Ask YC: Mid-sized, livable, hacker-friendly towns? - <AUTHOR> My wife and I are pretty sure that we're not going to stay here in Innsbruck after this summer (not positive yet, but it's likely).
So... we're starting to think about "where?!".  We have a child on the way, and I've "done my time" in the bay area.  I'd rather have a smaller chance at making a successful startup than deal with that rat-race again.
Our preference is for somewhere livable, with a decent climate, "mid-sized" (say 100K-500K), with a university, and some topography (dead flat places need not apply:-).
How's Boulder, Colorado?  Santa Fe, NM? Boulder's sort of up there on my list.  I like Southern Oregon a lot too (Ashland), but it doesn't offer much in the way of job opportunities.  My wife is in biotech, so someplace that offers something for her is high priority too (once again, the bay area would be good, but... not with a kid, and having to drive everywhere).
Anyone got a favorite mid-sized town that might not easily pop up on the radar, that more or less fits the bill?
Incidentally, this doesn't have to be in the US.  We would be in Padova, Italy if everything else were equal, but the political and economic situation in Italy is not pretty right now.   A romance language would probably be easier to deal with (indeed, I'm looking at an opportunity in Portugal).
Thanks guys, Dave <comment><USER2> I live in Austin, TX and find its size to be manageable, although it is growing fast. Is that too large for you? It has the University of Texas, its in the 'Hill Country', and has a lot of smart and creative folks. I don't have a car and ride nothing but the Capital Metro bus. The average age is pretty young here, so there are a lot of parties and such, which is a plus for some but minus for others. You will like it if you are into: lots of coffee shops with wireless access, live music (South By Southwest is just around the corner, and there are concerts all the time), lots of bars, the Texas Longhorns, attractive people, and some yuppie/hippie types. Lots of people hang out at Zilker Park (where the Austin City Limits Music Festival is) and run around Town Lake.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the info, I'm city shopping right now and I'm planning to check out Austin at SXSW. Any Austin tips for me? I try to avoid having a car at all costs, so it's good to know you've found that feasible.

<comment><USER2> This probably is moving away from what davidw was asking, but here's my quick guide to Austin.

The 6th street advice depends on who you are. If you are looking for live music, definitely 6th St. and the clubs on Red River. If you want cheaper drinks (like $1 Rum and Cokes of low quality), want to party with more of college-age crowd, are single and looking for attractive women, you will be very happy there. Very little work gets done on 6th St (unless you work in one of the bank buildings). Once the 6th st. crowd graduates, they hang out in the Warehouse District, which is around 4th and Colorado/Lavaca. This is where you go if you want more like a $4-5 drink or if you enjoy sipping Lattes. Less live music stuff. More cafes. I work out of a couple coffee shops over there, and also work out of a neighborhood called Hyde Park (which is not downtown). Austin is growing fast. There are many condos being built in the downtown area, particularly in the area that is now being called the "2nd Street District". Hyde Park is a cool little neighborhood if you don't want to hang out downtown. Houses are older, smaller, and more expensive there. When I say expensive, I mean Texas expensive, not California expensive.

I'll be at SXSW if anyone wants to meet up. I'll be attending the SXSW interactive and as many of the live music shows that I can fit in. The full list of over 1000 bands was released today and can be viewed at <http://2008.sxsw.com/music/festival/alphalist/>. Yes, all of them in one week.

For some funky shops and a cool place to visit in the day it'd be worth stopping by the South Congress area.

For live music places, I recommend Stubb's, Emo's, and The Parish Room (for more Indie Rock stuff), Elephant Room (for Jazz), Mohawk, and Antone's.

For a cool neighborhood pub with a jillion beers that you probably wouldn't run into normally, go to <http://www.draughthouse.com/>. Other places with a large beer selection where you can hear yourself talk are The Ginger Man and Opal Divine's.

Some magazine voted Alamo Drafthouse the best movie theater in the country. It's one of those theaters where you order a beer and food while you watch the movie, so I enjoy it more for a humorous movie. Some other magazine voted Book People the best bookstore in the country.

For good coffee places to use free wifi, go to Austin Java (Downtown), Halcyon (Downtown), Epoch (Hyde Park), Quack's (Hyde Park), Flightpath (Hyde Park), The Hideout (Downtown), Metro (by UT Campus), JP's Java (near UT campus), Little City (Downtown), or Spiderhouse (near UT campus).

Barton Springs and Zilker Park is where a lot of people go for outdoors stuff like running, walking dogs, frisbee golf, and swimming.

Shop at HEB for a big cheap grocery store. Go to Whole Foods or Central Market if you want to stock up on organic expensive stuff.

If you are rich and want to buy some designer sunglasses, go to the Domain or the 2nd St. District. If you are an indie/emo kid, go to SpiderHouse, Beauty Bar, or....Emo's. If you are a metalhead or goth type, there are some places on Red River for you.

For a really big delicious burger or some tasty wings, visit Casino El Camino on 6th. If you want some cheap gigantic breakfast tacos, go to Juan in a Million. For an open-faced burger with a mound of cheese fries piled on top, go to Hyde Park Grill. For a wine bar, go to Vino Vino.

A car is not very important if you know the Capital Metro bus routes and stay central, which is where most of the interesting stuff is anyway.

If you like bumming around a college campus, hang out around UT-Austin, which is between 26th and 21st st. Many people will be wearing an ugly burnt orange color, similar to the orange at the top of this web page.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. However, you haven't mentioned the BEST "feature" of Austin. We have an absolutely unique freakin jungle within 6 miles of downtown called "Greenbelt" where you can do all kinds of crazy things on your mountain bike, or swim with your dog in one of those natural pools or just walk for miles. Also you can rent a boat and have fun on lake Travis, where my favorite thing to do (although dangerous) is to jump off the rocks. Those things are why Austin is 1st or 2nd fittest city in the nation and this is why I don't want to move to the Valley. We have lots of "Valley refugees" here, who moved because of cost of living and "lack of culture".

However, if "good hacker community", and especially start-up community, is priority #1, I'd stay around SF Bay Area. Austin has only one traditional "software VC" and they're not nearly as open minded and progressive as numerous VCs in the Valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You might want to consider Montreal, Quebec. It's a very lively city. It's more populated than what you're asking for (1.6M), but it has 4 universities, and the city itself is on a mountain (mount royal, not a very big mountain), which is itself on an island (the island of montreal).

You can e-mail me if you want to know more about this city. iratsu at gmail dot com

<comment><USER6> Ah, La Belle Province. It's been 5 years since I moved to the US, but I still have to go home for some Poutine - it's just not the same when I make it at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stay away from Santa Fe! I lived there for a few year and it's not hacker friendly. It's a beautiful place, but when I was there there wasn't much of a hacker community. Also, it's expensive there and it's hard to find jobs that pay well outside of Los Alamos and city/state government. If you're white (I'm not), you'll likely encounter racism and you'll likely have a harder time in city/state government than if you weren't. If you're a freelancer, you'll have a hard time finding customers that are willing to pay a decent amount for your services. There's also a large current of snobbery and defensiveness in the culture which is distasteful in general and which doesn't really nurture hackers.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out Santa Clarita, CA. It's just shy of 300,000 in terms of population and it's just north of LA (at the 5 and 14 freeway). It is a bit expensive ($400k+ home prices) unless you opt to live on the outskirts of town. You can survive on under $30,000 with a family though, if you have inexpensive tastes and have some self control. It's only about 5mi radius, so everything is pretty close. The city is developing quickly and does have a few tech companies around here, but I have to be honest, the entertainment industry is much larger here. We have a bunch of movies and other things filmed here. But as far as job opportunities for hackers, we do have a somewhat entrepreneurial climate.

The only "Universities" are 2 community colleges: College of the Canyons, and Cal Arts. College of the Canyons is decent though, with about 20,000 students per semester and growing. Under an hour drive to UCLA and USC without traffic, and there's Cal State Northridge too (my school).

Another notable feature, Six Flags, Magic Mountain is here.

And as an added bonus, we are in a valley (surrounded on all sides), and it just snowed on the mountains. It looks beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Boulder's great - good community of hackers. Startups work together to throw fun events (private hack-a-thons, discussions around new technologies, etc). They've got some great New Tech Meetups, The Boulder Open Coffee Club, etc. Good group of VCs in the area as well.

<comment><USER9> I love Boulder, but it's not a good place for his wife's career neerds. Other than UC Boulder, there's not much biotech in the area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somerville, MA fits the bill pretty well, for sufficiently small values of "decent climate".

<comment><USER11> I lived in Cambridge, MA (Harvard Square in particular) for two years and would say that Somerville, Arlington, and Cambridge are all good places to check out. Boston and the surrounding area has become one of the leading centers for BioTech research, so that would be a big plus for your wife.

I currently live in Providence, RI which is about an hour south of Boston. Smaller hacker community, but at least there is one and its not to far from Boston either. We also have a growing BioTech industry thanks to Brown University. I have a friend that works at EpiVax and loves his job. Might be worth checking out.

<comment><USER12> Loved Providence. Beautiful city, great history. Best airport on the Northeastern seaboard.

We moved to California from Providence. The __* best __* assortment of restaurants in the whole country, as far as I'm concerned. The Boston Globe often says that 9 out of the 10 best restaurants in Boston are in Providence. Good entertainment scene, arts scene, etc...

Downsides: The townies (locals) get a little crusty, and you have to get used to the idea of government == corrupt.

We moved to LA so my wife could try out the film scene, and because my contract work in health care was drying up fast.

