Mathematicians urge colleagues to boycott police work in wake of killings - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01874-9 <comment><USER2> The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0] so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as it's intended to is policing. For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD.

For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.

On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].

> _To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her > students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common > assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more > positively residents evaluated the police services they got._

> _" Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative > impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service > provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their > better trained and better financed larger neighbors."_

> _But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in > small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in > community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge > of the local area & more trust from people._

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast)

[1] [https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1270406823158468614](https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1270406823158468614)

<comment><USER3> There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to present: [https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images- archive-re...](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-read- only/wp-content/uploads/sites/1294/2016/07/11210814/30_003.jpg)

And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US)

State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor of 3.5, even after _adjusted for inflation._

With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to 2014: [https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%...](https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C414px&ssl=1). Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: [https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf](https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf) (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last few years.

The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc: [http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl- budget-2019-20.pdf](http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf). Despite spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance.

Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty, even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.

<comment><USER4> > Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s > averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: > [https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf](https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf) > (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 > billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% > increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't > enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic > failure in the last few years.

Just because the spend per rider increased over that time doesn't mean the system is getting what it needs though. A newer system will usually function better than a starved system years later naturally because of deferred maintenance and other aging infrastructure ailments even if the per rider numbers have increased. Comparing it just on the per rider spend assumes that the earlier number is enough.

<comment><USER5> The London underground was created in 1863 though: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground)

Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the 1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.

<comment><USER4> One major thing is probably that the NYC subway did 24 hour operation (recently stopped due to covid-19) so there wasn't an easy period for maintenance tasks where the London Underground seems to run 5am-12am so there's a nice 5 hour block for maintenance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know enough to agree or disagree, but to me having academics even ask questions on the ethics of their work is the most important thing; if one's work affects the real world then you can't duck responsibility for it.

<comment><USER7> Academics often ask ethical questions about their work. There are a huge number of physicists who devote time to non-proliferation work, cleaning up the ethical detritus from generations past.

<comment><USER8> Well even that is not an ethically straightforward issue. Nuclear proliferation reduces the frequency and typical intensity of violent conflicts, in exchange for risking an extremely high intensity conflict.

<comment><USER9> It's also about the only direction left. There's hardly any lawful, paid proliferation to go around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People are boiling this down to "less crime = good". Like if a mathematician can design a deployment system such that the percentage of crimes where an arrest is made increases from 15% to 20%, how can that be a bad thing?

What if every single one of those additional arrests is a Black person? Well that might require an additional look. It's possible that it's all Black people doing those crimes. It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling.

Will the mathematician be able to say, "hey cops can we take a second look?". No. Can the police be trusted to dig into the nuance themselves? Also no. Is racism active and documented in police departments across the country? Yes.

Should everyone who has any ability to do so stand up and say, we won't support this shit, which is what these mathematicians are doing? I think yes, but that's obviously my opinion.

<comment><USER11> > It's also possible that the mathematician built an algorithm anchored on > years of arrest data from racist cops doing racial profiling.

That possibility is explicitly excluded since the data comes from crimes reported by victims, not investigations initiated by police officers.

<comment><USER12> Minorities are less comfortable calling the police in the first place.

<comment><USER11> Do you have any data to back up that claim, other than anecdotal "evidence"?

Here's some real data: [https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpa11.pdf)

 _Across all races and Hispanic origin, American Indians and Alaska Natives (15%) and persons of two or more races (15%) had the highest rates of reporting crime or neighborhood disturbances to the police. No statistical difference was observed between the percentage of white (9%) and black (7%) persons reporting a crime or neighborhood disturbance to police in 2011._

Also, perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but Appendix Table 4 suggests that minorities are much more satisfied with police response than the average.

<comment><USER12> Quick search,

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police- violence-lowers-911-calls-in-black-neighborhoods/501908/)

And then there is the fact that illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears.

<comment><USER11> > > [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/police-..).

3 people "screened and analyzed" 1.1 million calls and found out that there was a (presumably temporary) effect on minorities after one much-discussed incident involving minorities? The rest is cherry-picked examples and wild conjecture and not thorough analysis of the data.

> _illegal immigrants do not call the police for their fears._

Um, that's because they're _illegal_ and has nothing to do with racism.

<comment><USER13> It doesn't look great when you are presented with evidence then try to find some reason to disbelieve it.

<comment><USER14> I disagree, I think that's how we should expect dialogues to proceed. To uncritically accept any evidence presented to you is a much less effective method for reaching the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They are complaining about "racial bias" in predictive policing products. This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics. If reality doesn't support the ideology, reality must be ignored. This is the sorry state of academia nowadays.

<comment><USER15> I think many of the mathematicians would agree with:

>This "racial bias" is composed of data collected from crime statistics.

They disagree that crime statistics are reflective of where crime occurs. They are more reflective of where police officers are and where crimes are most easily spotted. For example, the racial disparities in policing crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.

Predictive systems that read in biased data will produce biased data.

<comment><USER11> > They are more reflective of where police officers are and where crimes are > most easily spotted.

The article says: _MacDonald argues that PredPol uses only crimes reported by victims, such as burglaries and robberies, to inform its software. "We never do predictions for crime types that have the possibility of officer-initiated bias, such as drug crimes or prostitution," he says._

<comment><USER16> That doesn't mean reports are completely independent. Isn't it obvious that the perception of whether the police will do anything is going to affect the reporting?

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't that affect it in an inhibitory way, though? Black areas would be reporting less crime than actually occurs- so if reported crime rates there are _still_ higher, that tells us something?

<comment><USER16> Just as a thought experiment, it could be that lesser crimes are not reported because the police don't take them seriously, which leads to more criminals committing major crimes, which are mostly reported.

By lesser crimes I don't mean trivial things that provide an excuse to harass non-criminals and give "broken window" policing a bad name, but actual crimes which aren't major violent crimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is no question that the advancement of science has been good for humanity as a whole.

Using math to improve the effectiveness of the police is a good thing. This effort - however well intended maybe - would throw out the baby with the bathwater.

<comment><USER19> Using math to improve the effectiveness of police is not necessarily a good thing, because this kind of works really works to perpetuate proactive policing and over-policing, as well as encodes bias.

<comment><USER20> So maybe address the biases?

People who live in areas that experience high incidence of criminal activity also want to have crime reduced. They want someone to establish order—when you have a vacuum, someone will fill it, usually someone with even less oversight, though occasionally you can luck out with a benevolent dictator of sorts.

So yes people in those areas want policing —though they may also want some reform as well. Few people want no police. They know that's a recipe for a power vacuum and the domino effect that has.

<comment><USER21> Well, when you're witnessing multiple instances of officers willingly and enthusiastically assaulting defenseless and innocent citizens/journalists on the street every day, you're past the point of "bias" correction.

These instances are not the result of some nebulous ingrained tendency to view others as less than themselves, they're the result of a coordinated and deliberate attempt to assert power.

Your assertion that removing police would create a "vacuum" assumes incorrectly that there is currently a sense of "order" established. This is not the case, as there is no set of behaviors black men in particular can adopt which will not result in their extrajudicial execution. Police are more accurately viewed as an occupying militia and I see no reason to believe it would just as soon be replaced by something similar.

<comment><USER20> In France there were similar issues with the police vs the yellow vests.

(Anti-Riot)Police see themselves as the entity that establishes order at the cusp of disorder.

When you have these kinds of confrontations (it could be internecine for all I care) you're going to see that kind of human interaction. Neither person is a robot and thus the results are less than ideal.

What is worse is a power vacuum and the resulting gangs and warlordism (unless the community stands up its own local police force) but we're back to policing.

<comment> munk-a It was frankly amazing to see how utterly silent US media was on the yellow- vests movement. Do you have any good retrospective sources that I can read up on about those, I think my media experience with it was hearing about it once on NPR and then never hearing it mentioned again except in the form of a neo- facist related movement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if any of the scientist or commenters in this thread have ever lived in a bad hood. The hoods require more and better policing, the worst offenders, who kill orders of magnitude more people are criminal gangs. You remove police - you'll get spike in homicides.

<comment><USER23> Does it occur that the gangs are an attempt from within consistently brutalized communities to mirror their brutalizers

<comment><USER24> Nothing is anyone's fault, huh. He's not a murderer--he's just brutalized and oppressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It appears that one of the signers is selling a competing/alternate/supplemental product: Cathy O'Neil : [https://orcaarisk.com/](https://orcaarisk.com/)

From her twitter page ( [https://twitter.com/mathbabedotorg/status/127394137538240512...](https://twitter.com/mathbabedotorg/status/1273941375382405120) ) : Cathy O'Neil @mathbabedotorg I'm interested in algorithmic accountability, civil disagreement, and the social mechanism of shame. Algorithmic auditor at ORCAA.

</comment><comment><USER26> This doesn't seem to make sense. By more accurately predicting where crimes will occur, the police departments can _reduce_ the amount of patrols needed.

