Mark Zuckerberg's Free Basics argument doesn't address conflicts of interest - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/disconnect-mark-zuckerberg-scam-indias-poor <comment><USER2> What's mind boggling is the amount of money FB is spending on advertisements & lobbying so that they can be allowed to be "charitable". What's funny is that Mark's getting upset that people don't want "disingenuous charity".

There are a thousand effective ways in which you can help the underprivileged. Partnering with ISPs to decide what's "basic" internet is not one of them.

P.S. Many professors from India's top tech institutes, startups, entrepreneurs & other eminent people have spoken against "Free Basics".

[https://github.com/net-neutrality/no-free-basics](https://github.com/net- neutrality/no-free-basics) \- Feel free to add more with a Pull Request.

<comment><USER3> > P.S. Many professors from India's top tech institutes, startups, > entrepreneurs & other eminent people have spoken against "Free Basics".

Or essentially everyone that would not be a target market for this service.

<comment><USER4> Do they have to be? They can be smart enough to rationally weigh the pros and cons here.

Really, there aren't any pros of Free Basics when you take into account the fact that a similar, net neutral business model can and has been implemented (by Aircel). The details are different (data cap or speed cap instead of walled garden), but the business model is the same -- get people to start using the internet for free in a limited way, and some of them will come to the non-free services. But net neutral. You can basically take Facebook and the walled garden completely out of the picture and it would probably have similar efficacy.

Why can _Facebook_ and Zuckerberg support free basics -- when they're not even _from_ India, but these smart Indians cannot oppose it because they're not the target audience?

<comment><USER3> Well, I just think its a little classist to have these elite Indians decide what free service should or should not be allowed to be provided to poor Indians. They're essentially deciding the sacrifice that the poor will make (by forgoing this service) to serve their ideal (net neutrality). Their words and beliefs bare no cost but will be involuntarily paid for by others.

The pros are that its a service that people have a choice to use so if a customer freely chooses to do so, that person is obviously off. If you, or Aircel, want to provide a more competitive service you are free to do so. A different model that you feel is more effective is not an argument to restrict another competing model.

<comment><USER2> > elite Indians decide what free service should or should not be allowed to be > provided to poor Indians

What's you definition of elite ? There's a very diverse background of people who have spoken against "Free Basics". Also keep in mind, that your average Joe won't even bother to read the fine print about the pros/cons of "Free Basics". So in a way, you have to depend on someone with a keen interest to voice an opinion.

<comment><USER3> I didn't mean "elite" as a slight, but rather as a generalization of those that are speaking out against a service that they will likely never use. It's as though I find something distasteful and I don't personally benefit from it so I favor banning it. It is no cost to me since I don't personally benefit from the product or service. This type of attitude leads to the social acceptance of a lot of censorship (e.g. vulgar material, I have nothing to hide, etc).

I believe the keen interest lies with those that are going to potentially use the service. These "elites" don't know the people that could potentially use this service. They don't know their values, their circumstances, or anything about them. It is presumptuous to think that those outside groups somehow know whats best and can choose for those being forced to forgo the service what sacrifice they should make for their ideals

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My main concern with Free Basics is that it's literally a reinvention of AOL, using a different shade of blue.

Moreover, I find it extremely hypocritical of Mark Zuckerberg to push a system that would have prevent his own company from becoming as big as it has. Put another way, he would be screaming bloody murder if it was Google offering Free Basics, and forcing everybody to access the web through Google+.

<comment><USER6> But a free AOL. Net neutrality makes sense when you pay for it. When someone offers you a free service it is hard to complain about the quality. You might refuse to call it "charity" but I don't think there is anything wrong with it.

<comment><USER7> It's not so simple. If the company who has monopoly power[1] provides free services, or if the free service can be used to gain monopoly power, there is possibility for market failure.

If it would be OK to do anything as long as the service is free, it would make sense for Chinese government & Baidu & Huawei consortium to provide High Quality Free Basics for every American who wants it.

\---

[1] Remainder to avoid fruitless arguments: monopoly power ≠ monopoly [http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Market_failures/Monopoly_po...](http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Market_failures/Monopoly_power.html)

<comment><USER6> But you can say the same of any free service. What about free news website, free email services, etc? They all could (and do) drive competition out of business. But they provide a service which is just good enough for most people. And if people want something better they will pay a premium for it (like access to The Economist website).

I am sure that most Indians who have the means to pay for broadband will not want to be restricted to that facebook service. In fact the more restrictive facebook makes it, the more likely it will not prevent competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's odd that the article regards privately owned schools, hospitals, and libraries as absurd abominations. Private schools are a huge part of the American education system, and they're not the problem. Even when the funding is public, lots of jurisdictions in the US are moving _toward_ privately owned schools, i.e. charter schools. The Catholic Church runs private schools around the world and is widely lauded for it. A big portion (most?) of the best American universities are private. 80% of hospitals in the US are private. Private is good.

Can someone explain for me how Free Basics would be harmful for anyone? If there's an alternative way to bring full internet connectivity to people who currently can't pay for it, wouldn't that alternative beat Free Basics in the market? The article briefly mentions "public internet access" as an alternative, but the Indian government has already failed the 400 million Indians without electricity, and 1 billion without internet. "The Indian government can probably get the money somewhere" reveals a total misunderstanding of the scale of the problem and places a laughable faith in the Indian government, the incompetence of which is in fact the single largest factor holding India back. Why not give market solutions a chance?

<comment><USER9> Private is also classist. Either you're already wealthy and the cost doesn't matter; or you're working harder and saving less money for retirement as that money is siphoned off on a kid learning how to be a good worker bee and being socialized.

Private schools exist from an aristocratic history. England has this nonsense also. Meanwhile there are countries who take public education seriously and there is essentially no such thing as private education. Look at how Scandinavian countries do this. And the Germans are offering U.S. college students free degrees, many of them stay in Germany. And by and large the education level in these countries is more uniform, where in the U.S. it's again, quite classist.

So if you're in favor of feudalism, yeah private school is a great idea.

As for Free Basics, I think it's for the users to decide whether it meets their needs or not, but for that to be possible Facebook shouldn't be referring to what they offer as an essential service. Facebook itself is not essential. A full, unabridged Internet connection, is essential. But that's not what's offered. Further, the connection with the user requires dual certificates, so Facebook can see what everyone's doing even if they aren't using Facebook proper - something an ISP doesn't even get to do. The harm is the obfuscation.

<comment><USER10> Germany has a three tier class system built right into its education system.

<comment><USER9> it is not a class system, it's integrating some aspect of meritocracy. It is performance, not wallet based.

<comment><USER11> Performance is highly correlated with household income for fairly obvious reasons, regardless of system.

<comment><USER9> Of course, but there's a difference between income being relevant yet incidental, and embracing it as a completely appropriate model to relish in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "If Zuckerberg really wants to sell Free Basics, he needs to stop trying to convince people that it's some self-sacrificing public service and admit what it actually is: a company offering a service that's (supposedly) beneficial for both users and the company in question."

This is a good argument. This is not a charity act but a business decision. Although it brings something good to the Indian, Indian also helps Facebook to expand its business.

<comment><USER3> There is nothing wrong with expanding a business by providing a service. Every service that we use voluntarily, charitable or otherwise, makes our lives better off otherwise we would not be using it. I can't help but think that the poorest in the world are more helped by the efforts of private profit motivated enterprise than that of governments and charitable organizations.

> The World Bank and African Development Bank report there are 650 million > mobile users in Africa, surpassing the number in the United States or > Europe. In some African countries more people have access to a mobile phone > than to clean water, a bank account or electricity, the agencies add. [0]

Perhaps its time to rethink what organizations are best suited for raising the standard of living.

[0] [http://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/may-2013/africa%E2%...](http://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/may-2013/africa%E2%80%99s-mobile- youth-drive-change)

<comment><USER13> It doesn't have to be either-or, and I'm saddened that so many people still think that government solutions are always superior to private ones, or the other way around. In fact both have their strengths and weaknesses, and we should learn to evaluate which one fits a given problem better - or even structure a combination of both. For instance, mobile phones are a great success story of market economy, but mobile _networks_ universally start to suck as they grow, and have to be heavily regulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Indian politics has trained people well to see through Zuck's strategy and his TOI article only exposes his immaturity about what works/doesn't work in India.

It's not difficult for people to understand this initiative violates net neutrality and is an attempt to create a "separate internet" where budding entrepreneurs/content providers have no choice but to pay Zuck to be onboarded. This is akin to license raj ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licence_Raj)) that was demolished way back in the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER15> This argument is a non-starter. We do indeed allow private organizations to create libraries. Moreover, the conflict of interest exists even when the state (not to be confused with society) participates. How do we make sure our public schools don't become institutions where the pupils are 'educated' to blind obedience to the current president, for example?

<comment><USER16> > We do indeed allow private organizations to create libraries.

Are those for-profit and not readily regulated?

> Moreover, the conflict of interest exists even when the state

But in this case the state is a democracy. Ideally conflict of interest is non-existent.

<comment><USER17> Sure. Typically they are specialized in a single type of content. For example, JSTOR is a self-described "digital library" which provides journal access. Your local movie rental store (or its competitor Netflix) provide entertainment or educational content (movies and shows).

