Amazon Has Just Registered to Sell Ocean Freight - <AUTHOR> https://www.flexport.com/blog/amazon-ocean-freight-forwarder/ <comment><USER2> This deal is huge, but I hope Amazon starts doing a little better diligence on their sellers. I was initially drawn to Amazon for their amazing customer reviews - they were usually current and decently, well-written - but most importantly they offered a resassurance that websites without product reviews didn't have.

Over the past year, I've noticed a HUGE uptick in the quantity of fake 5-star reviews. They are so blatant it's frightening, and they usually go unnoticed in Amazon's default "Most Helpful" sorting.

In particular, the Home Office Desk Chairs landscape is pretty insane: [http://www.amazon.com/Home-Office-Desk-Chairs- Furniture/b?ie...](http://www.amazon.com/Home-Office-Desk-Chairs- Furniture/b?ie=UTF8&node=3733721). I was trying to find a chair back in September, and I was appalled by some of the reviews I was seeing. Top selling products, with several hundred reviews that averaged out to 4/4.5/5 stars.

This is a screenshot from back in September: [http://imgur.com/qbCz0yE](http://imgur.com/qbCz0yE), and it only contains a small sample of the "Awesome, highly recommend" reviews spattered around. You'll notice this pattern on virtually every chair on Amazon, except the Aamazon basics chairs which wer launched sometime in late September / early October. Their reviews seem pretty good so far (i.e. real), but unfortunately for me I had purchased a chair from eBay before these launched.

These patterns are pretty frighteneing (especially considering a lot of people are actually buying these things), especially considering I've experienced the same issues when shopping for others things.

Has anyone else had an experience like this? Or am I losing it?

<comment><USER3> You will probably like [http://fakespot.com/](http://fakespot.com/) for discovering those fake reviews. ;)

Unfortunately it does not always work accurately, but I think it gives a good estimation whether a product is legit.

Example for AmazonBasic: [http://fakespot.com/product/amazonbasics-mid-back- mesh-chair](http://fakespot.com/product/amazonbasics-mid-back-mesh-chair)

And for "Engineered Now": [http://fakespot.com/product/headrest-for-herman- miller-aeron...](http://fakespot.com/product/headrest-for-herman-miller-aeron- chair-h3-standard-by-engineered-now)

<comment><USER4> Fakespot should create a chrome extension - extremely useful when I navigate Amazon.com

<comment><USER5> When I go to the page there's a blue popup above that says they have one... (I'm on firefox currently)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot- analyze-f...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fakespot-analyze-fake- ama/nakplnnackehceedgkgkokbgbmfghain)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did Flexport just preemptively reveal Amazon's entry into the ocean freight market and then convince every major newspaper in the world to label the service unfit for American companies?

<comment><USER7> Well, I haven't seen The Washington Post weigh in on the subject yet.

<comment><USER8> Cpt. Crunch would have been a better choice of novelty account name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Up to now they were telling anyone who wanted to ship directly to FBA warehouse to use Samuel Shapiro and Co., Inc.

I still have a stack of paperwork from them back when I was considering shipping some items by container from Japan.

<comment><USER10> The big question is, if you're a Chinese factory and you want to sell directly on Amazon's marketplace, don't you still need an "importer" of record? I do recall hearing about this mysterious Samuel Shapiro Co as well. Is that going to change? If the goods are sitting in Amazon's warehouse, does the Chinese factory still legally own them? Who gets sued if they're defective?

<comment><USER11> You can import into the US as a Foreign Importer of Record:

[https://www.flexport.com/learn/not-based-u-s-importing- forei...](https://www.flexport.com/learn/not-based-u-s-importing-foreign- importer-record/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm working on software to facilitate international commerce.

Amazon getting into international freight logistics is big news.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it is going to a big "oh shit" moment for all the existing players in the logistics and freight forwarding industry. It may take Amazon a few years to build up the infrastructure but once they do, they could eat everyone's lunch.

<comment><USER14> Isn't that assuming that all the others in the space haven't spent years and millions of dollars optimizing these things already? Amazon brings a good entry point for products to the US market from overseas, but I don't think there is any shortage of that capability already.

I'm sure I'm missing the greater significance.

<comment><USER15> All the big players definitely have spend years and millions (hundreds of millions) optimizing these things. But they are optimizing DOS-based systems built in the 80s. The tech stack that the old guard is working with is unbelievable.

<comment><USER14> You said DOS like its a bad thing. It's well understood, completely paid for, and does the job.

Whats wrong with it, in this case? Even if maintenance costs go up, its still cheaper to maintain than to build a new system, especially if the old system fulfills all the requirements and is proven.

<comment><USER15> These systems fulfills all the requirements in yesterday's world. And more importantly, they fulfill the requirements of the company's operating organization; not their customer's.

Modern customers want real-time data and analysis. They want all of their information available on the web, mobile, sms, email, API. They want a modern technology experience.

A DOS program consuming data via EDI and Excel-based input is a good candidate for the worst technology to do these types of things.

<comment><USER14> Why would a customer need real-time data and analysis from a bulk cargo shipment? That doesn't make any sense.

I think most customer just want to know when their stuff is going to arrive - they don't need 'real-time data and analysis' (or if they do, they don't expect the guy moving the cargo to provide it for them).

Also, those DOS\cobol systems already made shipping so cheap you can get a 40 foot container (full of stuff) from China to LA for $1300.

They can't scale? They currently handle the whole world's shipping needs. That sounds like it scaled just fine.

<comment><USER13> _Why would a customer need real-time data and analysis from a bulk cargo shipment? That doesn 't make any sense._

You wouldn't, but freight forwarders typically don't move bulk cargo, they move containerized cargo. Bulk means the entire vessel hull is loaded with one raw materials commodity, like grains or minerals.

Companies importing finished goods absolutely do want instant, automated status updates on where their goods are at, because that information helps them load-balance their supply chain to keep their warehouses and stores stocked at the right levels and evaluate the performance of their contracted manufacturers and logistics service providers. Supply chain managers absolutely want scorecards and dashboards and push status updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 50+ years in future - Amazon is still optimising some part of their ecommerce infrastructure / entering a new market. Jokes aside, it will be incredibly interesting how Amazon's strategy to discard profits and just scale everywhere will work out. Will they become insanely profitable as everyone expects?

<comment><USER17> I would imagine that tgey realized it would be easier to do autopilot on a container ship than drones.

They already have pilot boats, where a licensed captain navigates from a staging area off shore into the port of call. Actually a reasonably standard thing in shipping.

They are now the level 3/cogent + verizon + netflix of commerce. I dont even think walmart had this level of rollup.

<comment><USER18> Amazon do have their own ships, they are reselling shipping services.

<comment><USER19> So they're doing the shipping version of AWS?

<comment><USER20> Amazon Wet Services?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I read this correctly this is a vertical integration play.

Just from the title I had guessed that that they would own ships as a hedge against rises in freight costs, just as airlines buy oil stocks etc.

