The greatest privilege we never talk about: beauty - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sfard/the-greatest-privilege-we-hardly-talk-about-beauty-7db3f70c1116 <comment><USER2> Being ugly, middle aged woman is like invisibility cloak in certain work environments.

In one of my first jobs I worked with female electrical engineer like that. It took me few years to gradually discover how good she was. She had good ideas and solved problems but we somehow forgot where the idea came after we talked it over. It somehow became team effort. After someone was boasting how they had high scores in Mensa test, she just casually mentioned that she had scored 155.

I later started a company with her. The best decision I have ever made. Imagine working with Elon Musk who is enthusiastic about chess, crocheting and mushroom picking.

<comment><USER3> Wow, grim. As someone who's on their way to being an ugly middle aged female engineer this is tough reading. Did you ever tell her you spent years completely discounting her and 'stealing' her ideas? I wonder what she thinks about that.

<comment><USER4> > Did you ever tell her you spent years completely discounting her and > 'stealing' her ideas

I don't think the "discounting"/"stealing" was intentional... and it's not necessarily exclusive to women. "Selling yourself" is a skill that even men struggle with, especially the quiet, introverted, but definitely intellectual types.

<comment><USER3> Selling yourself can be hard, but I have to say in my time of browsing HN I've never seen a male engineer complain about being completely ignored in their job in the way the commenter describes. Overlooked in interviews due to ageism, yes, but once they get in I don't have the impression it would take a middle-aged man with an IQ of 155 YEARS to get out of 'invisibility mode' (and would his attractiveness come into it at all? Probably not, if most of his coworkers are also male). If anyone wants to share their experience here to prove I'm wrong, please do!

<comment><USER5> > I have to say in my time of browsing HN I've never seen a male engineer > complain about being completely ignored in their job in the way the > commenter describes

To be frank, that's because in most environments a male engineer would be told it's their own fault for not trying harder to get recognized / pushing their "personal brand" more (i.e. they'd be social punished for pointing out this problem, rather than getting social justice.)

Men internalize this early in life, and so don't bother to complain about such things no matter how often it happens to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a male of above average height who (by western standards) would probably rate as fairly attractive thanks to some lucky genetics. Those inherent characteristics are only part of the picture, though; at various times in my life I have varied in attractiveness greatly (i.e. deciding to work out, maintain a proper weight, and generally paying attention to my appearance), so I have experienced both sides of this effect (I imagine many attractive people have had similar experiences; remaining "attractive" is non-trivial).

People do, clearly, have a bias towards whatever their standard of attractiveness is. I don't think this is really a controversial observation; it's subtle in some situations, overt in others, but it almost never disappears.

This is also enhanced by another effect the article doesn't really hit on: confidence. Once you realize people _perceive_ you as attractive, you start to understand how this advantage tilts the world in your favor. You realize people may listen a bit more, so you speak up a bit more. You start putting yourself out there and more and more opportunities fall into your lap.

This is, as I hinted above, something that people can make a conscious effort to achieve. I've got certain genetic advantages, and I acknowledge that, but it's _amazing_ how far simple physical fitness, careful grooming, and confidence can go.

For men who perceive themselves as unattractive, I would strongly recommend that you put forth the effort to become attractive, even if your own self- image is that you are unattractive. Your genetic predisposition may set limits and boundaries on how far you can take this effect, but if you even move the needle a little bit you can start to see gains (I'd not presume to make any such recommendation to women, because although I feel confident that attractiveness has _never_ hurt me as a male, I do not know whether attractiveness is such a "clear win" for women).

It's unfortunate that humans are wired this way, but you might as well take advantage of it.

<comment><USER7> > For men who perceive themselves as unattractive, I would strongly recommend > that you put forth the effort to become attractive, even if your own self- > image is that you are unattractive.

In dating, I've always heard two rules:

1\. Be attractive 2\. Don't be unattractive

What's attractive is very subjective. But what's _un_ attractive is almost universal. Take a shower, wear antiperspirant, groom your hair, and make an effort to be in good physical shape. Men, if you're growing a beard, groom it. If not, shave it regularly. I look back at pictures of my early 20s when I shaved like once a month out of laziness, and damn I looked terrible. #BlunderYears

I've seen first-hand people that believe they've failed at #1, so they ignore #2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am probably the most beautiful person I know. I am in every way an embodiment of physical perfection. I stand in the mirror and sometimes can't help but notice just how remarkable my reflection is. Despite all of this, I've had a long, and very difficult life. So many of the ugly people around me are faring far better. So I'm not so sure.

<comment><USER9> Brilliant comment.

And the fact that most of the responses to you are confused by it shows how ludicrous it is. And yet when someone uses that exact same reasoning in a different context people are somehow unable to see its absurdity and vehemently agree with it.

<comment><USER10> Individual anecdotes are also informative but the scientific data is pretty clear, women who are more attractive and men than are taller (and more handsom) do better in business and wealth. We have strong biases towards them. It doesn't mean all attractive and tall people do well, just there is a clear trend across society that they are promoted more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > In a meta analysis of the role of attractiveness in criminal sentencing, it > was found that unattractive people received 120–305 percent longer sentences > than attractive people.

I wonder if this is an evolved phenomenon. Societies where punishment was harsher on the less attractive was faster to remove less fit genes than otherwise and, thus, out competed their adversaries.

(Obviously abhorrent on a human level, though.)

<comment><USER12> Beauty isn't as simple as being born looking a certain way. It can be influenced by health. It can be influenced by social savvy. It can be influenced by socioeconomic class.

To think that it merely reflects your genes vastly oversimplifies it.

(I was once "beautiful." I have a genetic disorder. This is a subject I have thought a lot about over the years.)

<comment><USER13> Actually not really, I mean if you're ugly and rich you're just ugly with money. You may get benefits just because you've money. But if you don't show off then there's no way to influence your "perception of beauty"

Beauty has more to do with culture (what do we consider good looking and what not) but there's also an objective beauty that has to do with body proportion for example

[https://www.nature.com/articles/526S16a.pdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/526S16a.pdf)

<comment><USER14> As an example, check pictures before and after being millionaire of some rock stars, actors, sportsmen, etc and you will see how money can really change the looks.

Take this picture before after of Cristiano Ronaldo, for example:

[https://elbocon.pe/resizer/0hZVESd2S5BEAOwYYdT6_FUcIEE=/980x...](https://elbocon.pe/resizer/0hZVESd2S5BEAOwYYdT6_FUcIEE=/980x528/smart/arc- anglerfish-arc2-prod- elcomercio.s3.amazonaws.com/public/AWWTL3OO7NFMLKFD62VKAXEKAY.jpg)

<comment><USER15> This is laughable. Using a picture as argument to say "you can be handsome with money" is pretty much pointless

[https://www.besoccer.com/new/the-20-ugliest-footballers- in-t...](https://www.besoccer.com/new/the-20-ugliest-footballers-in-the- world-10240)

[https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/has-cristiano-ronaldo-had- pl...](https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/has-cristiano-ronaldo-had-plastic- surgery/1gnvery8a5m8c14b9rn9b3z090)

[https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney- confi...](https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/sydney- confidential/image- gallery/f04d03d33e448963c703a39d8a346cdb?sv=3868ed79c03f71b9fddb3904f0625065)

[https://www.imdb.com/list/ls054789830/](https://www.imdb.com/list/ls054789830/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We never talk about it? Seems for a long time it's all we talked about. You don't have to go very far online without running into somebody ranting about the privileges that beauty brings, and people with that privilege talking about how it's not a silver bullet to life's problems and brings with it it's own challenges.

Fat shaming, thin shaming, thigh gaps, Chads and Stacys, my head hurts just thinking about it all.

Everything old is new again.

</comment><comment><USER17> Dan Hamermesh (well known labor economist) spent a significant part of his career investigating the economic outcomes of beauty.

[0] Book: [https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691158174/be...](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691158174/beauty- pays)

[1] Daily show: [https://econ.video/2017/11/27/the-daily-show-ugly-people- dis...](https://econ.video/2017/11/27/the-daily-show-ugly-people- discrimination/)

</comment><comment><USER18> There are some important points raised here, but also a lot of sloppiness. If so much is riding on beauty then it should be important to be precise so as to understand what is going on.

Beauty is inherently subjective to the point of including wild contradictions such as Europeans going to great lengths to tan their skin while Asians may poison themselves with attempt to bleach their skin to make it lighter. This is not some simple scale even if there may be examples of people that are considered beautiful by many.