Of course they can be regulated just like any business or service. So could this service, in fact. Forcing net neutrality for all service providers would cut out a lot of crap and I'm convinced it's a long-term boon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So Mark Zuckerberg made billions selling people's data contributing to a business model which makes the world a worse place in exchange for a bit of entertainment. Whatever, at least people semi-voluntarily signed up for that (it wasn't obvious to many what the deal is before they got a big chunk of their life locked in there) and they are getting their fix on regular basis.

So how is Mark using the billions now? Right, actively trying to make the world much worse and closed place. A place which would prevent him from starting his business in the first place. What world we live in that such individuals are so successful :(

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't get why Zuckerberg's or Facebook's intentions are even relevant.

It's a fairly simple question. If Free Basics, which violates net neutrality (Facebook has never denied this, instead responding by saying that poor people internet is more important than net neutrality) is allowed, then every ISP in India will have the legal ability to violate net neutrality.

Indian providers are already terrible, and will almost certainly abuse their powers to have both website providers, and customers, pay more to access services. They will be providing different packages with the lowest tier only giving Facebook access, the next one adding Bing, etc...

What we know as the internet, and the best parts of the internet, which allowed companies like Facebook and Google to flourish in the first place, cannot exist without net neutrality. Allowing Free Basics is essentially India kissing the internet good bye, in favor of AOL style walled gardens. Admittedly, there will be a wide variety of walled gardens to choose from, and some of them may even allow you to talk to your friend in a different walled garden.

But the internet won't exist anymore.

</comment><comment><USER20> Check this link for some good arguments against Free Basics - [http://www.firstpost.com/india/iit-iisc-professors-call- face...](http://www.firstpost.com/india/iit-iisc-professors-call-facebooks- free-basics-misleading-and-flawed-in-statement-to-trai-2565542.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't get it. You can completely ignore using Facebook.com, and just use the free access to Wikipedia, among other useful local services.

When I first got a Kindle, it had unlimited free access to Wikipedia. I thought this was the coolest thing ever, and didn't think about net neutrality, just a cool bonus that came with the device.

<comment><USER22> You might not use Facebook, but the vast majority of other users will and that's where the real problem lies. Unlimited free access to a non-profit website like Wikipedia alone would be great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems like the same old mentality of someone from outside a particular society trying to impose rather imperious ideals in a manner that leaves them open for criticism of their motives.

Zuckerberg might spend a lot of money on this, but an entire continent's opinion is turning against him.

This is not going to go well for him.

</comment><comment><USER24> India should do what Romania did: nothing. Deregulate all telecommunications and create a free for all. They'll have the fastest internet and the cheapest phone system with a couple of yours. It's not as if Indians aren't as much or even more entrepreneurial than Romania (which still has a head start over the neighboring countries because of this).

Corruption will likely not tolerate such a free market without getting a slice of the pie, that's the biggest stumbling block.

<comment><USER4> Market forces are slow in some markets. It's very hard to get started in the telecom industry in india, so you pave the way for an oppressive ologopoly instead. There's no reason to believe that Romania's telecom industry and market is comparable to that of India.

<comment><USER25> What are the reasons to believe that it wouldn't work?

ANRC (the body that governs communication) in Romania I think did more (by doing very little) for the Romanian economy than any other government agency. It's funny because we used to hate them for not allowing us to get more ethernet cables on the public infrastructure (which we payed for a nominal price) because of some safety issues. I was working as and admin working for one of those free for all ISPs. It's crazy how good and cheep the internet has become since then.

What happened is that in a small city (250k people) we had about 30 independent ISPs and we had gigabit peering between ourselves. Scroll 5 years, big companies come in and buys us all out, then slowly start replacing ethernet with fiber. Scroll another 5-10 years, most have fiber in the cities and gigabit connections at very low prices.

It can be argued that the little guys (ISPs) got a little screwed especially those who haven't been bought, but overall the romanians got a really good internet and that's all that matters in the end.

The take away here is that once people started getting used to low-cost mostly local network + internet within a highly competitive environment, the "big" ISPs had no choice than to provide at least an equal service.

It's true, that was a different time, but now it's even better, because hardware is a lot faster and cheaper!

<comment><USER4> Looks like in your case you had an overregulating authority that loosened up.

That's not the case in India.

Also, note that India is much larger and setting up a network is a much harder investment to make. If there's an oligopoly already active, they could simply not let new ISPs get a foothold unless you set up all the infrastructure on your own. And part of the problem of low internet usage is low internet connectivity in rural areas (which is probably less of a problem for Romania). That's not going to be solved by Facebook or market forces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Poor people needs food and shelter, not Internet. That comes later when basic life needs are met. Free Basic is not even Internet. It's just Facebook with perks.

</comment><comment> V-2 _" imagine that instead of building a public school, the area allowed a private company to build and operate the local schools. If you lived in the area, would you be in favor of these plans? Of course not, because the opportunity for conflicts of interest is too great"_.

It really irks me when someone tries to convince me by speaking on my behalf. Yes, I might be in favor on these plans.

 _" Exxon could build a school and then teach kids in its science classes that fossil fuels are the healthiest way forward for our planet"_

And states don't do that? Pick up a history book from American, French and Russian public school, see if they tell the same story...

 _" Penguin could build a library and stock it in a way that pushed more people towards reading (and buying) Penguin's books"_

So what, as long as other publishers aren't forbidden from doing the same thing??

</comment><comment><USER27> If it isn't too much of self-promotion, I'd like to leave a link to an article I drafted when I first saw that advertisement: [http://awal.js.org/blog/thoughts/2015/09/12/internet-org- fac...](http://awal.js.org/blog/thoughts/2015/09/12/internet-org-facebook- little-zoo.html)

tl;dr: even if we agree that FB isn't aiming at personal benefits here, internet.org isn't useful. reasons in the article.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why it is not called facebook.org and zero rating for only facebook?

Many facebook posts include links/videos to other sites, and almost all of these will not work unless you pay facebook tax.

Most indians use whatsapp as it is cheaper(free) and offers more features than SMS, that actually means people use data probably 2G, but vast majority of these customers are not using facebook. free basic is to get the whatsapp users to become facebook users.

<comment><USER8> It's not only Facebook; that's why. Anyone can apply to join the program. [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/how-to- sub...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/how-to-submit)

<comment><USER29> With Facebook's permission of course..

There's the facebook platform and all sorts of startups that have been excluded for competing with Whatsapp or Facebook or being a threat to facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > But it's difficult to agree wholeheartedly with Zuckerberg's mission in > India when he's apparently willing to make such a misleading, fallacy-ridden > argument in an attempt to win more Indian supporters and discredit his > opponents.

Unfortunately this is a winning strategy politicians follow in India to garner support. Its getting better with education and the Internet, but it still works to some extent.

</comment><comment><USER31> Facebook's free 'basic internet services' have been shut down for 3 million Egyptians

[http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-free-basic- internet-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-free-basic-internet- services-shut-down-in-egypt-2015-12)

</comment><comment><USER32> 1\. Free Basics and Facebook (aka FB). Definitely not a coincidence.

2\. What services are available on Free Basics? It does not seem very easy to figure out what you can get access to.

3\. Internet.org by Facebook.

4\. Facebook is the gatekeeper of what sites are available on Free Basics.

</comment><comment><USER33> > instead of building a public library, the town allowed a private publishing > company to build and operate a library

But that's not what the alternative is. It would be correct to write "instead of having _no library at all_".

<comment><USER34> That's incorrect. People in India already have access to pretty cheap internet. A one day ~50MB GPRS pack costs $0.1 and can be voluntarily renewed daily. That's ₹10. And for the extremely poor(who are being targeted by Facebook) that's not a big sum to pay. You'd consider that if they can spend $50 on a phone, they can spend that much once in a while to access critical information like whether and crop prices. This is disregarding that monthly edge packs for up 3GB data are available for less than $5 from most providers and the speeds are very usable.

There is not such a huge barrier as is being portrayed by Facebook. A better comparison would be a very cheap book rental store which can lend you anything you want to a free private library which controls what and how you read.

<comment><USER33> Cheap != free. Free option on a market where cheap options exist != "instead".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> well, as you would say in Hindi: _Kutte ki dum kabhi seedhi nahi hoti_.

<comment><USER24> English translation?

<comment><USER36> A dog's tail can not be unbent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We changed the outrageous title to something that more neutrally expresses the substance of the article. If anyone can suggest a more accurate neutral title, we can change it again.

</comment><comment><USER38> Is it better or not, for Indians, to have this or not? It sounds like a significant advantage to Indians, and to Facebook, for this to go through.

</comment><comment><USER39> I may be naive but I think Zuckerberg is actually trying to good rather than hoodwink India. It's a possibility anyway.

<comment><USER40> I don't believe he's trying to hoodwink India. I believe he sees a lot of potential for business growth here and I _think_ he also wants to do something good and feel like he's helped make a difference somewhere.

The problem is that he's trying to kill both those birds with one stone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> test

</comment><comment><USER42> >Free Basics might still be the best short-term solution for some people. I'm not interested in trying to decide for others what might be right for them.

