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As an aside, pretty baffling that people go to all the trouble to travel through such a unique, pristine environment and still won't bother to clean up their rubbish (just to be clear, actual garbage, not human remains).

<comment><USER11> I'm clueless about this whole process. Where would they put that? Carry it up and down again?

Is that feasible?

<comment><USER12> Sherpas trek up and down various parts of the climb dozens of times for each group that hires them setting up the next camps, routes, etc. There are people paid for cleanup who also do similar.

The tourists/climbers could do it but aren't as acclimated to the environment. Paying someone else to do it is probably the best way to ensure reliable cleanup and safety of the tourists/climbers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does it really matter if there is trash and dead bodies up there? Who's bothered or poisoned by this? Other rich people? Is there an ecosystem up there?

<comment><USER14> Here is an excerpt from "The Tragedy of the Commons" paper [1]

"""

The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. "Flowing water purifies itself every 10 miles," my grandfather used to say, and the myth was near enough to the truth when he was a boy, for there were not too many people. But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

"""

The excerpt seems to convey the same opinion, but if read the paper you get to see it from many more view points.

1\. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full)

<comment><USER15> That doesn't answer the question, except if you are implying that populations are going to move to Everest in the future.

<comment><USER14> Can you imagine a scenario in the future where there would be a need to do an activity at the summit of Everest?

<comment><USER15> No, I can't.

What is your point?

<comment><USER14> Without significant effort, we are not so good at a judging what resources that are not essential now yet will be in the future. Even the example, I'm going to give is lacking because it is rooted in today's technological activities.

For example, how would the stuff left on Everest affect the remote sensing requirements of the future? Perhaps there is more, but we cannot have thoughts about the questions we do not know to how to ask yet. This view point should not be straw-maned as objecting to any and everything, it is simply cautionary.

In summary, in coming to conclusions we have to factor in our lack of sufficient imagination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I do find it ridiculous that hikers are allowed to attempt the climb, and that if they die on the climb their bodies are allowed to litter the landscape forever.

When you attempt a climb, it should be required that you pay a deposit that will pay for 1) removal of all trash left by you assuming that everything you carry becomes trash and 2) recovery and removal of your body in case you die on the climb.

Since mostly wealthy people do these climbs it shouldn't be a problem at all.

<comment><USER17> Your proposal is basically that on the event of a rich person's death, several poor people should risk their own lives to commemorate the way that he died. Is anyone surprised that isn't how it works?

<comment><USER18> Poor people are already "required" (i.e. paid enough money to do it willingly) to risk their lives helping rich people get up and down the mountain. This doesn't seem substantially different.

<comment><USER19> Hauling a heavy dead body down the mountain is a lot tougher and more dangerous than carrying some extra oxygen bottles and food. In the death zone the porters are already working at the outer limit of human performance.

<comment><USER20> This. Never actually been in the death zone - my highest has been just under 7km, but it was hard enough carrying my own stuff up and down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> When I climb a mountain (and I've climbed plenty), I don't want to see people, living or dead. It detracts from the experience. Everest? No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER22> I must admit that my first thought was corpse-looting. Also a lifetime supply of free food.</comment>


Character Based CNNs for text classification in PyTorch and trained model+ viz - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ahmedbesbes/character-based-cnn <comment><AUTHOR> PyTorch implementation Tensorboard metric plots Trained models Documentation Annex video tutorial</comment>


Ask HN: Would Feynman be nearly as well known if it weren't for his personality? - <AUTHOR> I'm just curious whether his work alone would have been enough to make him one of the most well known physicists of the 20th century as he is now. <comment><USER2> If you mean well known within the scientific community, then yes, absolutely. I believe his work on Quantum Electrodynamics alone is sufficient to establish his standing as one of the great theoretical physicists of the 20th century.</comment>


Humble Indie Bundle #3 now includes the Humble Indie Bundle #2 games - <AUTHOR> http://www.humblebundle.com/?hib2

<comment><USER2> It's weird.. I feel slightly annoyed every time I even look at the steam store because either I've bought a game then bought it again in a bundle, or because I expect it to be in a future bundle. Now, you might as well just buy the next one, or the one after that, not good for sales.</comment>


What Junk-Rated Netflix Just Said about the Bond Market - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2017/10/24/what-junk-rated-netflix-just-said-about-the-bond-market/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the article: "Why can't Netflix find a self-sustaining business model? Because it doesn't have to."

</comment><comment><USER2> Good read, thanks for sharing</comment>