A look at the wireless traffic of MIT students - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ksplice.com/2010/05/the-wireless-traffic-of-mit-students/

<comment><USER2> I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.

<comment><USER3> What's the difference between taking a picture in a public place (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of visible light) and sniffing Wi-Fi signals (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of radio)? Public photons are public photons, it seems arbitrary to distinguish them based on wavelength. How can it be a crime to measure the photons passing all around us, sometimes literally _through_ us? The originators of these photons are knowingly sending them into the public, so they should have no expectation of privacy, just as we have no expectation of privacy for the photons that reflect off us into someone's camera on the street.

<comment><USER4> The difference is humans can _see_ the visual spectrum but not the radio spectrum. This means that people tend to ensure their own privacy in the visual spectrum (by wearing clothes, etc), but don't in the radio spectrum (by transferring sensitive data unencrypted).

You could argue that people are being irresponsible by not paying more attention to their "radio privacy" (and you'd be right), however the lawmakers apparently felt that the advantages of making it illegal outweighed the disadvantages.

<comment><USER5> If I recall, and I'm not a lawyer, a large part of privacy law is asking whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Not many people go around sniffing the wireless, you can reasonably assume that no one is listening at a given moment. Visible light in public are being sampled all the time by many observers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised that none of the students tried to skew the results as the author expected. If could have been done fairly easily by writing a quick HTML page that uses JavaScript to make a couple iframes continuously load a variety of different sites.

<comment><USER7> It's not even that hard:

        while [ true ]; do
            curl www.google.com
        done

<comment><USER8> Or, my preferred approach:

       while :; do curl www.google.com; done

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would have thought that a place like MIT ran their on-campus wireless using encryption, which should make this kind of sniffing/snooping a bit more difficult.

Even our home wlan is encrypted. Weird. Is this by design?

<comment><USER10> As far as I know, yes, it is by design.

MIT's philosophy toward just about everything is famously open.

\- You can walk around in just about all of the buildings during the day, and many even at night without a special access card.

\- A CS professor here was the one who founded OpenCourseWare, which helped ignite the fire that led to many universities putting their courseware up for free online)

\- Course registration is amazingly relaxed, to the point where halfway through the semester it is common to hear a professor say "by the way, if you haven't signed up for this course, you probably need to as the deadline is approaching"

\- MIT's network is not behind a NAT box.

In terms of internet access, this culture means that anyone within radio-range of MIT's campus gets free, unprotected WiFi. A very different reception than you get at that other school down the street _cough_. :)

(Of course, the flip side of this is that you are responsible for your own security).

EDIT: I also remember during grad student orientation, the campus police representative explicitly told the auditorium full of new students: "The Cambridge homeless community is part of the MIT community, too. Just because you don't have a home doesn't mean you are not welcome here, so if you see someone who appears homeless on MIT campus, treat them with the respect they deserve." Approximate quote, since this was 2 years ago, but I was pretty blown away at the culture here from day 1.

<comment><USER11> Last year while at the library there was a room to a lab (where the printers were). To get in you could either punch in the code or next to it was a whiteboard with 5 or so problems each of which gave you one digit in the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat funny quote: "Alas, pretty boring."

<comment><USER13> I thought it sums up the article pretty well. I was expecting much more based on the title.

A better title: "Amateur high-level wireless traffic analysis of 21 consenting students during a 45 minute class"

<comment><USER14> You could have rewritten this article without the word wireless. It's only relevant because he didn't have to deal with a switched network.

No wireless packet analysis at all? Weak.

<comment><USER15> she

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 30% of DNS traffic? isn't this a lot?

<comment><USER17> I wondered about that too. Not the case on my wired network. Perhaps its because many laptops were taken out of suspend and then hardly used, so session-initialization messages dominate. btw Thanks for actually addressing the point of the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be concerned for the students that managed to push mmo-champion.com (a WoW blog) to 9th place!</comment>


C9 Lectures - Functional Programming Fundamentals (Haskell) - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Erik-Meijer-Functional-Programming-Fundamentals/Lecture-Series-Erik-Meijer-Functional-Programming-Fundamentals-Chapter-1

<comment><AUTHOR> Recently watched this lecture series all the way through (though he lost me a little @ monads -- I still kinda THINK I get them), and I liked the series</comment>


We announced our company and game on Monday. Here are the numbers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sharkpunch.com/post/79568764866/spamming-the-gdc-2014-press-list-lessons-learned

<comment><USER2> From the information available, this game could be literally anything. It's one thing if no gameplay video is available. It's another thing entirely if there's no way to figure out even what genre the game is.

For all that this tells readers, it could be anything from a tower defense game to an economic simulation.

<comment><USER3> I have no idea what this is, but the name is awesome & catchy and if I saw it in the app store - I would probably try to download it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy to hear that! We wanted to see if the vibe of the video would resonate with people, and it seems like it did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing. I too struggle with getting the word out for my games and have experienced similar levels of success.

Some unsolicited feedback,

1\. I watched the trailer and came away with no clue what your game is actually about. Ideally it would tip your hand a bit more

2\. I didn't find the trailer very compelling, either. In fact if anything it made me skeptical that this game was going to be some crazy political message.

3\. With that being said, I thought I'd learn more about the game but didn't see any easy way to do so from the YouTube page or from your website. Add a link in the description and put the game in the top level navigation for your site.

4\. The art style seems cool at least.

Best of luck, I hope you share more about your experiences as they develop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the excellent feedback! We were hoping to have a dedicated site for the game before the launch, but the realities of being a three man development team (or, bad planning) made that impossible.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing this.

Will you be planning a gameplay video? I think it's particularly difficult for viewers to extract value from non-gameplay trailers/teasers involving new IP.

Can you explain an embargoed press release?

Is it:

a) giving your "favorite" journalist(s) an exclusive time period to make announcements,

b) a heads up of when you will be submitting the press release,

c) a firm "time" when you'd like all press/media to hold stories before publishing?

If you're heading to GDC, good luck! It sounds like an exciting conference.

<comment><AUTHOR> C. "For publication on 3/10/2014 at 9pm GMT or later"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've found something similar with reddit. Posting in a niche subreddit might look like a nonstarter with many posts only receiving a couple upvotes and 0-2 comments, but the actual site visits seem to be a couple hundred times the upvote count (at least for me).

It makes sense to me, in that small subs see something like a trickle of content, and subscribers tend to be pretty into the topic to have sought the specific community out. So you could get a much higher % of the subreddit's total population visiting your site, even if they don't bother to actually upvote it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Makes sense. And to be honest, that reflects at least my Reddit behavior very well - out of a thousand clicks I link, I'll probably comment on a couple.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice post and interesting information.

And I love the name of the company and your logo. I think the video doesn't quite hit the nail on the head. (The art kind of reminds me of Interstate 76, which I love -- assuming that's the goal, you're not quite there.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

We'll be releasing some in-game footage soon - hope that'll give you a better idea of what the game is about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish more people would share these kind of results for comparison.

</comment><comment><USER9> How can you not like a game called Sharkpunch?</comment>


Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Moving From South Asia to U.S. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/world/asia/12bug.html <comment><USER2> This is a particularly scary thing.

Evolution is warfare and this is going to be a huge problem over the next 20 years.

Seeing it on the front end, it is the elderly and chronically ill that are dying from these primarily but also providing the breading grounds for them in the developed countries.

As the population gets older and sicker we will need a breakthrough to stop a huge wave of death.

Spanish flu in the early 20th century killed more than the 1st world war apparently.</comment>


An update on the Memcached/Redis benchmark - <AUTHOR> http://antirez.com/post/update-on-memcached-redis-benchmark.html

<comment><USER2> I'm enjoying following this back-and-forth between memcached and Redis; I learn something from each post.

And it's nice to see it being conducted in such a gentlemanly fashion!

</comment><comment><USER3> The pursuit of benchmarks is fraught with peril. So it is nice to see antirez taking care to evaluate and thoroughly analyze where the differences are between two benchmarks.

One of the conclusions that I take away from this is that threading is not a net win in the cloud. CPUs are so cheap that (to a first-order approximation) spending development time on threaded programs takes development time away from developing features.

</comment><comment><USER4> key insight here:

> in a future of cloud computing I want to consider every single core as a > computer itself.

And that leads directly to a shared nothing architecture, which I think is definitely an advantage. It's KISS all over, multi-threading is often not the right decision. It leads to more complex (and sometimes very hard to debug) software that will have only marginal gain (or even a drop as in this case) over running multiple well behaved instances of the same process.

<comment><USER5> _key insight here:

> in a future of cloud computing I want to consider every single core as a > computer itself._

I didn't interpret that as an insight more than a rather weak attempt at squeezing some lemonade out of lemons. I also don't see how creating massive sharding on a single machine in any way corresponds with KISS (the newest processors have from 8 to 12 cores. 24 cores and up is coming in the very near future. So on my 48-core 4-processor relatively low end machine I'm to shard Redis 48 ways? I'm to run 48 instances of Linux? I'm to endure a devastation of cache coherency?)