Oh, so you agree that it shouldn't be banned, which means you're taking Facebook's side, against the advocates that do want to ban it. Glad that's clear.

</comment><comment><USER43> nd at the end, FB addicts gonna use it rather than the poor section of Indian society. Zuckerberg has an evil plan is disguise which he considers that the world doesn't know, however, everyone knows.

<comment><USER44> I feel "evil plan" is a stretch. The worst case of malice you can attribute to FB is they are trying acquire huge untapped user base but disguising the fact under sheet of public good.

<comment><USER45> Well that's exactly what Internet.org and Free Basics is. Transparently so. FB has 1.5 billion users in a world with 7.3 billion people. It's not an exaggeration to say that pretty much everyone 13 and up with an Internet connection that wants a Facebook account, has one. That means that the only way you can grow your user base is to increase the number of people with an Internet connection.

Zuck and Facebook do bill Free Basics as a charity, but yet, they're not giving the Internet, they're giving poor people what Zuckerberg wants. They're not hooking up Twitter are they? They say it's because of "agreements", but really it comes down to the fact that they are paying the telcoms money, and they want an audience for their ads. Now that's not immoral, but it's not a charity, so don't expect people to say how great and benevolent they are. Now FB could pay for the real Internet, but they don't, because they're not a charity. It's this mismatch between rhetoric and actions that really pisses people off.

We saw this before when Google first started operating in China. The Google Triumvirate said, "Hey, isn't some Internet better than no Internet?" (The exact same argument that Zuck is making today.) Of course, the Chinese had Baidu at the time, and Baidu actually worked better for Chinese language search than Google as well. The real reason Google wanted in China wasn't to spread knowledge, but rather to get access to the 1.4 billion potential users, because pretty much everyone with an Internet connection outside of China already used Google.</comment></comment></comment>


"I hope this is as successful as Apple's purchase of NeXT." - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Keith-Rabois-How-do-you-feel-about-Slides-sale-to-Google

<comment><USER2> I'm having trouble grokking the gaming space these days. I get it: companies are buying these glorified skinner boxes (Zynga, I'm looking at you) & hope that adding 'gaming' components to normal products will make them more sticky. I understand the value of that, hell, I'm doing it myself. But, _really_ , Google?! Weren't you about "organizing the world's information"? What do you think is going to last? What's going to stand on its own 10 years from now: "We organize information" vs. "We build better games"?</comment>


Ways You're Making Your Employees Less Productive - <AUTHOR> http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2013/09/24/10-ways-youre-making-your-employees-less-productive <comment><USER2> Hypocrisy. Telling employees it is "up to them" while in reality giving them no resources, control, nor choices -- or none that matter, i.e. not really listening and responding to them.

Aka "passing the buck".

<comment><USER3> Exactly.

I have had this boss, unfortunately. To a t. He'd tell me a project was "completely up to me," that I was "the leader" of it, and that I should feel "totally empowered" to make decisions, allocate resources, etc. He proceeded to show up to each of my project meetings, often late and out of context, disagree out loud, offer unsolicited opinions, micromanage, and badger me into implementing his ideas -- thoroughly undermining any ostensible authority I had over the project, or reversing any progress the team had made up to that point. His ideas came in two flavors: a) completely off-the-cuff and unconsidered, and b) foregone conclusions (what the team and I liked to call his "pet" ideas). Both of these types I had to entertain, and often to implement. And of course, when it came time for him to chip in with the execution in any way, or even to explain his rationale, he'd bolt for the door.

Essentially, I was his task rabbit. If a project went to shit, he'd claim it was "mine" and be able to pass the buck accordingly. If it went well, he'd swoop in and scoop up the credit. Attempts to talk to him about it in one-on- ones went nowhere. Attempts to "check in" with him prior to meetings, in the hopes of pre-selling him on a plan, went nowhere. He'd be dead set on a pet idea, and it was my job to "totally lead" the execution of that idea.

Bosses like this are toxic. I'm not sure I've ever found a good way to work successfully with this personality type. If this describes your boss, figure out how to transfer, how to escape, or how to develop Vulcan-like mastery over your anger and your pride. Some tigers can't change their stripes, and I can guarantee you that this kind won't.

<comment><USER4> I have been on both sides if this, although as a boss I have always tried to give others the glory and take the heat. Also I probably do swoop in with ideas, but I don't leave people high and dry to figure them out.

The solution is really to speak up for yourself. You may have to remind your boss that he put you in charge. I can be a tough boss but I will listen to any argument and will be glad to be proven wrong or told that my idea is going on the list for later. But - you must convince me that your idea is better, or more practical, or that you at least have thought things through.

I know it can be tough because bosses tend to be older and, maybe in some cases wiser (but not always). As the boss your pressure is to keep a team moving forward and so you grow used to delegating. I had to be reminded that I gave somebody a project once and I felt really bad about not letting him do it on his own. I really just didn't want to see him fail, but I was micromanaging. It was difficult for him to bring it up to me but I was glad he did and we got past it.

I'd say - face it head on. If the boss still won't listen, then start figuring out another employment opportunity.

<comment><USER3> _" The solution is really to speak up for yourself. You may have to remind your boss that he put you in charge. I can be a tough boss but I will listen to any argument and will be glad to be proven wrong or told that my idea is going on the list for later. But - you must convince me that your idea is better, or more practical, or that you at least have thought things through."_

I'm fine with that, and believe me, I tried on almost every occasion to take that approach with this boss. Whenever I did, I'd get some condescending reassurance that he'd respect my plans, etc. From there I figured, as you suggest, that perhaps he didn't understand how I'd been thinking about something. Attempts to walk him through my thinking, or my team's line of thinking, would be met with a mixture of apathy and hostility.

It became pretty clear, in this particular guy's case, that he wasn't really interested in empowering anybody. He had some ideas, and he wanted them executed. Over the months, that became the path of least resistance, and we all just sort of accepted it. Unfortunately, many of his ideas -- perhaps even most -- turned out to be pretty bad.

Wisdom was probably the one thing this guy really needed, to be honest with you. He was older than I was, but only by 3 or 4 years. He was the type of guy who'd either been good or lucky early in his career, and who'd risen to a position of leadership for which he was probably not ready, or to which he was just not suited. He had been a strong individual contributor in his early days, and what I saw in him was an individual contributor uncomfortable with delegation and management. And the frosting on the cake was a big dollop of narcissism. (Not all inexperienced or uncomfortable bosses are narcissistic or bad; this guy happened to be, pretty nakedly).

 _" I'd say - face it head on. If the boss still won't listen, then start figuring out another employment opportunity."_

True. But depending on the case, I'd amend that to "Face it head on _and_ start figuring out another employment opportunity." Those things should happen in parallel, because, depending on how big a narcissist your boss happens to be, and depending upon the organization's culture, facing the issues head-on could result in your getting blacklisted within the organization, or negatively reviewed for insubordination.

It's possible your boss is just looking for you to step up. But it's equally possible he's just a douchebag. Hope for the better case, but prepare for both. Hope you don't have to pull your parachute -- but pack one, just in case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My faves:

4\. Pretending To Know

3\. Not even attempting to communicate (or "communicating" through hints.) Particularly in high-pressure situations.

2\. Microcontrolling. (By which I mean: grabbing control of some low-level aspect of the project, or of the team communications, thinking you know better than the team member who already took action to such an extent that you don't need to explain your actions. See also (1), (2).

And my favorite of all:

1\. By your very presence. Seriously -- things like overbearing demeanor, poor tact, sexist or jockish language etc can not only be toxic, but instant invitations for your team members to not only begin their job searches immediately, but look forward to the task with vim and glee.

<comment><USER6> Number 2 is what Joel Spolsky calls "hit and run management".

 _" hit and run management because managers tended to pop up unannounced, give some silly order for exactly how they wanted something done, dammit, without giving any thought to the matter, and leave the room for everyone else to pick up the pieces."_

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html)

This is the most frustrating when you have spent an entire afternoon carefully considering different approaches to solving a problem and figured out all of the non obvious but important edge cases that show why a particular approach won't work to have someone come in and give it five minutes consideration and say "nah, we should do it that way, it'll work out".

<comment><USER7> AKA Seagull Managers ("Fly in, make a lot of noise, shit on everything, fly out").

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_manager](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagull_manager)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fun pop-psychology on hiring people by 1-10 ratings and what it says about the hiring manager.

If you hire an n, where 0<=n<=5 then you must be an m where n<m and 1<=m<=6. Because incompetent people want to hire more incompetent people to make them look good and secure their position in the organization.

If you hire an n, where 6<=n<=7 then you must be an m where n<=m and 6<=m<=7. Because reasonable competent people don't want to bring failure into an organization, but don't want anybody showing them up.

If you hire an n, where 8<=n<=10 then you must be an m where 8<=m<=10 and there is a high probability that n>=m. Because truly competent people want to bring in other truly competent people and aren't threatened by people with higher levels of competency, and even might welcome it.

<comment><USER9> Interesting - sounds like a more detailed version of "A's hire A's, B's hire C's".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems self-evident to me that if you treat experienced, talented, highly paid developers like minimum wage workers then you're either losing out on much of that experience and talent or you're paying far too much.

