Malcolm Gladwell: How I Rediscovered Religion - <AUTHOR> https://relevantmagazine.com/life5/malcolm-gladwell-how-i-rediscovered-faith/ <comment><USER2> In my late teen years, I had a transcendental experience at a youth rally and became a devoted ('born again') Christian and remained this for several decades. There is nobody who questioned my faith more than I myself. In the end science won. I believe that Sean Carroll gives a rather convincing argument why there is no 'spiritual' dimension, that there is no life after death and no super natural dimension, because if they would have existed, they would have been found by now. Joscha Bach presents an interesting view in his 'The Ghost in the Machine' talk about our experience of what is reality. This makes every 'convincing' experience of human reactions less reliable than the scientific facts derived from experiments with respect to elementary particles and elementary forces.

<comment><USER3> Christianity is so very sticky; trying to clean it off just results in more of it getting gunked around. At this point, I've structured my thoughts around religions so that my default assumption is that all religious beliefs are delusions. My reasoning comes in the form of three barriers.

First, historicity. When we pull apart ancient holy texts, we find a mix of myths, legends, distorted tales, and eventually the foundation of history. Any religious belief has to first demonstrate that it's consistent with our archeological finds, current resources, and competing histories.

Second, speaking of competing histories, is comparative religion, AKA comparative values and beliefs. Religions generally have contemporary competitors. They may claim different versions of historical events or have contradictory metaphysics.

Third, physics and the fallacy of nature. In short, observable events are natural and described by physics, and the burden of proof is on religions to show that supernatural events happen. As science has marched on, miracles have shrunk in occurrence and priestly rituals have decreased in power.

So, for example, how might born-again Christianity fare when considered this way? On the first barrier, there probably was somebody like Jesus or John the Baptist or Simon the Zealot at roughly the given times, stirring up the trouble and getting killed for it. Also, we know that the Gospels were secondhand accounts at best due to when they were written, and we know that they were deliberately crafted to fulfill Jewish prophecies. However, Second Temple Judaism doesn't have strong historicity for its founding figures of Abraham and Moses, which hollows out the promises that the figure of Jesus makes.

On the second barrier, there are a pile of sun-god and resurrected-demigod cults around the Mediterranean, some dating back to the Egyptian New Kingdom, which would have made the general mythological ideas over a millennium old at the time of Jesus. Indeed, in the Gospel of John, Jesus performs a resurrected-demigod ritual. I want to say "nothing is new under the sun-god", or maybe "Jesus is too much in the son-god"?

And on the third barrier, there's no reason to accept any of the miraculous claims for as long as there are natural physical mechanisms of action, and explanations which are simpler than the implications of the Problem of Evil. We know that modern speaking in tongues is a sort of hypnosis, that modern faith healing is quackery and scams, that modern reincarnations are a combination of childish pranks and gullible adults, that modern water to wine is a magic trick dating back to Egypt, and that modern baptism feels tingly in your brain because of the mammalian cold-water diving reflex. There's no evidence to suggest that these were any different in ancient times, and plenty of evidence to suggest that humans were broadly the same then as now, and that their culture was extremely similar to ours.

So, on reflection, what actually supports Christian beliefs, and why should we accept it as evidence? It turns out not much at all!

<comment><USER4> Excellent. This is pretty much my reasoning as well. On your third point, I use a different angle which is "religious explanations don't outperform no explanation at all" in a nutshell. But I love it, this progression really helped me put aside religion altogether.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is intellectual weakness. God cannot possibly exist and science fearing people know this. When we redefine what the word "believe" means, we can believe anything that brings comfort. I'm sorry to all smart people who will soberly listen to science, god is not real. No one can logically argue that supernatural is compatible with science. You cannot believe both without redefining what believe means.

<comment><USER6> While i agree, be careful making claims of fact. You dont yet have enough evidence to claim that something doesn't exist, just like they don't have enough evidence to claim that something does...

If you use the same weak foundation they do your argument is at the same level as theirs, and that is not right. They need to produce evidence to back their claims, until then the default value to apply is 0 (disbelief) .

 __edit Also its worth noting that the OP article isn 't about facts or accuracy. its all about support structures. The guy had a few moments when he needed some and the ones that A) there and B) easy to slot _back_ into were Christianity.