<comment><USER19> Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests.

Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on.

Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year.

Police patrols should be entirely _reactive_ , and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.

<comment><USER27> This is false. Socio-economically disadvantaged areas genuinely have more crime than elsewhere. They require more policing as a result. Without more policing, the crime problems get worse not better. Your sort of thinking has been tried out with disastrous results in cities throughout the US. It is actively harming law abiding citizens living in poor communities.

Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime is causing crime.

<comment><USER19> Wage theft in the US is the majority of theft. Tell me, are people in socio- economically disadvantaged areas committing more wage-theft?

You have to ask yourself why there is more crime in poor areas. The answer is that we don't go looking for or don't care about the crime that happens in other areas as much, and that the socio-economic conditions lead to more crime. You can't fix these issues by sending police there to act like an occupying army. You can only fix the root cause.

As a personal anecdote, having grown up in such places, people have so many bad experiences with police that they genuinely don't want to call them when their presence might maybe help. So is sending police patrols to maximize the number of arrests and create ever more negative experiences the solution? No. You have to fix the root cause.

<comment><USER27> I'm sorry but I don't take your anecdotes seriously. I've seen too many legitimate uses of police force described as "police brutality" recently to take accusations of police brutality at face value. It seems that people have convinced themselves of police brutality through popular narrative and twisted anecdotes.

Removing criminal elements from communities creates safer communities, which is a prerequisite for people thriving.

<comment><USER28> When the NYPD did a work slowdown, rates of crime according to their own data went down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _widely documented disparities in how US law-enforcement agencies treat > people of different races and ethnicities_

Citation needed, particularly for Nature. As far as I can tell the supposed disparities are explained by the amount of violent crime the race and ethnicity commits (leading to more police interactions), but it's impolite to bring that up.

<comment><USER30> Would you also like a citation for the statement "racism exists"? There are some truths that are so plainly obvious and supported by mountains of data that it's absurd to demand a citation for them.

<comment><USER31> Part of maintaining these systems of white supremacy involves firstly disbelieving that such paradigms exist, and then secondly putting the labor of "proof" on the marginalized communities and their allies.

<comment><USER29> Part of maintaining the lie of "white supremacy" is never being very concrete, just ejecting dissenters with this weird homework assignment, or if pressed, handwave everything away with vague allusions to the unfalsifiable "systemic racism."

If the rare skeptic persists at this point you can now label them a "white supremacist," having conveniently shifted the goalposts on that term so that they are now an irredeemable racist, and proceed to burn their existence to the ground and salt the earth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This sounds like _exactly_ the opposite of what needs to be done in fact.

I do support ethical decision making, academics should be conscious of first and second order consequences.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand this. Usually the answer to bad algorithms is to produce better ones, through research.

What is the alternative? To give up and stay out? Ethical considerations are great. Define fairness and set a valid goal for the algorithm that takes fairness into account.

Do the signatories presume a non-quant approach would be less biased towards this supposed "systemic racism"?

</comment><comment><USER34> You'd think mathematicians of all people would be able to look at the numbers of 'killings' and see through the propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER35> The deeper question: should heuristic methods be used at all by police?

I mean not only artificial heuristics like machine learning, but the ones people have always used, e.g.: "acting really weird means the person is probably on drugs/commiting a crime".

All prejudices we use are heuristic techniques. Some are badly calibrated and give bad results (e.g. racism) but some may give accurate results (e.g. "poor neighborhoods have a higher crime rate"). Should these techniques be used when they're accurate?

<comment><USER36> Cops shouldn't be put in a spot to make decisions. Otherwise societal biases seep into those decisions. Our policing systems should be resilient against biases in the individuals policing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> i think that it shouldn't be boycotted, instead all such work should be done in public. And not just through the crutches of FOIA. It should be in the open to start with. There should be no NDA (except naturally for whatever PII is protected by law). Police should publish all the data. Any contracts on working with that data, any resulting models and their application should be in the open.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've always wondered if there's a probabilistic argument to show just how biased of policing there is by quantitating somehow the arrests made on a given subpopulation and somehow show how improbable it would be to randomly achieve a given arrest disparity to another subpopulation under the presumption of equal offending by those subpopulations. Is there any math to explore such a thing, sort of like flipping a quarter and hitting heads 5x in a row, that sort of thing.

To use a less charged example say I have three populations of fish, and all swallow coins in the same proportion as each other. In this universe sharks make up 10% of the fish population, sea-bass 30% and rockfish 60%. Exactly 5% of each fish type has a coin in their belly at any given time.

So if we have a world of 1000 fish, then we're talking 100 sharks, 300 sea- bass, and 600 rockfish. Of those 5 sharks, 15 sea-bass, and 30 rockfish have coins in their belly. To measure anything other than those counts of 5% per subpopulation, is there a way to measure how improbable that would be with random selection and subsampling and what not? Does this question even make sense and is well defined enough? My stats strengths aren't the keenest.

</comment><comment><USER39> So-called Black Lives Matter costs black lives by making policing less effective. The "Ferguson Effect" has been documented. Recent headline: "104 shot, 14 fatally, over Father's Day weekend in Chicago" [https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicag...](https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/20/21297470/chicago- fathers-day-weekend-shootings-homicide-gun-violence-june-19-22-104-shot) .

<comment><USER40> Roland G Fryer's recent work shows that for every investigation over a white cop shooting a black person allegedly wrongly, 179 extra people die due to the severe reduction in policing (up to 90%!) over the next two years. Roland G Fryer is a black economics professor at Harvard. His papers are working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and as such not peer reviewed. When he discovered in 2016 that (if you do the math properly) police are actually more likely to shoot a white person in a life-or-death situation, he said it was "the most suprising result of my career."

<comment><USER41> I found that work fascinating, and I've linked to it here before. Your summary of the finding is misleading.

>for every investigation over a white cop shooting a black person allegedly

This is false. Fryer saw the effect when investigations were in response to social media outrage. In fact, he called out that the effect is not seen when investigation are started in response to complaints through the regular channels.

<comment><USER40> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Everyone agrees that the police should be held to a high standard, but I'm getting tired of people preaching this thinly-veiled anti-police bigotry.

</comment><comment><USER43> Really, nature.com?

Is noplace safe from politics?

</comment><comment> tj-teej A lot of comments here are missing the point of boycotting, it's an expression of power with the concrete goal, it's not individual decisions of whether the mathematicians feel the work is "ethical".

Yes, having more liberals working in policing is probably more inline with the goals of those liberals than not, but that's not the point of a boycott.

If the police can't get the help they need from mathematicians because of a large enough boycott then it gets them to the table and forces them to reform.

I'm not arguing whether or not this will work, or making a value judgement, I just see a lot of comments which don't seem to understand this point.

<comment><USER44> If they can't get help from mathematicians, they'll try to do their own analysis with Excel spreadsheets or just use their gut instincts.

<comment><USER45> And if they can get by with Excel just as good, then they didn't need mathematicians in the first place.

If not, this will make someone unhappy. And this is the whole point of boycott.

The police is making mathematicians unhappy. Bad cop, no donut in any dimension.

<comment><USER44> It probably won't be as good, and the people they make unhappy will be the general populace, who will experience more crime and worse policing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> And identity politics breached into the final bastions of logic completing the spread of corruption and signalling the completion of the ritual to summon the lord of chaos.</comment>


On Cryptocoins And Quantum Computers... - <AUTHOR> http://wayneharrelblog.com/post/78460298154/on-cryptocoins-and-quantum-computers

<comment><USER2> >After the inception of quantum computers that actually work in our world, gazillion times faster and what not, what will happen to the cryptocoin mining world?

Cryptocurrencies probably will be least of our worries. We may have to rethink cryptography all together.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do any research ([https://encrypted.google.com/#q=bitcoin+quantum+computing](https://encrypted.google.com/#q=bitcoin+quantum+computing)) when you can just write a content-free blog post and submit to HN?</comment>


Show HN: Analyzes your social media comments to get psychometrics on personality - <AUTHOR> http://emotize.co/?testt <comment><USER2> "Okay"? Is all I can think about. I would try and provide more information, such as how people can _use_ this information.

I found it was accurate for me - but these sorts of things tend to be broad enough to be accurate to anyone with vague accuracy.

 _> natural language processing and sentiment analysis of your last 25 reddit comments!_

Perhaps expand on this or give a page on how you're doing the processing/analysis?