</comment><comment><USER11> #5 is one of my favorites. One of my co-workers refers to one of our managers as a "drive-by" manager. He agrees with the _concept_ of carving out chunks of time - even remotely - to focus. In reality, if you are on-site, he is constantly "driving by" with things that could have waited or been communicated via IM/email.

</comment><comment><USER12> _" 8\. Insisting on doctor's notes in order to take sick days."_

Is this common in the US? Even for a single day?

I'm in the UK and my contract states (from memory) that I have to get a doctors certificate after five contiguous days of sickness. I'm fairly sure thats been the same for all other companies I've worked for.

</comment><comment><USER13> Process, management, de-empowerment, hiring B people.

<comment><USER6> Somebody has to hire us "B people".

<comment><USER14> I understand that you are using self-deprecation to poke fun of the elitist parent comment, but the fact is that nobody is required to hire "B people".

<comment><USER6> There aren't very many "A people" to go around, most people who think they are hiring A people are hiring B or C people.

Most of the useful work on the planet is done by B or below people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I live in San Diego (where a huge Intuit campus is located) and have known lots of people who work there, but none that work remotely with any regularity. I'm curious what #7 (let employees telecommute when they need to) means at Intuit. I wonder what their definition of "need to" is.

<comment><USER16> I worked at Intuit in the bay area for about three years. During that time, I knew many people that would work from home regularly 1-2 times a week. I really preferred working on my multi-monitor setup in the office (I lived easily bikeable three miles away from campus), so I never took advantage of the liberal WFH policy while I lived out there (except for when waiting for cable man visits and the like).

After three years working in Mountain View, my girlfriend got into a PHD program at the University Wisconsin and Intuit was A-OK with me working remote. So I packed up all my office gear, got issued a Desktop VPN VOIP phone, and moved to Madison, WI. I did that for about two years before I left to cofound a company with several longtime CS friends here in Madison.

So, yeah, Intuit is pretty liberal with telecommuting when it fits the situation (as long as you don't abuse it). : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Allowing unrestricted Internet access.

Seriously, whitelist only the domains necessary for the job. If it's programming, I would only recommend specific StackExchange sites, GitHub, and any documentation sites. Some people have horrible self control and will waste all day on the Internet, despite that they may be great programmers and can actually get stuff done if they put their mind to it. It's not even that the job is boring, it may actually be exciting, and their project may be something they really enjoy, yet the distractions are still more entertaining to them. Like reading and interacting on Hacker News.

<comment><USER18> > Allowing unrestricted Internet access.

On the contrary - filtering my internet indicates that you don't consider me capable of self-regulation... I prefer being treated like a responsible adult - responsible for my great code or my slacking off, whichever I choose.

I greatly value this level of respect from employers.</comment></comment>


Human intelligence is overrated (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://togelius.blogspot.com/2012/05/human-intelligence-is-overrated.html <comment><USER2> Multiplying 3842 by 543 is very hard for humans. They're slow and inaccurate. Computers do it perfectly at incredible speeds.

 _Inventing multiplication_ is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do.

For another analogy, moving ten tons of rock a thousand feet is something humans can do, and have done for millennia. It's very slow and difficult. A bulldozer can do the same thing in minutes. But a bulldozer would never, ever have a _reason_ to move ten tons of rock.

<comment><USER3> Doug Lenat's _Automated Mathematician_ (AM) apparently did "discover" multiplication by itself:

[http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/ai- course/lenat.txt](http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/ai-course/lenat.txt)

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

Of course, you could argue that multiplication was implicitly there in the rules and facts it was programmed with.

<comment><USER4> Let me know when humans invent something not governed by the rules the universe was programmed with ;-)

<comment><USER2> Poetry.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't go that far. Maybe, "witty", but I wouldn't call it Shakespeare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > the argument goes both ways here as well: take an arbitrary human (such as > yourself, if you happen to be human) and try placing this human in the > cockpit of a landing jet plane, in a semiconductor factory, in the oval > office of the White House, in the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant, on a > horseback in Siberia, or equipped with only a spear in the middle of the > Amazonas jungle. There are humans that have been programmed to do well in > each of these situations, but it is very unlikely that the human you were > thinking of (perhaps yourself) would know what to do in more than at most > one of these situations.

This part seems wrong. I think most humans would make a decent go of most of those situations. Not as good as an expert by any means, but they'd be capable of doing _something_ , unlike a computer program.

<comment><USER6> While your point is true, I'm not sure it is relevant to measuring intelligence. The human has two advantages in this situation: First off, all humans have agency: they can take action to do things. If you want the comparison to be remotely fair you need to compare a program that has agency to see the same stimuli as the human would and have access to the same range of actions. Not a particularly difficult programming task.

If you put an untrained system and an average person in the crashing plane situation, the average person is probably going to do better, but it's because your average person /has/ some training in what to do in this situation. They've been exposed to enough culture to know that the joystick is the main way of controlling the plane and that planes moving towards the ground at steep angles are likely to be bad, and probably know generally what action to take that might help the situation.

Fair comparisons would be say, an untrained program vs a baby, or a system trained with some general knowledge of vehicle control vs an average person. I'm not really sure that humans win out in either of those comparisons.

<comment><USER5> > First off, all humans have agency: they can take action to do things. If you > want the comparison to be remotely fair you need to compare a program that > has agency to see the same stimuli as the human would and have access to the > same range of actions. Not a particularly difficult programming task.

Huh? I think the whole point is that that's a very difficult task.

> Fair comparisons would be say, an untrained program vs a baby, or a system > trained with some general knowledge of vehicle control vs an average person. > I'm not really sure that humans win out in either of those comparisons.

The human got very little direct training. They mostly got exposed to the environment and picked it up. You can give the computer program the same number of years and the same environment as the human got, and it won't do much good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All this talk of 'intelligence' gets confusing - it seems like the core distinction people are talking about most of the time with 'general' or 'strong' AI is really something more like Artificial Consciousness.

This has issues too - if consciousness is an emergent property of a neural net with the right feedback mechanisms and training material then even if you have the right feedback mechanisms you could still create an artificial consciousness that's stupid.

You see this problems in humans - depending on a lifetime of 'test data' exposure (parents, peers, environment) and the underlying brain neural net 'hardware' you can get people that believe a lot of stupid things.

Maybe consciousness doesn't have to work that way and we're just dealing with a local maxima of evolution (or some reproduction/sex drive constraint), but we might end up stumbling on the ability to create a neural net with the ability to emerge a consciousness before we can craft the type of consciousness we'd want.

Actually understanding how the system works is harder.

<comment><USER8> Intelligence exists in human culture, not in individual humans. A high IQ has limited usefulness without a culture it can learn from and operate in. (Ask any octopus.)

Human culture persists outside of individuals, so the occasional genius can change culture _and culture stays changed_ because collective memory is altered. This doesn't happen with individual animal intelligence.

So I don't think we'll ever see a true AGI. What will happen instead is that collective cultural memory will improve, and connections between human brains will become faster and deeper - just as they have done for millennia.

If there's ever a singularity it will be created by human brains operating together in a new and vastly accelerated shared state, not by silicon brains that have been programmed to appear sentient.

<comment><USER7> Your first point is what I was trying to get at - basically the culture is the 'test data' and IQ would be the capability of the 'hardware' or genetic make up of an individual brain/person in this case.

I think your point about intelligence not existing in an individual is too narrow, but ultimately that comes down to how you decide to define intelligence.

Not sure I agree that AGI won't happen - in fact I suspect the computing power we have now is good enough to do it, but we're just missing some insight with how.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "Humans are quite stupid in many ways, compared to computers. Let's start > with the most obvious: they can't count. Ask a human to raise 3425 to the > power of 542 and watch them sit there for hours trying to work it out. > Ridiculous"

I hope this guy is just trolling, but in case he is not, this is a tired argument that should be debunked once and for all.

The brain in the course of seemingly mundane activities (interpreting what we see, for instance) effectively performs a stupendous amount of complex calculations per second [1]

What people confuse is conscious calculations vs effective calculations.[2] The brain does not need to output intermediate results of basic operations because that is not it's computational objective.

I was actually a bit disappointed at the shallowness of the article; from the title I was expecting maybe a discussion of how complex even the very concept of intelligence is, and how speed of calculations does not necessarily equate to intelligence.

[1] [http://gizmodo.com/an-83-000-processor-supercomputer-only- ma...](http://gizmodo.com/an-83-000-processor-supercomputer-only-matched-one- perc-1045026757)

[2] [http://chrisfwestbury.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-processing- spe...](http://chrisfwestbury.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-processing-speed-of- human-brain.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is an existential horror SciFi novel, but BlindSight by Peter Watts is the only book I've seen talk about this idea.

Avoiding totally spoiling the book, it asks the question: "Is consciousness really a survival trait in the long term?"

<comment><USER2> That's a great novel. Vampires!

<comment><USER11> [http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm](http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > But the argument goes both ways here as well: take an arbitrary human (such > as yourself, if you happen to be human) and try placing this human in the > cockpit of a landing jet plane, in a semiconductor factory, in the oval > office of the White House, in the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant, on a > horseback in Siberia, or equipped with only a spear in the middle of the > Amazonas jungle. There are humans that have been programmed to do well in > each of these situations, but it is very unlikely that the human you were > thinking of (perhaps yourself) would know what to do in more than at most > one of these situations.