The guy was never really free of that yoke, he just didn't have a lot of need for it. Until he did and slotted back into the fold seamlessly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gladwell's entire career has been seeking one revelatory moment after another. Always backed by (entertaining!) anecdata and cherry picking.

On the one hand, I have trouble believing he ever lost religion given the way he operates. On the other, this seems like marketing for a new book.

Now what's the hand of two hands not clapping?

<comment><USER8> Certainly not his entire career. Malcolm Gladwell is/was a propagandist shilling for pharma, big tobacco, wall street, and the health insurance industry.

[https://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm- gladwell-2/](https://shameproject.com/profile/malcolm-gladwell-2/)

Eg.:

* [https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/02/27/n...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/02/27/not-smoking-could-be-hazardous-to-pension-system/0c2151ba-c38a-400d-aab5-bd45a5ba80ec/)

* [https://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-g...](https://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-gladwells-10000-rule-2014-7)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Title: s/Religion/Faith/

</comment><comment><USER10> Religion is a great thing, for some people. (I am one of those.)

Whatever you need to bring you peace. Life is hard, and complicated. These things help.

<comment><USER4> In the other hand, being forced to navigate the willful delusions of so many makes the world a harder, less prosperous, and less kind place.</comment></comment>


Nobody Really Knows Why Apple Is Struggling in China - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/apple-china-struggles-theories.html?via=homepage_section_features <comment><USER2> The trade war might me a bit for something but I have been in china for nearly 7 years and I have seen habit changing quite a lot within the last 2 year.

Back in 2012-2015 when I was in the subway or with chinese friends, I was one of the few people who got an android smartphone. I even had few colleagues who were willing to spend 2 months salary into brand new Apple product.

Since 2 years ago, I have noticed a kind of Apple "fatigue" from chinese consumers who are expecting breakthrough from tech companies quite often. Why would they spend money on a new phone that nearly look like the same as the previous version? Sure there is this new "face unlock" but the finger print unlock works well.

No need to mention that the new measures pushed by the chinese government make the people more nationalist so if they want a brand new phone, they will look for local brands like Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, etc... and they have really good phones for half the price of an IPhone.</comment>


Modern Perl: 2014 Edition is Out - <AUTHOR> http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2014/04/modern-perl-2014-edition-is-out.html

<comment><USER2> Thank you for posting this. I'll see whether one of the local stores has it.</comment>


Jeff Bezos's 1997 Letter to Amazon.com Shareholders - <AUTHOR> http://benhorowitz.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/amzn_shareholder-letter-20072.pdf

<comment><USER2> How the world has changed:

"We established long-term relationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy"

<comment><USER3> For all the heat yahoo gets, they are still doing reasonably well. There aren't that many billion dollar dot coms that survived the crash and moreover provided some real value.

<comment><USER4> As well as a very solid engineering department, despite the other structures surrounding the department.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And his 1994 ad seeking Unix developers: <http://groups.google.com/group/mi.jobs/msg/d81b6c1fa8f361fc></comment>


Using rational numbers to key nested sets [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/0806.3115 <comment><AUTHOR> This builds on Vadim Tropashko's work related to nested intervals and is related to the Stern-Brocot and Farey sequence and Calkin-Wilf tree:

Nested Intervals Tree Encoding with Continued Fractions [https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0402051.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0402051.pdf)

Nested Intervals Tree Encoding in SQL [http://www09.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0506/p47-articl...](http://www09.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0506/p47-article- tropashko.pdf)

Nested Set Model [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_set_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_set_model)

Farey sequence [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farey_sequence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farey_sequence)

Stern–Brocot tree [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Brocot_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern%E2%80%93Brocot_tree)

Calkin–Wilf tree [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calkin%E2%80%93Wilf_tree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calkin%E2%80%93Wilf_tree)

Recounting the rationals [https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/website/recounting.pdf](https://www.math.upenn.edu/~wilf/website/recounting.pdf)

The Stern-Brocot or Farey Tree [http://oeis.org/stern_brocot.html](http://oeis.org/stern_brocot.html)

Infinite Fractions - Numberphile [video] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpwUVExX27E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpwUVExX27E) part 2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv5M9zuZiXo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv5M9zuZiXo)

<comment><USER2> I explored Tropashko's work in PostgreSQL back in 2004:

[http://seespotcode.net/2016/04/30/static- trees/](http://seespotcode.net/2016/04/30/static-trees/)

I updated it in April 2016 to then-current PostgreSQL versions. It was interesting to me to notice not only the improvements in PostgreSQL over those 12 years, but also how my own practices had changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Related:

> A Novel Method for Representing Hierarchies in a Relational Database Using > Bignums and SQLite

Stephen Huntley, Tcl conference 2011.