Is anyone aware of any analysis of Amazon's recent moves in aircraft, drones, and so on as hedge vs integration vs disruption?

<comment><USER22> Amazon is planning to drop DHL as delivery service in Germany, and instead start its own one, as newspapers reported in the last weeks.

So it makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Due to shipping company economics the ships are in port. [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-11/nothing-moving- balt...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-11/nothing-moving-baltic-dry- crashes-insiders-warn-commerce-has-come-halt)

Amazon needs move product to make money. If others will not physically move that product to the US, then they'll have to do it. More expensive is better than none at all.

<comment><USER24> The ships are moving. Zero Hedge's Tyler Durden didn't pay for access to the data that shows the ships that aren't in port, didn't realize it, and came to the wrong conclusion that ships aren't shipping.

It's like looking at a parking lot and concluding no cars are on the freeway.

<comment><USER25> Yeah this guy is a real amateur, probably the worst analysis I've ever read about the shipping industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> this is actually really big.

amazon was changing up it's rules with shipping from china a few months ago, now I can see why they did it.

</comment><comment><USER27> >As the freight forwarder on a company's shipments, Amazon would see both the name of the supplier and the wholesale price paid by the importer. (from the Article)

It's unlikely that an importer or exporter is going to use Amazon for the freight forwarding outside its network. I guess Amazon only will end up handling shipments of its own or network sellers who significantly rely on amazon to sell their products, likely through LCL Consol box, putting a lot of smaller shipments into a single 40HC container., that's going to save them a lot of cost as well as give them tighter control over the shipment routing and transit time etc.

Other regular importers & exporters either in China or USA are never going to use it. Because of the reason mentioned above.,

An importer or exporter shares too much sensitive and critical information with his freight and customs agent., If I suddenly get involved in trading or in other words become their competitor its obvious no one is going to share the information with me.

<comment><USER13> Amazon would need to put up a convincing firewall between their freight forwarding business unit and their e-commerce and product business units.

I have seen other companies where this is done--a particular business unit or subsidiary is prohibited from disclosing its sensitive customer data to its parent company because of the conflict of interest it would create.

Amazon is serious about internal controls so I don't doubt they could pull this off as well if they want to.

<comment><USER28> They seem to have no qualms about using sales stats to undercut sellers on Amazon Marketplace. [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023044414045774829...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304441404577482902055882264)

I see no reason this would be any different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I understand the move and why they are doing it...this just feels like what a monopoly starts to look like.

<comment><USER30> I have been wondering why the U.S. seems to have moved so far from the trust- busting days of Teddy Roosevelt, and why it now seems so permissive towards monopolistic practices. This helps explain it [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting possible side effect. Ocean freight vessels are, disproportionately, on of the greatest contributors, and in fact one of the greatest contributors in absolute terms, to CO2 emissions. Perhaps Amazon's involvement will shine a spotlight on this issue that has heretofore gone under the radar.

<comment><USER32> Unfortunately they are also the most efficient way to move a disproportionate amount of cargo over international waters, they get terrible "mileage" but when you consider tonne/miles instead of raw distance per gallon of fuel they are "efficient" compared to alternatives.

Unless we plan on equipping civilian vessels with nuclear reactors or somehow make storing gigantic hydrogen fuel cells safe the situation isn't going to change much.

<comment><USER31> It's not the mileage. It's the fuel and lack of regulation.

"The fuel used in ships is waste oil, basically what is left over after the crude oil refining process. It is the same as asphalt and is so thick that when cold it can be walked upon . It's the cheapest and most polluting fuel available and the world's 90,000 ships chew through an astonishing 7.29 million barrels of it each day, or more than 84% of all exported oil production from Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil exporter." [1]

[1] [http://www.gizmag.com/shipping- pollution/11526/](http://www.gizmag.com/shipping-pollution/11526/) [2] [http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-...](http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping- pollution)

<comment><USER32> Yeah, bunker C is awful environmentally, but it's cheap and still pretty good as far as energy density is concerned. Even if freighters ran on refined petrol they would still be going through millions of barrels of petrol a day though, I'd be interested to see the breakdown of pollutants exhausted from burning a gallon of bunker C vs refined petrol - I'm having a hard time finding this data.

<comment><USER31> don't normally do this, but, given the seriousness with which i take this topic, just wanted to say, that was an exceedingly ignorant statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I thought amazon was already in the container game [https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/](https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Someday I hope that Amazon will provide a fully vertically-integrated ecommerce marketplace for the people of the Amazon River basin.

</comment><comment><USER34> I take it as a sign of unhealthiness.

Amazon obviously have too much cash lying around.

So be good and stop using Amazon!

</comment><comment><USER35> the govt should seriously start considering breaking up Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER36> I thought they would have had this in the works years ago. No surprise.</comment>


What HN Users Wish They Were - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22I+wish+i+was%22&sortby=create_ts+asc&start=0

<comment><AUTHOR> This is the successor of what HN Users don't mean to be

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658860></comment>


MenuetOS - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MenuetOS <comment><USER2> Sad to move from so restrictive to closed.

Pass.</comment>


Man's Voice Reveals His Fighting Ability - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/human/man-voice-strength-fight.html

<comment><USER2> Offtopic, but from the article:

"'When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow.' This sentence includes every sound in the English language."

I see immediately it seems to lack the "oo" of food, so I don't think that's quite right. I would be very interested to see what an actual sentence is that does have all the sounds.

<comment><USER3> Here you go:

"When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow _of food_."

<comment><USER3> upgraded with other reportedly missing sounds:

"When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow _of good-eatin' food_."

I'm hungry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we please keep these fact-free pseudoscience articles off HN? Particularly those lacking a link to the original source or even the title of the paper.

<comment><USER5> It's not a total loss, I have added another author to my list of sources to generally avoid. (Did you click on the author's name? - instead of a profile it leads to a list of articles - and they all look to be this same sort of silly nonsense.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Original source: [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/14/rspb.2010.0769.full.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Thanks. It bugs me when people post the probably wrong journalistic summary when the paper is only 10 pages anyway!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It ought to be fascinating to find out if such vocal characteristics changes over time with upper body strength in the same person (for instance, putting them through a six month strength training program). Or if this is somehow set at puberty, and people's relative strength remained the same over most of their lives. I would imagine most people don't suddenly acquire an urge to become stronger after they reach their thirties. Or at least they didn't while humans were evolving.

</comment><comment><USER9> Mike Tyson may be the exception to this rule.

<comment><USER10> I've read somewhere that his voice actually was actually one of the reasons for him becoming a boxer. He was bullied in school for his lisp, and in order to stand up to them and take up boxing.

<comment><USER11> Yep.

He was made fun of and was afraid to fight at first.

But then, apparently Tyson owned pigeons as a kid. Some guy from his neighborhood took a pigeon and said to him "You want your pigeon back?", and then proceeded to pop the pigeon's head off. Tyson then proceeded to beat the shit out of him (~6 mins into the documentary).