The winter's do get kind of long, though. And if you hear people talking about a coming, "Noreestah" go to the store and buy all the bread and milk you can. :)

If you do move to Providence, be sure that you live on the East Side of town. It can be really hard to make friends if you're living anywhere else. The native Rhode Islandics aren't really used to people from anywhere else, and it takes a long time to make any headway in the friends department. The East Side has RISD and Brown, so people on that side of town are a lot friendlier and used to strangers and "ethnic people". (My landlord's phrase, not mine. Ironic because he was very Irish. :D ).

Heck, anywhere in New England is pretty nice, and you can drive from one state to another in less than an hour. It's all pretty close.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Move to Coimbatore, India.

Great climate, natural beauty, five big engineering colleges, low pollution, low living cost ($300/month=great life), many libraries, awesome eateries etc.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the heads up. Do you know of some good companies around there?

<comment><USER13> No I don't. If you have specific interests in mind, I can try to find out through my friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I live in Ann Arbor, MI, and I love it there. It's got the University of Michigan. It's economy is dominated by education, high tech, and biotechnology, according to Wikipedia. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor,_Michigan>

According to Forbes, Ann Arbor is the third smartest city in the US, behind Boulder, CO, and Bethesda, MD, but just ahead of Cambridge, MA. [http://www.annarborspark.org/about-us/newsroom/ann-arbor- nam...](http://www.annarborspark.org/about-us/newsroom/ann-arbor-named-third- smartest-city/)

If you really want a great city to live in, though, especially for kids, Plymouth Township, MI (this is actually where I'm living right now) was rated the 37th Best Place to Live by Money Magazine, in part due to its great school system. [http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0707/gallery.BP...](http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/moneymag/0707/gallery.BPTL_top_100.moneymag/37.html)

Employment Review Magazine rated Ann Arbor the 10th best city in the nation to live and work in June 2002. It also earned the number 10 spot in The Princeton Review ranking of the best college towns in the nation in September 2001. Additionally in 2001, American Style Magazine named Ann Arbor the 22nd best Arts Destination in the nation.

Of course, then again, you've also got sites like these for a good counterpoint. <http://www.annarborisoverrated.com/>

<comment><USER15> Oh, and the reason I mentioned Plymouth Township is because it's less than half an hour from Ann Arbor, so you could easily live in Plymouth Township and work in Ann Arbor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You might consider Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC area. I'm in the Bay Area now, but I enjoyed living in "The Triangle" as they call it.

Cost of living is great. There are three large universities in the area: UNC, Duke, and NC State, meaning lots of youngish, educated people.

There's a pretty good geek community. IBM, Cisco, Redhat, and SAS all have large presences in the area, and there is a startup scene (nothing like the Bay Area, but it exists).

When I lived there, we had twice-monthly geek meetups and got great attendance - met some really interesting, fairly diverse, people. The large amount of northern ex-pats mixed with the southern culture made for a pretty cool, laid- back, friendly atmosphere.

And there is biotech in the area as well. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_%28North_Carolina%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triangle_%28North_Carolina%29) for a start...

Only downside is you'll definitely still need a car to get around. If you're smart and/or lucky you can probably minimize that a bit, though. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro area can be pretty walkable/bikeable.

</comment><comment><USER17> May I suggest Charlottesville, VA. It's really a great city to live in with a good climate and with UVA there, plenty of things to do. It's only 2 hours from Washington DC and 1 hour from Richmond when you do have a need for the big city (airport, etc...)

<comment><USER18> Charlottesville is great but may be a little smaller than your target city. It has a little biotech spun off from UVa. The downtown mall is a great little area with a nice pedestrian mall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can vouch for other people's vote for Madison, WI. I just moved here a few months ago after a brief stint in Richmond, VA, and a life in (or near) Chicago.

I am really enjoying the vibe of this often forgotten city, and and really impressed with how diverse the terrain is in the state (considering its the midwest).

I've met some guys from a video game startup, and a good number of people from the big software company in town EPIC.

Certainly the cost of living here is pretty fantastically reasonable. I bought my first house here!

email me or message me on skype (same as my name on here) if you care to learn more about Madison :-)

I'm actually looking to start a Jelly or something here, so I can try meet other entrepreneurs.

Good Luck!

 __I'd love to meet bilbo or anyone else here in Madison :-)

<comment><USER20> Madison is pretty great, especially in the summer, but I think our winters are a bit foreboding.

The main problem with creating a startup atmosphere in Madison is that most people leave once they graduate. I've managed to stick around almost a year after graduation, but the coasts are beckoning. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Albuquerque is nice. Not Flat Decent city with interesting things to do. Fair community of hackers, coders and makers. Lots of movie money, lab money and spin offs. It's really booming around here lately Still possible to live walking distance to good food, bars, music, parks, and grocery stores for minimal green (especially compared to Bay Area).

Santa Fe is expensive and full of retirees who are snobs. It's close enough to drive up or train up (coming soon) if you'd like to visit, but no one should live there.

The only caution is NM is the land of entrapment. Stay for more than 2 years and you will never move away. (the spanish have been here for 500 years).

</comment><comment><USER22> What didn't you like about the bay area? Mountain View or Sunnyvale seem to be the perfect fit for what you're looking for!

<comment><AUTHOR> I want to live someplace I can get around by bicycle. Perhaps that's technically possible in, say, mountain view, but mountain view isn't really a town unto itself, but a suburb or exurb or something. For all practical purposes, all those peninsula towns are part of a big, urban area that stretches from SF to San Jose. I agree that it would be good in a lot of other ways, and it's a tough decision, but in terms of livability I get sick of it every time I'm there, and I'm unenthusiastic about trying to raise a child there.

<comment><USER23> i get around on a bicycle in mountain view, palo alto, and the other towns around here. you just need to figure out the bike routes.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, Palo Alto and Stanford are very bike friendly and very expensive :/ I got around for most of my first year on bike.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pittsburgh, PA (Oakland, Squirrel Hill) is a great place. Housing close to the city can be found pretty cheap. CMU, Pitt Med School, RAND. It definitely has topography. Has a small biotech community.

<comment><USER25> I'm in Pittsburgh until I leave... the biotech community mostly consists of UPMC but they have a huge presence in the town. There are some medical device startups here but the lack of angel/VC funding minimizes the startup presence.

Housing is very cheap here; it's one of the few housing markets in the country with the peculiar property that a monthly mortgage payment would be less than rent on an equivalent house. I wouldn't recommend raising a family in Oakland, which is turning into a student ghetto all over, but Squirrel Hill's a good neighborhood.

There's a whole lot of topography and global warming has made our winters a little better.

<comment><USER26> +1 for the Squirrel Hill and Shadyside neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. Incredibly cheap housing, biotech jobs are numerous, and there's more capital available than you'd think. CMU & Pitt churn out lots of science and engineering students as well.

Major cons: cold winters (it hit the single digits recently), shitty road surfaces

<comment><USER27> I grew up in Pittsburgh and it has another con you forgot: it is one of the cloudiest places in the US. IIRC only Erie and Buffalo are worse. I took it for granted when I was a kid, but it would get me down now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Madison Wisconsin is a neat town-- I almost moved there. Winters are a bit cold.

I'm digging Seattle quite a bit... It's a big soggy in the winter but downright glorious in the summer. Winters aren't much wetter than the Bay Area, near as I can tell. Great access to outdoorsy stuff and a fairly lively startup community. Skiing 45 minutes east. Dry wine country 2 hours east. If you want to live in the sticks, there are some cool towns that people commute from on ferries. How cool is that?

Austin is cool. Decidedly un-Texan and charming.

</comment><comment><USER29> Charlottesville, Virginia.

Lots of great outdoorsy things to do, great university, great cost-of-living, great quality-of-life, and fairly-easy access to Washington DC if you want to do the huge city stuff. (Plus there are things that DC has that you're just not going to find anywhere else) UVA has a huge medical college with all kinds of biotech. There is some startup activity in the area, but as you mention, you'll be taking a hit from places like SF.

</comment><comment><USER30> biotech is more of a limiting factor than hacker-friendly. there are only three places in the USA: bay area, boston area, philadelphia suburbs / new jersey. none of which are mid-sized.

Boulder is nice, but I can't stand the people in Colorado. I would not say it is 'hacker friendly.' New Mexico is an interesting place to visit, sort of... but a horrible place to live.

My favorite mid-sized town in the USA is probably Portland.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're 100% correct about biotech being a limiting factor. I can find _some_ kind of programming job pretty much anywhere, but biotech really is about clusters...sigh. That said, she can only work at one job, so if she gets one of the few jobs in someplace like Boulder or Portland or wherever, that's good enough.

What don't you like about NM? I've never been there but it always seemed kind of interesting/different. And the people in Colorado...?

<comment><USER30> Different is a good word for NM. It is "kind of interesting" but it is also completely disgusting. Think of the worst place you have ever accidentally driven through in the USA. Now imagine that place is in the desert and everyone who lives there is on crystal meth. That is Albuquerque. Santa Fe is more of a retirement town that happens to have an atomic research facility.

I don't like stereotypical republicans or phony outdoorsy liberal types, so I didn't get along with anyone in Colorado.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Coimbra in Portugal would be the nearest Portuguese city that fits the bill.

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

However, the economy in Portugal is so-so ... it's gotten better, but at times seems like a 3rd world country in Western Europe. Surprisingly high prices given the low salaries there.

</comment><comment><USER32> Romanic language and decent climate? Most of Spain is full of lovely mid-sized towns. fitting _those_ bills. What else is "hacker friendly"? Heck, any rathole is hacker friendly, all I need is coffee, cigarettes and somewhere to plug my laptop into.

Oh, you have family. That's different. Still, Spain's nice and Portugal might be, too.