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/pub.xhuntley.net/Huntley_Tcl2011.pd...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pub.xhuntley.net/Huntley_Tcl2011.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Does this sound a bit like using arithmetic coding (when done for compression)? I remember implementing that a while back and seemed to be based on a similar idea.

</comment><comment><USER5> We were really happy to read the work of Vadim Tropashko but found during prototyping that we couldn't use it because alternate rows reversed the order of siblings. This encoding started out as a simple stab at skipping every second row to correct the sibling ordering problem. But the maths fell out so easily it seemed worth writing it up. Vadim incidentally was particularly approachable at the time. Lovely fellow.

By essentially skipping every second row of Vadim's, you end up only being able to go about half as deep before you blow BIGINT. And that wasn't so deep to begin with.

I haven't visited this stuff in many years now, but it seems likely that if you were to use the pgmp postgreSQL extension, or something similar that provided arbitrary precision integers/rationals, you would solve the depth limitation.

I'd be really interested to hear about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Dan - Nice paper. Have you seen "FUNCTIONAL PEARL: Enumerating the Rationals"? -- I just discovered it today:

[https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/rational...](https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/jeremy.gibbons/publications/rationals.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I remembered Dan working on this project many years ago. The key idea is to create hierarchies in SQL without having to do self joins. This can be useful for computing permissions quickly, for instance, a department manager may have permissions for his/her department, while someone working under the manager would have a subset of his permissions. One of the problems encountered is there is a limit to how deep the hierarchy can be, and the modelling limitations of mapping permissions to an org chart.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone explain what is interesting in this work and how can it be applied? Maybe an ELI5?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can encode and store an entire tree path/sequence in a single rational number.

The encoded number is reversible -- the number is encoded in such a way that you can algorithmically calculate/derive each node's parents and ancestors without querying the database or traversing the tree. Possible siblings and children can be calculated the same way (if they exist).

More exotic adaptations might include a form of semantic content-based addressing by mapping the code to coordinates in a metric space. For example, see the similar Calkin-Wilf H-tree layout: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calkin–Wilf_tree#Definition_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calkin–Wilf_tree#Definition_and_structure)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> this could be helpful to iterate through tree-like structures. Such as trees. * I was going to mention Calkin-Wilf * discussed below.

Conway games also take values that are fractions but only dyadic numbers (2^k as denominator) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Numbers_and_Games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Numbers_and_Games)</comment>


Ask HN: Naming our startup: does it matter? - <AUTHOR>

I met my co-founder a month ago.
He had the vision of creating a better P2P marketplace and has gotten some starting traction (around 500-1000 signups).
I've jumped on-board because I believe in the vision, but the name has always left a sour taste in my mouth.
I've asked for people's opinions on the name, and also asked on /r/startups (http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1afhlm/ask_rstartups_whats_your_opinion_on_the_name/). I've always received either neutral or negative feedback.
Am I being too obsessive about the name of this start-up? Or is it something that is worth changing while we're early in the game? <comment><USER3> I think it matters, and I don't like Stuffak very much. Like somebody else said, it sounds like something you take when you have chest congestion or a sinus infection or something.

I would warn against being too attached to names that you come up with. We all have a tendency to fall in love with our own ideas, and sometimes we need a 3rd party to tell us "that's crap". To illustrate, let me share an anecdote from my own adventure:

We have 3 "real" projects that make up our product suite at the moment, and a fourth project that might or might not continue to exist as a standalone project. All are Open Source and the projects are all named after light- houses. All along we figured we'd eventually have a different name for the "branded" release, vs. the OSS project name... kinda like the way Fedora -> RHEL. Anyway... we had the idea of an "umbrella project" to refer to the entire suite. Since all our branding is based on light, illumination, light- houses, etc.

Company: Fogbeam Labs

Product 1: Quoddy (named after the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Maine)

Product 2: Heceta (named after the Heceta Head Lighthouse in Oregon)

Product 3: Neddick (named after the Cape Neddick "Nubble" Lighthouse in Maine)

Product 4: Hatteras (named after the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina)

So, when trying to come up with a name for the "umbrella" project, I had this bright (pun intended) idea to name it "ScrewPile" since screwpile[1] is a technical term related to lighthouses.