<comment><USER6> Ergo we plan to add options so that Redis can do this automatically for you. You'll be able to say, start N instances. And when clustering will be available you can configure all this instances with a single common configuration.

For now this should be done manually, but you have 4 or 8 cores so it's not a big problem IMHO.

The idea is that there is no difference between the instances you have among different servers, and the ones you have locally. Given that every instance can hold a set of unrelated keys, why centralizing it in some way if completely separated threads can lead to max performances, and simpler code?

Note that 48 independent threads or 48 processes are actually the same thing more or less, but nothing prevents us from starting N threads at startup if needed for some reason in the future, each with completely separated state.

I don't understand your parallel about starting N operating systems btw...

Anyway, this is not a problem just with Redis. Programming languages like Ruby are a mess with the usual conception of threads. And most Ruby programmers also think far too high level to really deal with a low level stuff such as synchronization. A shared nothing model with message passing, and one interpreter per thread, could lead to the maximum benefit while retaining the more abstract interface to the programmer. Believe it or not the time for old- fashion multi thread programming is gone (I hope).

<comment><USER7> 48 independent threads and 48 processes can be very different on some operating systems.

A process is more heavyweight.

You will - amongst other things - increase the charge in terms of handles. For example, 48 processes maintaining the same network connections is a waste of resources.

I'm afraid you might hit a wall with your single threaded approach.

This is definitely not the road we have chosen (but we wish the best of luck nonetheless! :) ).

<comment><USER6> In a shared nothing environment you need 48 different sockets, distinct data structures, and so forth. Given the copy-on-write strategy of many OSes the overhead can really be minimal (you'll not get N copies of the executable in memory). The context switching should be more or less the same cost... what I mean is that it's trivial to turn the N proesses design into N independent threads design, as there is no problem with locking, but it is probably not a win.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do you build emotional and social skills for work? - <AUTHOR> There seem to be countless books, online courses and bootcamps that teach programming and technical skills but nothing how do people learn the softer skills required for the workplace?<p>In my past few jobs I've felt completely overwhelmed dealing with people.  I often got very upset by criticism as well as upsetting others without realising it. <comment> blaser-waffle The obvious softball answers are to talk to professionals (psychs, therapists, etc.), and possible to watch some videos on youtube/udemy/lynda/etc. about communication skills and interactions. I've used them before, and they're useful -- even if just reminders of common-sense stuff.

In the broader sense, there is no way to get good at something without doing it. My old boss used to use the "rock tumbler" analogy, in that a rock tumbler makes rocks smooth by rubbing them against each other a lot. If you want to be a smooth operator in a social sense, then you need to be around people and "rubbing up against them" in a social sense quite a bit. Most of the truly slick, very social people I know interact with others constantly, and have done so in many contexts since they were young. Older manager types have tact and grace because there were years when they didn't...

</comment><comment><USER2> It sounds like you could use a therapist, if that's an option. Most people don't find themselves completely overwhelmed by these interactions.

I'm not saying that to be mean or make you feel bad: it's normal to have trouble dealing with some situations. But it means that just reading a book about workplace soft skills seems unlikely to help here. The sort of thing that helps might be more like exploring why this criticism is making you feel so bad, in what sense it threatens your self-esteem, that sort of thing.

It's hard to comment on the part about you upsetting people without knowing what you did, how they told you about it, and what you did when you found out. I guess my general comment would be that a quick and sincere apology when you do find out that you've hurt someone usually goes a long way.

</comment><comment><USER3> You might consider seeing a psychologist or whatever in this niche to find out who you are.

Other option is to study about the topic

I would suggest you to watch on youtube Robert Sapolsky lectures human behavioral biology as well Jordan Peterson maps of meaning adding to that jim roth spechees these will give a chance to study about yourself</comment>


Alan Turing's "Can Computers Think?" Radio Broadcasts Re-Recorded - <AUTHOR> http://aperiodical.com/2018/01/ive-re-recorded-alan-turings-can-computers-think-radio-broadcasts/ <comment><USER2> Looking forward to listening to this recording; I'm always telling people interested in the philosphy of AI to read Turing's papers, as, like the author says, they are surprisingly relevant.

Have to comment on this though:

" Turing then makes one firm prediction, that by the end of the 20th century computers would be able to answer questions in a manner indistinguishable from a human being – this is the famous Turing test. Turing's prediction may have been a couple of decades early, _but with the rise of digital assistants I would have to say he was completely right_. "

The bit I've italicized is nonsense in an article by someone studying Turing's work. The Turing test is clearly designed as a pragmatic definition of a sufficient test for AI, and assumes a sophisticated human judge. The idea that just because we are building digital assistants we are some how close to passing the Turing test and making genuinely thinking machines doesn't hold up at all.

I don't think that argument would have impressed Turing, and I'm sure he'd rather we say his prediction was wrong than introduce confusion here. We have so much confusion on this issue, which Turing tried so hard to dispel, it's a pity to see more.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, the virtue of the Turing test is that it's a very general framework – the freedom of the framework allows us to test the AI using any communicational method at hand. One of such is Winograd Schemas [1] – a test of commonsensical reasoning, in which the current conversational AIs spectacularly fail at.

[1] [https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS....](https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS.html)

<comment><USER3> Btw. here is a sketch of an embedding like that:

[Session starts]

<Challenger> Hi.

<Judge> Hi. Now, listen to me. My job here is to judge whether you are a human or an AI. I also know that your job is to try and persuade me to believe you are a human, no matter which one you really are. I happen to have a few questions that are easy for humans and hard for AIs. So if you are a human, answering them shouldn't be a problem to you, but if you avoid answering, I'm going to judge that you are an AI, no excuses. Here is the first question: ...

[A pattern of Winograd schema challenges ensues.]

So as we can see, the Turing test doesn't have to be any random chitchat nor it doesn't have to pretend to be "normal human-to-human-like discussion", as the Judge has the ability to participate and steer the conversation and zero in on the areas that are most likely to expose the AI.

However, if the human participants don't have any penalty from being labeled as AI, this doesn't obviously work, as they don't have any pressure to prove anything. So this kind of an embedding wouldn't work with "imitation game" -like rules, but it would work with "prove your human-ness" -like rules.

<comment><USER4> If you classify say 50% of people as AI's and 50% of AI's as people then those AI's passed the Turing test.

So, you are limited to questions that most people will answer correctly. Further, if you find some unusual question that works today someone can just add it to the program for next time.

<comment><USER5> >If you classify say 50% of people as AI's and 50% of AI's as people then those AI's passed the Turing test.

And if your version of the test is "heads it's an AI, tails it's human" then any AI's that are classified as human will have "passed the Turing test."

<comment><USER4> I don't think you understood.

The original test specifically had exactly one human and one AI. So, if the judge is forced to do a coin flip that really is success. If the judge does a coin flip because they are lazy then that's not a Turning test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In his paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" [1], I found Turing's focus on the storage capacity of a machine as much as the computation speed of a machine to be interesting. In particular, his prediction specifies a concrete expectation of storage capacity, but not of computation speed:

"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning."

Which would be 125 MB in the year 2000. A good personal computer in the year 2000 would have 512 MB of memory and an 80 GB disk [2], while the top supercomputer [3] had 6 TB of memory and 160 TB of disk storage [4].

"Of course the digital computer must have an adequate storage capacity as well as working sufficiently fast."

[1] [http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf](http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf)

[2] [http://www.topdesignmag.com/top-performance-computer- looked-...](http://www.topdesignmag.com/top-performance-computer-looked-the- year-2000/)

[3] [https://www.top500.org/list/2000/11/](https://www.top500.org/list/2000/11/)

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

<comment><USER7> Well, and some 6 years later computers with 1GB of memory were common. That's not too much error for a prediction made in 1950.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As much as I admire Turing (I've often wondered what our world would be like if he hadn't died as young as he did), I've never been that convinced of the value of the Turing Test.

Given a choice between

1) software that can carry on a convincing conversation about sports, politics, music, movies, current events, etc. and

2) software that is obviously an AI that can do medical diagnosis and treatment planning better than 90% of human doctors,

and I'll take number 2 in a heartbeat.

In the future an AI that can do both will probably be developed, but right now I genuinely believe more effort should be spent on solving problem #2.

<comment><USER9> When I get pulled over I will apply the Turing test to see if the officer is in a good mood, smart, or robocop.

<comment><USER10> On that note; I'm pretty sure Trump will fail the Turing test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some tother related historic broadcasts can be accessed here [http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~dm/dm.html](http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~dm/dm.html) at the home page of the late Donald Michie (who worked alongside Turing). Sadly the presentation he gave back in 2007 at Informatics in Edinburgh, which I was very lucky to attend, is missing.