FWIW: [http://i.imgur.com/xOY3owP.png](http://i.imgur.com/xOY3owP.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure thing! It creates a machine learning classifier from a corpus of data using a unique algorithm which allows for a higher accuracy rate under the circumstances of natural language dialogue. The machine learning and text classification algorithm I employ is my own derivative of Naive Bayes, with added tokenization, named entity recognition, and Laplace smoothing. I have plotted the accuracy rate of the true/false positives of each of these machine learning classifers on a ROC curve, with their AUC probability from it. Here are the categories which Emotize's text classifying and machine learning algorithms classify the chatting input from the user into: Mood and Sentiment Polarity Classifier: True False Personality Analysis Conducted with the Five- Factor Model (FFM): Openness to experience inventive/curious consistent/cautious Conscientiousness efficient/organized easy-going/careless Extraversion outgoing/energetic solitary/reserved Agreeableness friendly/compassionate analytical/detached Neuroticism sensitive/nervous secure/confident Mood and Sentiment Polarity Classifier

Since Emotize's sentiment analysis is polar (either Negative or Positive), the algorithm can either classify positive correctly, or incorrectly. For 77.9% of the corpus phrases, the text classifying algorithm categorized the corpus data correctly. The dataset corpus that this text classification algorithm was trained with for use on Emotize was introduced by Pang/Lee, with 3,800 corpus phrases. 1/3 of them (1,280 corpus sentences) were excluded from the training set of the classifier and the ROC curve was calculated with the remaining corpus sentences from the training examples. This allowed the true/false outcomes to be known, and for the accuracy rate to be calculated by comparing the two outcomes. This data illustrates that Emotize's sentiment analysis machine learning algorithm has an accuracy rate of 77.9%, which is a 1.1% difference between the average human sentiment analysis detection accuracy rate to positive/negative texts, which is 79%.

Mood and Sentiment Polarity Classifier

Since Emotize's sentiment analysis is polar (either Negative or Positive), the algorithm can either classify positive correctly, or incorrectly. For 77.9% of the corpus phrases, the text classifying algorithm categorized the corpus data correctly. The dataset corpus that this text classification algorithm was trained with for use on Emotize was introduced by Pang/Lee, with 3,800 corpus phrases. 1/3 of them (1,280 corpus sentences) were excluded from the training set of the classifier and the ROC curve was calculated with the remaining corpus sentences from the training examples. This allowed the true/false outcomes to be known, and for the accuracy rate to be calculated by comparing the two outcomes. This data illustrates that Emotize's sentiment analysis machine learning algorithm has an accuracy rate of 77.9%, which is a 1.1% difference between the average human sentiment analysis detection accuracy rate to positive/negative texts, which is 79%. The raw, unparsed, and unorganized survey data used partly as the corpus data during the training process for this algorithm, is available here in the form of a ZIP file. Personality Analysis Conducted with the Five-Factor Model (FFM) Classifier

The corpus for the 5-factor psychometric machine learning algorithms were collected through a survey of 1,741 participants through the Emotize website. Emotize was able to build the 5-factor psychometric machine learning algorithm through this data. As in the Mood and Sentiment Polarity Analysis, 1/3 of the algorithm's original training set corpus of the classifier was used in the ROC Curve.</comment></comment>


Real-Time Object Detection with Phoenix and Python - <AUTHOR> https://www.poeticoding.com/real-time-object-detection-with-phoenix-and-python/ <comment><USER2> Congrats for the detailed post. I had a quick glance and was surprised you didn't mention ErlPort. It seems it could simplify things a bit or am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Erlport isn't in development anymore(hasnt it been replaced by ports?) , and the ports system of erlang and elixir nowadays is perfectly fine, a new porcelain would be cool tho

<comment><USER2> Ports aren't a replacement for ErlPort, they're a pre-existing mechanism of Erlang/OTP. ErlPort is a library that makes it easy to use ports with Ruby and Python. It's not actively developped but the community has managed to keep it compatible with recent Erlang/OTP releases. In my experience it works well and makes it a breeze to call Python from Elixir.</comment></comment></comment>


Zune HD apps are here... complete with pre-roll ads - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/zune-hd-apps-are-here-complete-with-pre-roll-ads.ars <comment><AUTHOR> It takes a lot to make me dumb-founded. This is one of those times. Microsoft isn't small, which means multiple people all agreed and signed off on this being a good idea? I feel like a small group of the same people decided that this, the 64 cell upgrade matrix for Windows 7, and windows 7 starter edition were good decisions. Please keep them away from the XBox, which is still one of my favorite consumer devices of all time. Actually a close second behind the iPhone.</comment>


Example of Subliminal Advertising - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg <comment><USER2> _This video contains content from Channel 4, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds._

What.. my country, the UK? The country where I have to pay an extortionate TV tax/license every year, part of which goes to fund Channel 4? How comes I can view this through a US-based VPN yet not directly in the UK when the content is from a _British TV station I'm paying for_?

<comment><USER3> I was surprised too. You can view the video on Channel 4 website: [http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-mind- control...](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/derren-brown-mind- control/video/series-4/episode-1/animal-heaven) (hopefully that's the one linked).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone who thinks this isn't real, go and read some mentalism books. Derren's ebooks and audio books are especially interesting for beginners.

I was staggered at the practicality of many of their ideas. E.g. I now recognise when someone unwittingly is using hypnotic suggestion in a conversation and it doesn't have the effect it may have. I'm able to pretend to be psychic at parties, and can pull of some pretty good cold reading tricks as well now.

It's worth learning how to do memory palaces just for fun (one of Derren's audiobooks has this, which is a good beginner introduction).

If you don't think he's capable of tricks like this without cutscenes, there are some videos floating around of him performing tricks better than this on other top class magicians which couldn't have been faked. I suspect he claims he's doing illusions because it makes it seem less powerful than it really is, and makes us seem more in control than we really are.

<comment><USER5> I lost respect for Derren Brown when he did the show where he guessed the lottery numbers. The video was clearly edited.

<comment><USER6> Yeah... _clearly_ is was faked. It was so obvious, I'm sure you spotted it before you read the detailed analysis of how it was done, right?

<comment><USER7> You're just trolling now. Could you be a bit more informative and point the rest of us, who don't know what this is about, to a link with that detailed analysis?

<comment><USER6> [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213841/Derren- Brown...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213841/Derren-Browns- lottery-trick-Amateur-film-maker-recreates-stunt-perfectly---magic-hocus- pocus.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's worth noting that Derren Brown is an entertainer / illusionist. For everything that you see in the video, there are likely a large number of things you're not seeing.

Instead of working his tricks under the illusion of them being "magic" he pins the workings on pop psychology - he may tell you that he's using subliminal messages posted along the route, and not mention a bunch of coloring books left in the room with similar pictures (for example).

It's a cool video, for sure; but the results are most likely not derived from "subliminal messages".

<comment><USER9> Even if this was the result of an illusionist, it highlights something I've often thought of, and has come up on HN a few times: that very similar products and movies will come out at just about the same time. The best examples I can give are from movies, and how close together certain movies are made and released, that have very similar plots:

Deep Impact (May 1998) -> Armageddon (July 1998)

The Illusionist (September 2006) -> The Prestige (October 2006)

Paul Blart: Mall Cop (January 2009) -> Observe and Report (April 2009)

These movies came out too close together for one to copy the other, so either the directors and studios were in it together on these movies (entirely likely I suppose: I don't know much about the movie industry; if anyone does know why this occurs, I'd be very interested), or one studio got wind of what the other was doing and made a "copy" before the original even came out, or else something much more subtle is going on.

In the startup / tech world, I think this happens too, because we all tend to follow the same blogs, news sources, etc – so any subtle (probably unintentional) message that makes one of us think of a new product makes 1000 of us think of a nearly identical product, at the exact same time. To me, that highlights execution is so important, and ideas are a "dime a dozen".

<comment><USER10> Three examples over more than a decade can be easily chalked up to coincidence.

<comment><USER9> I just picked three; here's some more:

(It still could be coincidence I suppose, but it feels like more than that)

[http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies...](http://www.11points.com/Movies/11_Damn_Near_Identical_Movies_That_Were_Released_at_the_Same_Time)

[http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in- pairs...](http://www.filmjunk.com/2007/03/07/when-movies-come-in-pairs- examples-of-hollywood-deja-vu/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Summary:

a) Guy hires designers to design a logo.

b) Guy feeds designers subliminal messaging on their cab ride to office.

c) Designers build nearly an exact copy of the logos / messaging that the guy implanted.

More about this guy here:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derren_Brown>

Definitely worth a look.

<comment><USER11> I read the Wikipedia article and there's an awesome section called "Waking Dead". I did some googling and found another holy-crap Youtube video, embedded here: [http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/derren_brown_waking_dead.ph...](http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/derren_brown_waking_dead.php)

Here is a description from Wikipedia:

In June 2005, a clip from the second series was widely circulated on the internet. In this clip, Brown claims to have created a video game he calls "Waking Dead" which "is able to put roughly 1/3 of the people who play it into a catatonic trance". In this episode, he places the video game in a pub to lure a supposedly unsuspecting patron into playing the game. He then "kidnaps" the catatonic "victim" and places him in a real-life recreation of the video game, having him fire an air gun at actors, pretending to be zombies and outfitted with explosive squibs.

<comment><USER12> That video is really crazy -- and quite fun to watch!

I'm just not really sure if something like that is ok to do to a random person -- might cause a serious trauma...