Brilliant, right? Except... like 3 people in the entire world actually _know_ what "screwpile" means and would "get" the connection, and - even worse - <USER2> you _don't_ know what it means, it just looks... ugly. Almost vulgar, to be honest.

It took the VP of Sales from a former employer of mine calling me out on it, in no uncertain terms, to convince me to change it. But once he really pulled the wool from over my eyes (wool _I_ put there) it was dead obvious to me what as stupid name it was.

So, we renamed it Fogcutter and so far everybody is a lot happier with that. :-)

What's astonishing though, is the degree of rationalization and self-delusion I experienced before finally changing the name. Hell, I _knew_ it was a bad name in many ways, but I was convinced "it isn't that bad" and "at least it's consistent with the other branding", blah, blah, blah. None of which mattered in the least when we have a product name that sounds like it should be the name of a porn flick or maybe a personal lubricant. :-)

Stuffak might not be _as_ bad, but my honest opinion is that you should change it.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-pile_lighthouse>

<comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic response, thanks for your insight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started a service, once upon a time, and to keep a clear separation I figured I'd register a company, get a company bank account, etc.

In my case the actual product was a website, and that had a name which was good. The actual company itself was less important - the only time folk would see it would be on cheques, or invoices.

on that basis I figured I'd take the first name that sprang to mind, and I became "Pink Pony Productions"; a name shamelessly stolen from a throwaway line from Lisa Simpson - Episode "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner".

So: Product name / Website name / Service name == Important, but company name / startup name .. less so.

</comment><comment><USER5> Random thoughts:

\- If, when you say it, you find yourself having to spell it for people, it's a bad sign.

\- A name that succinctly describes a service is great for that service, but can make it hard to pivot. Conversely, a nonsense name gives you more latitude (and likely unique Google-mojo) but now you have to teach people what it means,

\- If a name isn't obviously _interfering_ with what you're doing then it's probably not that big a deal while you're validating an idea, but of course if things don't take off you're going to wonder how it might have been different if you had a catchy clever name :)

<comment><USER3> The advice I've always heard is that names should have four primary attributes:

1\. easy to pronounce

2\. easy to spell

3\. easy to remember

4\. memorable

To that list, I'd add:

5\. Don't have obvious negative connotations (eg, sounding like a sexual perversion or a cough medicine)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Critical. Change it, it's terrible.

Ref: [http://blog.launch.co/blog/how-to-name-your-startup-and- land...](http://blog.launch.co/blog/how-to-name-your-startup-and-land-the- perfect-domain.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Criteria you should concern yourself with.

1\. Brevity 2\. That is relates to the service or product 3\. Phetically accurate easy to transcribe from sound</comment>


Bernie Sanders Campaign Is Disciplined for Breaching Hillary Clinton Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/18/sanders-campaign-disciplined-for-breaching-clinton-data/?smid=tw-share <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-sanders- campaig...](http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-sanders-campaign- data-breach-20151218-story.html) "The ex-employee, Josh Uretsky, told CNN that he wasn't trying to steal Clinton data but rather trying to understand the gap in security in the system."

</comment><comment><USER2> The gap was a two-way street. So the Clinton campaign could have people breaching the other side as well that haven't been caught or revealed yet as well as other campaigns that have access to that system.</comment>


Replace Your iPhone X: The Suica Problem Is Everybody's NFC Problem - <AUTHOR> https://atadistance.net/2018/07/24/replace-your-iphone-x-suica-problem-everybodys-nfc-problem/ <comment><USER2> I haven't really noticed any problems with NFC, but I am curious if this is something where I could just walk into an Apple Store, explain my concern, and request a brand new device. Has anyone actually gone through this?

<comment><USER3> I never really thought about it, but I've had to redo every Apple Pay purchase with the iPhone X when using it.

It always errors out the first time, then the teller resets the transaction, I scan again, and it works. I always assumed it was due to an issue with the card readers.

I'm going to head to the grocery store and do a small purchase to double check, but it looks like my Jan 2018 phone might be NFC hooped?

I'll chat with Apple customer service and see if they are willing to fix it if that is the case.