<comment><AUTHOR> The 'biotech jobs' thing is the problematic thing about Spain (and likely Portugal as well). I think. Anyone with good local knowledge is welcome to correct me. Otherwise, it has certainly crossed our thoughts - we went to Madrid, Sevilla and Granada on vacation a few years ago and enjoyed ourselves quite a bit.

</comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill You may want to consider Almeria, Spain. Large contingent of Brits and other expats, excellent weather, excellent services, and at least one University in- town, others nearby. A quick 45 minute flight to Madrid. Old Roman bath nearby , Mediterranean Sea, then beach, then 30 minutes away are foothills/rocky terrain.

If staying in the USA, the area outside Philadelphia (Main Line) or going a little farther, Lancaster, PA, will have excellent access to just about anywhere on the East Coast, while being as small to mid-size as you want, as you can choose between mostly-rural to mostly-urban as you travel west on Rt. 30 out of Philly.

</comment><comment><USER33> If you like southern Oregon, but want better job options, it's tough to imagine how you could do much better than Portland. There are plenty of big tech employers along the 26 corridor, great mass transit and bike access, and an increasingly-vibrant startup culture.

True, there aren't the same number of overnight paper millionaires being minted as in SF or NY, but you can still house and feed a family on 60K a year.

We've got an up-and-coming restaurant scene, and some of the best beer in the country, too. I find it a pretty nice mix.

It does rain a lot. I'm usually too busy coding, cooking, or biking through traffic to care, though.

</comment><comment><USER27> In the US any college town that size should fit the bill. It will be cheaper if not a suburb of a big city (Boulder is pretty expensive), and have a better climate if in the west. Portland might be the optimum.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure... it's not hard to look up college towns in the west, but I'm also looking for information on the 'feel' of places. Some people have posted negative opinions about New Mexico, for instance, which is something I wouldn't have found out on my own.

<comment><USER34> Davis, CA is a small university town with a great feel, and is only a 90 minute from the SF Bay Area. I prefer big cities and currently live in San Francisco, but I would live in Davis if I wanted to live in a small town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Holmdel, NJ. Home of AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Avaya, Vonage and general telecommunications. Lots of brain here. Population is 20% Asian, so kids get off on chinese new year (today). Schools are very exceptional, and the selective High Tech High School nearby in Lincroft is top 50 high schools in the country. A decent home around here is between 400-700k, probably a little cheaper for townhouses.

</comment><comment><USER36> Maryland is great. You can live in Columbia, MD and be between Baltimore and D.C. The IT salaries are very competitive and the cost of living is dramatically cheaper. Tons of great schools and Universities. Mountains 3 hours to the west, beaches 3 hours to the east. It gets a little too cold Dec.-Feb..

<comment><USER37> Cost of living is indeed fantastic, I bought a nice house in Baltimore for just over 200.

However, in terms of bike commute, or to say that it's hacker friendly, I don't see that myself. Have you found people that I haven't?

Also, is there much biotech outside of UMBI?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> There's New Haven, Connecticut. It's got Yale University and a bunch of biotech companies. The downtown is greatly improved and offers a variety of delicious restaurants. The housing prices are pretty cheap too. Not so many software companies though, so that might be an issue.

</comment><comment><USER39> How about Brighton, UK?

It's pretty small (around 250k people).

It's by the sea.

It's pretty hilly (For England)

It's an hour from London.

It's very hacker friendly - we have:

2 Universities:

<http://www.brighton.ac.uk>

<http://www.sussex.ac.uk>

A thriving geek/entrepreneur community:

<http://www.brightongirlgeekdinners.co.uk/>

<http://www.brightoncodingdojo.co.uk/>

<http://fivepoundapp.com/meetup/10/>

<http://www.opencoffeesussex.com/> (Sometimes open beer and open juice meetups too)

<http://brighton-ruby.org/>

<http://www.brightonfarm.com/> (Freelancers meetup)

<http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/419779/> (Geek Wine Thing)

<http://www.businessbricks.co.uk/>

Great places to work either in startups or as freelancers:

<http://www.sinc.co.uk/> (Sussex Innovation Centre)

<http://www.werkshop.org.uk/>

<http://www.brightonnewmedia.com/>

Great events:

<http://www.barcampbrighton.org/>

<http://2008.dconstruct.org/>

<http://widgetygoodness.com/>

Some big companies too:

<http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/401666/> (Linden Labs)

Plus a couple of games companies - Climax, NCSoft [http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2007/11/club_peng...](http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2007/11/club_penguin_to_celebrate_guy.html)

Plus it's a really relaxed and friendly place to be, more pubs/bars than days in the year (really) and the famous North and South Laines shopping areas for people who don't really enjoy the mall. Oh and some people call it BrightonCisco (<http://presencelabs.com/2007/03/07/brightoncisco/>).

There are many other reasons to be here and I'm sorry to any one if i've missed something really important out.

Kev

<comment><USER40> Don't forget the brilliant SussexDigital that brings much of this together: <http://www.sussexdigital.com>

... and groups like <http://www.wiredsussex.com>, <http://www.projectbrighton.com> and <http://www.inuda.net> (I'm the founder of that one)

.. oh and the weather today is amazing! : [http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/brighton/clusters/beach- pi...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/brighton/clusters/beach-pier-sea/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why not live in the bay area, enjoy all of the awesomeness, and opt out of the "rat race"?

<comment><USER41> housing is insane around in here. 800k buys you a shack. Unless you were either 1 Rich, 2.Cashed out huge amount of option shares 3.Gettin in debt out of your eyeballs, it is hard to afford a decent house with a normal salary. I like Berkeley, and SF, but still, living around in here is very expensive.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find that this has a big impact on the local demographics. One of the reasons I was so happy to return to Padova in 2000 is that it just feels more 'real' to me. There are rich people, poor people, and everything in between. Lots of old people, but plenty of young people and families as well.

The bay area, unless you're rich, seems to be more about "get in, make money, get out". We're a bit weary of moving, and would like to stay somewhere for a little while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Seattle is pretty good too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm from Eugene, and don't think I could handle the weather there again, let alone further north, although if other people reading this are curious, I'd have to put a word in for Portland, if the climate isn't a problem for you.

<comment><USER43> And you aren't even thinking about Corvallis?

I mean Eugene and Corvallis both have most of the features you listed, plus you're an hour away from the coast and from the mountains...

For those looking to plug in to the Willamette Valley Tech social networks <http://barcamp.org/BeaverBarCamp> is coming up on March 1st in Corvallis.

<comment><USER44> I've been armchair-surfing the Portland tech scene. This blog about the PDX tech scene is interesting..

<http://siliconflorist.com/>

"Calagator, the community project designed to give Portland one tech calendar to rule them all, has quickly begun to show signs of progress. In fact, events have begun populating the calendar already." <http://calagator.org/>

I didn't know Oregon (Corvallis) had such a vibrant technology culture/market.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know that Corvallis is big enough to be really "happening", although it's a pleasant enough place. Portland is a better bet if you can stand the climate. Unfortunately, I really can't. The endless gray just wears me down mentally. I need regular time outdoors and sunshine. For others though, I'd heartily recommend Portland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Copenhagen is a great place. I'll buy you a beer if you go here :-)

<comment><USER46> Sipping beer on a nearby hilltop... :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Denmark seems cool in a lot of ways, but unfortunately one of those ways is the climate - not to mention it completely fails the topography test: our house in downtown Innsbruck is about 3 times higher than the highest point in Denmark.

I actually have to say that Innsbruck isn't such a terrible place, but it's a bit too small and doesn't seem to have much of a tech scene. The area is gorgeous though:

<http://www.welton.it/photos/innsbruck/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Anyone have experience with Sacramento? There is definitely some tech stuff going on in the surrounding area (Folsom), but I am not sure how many startups there are.

</comment><comment><USER48> Ventura County, CA - Lots of places. Thousand oaks is where Amgen is HQ'ed. Lots of programming firms there. Bit on the pricey side though.

</comment><comment><USER49> Two come to mind for me: Columbus, OH and Champaign, IL.

Champaign seems pretty close to what you're looking for, but it's definitely too flat. That's why I'm leaving.

Columbus has Ohio State right there, and is as booming as you're going to find in Ohio. It's a beautiful city for the size and there's a sizable tech industry there. It's a place I wouldn't hesitate to live, but I have yet to do my time in the bay area and look forward to trying that for a few years.

<comment><USER50> Columbus OH???

I lived in Columbus. Your opinion is invalid.

Topography: absolutely flat

Size: Columbus is a sprawling stain of concrete blight of about a million people.

College: If you obsessively love football and Natti Light, OK.

Tech Industry: name one. A small, dying satellite office of a huge multinational doesn't count. Neither does insurance or fast food.

Beautiful: Short North area is OK, but nothing special unless you compare it Toledo or Dayton

<comment><USER49> I'm not sure I understand why my opinion is invalid. My family is in the Columbus area, I'm not entirely ignorant on the topic.

And I do obsessively love football :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't vote anyone down, because I don't want to hog this whole thread, and some cool places turned up that I personally wouldn't consider but might be great for others (Madison sounds nice), but I think he's referring to the fact that Columbus is 1) bigger than the listed target size, 2) doesn't have a good climate, 3) is flatter than a pancake, and 4) according to him at least (I wouldn't have a clue) isn't really that great for startups/hackers anyway.

Truth be told, I think my idea of 'topography' is different than a lot of people's. _This_ is topography:

[http://www.welton.it/photos/innsbruck/innsbruck_panorama.htm...](http://www.welton.it/photos/innsbruck/innsbruck_panorama.html)

While I'm fine with places not quite that dramatic - Padova only has some low- lying hills (5-600 M) nearby - I'd go crazy without some nice places to go biking/hiking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'd say somewhere around Boston would be ideal - Brookline, Cambridge, Framingham, etc..