<comment><USER13> is it really even possible to do something like that?

<comment><USER14> If the person suffers from some form of epilepsy, could drop in a state of unconsciousness. From there should be easy to just recreate a similar environment to the previous one (if you find yourself, in a credible place full of zombies, with a gun, you will shoot, instinct).

Video games, offer a good immersion in the story, if played long enough (think of the current military training).

Though, the people in the video linked are just actors (and bad ones). Considered the complexity of organization, I was disappointed in the end: just touch the actor head with his hands, and the actor 'magically' (instantly) calm down, and return to the previous state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I gather this is the (reasonably old) clip with the logo designers?

Great clip - and I recommend you watch more of Derren Brown. He is by far one of my favorite entertainers because he makes very clear that everything he does is a matter of manipulative psychology and "sleight of hand".

Which makes it all the better because you spend the whole episode trying to figure out how he managed it - and wondering if the solutions (which he often provides) are actually real.

The other great thing about Brown is that he loves debunking pseudo-science and other rubbish. The section in one of his books about Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a fantastically well thought out debunking - he actually tried NLP at one stage in his early career and you can see his fascination with the idea before his final realization it was just pop psychology (his section on religion is equally compelling).

But best of all he pulls some awesome stunts/tricks. Highlights from the past include: playing Russian roulette, live.... (with blanks, but still lethal...) and (my personal favourites) "programming" a group of people to pull off a fake heist and paying for stuff (in the US as it happens) with paper instead of real money.

</comment><comment><USER16> This makes one wonder how much influence major websites are having on designers in general. If a designer is using facebook 10 times a day, will they submliminally add facebook style typography or layout on their next client site?

<comment><USER17> In the online real-time strategy game Starcraft, there is a term called the "metagame" that refers to (among other details) the current trends in how the game is played.

There can often be large shifts in the strategies that a majority of players are using. They often start with the professional gamer who first developed it and dominated with it, thus popularizing it. People end up getting exposure from watching the pros play, and also from having the strategy used against them. The more someone loses to a given strategy, the higher they will regard it.

I'm curious if this happens with design trends, as you were saying.

For more info on the metagame, see <http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Metagame>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> marketers are _NOT_ masters of persuasion. there's a selection effect at work that over time the companies best at this sort of thing have triumphed. sure, there's intelligent direction, but lots of effective marketing tools were discovered by accident.

</comment><comment><USER19> The 'trick' to this guy's videos is that he's making the viewer believe it's true.

</comment><comment><USER20> At first I thought this was just SPAM. But, I watched the entire video and found it quite intriguing.

After it ended, I watched the first few minutes again... and sure enough, I saw the same stuff once I knew what to look for.

</comment><comment><USER21> Watch carefully at around 1:15. When the camera comes is shot behind the designers, the envelop is not on the table. It is still in Derren's hand, as it should be. When the camera view switches to the one from behind Derren, the envelope (or whatever that is) is already seen to be on the table. Then it switches back to the view behind the designers, and he has it in his hand again and finally places it on the table. There's lots of other shading editing throughout.</comment>


How Apple sidestepped a 2013 crackdown on its Irish tax practices - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41889787 <comment><USER2> The issue with all of these major companies will forever be their "product".

\--- From: Silicon Valley (HBO)

Jack: Richard, I don't think you understand what the product is. The product isn't the platform, and the product isn't your algorithm, either. And it's not even the software. Do you know what Pied Piper's product is, Richard?

Richard: Is... Is it me?

Jack: Oh God! No! No. How could it possibly be you? You got fired. Pied Piper's product is its stock.

\---

When the only product a company cares about its stock, and they only care about their accountability to the shareholders, we will continue to see mass tax evasion schemes and using any/all methodologies (including illegal/unethical) to maximize profits.

<comment><USER3> wtf does this even mean. companies will always care about profitability for their owners. that's the whole point of starting and having a business

<comment><USER4> How is this the whole point of starting a business? Elon Musk is often quoted as using Tesla as a mean to promote electric transportation. Corporate structures that may never pay dividends to the owners such as gGmbH (gemeinnützige GmbH) exist and get used in practice. There's a ton of reasons to start a business, shaving off the absolute maximum in profits is just one.

<comment><USER5> What Elon Musk is doing is called amazing PR and guerilla marketing. I wish it wasn't so but I'm eagerly waiting to be corrected

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If passed, and for a brief period of time, Trump's dollar repatriation tax scheme brings home some of the +2 trillion dollars sequestered abroad - including some of the billions Apple has parked offshore.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop-tax-reform-plan- bil...](http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-gop-tax-reform-plan-bill-text- details-rate-2017-10)

There's something to be said for Apple's efforts to level the playing field against the favorable tax & public policies under which Samsung and Huawei Technologies operate. I'm not crying 'boo hoo' for Apple, but their tax strategies are understandable.

<comment><USER7> Or the US Congress could just change the law, close the loophole and require corporations to bring the money home anyway without any tax holidays...

<comment><USER8> I'm always skeptical when someone precedes "close the loophole" with the word "just", especially when the entity searching for loopholes has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. Closing loopholes is good, but they'll almost certainly find another one.

<comment><USER9> The thing, though, is that their main "loophole" currently consists of "play chicken with the government until someone passes a tax holiday". If you make it clear there will never be a tax holiday, but that you will instead keep adjusting the rules to go after earnings withheld abroad, at some point the rational choice for them will be to bite the bullet and repatriate the income.

As it is, the most rational choice for them is to keep waiting for that amnesty/tax holiday unless they badly need the cash.

<comment><USER10> In this case it's not a loophole in American laws. It's a problem with European and Carribean laws. This money was earned abroad. Blame the Irish, and now whatever this Jersey Island place is.

The EU made a move to close the loophole, apple found another.

I suppose there are loopholes with them selling IP assets to subsidiaries. But that's a different loophole than the one with them floating money around different countries. That money wasn't earned in America, so why are you trying to "repatriate" it? The better term would be "appropriate" it as it was never here in the first place.

Until it costs more for apple to pay interest on a loan (and/or penalties and fines) than they would pay in taxes, that money will never come here.

<comment><USER11> The US government doesn't, as a general rule, care if the money has ever been here. If you as a private US citizen choose to live and work abroad, you are required to file US income taxes and declare all foreign income. And depending on the precise details of the foreign government's treaty situation and tax rates, you may be required to pay the normal US tax rate on some or all of that income.

I don't know that it counts as a "loophole" exactly that the system for corporations works the way it does. "Loophole" sort of implies an unintended consequence, when the reality is that the laws are written with the express purpose of making this type of tax avoidance possible.

<comment><USER12> > If you as a private US citizen choose to live and work abroad, you are > required to file US income taxes and declare all foreign income.

Do you support this practice though? Does any other country try to tax people for income earned entirely abroad? This puts US citizens at a disadvantage compared to citizens of say, the EU.

<comment><USER13> The US and Eritrea are the only two.

In practice, the US has tax treaties with most other nations that permit foreign taxes paid (on income that would be taxable federally, so not on wealth taxes) to be taken as a dollar-for-dollar credit. That means that any country with a lower tax rate than the US will generally not increase your overall income tax bill. If you owed $X to a foreign country and $Y to the US for work done in the foreign country, you pay $X to the foreign country (regardless) and if Y is greater than X, you pay $(Y-X) to the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Point of debate:

Why should Apple have the US government lay claim to the revenue/profits that it generates in non US countries?

From the article: "This allowed Apple to funnel all its sales outside of the Americas - currently about 55% of its revenue - through Irish subsidiaries that were effectively stateless for taxation purposes, and so incurred hardly any tax."

If you support the taxation, do you also support the IRS taxing the wages of expats living abroad?

<comment><USER15> Doesn't it already? I've been under the impression that is one of the big "things" about being an American. You will always pay taxes to the US:

"If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, the rules for filing income, estate, and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad. Your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you reside."

Per [https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international- taxpayers/taxp...](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international- taxpayers/taxpayers-living-abroad)

EDIT: To answer your question, no, I don't like that, but I don't think "companies" should be exempt.

<comment><USER16> For the US to start taxing Apple's foreign income abroad is not like taxing an American living in Ireland (and even that is crazy). It's like if the US started taxing an _Irish_ person in Ireland[1].

However obvious it is that EU Apple is a sock puppet of US Apple, directly imposing taxes on foreign companies operating in foreign countries would be met with retaliation. It is not a smart nor a profitable trade policy.

[1] This actually does happen: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American)

<comment><USER17> >>For the US to start taxing Apple's foreign income abroad is not like taxing an American living in Ireland (and even that is crazy). It's like if the US started taxing an Irish person in Ireland[1].

I'm not sure I follow. Apple is an American company.

<comment><USER18> No, Apple US is a shareholder of Apple EU. The US can tax Apple US for whatever income they get from Apple EU, but they can't tax Apple EU

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you unplugged Apple's board (or given decision-making apparatus) and plugged in a (currently nonexistent) AI with the parameter "Maximize Profit," would you see a different result? I think not. I think we'd see things far more morally horrifying, in fact, with just enough PR makeup to ensure "maximized profit."