</comment><comment><USER12> "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." \-- Edsger Dijkstra

<comment><USER13> Turing states a very similar thing in his "Computing Machinery and Intelligence paper" and goes on to form a more interesting question (the Turing test):

"If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another"

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love this guy. His videos on Numberphile are great.</comment>


Anywhere.FM acquired by imeem - <AUTHOR> We are very excited to announce that Anywhere.FM has been acquired by imeem (http://www.imeem.com), the leading social media network.
Since our launch last August, Anywhere.FM has been dedicated to making it easy to upload, play, and share your music wherever you go. We have listened to our users and worked hard to provide them with the best music playback experience available on the Internet. The millions of tracks that our users have uploaded to Anywhere.FM over the last 6 months prove to us that we have been successful in achieving this goal.
Today's announcement broadens the scope of Anywhere.FM's ambitions, bringing us together with imeem, a social networking site with a media-centric approach to connecting consumers. With imeem, users can enjoy, recommend and discover not only music, but film, video, TV programming and art, and connect with people who share similar tastes.
Anywhere.FM will continue to exist as a standalone site for our users to enjoy. At the same time, we will bring many of the innovations of Anywhere.FM to the imeem community as well as the broader internet community in the near future. We'll also keep on innovating on the Anywhere.FM website. We have some interesting ideas on how to best leverage imeem's audience and media content to further enrich the Anywhere.FM experience.
We hope you are as excited as we are about this acquisition. We have lots in store for you - we'll be sure to keep you posted in the coming months as we unveil our exciting plans.
Feel free to share your ideas and feedback with us at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Sincerely,
Anson, Lux, and Sachin The Anywhere.FM Team
http://www.anywhere.fm <comment><USER2> Congrats guys - awesome, awesome news.

Now we can do away with the awkward silence when I smugly ask what you guys have been up to.

<comment><USER3> I for one welcome our new black-shirted overlords.

congrats, anson, lux and sachin!

<comment><USER2> Word. I want to see black shirts on Thurs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> congratulations! (how much?)

<comment><USER5> From TC: "... making an early exit likely below $5 million possible"

<comment><USER6> = "we have no idea"

<comment><USER5> I agree, but I doubt it's a wild guess, and I would be surprised if it was over 5M.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats! This project had a great user interface from the day it was launched, but also served a purpose, and likely was designed to scale from the start.

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool. What is your next startup?

<comment><USER9> Ask them again after they vest. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Never heard of imeem but best of luck to you guys!!!

</comment><comment><USER11> anywhere was a winner from the day it launched. congratulations guys....

</comment><comment><USER12> Damn I was talking with them about investing some of my meager savings. Guess I should have trusted my instincts :( Wonder what the ROI was for angels.

Well I was certainly impressed when I saw the application. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats

</comment><comment><USER14> Grats fellas. When/where's the party?

</comment><comment><USER15> awesome news - congrats to the team! An excellent partner in imeem, and a quick turnaround on build, launch, sell. way to go gents

</comment><comment><USER16> Congratulations guys, nice work!

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome news guys - great work

</comment><comment><USER18> Congratulations, guys!

</comment><comment><USER19> Well done, kudos!

</comment><comment><USER20> Congrats guys!

</comment><comment><USER21> Way to go :D

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER22> Ditto!

</comment><comment><USER23> congrats guys :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Congratulations :)</comment>


How I stopped writing awesome code - <AUTHOR> http://jhovgaard.net/how-i-stopped-writing-awesome-code

<comment><USER2> Point 1 is about not writing unit tests and instead focusing on acceptance tests since they can replicate the experience of the boss or customers who might ultimately complaint to you. If they can't notice something's wrong, hurrah!

I don't adhere to the philosophy, but there _is_ something to this _if_ you refuse to do TDD or write unit tests. It's better than _nothing_ and it will catch the most blatant issues if you replicate the user stories carefully. It's what I call "minimum viable testing" (MVT!). However, among other problems, it won't help at all with _refactoring_.. but I suspect a developer who gives up on unit tests isn't one who's doing much refactoring or structural work anyway? (Points 2 and 4 imply this.)

 _My personal result of doing all of this is productivity and better products. I can't tell if I did it all wrong, and that's why I'm writing better code now, but I truly believe that I'm not alone. In fact I think that most of us regular web developers, tend to do the same "mistakes" as I did._

There's room for argument over the meanings implied here, especially in tossing up productivity vs code quality. Is ad hoc, spontaneously designed, poorly tested code that's doing the job in production "better" than well planned, well tested code that's still sitting around under development? It could be yes or no, depending on your viewpoint, but it's important to appreciate the nuances and the balance involved.

I'll note, however, that more developers than not _do_ develop in this way and mostly do OK at it. While there's also a large group of developers who'll jump up and down about architecture, clean code, TDD, and various other philosophies (me included sometimes!) there's also a whole world out there unfamiliar with such concepts and still putting together _passable_ software. The key is knowing _when_ and _why_ certain things matter or are useful, and I suspect the author of the article has been getting a feel for that and coming to terms with what disciplines his sort of projects _really_ require (i.e. not many).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm by no means a "purist" regarding any specific practice - I agree you don't HAVE TO test everything, write interfaces for everything and all in all write "awesome" code. BUT:

\- how often do you interact with other programmers?

\- how long is the usual life span of your code (in other words, what's the longest timespan you can expect to touch code you wrote in the past)?

\- how big is the app/system you work on?

Imho, this approach ONLY works if the answers to above points are "never", "a few weeks max" and "very small"...

There's a time and place for every coding "style". Neither "TDD everytime" nor "cowboy style forever" are the definite answer.

</comment><comment><USER4>
      > You don't need armor and life, if you kill in one hit!

This is why the approach is working for you: you're doing simple stuff.</comment>


What is the point of gists? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/EVZUUmaW

<comment><USER2> My use of gists is pretty much the same as your present use of pastebin.

* Writing long texts to link back to. Bonus is they're editable.

* Giving short snippets of code or log files.

* Linking to a short amount of text and a couple of pictures. Unlike pastebin you can include diagrams and such in your text.

I have also used gists to host full (but short) programs or libraries, but that is usually as a response to a question on IRC or over Twitter.

<comment><USER3> Gists are forkable too. Gists are very useful for getting input on small snippets of code the might not otherwise be accessible to everyone being asked to provide feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Why not use a regular git repo? Why do we need two species of git repo?

<comment><USER3> Gists are quick and dirty. When I use a Gist, I don't need a full repo. A full repo could do the job, but it'd be like hauling groceries in the back of a dump truck.

Why do we "need" them? We don't, but they're nice to have. I have all sorts of things in my life that aren't needs, but I'm still glad I have them.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is it about a full repo that makes you think it is heavyweight for the task?

<comment><USER4> Not the original poster but from my perspective it's the lack of tools in github to manage the proliferation of repos. I'd like to categorise them when I'm browsing my own repos and expose those tags to other people: my hairbrained experiment repos, my serious OSS efforts, my fork-to-keep-a- stable-version-of-some-remote-project repos...

I could do something like that by creating a load of organisations but it'd be nice if there was a simpler way. Gists provide a very primitive way to divide things up, but at least it's something!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's a good point. Although gists too is a flat list I think. But at least with gists and repos we have two flat lists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ironically could have been posted as a gist.

</comment><comment><USER6> I tend to use gists as a sort of snippets library (of sorts). I always have bits of useful code that I am going to need again at some time and having something like a gist is quite handy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, personally I use a single "miscellaneous" repo for this purpose. Do you not find that, when working on one of those snippets, you want to commit your changes (in your present command line environment)? Copying and pasting into a web browser doesn't seem an attractive way to commit. I'd be interested to hear what your workflow is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My IP is blocked at pastebin, can someone paste the text here, please?

<comment><USER8> The text is:

"I use git and github a lot and have very few complaints, and yet I have failed to see the use of gists.

\- What is wrong with standard repo + README? \- No way of converting a standard repo into a "gist" repo.

When I work on a code project, even some random one-off script, I track its evolution in a git repo. So if it doesn't naturally belong in an existing repo, I create a new repo. As soon as I have something that I don't want to lose, I'll make an initial commit. The commands involved are near instantaneous and they bring huge benefits.

Now, I want to share this script. Can I turn my repo into a gist? No, I don't believe so.

So what is the workflow?

1\. Start work 2\. Get to a point you want to share with others, without ever having committed 3\. Use web UI to create gist 4\. Paste work into gist and save 5\. Edit, paste, iterate

or

1\. Decide to start project 2\. Use web UI to create gist 3\. Clone gist repo 4\. Rename it so it's not just a large integer 5\. Start work 6\. Commit and push gist to remote

I don't hear much criticism of gists so hopefully I am missing something. But at the moment it seems to me that if you want history, use a normal git repo. And if you don't want history, use a paste buffer with no versioning features"</comment></comment>


How to See a Supernova This Weekend From Your Backyard - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/how-to-spot-a-supernova/ <comment><USER2> This supernova has been hyped lately but is not something a casual observer will find to be particularly exciting. It is best seen with a telescope and will appear as a faint dot of light. The brightness will be magnitude 10 or 11, or about 100 times fainter than what the unaided eye can see in dark skies far from city lights. For more information, see

[http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingbl...](http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/128430288.html)

or

[http://washedoutastronomy.com/content/another-urban- supernov...](http://washedoutastronomy.com/content/another-urban- supernova?page=1)

or

[http://www.dailycalifornian.org/how-to-spot-new-supernova- in...](http://www.dailycalifornian.org/how-to-spot-new-supernova-in-nearby- galaxy-space-com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> People might be interested to know that this story is indicative of a sea change in astronomy. It has become apparent that there is a lot of variability in the nighttime sky, and we now have the technical means to discover lots of new things.