Modernity has made it common to be out of shape and overweight, so people who put extra effort into maintaining their health tend to be considered more beautiful than others. This means that to some extent beauty is a parameter that can be controlled. This leads to complex trade offs where beautiful people may be strongly desirable, but end up eating and exercising in a very controlled way which makes deep socialization with ordinary people awkward. Want to share lunch or a snack? Sorry, I don't snack and am not eating lunch today or most days. Want to share a drama? Sorry, I am going to the gym and expect to come back too low on time and energy for that. And so on.

</comment><comment><USER19> Even in the most trivial sense, I have seen it in action.

Me (normal looking guy) and the GF (average-trending-to-pretty) at a fast food restaurant. I go up to the counter and ask for a couple extra sauce packets, only to be told they are 0.25 each.

GF goes up 1 minute later, asks for two sauce packets and is given a hand full, for free.

<comment><USER20> How many sauce packets does it take to fill the wage gap?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I used to believe people were born beautiful and there is some truth to it but even the people I've thought were most beautiful, if I look hard enough, generally I can see they're just normal people who spend more time on grooming, style, clothing, posture, presentation, charm, etc... Maybe they got lucky and some of it came naturally, not necessarily genetically though possibly but more like serendipity to gain those habits or skills.

Take the most beautiful person you know and see them when they're sick and they rarely stay attractive.

In any case it's arguably learnable. I don't know if this example will resonate but certain cities have a culture of beauty. Tokyo is one. People dress up to go out, at least most women do. I use to think it was either (a) they were born attractive or (b) the city attracted beautiful people. But, I've changed my mind. Instead the city culture has set a standard and people, in general, feel pressure to try to adhere to it.

I know it's an anecdote but a very attractive women once told me the only difference between attractive and not is effort. We all probably know exceptions but in my experience they are fairly rare. I'm not saying everyone can be a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10 but I'm confident the majority of people can be 7-8 even 9 with effort. Many of the most beautiful people I know, put them in drab clothing with no make up and try to remove your memory of their prior attractiveness and they just look like plain ordinary people.

<comment><USER22> You can't be unattractive and then hit the gym for a few months and put on a collared shirt and be hot. Better looking than before sure, but not beautiful. It is a nice myth for people to comfort themselves with I guess. It is also viewed as unattractive to 'try really hard' when it comes to physical appearance so you can have the reverse affect if your efforts to make yourself attractive are too blatant.

<comment><USER23> Yea exactly, no amount of exercising will change your height as a man or the way you look.

E.g All else being equal, you're going to have a hard time finding a partner if you are 5'5 male.

Unfortunately, unattractive people will have to put in a lot more effort to succeed in life, especially with regards to dating.

<comment><USER24> I'm 5'5\. Working out won't change your height but it definitely changes the way you look. I have a beautiful girlfriend. I also have been compliment plenty of times on the way my clothes fit and how I'm in great shape.

Yes, being short sucks, but it sucks not being born a millionaire too. No reason to be down about it.

If you think being short sucks, try being short AND bitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Something I noticed recently (prepandemic of course) after living in Silicon Valley for 20 years: the amount of plastic surgery that you see around town in Palo Alto has really gone off the charts. Both men and women. So much botox. So much nips/tucks.

It feels like Los Angeles light.

<comment><USER26> Software is centered in Silicon Valley, entertainment is centered in Los Angeles, and ageism is rampant in both industries. It's not surprising that a culture of plastic surgery would emerge here compared to a place like New York, whose main industry is finance (where being perceived as older isn't nearly as much of a career headwind).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 40 Rock talked about it at least twice.

In one episode some man who was supposed to be super attractive to everyone had no idea he was so bad at everything. He passed through life because everyone let him off the hook for his beauty.

In another episode a beautiful assistant started at the studio and charmed everyone into getting her way. When Liv confronted her about it she replies that if it's fair for Liv to use the brains her genetics gave Liv than it was fair to her to use the beauty genetics gave her.

<comment><USER27> Are you from a parellel universe? In this reality it's 30 Rock and the main character is Liz Lemon.

<comment><USER21> Haha, I only watched the first 2 seasons or so and what was 20 years ago (yes, the number was a joke)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > On the unofficial but universally-understood 10-point scale of looks, I've > heard people call themselves a five, but never a one or a two. You might > tell a friend "you're a 10" but when was the last time you told someone you > respect "you're ugly." In the world of euphemisms, "average" is the new > below average and "ugly" is a taboo term reserved mostly for high school > bullies or kids playing in sandboxes — or whatever it is five year olds do > now.

Or maybe it's because beauty, just like most other traits in nature, follows the normal distribution, so most of us are around 5, and very few are really ugly (or astonishingly beautiful).

</comment><comment><USER29> _"If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."_

Roald Dahl, "The Twits"

The accompanying illustration has stuck with me for going on 30 years now: [https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c9/45/2c/c9452c05e8c3e60455a3...](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c9/45/2c/c9452c05e8c3e60455a3158c45e4c790.jpg)

I have met my share of people who by rights _ought to_ be physically attractive but are not, which also reminds me of Shelley: _Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command..._

<comment><USER30> So if I see someone with a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and I don't perceive anything that gives me the impression of sunbeams shining out of their face, should I assume they have ugly thoughts rather than good ones?

<comment><USER29> spend some time with them and find out!

"handsome is as handsome does" is at least as old as Chaucer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > They are perceived to have better personality qualities like trustworthiness

Reminds me of one of my favorite LoTR quotes, of Aragorn after first meeting him:

Merry: "How do we know this Strider is a friend of Gandalf?"

Frodo: "I think a servant of the Enemy would look fairer and feel fouler."

</comment><comment><USER32> Reading this article reminds me of Vonnegut's imagining of a future I never thought would happen:

[http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html](http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Doug Stanhope did a good bit on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgXwc- Gy19E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgXwc-Gy19E)

</comment><comment><USER34> While I agree with this overall, this list in the middle of the article was unsourced and presented as "just-so":

> Here is a list of features that are objectively beautiful, and their > absence, objectively ugly. Facial and body symmetry; proportional anatomy, > height (particularly among men); a full set of straight, white teeth; a full > head of hair; clear, evenly-toned, taut, skin; a well-toned physique; > proportional features; large eyes.

Of these, the "well-toned physique" is probably historically incorrect[1] - excess weight signified wealth and health for much of human history. Likewise, "a full head of hair" is somewhat gender-specific - super important for women, but many men can rock a bald head pretty well.

Overall, I think beauty ideals are somewhat more flexible than this article assumes. This is _especially_ true for romantic attraction and especially in some communities.

[1] Searching for this yields a lot of spam, best I found after a few minutes: [https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history- of-...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/07/health/body-image-history-of-beauty- explainer-intl/index.html)

<comment><USER35> I find the CNN examples tenuous. If the same logic was applied to today's relics in the future, historians might say that 8 foot tall anime women were idealised beauty, in the same way newly discovered buildings tend to be called temples. In reality (from the male perspective) preferences vary massively between individuals.

If Rubens' women are an ideal, why aren't Picasso's?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'll just leave this here as highly recommended and relevant Ted Chiang story, "Liking what you see: A Documentary" (PDF link to story) [https://canvas.wayne.edu/courses/102861/files/3959556/downlo...](https://canvas.wayne.edu/courses/102861/files/3959556/download?download_frd=1)

</comment><comment><USER37> Nietzsche claimed Socrates' renowned and profound ugliness would've been seen as an implicit argument against him in his trial since ancient Athenian culture openly associated ugliness with untrustworthiness.

<comment><USER37> As a follow-up, Aristophanes made it a point to underline Socrates' ugliness in his depiction of him in _The Clouds_

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I recently went on a first date with a woman that was certifiably gorgeous and wound up having one of the most fascinating conversations on this topic.

She discussed her prior career in the military, where she spent 8 years and ultimately got pushed out by a high-ranking officer (also female) in her division for very political reasons. It wasn't just a superficial rant, she described an incredibly detailed pattern of abuse and obstruction by some of her COs.

My main takeaway was that attractive people tend to get more attention. Much of it is probably good attention, but this isn't always the case. A few days after that date, I heard about Vanessa Guillén, an Army soldier murdered by a CO after suffering from persistent sexual harassment by him[0].