At least the random human will have a chance at doing something and if the situation isn't life or death like the landing plane or the Amazon jungle could with time actually learn to operate in the new environment even without interacting with other people who could teach them. That's what's missing from AI the flexibility to operate in a chaotic environment. Until relatively recently the slightest thing going wrong in even moving through an area or performing a simple task like moving a box would completely break.

> (It's hard to understand why anyone would want to be in a plane flown by a > human, now that there are alternatives.)

Detecting and ignoring spurious inputs and extreme edge cases are one of the main reasons that I feel better if there's a person alert and at the controls of a plane. Extreme cases like Quantas 32 where a huge number of systems are absolutely destroyed would be a huge challenge for modern autopilots which are great but aren't tested or designed for emergencies. [1]

[1] [http://lifehacker.com/the-power-of-mental-models-how- flight-...](http://lifehacker.com/the-power-of-mental-models-how- flight-32-avoided-disas-1765022753)

<comment><USER13> That's partly because nobody has tried very hard to write one piece of software that's good at landing planes and being the president. Why not just write two pieces of software? What business model would a combined piece of software enable?

Specialization of software is mostly a virtue.

<comment><USER14> Isn't it somewhat the same with humans though?

<comment><USER13> Yes. Because a specialized pilot or president will always be better than a generalist at that particular task.

Part of the argument given for the virtues of generalization is about availability. Like, if you find yourself the only available person in a plane over the Amazon, you can improvise a landing. But as the network connects more things in more places, this becomes less and less important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> He makes a flawed argument that computers are smarter than humans: but the flaw is obvious in that a computer couldn't even make that argument. It takes a human.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article is informal about intelligence and then comes up with a couple of ad-hoc examples where computers beat humans. It's unclear that they have much to do with intelligence. The following definition of the term has been proposed:

       Intelligence measures an agent's ability to
       achieve goals in a wide range of environments.

Togelius even addresses this a little by pointing out that humans have to be trained to be a pilot of a president. But it is unclear at this point to what extent computers can be intelligent in this sense. Alpha-Go's reinforcement learner, probably the most astonishing part of Alpha-Go, was not (to the best of my knowledge) Go-specific, instead, it was a general-purpose reinforcement learner. I doubt it can learn much more complicated forms of interaction without a simple reward function (such as games).

Nevertheless, I'm quite optimistic, but it's far from the foregone conclusion that the author implies it it.

<comment><USER17> Or, as alluded to in the article but with the opposite conclusion :

Intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like this article is being disingenuous in order to get discussion going.

</comment><comment><USER19> How did this article made it on hackernews? Someone take it down please.

<comment><USER20> Well, you can flag it, but with 42 points and 54 comments, that's not likely to do much good...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > It would be very easy to invent games that were so complicated that only > computers could play them; computers could even invent such games > automatically.

Of the many errors in this article this is one of the most flagrant. Computers have yet to invent any novel and challenging games. That would take ingenuity, something computers have failed to demonstrate. However, I suspect the author is trolling a bit.

<comment><USER22> i believe i've read about automatically --(i believe automatically, and it's a crucial distinction, but i'm not looking it up right now, so take it with a grain of salt)-- generated proofs so long they can't be reasonably understood by a human, but it "convinces" a computer. such a proof isn't a proof in the sense that it doesn't convince a human being, which is the point of the proof. but, since it checks out, maybe a better way to think of it is it's a mathematical proof but for an audience other than human beings.

i wonder if a game is much different from a proof. i mean, we can implement games as programs, so there is a connection at that level.

<comment><USER21> This sounds more like a computer playing a proof game rather than a computer inventing a proof game.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Now let's take another activity that humans should be good at: game-playing.

It should be just the opposite. There was no evolutionary pressure on humans to make them play Chess well. The games are interesting to us partly because they're challenging and make us think differently.

If you want a fair comparison, you need to look at how successful we've been at making machines to do things animals _were_ facing evolutionary pressure to do successfully.

Imagine trying to build an ant. A machine with a tiny, power efficient brain, that coordinates with its fellows to gather resources and build enormous hives. Could we make computers do that? Maybe eventually, but we're nowhere close today. Just making a machine walk with grace is at the edge of what we can do.

</comment><comment><USER24> Will a robot/AI crossing the street ever realize (without anyone explicitly telling it) that if it is stuck by a car then it will be incapable of moving?

Will an image recognizer ever "truly understand" what it means for something to be in a category?

If I set up a Go board such that the pieces on the board resemble a smiley face or some other pattern, will there ever be a version of AlphaGo that is able to recognize that? Will it be able to stop playing Go and start placing pieces on the board that fit into the pattern?

Will an AI be able to make an original joke that is not based off of any template?

To my knowledge we don't have an AI that can do any of the above, but any person would find those tasks easy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Comments seem to have gone off on a tangent about multiplication.

What stands out for me is the irony, that ultimately the purpose of AI is not to be especially good at multiplication but rather to replicate the tenuous, fragile and indefinable properties of Human Intelligence that can only come about through some process more sophisticated than logical binary determinism.

</comment><comment><USER26> No offense to OP or Mr. Togelius but this argument is terrible in almost every way imaginable and completely unconvincing at that. It makes its case entirely by subtly introducing straw men and double standards.

Leaving aside that its primary point is made by a redefinition of "intelligence" (itself being nebulous without providing two definitions), it completely ignores the fact that computers would be completely unable to do any of these things had smart people not told them how to. You may say the same of people as well, but people can learn things independent of knowledge. Even something as simple as space and time is understood a priori by people but most computers are oblivious to what these things actually mean.

The arguments about memory are terrible because one might as well say a library is smarter than a person if all that matters is the accuracy of recall and the amount of data stored. The computer itself does not know these things in the same way that we do, if you ask it to find them for you it will search them the same way you might but more quickly. Knowledge is contextual and intuitive, and computers currently are not great at context or intuition.

And that's just knowledge! It's so easy to demonstrate that human knowledge is more complex than computer "knowledge" that it's barely even worth discussing.

I personally think one of the strongest indicators of intelligence in people is their intuition and the ease at which they adapt to new things, i.e. how many things come easily to them. Nothing comes easily to a computer. Everything must be specified clearly and carefully to the computer by a person who is better at intuition than the computer is. The computer has no way of knowing whether something is "right" or "wrong" in the sense that those words intersect with both morality and logic. They might understand that something is "incorrect," but that does not carry the negative connotations that "wrong" does for a human being. Computers have not "computed how to play the game perfectly," they were told how to do so through increasing levels of abstraction. Computers have not "computed how to play the game perfectly" just as pencils have not learned how to make marks on paper. That a computer does what you tell it to and by definition can't do what you don't tell it to is evidence enough of its utility as a tool and not a person.

This is, of course, in the current context of AI. I have no doubt that some day we will create software with the sort of intuition and ability to contextualize information that people have. But until then, there's not sense deluding ourselves that we're already there. If that were the case, we might as well have stopped doing computer science research with the Bombe 70 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Ask a human to raise 3425 to the power of 542 and watch them sit there for > hours trying to work it out.

You can't compare the speed of a computer to the speed of a human. Only because a human is slow doesn't mean that the human is stupid, nor computer are smarter. The electric current in a integrated circuit acts near the speed of light. Light itself is also very _fast_ but not very _intelligent_.

> [...] the world Chess champion has been a computer.

Again, this is a matter of speed. If you give a human being the same amount of time in relation what a computer had taken to calculate the same steps of a chess game it would be a more true _comparsion of intelligence_.

> Humans have almost no memory

That's because the human brain isn't trained and not used. We use almost 10% of our brain. So this comparsion also hinks.

> The face recognition software that Facebook uses can tell the faces of > millions of people apart.

And again, this is only a matter of training and not a matter of intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems that any discussion about artificial intelligence eventually devolves into arguments essentially about whether human brains are magical or deterministic.

</comment><comment><USER28> There are tools and there are users of tools. Which is the computer? Which is the human?

</comment><comment><USER29> My suspicion is that Chomsky's "language instinct" is actually a derangement of our ability to reason about probabilities that leads us to make the same mistakes consistently, thus understand each other.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Human intelligence" is a fiction fabricated from cherry-picked examples of _individual_ intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER31> If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

I'm not familiar with Togelius' other writings so I don't know how fast and loose the man is with his words, but in isolation, these "arguments" are like a compilation of youtube comments. Normally I ignore them, but some days I take the bait.

The question at issue is made out to be "who's more intelligent, computers or human beings?" when the real question is "what is intelligence in the first place?". To merely assume some definition because it suites the author's position is nothing short of question begging.

There also do exist powerful arguments against strong AI and computationalism. Searle's Chinese room argument is perhaps the best known, but by all appearances, often unappreciated or misunderstood. The essential point he makes is that computers are syntactic machines, i.e., machines that transform strings of symbols (which are intrinsically meaningless) according to syntactic rules. However, human minds contain semantics (concepts). Because computers are syntactic machines only, they necessarily do not and cannot possess semantics. They can simulate semantics when a human being formalizes semantics by producing syntactic rules for the simulation, but no amount of syntax ever results in semantics any more than skillfully adding clay to a sculpture can ever produce a human being. Remember, a computer is anything that implements anything equivalent to the Turing machine (a formalization of effective method).