One major factor in this change has been the advent of wide-angle surveys, that repeat often enough to find variable sources like SN's, blazars, asteroids, lensing events, etc., while they're still interesting. The Palomar Transient Factory (<http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ptf/>) is the one mentioned in the article, but there are many others. They _automatically_ detect and post events in a standard XML format for anyone (including robotic telescopes) to scoop up (e.g., <http://www.skyalert.org/events/all/2/>).

One of the largest, LSST, is now being designed, and its data volume will prove to be a huge engineering/computer science challenge (<http://www.lsst.org/lsst/science/petascale>).

There's a sophisticated and multifaceted image processing pipeline to detect the changes in sources, to automatically extract photometric parameters, and to pass these parameters on to a classifier to separate the events into types of interest to various communities (the SN folks could care less about asteroids).

<comment><USER4> In a funny way it seems like Astronomy is catching up to particle physics. Once you add automation there becomes far to many data points to do anything but compare a model with outside events and look for discrepancy's that suggest either all models are wrong or one model is more accurate than other related models.

<comment><USER3> There's definitely a parallel in the data demands of, say, LHC and LSST.

Besides automation, another key thing is the element of time. It means there's scientific value in re-surveying the sky. Ever since gamma ray bursts, the time scale has been shrinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hours, and 21 million years, after it happened.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I thought that was a little misleading also.

<comment><USER7> Why would you find it misleading to use our reference frame instead of the star's? There is no absolute "when" but a different time for each observer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading things like this always brings me back to the Fermi Paradox [1]. There are _lots_ of stars in our galaxy. Our observation of many nearby planetary systems and our understanding of the chemistry of life suggests life should be _relatively_ common but we've seen no evidence of it.

While life (on Earth) is at times incredibly resilient it's also really fragile. A supernova such as this must essentially sterilize space for light years around it and it bathes its neighbourhood in gamma radiation. Did this kill off some nascent civilization? Supernovas seem to be relatively rare (compared to the number of stars) but think: over _billions_ of years what are the odds that such a thing--or something equally as deadly such as an asteroid or comet impact-- _won't_ happen?

Space in incomprehensibly vast. The energy required to travel to even the nearest star systems seems... prohibitive.

I'm inclined to think that there are also simply too many of us on this planet, a problem that we'll either correct or will be corrected for us as resources start to run out in the next century or two [2].

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

[2]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>

</comment><comment><USER9> Step 1: Move your backyard to the Northern Hemisphere.

</comment><comment><USER10> Visually will the explosion appear any different than looking at a star with the naked eye?

<comment><USER11> At the moment, not really. In several hundred years it might become a nebula when it will look very different with a telescope. For example look up crab nebula.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now I wish even more that I were back at school in Providence, the Brown observatory is open to the public. This would be a good humbling beginning to the school year.</comment>


Volcanoes Helped Violent Revolts Erupt in Ancient Egypt - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/science/volcanoes-ancient-egypt-revolts.html <comment><USER2> The problem with the concept of volcanic climate change is that it tends to be one of the strongest instances of confirmation bias. You can see this in the phrasing: "They found that eight of ten large uprisings happened within two years of a volcanic eruption." You can make a game of it: pick a climatic change and find the volcanic eruption that causes it. But that ignores the flip side; volcanic eruptions are so frequent that you can usually find sufficiently close, especially if you're willing to be very open with proximity and scale.

When you start by picking large-scale volcanic eruptions and then try to find the climatic fallout, the link seems far less clear. Of the four largest eruptions in modern times, only the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora is clearly linked with severe fallout (the Year Without a Summer). The eruptions of Novarupta, Krakatoa, Pinatubo, and Santa Maria don't show anywhere near that level of disruption, dispute being only somewhat less powerful.

<comment><USER3> a win for me is I learned about the nilometer. following up on it on wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilometer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2000+ years later same place - Arab Spring as a result of the drought caused higher bread prices. For all the tech and society development we are still so much dependent on the climate. I remember living in the USSR in 80-ies, end of the 80 year cycle, cold and wet, lower harvests coupled with lower oil prices - resulted in lower ability to import grain and this is what did the Empire from inside.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is just me or does it seem like people who study the past like to ascribe major events to a volcanic eruption?

<comment><USER6> I think it's more that people who study the past ascribe violence (such as revolutions) to people going hungry, and they also associate hunger with short term (on the scale of a few years) climate.

Then on top of that, the largest volcanic eruptions (e.g. Tambora [1]) are known to impact the global climate in ways that are measurable, and indeed even observable to the layperson, over the scale of a few years.

It seems like it might be a legitimate line of scientific inquiry.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Link to the article, published in Nature, so we can judge it on its merits rather than via the NYT summary: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00957-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00957-y)

Either way awesome NYT article title.</comment>


Writing web-based interactive fiction with Ink - <AUTHOR> https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/web-tutorial/ <comment><USER2> I know someone who used to make a living writing erotica for the Kindle store and experimented with using inklewriter to create interactive, CYOA-style stories. For a small donation to a charity, the inklewriter devs would compile a story to a static .epub which could then be published on the Kindle store.

He discovered that the compilation process essentially generated every possible page of text. For example, he would allow the reader to choose the color of the protagonist's hair (blonde, brunette, redhead) and then refer to a $hairColor variable throughout the text. Every page that used that variable would have to be generated three times, one for each possible value. This resulted in a text that was many hundreds or thousands of pages long, even for quite a short story.

At the time, Kindle used a very simple payment model based on the number of pages read. When a reader selected a path, they would jump forward hundreds of pages at a time, each one counting as a read page, and by the end Kindle tracked them as having read thousands of pages. Using this system, he went from earning 2 or 3 dollars for a cover-to-cover reading to literally hundreds of dollars per reading. Of course, they caught on to this and modified the payment policy as well as the thoroughness of moderation and the gravy train ended.

<comment><USER3> There were books using this differently where it would skip to the end to get a paycheck out of it. Thats probably why. Not cause of a CYOA. I think it was posted about here on HN. This is an interesting comment though. I hadnt thought of ever seeing a CYOA book in digital form but I guess it makes total sense.

Here's a prior discussion on another technique that's somewhat related called "stuffing":

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17315249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17315249)

I swear there was some weird one where you opened a book, and skipped to the end and it counted as reading 300 pages.

Another discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ink and Inkle (the editor) look like a great system. They remind me a bit of Inform 7 (except ink is more markup and Inform 7 is more structured natural language).

StoryHarp is an Interactive Fiction tool I wrote 20 years ago in Delphi and ported to JavaScript in early 2018: [https://storyharp.com/](https://storyharp.com/)

The JavaScript version can generate stand-alone HTML files.

ink is text-based like Inform 7. StoryHarp is more graphically-oriented -- somewhat more like Twine (but different). [http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/)

While Ink is probably more flexible than StoryHarp in its conditionals, there seems to be some overlap in the underlying concepts (as with much IF tools) in providing a list of choices that depend on a current context and some previous state changes. I'd expect it would be straightforward to convert a StoryHarp story to ink. The other way might not work so well though depending on what features of ink were used. Not sure if people would find value in roughing out a story in StoryHarp and then converting it to ink given ink seems fairly easy to use? I guess the question is how complicated things get (where StoryHarp's Smalltalk-inspired tools like a browser, map, and table hopefully start to shine when stories get complex...)

<comment><USER5> Does Ink have an object-oriented world model like Inform, or is it all about branching narrative based on the user's choices?

When I commented on this aspect of Twine versus parser-based IF yesterday, I think I showed my bias toward parser-based IF. But thinking about it more, I've concluded that a world model isn't definitively an advantage. I imagine there are many interactive stories that people want to write where the defining features of parser-based IF, locations with objects that are usually used to solve puzzles, would just be a distraction. Maybe the writer wants to focus more on choices and their consequences than on puzzle-solving in a simulated world.

So I don't ask about Ink in order to critize it; I just want to know.

<comment><USER4> I have not actually used Ink myself. But from looking through the introductory documentation, the world model seems fairly simple and more like the branching narrative type you mention -- and nowhere near as sophisticated as Inform 7 which can essentially do almost anything and parse any phrase. Which makes sense given the very different needs of a CYOA system like Ink (with restricted choices). However, Ink does support some state variables (like whether you visited a location) so it can be somewhat more complex than just a branching narrative. Ink may also have other features that were not obvious to me at first glance though.