0: [https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/06/fort-hood-soldier- va...](https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/06/fort-hood-soldier-vanessa- guillen/)

<comment><USER39> > I heard about Vanessa Guillén, an Army soldier murdered by a CO

The other soldier mentioned in that article was the same rank, not a commanding officer (CO). In no way diminishes the seriousness of the apparent murder, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I can think of one that's even greater: intelligence.

<comment><USER41> Depends how you quantify privilege. I've seen a few convincing arguments that, for men at least, height is a better predictor of success than intelligence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Steve Martin once said about Gael Garcia Bernal, "I'd do anything to look like that guy, except eat right and exercise."

It's very seductive to justify people's anxiety and envy by synthesizing a narrow difference into an perceived injustice. If a person is truly repellent or creepy, it's because they present something that triggers a sense of danger or disgust in others, which is completely relative to the individuals. Liars are usually repellent, so are predators, manipulators, often the mentally ill, when you get a waft of that aspect of who they are. You have to ask who benefits from you not trusting your instincts when it comes to being around people you may feel repulsed by.

EDIT: corrected re comment below.

<comment><USER43> But there are lots of superficial traits that people _associate_ with those categories of people, that don't actually serve as a remotely valid indicator. And those kinds of associations, permeated throughout society, serve to make some people's lives worse in a very real way. People on HN often overestimate the rationality of humans, and underestimate the perpetuating effect that stereotypes have.

<comment><USER42> The main issue is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect) , but what gets missed when people use the Halo Effect term is that when the performance of someone attractive or charismatic is only average, we blame them for having "deceived" us, when it was our own bias toward them that caused the disappointment.

Criticizing the "privilege" of the attractive as a means to de-legitimize them personally seems to double down on this error and seduce people who have the conceit of blaming others for their own biases into further self- justification, imo.

<comment><USER43> I didn't take the article as seeking to "de-legitimize them". Having privilege isn't a sin (unless you acquired it through some ill means, but that's not even possible in most cases).

Privilege is nothing more than a social factor to be aware of, both for the haver of privilege whose perspectives might be warped by their experiences, and for the social systems (like the justice system, mentioned in the article) who at least in theory are trying to be objective about things.

Don't take it so personally. Privilege doesn't make you a bad person, and raising awareness of it is a good thing.

<comment><USER42> A lot of people would argue the idea of privilege is not a neutral or valueless observation at all, and more precisely, it resembles a new original sin invented by a secular movement instead of a religious one. Critical frameworks that rely on it earn extra scrutiny. I recommend taking that personally.

<comment><USER43> I think "a lot of people" is an over-statement, I don't think an intrinsically broken moral judgement made by a minority of people should be allowed to delegitimize the real issue, and I don't think the OP was talking about anything but the real, legitimate issue.

Privilege is nothing but an acknowledgement that some people have advantages in life that they didn't earn. There is no possible world in which it doesn't exist, and almost by definition its holders can't usually be blamed for holding it. But we can a) take steps as a society to decrease its impact in various ways, and b) see it as a reality-check on social-darwinist or meritocratic thinking.

<comment><USER42> There is no real or legitimate issue about how attractiveness is somehow "unearned," as though it should be earned, I can only presume through labour, and probably struggle, though it is not clear from whom one might earn it. Perhaps the forces of history inevitably closing in on a dying class? The idea of privilege is an artifact of that ideology and it's the defining attribute of an antagonist. Is it useful? It is a tool that is applicable in some limited instances, but applying it to the alleged "privilege" of beauty seems like that old adage of when all you have is a hammer and sickle, everything looks like a kulak.

<comment><USER43> The OP gave a clear example of how awareness of this bias could help real people:

> In a meta analysis of the role of attractiveness in criminal sentencing, it > was found that unattractive people received 120–305 percent longer sentences > than attractive people.

So coming up with a way to factor physical appearance out of courtroom proceedings could dramatically improve justice system outcomes. There's nothing hand-wavy or insidious here. I really can't figure out where your hangup is, and I think I'm going to stop engaging with this conversation because it feels like a waste of time and energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> People are more biased by charisma, beauty, having a skill, being fashionable, being talented, working hard etc etc. The idea that race alone is a deciding factor is minor compared to how attractive you are in general.

</comment><comment><USER45> Note that most (all except one?) of the studies on attractiveness in sentencing were using mock juries or similar (unlike the race based statistic which uses real data).

In the single study that was based on real data there was no control for income. The impact of that should be obvious to all: richer people are generally better groomed in court and have better representation.

</comment><comment><USER46> > a full set of straight, white teeth;

Funny thing is in some Asian countries having a certain form of "crooked" teeth is often seen as more attractive (in woman).

Similarly having body volume (e.g. slightly overweight) is often seen as attractive (in man). (As it convoys wealth, only wealthy people can afford to eat that much.)

Honestly most, not the large majority of people is not ugly and can have reasonable good looks if they do _carry_ them self properly and war clean clothes, hair, etc. Sure much more can be done using makeup or similar but that costs time and money every day and is normally not necessary.

Sure people which look rally good still do have some benefit. I just mean that for many people the problem is not inborn bad looks but how they carry them self IMHO. But then beauty is very subjective so I wouldn't be surprised if many people thing differently.

</comment><comment><USER47> "She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous."

</comment><comment><USER48> Judging by stereotypes, I wouldn't expect people here to pay that much attention to their looks. But clearly it matters...a lot. After reading this article, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone why people, especially women, spend so much time and money obsessing over their appearance.

Yes, you could argue that it shouldn't be this way and people shouldn't dwell on looks so much. But it doesn't matter how right you are. Attraction isn't rational. It's emotional and instinctive.

So do yourself a favor and always try to look your best. You don't need to care about what people _think_ about you, but should care about what people _feel_ towards you, because it will impact the quality of your life.

</comment><comment><USER49> How does one separate cause from effect here? People who are more privileged have two advantages: they have more resources with which to maximise their 'beauty', and also beauty standards will tend towards emulating those of higher status.

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't think we realize how much "work" some people have had done.

Take Elon Musk. It's amazing how his hair grew back and that's he's aged so well considering the stress he's under. Hair implants, Botox and a nip and tuck here and there will keep you looking your billionaire best.

I was oblivious to this type of thing with men until my wife started pointing it out.

It's no wonder that among the things that money can buy is happiness if plastic surgery improves your esteem and how people react to you.

</comment><comment><USER51> Never talk about it? Ever hang out with college age people? They talk about it a lot.

<comment><USER52> i think they mean talking about in the context of privilege

<comment><USER20> It's a key component of incel discourse, in my experience.

<comment><USER53> What brings you to the incel discourse?

<comment><USER20> Individuals on HN, and other internet communities, have brought it to me. I was also briefly exposed to it in uni.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's got a name: lookism

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

</comment><comment><USER55> Someone else mentioned intelligence, but being born human puts sets you up better than any other living being on earth

Also everything is a privilege now: \- being human \- being alive \- having two legs \- having two hands \- having two parents \- having a computer at home \- having an iphone

</comment><comment><USER56> > compared to other other privileges that may arise from race, gender, or > sexuality, we don't talk much about it.

Because beauty is relative. Whiteness and maleness are absolute. Sexuality, once outed, is also absolute.

</comment><comment><USER57> Beauty is a gift but not a privilege. I don't think the attention you get or you don't get for it is valuable or is going to change your life.

Sure, some of the people around you are going to pay more attention to you but you will not earn anything for it. No investor is going to invest on you because you are beautiful. You don't get to control your life only because you are beautiful.

It's other talents that you have and the choices you make that really helps you to construct your life. And you get more privilege when you are more successful. If someone is extremely beautiful and made a career in beauty or fashion, it's not because (s)he is beautiful. Otherwise every naturally beautiful person could make it.

</comment><comment><USER58> Its amazing that people I work with spend years and years at school learning "skills" but spend no time learning looking good, social skills or how to dress properly.

<comment><USER30> Perhaps they consider that people who spend effort on looking good or dressing "properly" are playing _defect_ in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I tell you honey, it's a crying shame; All the pretty girls really look the same. \-- Iggy and the Stooges

</comment><comment><USER60> It depends, we have the dumb blond stereotype and I know of developers who are attractive and have a harder time interviewing because they get perceived as dumber. It could be that there's an unconscious bias of hiring someone that looks like a stereotypical movie hacker (long hair, beard, wearing old tech swag, etc). This is of course changing slowly after Apple made a push on cleaning up the image of all the higher ups to have them be part of the presentations and now all companies seem to hire PR consultants that work the appearance of their clients. You sort of see this aesthetic trickle down with time.