Unsure why we laud capitalism and then act horrified at the result. Here in America we've made our decision - profit rules above all else. It is more profitable to lobby congress than it is to upgrade a refinery, it's more profitable to auto-deny every health insurance claim than it is to provide the services your customers think they're paying for, it's more profitable to avoid taxes than not (as long as you can avoid breaking the law TOO hard).

<comment><USER20> If you unplugged the government's board (or given decision-making apparatus) and plugged in a (currently nonexistent) AI with the parameter "Maximize Power of Government," would you see a different result? I think not.

\-----

My point is that you are implying government is the alternative ("they will govern morally! academics will keep them in check! journalists will keep them in check!") then you need to rethink your conclusions

<comment><USER21> Government, by definition, has total power over it's space. That power is systematically reduced by the law (every positive individual right is a restriction on government). Reductions (law) are enacted by the people (in the US, the members of Congress are "the people"). If we can speak, if we can vote, then we have, theoretically, the ability to set the dial of government power anywhere from 0 (Somalia) to totality (North Korea).

There are obvious constraints on this slider. Set the slider too low, and a weak government is vulnerable to take-over. Set too high, the people are oppressed, unhappy, and will revolt.

The West's slider is pretty firmly in the middle, although it's uneven from policy to policy (it's set very low on gun ownership; it's set very high on commercial flying).

The US Federal government could acquire far more power in a variety of ways. For example, they could federalize local law-enforcement. They could run drones within our borders, for both surveillance and assassinations. They could outlaw independent media and control all media output (a la Russia). They could require us all to carry Federal ID and require us to show this ID to any law-enforcement on-demand, for any reason. They could require us to run special DRM/tracking software in our smartphones, and fine/jail us if we remove it.

<comment><USER22> Government, by definition, has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. But it doesn't (even in theory) have total control over its space. It's constrained by its ability to fund and apply force (military dictatorships aren't inherently stable), by its relationships with stakeholders both inside and outside its borders, and to some extent by the consent (or at least the acquiescence) of its public.

To put it in a more concrete sense, the government can decide to tax whisky at a rate of $1m per barrel. But it almost certainly doesn't have the power to enforce this against moonshiners, rights and law or otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Don't fault corporations for exploiting legal loopholes to save money... They optimize what they must optimize as operating businesses, and if we the citizens want to compel them to do something we must pass the laws necessary to do so...

Stop moralizing the behavior of companies. They aren't humans.

If you choose not to buy apple products in reaction to their behavior, great. If you want to convince your friends to do the same, great. But legal repercussions are reserved for law breaking entities. Loophole exploitation is not law breaking.

<comment><USER24> I disagree with this whole heartedly. Laws like this are not deterministic procedures, they are more like best practices. Can you seriously argue that Apple is not a functioning member of society? For many its a daily companion.

It should be held accountable to behave like a good citizen within society like everyone else and not find ways to sidestep the law.

If society can oust an individual like Weinstein and hold them accountable for their actions why not a company? A company consists simply of a group of individuals making decisions with moral implications no different than an individual. Demoralizing companies is the most irrational proposal I've ever heard. Capitalism is not a computer program, it is a set of guiding principles meant to operate within a society of well intentioned and reasonable individuals that are held accountable for their actions.

<comment><USER10> The entire and only purpose of laws and regulations is to dictate behaviors and punishments in a theoretically fair manner.

If a law is not broken, then any punishment would very likely be unfair as it would not be evenhanded in application.

I feel American political problems are rooted in having a professional political class, and a system in which politicians can enrich themselves by legislating.

If I were king, I would enact short term limits and regulation preventing any politician from increasing their networth while in office and for a period thereafter. Not applicable to myself of course.

<comment><USER25> > If I were king, I would enact short term limits and regulation preventing > any politician from increasing their networth while in office and for a > period thereafter

As an aside... I can't see this ever working, it wouldn't prevent monetary bribery, it would just arbitrarily defer it. I suppose it would at least make it less attractive, but that is subjective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When talking about "tax avoidance", it is important to be fair. There is only one question, "Is this illegal?", and that question has only two answers. Either it's not illegal, and the onus is on you to lobby for and define laws which achieve your goals, or to simply accept things as they are; or it is illegal, and the onus is on your prosecutors to prosecute.

Avoiding taxes is the rational, moral, and fair thing to do. People should not be punished for playing by the rules, because then it becomes arbitrary.

<comment><USER27> I think the EU knows very well that it needs a uniform tax code. This faux outrage - "I am shocked—shocked—to find a tax haven in the channel islands!" \- is just laying the political groundwork for the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Unpopular opinion: Since did "technically" following the law matter more than a companies reputation, both with the public and with the government and society in which it resides.

If my neighbor built a giant flashing neon sign facing my bedroom window and it was somehow "technically" within the bounds of the law I would still be ticked off, even if my neighbor provided me with iCloud sync. The problem is that Apple avoiding taxes isn't as blatant and irritating as a neon sign in our window, but it SHOULD be when we go to pay our taxes. We should feel immediate outrage at anyone that isn't pulling their weight, especially when there are individuals in government trying to get us to pay even more in our taxes to make up the difference.

Get apple to pay their damn taxes first. ONLY then you can talk to me about upping my taxes to fund something like universal free college education.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe developed countries should agree on minimal profit tax for multinationals?

E.g. 10% of profits for companies that have revenue larger than X mln / year?

Right now it's race to bottom and there will be another loophole. So much of energy of smart people goes to tax minimization instead of finding a useful way to reinvest those money.

<comment><USER29> +1! You can try to apply morals to companies in an internationally competitive environment all you want, but it ain't gonna happen. The only way to ensure they can't play governments against each other is to effectively make a cartel. How you'd get over the collective action problem and prevent countries from defecting is beyond me though, would probably need something like the OECD to pass a resolution.

Most current tax havens are UK dependencies, so such an agreement would have a significant impact. Additionally, individual countries could do something like what the US does with its citizens - if you've paid a sensible amount of tax abroad, great; if not, pay the difference here. You can locate wherever you want, but relocating to save on taxes becomes moot.

<comment><USER30> The UK doesn't benefit from protecting these dependencies and we're a change of government away from seeing them all brought to heel.

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/05/uk-could- impose...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/apr/05/uk-could-impose- direct-rule-on-tax-havens-says-jeremy-corbyn-panama-papers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _> "...We do not stash money on some Caribbean island."_

Nope. Just Jersey. Much less exotic!

<comment><USER32> For those interested:

[https://youtu.be/KPLXrkTZ8mo?t=41s](https://youtu.be/KPLXrkTZ8mo?t=41s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is all a bit misleading. The general tone of the article is "Apple's not paying their fair share in Europe." The bigger context here is these are taxes owed mostly to the United States. That's where most of Apple's value-creating work is done and that's traditionally how international tax law works. What's happening is, Apple is parking funds in offshore tax havens while lobbying Congress to lower the tax rate for repatriating funds to the U.S. from ~40%, which they think is too high. So all this talk of "avoiding" taxes is true but it's a temporary avoidance.

That matters because it affects what would happen if Europe were to raise taxes. It wouldn't necessarily mean that Europe starts getting Apple's taxes moving forward. It would just eliminate the possibility of parking funds in Europe like this. Maybe it would prompt Apple to look outside Europe for havens. Or perhaps it would impact the stalemate that exists between U.S.-based multinationals and Congress. Ultimately, Congress doesn't want to miss out on those taxes in the long run and Apple doesn't want to get double- taxed when they repatriate. That's why Cook calls it "political crap"... Changes probably wouldn't benefit Europe in the long run.

<comment><USER34> > that's traditionally how international tax law works

No, that is how US tax law works. Most jurisdictions traditionally do not tax foreign earnings, but exempt them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think the clash between globalization and countries (sovereign governments) is just being delayed for no good. It is proving more and more that globalization doesn't work with sovereign governments.

Case in point: Let's say the US government gets strict with Apple and taxes it heavily. Apple already produces its iPhone hardware in China. Its sales are derived from the whole world and the Chinese market might become bigger than the American one. So Apple could just move to an off-shore jurisdiction that is out of hand of the US government.

Boom. Apple escapes the US tax penalty. They might even be able to carry on their US engineer development while being listed as a Hong Kong or Singapore company. The only way to stop that, is for the US to pressure these smaller off-shore city-states.

But smaller and other non-major countries can't do that. So big corporations will be able to screw them. In the end, you'll either end up with weak governments which end up breaking down under the negative financial effect; or have the US rule the world "fiscally".

It seems that we are going for the latter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act)

</comment><comment><USER36> Why is it that criminal laws are judged on a case by case basis and tax code is so inflexible?

For instance, in states that allow shooting trespassers, you could buy a patch of sidewalk and shoot anyone that walks into it. I doubt that you would get off scot-free since in criminal law you always consider context.