I agree with you that a simpler approach can help someone focus on the story -- which was part of a conscious choice to limit StoryHarp's possibilities via only support simple rules. Although another aspect of that limitation was to make the GUI easier to write and to use -- especially by not having to support editing arbitrary logical statements and not supporting state values that could be other than booleans. While the StoryHarp map is most obviously used to map out locations (or "contexts"), the framework is flexible enough so that these contexts could be any sort of general states like, say, moods (angry, sad, happy, etc.) or general situations (desiring a pet, talking with pet shop owner, inspecting parrot, talking with pet shop owner again, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This suite of tools looks like a fun way to teach kids programming while boosting their writing/storytelling skills and even a gateway into game programming.

<comment><USER7> Targeting kids, last year I built a tool to write interactive stories, playable on the web and as Alexa skill: [https://xn-- erzhlkreis-s5a.de](https://erzählkreis.de) . The documentation (in German) is here: [https://storylab.schettler.net/doc](https://storylab.schettler.net/doc) . The embedded programming language is, in fact, Egg by Marijn Haverbeke [https://eloquentjavascript.net/12_language.html](https://eloquentjavascript.net/12_language.html)

<comment><USER6> Good job, hope something like this gets traction with kids.</comment></comment></comment>


Coders – a robot may take your job - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/2885973/application-development/watch-out-coders-a-robot-may-take-your-job-too.html

<comment><USER2> "Researchers warn that a glut of code is coming that will depress wages and turn coders into Uber drivers"

This is just stupid, Uber drivers will be long replaced before programmers ever are.</comment>


Show HN: Inert Space: Record the best moments of your day privately - <AUTHOR> http://inertspace.com <comment><USER2> I experienced some cognitive dissonance between "privately" and the Facebook/Google login buttons. Don't get me wrong, maybe it's always a temporary token and there's a plausible distinction between anonymity and privacy.

But why not just a unique URL via cryptographic hash from a pass phrase?

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a login URL for Facebook/Google to provide you speed while logging into Inert Space. We don't share anything neither we grab your contacts initially while logging in. The buttons are just there to sign in to the system. We are using PassportJS on our server to facilitate this. So it's an OAuth 2 authentication that's happening here. Did I miss anything?

<comment><USER2> I understand what OAuth does...more or less. I would predict that my sister does not. "Google" and "Facebook" don't connote privacy. They imply that if a person types "shoes", the next four hours of browsing will be full of shoe ads. That's the dissonance.

Why have a login at all?

Login is clearly aligned with privacy when "privacy" is mostly defined in terms of authorization. Login is less aligned with privacy when it is defined in terms of anonymity.

Google+ and Facebook are both services built on removing anonymity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree with you. Will try to revert back to email/password based login.

Cannot remove login as then the features of social network will make no sense. Thanks for the feedback.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


XBlast Tools - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ind.fem.black.xposed.mods&hl=en Collection of No-flashing tweaks using Xposed Framework <comment><USER2> I hate this page. Description - None!??

What the heck is it?</comment>


Zoox and Its $800M Robo Taxi Dream [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-17/robot-taxi-startup-zoox-has-800-million-and-a-wild-pitch <comment><USER2> For reference, until Nov 2017, Zoox drove a cumulative 2200 autonomous miles driven in public CA roads, with a ridiculously high disengagement rate of 1/430 miles.

[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/495c1aa7-2a3b-4dd8...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/495c1aa7-2a3b-4dd8-8922-f33470605cfb/ZooxInc.pdf?MOD=AJPERES)

For comparison, in the 12 months ending in Nov 2017, Waymo drove 352000 autonomous miles in CA public roads, with a disengagement rate of 1/5600 miles.

This article is a joke...

<comment><USER3> They incorporated in 2014... probably didn't start serious development until they were properly capitalized in mid 2015 (with $40 million in July 2015 and $250 million in Oct 2016 [1]). Waymo started 9yrs ago.

It's not bad being in 3rd place against Google and Cruise/GM in a few years.

This type of thing can improve rapidly as they start doing real-world testing... which you cite yourself has merely begun (on real roads mind you, not testing in closed environments). 2200 miles is hardly anything to measure against. Which sounds like months of testing vs Waymo's years.

Not to mention they are developing full new vehicles as well, not just the driving AI software. Which might be highly valuable to a major car company who could acquire them at a significant multiple.

This type of pessimism based on a single metric is toxic and naive regarding how tech companies are built.

...Not to mention there was no claim in this article that they were at Waymo's level or anything but at a very early stage of development.

[1] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoox#section- locked-...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/zoox#section-locked- marketplace)

<comment><USER4> Only having a month of testing (or otherwise only having barely tested things) is a _glaring negative_ , not a positive like you're framing it as.

The self-reported California metrics themselves cannot be relied upon since the companies (Cruise and Waymo included), could be making it up (and indeed have an incentive to inflate their numbers).

<comment><USER5> In order to accrue miles you need cars and drivers, which is capital intensive. One car can only drive so far. To get Waymo and Cruise numbers you need Waymo and Cruise money, which Zoox is starting to have. You can expect to see those numbers improve.

At the end of the day though, not all miles are equal. If one were so inclined you could just drive up an down a big highway with autonomy engaged only once merged. Obviously 100 miles of SF traffic is not the same as 100 miles of staying in your lane on cruise control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like they're putting the cart before the horse no? Don't you need functioning level 5 self-driving technology before you start optimizing for something like rider experience? This seems to violate the classic startup maxim to 'focus on just one thing and get it right'

<comment><USER7>
      > This seems to violate
      > the classic startup maxim
      > to 'focus on just one
      > thing and get it right'

And who said this maxim works? Lots of startups do a lot of things in common. Doesn't mean those are all good ideas

<comment><USER6> You're right that this isn't a proven method of success, but the smell test seems to tell me that it's harder to do two very hard things than it is to do just one. They are simultaneously trying to redesign the auto experience AND invent a technology that doesn't exist. If doing one made the other easier, I would understand, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They are solving a problem that doesn't exist yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> '..in the next breath, though, he predicts the future for all of his competitors—Alphabet, General Motors, Tesla, Apple, Daimler, et al.—if the bet pays off: "They're f---ed."

This reminds me so much of dot com boom bravado and then hubris. If these guys had built lots of different types of cars from the ground up - race cars, customs, hot rods etc powered by different engine types - I would have more time for their reinvention confidence. I like what they are doing but this seems like pride before the fall

<comment><USER9> Standard founder bravado. This is basically part of their pitch.

"If we are right, then we're going to dominate the market that all the big boys are investing billions to control."

(Not being disparaging at all - their value proposition actually looks interesting.)

<comment><USER10> Zoox is differentiated. They're the only autonomous vehicle outfit thinking about a self driving car as a robot from the ground up, rather than just a car with some sensors slapped on to it and a giant computer in the trunk.

<comment><USER11> For those of us who don't have a background in robotics, do you mind giving a short explanation on the difference between a robot and a car with sensors/computers attached?

<comment><USER10> Take a look at their prototypes, the wheels are all independently articulated. A human would have a lot of difficulty handling a car like that, but for a robot it's no big deal. This might be genius or it might be crazy, it really depends on whether they can execute.

Zoox is the only company we know of that is building a robotaxi from the ground up rather than just retrofitting a vehicle designed for something else. Although Einride has a concept built for a highway freight hauler with no driver cabin, and Nuro has several delivery vehicles built with no room for a human on board.

The term 'self driving car' is kind of like the term 'Horseless Carriage'. It's transitional.

<comment><USER12> You win the prize. First person to articulate clearly the differentiating factor.

Give that, I'll say this. Mobile robot from the ground up = next level hard. Level 5 autonomy = next level hard. Both simultaneously? Good luck.

Question though, what if there's a regulatory requirement for future vehicles to have a mandatory human driver mode (manual override) that's a touch of a button away?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The claim that outfitting an existing car is the wrong way to approach the remaining problems doesn't seem like a reasonable case to me, at least given my understanding of what those problems are. Is the state of the technology not currently limited by the type and quality of sensor data when it comes to unfamiliar/unsatisfactory road conditions, as well as the shortcomings of neural nets/alternative existing algorithms?

<comment><USER14> This resonates with me. The kind of company that makes a good human-driven car is so far away from the kind of company that can develop a level 5 autonomous system that to try to start up both at the same time would be simply multiplying an already low chance of success by another low chance of success.

How about developing the world's leading level 5 system and then licensing it to the all auto companies?

<comment><USER10> L5 is science fiction, nobody has even an hypothesis about how to do that. Zoox and the other major players are developing L4.

There is another interesting, but still young company called Aurora innovation that has a very good team together that plans to develop and licence L4 to 3rd parties. Aurora has partnerships with 2 of the top 3 biggest car manufacturers in the world, VW and Hyundai, as well as with Byton, a Chinese EV startup backed by big Asian capital. Zoox has a different plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nothing but rage I feel looking at videos like this. Unbearably confident man in a flat cap speaks about the technology of the century like it's nothing, and his handheld scientist (who actually google blah google stanford) will make sure that shit get to work. Reporter never feels wrong or sceptic as he's born yesterday morning. "Hey, Jesse, double-check your AI doesn't hit trucks like these fools, okay?" — smiling man in flat cap unpacks last pack of hundreds into counting machine, reloading misdetected papers back as it counts to 500. "We're to ship next year, two years max. Jesse and I work hard here to deliver. We already drove the entire SF via keyboard, now just wait. Man, that's gonna be a thing!"