1) Jonny Ive [http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/04/14/back-when-jonathan- ive...](http://www.edibleapple.com/2010/04/14/back-when-jonathan-ive-had-hair- and-a-mustache/)

2) Thiel and Musk (check Thiel's teeth) [https://i.insider.com/5dc349153afd375c04352664?width=1136&fo...](https://i.insider.com/5dc349153afd375c04352664?width=1136&format=jpeg)

3) Bezos [https://i.insider.com/596ccf31abc1c828528b4c9a?width=1136&fo...](https://i.insider.com/596ccf31abc1c828528b4c9a?width=1136&format=jpeg)

Guess money fixes beauty :)

<comment><USER61> Damn how did Elon Musk regrow that much hair?

<comment><USER62> There are only two ways to fix what he had. First is a hair transplant, he would be around NW6 now so it was a lot of grafts. Second way is a hair system (rebranded toupee), you can't really tell if someone is wearing one if it's good, you can have exposed hairline, modern hair styles etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's certainly true that beauty is a massive privilege and discriminator but the title is somewhat hyperbolic; it is unlikely to be the greatest (compared to the more obvious ones like race and gender etc) and is certainly talked about, though not as much as it should be.

<comment><USER64> The title is not saying 'this is the greatest privilege of all, and we don't talk about it'\- it's saying 'among the privileges we don't talk about, this is the greatest.'

Still might not be true, but it's less hyperbolic.

<comment><USER63> Yes, fair point - I misread. My second point stands though, it's certainly talked about, but maybe not as much as it should be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> That was some depressing reading..

</comment><comment><USER66> > Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in life.

Oh for God's sake, some people are born without eyes.

> Attractive people might have a hard time coming to terms with all of this. > Doing so would require relegating at least part of their achievements to > something mostly unearned.

No one deserves anything. The idea falls apart as soon as we even begin to examine it. I could walk into the woods and build a hut out of mud and sticks. Did I "earn" that mud hut, or was I privileged to be born with hands? Does the fact that most people are born with hands matter? If so, how can we quantify how it matters?

At the end of the day, none of this makes any sense, and we need to come up with notions of "success" (socially speaking) and "property rights" (legally speaking) that are based on something else.

</comment><comment><USER67> So when is america going to do positive discrimination toward ugly people ?

</comment><comment><USER68> Society is very quickly becoming obsessed with turning Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" cautionary tale into reality.

<comment><USER69> I disagree entirely. I see people being lifted up. In that story, people were torn down.

I have noticed this trend though, of reacting to justice movements by claiming it'll tear down people. Why do you believe this?

<comment><USER70> There's a lot of vitriol aimed at rich people right now, regardless of how they attained their wealth.

I imagine it'll soon be transferred to talented people as well.

Soon we'll be right where the story predicted, everyone wears handicaps to make themselves equal.

<comment><USER71> I don't care how you made your money, hoarding it should be looked down on. Greed is bad, we don't need to make things illegal, but I sure as hell am going to think anyone with a privately owned Yacht is a little bit worse of a person than someone reinvesting their money in their community and trying to explore new ideas, or if you are tired and don't want to personally invent stuff or run another business, go find some enthusiastic entrepreneur to support. I am not against rich people having power, I think we should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share, but beyond part of their money that ought to be allocated by a democratically elected government they can do what they want with their wealth to control the world. But anyone using their money to just show how wealthy they are is going to get serious judgement from me, and I think that is a healthy way to think about rich people.

I think it should be likely obvious from my statement above, I want there to be talented people, and I really don't see a substantial movement to pull down successful people.

What are examples of things people are doing that make you think we are going in this direction?

<comment><USER72> but seriously everything you are saying is seething with value judgements.

> should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share

what constitutes a 'fair share'? Who gets to decide?

it's easy to criticize yachts. Let's say a billionaire did something "you might like" like throw a ton of money into a basic physics project. But what if that basic physics project is looking for superluminal neutrinos? Or maybe you'd criticize that the billionaire just wanted to get their name out, which is, essentially vanity, an obviously negative character trait.

Or we could get into sketchier territory. What if the billionaire spent tons of money in "development" in an "underdeveloped country". Is that bad or good? Who gets to decide?

I mean the ironic thing is that on many metrics, buying a yacht could be the least bad thing of the three things that I have mentioned, at least the likelihood of buying a yacht actively hurting someone else is relatively low.

<comment><USER71> On taxes this will forever be an evolving discussion. Hopefully with good policies over the next few decades we can even out some of the income and wealth disparities and need a smaller welfare state. When that happens I'm all for tax cuts.

But at this point the capital gains rate is absolutely in need of change. Taxing the rich is really politically popular, across the political spectrum. If someone has to pay %39 on a million dollars of earned income, the "job creators" making billions can pay something closer to that on their income too.

<comment><USER72> Well the whole taxation thing, IMO is insane. There was a year when I made 30k and paid a higher proportion of my income to taxes than Bernie Sanders. Anyways if it's income disparity you're looking to fix, taxing the rich isn't going to help. You need to stop stealing from the poor, which is what the government does via policies like QE. Taxing the rich is linear, the QE is compounding damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Beauty is an earned privilege.

</comment><comment><USER73> Although this is a real phenomenon, individuals do possess the ability to improve their looks. With maybe a couple exceptions, nearly everyone can become very attractive if they take care of themselves, dress well, and lead a healthy lifestyle.

<comment><USER74> > nearly everyone can become very attractive if they take care of themselves, > dress well, and lead a healthy lifestyle.

You're going to have to define very attractive. No amount of healthy lifestyle will make your breasts bigger. No amount of dressing well will make your face less ugly (short of putting a curtain in front of it).

There are hard limits to what you can do as an individual without surgery. Even with surgery, you still will run into a wall.

<comment><USER73> Yeah of course those things are out of control. My point is that the things you can control have a huge impact. Maybe you can never be a 10/10 because of some specific flaw, but you could likely be at least an 8. Also flaws tend to be seen more as quirks in more "attractive" people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Who doesn't talk about this?

You see this discussion everywhere from The Guardian to Incel forums. You see activists going on about "beauty standards."

This is often discussed.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Good looks, just like intelligence, positive affect, or disease-resistance, > is a largely genetic advantage in life that we should not punish.

Well, wait a few years. I was surprised so many times recently with ridiculous initiatives, and I'm sure it can get way worse than that.

</comment><comment><USER76> Beauty is 99% hard work and 1% inherited.

<comment><USER56> Can you explain? There are people who are beautiful without any grooming.

<comment><USER76> add 300 pounds and let's see if they're still beautiful

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> One of the first "privileges" I learned about in my life was being tall. Why was it the first? Because short kids and friends I knew would openly lament about being short. Something I could tell they think about constantly, and something I _never_ thought about.

I suspect it's played a large role in dating and interviewing for jobs, though no one ever openly says "you're projecting more confidence simply because you're taller than average"

<comment> J-dawg Being tall is a huge privilege for a man. It's a large component of male attractiveness.

Many women make it clear on dating sites that they won't consider anyone below a certain height, or at least taller than they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Really? I disagree. Those who do not have beauty, end up compensating for it by exceeding in some other trait, and in the end, these other traits, or the ability to exceed in these other traits is the privilege, those not endowed with beauty get. So, it balances, and sometimes to the benefit of those not endowed with beauty.

<comment><USER79> Do you feel that way about every differential advantage, such as money and family support in childhood, or is there something unique about beauty that causes people to compensate better?

</comment></comment><comment> J-dawg This is a good example of how the modern philosophy of identity politics falls apart when you seriously examine it.

Think of all the ways that people are innately privileged (or not): intelligence, height, beauty, upbringing, parental wealth, personality profile.

Any combination of the above can have a vastly greater impact on a person's life outcomes than race, gender, sexuality etc.

<comment><USER80> "In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic."

<comment><USER81> Harrison Bergeron[1], for those who don't know. A wonderful short story.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron)</comment></comment></comment>


FCC stops defending caps on prison phone call rates - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/06/fcc-stops-defending-caps-on-prison-phone-call-rates/ <comment><USER2> When I was in federal prison several years back it was 70 cents per minute to call. You were limited to 300 minutes per month. Working at my job in the prison full time paid 5.25$ per month. For those guys who were in for a long time and had zero money being sent in, they had to support themselves on the best possible jobs which paid up to .19 cents per hour.

I'm still heartbroken when I think about the guys who somehow saved up money on these wages and sent it out to their families.