Aristotle, on the other hand, makes a much deeper argument about the nature of the intellect that can reinforce a restricted form of Searle's argument, viz., his arguments can be used to explain why computers lack semantics by showing that matter per se cannot possess "concepts" as such and apart from particular instances. This argument is difficult to appreciate without an understanding of Aristotle's broader metaphysics. However, the outline of the argument is as follows:

1\. Matter is particular/concrete (e.g., " _this_ tree/ _that_ rose").

2\. Concepts are abstract (e.g., " _Tree_ as a class/ _Redness_ as such").

3\. The intellect, the organ of abstracting concepts from particular instances, holds concepts.

4\. Therefore, the intellect is not material. QED.

...adding own minor premise and conclusion...

5\. Computers are purely material.

6\. Therefore, computers cannot be intelligent.

Note that "intellect" is not a synonym for "mind". Aristotle distinguishes such things as imagination (phantasm) from the intellect, the former of which he argues is material. To better see how concepts are immaterial, consider the word "tree". You may imagine a tree, or even a number of trees, but the image is always particular, it is always an image of a particular tree whether real or not. However, none of these is the concept "tree" which is not particular (if it were particular, then there could only be one particular tree). You can repeat the same reflection with anything: every triangle you imagine will be isosceles, scalene or right-angle and of some particular color, and indeed something _triangular_ and not a triangle as such.

The general problem here can be related to the problem of qualia (and intensionality) and thus the mind-body problem introduced by Descartes' metaphysics and haunting much of philosophical discourse since (even when the mind is dropped and the body endowed with the powers attributed to the mind). Note that Aristotle's immaterial intellect is NOT Descartes' mind.

Others who have argued against computationalist or materialist conceptions of the mind include Kripke and Popper, but there are many in-depth treatments of the subject that address many of the claims and objections raised by the computationalists. That being said, I find "AI" (arguably a misnomer) to be a very interesting field.

<comment><USER32> >4\. Therefore, the intellect is not material. QED.

That is face-palmingly bad logic. Can we pretend that famous ancient sages weren't so blindingly, obviously dumb as to believe one piece of stuff can't do multiple things?

>The general problem here can be related to the problem of qualia (and intensionality) and thus the mind-body problem introduced by Descartes' metaphysics and haunting much of philosophical discourse since (even when the mind is dropped and the body endowed with the powers attributed to the mind).

I don't see how the acquisition of abstract knowledge has anything to do with qualia or the mind-body problem. Abstract knowledge is just hierarchical modeling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Intelligence != Knowledge</comment>


Facebook Revenues Up to $700M, On Track Towards $1.1B - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/03/02/facebook-made-up-to-700-million-in-2009-on-track-towards-1-1-billion-in-2010/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InsideFacebook+%28Inside+Facebook%29 <comment><USER2> My suspicion is that Facebook revenues could be much higher than they are letting on. I say that as a non-Facebook user and a fairly neutral outside observer. If they were being coy because revenues were actually too good, it wouldn't be the first company to do so. Google was coy about its revenue in the 2002-3 timeframe, and it surprised a lot of people when it was later revealed just how much they were making.

Here is my theory: Facebook's traffic, measured in terms of users or page views is about even with Yahoo. Facebook has the added advantage that every single page view is a from a logged in user, who has provided Facebook with a fair amount of personal information, far, far more than what Yahoo has. Facebook has considerable information from the users' profiles as well as their various activity streams that Facebook tracks. This should enable Facebook to target its ads more precisely than Yahoo can, and therefore achieve at least as much revenue as Yahoo. From an advertiser perspective, it would seem like Facebook, with its vastly superior knowledge of user behavior, should be a better bet than old-school Yahoo. Of course, Facebook probably hasn't pushed its sales efforts as hard as mature Yahoo; still, I would expect Facebook to be doing a goodly fraction of Yahoo's revenue, which is running north of $6 billion per year.

If you buy my theory, long term, Facebook should overtake Yahoo in revenue; in fact a lot of Facebook revenue will likely come by stealing advertisers from Yahoo. So the company with the most to fear from Facebook is not Google but Yahoo.

<comment><USER3> Maybe facebook will be one of those powerhouse private technology corps like SAS that make money hand over fist but stays private to do whatever the hell it feels like in terms of personnel benefits and R&D expenditure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _The company has been roughly doubling its revenues every year — 2007 came > in at $150 million. We expect that trend to continue for the foreseeable > future, making Facebook a multi-billion dollar company within the next few > years. The question is becoming how Facebook can hit the inflection point > where its revenues increase much more quickly._

Um, doubling every year sounds pretty good. Can they, or any company that's hit that size and revenue level (it's easy to 10x or 100x your revenue when starting from near 0) really hope to do much more than double revenue yearly?

</comment><comment><USER5> Something has always bothered me about companies like Facebook and Google that generate such a high percentage of their revenue from advertising. They strike me as quite vulnerable.

<comment><USER6> Why? Advertising has been around for hundreds of years, and is involved in nearly every medium of communication. I'd wager that a high percentage of HN users who own businesses are advertising on Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER5> Well, my main issue is that for said companies, ads are essentially the only source of revenue. So what would happen if that source of revenue was cut off? Perhaps an ad blocker becomes wildly popular. Well, that destroys Facebook and Google's revenue model.

But it's also the nature of ads. I've never intentionally clicked on an ad. Anecdotally speaking, I've observed that the more sophisticated a user is, the less likely s/he is to click an ad. So in my opinion, a revenue model based solely on ads doesn't seem to bode well in an increasingly tech-savvy society.

<comment><USER7> I'm a pretty sophisticated web user and I have intentionally clicked on ads while doing Google searches. Why? Because I was looking to purchase something and I was looking for merchants. The organic listings were either equivalent or less relevant. Perfect example: Sending my mom flowers for Mother's day. I really don't have a favorite retailer I go to. I just go to Google.

Many people make this argument that the only thing Google has really made money from is ads. I take it to be FUD. Many business do extremely well by being really, really good at one thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And yet: <http://i.imgur.com/3HM89.png>

<comment><USER9> [http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook- crosses-300-millio...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/15/facebook- crosses-300-million-users-oh-yeah-and-their-cash-flow-just-went-positive/)

While I didn't find anything newer (in about 20 seconds of googling), facebook was profitable, and I see no reason that it wouldn't still be so. If someone feels like putting in the effort of finding newer information which proves this wrong, please do; I would love to be proven wrong (well, not really; but if I am wrong, I would like to know about it).

<comment><USER8> People have to use various non-straightforward meanings of "profitable" to define Facebook as such.

<comment><USER9> "Cash flow positive" sounds pretty straight-forward to me (would you care to explain how it is not?); sure, it may not have been profitable over its entire lifespan (which is perhaps your definition?), but once your cash flow in a given period of time becomes positive, if it stays positive you'll make up for any historical loss eventually.

<comment><USER5> Cash flows aren't exclusively tied to operational activities. You can lose tons of money on the operational side, but make up for it in investments and debt, thus making your company cash flow positive. I'm not saying that's the case with Facebook, but it's entirely possible that on the operational side they are losing money but still remaining cash flow positive.

<comment><USER10> The term "cash flow positive" generally refers to cash flow from operations. A company that closes a round of financing would end the year with more cash in the bank, but no one would call such a company "cash flow positive."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So no one here thinks Facebook will go the way of MySpace within 1-3 years?

<comment><USER12> 3-5. Way too many competitive threats for it to stay on top forever, but Facebook needs time to ossify and get slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> On track to win my bet with jacquesm:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=689993> :)

<comment><USER14> As someone who actually spends a lot of money on Facebook ads and thus has a little more insight on where those revenues are coming from, I'll take jaquems side too.

A significant portion of that increase in revenues is due to ad policy changes and deals with branders rather than any type of growth that could be sustainable in the future.

<comment><USER13> I'm happy to take more action. (It's like a few shares of Facebook stock!)

Same amount, same terms? (FB revenue>$2B for 2014 I win, <$2B revenue you win, murky situations go to an HN poll?)

I don't think FB has yet found their revenue-rocket equivalent to AdWords -- current ads are not it -- but I think they will.

<comment><USER14> Allright, I'm down for $100 for the same terms, my email is in my profile so you know how to reach me.

What happens to the bet if FB is acquired?

<comment><USER13> On the original jacquesm bet, I suggested we use the apparent revenues of Facebook-as-a-division. That might be tricky to measure depending on the acquirer's reporting and integration plans, but as I suspect any acquirer will be -- (1) a giant public company with detailed quarterly reporting; and (2) eager to keep 'Facebook' as a separate brand/division -- I think it's ultimately resolvable to sufficient confidence for someone to concede (or defer to a poll result). However, if you prefer for an acquisition to mean "bet's off (no action)", I'd be OK with that, too.