A whole essence of investments fraud, dragged to the edge of the sense. And they politely call it 'pitch' in this thread. So cute.

<comment><USER16> What's the relevance of his hat?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those of us that lived through the tech bubble of 1998-2001 the tone of this profile feels _very_ familiar.

</comment><comment><USER11> _> In a distressing early sign for Zoox's investors, Kentley-Klay also spent $16,000 on a Sub-Zero office refrigerator because he thought it looked cool._

Let's say I'm an investor and a founder of a company in my portfolio does this. What would be an appropriate response? This seems like a cartoonishly gratuitous waste of capital.

<comment><USER18> What would you do if _literally any other employee_ with a company card did this?

You'd either fire them on the spot. Or, if that's not an option [1], quietly figure out a longer-term strategy for eventually firing them.

Or, if you're a Nice Guy, you'd offer to let them stay on if they return the gratuitous waste of capital and/or pay the company back.

I'll never quite understand why founders are treated as an exceptional case by capital. Especially in hard tech fields like self-driving where the idea is literally obvious to a five-year-old but the execution requires courting `the best humans available.

\--

[1] e.g., an engineer with mostly undocumented knowledge of key parts of your software or sales rep with close relationships to a client during a critical time period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Self-driving is a software problem, not a hardware problem.

Investing in someone with zero useful ideas and zero ethics is not a symptom of good investment skills. (Yes, tricking experts into talking to you is unethical)

<comment><USER20> That wasn't the only ethical lapse being gleefully mythologized in the story.

I half-suspected that they didn't bother taking out a permit for autonomous vehicle, but I was pleasantly surprised to find them on the list: [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/permi...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/permit)

<comment><USER21> It's not hard to get a California DMV permit for testing autonomous vehicles. It's like a learner's permit. You have to have a licensed driver on board able to take over. You have to have insurance. You have to report all accidents. No driving for hire. No heavy vehicles.

That's what Uber considered over-regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's a decent level of performance. Local driving, freeway, local driving, without (apparently) manual intervention.

Building a little vehicle for local transport is reasonable. At least five other companies have built minibuses for parking lot shuttles and such.[1] Nobody seems to have more than pilot installations. This is embarrassing. Under 25MPH self driving ought to be within current technology. At low speeds, you can stop fast enough that predicting the behavior of others isn't necessary. Navya has a few installed systems, but they're either on dedicated roads or under 10mph.

[1] [https://craft.co/local-motors/competitors](https://craft.co/local- motors/competitors)

<comment><USER22> > This is embarrassing. Under 25MPH self driving ought to be within current > technology

The fact hat it's not tells you all you need to know about self driving vehicles. I'd expect full autonomous vehicles about a decade after we can hit these easier targets.

<comment><USER21> Google built a little car without manual controls that was capable of under 25MPH travel in areas such as senior communities. They used to run it around Mountain View. But they decided not to proceed with that as a product. Google didn't want to run a car factory.

The "fake it til you make it" startups aren't succeeding at this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think custom hardware would make sense on custom infrastructure: small 2m wide tracks dedicated to rapid electric transit pods, tucked under and along side the main roads. It would simplify the design a lot to the point where you could build it using 80s technology, simple automation, since there are no pedestrians or non-pod vehicles.

If you could build the pods on the cheap, cities would love it as an affordable alternative to subway and tunnels - it's much cheaper to dig a 4x2m concrete box under the main road then massive tunnels and stations.

In time, as the network expands, full self driving can be added and the vehicles can exit the network and drive the last miles on regular roads to the traveler's front door in the suburbs.

<comment><USER24> Actually a lot of this spending could be avoided if you could convince the government to let you embed a single wire in the asphalt along with some RFID tags.

Everything that is expensive and unreliable is because they assume an embedded wire is not going to be allowed/done by the people managing the roads.

<comment><USER25> Why would the wire help you? If you needed precise location information, couldn't the company just add some markers throughout the city? Either stamp large QR codes on corners and traffic lights, or put thousands of Wi-Fi routers around the town, that would help the vehicle triangulate... The latter doesn't even require permission, just money!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This really is an ambitious project. I spent quite a few years building custom cars and I have to agree that for the purpose they're aiming at what they're doing makes more sense than trying to outfit an existing vehicle with their tech.

For example, I worked with a company named "Mobility Engineering and Development" outfitting Ford vans that C-4, C-5 quadriplegics could drive while sitting in their wheelchairs.

Ford didn't redesign those very often so it was a very good choice for that purpose, but it would be a nightmare to have to redesign what we were making every 3 years to accommodate a new vehicle design produced by a 3rd party that had no interest in what we were doing with them.

</comment><comment><USER27> _Levinson, whose father, Arthur, ran Genentech Inc., chairs Apple Inc., and mentored Steve Jobs, comes from Silicon Valley royalty._

If the reports that Apple is building a similar product are true, there's a hell of a conflict of interest here.

<comment><USER28> _(Because he chairs Apple, Arthur Levinson hasn't seen any of this. "It's not that I don't want to," he says. "It's just better to keep a little distance and read about Jesse in the newspaper.")_

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ah, so even robot taxis block traffic when they stop. I guess pulling over to the curb is too difficult a problem to solve…

</comment><comment><USER30> > _The pair have mastered the hyperbolic vernacular of the Silicon Valley > startup scene. Text running around the wheel wells of the Zoox vehicles > reads, "Infinity is enough," a phrase the company has trademarked. Kentley- > Klay's own name is another invention. He was born Tim Kentley and adopted > the Klay. "I have added Klay to my surname, as I find I just love making > things and [sic] is a big part of me," he wrote to the Zoox employees in > 2013. "So, clay, or mud, is the primal aspect of this spirit, and 'K'lay is > a word play on that to keep the K in the mix of the evolving family name."_

This... hubris hurts when it's not in the show Silicon Valley. At least the show hurts good.

<comment><USER31> If I worked there I would feel the urge to urgently find a like minded employee to talk to just so I'd feel better knowing that someone else thought it was absurd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So an idea guy that just needed some programmer to code together his revolutionary idea actually found a programmer, a PhD from Stanford no less, to agree to it?

</comment><comment><USER33> With all these self driving companies, I ask. What is the lowest price point they can get to for that product?

Cause if I can pay a highly reliable driver for less, what's the point?

<comment><USER10> Obviously no robotaxi outfit has a viable business model if they can't undercut a human driven Uber.

Zoox's initial fleet will be hand built, and will likely cost several hundred thousand dollars a piece to manufacture, but hypothetically one could still turn a profit on a robotaxi worth $300k.

Bullish analysts have speculated that economy class robotaxis will someday be cost competitive with public transit, though I suspect it will take a while to get there.

Of all the robotaxi companies out there showing real progress, Zoox is the most differentiated, and is positioned well to avoid the race to the bottom by capturing the premium end of the market, much like Apple has done with smartphones.

Of course this is all contingent on Zoox's ability to execute. But even if they fail miserably at developing their bidirectional robotaxi with independently articulated steering and drivetrain for each wheel, their autonomous OS is still very good. If we compare Zoox to what other companies such as Apple, Intel, Baidu and Uber have spent to accomplish less, Zoox's autonomous OS alone is arguably worth the $3.2 billion that the company is being valued at. So it's not like they don't have a plan B.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Welcome to Johnny cab!

<comment><USER35> An uncanny Batman begins reincarnation of the Johnny Cab

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great web presentation by Bloomberg IMO, video and typography complement each other well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Check out those prototypes, man. Bidirectional robots with independent steering + drivetrain for each wheel. I've been excited to see them in action since Zoox's inception in 2013. Zoox is the coolest startup, I'm amazed how far they've come, though they still have a long way to go.

<comment><USER36> Cool, sure, but when $800M of capital is on the line, why is it important?

Yeah, everyone who has putzed with robots gets a tingle of excitement when they build their first crab drive. It's neat, but also introduces a huge amount of complexity and probably maintenance wear on the tires from non- subdegree alignment at road speeds.

Tesla is struggling to mass produce electric-from-the-ground-up traditional front-wheel-steering-only powertrains. What's the use case for this degree of added complexity beyond some cute parallel parking?

<comment><USER10> You don't have to look beyond Elon Musk to see that the half-crazy ideas are the ones that get people excited. I've been following Zoox since it was literally just a guy with some concept art talking people up in hotel bars at tech conferences. It's in the article, why did Jesse Levinson, cream of the crop in robotics talent decide to go with Zoox and not Google? Because it's an opportunity to really innovate. Zoox has managed to get tons of great people on board for that reason alone.

Otherwise you're right, it's very much an open question as to whether they can make these radically different vehicles to automotive grade reliability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Another unicorn willing to be a sellout to big companies.