He was also so scared during his first amateur match that he thought about grabbing a train and leaving (minutes before the fight).

Watch "Tyson" on Netflix (streaming). He tells his life story, first person. Surprisingly moving and not a sensationalized account like you'd expect.

<http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Tyson/70100412?trkid=1211018>

<comment><USER12> Slightly different version of that story from the Tyson quotes link posted by _chancho_ in this thread:

 _"One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died I was devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I left the crate on my stoop and went in to get something and I returned to see the sanitation man put the crate into the crusher. I rushed him and caught him flush on the temple with a titanic right hand he was out cold, convulsing on the floor like a infantile retard."_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If conveying that information in your voice is useful, it's also very useful to be able to fake it. I lifted weights in high school, went wakeboarding with people and (briefly) went to an MMA gym. I've met skinny people with deep voices and ripped people with high voices and vice versa. I wasn't able to find a link to the original study, but I think they're completely wrong, and the correlation is nonexistent or negligible.

<comment><USER14> The article implies that there's more to it than pitch:

 _Sell and his colleagues could not precisely pinpoint what qualities in a man's voice indicate strength._

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Margaret Thatcher had voice training to make her sound more authoritive. Here are 2 clips the first from 1975 and the second from 1987. They don't sound a whole lot different to me <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vIt9lRzuFE&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vIt9lRzuFE&feature=related)

</comment><comment><USER16> Men's voices tend to deepen over time. Almost thirty years later, I remember the simply awful sound of the Beach Boys (upper 30s? early 40s?) trying to sing in the keys they used at 20. Could the middle-aged BBs have thrashed the twenty-something BBs?

(No, I didn't pay for a concert ticket--they were on the radio from the Mall on 4th of July.)

</comment><comment><USER17> How does the research quantify "Fighting Ability" (hand-eye, violent nature, inherent strength)? Does muscle development through intense training change the voice?

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome. A journal article authored by people who don't know how to fight, summarized by a person who doesn't know how to fight _or_ do basic science.

</comment><comment><USER19> If this continues imagine Olympic few years down the line. Just send your health reports and voice samples. We will do analysis and declare winners.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ah, if this is really true as it claims, I am sure in the days of remote work, someone is probably working on a Skype plugin for deeper voice.

</comment><comment><USER21> Ok, this may explain why women want to talk on the phone before going out with the guy. Good thing we have SMS.

<comment><USER22> It's not just women who do that. I always talked to women I met online before meeting them in person. You get a lot more from conversation (like: can the person even hold one!) than you do from email. Sometimes after that talk you decide you don't want to bother!

Just curious: have you ever done that? Met someone in person without talking to them first?

<comment><USER21> Once I did. Met her on Facebook. Message, message, message then asked her out. Worked.

Other than that I have not. But I never call women I met. It is either email or SMS. I try to avoid anything real time unless we are in the same place so you can read my body language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of a loud chihuahua and quite pitbull.</comment>


Demo HN: Natural Language Twitter Experiment. Beta2 released. - <AUTHOR> http://beta2.tweetspeedreader.com/

<comment><USER2> Pretty cool for the beta.

You can tell the video is made by a technical person talking about 'redirects' and explaining the login process, and describing the minutia of how each process works. If they are looking to go mainstream with this, I'd recommend a more dynamic demo with less description and more about how useful it is.

At the same time, I don't find the UI very compelling. I was expecting a 'timeline' showing tweets with similar themes, etc. This doesn't seem much different from reading my tweets. By gathering some metrics on the number of followers from the tweeter (reader being tweetee) TSR may be able to provide a better method of showing you the most popular tweet on a given topic. Tag cloud navigation doesn't strike me as effective use of NLP vs theme clustering. But maybe that's just me.

Best of luck

<comment><AUTHOR> pedalpete, excellent feedback - thank you. Clustering doesn't seem to be conducive to the benefits of the long tail. Wouldn't clustering simply show you what's popular? Do you happen to have links discussing theme clustering? A quick Google search didn't yield anything tangible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I meant to get back to you after Beta1... The product is interesting, but wouldn't sway me from using a normal twitter client. For my use of Twitter I care more about who is saying what than what was said overall, if that makes sense.

You might want to refocus it as a trend or search type app. If you can out trend twitter trends by picking up on context and not just tags, I think you'd really have something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crad, thanks for your time. My goal isn't to replace twitter clients - but to offer a place one checks from time to time to get caught-up and possibly discover interesting tweets which were simply lost in the noise.

BTW, do you rely on the use of "lists" to keep up with "who is saying what"? Or do you simple resign that to a serendipitous event? I think this is what most people do. Another problem I'm trying to solve...

I find this "experiment" interesting because doing it well has widespread application and benefits.

<comment><USER3> I mainly use lists to export the people I follow into carefully packaged categories. I usually just tune in and tune out to the stream and miss vast amounts of tweets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I absolutely love it (seriously). I can honestly see myself using this very often. Good job to the team!</comment>


Joel Spolsky: My First BillG Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ <comment><AUTHOR> Best quote: "The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand.".</comment>


Saving memory using gradient-checkpointing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openai/gradient-checkpointing <comment><USER2> It takes about 4GB of memory to train a VGG network w/ batch size 8 on Tensorflow. Could I use a larger batch size at the expense of computation time w/ this module?

<comment><USER3> Yes, potentially a batch-size 64 with a 25% increase in run-time based on the figures they reported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if this would work when using keras with the tensorflow backend. Has anyone tried it?</comment>


Launch HN: OurWorldInData (YC W19 Nonprofit) – Data on World's Largest Problems - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!
We're Hannah, Esteban, Jaiden and Max, the founders of Our World in Data (https://OurWorldInData.org). We're a nonprofit in the YC W19 batch.
Our World in Data is a website that shows how and why global living conditions and the earth's environment are changing. Is the world becoming more violent? Is an end to poverty possible? It's hard to know because daily news focuses on negative single events, and misses long-lasting changes that reshape the world.
We're a group of researchers from the University of Oxford trying to solve this problem. We bring together data and research from many different sources often buried under jargon in static, outdated documents. We present a global perspective on living conditions and environmental change through interactive data visualizations and short explainers.
Max started Our World in Data in 2013 whilst working as a researcher at the University of Oxford. The project was born from a frustration that we are so poorly informed about how the world is changing—we fail to notice the important developments shaping our world and are not aware what is possible for the future. It has now evolved into a full-time project with a small team of researchers and web developers (we'll be looking for a new web developer this week!). We're all driven by the same motivation: to make sure data and research on how the world is changing is free and accessible for everyone.
We cover many topics, ranging from poverty to health, environment, energy, education, and violence. Our data and analysis are available at global, regional and country levels. And we try to provide the longest-term data we can, often going back many decades or centuries.
We average more than 1M users per month; these range from policymakers to journalists, academics to school teachers. But we've also had some use cases that took us by surprise: To many readers it's unexpected to see that the world has made substantial progress in important aspects and psychologists have recently told us that they use our website to help patients with depression and anxiety. We did not expect this use of our work at all and asked them for more details. One of them explained: "Facts can be a powerful weapon against fear, a gloomy worldview, learned helplessness. So I help clients find facts at Our World in Data."
We usually work remotely, because we are not all based in the same country—this is the first time that we were able to find a 3-month window of time to move to California and work together.
We come from a university environment and applied to YC because we wanted learn from the startup and the technology world. The work at YC and the contact with the partners and other founders have definitely given us an entirely new perspective on how to work.
We're here at HN because we are sure we can learn a lot from the community here. We knew there had been HN threads on aspects of our work before – but after a recent search (http://bit.ly/OWID-searches-on-HN) we had no idea there were so many. It's amazing to see that these posts created such great discussion within the HN community.
Our website is here: https://OurWorldInData.org. We are a non-profit and all our work is entirely free; open access research (Creative Commons licensed) and open source code. If you're interested in supporting this with a donation to us you can do so here: https://OurWorldInData.org/Donate.
Or if you have any other queries, you can reach out at firstname.lastname@example.com.
We would really appreciate any feedback you have on what we can do better. Thank you! <comment><USER2> One possible improvement is to provide a way for the community at large to discuss/criticize possible problems with the data as well as for Our World in Data to respond to criticisms from the public.