\--

Update: Talked with Apple Support. I brought up the issue, and they asked why I was discussing this. So I shared the link. They pored over it for a while and asked me to wait a few minutes multiple times (likely showing a manager or tech rep).

They then asked for my serial number and iOS version to confirm I was on the latest iOS (I am).

After asking to wait another few minutes, they asked me to do a General > Reset > Reset All Settings. This removes my Apple Pay Cards. So I'll need to re-add them and then try a purchase again at some point.

Following that, they sent me an e-mail with some help articles and have asked me to proceed through the following if it still doesn't work:

\- Redo the General > Reset > Reset All Settings

\- Reset Network Settings

\- Perform a full Factory Reset (Wipes device)

I'll proceed with the rigamarole and see if it actually fixes anything. To be honest, I wager I'm still going to keep seeing issues and have to eventually be a little pushy and have the device replaced.

<comment><USER2> I think it is a little ridiculous that they expect us to entirely wipe our devices before they'll acknowledge that there might be an actual issue.

<comment><USER4> I think it's very ridiculous to suggest that a company immediately replace a thousand-dollar product because an arbitrary link on the internet suggests there might be a problem, without making any sort of diagnostic effort first.

If there were a widespread problem with NFC, and a large pool of internet reportage on it, sure, assume the worst. But at this point, I've heard one report claiming there's an issue, and one comment here suggesting there might be an issue, and my own experience with no issues at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a large pool of Internet report on it and it is from Japan. The usage of Apple Pay in US, or the whole world does not even match the usage of Sucia in Japan.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft Officially Rebrands SkyDrive To OneDrive - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/microsoft-officially-rebrands-skydrive-to-onedrive/ <comment><USER2> This was submitted a gazillion times about 3 weeks ago, and this is now the second submission in a few hours. Why is it suddenly re-surfacing? What's changed?

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=skydrive+onedrive#!/story/forever/...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=skydrive+onedrive#!/story/forever/0/skydrive%20onedrive)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just logged in to skydrive and it says "As one of our first users, you've earned 100 GB". It is valid for one year.</comment>


Ask HN: HELP suggest how to empower poor village kids with CS/IT - <AUTHOR>

Background: I'm from Bhilai(India), a city with a large integrated steel plant under SAIL (a public sector steel co). So my mom was asked on Women's Day to come inaugurate their CSR undertaking consisting of "Computer training" for poor kids from nearby villages. They have 4 old PCs for this purpose and one old retired dude who has come to know MS Powerpoint and Word through usage.
The kids are very happy about this (13-17 aged, drop-outs at grades 7-9). We discussed at home yesterday how they need to complete schooling and so we're trying to find people who are willing to teach as volunteers. We think English and access to the internet are very important as well.
To HN: I need you guys to give suggestions for their CS/IT curricula considering their need to find employment soon. Going by local job needs, familiarity with Office will help but I feel they will stagnate, bound to these apps.
1. What tools can we teach them that they can further their knowledge themselves after finding immediate employment? 2. What languages can be taught at this level, so they can catch up to their affluent peers - eg. Basic?
Edit: As suggested by pook, I would need 'a good selection of webapps and tutorials pre-bookmarked'. Please suggest as many as you think will help. <comment><USER2> As someone familiar with Indian IT ecosystem, please bear in mind Indian IT system is different bit and lags behind SV. Indian IT system is pro-Microsoft rather than Linux based. Indian CS/IT education concentrates on MS Windows from lower grades itself.

There are two sections of people you might face - those who need IT literacy so that they can move on with jobs like DTP, Admin Assisstant and those whose career would like to be built on computer science.

For IT literacy section, familiarity with MS Windows, MS Office (or OpenOffice alternative), Internet Browsing, Accounting packages like Tally, Computer and printer hardware assembling and troubleshooting

For Computer Science section, you will still need

Programming: GWBASIC (or latest MS Simple Basic) to get them familiar with programming and their syntatic structures. Database: SQL language based on DBASE III (or latest MySQL alternatives).

Teaching programming in C,C++ and Java always helps, as most schools and companies insists them as your passphrase in your resume to be even considered for written tests (talk about idiocrazy)

One another thing I faced during my career start, I could not afford any computer literature like books, magazines as it is way too expensive even for great Indian middle-class. So wherever possible, I try to sponsor computer magazines and books to local libraries and private lending libraries so my fellow citizens have better learning opportunities than me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you read about the Hole In the Wall project? <http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-Wall.htm>

I'd suggest a similar model for education. If this is to be within a school you don't need such an emphasis on durability, so you have much more options for UI(the original lacked a keyboard). Definitely include a Hacketyhack(Ruby) environment, several typing games, etc.