</comment><comment><USER52> Have you looked at Munich, while visiting the Android Developers Workshop?

</comment><comment><USER53> Florida: There are some very pretty places in & around Orlando. There are tons of heavy-tech firms like Lockeed and Disney. I remember a few years ago that they were trying to whip up a "biotech hub", too. Scripps-Howard is setting up something in Boca Raton.

<comment><USER41> no f ucking way. Orlando is just a huge boring strip mall. Disneyland is a rip-off. And those firms, are really just megacorporates where only code monkeys work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> milwaukee, wisconsin, GE medical

<comment><USER55> Only having read his description, I would say Milwaukee is definitely NOT for him. Madison would be more his speed.

It is full of startups and a big university. Bio tech, medical and video gaming are the big things in Madison startup-wise. Milwaukee is good for financial, corporate and real estate type things.

Fun fact: Over the last decade, GE Medical has outsourced a LOT of tech people. Many were made offers in Madison. GE Medical, and the Milwaukee area in general, typically buy these people back essentially at a significant markup when they acquire the startups. Think Lunar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a nice place (voted up), but fails our climate and topography tests. Maybe it's right for someone else reading though, I read about it a little and it sounds like it's got a very good feel to it in terms of size and population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Chicago, IL - or Evanston, Skokie which are around. Great place. No need to have car, unless you want to have it :-)

<comment><USER57> This is strange. The only place in America I would leave Chicago for is San Fransisco.

<comment><USER44> Chicago has the best waterfront in my option and the best summers. The restaurant and art scene are top-notch. The winters though...

<comment><USER57> Oh God, I know. One of my highest priorities in life is to be able to be somewhere else during the Chicago winter.

<comment><USER56> Miami is close. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> vancouver or san diego. both little bigger, but both fit the 'livable' bill

</comment><comment><USER59> Wellington , New Zealand. Totally rules.

<comment><USER60> What's great about Wellington for hackers?</comment></comment>


Is Zynga stealing stockphotos or just not removing watermarks? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/pbrs0/is_zynga_stealing_stockphotos_or_just_not/ <comment><USER2> Zynga may be a sleaze factory, but I doubt that they want to use a watermarked image just to save $30 and open themselves to copyright suit.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. :)</comment></comment>


Interview on "Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way" - <AUTHOR> https://notamonadtutorial.com/interview-with-will-kurt-on-his-latest-book-bayesian-statistics-the-fun-way-63ce8aee32ed <comment><USER2> As someone who has a master's degree in statistics and often uses Bayesian statistics, I think we should not focus on whether one is a Bayesian or a frequentist, but rather be pragmatic and take the most practical approach to solving a statistical problem. Moreover, I think statistical education should start with frequentist concepts and then extend them to the Bayesian framework since the likelihood plays also a major role in obtaining the posterior distribution. In my opinion, this progression is much more natural than starting fully Bayesian.

<comment><USER3> Respectfully, I find that people who are _not_ statisticians overwhelming disagree with your point on which should be taught first.

Bayesian is a natural order of inference for people. The whole concept of the black swan ("all swans are white") proves this out.

Frequentist statistics is much less intuitive to people.

My preference is for people to be able to use _some_ statistics, and Bayesian gets them productive faster.

<comment><USER4> Frequentist statistics is often pretty poorly taught. Ideas like likelihood, modeling, and optimization underly the mechanics of both worlds. There's a big obsession with testing, but the Neyman Pearson testing framework is sound an intuitive.

Bayesian statistics gets a big boost because it's usually taught as a system instead of as a recipe book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who uses statistics all the time at work, I sympathize so much with this article and greatly enjoyed it. Every time I try to introduce a Bayesian prior, coworkers either look at me like I'm crazy (because they've never heard of or used Bayesian stats) or like I've suddenly gone soft and introduced a bunch of nebulous, touchy-feely context into the objective truth (if they're dedicated frequentists).

Then we promptly switch back to p-values of .05, a lot of the time not even bothering with a statistical power calculation. I've had better success with introducing power, though. I suspect that's because we can fit it into the existing frequentist framework.

<comment><USER6> > like I've suddenly gone soft and introduced a bunch of nebulous, touchy- > feely context into the objective truth

This drives me nuts. If you haven't, check out the paper "Beyond subjective and objective in statistics" by Gelman and Hennig (2017).

Right at the beginning they make the point that any analysis includes external information in many ways, such as adjusting variables for imbalance, how we deal with outliers, regularization, etc.

Especially if you're doing any sort of causal inference, you're usually making strong assumptions before estimating your model, even just in terms of which variables are included and how they're connected. The idea that priors are somehow ruining an "objective" model is just absurd to me. You're already making so many other decisions about your model that will affect estimates and your interpretation of them. Priors seem like another perfectly reasonable decision to have to make as well, with the benefit of getting results that I think in general are must more easily understood by a lay audience. (E.g., I don't think I've ever encountered someone not on my data science team that actually understands what a p-value is. But people are much better at understanding when I say, there's an X percent chance that there is a positive effect here.)

<comment><USER7> This critique might come from the idea that having a good analytic model, or at least some valuable analytic insights, involves much more than assigning some priors. Of course, the two things don't exclude each other, but for some frequentists Bayesians have the wrong perspective - or at least that's the critique, whether it's true or not.

Another issue that I personally have with Bayesianism is that I believe that assigning probabilities to singular events is only meaningful and admissible at all if there is a good analytic explanation for the respective propensity. For example, we may be able to deduce that a die is reasonably fair from the way it is constructed and our knowledge of physics, and later confirm this by frequentist analysis. Merely believing or claiming that the die is fair is not acceptable. Again, the difference is only one of attitude in the end, I suppose.

Maybe philosophers have given Bayesian statistics a bad rap, too, because many of those who call themselves Bayesians are also "probabilists", i.e., they think that rational belief must conform to the probability calculus. There are many arguments against probabilism and the only arguments that speak for it are Dutch book arguments. The view does not have very strong foundations.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _assigning probabilities to singular events is only meaningful and > admissible at all if there is a good analytic explanation for the respective > propensity._

Wait a minute, you are making a type error here: probabilities are _not_ propensities. They're degrees of belief. (And even if you disagree in general, this is a Bayesian context you're talking about.)

If I put a die on a table and hide it with a cup, you could still estimate your probability distribution about which face is up. My probability distribution would obviously be very different, since I put the die in there myself. (Replace "probability" by "betting ratio" or "degrees of belief" if it makes more sense to you.)

> _The [probabilism] view does not have very strong foundations._

Read the first 2 chapters of _Probability Theory: the Logic of Science_ , by E. T. Jaynes: "Plausible reasoning" and "The quantitative rules". It's very accessible, and you shall see how strong the foundations really are.

[http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...](http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/GaussianModel/JaynesProbabilityTheory.pdf)

<comment><USER7> No, I was not speaking from a Bayesian perspective, I was laying out the propensity-theoretic explanation of probability. The propensity explanation is one of attempts of explaining why singular events might be said to give rise to probabilities, living besides frequentism and Bayesianism. Another perspective worth mentioning is the logical approach, which is in the end purely combinatorial.

Some people think that you need to explain why a die can be fair, rather than just assuming it or only looking at it from a frequentist perspective. Of course, die-hard Bayesians don't think so, but that would be begging the question in the context of discussing criticisms of Bayesianism.

> _Read the first 2 chapters of Probability Theory: the Logic of Science, by > E. T. Jaynes: "Plausible reasoning" and "The quantitative rules". It's very > accessible, and you shall see how strong the foundations really are._

I'm an expert on this topic. The only arguments for probabilism are Dutch book arguments, and there is a large number of arguments against these. See for example various articles by Hajek. Alternative representations of graded belief are, among others:

\- plausibility theory (Halpern at al.)

\- possibility theory (Dubois & Prade)

\- Haas-Spohn ranking theory and variants thereof

\- various notions of epistemic entrenchment

\- Dempster-Shafer belief theory

\- almost any quantitative or qualitative representation of belief in belief revision theory not covered by one of the above theories (e.g. belief update by Katsuno & Mendelsohn)

\- by a general logical connection, nonmonotonic logics and AAFs can generally represent notions of belief update, such that the underlying qualitative ordering of states is a representation of graded belief

What you probably mean is that the above generalizations (or qualitative theories, in some cases) could be simulated with probabilities, e.g. by using convex sets of probabilities or what Josang is doing in his "subjective logic". That's true, but then we're no longer talking about probabilism in the sense I've used the word.

Of course, you can also try arguing for probabilism like Savage did: Lay out a set of postulates for your subjective plausibility that happen to allow you to proof that this notion of subjective plausibility is in the end probability. Despite the merits of such work, it is in the end a form of cheating (or "reverse engineering"), because you could just as well come up with plausible postulates that yield the weaker axioms of possibility theory.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _No, I was not speaking from a Bayesian perspective, I was laying out the > propensity-theoretic explanation of probability._

Unless you can explain this "propensity" in terms of actual physical properties, propensity by itself is… unjustified. The only domain I know of so far where we could possibly argue propensities are a thing is quantum mechanics. And even then it seems to rest on an anthropic argument: which universe am I living in?

> _Some people think that you need to explain why a die can be fair,_

A die by itself is not fair, right? A die might be _balanced_ , and the way it is thrown it might have enough unpredictable variability to cause everyone in the room to think "uniform distribution over [1..6]".

Likewise, a cryptographic pseudo random generator is unpredictable (and thus "fair"), to anyone who doesn't know its internal state. Even though the process itself is deterministic, it's just not computationally feasible to guess its output just from the observation of past inputs. (Though for this one I'm relying on the fact we're not logically omniscient.)