Recently, Bill Gates issued a Tweet demonstrating excitement for progress in diminishing global poverty, citing Our World in Data: [https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072](https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072)

This received substantial push back, with claims that this data is a reckless extrapolation of sketchy sources, such as this article by Jason Hickel: [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill- gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal)

Is there anything Our World in Data can do to better facilitate this discussion, note that it is happening, or respond to criticism?

<comment><USER3> A community discussion forum to discuss research would be great. I'd be interested in hearing what you would suggest? We have discussed whether something like StackOverflow, but for global development, would be possible. I think we are too small for it though. If we'd build a platform we'd need a big group of engaged contributors and we don't think we are big enough for that yet.

I read the newspaper article and have been in a lot of contact with the author, we agree on many points, especially that higher poverty lines are needed to track what is happening and that it is surely not enough to look at extreme poverty. But low poverty lines are needed so that we see what is happening to world's poorest. One of the biggest failures of development over the last decades is that incomes of the very poorest on the planet have not risen: [https://voxeu.org/article/assessing-progress-poorest-new- evi...](https://voxeu.org/article/assessing-progress-poorest-new-evidence) This is not widely known because the extreme poverty line is not low enough to focus on what happens to the very poorest. So overall I think it is very important that we keep track of what happens relative to different poverty lines (and we do [https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty- lines](https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-lines)) On the particular point you emphasize, that historians have a poor understanding of poverty and prosperity in the past I do not agree that it is a 'reckless extrapolation of sketchy sources'. I think this is overstating the existing uncertainties and it's not a fair description of the careful and tedious work that historians do. And we did respond to it here [https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history- methods](https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods) and go in some detail of this historical work. We understand our job as providing access to good, existing research and so our job is to understand the research that is out there and bring it together on the web to make it possible for everyone to understand it, and access it. A very thorough book on what we know about poverty, including the historical decline of the share living on less than an extremely low poverty threshold, is Martin Ravallion's 'The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy'. Let me know what you think!

<comment> bjelkeman-again We have been trying to engage the international development community in working with crowdsourcing of content in a wiki around water issues, [https://akvopedia.org](https://akvopedia.org) It hasn't been very successful.

I have seen efforts around using a StackOverflow model to get engagement, but it hasn't been successful.

The way we ended up getting content varied. We convinced those that had content to allow us to republish it in wiki suitable format. We hired an editor to do a lot of the work. We built in content publishing in the Akvopedia as a way to publish results from programmes.

It is interesting how reluctant a group of professionals can be at contributing, despite it being an appreciated source. We hear from UN organisations HQ in New York that when they get new staff they send them to the Akvopedia to read up on the subject. We know thousands of people read the content, from all over the world. I meet people at conferences that used the resource.

We specifically licensed the content to be portable to the Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia editors we have encountered are not very helpful when trying to move content over or linking content. The exception has been some content we have managed to get onto Wikiversity. But even there we met some resistance.

I think it is really important that we try different methods to spread this type of information. Something will stick at some point I am sure. Keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing your experiences on this. I hadn't heard of Akvopedia before, so it's new to me.

Agree that finding the right solution that sticks: is read by many, consistently kept up-to-date and gets the level so detail correct/unbiased is difficult to do.

We're trying our best to do our version of this work. It's reaching some people, but we can always do more/better. It's really helpful to hear experiences/responses from elsewhere which we can learn what works and doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Facts can be a powerful weapon against fear, a gloomy worldview, learned helplessness". This is so true.

However I also notice a frequent and not so helpful use of such data, namely as a way of countering people's legitimate complains about their current state. It is especially concerning when the positive trends are touted as consequences of certain public policies, even when the correlation is questionable. There are heated online debates between the Bill Gates/Pinker/Factfulness camp and the 'left' on the role of the free market vs a strong state in shaping progress during the past 50 years.

How can you avoid any sort of bias creeping in the content of your site?

<comment><USER5> Have any recommendations for good pieces related to this debate you mention?

I'm sure there are lots of heated online debates, but any good ones in mind?

<comment><USER4> The top comment in the thread has the most recent debate I know of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is fantastic. I've been waiting for data driven policy initiatives, and I'm sure this is a great resource for that. Have you considered implementing a system like Kaggle Kernels that allow people to submit further models and analysis of the data?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great to hear - we're working hard to make sure our work also reaches many of the key people influencing policy initiatives and decisions.

That's a great suggestion - we hadn't actually thought of that in the context of our work. But it makes sense given we have such an abundance of open-source data.

What Kaggle Kernels do is awesome. It'd be cool to integrate this concept into our work at some point. Thanks for the suggestion!

<comment><USER6> Absolutely, it would also allow people to have a conversation about the data through various kernels and threads. As another comment said, there was some recent controversy over some of the reports, a Kernel system would enable an environment where people can have a data driven debate about what the data really implies. Thanks for your work and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it evolves!

Edit: When you provide an open platform for people to collaborate, it can be amazing who shows up and what gets done!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Our World Data website is awesome. It is very generous of Hannah, Esteban, Jaiden and Max to make it available and I can only imagine their passion. I represent a specialist area Mental Illness/Psychiatry and have shared this reservoir of knowledge across the globe amongst peers. Importantly it has aided us in our creation of the CAPE Vulnerability Index which is now getting traction across the globe in particular amongst Foreign Aid doners looking for greater accountability for spend to outcomes. Thank you Twitter @geopsychiatry

</comment><comment><USER8> I thought that this was what [https://www.gapminder.org/](https://www.gapminder.org/) was for, ever since 2005? And yet you don't mention them?