Why is that notion of context impossible to include in the tax code and leave some interpretability to the judge? This would make these loopholes more risky and therefore less attractive.

<comment><USER37> Criminal cases in nearly all jurisdictions in the United States are not judged on a case-by-case basis. They are judged on precedent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > What could Apple buy with its offshore cash

The examples are ridiculous. How many teachers, nurses, doctors could you employ with that money, had it been properly taxed?

</comment><comment><USER39> Apple has now issued this statement on their tax payments [https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about- apple...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple-tax- payments/)

</comment><comment> aaron-lebo _Steve Jobs: What if the computer was a beautiful object? Something you wanted to look at and have in your home. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone 's hands?

John Sculley: We'd be talking about the most tectonic shift in the status quo since...

Steve Jobs: ...ever._

Wonder if Sorkin could make a $1,000 phone and tax avoidance sound good? When did Apple change from being about the average person to being about the ultra rich, or has it always been this way? Maybe it's an unethical company not worth supporting anymore.

Way too much of the tech industry has come off as immoral and greedy this past weekend with these revelations. How do we reboot?

<comment><USER40> What's this got to do with the tech industry? Doesnt every industry have this problem. Ikea is particularly well known for their ability to minimise tax. Mining/resources companies are currently under a lot of scrutiny in Australia for the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Techmeme summary: _BBC: Paradise Papers: Apple shifted to new tax haven of Jersey, after crackdown by European regulators of its Irish tax arrangement, sought to keep move secret_

</comment><comment><USER42> Apple employees earn a lot of money and pay taxes in the jurisdiction in which they live. Companies use their profits either to give dividends to their shareholders (and these are taxed), or to invest in new products or business activities. I think it is counter-productive for governments to go after company taxes.

</comment><comment><USER43> other details:

[https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise- papers/apples-s...](https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise- papers/apples-secret-offshore-island-hop-revealed-by-paradise-papers-leak- icij/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I wonder who else uses those tax tricks. Why isn't there somekind of SaaS that enables tax avoidance for everyone ?

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm with Apple on this one. The government can make it illegal if they wanted to. But it's not so Apple of John Doe should not be bothered for doing legal things when it comes to taxes.

If what they're doing is illegal, slap them with a fine too (like EU did...it's currently on appeal i think)

</comment><comment><USER46> >What could Apple buy with its Offshore cash?

Just 1 month of 2017 US Federal Gov outlays.

If you make Apple pay all its accumulated cash as taxes, you can run the US Fed Gov from January 1st to January 31 (IF my calculations are correct)

</comment><comment><USER47> Maybe Britain should invade Jersey?

<comment><USER48> I don't think you can invade part of your own country. The UK can pass any laws it wants in Jersey.

<comment><USER49> Jersey isn't part of the UK. The UK is responsible for the defence of jersey, so that's something of a bargaining chip, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> anybody seeing a message asking for a flash update in the first video? [https://i.imgur.com/mIQIKLx.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/mIQIKLx.jpg)

possibly a Bad Rabbit injection? -_-

</comment><comment><USER51> Test!!!

</comment><comment><USER51> need another karma point for keybase.io somone wanna help me out with that?

<comment><USER52> Try getting someone to help you out by, you know, posting something meaningful.</comment></comment>


DDR4 Memory Will Be Released By Next Month - <AUTHOR> http://www.hardwarepal.com/ddr4-memory-will-released-next-month/ <comment><USER2> What an amazingly vapid article. First off, Crucial's comparing DDR4 release specs to DDR3 release specs; in the 6 years since it came out, DDR3 has more than doubled in speed. Second, because memory controllers need to be altered to support DDR4, you won't be able to buy it in a computer for at least another year until either Intel or AMD will release chipsets compatible with DDR4. Finally, there's absolutely no discussion in there about the interesting parts of DDR4, like it moving to a pci-e style architecture of multiple channels. So no, don't hold your breath waiting for DDR4, you'll just pass out and hit your head on the coffee table.

<comment><USER3> It's just blogspam. Here is the original source, which according to The Wayback Machine was created almost a year ago: [http://www.crucial.com/promo/DDR4.aspx](http://www.crucial.com/promo/DDR4.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That can't be right. Dance-Dance Revolution III is not out yet.

<comment><USER5> I thought it was strange that such an article made it to the frontpage. I guess I assumed a lot of people on Hacker News play dance games...

<comment><USER6> Hahaha my first thought exactly...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But what systems will be able to use it? Afaik Intel announced DDR4 for Haswell-EP which is supposed to come out in late 2014.

<comment><USER8> Even then, won't this be of little impact to practical performance benchmarks?

We are not talking about bypassing the limitation imposed by slow interconnect busses.

I've been out of the hardware scene for a while. Someone more-knowledgeable please correct me or back me up.

<comment><USER7> well, it's also going to save some power and allows larger amounts of memory. I'm just wondering why they would put it on the market in a month when nobody outside R&D labs has the hardware to use it yet.

<comment><USER2> Altera at the very least has FPGAs you can buy right now that offers DDR4 interfaces [1]. Also, I imagine a lot of this is directed towards OEMs who can get the early silicon samples of Haswell-E chips so they can start testing with them.

[http://www.digikey.com/product- detail/en/10AX066H4F34I4SGES/...](http://www.digikey.com/product- detail/en/10AX066H4F34I4SGES/10AX066H4F34I4SGES-ND/4305237)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aren't they using DDR5 on video cards?

Sheesh people just started buying 1150 chipset motherboards, they have to buy again?

<comment><USER10> I think that's GDDR5 which is something different (and roughly comparable to [edit: DDR3]).

Also, for this comparison, hasn't DDR3 had much higher speeds than 1066MHz for a while now anyway? isn't it up to 1866MHz? so the comparisons claimed speed improvements seem exaggerated. I'd be interested to know the real world difference this would make anyway. For logistical reasons I recently had to order a workstation with DDR3-1600 rather DDR3-1866 memory but couldn't find out how much of a real world impact this would have.

<comment><USER9> If it is based on DDR3, video cards that use it are significantly faster than the same card that uses DDR3

<comment><USER11> If you mean it's faster than the same card using _G_ DDR3, that's because GDDR3 is based on DDR2.

Fantastic naming scheme, isn't it?

<comment> Tuna-Fish There are also plenty of cards that use DDR3, without the G. GDDR5-using cards are much faster than them.

<comment><USER11> Huh, wasn't aware of that. Is it mostly budget cards that aren't really intended for gaming, or do you see it in low-end gaming cards as well?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Critical vulnerability Pork Explosion cripples security on some Android phones - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/10/12/critical-vulnerability-pork-explosion-revealed-by-jcase-cripples-security-on-some-phones/ <comment><USER2> Yet another case of Binary Blobs Are Evil And Wrong.

Now, I wonder what would happen if someone were to issue the special fastboot command on an unaffected device?</comment>


When to start charging - <AUTHOR>

Hi I was wondering when is it the right time to start charging for what your startup is selling. I'm particularly interested on startups that are based on a B2B model. Should I start selling right the second I have something working or should I give it for free the first months? <comment><USER2> If you are going to give something away free, make clear the avoided cost. Say something like: "A monthly subscription of WorkBetterFaster is usually $1250, but because you are offering to give us feedback (or helping us work out bugs, or whatever) we are going to give it to you free for a year!"

It also works for steep discounts. Steve Blank would suggest that you ask for some money (maybe 90% off) just to prove that they can and will spend SOMETHING on it. So 2 lessons:

1\. Make clear what it would cost otherwise 2\. Charge something to show that they person can and would pay.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Never_ give _anything_ away for free! If people aren't willing to pay for it, your product has no value!</comment>


Show HN: Fully automated email newsletters, social media sharing for any website - <AUTHOR> http://cansend.com/

<comment><USER2> I didn't go through the hassle of creating a throw away twitter account so I could explore. To get feedback on the project you need to remove this hurdle. Let us see some features/examples on the landing page:

Step 1: Integrate with Google Analytics Step 2: Push Popular Content to Facebook and Twitter (show a sample tweet & fb feed item maybe) Step 3: Automatically create beautiful email alerts (show a 'beautiful' email example)

I like the idea but it all depends on the execution. I'd want some assurances that I wouldn't be spamming people. Some sort of approval queue would be good so I could see what cansend recommends and then approve/deny/merge these proposed tweets/feed items/emails before they go out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking the site out. It does seem that in my haste to release this I've neglected the marketing side a little. Will work on bringing the sell on the front page and about us up to standard...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is still very raw, so hoping for some feedback from this post...

How does it work?

We integrate with Google Analytics to discover the most popular recent pages on your website. These then get automatically pushed to any Facebook page or Twitter account. We also integrate with Mailchimp to automatically generate and send out beautiful newsletters from your hottest content.

Try us with no risk on a throw-away Facebook page / Twitter account / Mailchimp list.