The most gut wrenching thing about being in prison is the fact that the gaurds treat you like animals, and most all of them seem to derive a sick pleasure from it.

<comment><USER2> Some other interesting things, calls were limited in length to 15 minutes. Calls were monitored in real-time and if you started talking dirty with your girl, you got disconnected and could potentially be written up and given more time. The gaurds also use whatever they hear in the calls to decide which cells to hit and search for contraband. Guys who are down for a long time never use the phones. You would have to work at least 4 hours or up to 3 days to afford one minute of conversation. That minute could be burned up with the phone ringing and waiting for the person to approve the phone call.

Phone conversations are recorded forever and easily accessible by pretty much any employee.

If you get in fights or get caught with contraband or try to escape you lose your good time and stay in longer. Due to new rules, there is no parole. Good time is 15%. Other new rules also allow them to extend your original sentence for some infractions such as having a cell phone. Before if you got caught with a cell phone it was a write up and go to the hole for 90 days (small confined room with no human contact, no window, no mail, no calls, no nothing). Now they add up to five years on to your sentence and put you in the hole for a year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It shouldn't be so expensive to maintain contact with those whose punishment is gratuitous.

I suppose I should call my republican congressman's office on this issue. I took note of this submission from 84 days ago, but hadn't put the advice into action yet:

How to Make Your Congressman Listen to You (attn.com) - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12952116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12952116) / [http://www.attn.com/stories/12768/former-congressional- staff...](http://www.attn.com/stories/12768/former-congressional-staffer- explains-how-to-make-congressman- listen?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=internal)</comment>


Hide secrets with invisible characters in plain text securely using passwords - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/KuroLabs/stegcloak <comment><USER2> Coincidentally I posted this twitter challenge a week ago:

        #I #wonder #how #many #of #my #haX0r #friends #can
        #figure #out #how #I #made #all #these #hashtags
        #unclickable.

None of the hashtags appear clickable as they normally should, except for the #unclickable one, which I left as normal as a bit of a joke.

Twitter doesn't highlight # followed by a space, among other characters it ignores unless they terminate in an alphabetic character. #10 won't get highlighted, but #10d will. When I realized that, I just added a zero-width space after the #.

EDIT: Interestingly pasting it to a HN converts it to a normal space character, so I had to edit and delete them. Didn't really expect that one.

Here's the original link if you care to see what it looks like in action: [https://mobile.twitter.com/IntruderVS1400/status/12723814606...](https://mobile.twitter.com/IntruderVS1400/status/1272381460637507591)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Live @ [https://stegcloak.surge.sh/](https://stegcloak.surge.sh/)</comment>


An optimization guide for assembly programmers and compiler makers (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf <comment><USER2> The page containing the link to this pdf "[https://www.agner.org/optimize/"](https://www.agner.org/optimize/") has links to four other pdfs describing other topics on optimization.

<comment><USER3> Clickable and non 404: [https://agner.org/optimize/](https://agner.org/optimize/)

<comment><USER2> Sorry, I had forgotten that HN doesn't like quotes around links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      I like this site very much, its simple and old school.

Take a tour around the site for some other aspects of agners work, there is a good treatise regarding the fundamentals of digital electronics, as well as a proposed archetecture standard [ForwardCom]. some [as in a couple] of the links on agners site are stale or dead but do give you the general idea what to look for.

[https://www.agner.org/digital/digital_electronics_agner_fog....](https://www.agner.org/digital/digital_electronics_agner_fog.pdf) [PDF]

and:

[https://forwardcom.info/](https://forwardcom.info/)

</comment><comment><USER5> There is also uops.info which has a different, more formal characterization of latency:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04610](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04610)

<comment><USER6> And llvm-exegesis:

[https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm- exegesis.html](https://llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/llvm-exegesis.html)

"llvm-exegesis is a benchmarking tool that uses information available in LLVM to measure host machine instruction characteristics like latency, throughput, or port decomposition.

Given an LLVM opcode name and a benchmarking mode, llvm-exegesis generates a code snippet that makes execution as serial (resp. as parallel) as possible so that we can measure the latency (resp. inverse throughput/uop decomposition) of the instruction. The code snippet is jitted and executed on the host subtarget. The time taken (resp. resource usage) is measured using hardware performance counters. The result is printed out as YAML to the standard output.

The main goal of this tool is to automatically (in)validate the LLVM's TableDef scheduling models. To that end, we also provide analysis of the results."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I think I'm a 'full stack' developer, and then I read something like this. Sure I can dabble in simple assembly, but there's always a bigger fish.

<comment><USER8> Heh, the people who can dabble in Assembly for a living won't be able to (typically) setup a major Web PHP + Database and all that. Assembly optimization is a different skill than web development, or other stuff in the stack.

We all gotta pick our specialties. For me, low level high-performance stuff is more of hobby project level. I got a few cool things I've learned by myself but it isn't really what I do for a living.

<comment><USER9> I dabbled in assembly, for a living, at a major software firm. I can still do it after brushing up a bit. And I have no trouble setting up a pg database with web frameworks and writing optimized code.

Web isn't some magical beast- its just rote programming.

Actual business logic is where the categorization starts.

<comment><USER10> It's all plumbing and bookkeeping.

If you want to be humbled, go to a conference on high energy physics.

<comment><USER11> They've spent their lives studying high energy physics. It's going to seem impressive to a non-expert, but to them it's mostly plumbing and bookkeeping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I still remember the olden days when

       XOR AX,AX

was faster than

       MOV AX,0

and Abrash'es book was the magnum opus of the pre-P6 era.

I guess I better throw most of those assumptions out for modern microarchitectures.

<comment><USER13> Probably not directly faster, but "xor %rax, %rax" is still smaller (and thus faster if you're icache constrained) than "mov $0x0, %rax"

<comment><USER14> It is still faster because the register renamer handles it --- ditto for "sub reg, reg":

[https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the- surprising-...](https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/the-surprising- subtleties-of-zeroing-a-register/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm interested in seeing how the section about "Future branch prediction methods" (page 17) will change in our post-Spectre world.

<comment><USER16> This just came up today. Anybody know the answer? The problem involves a JIT (for opcodes, not scripting).

Chunks of code are generated. Sometimes, a chunk will need to branch to a chunk that isn't yet generated or even allocated. Chunks can be cleared away for various reasons like evictions to make room, so the branches to a chunk might need to not go there anymore.

One strategy is to use indirect branches. When the destination doesn't exist, the branch goes to code that will resolve that. It's a bit like how dynamic linkers work.

Another strategy is to replace the code. The processor may stumble a bit over what is essentially self-modifying code, but then it eventually runs faster. The degree to which the processor will pause is a key consideration here. Anybody know?

BTW, if you like digging into this stuff, we're hiring.

<comment><USER17> On a multithreaded implementation, you can do it with 2 stub functions and an array/hash of function pointers (hereto refered to as the "table") that itself acts as a spinlock array. Initialize the table with stub 1 and atomic write stub 1 to the table on eviction.

stub 1) upon entry, atomic write stub 2 into the table. Then compile or enqueue onto a compilation thread/process. At the end of compilation, atomic write the newly compiled address to the table.

stub 2) spinlock on function pointer array entry != Stub 2 address. At end of spinlock, call new function pointer. If you care about power consumption or timing attacks, the spinlock can have a backoff corresponding with the speed of your JIT compiler. This function should be able to fit into a single cacheline, so it should usually be hot.

inlined thunk: Given a function, read address from table and call it.

The client uses the thunk to call the function address in the table without knowing if it's compiled or not. On Intel, you shouldn't need a read fence due to MESI rules.

The branch/fetch predictor works by hashing the address of the branch instruction into its own lookup table. So by forcing stub 3 to be inlined, you're relying on the hash to prefetch the correct function address and call it directly.

You should also be able to put the JIT into a separate process that mmaps with the NX bit set, and have the client load without the NX bit set. So it would be difficult to exploit the JIT compiler itself (but the produced code could still be unsafe).

You might want to cachealign the function table or pack similar chunks in the same function table entry to prevent false sharing whenever there's an atomic write. Also, this table is going to thrash your cache by incurring an extra cacheline load for the trampoline that it does every time.

Anyways, that's my back of the napkin design for how to do it.

<comment><USER16> Thanks.

That is certainly a different way to think about threading. My instinct would be to keep a separate JIT cache for each thread, keeping the threads from stealing resources from each other but also keeping them from sharing the JIT effort.