> _I 'm an expert on this topic._

Good. Then you know that any inference strategy that falls prey to Dutch Books is not rational. Right?

To be fair, probability theory is not computationally tractable. I did not verify, but I guess any feasible approximation _is_ vulnerable to some more or less subtle Dutch Books.

Now the way you talk about Dutch Books sound like all the other strategies you mention are vulnerable, not just in practice, but in _theory_ as well. They are thus not perfectly rational. Do their authors at least have the grace to admit this is a flaw that should be corrected?

But then I suspect that correcting the flaw inevitably leads to probability theory itself: if you accept Jaynes three "desiderata" as required for any kind of rational reasoning, as he shows, the result is necessarily equivalent to probability theory as we know it (where probabilities are subjective assessments of plausibility, otherwise known as "degrees of belief").

I can only conclude that you do _not_ accept Jayne's desiderata as necessary for correct inference. And this is the point where I look at you like you're not quite sane.

For reference, Jaynes Desiderata:

      (1) Degrees of plausibility are represented by real
          numbers. (And a continuity assumption.)

      (2) Qualitative correspondence with common sense.
          (explained in more detailed in the book)

      (3a) If a conclusion can be reasoned out in more than
           one way, then every possible way must lead to the
           same result.

      (3b) The robot always takes into account all of the
           evidence it has relevant to a question. It does
           not arbitrarily ignore some of the information,
           basing  its conclusions only on what remains. In
           other words, the robot is completely non
           ideological.

      (3c) The robot always represents equivalent states of
           knowledge by equivalent plausibility assignments.
           That is, if in two problems the robot's state of
           knowledge is the same (except perhaps for the
           labeling of the propositions), then it must assign
           the same plausibilities in both.

Good luck convincing me (and I suspect, the majority of people, including frequentist statisticians), that we should reject any of these desiderata.

I don't care it's reverse engineering, those desiderata match the way I think. I accept the conclusion that probability theory is the correct (albeit intractable) way to think, because I ultimately agree with the postulates it rests on. Vehemently so. They're not just true, they're _obvious_.

If you don't accept them, then I can only give up, and remember what Yudkowsky once wrote: _" How do you argue a rock into becoming a mind?"_

<comment><USER7> > _Good. Then you know that any inference strategy that falls prey to Dutch > Books is not rational. Right?_

Do you even have an idea what "rational" means? There are people who argue that having cyclic preferences is not only rational, but even sometimes the only rational representation of evaluations. I'm not one of these, but just wanted to mention that things are not as simple as you lay them out.

If by "rational" you mean "fine for decision making", then I need to disappoint you. Dutch Books are not a working criterion for that. It is perfectly possible to make rational decisions with cyclic preferences. Your preferences need to weakly eligible and weak eligibility needs to be top- transitive (Hansson).

Weak eligibility: There are one or more alternatives such that there is no preferred alternative to them.

Top transitivity of weak eligibility: If a is weakly eligible and a~b, then b is also weakly eligible.

These are conditions on preferences. You can have similar conditions on subjective plausibility, of course, once you combine preferences and subjective plausibilities.

By the way, Expected Utility falls prey to Dutch Books. There is a money pump against every risk-averse or risk-seeking agent. Check out Wakker's book, which is much better than Jayne: _Prospect Theory for risk and ambiguity_. Anyway, EU is often considered rational and widely used, but according to your criterion it would be irrational. (In finance, the kind of Dutch Books are called "arbitrage" and exploited immediately, so the market prunes them away, but in other areas EU is used extensively. Are you maybe a finance guy???)

> _For reference, Jaynes Desiderata:_

Of course you can just claim "here is my list of postulates, and that's what 'rational' means", but that's not really an argument. The other theories I am talking about are also axiomatized. Take for example Fishburn's seminal work. According to your theory, Fishburn spent most of his life and efforts in decision making on irrational theories. I'm not convinced and rather be willing to talk about different kinds of rationality, if I'd be pressed to make a decision on that.

> _(1) Degrees of plausibility are represented by real numbers. (And a > continuity assumption.)_

There is a vast array of literature on qualitative decision making for which this assumption does not hold. Lexicographic decision making does also not fulfill that requirement and there is a whole French-Belgium school on that, including axiomatizations and practical methods (tools like ELECTRE). For lexicographic decision making usually hyperreal numbers are used.

Qualitative decision making comes with a host of problems and limitations due to Arrow's Theorem, but lexicographic models can be very reasonable and even required if some of the authors in the field are right about some examples of seemingly irrational preferences. In any case, just to say that these axiomatized theories are irrational because "here are my axioms" is unacceptable. I'm sure not even Jayne does that.

As for the continuity assumption: There is a whole field of measurement theory that would tell you when you need it and when you don't need it, and I really don't see any non-measurement-theoretic way of defending such technical assumptions as rationality postulates independently. Again, just assuming these kind of things a bit too simple. After all, I can take any postulate and call it "rational", that's not a meaningful discussion of rationality, though.

> _(3b) The robot always takes into account all of the evidence it has > relevant to a question. It does not arbitrarily ignore some of the > information, basing its conclusions only on what remains. In other words, > the robot is completely non ideological._

This is an interesting principle, because even in probabilistic settings it completely controversial how to deal with conflicting evidence and how and when to revise beliefs in the face of evidence that directly conflicts with your existing beliefs.

It's a very vexing and complicated problem with many different solutions. It is definitely an underdetermined problem. One of the best discussions of it has evolved from criticisms of the corresponding update rule in the Dempster- Shafer theory of evidence, so it's worth taking a look at if you're really interested in this topic. But you seem to be hell-bent on taking Jayne's book as some sort of bible, which is weird. It's not as if any of the other approaches I've mentioned in my previous post are unknown or have been proposed by outsiders - it's almost impossible to not stumble across possibility theory (Dubois & Prade) or Halpern's work if you're doing AI research, for example.

> _They 're not just true, they're obvious._

Maybe for people who do not know the literature very well, but certainly not to me. Sorry. :(

<comment> loup-vaillant > _There are people who argue that having cyclic preferences is not only > rational, but even sometimes the only rational representation of > evaluations._

Wouldn't be the first time otherwise serious people are defending nonsense. Noted nonetheless.

> _It is perfectly possible to make rational decisions with cyclic > preferences._

It is perfectly possible to make rational decision while being insane. Just, not _all_ decisions will be rational. Cyclic preferences are not insane with respect to all decision, but they do mean the decision system as a whole is not flawless.

While the absence of cyclic preferences is of course not sufficient for perfect rationality, it's obviously required.

> _By the way, Expected Utility falls prey to Dutch Books. There is a money > pump against every risk-averse or risk-seeking agent._

Well, if you're not evaluating risks correctly to begin with, of course you're gonna get ripped off (I'm not saying that's a good thing). Being either risk seeking or risk averse looks like a flaw too, though _perhaps_ less severe than cyclic preferences.

> _There is a vast array of literature on qualitative decision making for > which this assumption does not hold._

Wait a minute, this one is only talking about epistemology. Jaynes does not mention utility functions at all, and for all I know those may still be allowed to be discontinuous. (That would be perhaps a bit surprising, but I have yet to have an opinion on that particular point.)

Discontinuous _probabilities_ , that would be more surprising. Though I reckon this continuity business is the weak link here. It would be nice if we didn't have to assume it.

> _even in probabilistic settings it completely controversial how to deal with > conflicting evidence and how and when to revise beliefs in the face of > evidence that directly conflicts with your existing beliefs._

There are lots of reason why a piece of data might not change one's mind, even if that piece of data seems to contradict their beliefs directly. For instance that piece of evidence might have been cherry piked from a mass of otherwise normal data.

Not even acknowledging the piece of data might be a good _approximation_ in some cases, but in general it seems quite foolish. You don't just ignore a piece of evidence, you explain why it doesn't change your mind. (I believe Jaynes gives examples of beliefs _diverging_ when exposed to the same piece of evidence.)

> _But you seem to be hell-bent on taking Jayne 's book as some sort of bible, > which is weird._

Call it confirmation bias, but when I read that book, I already subscribed to probability theory as the correct way to think. I had for a long time. The intuition of probabilities being degrees of beliefs, I had for as long as I can remember.

Then this book comes up, and provide justifications for my intuitions that were even stronger than I anticipated. It's like suspecting there's a giant bearded man behind that cloud, and then actually _see_ it. And take a photo, and show it to your friends. Perhaps not foolproof, but pretty damn close.

\---

Now we still have a problem. Jayne's Robot cannot exist. I mean, that would be something like AIXI, that's not tractable. Probability theory is not tractable (we wouldn't have Monte Carlo methods if it were, we'd just compute the probabilities directly). Any inference engine that runs in the real world (like humans), has to be imperfect. We have to take shortcuts, and from them, flawed reasoning will arise.

There's also the problem that thinking has a cost. It takes time and energy, and with those, utility. So not only a real engine will have flaws, it also needs to evaluate whether minimising those flaws is worth the trouble (and that evaluation also costs some thinking).

To take a concrete example, the first Alpha Go program lost one of its games in part because it failed to take more time in a particularly hard to evaluate game state. It was obvious to top human players that this particular move required more thought than usual, but the machine wasn't programmed that way.

As certain as I am that probability theory is the correct ideal to attain, I also have to admit that it is just that: an impossible ideal. How to instantiate that ideal into a good enough working implementation, I have _no freaking clue_.

<comment><USER7> Well, I agree mostly with you, except that I'm not a probabilist. There is an extensive discussion about what and what not Dutch books show, see Alan Hájek's work on that, which is really worth reading.