<comment><AUTHOR> The work of Gapminder, and Hans Rosling in particular, was a major motivation for the work we do.

In fact, Max worked a lot with Hans Rosling in the past: in this BBC documentary on ending global poverty, for example ([https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end- poverty/](https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/)). You can find him listed as collaborator in the sources ([https://www.gapminder.org/news/data-sources-dont-panic- end-p...](https://www.gapminder.org/news/data-sources-dont-panic-end- poverty/)).

As you say, Gapminder is one organization that takes data from published datasets and communicates it to a larger audience. The Gapminder foundation therefore has a similar mission – promoting fact-based world views, informing people about long-term changes in living standards. But Gapminder is not broadly focussed on global change – it does not cover violence, war, poverty, education, environmental change, etc. – and instead more narrowly focuses on health and demography. The areas of my own personal work: environment, food, and energy, for example, are not extensively covered there.

In fact, for those topics that lie outside of its focus, they often rely on us as input (you can find us referenced throughout their book 'Factfulness' for example). And similarly for us: for long-run trends on aspects such as child mortality or fertility rate, we reference their datasets ([https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child- mortality](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality)).

So our mission is very similar and we continue to collaborate, but our approach slightly different. Gapminder is narrower in focus and tries to capture a much more general audience. We go for more breadth and depth, and target a less wide (but still large) general audience.

<comment><USER9> Do you collaborate with for-profits that do cover these fields (s.a gro- intelligence)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be interesting to see what adding radon would do to the section on air pollution (arguably, radon is a form of air pollution, albeit not particulate).

Since the current estimate in the USA is about 10,000 deaths per year ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2118410](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2118410)), with of course, some dissent ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590909/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590909/)), this is large enough to show up on the graph, especially for the developed countries.

Unfortunately, getting good data on radon-related death rates is difficult, as it must be parsed out of lung cancer rates with a number of assumptions applied. I figure that getting good data is in your wheelhouse. If not, I could probably put you in touch with someone at AARST or NRSB who may have better data.

Congrats on the Launch:HN!

</comment><comment><USER11> I like the idea of shifting to a demand-driven model. Unrelatedly, check out [https://datausa.io/](https://datausa.io/) if you haven't. Deloitte/MIT created a similar platform for US statistics. Doesn't seem like it's being maintained but it looks pretty/is easy to navigate.

</comment><comment><USER12> Best of luck. We need it!

That said, I'd like to suggest a book. "The Influential Mind." Long to short, there's more to influence than objective facts.

[https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change- Other...](https://www.amazon.com/Influential-Mind-Reveals-Change- Others/dp/1627792651)

<comment><USER13> She gave a talk at Google, for anyone interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > We would really appreciate any feedback you have on what we can do better. > Thank you!

What can _we_ do to help you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Any really honest feedback on the usability of our website would be the best thing for us.

We have lots of content - spanning everything from population growth to plastic pollution, income inequality to cancer rates. This is of course a key part of our work. But this could make it difficult for people to find what they're looking for.

Do you manage to find it easy to navigate? Is there anything you would recommend we do to make it easier for people to find content?

<comment><USER15> You might find some of the usability testing services useful also

There's a list of some here:

[http://www.usefulusability.com/usertesting- alternatives/](http://www.usefulusability.com/usertesting-alternatives/)

and here

[https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/usertesting-2](https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/usertesting-2)

They give you videos with people's out loud thoughts about for example trying to accomplish specific goals with your sites, which should be really useful.

And for a more guerrilla approach you might find this article useful:

[https://medium.com/@leemunroe/how-our-product-design-team- co...](https://medium.com/@leemunroe/how-our-product-design-team-conducts- usability-tests-every-2-weeks-afa8c60a8616)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great recommendations. Thanks for the tips. We've found it really useful recently to sit next to someone in person and ask them to navigate. It reveals a lot of unexpected outcomes just by watching them use the site.

But of course, in-person testing can be tricky to scale so an online service is exactly what we're looking for. We'll check them out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hey guys, great to see OurWorldInData here, huge fan! I've been following Max and the project for years. One thing I would love to see is "Immigration" as a category and consequently more data about the movement of people.

<comment><USER3> Hi betocmn, I'm happy to hear that! Yes, took quite a few years to piece everything together.

We have a long list of topics that we want to work on [https://ourworldindata.org/about/list-of-all-data- entries](https://ourworldindata.org/about/list-of-all-data-entries) (And further work on the existing ones.)

It's not just you, a research project on migration is on the very top of what our readers ask us. Currently we try to make the structure of the site clear and the interactive charts intuitive. But once we get back to research your topic will be one of the first ones we work on. (We are just 4 researchers doing this so it might take some months still though)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thanks for sharing your findings & datasets, I'll definitely be following your work. I saw your datasets repo on github, I was curious if any of the raw data or messier bulk data was available?

They seemed to be summarized, or the result of a larger project, vs the structural content.

I did see mentions of using public/gov datasets, but was curious if you had any larger work accumulated?

Definitely not complaining, more curious from a research perspective. Thanks again.

</comment><comment><USER18> Your site reminded me one of my favorite charts and tweets of all time, so I want back to look and it was from max at ourworldindata way back in 2017! It's this one: [https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/8528130327238574...](https://mobile.twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/852813032723857409)

Thanks for doing this, I love having big easily accessible data to show people how then world really is.

</comment><comment><USER19> Wow, this is awesome. I have a project where I want to visualise reported news and weather on the world including trends of news topics. It will be at world.ie (nothing there yet)

<comment><USER3> There should be many more projects like ours so I'm happy to hear that! I'd really like it if we had as much reporting on the slow long-term changes as we have media that focusses on single events in the last 24 hours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great! Nice job balancing data with explanations. Health data is often oversimplified or not understandable by lay people.

For the cancer section, I'm pretty sure you're showing net survival rates. You should mention this to avoid people from thinking they're actual survival rates.

In the last two charts on the cancer page, what does the circle size show? Total GDP? Patient count?

<comment><USER21> It shows the population of the country. I agree it should be labelled.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you both for flagging this. I agree it's not clear at the moment. We are doing some tweaks on the interactive charts and will make sure to include this labelling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This look really interesting. I am really happy to see something with great benefit to society in YC. I would suggest looking at Future Agenda [1]. I have worked with them in the university setting and both OWID and FA seem to be in line.

[1] [https://www.futureagenda.org/](https://www.futureagenda.org/)

</comment><comment><USER23> This is absolutely fantastic ! I have been banging on about wanting a "ordered backlog" of global issues that could be used to anchor our politics in the daily twitter storms of our attention battles. This looks like it could become my go to site

Good luck guys, we are rooting for you

<comment><USER3> Thank you very much!! Let us know if you are missing something to make it your go to site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It would be cool to have the data in a virtual cacheable JS database that can run SQL queries. Eg something that you could just include in a script tag. And also run locally. To allow anyone to easily create and share cool interactive graphs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Anecdata. Applied for a UN World Food Program grant this morning and they asked us to re-waffle the humans-vs-earth problem. A URL to your data would have been a neat answer :)

</comment><comment><USER26> this is great, bookmarked it. a news feed of research about the topics i care about it would be awesome. so nice to see progress instead of depressing news articles.