I think your approach is pretty much how /lib/ld-linux.so.2 deals with the PLT. I didn't see an explanation for stub 3, but I guess you mean the part of the JIT output that does the indirect jump. I take it that you believe the speed advantage of a direct jump is not enough to overcome the occasional hit caused by modifying it, with all the invalidations (icache, trace cache, etc.) that it might cause. Being similar to the dynamic linker is probably well- aligned with what Intel is trying to optimize for upcoming chips. OTOH, the spectre problem might limit what Intel does.

Putting the JIT in a separate process would have to add latency. Upon hitting a missing chunk of code, translation can't really wait. The idea is to run modern stuff, such as a recent desktop OS, via the JIT. We do use more than one mapping on Linux, as required to keep SE Linux happy.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm assuming once code is JIT'ed, it will take a while before being JIT'ed again. But in the meantime the caches will cover some of the trampoline costs.

With regards to latency, if you have a dedicated JIT thread, you can read ahead and JIT the start of all the jump/calls up to the next current ret in parallel to executing the first chunk. Like a super fancy prefetch. Heuristically, I think it's safe to assume that most code is local but I could be wrong.

Also, if you load hwloc on x86-64, you can read your CPU topology at initialization time. If hyperthreading is present (which is somewhat common), you can set affinity for JIT threads to be on the same core as the emulated CPUs. This will minimize read concurrency overhead since you'll be reading/writing to the physical core's L1 almost every time. (This part is crazy, but you _might_ even be able to get away without using atomics due to how cache-associativity works, but I've never tried it and it might not be guaranteed into the future.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've heard this individual's name come up quite a few times(it's very distinctive)in discussions about the compiler/optimization/cpu architecture space.

Does anyone know if this individual still teaches at the Technical University of Denmark and if there might be any lectures of their's online?

I've been watching Onur Mutlu's CMU lectures online and this material is a nice addition to computer architecture self-study.</comment>


My Year of Living Dangerously - <AUTHOR> http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/my-year-of-living-dangerously <comment><USER2> That's a pretty interesting article, but I found it nearly impossible to read. Every paragraph there's a link on an (apparently random) phrase. When there's a link to something like '"real" job', I expect a link to his former company, or a blog post describing is old job. What I don't expect is an ad. Boo.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dude, you have a kid!

<comment><USER4> Nah, they repossessed him months ago...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Steadily employed for many years:

<http://www.russellbeattie.com/Russell_Beattie_resume.html>

...and he has a kid and can't make car payments after being unemployed since September 2006?

<comment><USER6> i don't know if I would call 20 jobs in 13 years steady...but yea

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> the website he started while "living dangerously" is pretty cool: <http://mowser.com>

</comment><comment><USER8> I think he already knew that?</comment>


DPDK: Data Plane Development Kit - <AUTHOR> http://www.dpdk.org/ <comment><USER2> If you're interested in this also checkout netmap and vale: [http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/](http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/)

<comment><USER3> Agree Vale is fast, also fast are 6windgate DPDK.

DPDK has Openstack support, does Vale have Openstack support? Vale looks brilliant in that it takes away complexity yet is fast!

Link on Vale performance [http://cnp.neclab.eu/vale#scalability](http://cnp.neclab.eu/vale#scalability)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget PF_RING:

[http://www.ntop.org/products/packet- capture/pf_ring/](http://www.ntop.org/products/packet-capture/pf_ring/)

</comment><comment><USER5> The Programmer's Guide pages do a good job of describing how the pieces fit together within this project: [http://www.dpdk.org/doc/guides/prog_guide/index.html](http://www.dpdk.org/doc/guides/prog_guide/index.html)</comment>


Are users trying to make developers angry? - <AUTHOR> https://www.exceptionnotfound.net/are-users-trying-to-make-developers-angry/ <comment><USER3>
        But their stupidity persisted. They did things that
        were so wacky they boggled my mind (like putting a
        credit card number in with spaces between each
        number)...

Not allowing spaces in a credit card field is a pet peeve of mine. It's a trivial problem to solve in code, and almost nobody does it. Whether it's a space every 4 numbers (the most logical to me) or a space between each number, it really shouldn't matter.

There are spaces in the number on the card itself. Entering the number with spaces makes it easy to check if you've made a mistake in only a few glances, instead of painstakingly going number-by-number and losing your position a few times.

It shouldn't be the user's fault.

<comment><USER4> I just enter the 16 digits without much trouble.

Then I get to the expiration date and the first column is a drop list of Jan, Feb, Mar... wat?

Now my brain has to convert 07 to Jul instead of just picking 07. Why?!

 _Are developers trying to make users angry?_

<comment><USER5> Then I get to the CVC code. I have to turn the card, there are two numbers, printed such that they look unimportant. Which one should I pick?

Banks are making users angry really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think sometimes users think developers are trying to make them angry.

"It's not that the users were trying to make me angry; it's that they were ignorant of how to make the app do what they want."

Actually, I think the ignorance is on the developers part.

Users don't care about what some developers may perceive as a sexy UI. Honestly, most don't really even want to "learn" the UI. They just want to get stuff done without having to think about it.

We as developers need to get better about developing software that doesn't require a manual. That doesn't require a user to learn how to use something that in their minds should really be so easy.

Example: don't force a particular credit card entry format such as multiple entry fields, doesn't allow spaces or requires use of dashes, etc. Same thing with date formats. Make your software smart enough to handle as many use cases as possible. If they do something incorrectly, make the UI guide them through the error in an easy to understand way.

We as developers are used to reading through complicated documentation, tutorials, etc. That doesn't mean we should subject our customers to that same pain. Unless your software is at the Salesforce scale, the aim should be to develop it in a way that doesn't require a manual or require your users to dig through a bunch of tutorial pages just to get started.

<comment><USER7> >Users don't care about what some developers may perceive as a sexy UI. Honestly, most don't really even want to "learn" the UI. They just want to get stuff done without having to think about it.

Very much this. Users aren't stupid, they just don't give a shit. They use dozens, maybe hundreds of user interfaces per day and your UI has no right to be a difficult POS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I look at this a little differently. If a user is _able_ to make a mistake, I've failed (this is too broad, but you get the idea).

If you take an honest look at your application, and step away from it, it's usually easy to see how they misinterpreted something, etc. I think empathy is an important skill in developing software. It's not right to expect someone to change how they think about a task, because you've written the software to work in that way.

Good software and UX is hard. Modeling problems in a way a computer _and_ a user can understand is hard. Browsing [http://ux.stackexchange.com/](http://ux.stackexchange.com/) and reading some of "The Design of Everyday Things" opened my eyes to how bad things are - <USER2> how much better they can be.

Also, if you haven't you should watch some talks by Bret Victor or Alan Kay.

<comment><USER9> Totally agreed about the not letting mistakes be an option.

I was building an admin ui to configure basically a fancy slideshow for employee performance metrics (gamification). We originally had planned a few days work to put proper validation and error messages in, but then flipped the task around and made it so that every field had a sensible default, and no mistaken values were possible to be filled in (e.g. number fields with automatic limits, date pickers instead of free text).

It turned out to be much less work and the user never sees an annoying "hey you've not filled in this field in the way one of our devs wanted you to".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > users saying something doesn't work, only for us to point out something > simple that they forgot to do, or the instructions they totally didn't read, > and then the error magically goes away

If that's how your software works, you're doing it wrong. It means there was little to no design planning. The error should tell the user/developer what to do to avoid the error thus avoiding an angry email in the first place.

<comment><USER11> Are you saying users read error messages? People come to me for help when things break, and ~60% of the time I save them by _reading the error message_ and doing what it says.

<comment><USER12> Are your error messages readable and obviously relevant?

<comment><USER10> I would argue that developers should aim for 0 error messages ever. If your software requires an action to be performed before moving on, then redirect them to the action, highlight the point of interest, and give a little alert at the top that tells them what to do. When you have a scary error message, users get scared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't think I've ever felt that users are intentionally trying to annoy me, it's more that it feels like they're not trying hard enough. The sense that the application is not impossible to use, lots of their peers have apparently been able to use it with no problem, and that they need to meet me halfway. A kind of unspoken contract where I try and make it as easy as possible for the user, and the user puts in the effort to read the directions rather than just immediately clicking through.

This is not to say that it's their fault or that I am not always working on improving my own work to better take into account human nature as part of interface design. Merely that the post focuses on "intentionally piss off" as the prime motivator, and I'd be a surprised if most developers attributed it to that.