> _Being either risk seeking or risk averse looks like a flaw too, though > perhaps less severe than cyclic preferences._

Yes, I don't want to deny that this view is appealing. However, even if you use probabilistic representations of degrees of belief, you need to deal with ignorance and conflicting evidence in one way or another. Convex sets of probabilities can be shown to be able to represent many of the alternative approaches I've mentioned. There is also this "subjective logic" by Jøsang that is surprisingly nice despite it's silly name. Check it out, maybe the only quirk I have with it is that he mostly seems to re-brand many prior ideas, but the framework is interesting.

> _Not even acknowledging the piece of data might be a good approximation in > some cases, but in general it seems quite foolish. You don 't just ignore a > piece of evidence, you explain why it doesn't change your mind._

I agree with you, but at the same time we know from qualitative belief revision theory that there are many, many ways of dealing with conflicting evidence. Okay, we can rule out some of them, e.g. discarding all previous beliefs to learn the new evidence, but among the many less obviously flawed methods a choice needs to be made. The probabilistic setting doesn't help too much in that area, it actually makes it harder to see what's going on. As I've said, the problem is underdetermined.

> _Then this book comes up, and provide justifications for my intuitions that > were even stronger than I anticipated._

I'm definitely going to read it! However, I might already be tainted by other books on the subject and philosophical discussions. I really do think a belief representation ought not be closed under negation, i.e., I have strong Dempster-Shafer intuitions, and that some way of distinguishing ignorance from doubt is needed.

> _Call it confirmation bias, but when I read that book, I already subscribed > to probability theory as the correct way to think. I had for a long time. > The intuition of probabilities being degrees of beliefs, I had for as long > as I can remember._

Kudos to you for having such strong intuitions. It makes life easier. Maybe I'd be willing to buy into them for probabilities, but that wouldn't help me because of similar problems on the evaluative side on which most of my work focuses. On the evaluative side we have thought experiments like Spectrum Cases (Temkin, Rachels): Suppose A gives you extremely high pleasure for a month, B gives you a little bit less pleasure than A (barely noticeable) for 3 months, C gives you a little bit less pleasure than B (barely noticeable) for 9 months, and so on. Some people (not all) have the intuition that B is better than A, C is better than B, and so forth, until at some point, say Z, they would judge that A is better than Z. These thought experiments come in all varieties, can also be made about well-being and other notions of goodness and can be made as realistic as one wishes. Most people who want to keep "better than" transitive introduce some notion of significance, which is lexicographic decision making in disguise (significant value attributes always outrank insignificant value attributes). But okay, you were talking about probabilities only and already acknowledged the evaluative component could be discontinuous. (To be more precise, in this case the Archimedean axiom fails.) It's just that even if graded belief is purely probabilistic, these kind of preferences will complicate making decisions on the basis of your belief.

I agree about the tractability, too. Since you are a probabilist about graded belief, that already makes your life much easier than mine, though. Couldn't you just say that any heuristics are permissible in certain circumstances as shortcuts that - under these circumstances - are conducive to adequate probability approximations?

I didn't want to insinuate that there is anything wrong with being a probabilist, it's in the end a matter of intuitions, I merely wanted to point out that there are some fairly well-known authors who are not probabilists about graded belief in the narrow sense, e.g. Bouyssou, Fishburn, Vincke, Pirlot in decision making, people like Halpern, Dubois, Prade, Spohn and their scholars in A.I., and of course almost everybody in mathematical psychology such as Luce and Tversky. But as I've said, most of their generalizations can be represented by more complicated probability representations such as sets of probabilities.

Anyway, it was nice chatting with you!

<comment> loup-vaillant > _Well, I agree mostly with you, except that I 'm not a probabilist._

Good enough for me. :-) (Aumann's agreement theorem notwithstanding, I have to recognise the capacity for actual humans to agree is limited.)

> _I 'm definitely going to read [Jayne's book]!_

I have yet to read it all, but the foundations are laid out early. The preface mostly explains where the author is coming from, chapter 1 and 2 do most of the justifications. The rest focuses more on applications of probability theory. My general impression was like:

      Matches my intuitions,
      solid theoretical foundations,
      works in practice...
      ...case closed I guess.

> _On the evaluative side we have thought experiments like Spectrum Cases > (Temkin, Rachels): Suppose A gives you extremely high pleasure for a month, > B gives you a little bit less pleasure than A (barely noticeable) for 3 > months, C gives you a little bit less pleasure than B (barely noticeable) > for 9 months, and so on._

Hmm, that's a hard one. Depending on the value I attach to pleasure, there should be 3 possibilities: A is best, Z (or whatever is the last iteration) is best, or there's a sweet spot in between. I get the circular preference, and would likely fall prey to it if the circle is hidden to me. But stuff like that is like a big warning sign that most probably requires more thought than a quick intuitive judgement.

> _Couldn 't you just say that any heuristics are permissible in certain > circumstances as shortcuts that - under these circumstances - are conducive > to adequate probability approximations?_

I could. I didn't because once we start making shortcuts, evaluating the impact on the shortcut on the final assessment is very difficult. Probabilities are non-linear, it's very easy for a seemingly innocuous approximation to translate to snowball into a huge error. But if careful, it often can (and _does_ ) work.

It's a bit like floating point approximations. The ideal math on real numbers is correct, floating points only introduce small errors, but some operations (like a division close to zero) can magnify those errors from "approximate" to "utterly wrong". Special care is typically taken to ensure that does not happen.

> _Anyway, it was nice chatting with you!_

For me as well. I'll keep your references in mind, and thank you for your patience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the swedish fish approach is a particularly fun way: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OJEae7Qb_o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OJEae7Qb_o)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love the idea of making an approachable version of Ed Jaynes's classic.

</comment><comment><USER10> "For coin tosses both schools of thought work pretty well"

How many coin tosses in a row have to land heads before a frequentist decides that the coin is unfair?

<comment><USER11> 6, if it's a two-sided test.

<comment><USER10> Explain?

<comment><USER12> I'm guessing 1 flip to pick Heads or Tails, and then 5 flips to get a 'good' p-value (2^-5 = 0.03125 < 0.05)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >First of all, p-values are not the way sane people answer questions

I think they are pretty close to the way sane people answer some kinds of questions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can anyone recommend a 'Bayesian statistics the hard way' book?

<comment><USER15> Bayesian Data Analysis by Andrew Gelman

[http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/](http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/book/)

<comment><USER16> one vote for BDA. For programmers who learn better by implementing things, this book [1] is also good:

[1]: [https://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Methods-Hackers- Probabilisti...](https://www.amazon.com/Bayesian-Methods-Hackers- Probabilistic-Addison-Wesley/dp/0133902838)

<comment><USER17> Parts of that book are available online[1] for free. If not for that book I would never have understood how to apply Bayesian stats to problems that interested me.

[1] [http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic- Programming-...](http://camdavidsonpilon.github.io/Probabilistic-Programming- and-Bayesian-Methods-for-Hackers/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got in an argument with a friend (a mechanical/electrical engineer) who knew about bayesian statistics. My other friend, a PhD in statistics, whom I had many discussions about because both personal interest and work interests, had supplied me with my modicum of statics knowledge.

My engineer friend called my PhD friend a "frequentist", like it was a dirty word, despite only having one, maybe two, classes in college about bayesian math/statistics/whatever (my ignorance).

This quote jumped out at me in the article:

 _" I wanted to write a book on Bayesian statistics that really anyone could pick up and use to gain real intuitions for how to think statistically and solve real problems using statistics."_

In the context of the statement, it sounds like he is claimin any non-bayesian statistics is useless (or less valuable/reliable at best) than other forms of statistical analysis?

<comment><USER19> Having known Will when I lived in Reno I'm certain your focus should be on "anyone could pick up and use" and not any statement about the usefulness of other approaches. The Will I know is fundamentally about teaching things in very easy to understand ways, and curious about all approaches to solving a problem.</comment></comment>


New Facebook Feature Empowers the Dangerous "Comment Nazis" - <AUTHOR> http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000823.html <comment><USER3> _"You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."_

It's not a lack of integrity - what people say and how people act is _always_ based on the context it's in. There are things you'd say to your friends that you wouldn't say to your family or even other friends. It's always been this way, and it's pretty arrogant for Mark and, consequently, Facebook to assume otherwise.

This has actually pretty much pushed me off Facebook, as the only stuff I post is what falls in the relatively small subset of stuff I'd tell to my family, coworkers, boss, friends, and people that I know online.

<comment><USER4> Anyone trying to beat facebook should read that quote every day.

People should, in an ideal world, behave with integrity. But it's not an ideal world. My boss shouldn't care what I'm doing in my own time, but he might. The military shouldn't care if a potential recruit once tried pot at a college party, but they might. No employer should care about sexual orientation, but they probably do.

It's not about integrity. It's about living in a hypercritically judgemental society.

Choosing to remain slightly anonymous is one way to maintain your integrity. It's better than treating every statement like a PR release. Like Mark does, if he has the integrity to say everything using his own name, like he tells us to.

<comment><USER5> To play devil's advocate here for a moment.

You state a lot of things that people _shouldn't_ do. Isn't it kinda sad that the one thing we _shouldn't_ be doing, being ourselves, isn't on that list? That's what this discussion is essentially about. Freedom to think what we want, be who we are?

Maybe the goal shouldn't be to hide from everyone, but to expose everyone for who we all really are? Maybe if everyone realizes how messed up everyone really is, we'll stop being so judgemental? So maybe the best way to do that is have a single identity, a single being. Sure, how you act might be different between different social groups, but that doesn't change who you are.

Maybe this is an idealist outlook, but isn't it an ideal we should be working for, not hiding from?