Just express a preference before an acquisition happens, or my preference -- calculate it as a division -- should stand. (I like FB to make this revenue target standalone; I like them as part of Google/MSFT/Apple/Disney/etc.; I like them in a box, I like them with a fox; I like them in a house, I like them with a mouse.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Open Source in your Inbox: Code Triage - <AUTHOR> http://www.codetriage.com/

<comment><USER2> Code Triage is great! I hope this gets more attention and signups.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> related blog post from @schneems <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5182884></comment>


An analysis of Facebook photo caching - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/220956754772273/an-analysis-of-facebook-photo-caching/ <comment><USER2> Most interesting is a new caching algorithm that outperforms LFU and LRU:

S4LRU: Quadruply-segmented LRU. Four queues are maintained at levels 0 to 3. On a cache miss, the item is inserted at the head of queue 0. On a cache hit, the item is moved to the head of the next higher queue (items in queue 3 move to the head of queue 3). Each queue is allocated 1/4 of the total cache size and items are evicted from the tail of a queue to the head of the next lower queue to maintain the size invariants. Items evicted from queue 0 are evicted from the cache.

Paper: [http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~qhuang/papers/sosp_fbanalysis.pdf](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~qhuang/papers/sosp_fbanalysis.pdf)

<comment><USER3> One way to think about this is that there is a single queue, but that new items are added three-quarters of the way in. When an item is accessed, it is promoted to the quartile point two back from its current position.

I think that makes it clearer that it is essentially a less aggressive LRU; being less aggressive shifts its focus to a longer timescale.

It also lets you think about other ways to tweak LRU; what if instead of promoting an item to a particular quarter point, you just moved it up N places in the list? If you set N to three eighths of cache size, that would be roughly equivalent to S4LRU, but with a smoother response. You could then think about varying N according to where the item starts in the list (making it tougher to climb to the very top, say), or according to some other property of the item (making it easier for small items to climb, say).

Another way to think about this is that it is 4Q-LRU, but with items that fall off the higher queues being demoted to lower queues, rather than being evicted:

[http://www.vldb.org/conf/1994/P439.PDF](http://www.vldb.org/conf/1994/P439.PDF)

It'd be interesting to see a comparison between SnLRU, nQ-LRU, and ARC. The comparisons to FIFO, LFU, and LRU in the paper really only serve to establish that SnLRU is interesting, not that it is a great algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ttheir origin cache handled but 5% of all traffic and did very little to help the system. The big takeaway should be to understand the usefullness of every level, both in terms of added cost in maintaining, complexity and equipment so that you know where to invest your energy and what sorts of gains you cab have from that investment. Very nice write up.

</comment><comment><USER5> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320885)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why is it that an infinite sized cache has < 100% hit ratio?

<comment><USER7> A hit is defined as the event of "the thing I requested was in the cache". Assuming you have already put as many items as you can in your cache, with an infinite sized cache, everything will fit in the cache, so you will never have an occurrence of the event "the thing I requested was not in the cache", giving you a P(hit) of 1.

Of course, this ignores cache invalidation, population and I'm sure some other fun problems Facebook get to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that they spend so much time thinking about photo caching, considering that they recompress them down to quality 70 JPEGs, making them not worth looking at in the first place. Everybody involved with that decision at Facebook should be prosecuted for crimes against image quality.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure. I'd rather have photos show up quickly (eg. flipping through a slideshow) and then be able to get better quality.

Has anyone looked into server-side support for progressive JPEG images? Eg. if a browser is downloading 30 images in parallel, then the server will only send enough data to display each image coarsely before it finishes sending the entire image file?

Has anyone made an image viewer that treats flipping through the image collection differently than viewing a single image? Eg. for many online image viewers (most "gallery" plugins), if you click "NEXT NEXT NEXT" quickly, the browser eventually just shows the spinning throbber and not the image because it's busy downloading the high-quality version of the image several clicks back and i have to wait to catch up. I'd much rather have the browser stop the download when I click NEXT and _immediately_ scale up the thumbnail that it already has; that way, at least I know what the image is going to be about.

Or: Couldn't we distribute thumbnails for a 30,000-image gallery as 30,000 consecutive frames in a .webm or H264 video? With special sorting techniques, I'm sure we could take advantage of a bunch of shared image structure that way.</comment></comment>


Facebook Lets Publishers Contact "Likers" - <AUTHOR> http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/07/facebook-contact-likers/

<comment><USER2> Anyone else think this is going to become a new spam channel? It's like having 100% guaranteed email delivery into an inbox, with a very high percentage of recepients actually reading what you sent.

</comment><comment><USER3> Contact by publishing things to the feeds of those who Liked something.

Still. I _knew_ they'd continue down this route, and I completely expect them to make things ever more advertiser-friendly and user-hostile. Makes me glad I jumped ship a while ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> What are "the feeds of those who Liked something" - mixed in with the Status updates of my friends? I think that could be a big deal, and also make people think twice about liking stuff. Or rather, they'll probably not make a connection and just get annoyed at FB.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much exactly what it sounds like, yes. The documentation calls them "stream updates", in the same way as you can with Pages. I'm not on FB, so I'm not sure if Pages allow you to do more than that; if so, I'd assume Liked-updates can do the same things.

<http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph#publishing>

<comment><USER4> So when they post something to my stream, does it also show up in my friends news feed?

It's bad enough that "liking" something means I opt in to potential spam. But it would be even worse if it opted in my friends too.

<comment><USER3> Not _certain_ in the least, but I do doubt it. Unless someone can verify one way or the other? Do your (subscribed-to) Page's updates appear to your friends who are not also subscribed to that Page?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The useful information is not only that you like an object, but if you want to receive ads for objects "similar" to that one, so they need a way to know how specific are you about your object. If you want a generic object give 0 as specificity level, if you are very selective put 90. If you are only interested in this particular object and not in any other put 100. Just an idea.</comment>


Personalized news recommendations and privacy are not mutually exclusive - <AUTHOR> https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-16/your-news-is-not-our-business.html <comment><USER2> I think this "locally filtered, personalised content" idea has a lot of potential, and I think that domain name filtering is just the very tip of what can be done. Using browsing history is a great idea, but I think there needs to be better information to filter on rather than just domain.

Consider tags. Imagine if in your history, all the tags associated with an article were saved too. Tags aren't provided by the website? Websites should be encouraged to provide better tags for personalisation (tags over tracking beacons!), or the browser/browser plugin uses some kind of text processing (machine learning?) technique to generate tags automatically from content, and can train on the millions of already tagged articles in websites around the place.

The trivial solution is then: increment the count for each of the tags when a user visits a page with those tags. In top news, show the stuff at the top with the highest tag count. When doing a search term for something ambiguous that contains some of the tags, show the highest visisted tag results first. e.g. if you search for "election results" and the user has a higher frequency of "us politics" tag visits compared to "uk politics" tag visits, how US election results higher up. (You could weight this based on current events too, e.g. which one is more recent and so on). Over time, the plugin itself could have a model which could train its filtering, and maybe receive global anonymous updates that improve the algorithm. All data is local, the only thing you need is a list of tags for each article.

<comment><USER3> > The trivial solution is then: increment the count for each of the tags when > a user visits a page with those tags. In top news, show the stuff at the top > with the highest tag count.

Just last week I started building a feed reader which does exactly that.

Feeds are more like entire newspapers, but maybe you're only interested in the tech articles. You can build up a weighted distribution of keywords over time which describe the current interests of the user, using the approach you described. And all you need to do to make it work is read as usual.

If you want to try it out: [https://www.feedist.io](https://www.feedist.io) It's still in beta but will very likely leave it next week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Note that the only information sent is domains—not interests, not profiles, > just general-purpose news domains like bbc.co.uk.

Alex requests The Washington Post and CNN.

Bob requests The Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

And Joe requests PornHub.

I know the last one is not in the list buy my point is: the domain is more than enough to profile you for profitable reasons.

Plus, the fact that this isn't addressed or even mentioned in the article is not good.

Will we ever get a browser that dose not send anything to the company/organization developing it for any reason/excuse?

</comment><comment><USER5> I was going to ask why this MVP wasn't its own plugin instead of a browser, but Cliqz is obviously more than just news recommendation, and also includes an initiative to build a separate search engine/index among other things. Their about page, for anyone who is as unfamiliar with Cliqz as I am: [https://cliqz.com/en/about](https://cliqz.com/en/about)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder though if a recommendation engine is good after all.

I wrote a concept with (possibly local) curators to subscribe to and the ability to up- or downvote them in your news stream. This way everything stays on a 1-to-1 basis.

There is no AI judging your clicks (quantitatively I click more cat pictures than 7-page articles, even if I prefer the latter).

And no grouping/democracy which I think does not work well for taste-stuff (everybody can agree on cute cats and your bubble agrees on political opinions that are obvious to you, but thought provoking, hard to digest stuff is out again).

If anyone is interested I can send you my write up (even has a few pictures in it!).

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm concerned with how the "noise" is implemented since it not that hard to pick out the fixed set of real preferences given enough samples of the noisy data.

Like as described this seems like it could be defeated by a naive top(3, count(sites)). I guess it helps but the there's probably more ambient noise from NAT and changing addresses than is being added by the random options.

<comment><USER8> Thank you for taking the time to read the article and sharing your feedback.