<comment><USER3> We were thinking of building "a news feed of research about the topics [you] care about".

What do you have in mind? Do you have an example?

We'd be curious what it is that you would expect there. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How about an API?

<comment><USER17> I'm curious about an API also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One of the most important metrics is entirely missing: wealth and income, finances are totally missing

</comment><comment><USER29> I think the work you do is vastly important, and it is especially heartening that it originated in academia. In the age of choose-your-own-facts, academics of all stripes have a moral duty to engage the public on what is - and, crucially, what isn't - known about nature and society. And they're largely asleep at the switch. So this is major progress.

A couple of long-term ideas:

\- breadth of topic: global development trends are a natural and important place to start. However, this is pretty remote, non-experiential stuff for most people. What about a canonical, accessible repository of what is known about nutrition and health, for instance? ("Is bacon really bad for me?" ... with links to every study ever, statistical meta-studies on top of these "research atoms", and a Vox-esque explainer/lit review layered on top, giving laypeople the tldr). This example is well outside your (well-chosen) scope, probably, but IMO the generic problem here is access to intelligible (scientific) knowledge about anything that affects people and their understanding of the world around them.

\- moving the data to the "point of sale": a huge fraction of the people asking "is the world getting more violent" won't ever find your website, because people don't think in terms of "global development trends data websites", but they just ask questions, and expect Google to answer them. It seems like the long term play is to make expert knowledge itself computational and linked, and for domain-specific knowledge aggregators and synthesizers such as yourselves to work with the Googles of the world so that when I ask "hey Siri, is the world getting more violent?" I get a crisp "no. There are fewer wars and crime trends are declining in most countries, tap to find out more," with the tap taking me to a source I can trust (because it references said underlying knowledge base) instead of some random shallow news article. I'm in in no way knocking your current product strategy of putting up a high quality space on the web you can curate and control - it's practical, valuable, and honorable - but I think the future ultimately lies in making expert knowledge structured, and linking it directly to answers to low-intent, everyday questions that everybody has, instead of hoping people know about the domain / are motivated enough to find and dig through your website.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're absolutely right! And actually, much more recently we have been been trying to steer our work towards addressing point (2) you raise above.

It became apparent to us, as you say, that most people will find this stuff simply by asking google specific questions e.g. "how many people are there in the world?". And a lot of our existing content will not appear in Google or Siri as the answer, despite us having it in longer articles on the site.

So we've been very recently trying to answer much more explicit questions that people would ask (although we should have been doing this much earlier), and are thinking of reformatting a lot of our existing content in this way too.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts - it's really helpful perspective for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Fake news.

I applaud what you're trying to do, and look forward to using it, but the problem is that the most studiously honest broker can be slandered as either the plaything or the cynical agent of vested interests at virtually no cost. The arguments of bad faith actors are not based on substantive disagreement but on inducement of emotional posture.

One strategic response to this might be to formalize your citation process. You cite various media organs that use OWID as a source; could you establish partnerships or public agreements such that if a media outlet uses your material as a source, they do not cherry-pick but must present it in an embed to the reader, and can be called out, cut off, or be subject to contractual penalties if they knowingly misrepresent the source data?

[https://ourworldindata.org/about/coverage#coverage](https://ourworldindata.org/about/coverage#coverage)

Edit to add that this isn't a problem I think you can or should have to unilaterally solve, but rather than observation that our lack of any good mechanism for certifying sufficient consensus is an unfortunate obstacle to OWID's very worthy mission.

</comment><comment><USER31> I stumbled upon your website a couple of days ago and found its content extremely useful. The language is precise, opinions balanced and use of data is sensible. It feels like you have no agenda other than bringing some objectivity to the discussions. I hope your journey into the startup world won't change it. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Our main goal is what you say. I am happy to hear that. Thank you! It is exactly what we try to do.</comment></comment>


Fiverr Biverr Clone Script - <AUTHOR> http://stuff-about-money.com/products/Fiverr-Biverr-Clone.html

<comment><USER2> I see another script like this on <http://website-force.com/products/Fiverr- Biverr-Clone.html>.</comment>


Flexbox Patterns: Build user interfaces with CSS flexbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.flexboxpatterns.com <comment><USER2> Flexbox is great, but honestly I'm not going to spend any time trying to master it until IE supports it well. I know there are workarounds with conditional styling rules and other fallbacks, but that just means I would need to write more code instead of less. Hopefully IE11 will patch some of the bugs and then when IE 8+9 finally drop to a small enough percentage of share in another year or so, it will be time to jump on the flexbox bandwagon.

<comment><USER3> You could always use a polyfill: [https://github.com/10up/flexibility](https://github.com/10up/flexibility)

<comment><USER4> I just discovered this yesterday. I'm excited to dig in and make sure it works well, but if it does it's very likely that we'll start using flexbox in our production stuff sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great tutorial, but why obfuscate the CSS as SCSS? In most cases here there's essentially nothing gained.

<comment><USER6> How exactly is SCSS an _obfuscation_ of CSS?

<comment><USER7> 'Obfuscation' might be taking it a bit far, but demonstrating a CSS feature in _anything_ other than vanilla CSS is, in my opinion, a really poor choice.

It's like having an explanation of a JavaScript feature...in TypeScript.

<comment><USER6> I'll happily agree. I was only pointing out that obfuscation of CSS was not happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Flexbox Froggy: A game for learning CSS flexbox

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10652909](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10652909)</comment>


Twitter's Problem Isn't the Like Button - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-30/twitter-s-problem-is-bigger-than-the-like-button <comment><USER2> Quite honestly, I feel like most of the media websites do the same thing. Write negative articles for more clicks, virality, etc.

For example, this article could have been a piece on educating people on how to use Twitter correctly (follow your interests, don't respond to trolls, think critically), but instead focuses on how things are all dark and bad.

That being said, the solutions proposed here are actually sound IMO.

<comment><USER3> Everyone want to make money. They sell ad space, not news.

<comment><USER4> I also want to make money, because my landlord doesn't accept my being a wonderful socially responsible person in lieu of rent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twitter is dying, and upper management is creating the conditions for these toxic twitter users to ruin the site. Twitter has royally wrecked the API and done numerous other things that hurt the platform, but the content generated by a subset of users is what has created this lethal situation for Twitter as a platform.

<comment><USER6> Twitter was dying since it began ... remember it's very difficult growth after inception ... and that it can't seem to make money no matter what it does?

I believe Twitter is a monument to the 2010's second dot com bubble, and in the future, will be looked back on like pets.com is now.

<comment><USER7> Twitter is like 12 years old and has somewhere over 300 million users. It has been public for five years.