<comment><USER6> Would you want every conversation you have with your spouse/child/parent to be available to every single other person you know?

Regardless of how sincere and honest those conversations may be?

If not, then this idea that "the days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know" is very much _not_ over.

The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly alright and natural for this to happen.

When I'm with someone else and they get a call from someone close to them, I excuse myself from the conversation in some way. That's just the polite thing to do.

This idea that all this is coming to an end is just wishful fantasy on the part of the owner of a site who's existence and popularity probably depends on this being true.

<comment><USER5> Again, playing devil's advocate...

The argument is valid, but doesn't apply in this case.

> Would you want every conversation you have with your spouse/child/parent to > be available to every single other person you know?

No, of course not. However, this is forcing private stuff public. Nothing is being forced here. Certain sites will require you to log in with your Facebook identity. You choose to interact with them in this manner, or you choose not to. If you comment in Facebook comments, you are doing so in a public forum.

> The fact is, people have private interactions with other people all the time > and they expect it to be private and society accepts that it's perfectly > alright and natural for this to happen.

This doesn't change anything. The proposal isn't to share your private life. Simply to make public comments just that, public. If you want things to remain private, keep them private.

Basically, you're arguing for something that isn't a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ah, this will be how Facebook crumbles.

The value of Facebook's users is that the overwhelming majority of them are real. People use their real names, and hook up with their real friends, resulting in a real social graph.

But if Facebook becomes the single-sign-on provider, the identity provider, for a majority of blogs and forums and other venues where people today participate anonymously, then Facebook will start seeing a huge number of fake profiles appear as people make multiple identities to preserve their privacy and anonymity, and the more those fake profiles are used, the less the real userbase will be worth, which ultimately threatens their bottom line.

<comment><USER8> We can only hope that people will be smart enough to do that. It's certainly not a guarantee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity._

This sounds _awfully_ like:

 _Mr. Anderson, it seems that you've been living two lives. In one life, you're Thomas A. Anderson, program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number, you pay your taxes, and you... help your landlady carry out her garbage. The other life is lived in computers, where you go by the hacker alias "Neo" and are guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future, and one of them does not._

</comment><comment><USER10> Ever get the feeling that the web is suddenly trying to profile you? Every upvote you make, every comment you leave, every article you read... Until one day they start knocking on your door for having negative thoughts, being unhappy, being prone to rebellion, not being conformist, or whatever category some data mining app applies to you.

<comment><USER11> Of course the web is trying to profile you. If it's not Google and their advertisers then it's Facebook and their government friends who plug all your comments into NSA supercomputers to check for terroristy thoughts.

We all have profiles in some NSA database somewhere, just waiting to be expunged and used against us when someone important decides we're a Homeland Security threat.

<comment><USER12> I think you mean "extracted" or "opened," not "expunged" (expunged means sealed or erased, the opposite of what I assume you intend).

That being said, I work on anti-abuse systems at Facebook and I'm pretty sure we don't "plug all your comments into NSA supercomputers." What evidence do you have that indicates we do such a thing?

<comment><USER11> I meant exhume actually.

You don't need to plug them into the NSA. Since Facebook pays your salary it wouldn't be your job. NSA employees would do all the work.

I'm sure they have circumventing the privacy measures down to a well oiled system by now. The NSA loves to illegally wiretap everything. This is their obsession. Justification: all the foreigners who use Facebook being a potential national security threat. All the communication on Facebook (e.g. Egyptian revolution) being invaluable data to CIA analysts. Etcetera. It's naive to think that these agencies don't have large teams focused solely on extracting value from Facebook.

Zuckerberg, being the guy with control over everyone's data now, is way too friendly with the various alphabet soup agency heads to believe that Facebook is hindering their never-ending investigations. You don't see FBI directors kissing the feet of Larry and Sergey.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As an addition to that last question, about the Eygptian protestors, I also often wonder how different Mark Zuckerberg's positions on privacy, anonymity and identity would be if he were gay...

<comment><USER14> Or if he ever had to to apply for a job, after getting caught calling other students "dumb fucks" for trusting him.

I mean what I say, but I can't rely on every stranger out there to treat me rationally afterward, so I intentionally limit who knows it was me. In venues like Facebook (and now linked forums), solely because I can't do that, I never say anything beyond the inoffensively vacuous when I bother to use them at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nothing stops one creating a fake Facebook profile. Choose a reasonably human sounding name, crank the privacy levels way up, and comment. FB is unlikely to figure out it's fake.

There are some disadvantages. Your fake identity will probably need to be reused across sites, since creating a new account involves getting an email address, which takes a few extra minutes per identity. But choose a generic enough name, and it is less of a problem...

<comment><USER16> Now Google is _requiring_ users to verify new gmail accounts with a text message sent to a mobile phone. I can only assume that it will soon be prohibitively difficult to create fake email addresses to use to create other fake accounts. I fear that anonymity will likely die soon, whether we like it or not.

<comment><USER17> Um. You know Google is not the only free e-mail provider, right?

Anonymity and privacy are like punk rock. People have been saying it's dead since its inception, but look around and you'll find it all over the place.

<comment><USER16> Of course. I'm just suggesting that once one provider starts doing it, others may likely follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The only thing I put in my FB feed is funny pictures. No politics, no computer stuff, nothing that might be construed as being controversial.

Why? Because I am a "fake" person? I mean heck, I post a lot more than that over here.

Nope, because my FB feed includes stuff like friends of my grandmother, or my 14-year-old son, or my HS buds. Each of these audiences has completely different standards and measurements of civility.

</comment><comment><USER19> The concept of having your "real identity" associated with comments is very similar to the recent issue with the gaming company Blizzard. There was an announcement a few months ago stating that a poster's full name would be displayed on the battle net forums (this was prior to the release of WoW Cataclysm and SC2).

There was an online petition and a massive cry of dissent from the users. There was even a moderator who tried to justify Blizzard's position by posting his real name and saying he "didn't care". Much of his personal life information was displayed and if I remember correctly he had to change his FaceBook account due to all the trolls.

Blizzard did not put this idea into effect.

Associating identities with views online can have massive repercussions regardless of how much "integrity" that person has. Trolls and stalkers would have an absolute field day due to the loss of anonymity.

And now, for some humor to wash down the pessimism, s/fb/blizzard or vice versa:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NgAkWxcPBE>

</comment><comment><USER20> I've chosen to out-opt of Facebook for a variety of reasons that aren't really germane. To assist with this, I use a Chrome extension called "Facebook Disconnect" to basically remove FB from my daily web experience.

So for me, TechCrunch doesn't have a comment system anymore. That's too bad, as I liked the previous system and found the commentary interesting. I'm not alone -- 4,000 people a week install this browser extension.

The end result for TechCrunch is that a small, but growing minority of readers will be less engaged with the site. In the grand scheme of things, not a big deal for them I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER21> A problem with that article is fundamental, but unfortunately not uncommon, misunderstanding of free speech.

A website is a private property.

You have no more right to leave a comment on my website than I have to come to your house and bore you with a speech on politics.

My free speech rights allow me to publish my thoughts on my blog or publish them in my newspaper. Free speech, however, is not about allowing me to publish my thoughts on your blog or giving me right to publish an op-ed in New York Times, anonymously.

So saying:

"But to force all comments into the realm of "single real identity" public exposure -- as Facebook now appears intent on doing -- is unacceptable, reprehensible, dangerous, and utterly at odds with basic free speech rights in the United States at least."

,as dire and dramatic as it sounds, is, frankly, utter bullshit.

Today we have unprecedented ability to exercise our rights to free speech, anonymous or otherwise, so let's not fall for demagogy of people who want to pollute web with worthless comments while hiding behind principles of free speech (while completely misunderstanding those principles).

<comment><USER13> Normally, I would agree with you. However, there is an exception I make for hegemony. When a private entity becomes powerful enough, I think there are similar arguments to be made about as there would be for governments. Maybe "censorship" and "free speech" aren't accurate terms, but that doesn't negate the discussion itself.

<comment><USER22> This might be a valid point except that TechCrunch made a business decision to use FaceBook's comments in an apparent attempt to improve the user experience by limiting trolls.

In no way is any government or monopolistic entity forcing them to do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The comment attributed to Zuckerberg, really shocked me. It has the ring of a pronouncement made by a despot, or an out of touch royal detached from the real world. It scares me that this guy and those around him, are able to try to shape world according to such twisted world views.

Even if this really was a question of integrity, why does he feel the need to enforce it on our behalf?

This for me is a pronouncement that is fit for a dictator.

</comment><comment><USER24> Everyone did notice that Facebook's comment system allows you to login via an essentially anonymous Yahoo! account as well, right? When/if they add Twitter and Google those will be equally anonymous and the trolling / spamming will return to normal levels.

</comment><comment><USER25> In Season 5, Episode 17 of House, a guy loses his inhibition which causes him to speak his mind having no control over what he says. Now if you watched this episode (or read the recap), I hope you would understand the difference between stating a comment because you take notice of those around you versus saying the first thing that comes to mind.

<comment><USER26> Is a TV show really the best example, even if it's been seen by a relatively large number of people? It's not real, after all.

<comment><USER27> It is in fact a perfectly real condition: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinhibition>

<comment><USER26> I know the affliction is real, I'm just questioning the wisdom of using the _portrayal_ thereof by a TV show as a basis for argument. The gracious commenters provided good links to expound on the fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Long story short: if you don't allow anonymous or psuedonymous comments on your site, you're a Nazi.

<comment><USER29> And if you insist upon making anonymous or pseudonymous comments, you're a troll.