Noise is added for what is called plausible deniability. Note that messages themselves do not contain any user-identifier. We take extra measures to strip request headers not needed by the server to avoid extra information that could be used for implicitly linking messages[1]. Possibility of linking messages based on network fingerprinting (ex: IP - which we do not log) still exists and is an open concern which we will solve in the next version. This at most makes it possible for us to learn that these 3 domains are visited by the same person, again - given that the list of domains are from shortlisted top-news domains, it is safe to assume that they do not contain any PII.

That said, it is not the strongest model we apply -- due to resource- constrains we have not updated to strongest models like we do on more sensitive data - via HumanWeb[2]. We will soon do the changes on a couple of dimensions: a) each domain as separate message, right now this introduces un- wanted spatial correlations, and b) send the domain through the proxy network HPN[3].

Ref: [1]: [https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser- core/blob/7679c40aec9fe...](https://github.com/cliqz-oss/browser- core/blob/7679c40aec9fe5dd5df590aab4a12b9627563068/modules/core/sources/request- sanitizer.es) [2]: [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting- da...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-collecting-data-in-a- socially-responsible-manner.html) [3]: [https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy- network...](https://www.0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-web-proxy-network- hpn.html)

Disclaimer: I work for Cliqz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Enlarge the time frame for recommendations (our current product is based on > the standard 24-hour news cycle, which makes sense if you consider the > ephemeral nature of news data, but we want to evolve our news—to a content > recommendation product)._

it's impossible to keep the promise of delivering quality content, when their sourcing for the "What you need to know / Top News" feature submits itself to the rules of a _24 hour news cycle_ [1]:

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_news_cycle#Critical_as...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_news_cycle#Critical_assessment)

... and ...

 _> footnote: The first version of Cliqz News recommended articles to users in the form of a web application by harnessing the power of the crowd. Topics were represented by large groups of Twitter users with influence in a particular topic. The content circulated within these groups was then classified and ranked, allowing us to make predictions about stories you might want to read based on detected similarities with other users' interests_

They realized they could predict what will become newsworthy by looking at twitter echo chambers. Twitter is awesome because we get to watch how (especially Western) news break, and how larger established outlets cover the same story, and (with some manual digging) follow discussions/reactions in different echo chambers and how these continue to affect the coverage. Twitter feels (or in the past felt) like grassroots journalism. The problems of the 24hr-News-Cycle aren't created by Twitter and already existed with tabloids. But Twitter amplifies the problems mentioned on Wikipedia tremendously, while even creating some new ones. Cliqz doesn't look like it is going to solve any of this, instead they assume nothing is wrong with how things work currently. Cliqz inability to think about this problem, while at the same time building / peddling services on top of it, is a red flag imo.

EDIT: the wikipedia page has a brilliant book[0][1] linked at the bottom ("Skyful of Lies & Black Swans") which I highly recommend:

[0] summary: [https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our- research/skyf...](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our- research/skyful-lies-black-swans) [1] pdf [https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/fil...](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2017-12/Skyful%20of%20Lies%20%26%20Black%20Swans.%20The%20new%20tyranny%20of%20shifting%20information%20power%20in%20crises.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, [disclaimer - I work at Cliqz]

Cliqz News covers the "news cycle" consisting of "the media reporting on some event, followed by the media reporting on public and other reactions to the earlier reports" mentioned in the Wikipedia page you base your comment on, by the nature of the product. As you might want to read what you "need to know" are most relevant news events at any time of day. We look 24hours back to get the all news articles from hand-picked, trusted news domains in a country and follow event developments. the process is started every hour. There are no social signals involved in the development of this product.

Below the product statement again for further clarification "The product translates into a limited, per-country list of news articles, aiming to keep Cliqz users informed about current events. All articles originate from hand- picked, well-respected and trusted news outlets in a particular country. In order to determine the most relevant news, we first collect and process all articles that were published by those outlets during a defined timeframe, which we then compare among each other to form clusters around current events. The impact of these events, their prevalence on news sources, their presence on homepages and their times of publication all help to curate a list of Top News—updated hourly or every time a major story breaks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now only if there was a way to take this across channels.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cliqz is currently gaming the shit outta HN with submissions every day this month, many staying on the front page for hours: [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=0x65.dev)

</comment><comment><USER12> I like how the domain immediately suggests that the site is not bloated.

<comment><USER13> Sorry for missing the point, but how does the domain suggest that?</comment></comment>


I don't use PureScript because xyz. Change my mind - <AUTHOR> I don't use purescript because:
  - lack of good documentation and/or examples (most of the times the only documentation a dev has are types and you can't expect that everyone will understand it)
  - error messages are not really friendly to read most of the times
  - lack of css libraries, which are very important if you can't write your own css library. There are some wrapper around Material UI made with purescript but most of there are outdated. The only way you have to customize your UI is by hand
  - lot of times you have the impression that you are doing a lot to get little in return
  - if you leaves the types to the compiler you end up with we a lot of weird type everywhere<p>Please help me change my mind because I really like purescript as a language and I think it have lots of potential <comment><USER2> People have different priorities. Some people really enjoy adopting niche languages, and that outweighs the drawbacks of something that isn't 100% mature.

If you really like PureScript as a language, why not just use a mature language like Haskell[1] or OCaml[2][3] and compile to JS?

1\. [https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs](https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs)

2\. [https://github.com/ocsigen/js_of_ocaml](https://github.com/ocsigen/js_of_ocaml)

3\. [https://reasonml.github.io/docs/en/what-and- why](https://reasonml.github.io/docs/en/what-and-why)</comment>


Most Influential Boston VCs on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/23/most-influential-boston-vc-partners-on-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Surprised Joe Medved @joevc isn't on this list.

<comment><USER3> Hi there -- I authored the article. You are correct, as I did not include Softbank (see 2nd paragraph for methodology on which VCs were included). As you can imagine, this was a painstakingly time intensive proces so we had to weed out some of the VC firms in the area somehow (as is we looked at over 200 different partners). If I get enough calls for updates, I will add to the list and let people know. Thanks for mentioning!</comment></comment>


Servers Seized at Ukrainian Firm Where Petya Attack Began, Charges Considered - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/servers-seized-at-ukrainian-firm-where-petya-attack-beg-1796622607 <comment><USER2> > Col. Serhiy Demydiuk, the head of Ukraine's national Cyberpolice unit, has > not accused anyone at MeDoc of being involved with the attack. He has said > that the company was warned multiple times about potential security > vulnerabilities in its systems. "They knew about it," Demydiuk told the > Associated Press. "They were told many times by various anti-virus firms... > For this neglect, the people in this case will face criminal > responsibility."

Criminal charges for not fixing known vulnerabilities? That's a risky road to travel down. Especially given the general state of infosec among various governments around the world and the offensive first mindset of their security agencies.

This sounds like the result of being pressured to appear to be doing something about a very public problem rather than using the justice system to set a meaningful precedent. Especially if enforcement is going to be arbitrarily based on only exceptionally bad cases.

People love to use the courts as a knee jerk reaction to every problem without considering more effective or efficient alternatives first.

<comment><USER3> >Criminal charges for not fixing known vulnerabilities?

Why not? Incompetent vehicle operators regularly face criminal charges too.

<comment><USER2> So you'd like to have agencies set up to fine every company that gets hacked through 'known vulnerabilities'? Enforcing this arbitrarily after big hacks is hardly an equivalent analogy to enforcing traffic violations. It'd have to be consistent, well defined, and widely enforced to be at all effective.

To me this is an emotional reaction that has no regard for cause/effect.

<comment><USER3> >So you'd like to have agencies set up to fine every company that gets hacked through 'known vulnerabilities'?

Not exactly, but I do feel that entities recklessly handling PII or possibly in this case their update servers should face consequences.

>Enforcing this arbitrarily after big hacks is hardly an equivalent analogy to enforcing traffic violations. It'd have to be consistent, well defined, and widely enforced to be at all effective.

We definitely agree on this.

>To me this is an emotional reaction that has no regard for cause/effect.

This particular raid? Undoubtedly.

<comment><USER2> The end result will likely result in more companies wasting time of useless theatrics like PCI compliance to protect themselves from legal liability rather than meaningfully protecting users data and preventing their systems from being launch points for bigger attacks.

This is why I'm highly doubtful about the ROI of burdening companies, courts, and law enforcement with this 'solution'.

Even though it feels good to punish a faceless corporation for making a seemingly obvious mistake.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with a PCI-like compliance that ensures companies that affect this many people have their servers patched on a regular basis?

Rubber stamps like PCI compliance might look like time wasters. Not all of them are. Given the huge increase in the amount of online credit card transactions, the number of cases where payment information is compromised is very low. That is partly due to PCI compliance IMO.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My daughter uses prezi.com pinterest style - <AUTHOR> http://adamdomoney.posterous.com/my-11-year-old-created-her-own-pinterestcom-f

<comment><AUTHOR> Needless to say very impressed dad.</comment>


Uber ordered my driver to do something totally illogical; and they were right - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/uber-ordered-my-driver-to-do-something-totally-illogical-and-they-were-right-a32a358022df#.gnz9z7je5 <comment><USER2> So many words yet so little content. Is there some sort of word minimum for posting? This article is 95% bloat.</comment>