This currently powers the social media sharing and newsletters for SgForums: <https://www.facebook.com/SgForums> <https://twitter.com/sgforums> [http://us2.campaign- archive.com/home/?u=d03e91fc72f6454ee7b8...](http://us2.campaign- archive.com/home/?u=d03e91fc72f6454ee7b8e53eb&id=aa6892756d)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you need some more info as to how it works. A simple page explaining it or a walkthrough video?

Upvote and comment because I want to see all Show HN's on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback and upvote. Yes I need to work on the sell and call to action to get people to try it more...</comment></comment>


Dashcam captures crash of ATR72 in Taipei - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fWhYJNZt08

<comment><AUTHOR> What I find interesting about news reporting here is two technosocial trends:

1) The proliferation of dashcams is giving footage of lots of things that used to have no video material, like plane crashes or a meteor in Siberia - <USER2> addition to the actual point of dashcams, recording what happened in traffic accidents

2) You hear of major incidents first through social media, not traditional news. I watched this in Youtube before it was in CNN, BBC or other major Western news sources. However, what's in Youtube seems to be captured from local TV broadcast.</comment>


Parallelized Decision Making (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://arkwright.github.io/parallelized-decision-making.html <comment><USER2> Going to play devil's advocate here. This is one of those "strategies" that looks great in retrospect but doing this up front will be nearly impossible within the confines of a non-fictional organization. This is so highly dependent on multiple critical factors such as resource availability (do you even have enough devs to allocate to this parallel strategy?) and business buy-in (good luck telling the business that you are going to divert all these tech resources in order to throw out all but one of these experiments many months from now). Unfortunately I can't even get companies I work at to agree to 20% time let alone telling them we can't make decisions so we're going to burn huge amounts of cash trying to reach one in parallel.

Like the article said, people are much more cost averse. People includes leadership and product. Both of which will almost always decline this strategy.

<comment><USER3> >Like the article said, people are much more cost averse. People includes leadership and product. Both of which will almost always decline this strategy.

If you're saying this, then call it like it is: you're calling leadership and product stupid. Because unless you substantively disagree with the logic in the article, you're agreeing that the parallel experimentation strategy does all of:

reach a solution faster,

cost substantially less,

and result in greater wealth generation later.

Later here meaning only "within 5 years," so not even that much later. If you're a business, what else do you care about than wealth generation?

I thought the article was very, very good.

<comment><USER2> The logic in this article is way too cut and dry in almost every way. For example the article exclaims that "parallel is always faster than serial". That assertion does not hold up in software engineering and it doesn't hold up with teams either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some counter points: I'm not sure that parallelizing the experiments would keep the same 4 month implementation time frame. It would also fragment the knowledge base, as fewer people would have been working on the one version that gets pushed. I also have my doubts about what happens when two of the experiments seem equally promising.

Interesting idea nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER5> GraphQL hype train stopped already. The only people who talk about it seem to be those trying to monetize it.</comment>


Someone started dumping Lockheed Martin stock just before Trump's tweet - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/808354101272645633 <comment><USER2> I guess we could look at the data....

The largest reported trade is 669 shares, so if someone was "dumping" stock then they didn't do a great job.

The last trade before 8:26 was at 8:20:40 for $260.05 according to Bloomberg so the gap down the poster is showing I can't even reproduce.

Almost all trades at this time were odd lots this morning, so again if someone was dumping,they didn't do a great job.

Trading was even very sparse until 8:26 when Trump tweeted and then the market activity picked up, which is exactly what you'd expect wouldn't it?

Now, in favour of a conspiracy, early morning activity was much busier than the previous week, but still very small.

I'm now embarrassed for myself that I even spent time on this:(

I thnk the best thing you can take from this is a quote I saw from Jim Greco on Twitter:

[https://twitter.com/jgreco/status/808310517752365056](https://twitter.com/jgreco/status/808310517752365056)

> Trump is the ultimate case for diversification. You don't want to hold an > individual stock when he tweets

 __EDIT __I think what this guy is seeing isn 't a trade at 8:25, but rather his charting software just joining two points, one at 8:20 and the next at 8:26 when trading starts around Trumps tweet.

<comment><USER3> You are not going to see the correct volume for pre-market trades. I checked with my trading account and the poster is correct. The trades were before Trumps tweet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Trump doesn't write all his tweets, a digital media company he hired publishes the majority of his social media content.

[http://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504520364/how-trump-waged- an-u...](http://www.npr.org/2016/12/06/504520364/how-trump-waged-an-under-the- radar-ground-game)

Somebody there knew what the next tweet would be, and traded based on that info.

</comment><comment><USER5> To me, it looks like a bunch of people who don't know much about the market, jumped to conclusions.

A. It wasn't that large of a selloff B. There were many indications prior to the announcement that LHM would be taking a hit

</comment><comment><USER6> Twitter says he posted that at 5:26 AM, not 8:26 AM.

<comment><USER7> According to which timezone?

<comment><USER6> All times EST. :)</comment></comment></comment>


How we hacked our office doorbell using Slack, MessageBird and Now - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mollie.com/how-we-hacked-our-office-doorbell-using-slack-messagebird-and-now-b2042c060e29 <comment><USER2> Considering you don't actually check who the person is, wouldn't it be easier to just leave the door unlocked during business hours?

KISS and all that...

<comment><USER3> Looks like from the video that it's a multi-tenant building, seems like they created an easy way for anyone who wants to enter to do it without actually being authorized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The main advantage that this overengineered solution has over a doorstop is that no one will upvote an article on HN about a doorstop, and then your company loses out on the publicly.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, seems like an astroturfing attempt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So wait a sec, do you open the door to anyone without checking who is it?

<comment><USER7> If that's true, then on top of that, they've now broadcasted that fact to the world. And they're a payment services company.

<comment><AUTHOR> You guys are right about that. But first to be clear. This is NOT our HQ, but an office not working on our core- platform. People sitting in this office can look out of the window to see who's standing at the door before opening the door.

Also, please note, this was just a fun small project for us. Making an image with a camera and posting to Slack would be better. We had much fun making this without putting a lot effort in it, that was for now the point.

We are aware of all the security issues and are not using this in production at our main office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FTA:

> MessageBird sends a couple of extra parameters with each request, including > a callID. When a new request comes in, we'll make an API call to > MessageBird, to verify whether this voice call actually happened and if it > happened within the last 2 minutes. We also used the query parameters > destination and source from the incoming webhook call and matched these > against the data from MessageBird. This would make sure that only "real" > doorbell calls would trigger Slack notifications.

This approach seems to be reinventing the wheel of validating MessageBird webhook calls. From their docs ([https://developers.messagebird.com/docs/voice- calling#handle...](https://developers.messagebird.com/docs/voice- calling#handle-callbacks)):

> Each callback HTTP request is signed with a signature, a base64 encoded HMAC > found in the X-MessageBird-Signature HTTP header. To ensure the callback is > coming from the MessageBird platform, we strongly advise to validate its > signature by calculating the HMAC of the callback and base64 encoding it. > Using HMAC-SHA256, the HTTP body is the message and the token of the related > webhook resource is the secret. Only handle the webhook if the computed > value matches the signature in the HTTP header.

</comment><comment><USER9> Opening doors to everyone, using 3 products to do so and depend on other people's code & services in the process... I think I will pass on you guys for my payments.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did you hack it or just integrate to it?

<comment><USER11> To be fair, they had to both point _and_ click.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems the definition of 'hacked' is getting looser and looser these days. Sounds like you just consumed services from a SaaS, thats 'hacking' today.

</comment><comment><USER13> Related solution built on AWS SQS and a Pi - which takes a picture of the individual ringing the bell.

It's an email alert - but it'd obviously be trivial to connect up the slack API to pass the message + image to a channel.

[https://www.hackster.io/taiyuk/iot-doorbell- faee18](https://www.hackster.io/taiyuk/iot-doorbell-faee18)

</comment><comment><USER14> We use a few Dash buttons and a macOS app (with Node.js backend) as our doorbell solution.

[https://github.com/calltracking/doorbell](https://github.com/calltracking/doorbell)

It's not the most beautiful thing, but it gets the job done of letting us know when someone is at any of our 3 doors.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm going to be 'that guy'....

> How we automated our office doorbell using 3 products already available.

Wrong usage of the word 'hacked' in the original title.

A more hacky way to do it, would have been getting a voice modem dongle that takes SIM cards, and writing software directly to detect/answer the incoming call, verify it's the doorbell, post to slack and wait for auth., then play a WAV back out through the dongle (like a voicemail greeting). Same result, less dependence on 3rd party services, learn a lot in the process.

It's all well and good using 3rd party services if they are available, but sometimes these articles are akin to me writing a post on 'how I found something on the internet using google'.