Whatever it may be, it is not pets.com

<comment><USER8> > Twitter is like 12 years old and has somewhere over 300 million users. It > has been public for five years.

And has never shown a profit.

> Whatever it may be, it is not pets.com

What if the runways are just longer this time around?

<comment><USER9> > And has never shown a profit.

Twitter has had profitable quarters.

[https://www.recode.net/2018/2/8/16989834/twitter-q4-2018-ear...](https://www.recode.net/2018/2/8/16989834/twitter-q4-2018-earnings- revenue-jack-dorsey)

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/twitter-posts- record-100m-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/twitter-posts- record-100m-profit-but-loses-1m-users/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe they should disable the ability to comment instead? It seems to me that comments are often a big problem on social media.

When comments stay relevant and informative, like they do here on HN, for the most part anyway. They are an asset to the social media, but as soon as they become something else they become a big problem.

Maybe they shouldn't be disabled entirely, but instead you'd need to be approved by the poster to comment? I could see a value in giving users the control over you would allow to comment on your tweet.

<comment><USER11> That takes the social out of social media. Also gives way to a complete echo chamber.

<comment><USER10> What's social about a bunch of strangers screaming profanities at each other?

It should really be called angry mob media, if anything.

I see your point of course, but I'm not really worried about creating echo chambers by giving users more ownership over their own conversations.

If you started screaming at me in the real world, I'd walk away and probably never talk to you again. That's an echo chamber, but it's relatively harmless, and I think the same thing would apply to almost all of social media.

I'm sure political tweeters would be terrible at it, but would it really change anything? Right now thousands of people are trolling each other in Donald Trumps twitter feed, but do you think they make a difference? I don't, in fact I don't think anyone has ever really been pursauded of anything in a political twitter comment section.

Mean while, the rest of us are taken hostage by the angry mob and a lack of control of what ought to be our content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Echo chambers are a problem, at the same time, communication across levels of closeness are different.

This is what Twitter needs to get right.

A tweet from a friend is different from a tweet from a famous person. Conversations happen differently. (And it seems they have some different behaviours for these tweets)

Killing the like button won't help.

Taking abuse/harassement more seriously helps, especially things like the obvious targeted DM harassement in the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> There's a knowledge transfer/attention span problem.

With the old 140 characters, or a picture meme, the best you can do is communicate like Frankenstein in the old horror movies: "Fire BAD!" "Sun good!"

Life isn't like that.

The is the same problem political ads face. If I've only got 10 seconds of your time before you click on to something else, as a writer, I'm going to have to punch you in nose. There's just no other way of using the medium. It's built into the system.

But as others here have pointed out, it's not just Twitter, and it's not related to likes by any means. (I have no idea what Twitter thinks they're doing.)

I never participated in Quora because of this same thing, and it's much more of a long-form site. For things worth knowing, things that will change your life? You have to invest some time and effort. It's a conversation. It's back and forth -- even when reading a novel. Drive-bys don't do that.

So let's look at tech overall.

Where we seem to have landed is this weird landscape where everything is either 10 seconds or 100 hours. Yes, there is some nice medium-scale content available, but even then, the creators will tell you that for the most part, people either consume in one of those two fashions. There are a lot of people purchasing long-form content that never use it. It just makes them feel better. We know this now -- and we didn't in the past -- because we instrument the hell out of everything users do.

Looking at the stats across multiple sites, I think if you really want to make people's lives better -- and not just sell stuff -- you have to acknowledge human nature and take a stand: are you going to be the 10 second guys or the 100-hour guys? I'd love to see somebody create something that somehow manages both well, with "progressive elaboration" of deep topics and avoidance of anything created that's low effort.

</comment><comment><USER14> The problem with Twitter is that there is not enough "bang for the buck". The meager rewards do not compensate for the time and mind-share that have to be invested in plodding through reams of Twitter dross.

There are so many more important and interesting things to do than read banal and insipid posts.

I'm happy to have the day's best Tweets sifted by news channels and Jimmy Fallon.

</comment><comment><USER11> > "The notion that harassment and negativity are important for countering echo > chambers should be the first to go."

> "First, tweets from blocked users should no longer appear in the replies to > a tweet."

Being able to respond with an alternative viewpoint without having your reply made invisible is not necessary for countering echo chambers?

Even on HN and Reddit, many people use the downvote button improperly. It _should_ be a button to downvote content that doesn't contribute to the discussion, or is spam, or morally bankrupt. It's not anything closed to this in practice. I think this is how the block feature will be used if you can just block someone to delete their replies.

I'm not a fan of removing likes from Twitter.

<comment><USER15> >It should be a button to downvote content that doesn't contribute to the discussion, or is spam, or morally bankrupt

Yeah, this is never going to work, because it is all subjective.

<comment><USER16> The temptation to use it to punish for opinions we don't like is just too strong. And as soon as somebody start using it that way, everybody else follows.

<comment><USER17> I like how person mentioning a practice of downvoting for unpopular opinions got downvoted for unpopular opinion

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An aside: Why is twitter's website so awful? Every time I might bother to click on the site to see someone's post it's "join twitter now" every 5 seconds with unresponsive touch design that jumps everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER19> Twitter's problem, like any other social media, is people

</comment><comment><USER20> Twitter is especially toxic for minorities. I am a Sikh and as Indian elections approach, toxicity and fake news of Indian blue ticks have increased substantially. I want to counter it, but my account is just one off and it has also gotten disabled too now.

On top, they censored a website that was raising awareness among elected representatives about politically motivated large scale massacres of Sikhs, 1984SikhGenocide.org Tweets go straight to draft if you plug this URL in. How can Twitter ban this on a global scale at behest of Indian government? Then they act chummy about being receptive of both sides views. How can a minority user counter all this negativity because you get flooded nearly instantly. Also, I had to provide my phone number for enabling my account, and considering that my account details can be asked by Indian government effectively means there is a chilling effect on me. Twitter needs to take into account its minoroty users too, because there aren't many accounts that can counter the propaganda. And the flood of tweets is just immense which then gets spread through WhatsApp. A spin agency sends message on Whatsapp, blue ticks posts on Twitter, screenshotted and posted back on Whatsapp giving it an air of authenticity.

<comment><USER4> Hey I want to send you some love from the States. I've never met a Sikh who wasn't an absolutely wonderful person. I have to admit I'm shocked that the Indian government is discriminating against you, given how much your people have contributed to the subcontinent over the centuries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> negative comments aren't always "harassment"

</comment><comment><USER22> Twitter has the same problem that reddit, facebook, youtube, etc does. Journalists and the media want to dominate it.

Why is twitter so terrible today? Because there are so many toxic journalists on it.

[https://medium.com/@Haje/who-are-twitter-s-verified-users- af...](https://medium.com/@Haje/who-are-twitter-s-verified-users-af976fc1b032)

Same thing with reddit. What happened to reddit? A publication company bought it and journalists are desperately trying to turn it into their propaganda platform.