</comment><comment><USER14> If the user has difficulties, it's usually your fault not the user's. Now that doesn't necessarily mean you can realistically do anything about it (time, budget, lack of UX people, etc)...

<comment><USER15> Meh. This is just as problematic of a way of looking at it, honestly.

If the user is having a hard time getting something done. It is probably a difficult problem for them. The job of the developer is to work with the user to make it easier. If you are lucky, you can make it easy. But, incremental improvements are huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Learning a graphical software interface is wasted lifetime, it's like having to learn a new spoken language everytime you want to talk to someone. If however you are married to that person, it might be ok to waste some time to learn that persons interface. Like a photographer that needs to learn how to talk to Photoshop so it can make the pictures prettier.

However most software resembles more the person that you randomly ask for directions in the city. Nobody wants to learn a new language just to exchange 2 sentences.

But building interfaces that require no learning at all is as hard as writing a program without any bugs or undefined behaviour. In practise it might be even harder since talking to the machine gives more predictable precise results, compared to talking to a human.

Most interfaces are therefore quite bad, because development time would go through the roof if any imaginable erratic user behaviour would be taken care of totally invisible. The bigger and more complex the program, the messier it's interface will be.

So yes, users might be trying to make developers angry by pointing out their lazyness.

</comment><comment><USER17> > _They weren 't trying to make me angry, they were trying to learn._

Yeah, these are the easy ones.

The hard ones are the "why should i think what to do? I have my job, just make this thing work!" kind that doesn't try or want to learn anything at all.

<comment><USER18> Honest question. What's wrong with that in many cases? I want to buy a widget. I don't want to try harder or learn the peculiarities of your website.

<comment><USER19> I think that comment may be in relation to tool software such as a CAD program as opposed to service software.

In tool software it is often impossible to always know what the operator is looking to achieve as it is often novel. Service software is quite the opposite where there are likely a few well defined goals the software is attempting to help the customer achieve.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough. Past a certain level of complexity some learning curve is unavoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A good guideline for writing user-facing software:

When you get asked a question once, it might be just a question.

When you get asked the same question by two different users, treat it as a bug report and see if you can fix the interface to make that question not arise.

</comment><comment><USER21> Its disappointing to me how little empathy there is in this profession for the people that use the things we make.

</comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr with just this quote

 _So we all (including me) need to calm down. Users are not trying to piss us off, they 're just trying to learn._

<comment><USER22> and it seems trivial to add too that they're just trying to get things done, one in a huge pile of never ending obligations and difficulties to plain old living in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Harrumph.

He has the razor pointing the wrong way. His users weren't trying to learn, they were trying to _teach_. In almost all enterprisey CRUD applications, the steel-toes on the floor know more about the domain than the developers.

Listen to them.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds like the author is blaming user ignorance when in fact it's bad UI.

</comment><comment><USER25> Hmm, not quite sure I agree; as with communication, I believe that the responsibility lies with the sender for the receiver to comprehend what you are saying.

Someone does not understand you? Then you are not explaining it well enough.

Someone can't figure out how to use your software? Then you did not create it in a way people can comprehend what they need to do.

Is a button you are not supposed to press (before you've completed some other action) enabled, it's your fault the user can click it.

Same goes for repeated clicks, allowing/not handling bad input, etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was frustrated enough with one user that I made RTFM part of his password. Some time later his son logged onto his laptop and asked, "Dad, do you know what RTFM really means?"

<comment><USER27> The abuse of passwords here on both sides makes my skin crawl.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >> The issue was that I live and breath code, and they don't.

Eh, dunno. Maybe try not to breathe so much code? I mean, that already sounds like you're overdoing it somehow.

</comment><comment><USER29> I actually have a very different feeling when I watch users struggle with my app. I feel slightly ashamed and very grateful. Most of the time I realise I've made too many assumptions about the UI, and i start getting ideas on how to maybe fix the problem so that other users don't encounter it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've watched developers who regularly work with UI get tripped up by all sorts of design paradigms. Everyone interacts with things differently, regardless of their background.

</comment><comment><USER31> Many of the commenters here are missing the satire. This essay is about a self centered dev learning user empathy, not a defense of hard to use software

</comment><comment><USER32> THis guys not even right

</comment><comment><USER33> I think the post is overly optimistic. No, they're not "trying to learn." They're just not willing or able to do the simplest of tasks.

These kinds of users should not be accommodated or even responded to. Good UI/UIX should not cater to the lowest common denominator.

<comment><USER6> "These kinds of users should not be accommodated or even responded to"

Please let me know the software you have developed so I can develop something better and make those users you refuse to respond to happy. Especially if they are paying customers.

This mentality is what results in failure and leaves paths WIDE open for your competitors.</comment></comment>


The Lunch Break Challenge. What can you do in an hour? - <AUTHOR> http://www.todotoh.com/emailimg/emailimg.aspx <comment><AUTHOR> I had an idea for something simple and decided to hack it together during lunch today.

How about a little friendly competition once a week? See what we can hack in an hour? It was fun to have the idea, choose an implementation and hack it together in a very short amount of time!

Obviously, there's lots I can do to improve this little service. The intention is not to do something for real, but to have a little fun, be creative and push myself a bit.

Who's in?</comment>


The Myth of the Lone Unique Genius: Ideas Develop in a Mosaic, Not a Vacuum - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/mind-cafe/the-myth-of-the-lone-unique-genius-6d6a93a6ae9f <comment><USER2> Do you see authors writing in a committee ? Do you not see solo musicians ? Do we not celebrate individual strategists in the case of war or business ? The same applies to engineers, inventors, programmers and in some cases business people. There are plenty of individual contributors whose solo works stand on their own. Their work is usually a result of working problems that they find challenging with or without collaboration.

Not everything is a group project. In plenty of sports, the epitome of group projects you still see individual contributions outlasting the team's contributions. What is sad though is that in teams usually there are multiple individual contributors, but the credit is usually stolen by some sorta figurehead. The mythological figurehead is more problematic than celebrating individual geniuses, because we live in an individualist society after all.</comment>


Show HN: Perspective for Men - <AUTHOR> http://www.helpaguyout.com/

<comment><USER2> The advice that men get when asking women about romance is often pretty much useless and will do more harm than good. It would be way more useful to ask men that have their stuff together and know what they are talking about. Besides, every man has female friends to ask. So, sadly, I don't think this is a good business idea at all.

<comment><USER3> I'd go further and say that the notion that there is "a" female perspective is sort of pernicious.

<comment><USER4> Well, there is a female perspective - thing is, women will tell men about what they are wanting but have no idea how provide the feeling of what she is wanting. I whole heartedly agree that women giving romance advice to men is, _a bad thing_ (I also think men giving women romance advice is also _a bad thing_ ).

<comment><USER3> Thats what I meant by pernicious, not all women are like that. Some certainly are like that, but not all. I have had girlfriends who _wouldn't_ tell me about what they were wanting, and in fact my current girlfriend is perfectly able to tell me how to provide the feeling she wants most of the time.

<comment><USER4> That's awesome, hold onto that! Most of the time you have to play the domination game in order to have anything of meaning with a woman - but if you have a girl that's on the same plane with you, that will reduce the amount "drama" in the relationship and also become a much more long term and productive relationship too.

Sorry for misinterpreting what you wrote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a programmer and this site looks like it was designed by a programmer. If you are serious about this idea, spend some money and pay a designer to make it prettier. I think this is the kind of site that needs an appealing design.

In particular, the bottom section with the 'guarantee' and the logos of 'buzz' sites looks like one of those dodgy software download sites with the fake awards and testimonials.

Also, I would want to see some samples of Questions & Answers before I handed over my cash. Have a question of the day or something so people can get a feel of the quality of your responses (if you have any yet).

<comment><USER6> I second the point about design and especially the point about giving one or more examples. $2 is a tiny amount of money, what's more important to me (and costs more) is the time I will spend on your site. If I spend 30 minutes polishing a question and get BS replies, you can't give back my time.

This may sound corny (but hey, the whole idea is a bit so) but I think putting a few pictures of the ladies who answer would also boost your chances.

<comment><USER7> It's $2 per answer. That seems pretty expensive if I want a lot of answers for one question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat idea. I tried it.

Long drawnout payment maze, used paypal, double-billed and my transaction history shows 3 entries - don't have any idea what any of them mean. No big deal, its just $2 but weird.

Some one-click payment approach would be nice.