</comment><comment><USER11> I just hacked my shoelaces.</comment>


Apple to disrupt notebook space with radically redesigned MacBook Pros - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/02/10/apple_to_disrupt_notebook_space_with_radically_redesigned_macbook_pros.html

<comment><USER2> Instead of making devices ultra thin I really wish manufacturers would simply fill up the freed space with batteries.

Not only Apple MacBooks, this goes for mobilephones as well. Samsung Galaxy half an inch thick and a runtime of one week please.

<comment><USER3> Apple's simplified product line is a very good thing, but they're only hurting themselves by not throwing a bone to customers with more specific needs. The Air itself finally satisfied the sub-notebook market that Apple all but ignored for a decade, and it was fantastic for their bottom line.

In a perfect world, they would have a 15 or 17 Pro model with an empty bay for BTO options, such as a 2nd battery, an optical drive, a platter HD, or a second SSD.

But we all know they won't do this. They'll cook the SSD onto to the motherboard to make it as crazy-sexy-thin as possible, the tech press will ooh and ahh, they'll sell like hotcakes, and the power users will cling to the last generation as long as they can, hoping in vain that Apple will eventually come around.

<comment><USER4> I agree with the customizable bay idea but also that it probably won't happen. Whenever I hear rumors about moving the mechanical drive in the MBP to the SSD in the MBA, I wonder about how they're going to satisfy all of the people who don't care/know about read and write speeds but wonder why their storage space got cut in half.

<comment><USER3> I wonder if Apple pays any attention to the users who put a 2nd HD in the optical bay? Anecdotally, it seems common among power users, but I'd be curious to find out just how widespread it actually is. And you're right, even regular users will be baffled when their shiny new laptop has less storage than their crummy old one.

All I know is, unless affordable 2TB SSDs magically appear out of nowhere, I'm never going back.

<comment><USER5> I use an optical bay caddy, too. Maybe Apple is betting on Thunderbolt external drives - those look pretty attractive...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something about AppleInsider's writing makes me feel like I'm reading an old copy of the _Soviet Union_ magazine.

Maybe it's the constant talk about industrial production power and revolutionary breakthroughs that, after years of careful planning, will soon be unveiled to the shock of hapless competitors.

<comment><USER7> Imagine if the Soviets had had the same follow through.

It's hard to overstate the shock of PC and smartphone "hapless competitors" at Apple's industrial production power and breakthroughs.

<comment><USER8> Given that in the last quarter the iPhone alone generated more revenue than all of Microsoft _combined_...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It makes sense and it wouldn't surprise me if by the end of the rollout there's no longer a "MacBook Air" or "MacBook Pro", just a "MacBook" in 11, 13, 15 and 17 screens with the CPU and RAM gradually increasing with screen size.

Seeing as how my MBP is almost 3yo, I'll have to pick one of these up. Let's just hope it runs ubuntu well.

<comment><USER10> > _Let's just hope it runs ubuntu well._

Historically Macbook support under Linux has been quite poor. Unfortunately, as time passes Apple hardware (and software) becomes more closed and proprietary. I don't know if I'd buy another macbook now. I've ditched windows in 2002, and I may well ditch MacOS soon, though there is no PC laptop remotely half as nice as macbooks are.

<comment><USER11> I was looking for an ultrabook and was disappointed at the alternatives. I ended up going with a MacBook Air, even though I was trying to avoid it.

However, Ubuntu supports it almost perfectly. I actually can't think of anything that doesn't work, except perhaps that sleep woke up on me once while the lid was closed (a pretty bad bug). Everything works fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So they will release beefier Airs and call them MacBook Pros? Radical.

</comment><comment><USER13> There was a rumor about a high density display similar to the iPhones with more than 300ppi. That would be the best and most important improvement, since OSX has to be adjusted heavily. I dont get it that we still use displays with 100-130 ppi like 10 years ago.

<comment><USER5> Is that practical, though? My eyes start to hurt from a 1680x1050 15.4 inch display, and I simply can't imagine working with a Full HD screen (maybe just for photo/video, but not for everyday work), unless it's 17+ inches in size...

<comment><USER11> Why not? The letters would be the same size, just smoother.

<comment><USER5> Is that the case with Mac OS X? On Windows laptops, the text becomes smaller as the resolution is increased, and the DPI scaling sucks...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So what exactly is new? It doesn't take an "Apple insider" to know that the MBPs are due for a refresh, that SSDs are the way to go, or that the next model of an Apple product is going to be lighter and thinner than the previous iterations…

</comment><comment><USER15> I remember thinking they wouldn't make it in the mid-90s. I had just bought one of the pizza box PowerMacs and it felt like an expensive mistake. Now it's $14B in profit for the quarter. It took my company all of 2011 to earn in EBITDA what they earn every 3 hours.

And I'll be contributing soon. The only thing that's kept me from getting an air is the lack of an 8GB model. If it's 15", even better.

</comment><comment> buff-a I like being able to swap out my HD for an SSD, and later a bigger/faster SSD. My 17" MBP is a mobile workstation. A 17" Air would suck for my purposes.

<comment><USER3> If they keep the 17" as the only thick and beefy model, I'll be contented; that seems like a reasonable compromise. It's insane to go Air-thin on that one: clearly anyone with a laptop that huge is more interested in power than portability. But now that Jonny Ive is at the helm... well, let's just say I don't think the man really gets us any better than Steve did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's the only way to go for laptops. I swapped a 17" 3 kIlograms MacBook Pro for an Air and I sure am not going back. My only gripe with Air: it's still too heavy.

Unbeknownst to many, Air's SSD is replaceable, you can upgrade it up to 480GB with an Air-only blade from OWC.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hope this is right. I'll be replacing my MBP in the Summer, and have been wondering if the trade down to 4GB memory and lower CPU speed in an Air will be adequately compensated by the SSD, or if I need another Pro. An Air-style Pro would be just right for me.

<comment><USER18> As always depends on what you are doing. I have a 13" air (2011) and it just flys. I use it for programming (PHP,nginx,mysql,memcached,...) and some photoshop now and then (loads so fast I though at first that it was broken:)). The only issue I have with it is that some badly programmed flash on web sites will spin my fan like there's no tomorrow (really loud). Oh that happens when playing games too, but that seems reasonable to me. All in all this is the best computer I have owned or used (and I've never used OSX before).

The most surprizing thing was that I came from a 15,4" laptop to a 13" and I don't feel being cramped at all, I can work on my stuff easily, which I wasn't able to do on my old laptop. The resolution is just perfect (at least for me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> wonder what this will do to the noise these things make. I had the 2011 Macbook Pro 15" i7 with dedicated graphics and under heavy load it was as noisy as a vacuum cleaner :/ Cant see how that gets any better with even thinner devices, despite the fact das Ivy bridge might improve heat a bit.

But still for power users doing graphics intensive stuff, the noise is an issue.

<comment><USER20> Just getting rid of spinning HDDs makes cooling easier. They generate an insane amount of heat.

<comment><USER19> if anything, the SSD i had in there made it even worse because the system wouldnt have to wait for the HDD all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It sounds like Apple is attempting to gear up before ultrabooks become established as market favourite.

The article mentions that the model referenced doesn't have style or panache .. but I've seen a couple of models that do.

<comment><USER21> Ooooh. I wrote something that isn't universally supportive, while commenting on a 'fair and balanced' (cough) Apple Insider article.

The down-vote(s) will surely teach me a lesson :)</comment></comment>


A single night of sleep loss impairs working memory in women, but not men - <AUTHOR> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsr.12651/full <comment><USER2> As I have come to expect in the world of random psych studies, this is the exact opposite of what I thought has been firmly established knowledge in this field and so we probably know less than nothing about the truth and I guess I am just going to discount all of this research (on both sides) as "fake science" now :/.

[https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/news/20030613/men- hand...](https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/news/20030613/men-handle-sleep- loss-worse-than-women)

[https://www.cantechletter.com/2017/11/women-handle-sleep- dep...](https://www.cantechletter.com/2017/11/women-handle-sleep-deprivation- better-than-men-do-russian-space-program-test-finds/)

<comment><USER3> Both of those studies also had tiny sample sizes, so sure enough we know nothing. But instead of discounting potentially valid research, just look at it critically. You won't always be able to tell but all of these are so bad as to be obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> n=12

<comment><USER3> Also, despite this they still didn't manage to prove anything. Their own data shows that ALL objective scores - sleep deprived, men, women, etc. are within one standard deviation of each other.

This is so obviously bad that I am tempted to engage in conspiratorial thinking about why it was posted here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bullshit.

I am disappointed to see this crap all over the news. It seems people are hungry for evidence that progressive orthodoxy is flawed - no matter how extraordinary the claim. As if men were magically immune to sleep loss!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_sleep_deprivation_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_sleep_deprivation_on_cognitive_performance#Working_memory)

<comment><USER6> You are exaggerating the claims of the study. Nowhere does it says or suggests that men are magically immune to sleep loss.

<comment><USER7> The title of this submission seems to imply it heavily.

> A single night of sleep loss impairs working memory in women, but not men</comment></comment></comment>