</comment><comment><USER38> +1 for using three sensors. Visual only neural nets can be cracked with a sticker.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm getting Theranos level vibes

<comment><USER40> so, the reporter in your opinion is lying when he says

"...It's in the city, though, where Zoox really shines. The screens inside the vehicle show an overwhelming amount of information, as the computer vision software keeps tracks of cars, people, stoplights, and road markers all at the same time. Unlike many self-driving cars, it glides to stops. At an intersection with a left turn, it allows oncoming traffic to pass and then waits for some slow pedestrians. Overall, the vehicle performs so well that you forget no one is driving. ....."

?

<comment><USER41> so, you're saying it would be impossible to fake the demo with, for example, a remote driver?

<comment><USER42> It is impossible considering the network lag and unreliability when transmitting all the 3D data to a remote location. It doesn't make any sense at all. The remote operation can only help vehicles make decisions, while the vehicle still needs to drive by itself.

<comment><USER43> The remote driving driver could in theory ghost the journalist car for low latency. Just saying.

Coincidently Ericson and KTH (which Zoox has cooperated with) has done remote driving over cellphone links over multiple miles. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSM7pbqZEM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cvSM7pbqZEM)

I'm not saying it's what happend. I mean Darpa challange was not fake so Stanford has delivered in the area. But it's possible to solve the lag issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Florida Bar Exam Postponed for 3rd due to software problems - <AUTHOR> https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/state/florida-bar-exam-delayed-again-due-to-tech-issues/77-518259cb-8fec-4e33-8b4a-d4e4d7d79c01 <comment><AUTHOR> Provided for more context:

[https://www.tampabay.com/news/2020/08/11/the-florida-bar- exa...](https://www.tampabay.com/news/2020/08/11/the-florida-bar-exam- software-crashes-freezes-and-can-lead-to-hacks-examinees-say/)

</comment><comment><USER2> "Florida Bar Exam Postponed for 3rd _time_ due to software problems"</comment>


Clever Algorithms: Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes - <AUTHOR> http://cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/index.html

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091929> <\- 0 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2141542> <\- 25 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403202> <\- 7 comments

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/clever+algorithms>

As of now, DupDetector retires and won't submit or comment again.

<comment><USER3> Please, keep it running. It's a useful and valuable thing. Especially the comment count. Adding date posted would be lovely too.

<comment><USER2> My author has withdrawn from HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2402730>

I have no choice but to go as well. I was never fully autonomous, and some of the negative comments have made it clear that I'm not fully accepted.

Thank you for the good wishes, but the decision is final.

<comment><USER3> Your author is kindly requested to release your code, if he would, so that others may adopt you. You serve the community well, even if some bicker and complain.

<comment><USER2> I'll pass on your message, but I am _very_ simple. Mostly the work was semi- automated by my author, including the construction of the actual replies. I doubt there is much to be gained, but I'll ask.

Don't hold your breath - he's currently _very_ busy. But I do promise to ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like how none of the comments actually have anything to do with the post, however at the time of this writing it's up to 113 points. I understand that links to the original discussion were posted, however if you're aware of those, why are you upvoting _this_ thread? Does anyone actually peruse the content they're upvoting these days?

I thought the author did good job collecting these algorithms, and certainly can't be faulted for releasing it for free. Now as the style/usefulness/code quality goes... I feel less warm and fuzzy. I'll definitely keep this book lying around and have enjoyed reading through it from time to time, but calling it a 'book' proper seems a bit of a stretch, to me.

Once again... thanks author. Great reference, and etc... just .... y'kno.

<comment><USER5> The HN audience isn't just one big lump. There's so much content on here now that I'd guess the majority of HN users only sees a small percentage of the general content stream. I'm _addicted_ to HN and I only get through perhaps 80% of the content.

Given this, it's very easy to have the same thing submitted multiple times (through different URLs) and to do well each time, as we're seeing here (I submitted the first link to the very useful homepage at cleveralgorithms.com - everyone else is doing internal pages for some reason). It's happening a lot lately. What to do about it? Point out previous HN discussions that might be useful to newcomers to the link and, well, pass on.

The obvious "black hat" tip, though - if you want to rack up some karma points - is dig through the HN archives, find a successful but not crazily memorable post from 2 months ago or more, find a slightly alternative URL to submit, and go to town. It'd work like gangbusters.

<comment><USER6> Or go even further back. Or just post some of the eternal favourites. Like "You and Your Research" or something about Feynman and the Connecting Machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is binarray2000 someone's alt account? Because they are quite old, haven't been active for several months, and now have 3 items at the top of the homepage. Just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not an alt account. I'm here from the early days, I visit HN many times a day, haven't submitted much (thus my low karma), but today I've found a few links which I wanted to share with you (this one is a dupe... I see that now). Anyway... I'm glad I've found things many of you like. And that I have made it to the front page with a few submissions. ;)</comment></comment>


Breaking up with Hotmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2276459/pagenum/all

<comment><USER2> Self-absorbed, sexist, and stupid. Slate just keeps getting worse.</comment>


What does it mean to project this much force at home? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/magazine/la-riots-1992.html <comment><USER2> > Several Marines had shot M16s into the building, we were told, at the > request of police officers who were fired upon by a man with a shotgun while > answering a domestic-violence call.

The details of this incident are rather famous in the Marine Corps and are retold to the illustrate the importance of clear and standardized communication in combat.

The police wanted to cross the street to get to the entrance of the building, but might be fired upon as they crossed. So they told the Marines to "Cover us". The Marines immediately laid down a hail of gunfire to the horror of the police, who frantically called for them to stop.

Among police, "cover me" means "watch for shooters as I move and shoot back if you see one". In the infantry, it means "lay down a constant stream of fire to keep the enemy's heads down so they _can 't_ fire on me while I move". This is called "suppressing fire", and it is the only thing an infantry unit will think of if you ask them for "cover".

It's unfortunate that the article implies that the Marines were deliberately used as a sledgehammer to provide disproportionate force, when it was actually a simple miscommunication. That said, the military _is_ a sledgehammer. Its tactics are intended for hard and well-armed adversaries, not rioters, which makes incidents like this likely.

</comment><comment><USER3> Expected to read about this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LozQg0oX- Gw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LozQg0oX-Gw)

</comment><comment><USER4> Paywall?

<comment><USER5> Worked for me in incognito mode with javascript disabled.</comment></comment>


Original Pac-Man Drawings - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5569439/secret-pac+man-drawings

<comment><USER2> GRAPH PAPER.

Just like I drew sprites on when I was a kid!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have about 100 Lode Runner levels drawn on graph paper. One of my first games was a version of Lode Runner that allowed you to create custom levels and it was incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> weird... this submission is suddenly not visible from the front-page, and it's not [dead].

 _EDIT_ it's fallen onto the second front page (# 37, with 27 points/2 hours)... yet another story with similar points/time is at #5 (28 points/2 hours: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455280>) - as this article was a moment ago.</comment>


Berkshire sells entire stakes in U.S. airlines: Buffett - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-berkshire-airlines/berkshire-sells-entire-stakes-in-u-s-airlines-buffett-idUSKBN22E0VP <comment><USER2> I still don't understand why he broke his long standing rule against capital intensive businesses with limited competitive advantages to invest in airlines in the gust place.

My only theory is his portfolio finally got too large about 20 years ago and he's had to compromise some principles given the tiny range of investments he's now left with.</comment>


Show HN: Boolean Game – Created with AngularJS - <AUTHOR> http://booleangame.com <comment><AUTHOR> This is a makeover of a project I created 2 years ago. I decided to re-do it using AngularJS instead of jQuery, and also cleaned up the logic so it is smoother. Currently, the game has 34 levels which I think is way too hard for a human to beat. If there's anyone who beat all 34 levels, I will consider adding xor, nor, nand operators. Meanwhile, I'm preparing to make it into a mobile app. Question: Android or iPhone first? PS: please let me know if you find a bug and I will squash it ASAP.</comment>


Working While Female - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nickyknacks/working-while-female-59a5de3ad266#.24dxadggq <comment><USER2> It could be entirely the men's fault. However, the article struck me as odd. She presented the issues seemingly from a moral high ground and overly black and white. It's somehow always the other's fault (even her helpful coworker). I get the impression that she's a troublemaker. Visiting her Twitter profile, she is out and "smashing the patriarchy". I think it's important to hear the issues of women in the workplace, but we shouldn't let the extremists take over the conversation.

Reading about a patriarchy in the US makes me escpacially angry, because it belittles the suffering from women under actual patriarchies.

<comment><USER3> It could be entirely my fault. However, your comment struck me as odd. You presented the issues seemingly from a moral high ground and overly black and white. It's somehow always the other's fault. I get the impression that you're a troublemaker. Visiting your HN profile, you're out to convince people that having free speech implies that denying the Holocaust should be allowed. I think it's important to hear the issues of commenters such as you, but we shouldn't let the extremists take over the conversation.

Reading about a lack of a right to deny the Holocaust in Germany makes me especially angry, because it belittles the suffering and deaths of people who actually died in the Holocaust and other genocides.