How do I get a response? Email? Poll the site? No clue anywhere in the process that I noticed anyway.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Joe,

Thanks for trying it out.

Please click on the "Check status" page which shows your current questions. Click on the view details link - which show a status of either :

(1)Waiting for a respondent (i.e. no one has reserved your question yet. (2)In - Progress (i.e. Someone is working on the answer. But it has not been submitted yet). (3)Completed. [ You will be able to view the response, and rate (1-5) the respondent]

Hope that helps. I just found out that the system does not send out emails when answers are complete. I will have to get that fixed today. In the mean time, please log in occasionally to check status.

Thanks. Paul

<comment><USER8> Got a sterling answer by the way. Far more detailed and thoughtful than $2 justified. Some philanthropy involved in the responders makeup I suspect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm way off but I don't see people paying the kind of money your asking for this. What's the advantage over Yahoo Answers or Quora?

There are girls on those sites as well, there are also plenty of forums for specific questions with male and female members.

How are you verifying gender?

Best of luck either way, what do I know, I thought Twitter would never take off...

As far as constructive criticism:

The site seems fast and functional which is great. I think the logo could be improved and the pink / maroon color and gold / brown text colors could be adjusted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your tips. I appreciate it.

Check out the last box (scroll down) "Gender Verified" on this page: <http://www.helpaguyout.com/ladies.php>

Basically, we ask women to submit their publicly available profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for one-time verification purposes.

<comment><USER10> But Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter don't verify gender, either.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true. This seemed to be the most simplistic way I could come up with without discouraging registrations. I would be happy to entertain your suggestions.

<comment><USER10> I don't really have any, aside from the 4-chan approach - send a photo holding up a sign with the date and some random string of characters - but that might also discourage a lot of women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We have all been through various phases in life where some sort of female perspective would have helped out a lot. HelpAGuyOut.com lets guys ask question and get advice from women on dating, relationship, love, life, almost anything. We are charging $2 for a question and passing $1/answer to the ladies who respond to the question. The monetory factor helps prevent spammy answers while making everyone's time worthawhile. Furthermore, 100% money back guarantee allows the asker to get a refund for any response that he/she deems unsatisfactory.

Thank you for your feedback.

-Paul

<comment><USER11> So if a question gets asked & 20 women respond, they all get $1 each?

Out of curiosity, what advantage does your paid service offer over the likes of r/TwoXChromosomes on Reddit where I can ask my question and have it answered for free?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But let clarify.

You need to specify how many women you want the responses from. That means, if you want 20 responses, you pay $40. [$2/response].

Try it out here: <http://www.helpaguyout.com/asker-submit-question.php> It's fun.

To keep things interesting, ask a question to your significant other, then ask the same question to 5 ladies on our site. See what happens. You will get very interesting result. [

To answer your second question, there are variations of advice related services - from free to proffesional ones charging hundreds if not thousands. What sets us apart is the ease of use, low pricing and guaranteed response. Plus our platform allows everyone to remain anonymous - women tend to open up and give a more insightful, genuine opinion that way.

Since the advice is paid for, the asker "owns" the advice and the woman understands that it is a private advice only for him. So, though, anonymous, there is a bit of "I am actually helping this guy out" factor involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some sample questions and answers would help.

Maybe I'm lacking imagination, but I'm not exactly sure what I would ask the ladies, or what kind of answers they could give.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since all of our Q & A's are private, they are not published. However, as you mentioned, showing some sample may help encourage others to participate. I should probably add a checkbox saying "My question may be publicized" to get permission.

Anyways, to help you get started, here is a sample question for you:

Let's say you are into slightly older/mature women. So your question would simply be something like: "Can I get some advice on dating older women?"

And you would elaborate it further by adding details: "I have not dated anyone for a while. Last week, I met this very attractive woman at a local bar who is 34. We really hit it off. We have been out once for dinner since. Even though I wanted to pay, she insisted we split the tab (mixed signals??). I would like to get romantically involved and take this up a notch but cannot tell how she feels. Any advice on how to pull this off without messing things up or coming across as a little too desperate? I am 21 and she is single."

<comment><USER10> What's the guarantee that the answer (answers?) I get for $2 are going to be better than those from a reddit thread?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no such guarantee. Sometimes, free services might offer much better results. Our pricing, $2 and compensation of $1 to women does not warrant time-consuming, elaborate, results. With the small charge of $2, the intention, and the goal, is to:

1)Keep spammers at bay 2)Provide a small incentive to women to participate 3)Give you a genuine, insightful, no-b.s. response 4)Do not pretend to be a professional advice service

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My first thought was the site did not look girly (not to be sexist but no pastels)

Are you competing with <http://www.girlsaskguys.com/> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wallflower,

Did not know about this site. Anyways, even though the concept is somewhat similar, I believe our approach and what we are trying to accomplish is different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> $1 seems like a frightfully trivial amount of money to receive for a well- considered answer.

See: "Pay enough, or don't pay at all."

[http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/05/pay- enoug...](http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/05/pay-enough-or- dont-pay-at-all.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Frobozz,

Agreed - as long as quality/depth is of critical importance.

A trivial fee ($2) does not warrant such response and neither do we guarantee that.

However, by charging that trivial fee, the goal is to "guarantee" an answer to anyone. In sites like Reddit, unless you can pique some corners of one's brain, you are not likely to get an insightful response in a private setting. We allow you to 'own' your advice and women understand that it is only seen by you and not the whole community. Therefore, they tend to have a more 'personalized' approach.

Of about 65 questions asked and a few hundred responses received so far we have noticed that women are actually taking the time to respond. It's not the $1 they make, but the trend seems to be that they actually 'enjoy' providing advice to men.

<comment><USER14> How do you guarantee the answer? What hold do you have over the ladies that makes them answer?

If someone is only going to pay me a dollar for something, I'm not likely to do it were it not something I'd do for free anyway.

This is the point of the "pay enough or don't pay at all" statement. Both quality and quantity tend to go down if you go from pure volunteers to paying below market rate.

To earn US Federal minimum wage, answerers would have to spend, on average, 8 minutes on each question. This is not just the reading and writing of the question and answer, but also any time spent getting ready to work.

Obviously, you're the one who has real-world experience of this, and I'm just an armchair pundit who has read a few articles; so you know more than me. I'm just curious about how you have managed to go against the current received wisdom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You want to get some SEO traffic and linking going on. After the guy says he's satisfied with an answer, ask him if he wants to make the answer public for others to benefit from. (You can also offer for it to be edited to take out any extra detail)

</comment><comment><USER4> Women giving advice [to men] is not a good thing - women only have a "feeling" based notion of what they want (feelings are intangible and subjective).

In addition to all of the PUA/seduction stuff, theres one simple "technique" I've learned: have fun, fun is infectious (particularly with women) and when women are having fun they get horny and they also start to "feel" something for the fellow that is their source of fun! Fun is light and not weighed down by the dependency for an archetypal mother projection (needy and "smothering" guys, that's you).

Fun feels so good - women love to feel good. If you happen to be the person she's with when she's feeling even slightly above her baseline "good" she will associate it with you, and if you can keep your cool and "play" with her a little bit (ya know, don't be so easy to catch) she will fall head over heels for you.

<comment><USER7> Likewise for women: just show interest and don't be afraid to be aggressive/forward. I've met so many awesome women who either lament their singleness or wonder why they never attract the 'good' guys.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> To whoever asked "What do you think about this site? <http://news.ycombinator.com> you are probably going to get a lot of women answering that question that read HN already. FYI.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sorry if this is answered somewhere, but I didn't see it in the FAQ: how do you prevent guys from signing up as girls? I.e. how do you guarantee this is really female advice?

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out the last box (scroll down) "Gender Verified" on this page: <http://www.helpaguyout.com/ladies.php>

Basically, we ask women to submit their publicly available profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for one-time verification purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote something similar as an experiment a year or so ago: <http://www.how- they-think.com/>

except its free

</comment><comment><USER19> Why would a I pay $2 to a website when for more or less the same I can invite a female friend to a coffee and talk about the issue as long as it's necessary?

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a Mr. Turing here to see you about whether this site is really connecting him to a lady, sir.

</comment><comment><USER21> and what's the guarantee that it's actually a woman answering and not some greedy male who put up a female facebook profile?</comment>


Is Facebook down or just me? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> For anyone who cares, here is a list of posts with people saying "Facebook is down":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080671)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080229](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080229)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15080038)</comment>