Who is leading the charge against facebook and google? Journalists and news companies. Why? Because they want preferential treatment on these platforms and want to turn them into their fiefdoms.

The real question isn't why twitter is bad. It's why journalists, news companies, etc are so toxic. Why is journalism today no different than political party evangelism? Every news organization and journalist sound like political advocates and the mouthpiece of a political party. Why are so many journalists and news organizations working so hard to help one party or the other? I thought journalism and news was supposed to be about facts, not political advocacy?

It's strange how these journalists loved social media when their political candidate of choice won. Now, they are whining endlessly about social media. They are as much, if not more, of a problem than twitter or any other social media platform.

<comment><USER23> Yeah outside of politics and journalism, Twitter is incredible. I think @jack focuses far too much on a crowd that will _always_ be dramatic, negative, and and rife with trolls/attacks/disinformation/pandering, because its part of their job description to be so. This is further awkward because journalistic outfits see themselves as a shining beacon of everything good to a degree that is somewhat comical.

Economics twitter, finance twitter, bio twitter, art twitter, intellectual subgroup(s) and unaffiliated smartypants twitter are all amazing. I have met many people through twitter, been invited to private slacks, made real friends, and learned so much. I love the platform. Way more intellectual than any other social network.

I just 99% stay away from the political machine on there, and the "toxic rage" that everyone is clamouring about seems to pass me by.

<comment><USER24> I logged in just to reply to this because I was one who generally doesn't like social media and thought of Twitter as just a proprietary version of RSS.

But I had to do some promotion for work and created an account and got hooked in. There is no doubt a lot of junk and the trending stuff tends to be sports and politics, but just like Reddit there is a lot of cool stuff there if you wander off the beaten path.

Things like the #pico8 [https://twitter.com/hashtag/pico8](https://twitter.com/hashtag/pico8) where people are posting simple pico8 patterns or As the Film Ends [https://twitter.com/endingsummary](https://twitter.com/endingsummary) a bot which posts final sentences from Wikipedia film plot summaries, are just cool.

I hope the service can endure in some form so oddball stuff like this will remain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't think it's fair to blame Twitter. When I first started using the internet (forums, usenet, mailinglists and so on) there where hateful speech, angry mobs, and just plain idiots.

The problem is that some people have come to expect that everywhere they go is a safe-spaces, where ass holes don't exists or can be swiftly dealt with.

Sure, Twitter needs to have a way to deal with things that are just plain illegal, and for the health of the platform they may need to add some additional policing. But let's face it, it's not the average internet user who are using Twitter.

The issues facing Twitter isn't that people are leaving because it's a hostile place. People leaving are either bots or realising that Twitter isn't good place it interact with friends and family. Honestly, most people don't need Twitter, but the media, which is full of Twitter power users, seem to think that it's THE platform. We need to look at Twitter more as a supplement to LinkedIn and not as a Facebook competitor.

<comment><USER26> > The problem is that some people have come to expect that everywhere they go > is a safe-spaces, where ass holes don't exists or can be swiftly dealt with.

That's such a strange thing to say - isn't that a very reasonable expectation? Even in the outside world, the expectation is that you won't be dealing with assholes every minute of your life when you participate somewhere.

And the thing about modern internet is that it's really really hard to find ANY place where you don't have to deal with them. Even HN isn't immune to deliberate trolling and personal attacks.

<comment><USER25> > That's such a strange thing to say - isn't that a very reasonable > expectation? Even in the outside world, the expectation is that you won't be > dealing with assholes every minute of your life when you participate > somewhere.

That depends, I can't go into a ghetto area or a bar and say what ever I want and not expect people to react, regardless of how right I may be. I'm sure that this is an unpopular opinion but posting on Twitter is actively seeking out the ass holes and loud idiots.

<comment><USER27> So you're saying Twitter is a ghetto? I can't say I'd disagree with that. But how do we start a social media site that isn't?

<comment><USER28> By your very nature, you can't.

As you reach a certain size, it becomes nearly impossible to moderate due to the volume of material. Also, _what_ to moderate will always be a fight. If you have a 10 million users, and 3,000,000 of them say that something is offensive, and 3,000,000 of them say that it is not and _needs_ to be left, you're in a real pickle. If you listen to either side, you're possible siding with a minority opinion. Even if you're siding with a minority, you're going to upset millions of people. And no matter what your stance, you're taking a stance (with either action or inaction).

What is the morally correct choice? It's the trolley problem every time a group gets offended (or counter-offended, or counter-counter-offended or...) Is it supposed to be a truly democratic state of majority, or a civil environment? What is the goal? None of these questions have "right" answers, just opinions. So what if you feel that your opinion is opposed by most of your users, who do you listen to?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rational Suckers - <AUTHOR> http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/rational_suckers-99998

<comment><USER2> See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_of_anarchy>. A way of analyzing the difference between the "optimal" outcome and the "rational" one. Common in the computer science literature, slowly infiltrating the economics literature I think.

<comment><USER3> I think economics got there first; that looks like <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm> : companies form, even in an efficient market, because they can potentially globally optimize groups of individuals into more efficient interactions than the individuals themselves could in any market.

The other side of it is that such optimization doesn't scale and a sufficiently large firm will be unable to find practical solution at all.

<comment><USER2> Cool, seems interesting and related, but also very different and more specific. The point of price of anarchy is to take any game and quantify the "loss" due to selfishness or lack of cooperation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Someone posts something about game theory

2) Someone comments that the scenario is unrealistic or contrived, then makes clever points bringing in nuances of real world behavior/situations.

3) [Optional] Original poster responds explaining why the situation reductively captures some underlying mechanism or why the commenter is mistaken

<comment><USER5> 4) Somebody posts how this means communism is the solution

Actually 4) should probably be 1).

<comment><USER6> I see your communism and raise you self-driving cars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> it's interesting that if you replace the cars with electrons and change the graph to its electronic analogs, the electrons would do the super-rational thing and go along separate paths.

<comment><USER8> The same would happen with cars if the drivers didn't care of getting to their destination faster, just enjoying the ride for the ride's sake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Asking these questions is admitting to the wishful thinking that competitive > optimization should lead to an optimum. Such is not the case, competitive > optimization leads to an equilibrium and not to an optimum.

Well, that explains a lot about capitalism and social inequality.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _"Altruism, evolutionary driven cooperative behaviors, and mystical concepts > like super-rationality are put forward as missing features in game theory."_

Is Superrationality considered "mystical"?

</comment><comment><USER11> Very interesting read. I wonder if there are any concreate examples of this situation happening in the real world?

<comment><USER12> In Seattle there are many people who commute across Lake Washington to get to work, where you have the 520 bridge, the I-90 bridge, or you can just drive around the lake. After reading this article I wonder if it would be effective to divide everyone who makes this commute into two groups. On even numbered days group A can use the bridge while group B must drive around the lake. On odd numbered days they would switch. Could such a scenario effectively reduce the overall time spent commuting for all drivers?</comment></comment>