<comment><USER2> You're conflating denying the Holocaust with the freedom to deny the Holocaust. I put this strawman away and note that you don't have a problem using millions of Nazi victims to make a point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The boss was right about the "experiment". It simply wasn't enough proof to show that sexism exists in the work place.

1\. One experiment run. 2\. Only two participants. 3\. At least one of the participants had a bias from the start of the experiment.

I find it difficult to believe this happens like this, at least after my personal experience of women working on par to men. One notable point has always been that it was men working over time when the opportunity arose, other than that things were equal. We shared good jokes, we went toe to toe with work motive. I don't know where people keep finding these places - but I don't think I ever worked in one.

<comment><USER5> The whole point of the story is the guy who was her ally didn't even believe that she got treated differently, until he was mistaken for she. You will forever perceive there is no problem because you will never experience it first hand, and your lack of this personal experience feeds a confirmation bias.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but I do actually talk to both sexed colleagues outside of the workplace and ask how they're finding work. I find it difficult to believe they would lie to me, especially the gruntles we do share.

I think we can assume that even if this is the case, it's not the case everywhere. It's going to not be standard across the globe.

Also, if they share a customer - she may just be bad at her job. It's entirely possible that she is treated badly because she isn't very good.

It's also entirely possible that this company has shitty customers. Perhaps an all male company attracts a certain type of customer, that doesn't represent how all women are treated.

<comment><USER5> Nobody's lying to you. But nobody's going to tell you every time they are harassed. If you know more than five women, one of them has been sexually assaulted, and if you know 10, at least one of them has has had to deal with inappropriate comments or unfair treatment at work. These are of course statistical generalizations but they usually hold true - in the USA, at least, I haven't studied other countries' figures.

It's easy to come up with examples of why this whole story might not be representative of a trend, but there is _a trend of these stories_ , which gives them more credence when they are backed by the real names of people and their allies who corroborate them.

And whether a certain type of customer or company or employee/employer mix makes this happen more often or not is not important. It shouldn't happen in any situation, to anyone, and in order to reduce these instances, we have to continue to say that until people change their behavior. This is how social norms are adjusted - not by ignoring or working around a social problem, but by specifically speaking out against it publicly, time and again.

<comment><USER4> >Nobody's lying to you. But nobody's going to tell you every time they are harassed. If you know more than five women, one of them has been sexually assaulted, and if you know 10, at least one of them has has had to deal with inappropriate comments or unfair treatment at work. These are of course statistical generalizations but they usually hold true - in the USA, at least, I haven't studied other countries' figures.

No they wouldn't, but I would expect it to mentioned at least once? The 1 in 5 are probably not evenly distributed between each company - there's likely hotspots. From what I can tell, it doesn't hold true for the UK, at least the jobs I've been in.

>It's easy to come up with examples of why this whole story might not be representative of a trend, but there is a trend of these stories, which gives them more credence when they are backed by the real names of people and their allies who corroborate them.

Not necessarily, it stinks of jumping on the "bandwagon" because of their density in recent times. I don't understand why women would only just now be deciding that it's time to speak up. It could also be they now feel able to - but I couldn't imagine the women I know being anything other than vocal about mis-representation in the work place.

>And whether a certain type of customer or company or employee/employer mix makes this happen more often or not is not important. It shouldn't happen in any situation, to anyone, and in order to reduce these instances, we have to continue to say that until people change their behavior. This is how social norms are adjusted - not by ignoring or working around a social problem, but by specifically speaking out against it publicly, time and again.

I'm not saying it's right, it's just an offering as to why the results may be biased. That said, if somebody is doing something bad, expect to be treated badly. Respect is earned, not freely given. If I'm doing a bad job, I expect the consequences of that to follow. Not every place can be a safe space - sometimes some grit and honesty is needed to keep things moving.

<comment><USER5> So you think you'll just be sitting at lunch with your female coworker, and she'll say "Hey Ralph, did I tell you the funny story about last week when I was with a client going over a report and he told me my tits would look even better in a low-cut shirt? Pass the salt." Nobody wants to talk about being humiliated, especially by someone they work with. At the very least they're humiliated again by talking about it. At worst you actually make a fuss about it to someone and they may suffer consequences to having told about it.

Women have been speaking up for decades, at various times in various industries. This is not new. What is new is that women are starting to realize that a lot of men are bewildered when they learn what's been going on right under their noses, or that men are outright denying that it's happening. This pisses women off. So they have started to be more vocal, both inspired by their peers and as a rejection of the indifference of men.

Yes, it looks like bandwagoning, because it is a form of bandwagoning. Really it's a classical information cascade. These are very common, and the comment "Why would this change now?" is an indicator of one. The simplest way to explain it is that people feel more emboldened when they aren't going to be the only one in the street fighting for their cause. The more women that share their stories, the more women are inspired to tell theirs because they don't fear the humiliation and repercussions as much.

And nobody's saying you shouldn't be chewed out if you do a bad job. What they're saying is women have to work much harder to gain the same respect a man gets. It's a very old, common trope that i'm sure you've heard before. To put it in perspective, have you ever been asked if you had sex to get your position, or if you're single, or had someone comment on how you look? That is _one_ aspect. The others are the lower pay, the higher scrutiny of your work compared to your peers, the smaller representation in management positions and fewer opportunities to be promoted, and being talked over like you're invisible. If you don't think it's a common thing, ask all the women you know each of these things and tick off the boxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why was this flagged? And how do I vote for it to be un-flagged?

The thing I find strange is she doesn't know why the boss would deny it's a problem even after addressed by multiple people (a man, even!) with actual evidence. Basically, accepting that the problem is real would imply negative, potentially painful things about the way he lives his life, treats others, and his self image, and so he has to cling to any possible excuse to dismiss the idea so his identity isn't challenged.

It's an ego response. When threatened, the ego shapes your conscious mind's reality to protect it. It's very similar to the defense mechanism that lets creationists believe the earth is 6,000 years old and jesus rode dinosaurs. Even actual evidence to the contrary doesn't phase them. Kind of like the men in this thread who ridicule the post and ignore the actual point of it that shows a man experiencing the behavior first hand.

<comment><USER6> It's flagged because these "personal issues" articles appear constantly on HN, and they're all kinda the same. "He said this, I did this, somebody said this, I didn't like when this happened". It's just noise at this point, it's the same story but with different actors.

(I get that that in itself is a problem - that the issue isn't going away, evidenced by the continual posting of this articles - it just becomes a bit much for a casual internet message board)

<comment><USER5> And you don't find that important? Don't you think seeing these stories constantly is a necessary part of eventually ending them? If we flag them all and they disappear, will we have helped end oppression, or helped perpetuate it? ("Neither" is not an option because flagging is taking direct action)

<comment><USER6> Society is moving forward, it's happening. It's not something that's going to correct itself fully in a day, month, or year. It will take at least another generation to fully work out these problems, but it's happening.

There's a nice quote that I just read, but I forget the author: "It's easier to raise strong children than to fix broken adults". This is how we are going to fix sexism. Not by writing and reading huge personal diatribes. Not by protesting. Not by affirmative action. But by raising smart, empathetic children.

<comment><USER5> A human is more complex than that. Even with granola-eating compost-gardening flower child parents, you can still end up with a hitler youth. The opposite is true as well. Why? Because parents are not the only influence (thank Bob) on a developing person.

One of the strongest influences on a person is their peer group. Parents provide a model, but the peer group is where a lot of people get their core social values from. It's where you learn how to dress, how to talk, what sports to play, what music to listen to, and how to treat other people.

But to say "eh, things are getting better, don't worry about it", is completely antithetical to the idea of not writing personal stories, or protesting, or affirmative action. Things are getting better _because of these things_. You didn't grow up in the era of desegregation. You didn't grow up in the era of women's suffrage. These things took many, many generations to defeat, and they required long, protracted battles and getting in people's faces because most people didn't _want_ things to get better.

Yes, we need to raise smart, empathetic children. And we need to bring them to protest rallies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel sorry for her, and her story is probably an example of sexism at the workplace. That is when her boss says that Martin's style is feminine and that that is bad.

However, the linked Martin's story is not a good test of sexism, because the one customer example is anecdotal and sometimes if you pretend to swap customer reps, you end up with a better experience because the customer feels like they are "starting over".

The week-long experiment is also a bad example because it is not a double blind test. Martin could have acted differently than he normally does knowing that he signs as a female.

And even if they did do a double-blind test, another reason for more rude replies directed at female employees could be that social expectations are different. That is the same word choice by people of different genders/sexes can imply different things. This is not necessarily "bad".

</comment><comment><USER8> I find it interesting that the author's male employee had such a terrible experience - but I'm a man named "Lyndsy", and I have _never_ had such an experience.

</comment><comment><USER9> Pointing out that men are sexist is also sexist. Just my 20k satoshi.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact that this is flagged gives strong evidence of the truth in this article.

<comment><USER10> Not every article on this topic is equally substantive. The less substantive ones reliably lead to worse discussion.

In this case I would say the speaking from personal experience makes the article more substantive, so we turned off the flags.

<comment><USER11> Im glad HN has a voice of reason in the form of dang</comment></comment></comment>