<comment><USER28> Who said that? Because, he overtly said the Nazi thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Like most, I disagree that having multiple identities are coming to an end. But I think it is a good thing that Facebook comments are being used on other sites because it will promote integrity. Not every site will use Facebook comments so when we want to dawn a different, anonymous personality, we can close the Techcrunch tab and open a different site that allows anonymous comments. Each site will have its own environment and purpose. I think it is a good thing that we are moving from an almost completely anonymous Internet to an Internet that allows you to be anonymous or not depending on the situation.

</comment><comment><USER31> We can all pull the "Mark never walked in our shoes" line, but what he is trying to say is that transparency is inevitable as we march forward into the information age. So we might as well accept our convictions and live with them.

As for the people in Egypt there will always be outlets for anonymous communication. However, it won't be found on some tech blog.

Putting faces behind the comments provoke people to consider their opinions more carefully, just like we do in real life. And if you are one of those people who want to lash out, but don't have the guts to do it in face then you should just tell your best friend or keep it to yourself.

Just my thoughts.

<comment><USER32> >Putting faces behind the comments provoke people to consider their opinions more carefully

You're absolutely right. KGB and Stasi had achieved a lot of success in putting faces behind the comments, and as a result people were considering their opinions extremely carefully.

<comment><USER31> Easy to take everything out of context isn't it? Also you would have to assume that the people hosting the comments where either KGB or Stasi... Are you referring to Techcrunch?

<comment><USER32> >Easy to take everything out of context isn't it?

yes. It is one of the reasons people may like to remain anonymous - to avoid dealing with consequences when comments are taken out of context, incorrectly interpreted and/or understood. Why should i spend extra effort dealing with morons who aren't able or inclined to understand a simple logical idea?

>Also you would have to assume that the people hosting the comments where either KGB or Stasi...

not necessary. Just reading/listening to have been enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As long as website owners are aware of the consequences, it seems to me to be up to them to use this or not.

I'm guessing the main attraction is to have the comments automatically propagated to the commentator's Facebook friends (that IS how it works, right?)

Personally I'd like to see a similar system for Hacker News - you'd get a much better comment moderation while keeping the discussion in one place and not having to worry about running a commenting system yourself.

</comment><comment><USER34> I find it rather ironic that I'm hesitant to comment on this thread because I disagree with the strongly opinionated majority. Therein lies a paradox.

<comment><USER35> I believe it'd be an interesting addition.

However, before you do, ask yourself: would you have the same opinion if you were gay and 15 years old in a fundamentalist family? In a middle eastern country? If you were transgendered but only in the beginning stages of transitioning? If you were polygamous in a community that disapproved?

How about if you were conservative in a liberal university?

How about talking about how you had an abortion? That's an important view, with policy implications, but you never know who would fire you if they knew.

Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?

<comment><USER34> > Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?

Absolutely not, and I agree with you. But help me out - isn't the root cause of all the examples you list a lack of information? Case in point of many: don't people in general become less bigoted the more educated they become?

Call me a naive idealist, but I wonder if the information barriers erected by people to protect themselves, are, on a wider scale, actually what keeps bigotry and hatred alive?

Zuckerberg isn't a saint, so I'm not suggesting that there is any altruistic motive behind his moves. I'm just questioning if greater transparency is inherently a bad thing.

<comment><USER35> That's how I live my life. I also have white male privilege and a wonderful family who embraced me coming out and the ability to choose my employers due to my skills as a developer. That's why I live out of the closet, precisely for the reasons you mention.

That doesn't hold for a kid in a religious household, the same exact kid who needs to find a community in which she or he can be heard. It was that anonymous community that allowed me to find the resources I needed.

Now, to be fair, the LGBT community is largely going to know better than to force people to name themselves, and the blogger always holds the choice. I'm more concerned about the overarching issue. I'm concerned about governments forcing their citizens to blog and comment using their own names. And Facebook's move is exactly the type of thing that will give them ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> You might have one identity, but you probably have many personas - <USER2> personas are what most people put forth on the web. That's a pretty fundamental fact, and it seems like Zuckerberg is dead wrong on this.

This might be an unpopular statement... but IMO, Google seems to get this on some level (even though they haven't figured out a way to package it.) There is a recurring theme in the occasional bits that leak out of Google about their high level thoughts on what they could contribute to the social web around understanding and helping people separate their personas -

<http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/google-social-slide-deck/> (update: creator of this deck now works at FB... wonder if he took his opinions with them, or if this is still indicative of the thinking at Google?)

<https://profiles.google.com/> (notice the language around managing what the world sees when it searches for you...)

</comment><comment><USER37> I have more of an issue with the lack of control that I have between my friends, family, coworkers and their social networks.

I had a coworker arrested on some very serious and character destroying charges. It was hard enough to having to relay that privately to our executives. I couldn't imagine that spiraling out on my network and remaining there forever.

A former coworker now has a very interesting business, that isn't very PC. Should I screen her because of what that will look like to business and/or community contacts?

No, in both contexts I wish to shape how others reflect on my identity. I shouldn't be constrained to one very public identity.

And concerning Zuckerberg, how does a billionaire, twenty something have a clue about a normal user of his system? And besides does he really sounds like a press release to his friends in real life?

</comment><comment><USER38> People, it's time we create a "contextual persona" toolset for social networking. This is the widest crack in Facebook's armor that a rival could exploit...

<comment><USER39> ok lets flesh the idea out.

you have a single sign on that allows you to create multiple persona's e.g. public, family and friends

when posting you would have the ability/requirement to tag content as being accessible to individuals in groups you have associated with each persona.

sounds like a bit of a pain in the ass that would become very unwieldy beyond a few groups.

<comment><USER40> What we need is a browser "persona" plugin, that allows you to swap in and out different accounts when it indicates you are on a FB enabled page.

<comment><USER41> But would it still help? I mean, accessing multiple personas through the same browser on same machine would still be a giveaway, isn't it?

<https://panopticlick.eff.org/browser-uniqueness.pdf>

<comment><USER40> Depends what you are trying to achieve, if we are talking a simple level about controlling what "side" of yourself your friends see I think the browser plugin is fine. If its about hiding your identity for security reasons then sure its not going to work, and also of course FB could use the techniques outlined to discover when you are doing this and block you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 It seems to me that there is a solution to these type of identity problems, although it's a bit non-ideal: don't mix business and personal networks on sites like Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER42> I believe if this feature takes of, the result will be a lot of sock puppet accounts on Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER43> A hacker in their early/mid 20's with supposedly poor social skills who's quickly become a multi-billionaire for making what is essentially just an profiles/feed website, went to Harvard, and who seems to have never had a real job in his life is, I dare say it, going to have a rather skewed and limited perspective on what's realistic in life for the vast majority of people. For the majority of folks who must or desire to maintain separate work/personal or friends/family or public/private identities, or who belong to oppressed groups, are clearly not going to be able to relate to it. People without FUx1000 money in the bank (like Mark clearly does) are going to have a hard time relating to it, because without FU money one does have to be much more careful and arguably afraid of what happens when the wrong people see the wrong thing and do something that hurts you down the line.

That said, despite his perspective, he clearly has a financial motive to turn Facebook further into the dominant identity system in the web. Actually, I'll take that back, it's not clear to me that he has any motive personally to make it any more dominant, because he's now into the discretionary billions range of wealth. Perhaps his motive is to increase ROI for all the sub-one-percent shareholders. I dunno. I've just never gotten this whole sort of unbounded ambition that thinks it's not good enough to be the 3rd best thing in the entire world -- we're talking the entire world here, it's not like coming in 1000th place, and it's not even truly a race. If anything, it's a race to stand still, and then you die, no matter what.

It's interesting to think that there are now more people with a Facebook identity than most meatspace nations have citizens. More _Facebookians_ than Brits, for example. Than French. Japanese. I don't know the exact count of total Facebook users offhand but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's already surpassed the number of US citizens as well.

<comment><USER44> > I've just never gotten this whole sort of unbounded ambition that thinks > it's not good enough to be the 3rd best thing in the entire world -- we're > talking the entire world here...

Reminds me of something...

       I have no spur
       To prick the sides of my intent, but only
       Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself,
       And falls on th'other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Zuckerberg doesn't get context sensitivity.

<comment><USER46> You're assuming that if he understood context sensitivity, he'd come to the same conclusions that you have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Wow, a lot of hate directed towards Zuckerberg. I understand why the auther can be sceptical og facebook and his comments, but degrading it into namecalling is just not keeping the debate at a serious level (in example, calling Zuckerberg a manchild).

</comment><comment><USER48> As far as I can tell Zuckerberg have no redeeming features (success isn't a redeeming feature in my mind).

<comment><USER49> Wow, is this really how bad the hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg has gotten on HN? To say that someone like Zuckerberg, whether you agree with him or not, has "no redeeming features" is simply ignorant. I'm all for reasonable debate about the privacy issues Facebook brings up, but can we please avoid this personal attack nonsense?

<comment><USER50> sorry, what are his redeeming features?

<comment><USER48> Seems kind of odd to me I can get a negative score for saying it and you can have a positive one for asking again. I have yet to see anything redeeming about him, he is one of the most influential people in the world but he isn't mature enough to use it properly. In fact, he seems to go the extra mile to piss off everyone about privacy, usability, whatever. His company is changing the world, but his personal ethos is making that world less and less a place I want to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> So small business owners trying to prevent their forums from become cesspools of curses should be considered "Nazis"? This post illustrates the same alarmist tone that trolls normally do.

He's trolling people because they're trying to stop trolling.

Requesting real accounts for comments on personal business websites isn't a violation of the Freedom of Speech. It's the equivalent of asking politicians to reveal what bills they voted for. Transparency means accountability, not the destruction of everything good online. Geese.</comment>