You will probably find that the children will explore and suggest far more interesting avenues than you will initially consider. As long as they've got a flexible starting point (Edubuntu + a good selection of webapps and tutorials pre-bookmarked) you are bound to get results.

edit: please please do not include BASIC. Ruby or Python are far more useful as educational languages. Not only are they far more useful and educational, but I guarantee the children will surprise you with innovation you simply cannot get from BASIC.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! Now I have a starting point. Didn't know about Hole In The Wall, so one part is

1\. unfettered access and exploration. 2\. Edubuntu and Hacketyhack. 3\. I'll browse around for webapps and tutorials.

<comment><USER3> <http://ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/> is a wonderful introduction to Ruby.

<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Python_Programming> ( wikibooks itself is a great resource. You might ask the children to contribute, thus helping them learn both English and programming simultaneously)

<http://tryruby.org/> is an online irb environment, great for teaching the basics.

<http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> might be a good resource, especially if you have the children contribute to interesting articles.</comment></comment></comment>


Woody Allen: What I've learned - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/woody-allen-0913

<comment><USER2> >It's just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don't have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we're just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it's Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There'll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.

I love this statement; there is so much truth in it. I find it is something that enters the realm of my thought quite often. The fact that at some time in my life the last event will rob me of everything I am, I know, and will render everything I have done useless to my then forgone reality. Between the truths of death of an individual and death of the universe, nihilism seems all too logical.

However, knowing this,I'm in no way a depressed individual. I don't think I could be any happier in my life. Nihilism has given me freedom.

<comment><USER3> Me too, but I am secretly hoping Elon Musk or somebody figures out how to let this generation live infinitely via mind transplants or organ re-generation. Come onnn!!!

<comment> k-mcgrady I'd be interested to see how many people would actual avail of a service like that. Religious people who believe in an after-life probably wouldn't but I'm sure a lot of others wouldn't either. Steve Jobs quote "Death is very likely to be the single best invention of life because death is life's change agent." appeals to me and people with that perspective probably wouldn't want to live infinitely.

<comment><USER4> Life extension is not forever. Eventually, temperature, mass, kinetic energy, lack of sustenance, or chemical reactions will catch up to you in the form of accidental death.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Based on current mortality statistics[1], only 2% of us would manage to live 10,000 years without succumbing to accidental death of some kind, and the number that would make it 100,000 years is just vanishingly small.

EDIT: This is more a consideration with respect to "cure for ageing"-type advances, not so much the mind-uploading scenario.

[1] [http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc- inj.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > But the biggest lesson he imparted is that if you don't have your health, > you have nothing. No matter how great things are going for you, if you have > a toothache, if you have a sore throat, if you're nauseated, or, God forbid, > you have some serious thing wrong with you — everything is ruined.

Even though this sounds like common sense, I only really learned it this year when I started having annoying health issues from working all the time, not working out, and not eating healthy (startup food). Something as simple as enjoying a Sunday in the park would not be possible because of say back pains. And then I realized that it didn't really matter what I did or achieved unless I had my health to enjoy doing it and the rewards from it.

<comment><USER7> But isn't a big, fat frankfurter, with the mustard, one of life's best rewards?

> "I haven't had a frankfurter in, I would say, forty-five years. I don't eat > enjoyable foods. I eat for my health."

I admire woody allen, but reading this comment makes me a little sad.

<comment><AUTHOR> One common thing you notice among highly creative people is how they completely lock down certain aspects of their life. It is as if they want to conserve all their mental energies for their creative efforts without wasting anything on miscellenous tasks. Hence you find people working with a single type of pens, clothes, walking routines etc.

So, not sure about Woody Allen's diet preferences but it seems to me that just taking out the option of eating unhealthy dramatically cuts down on decisions making and mental energy. A single Frankfurter will not alter your health, but if you open up the possibility of eating them you need to wonder - Is one per day OK? what about one per week? If you eat a hamburger does that mean you can't eat a Frankfurter for two days etc. etc.. If Allen is half as neurotic as he seems you can imagine him spending a lot of time deciding what to eat and what not. Just nukeing the option -- will not eat frankfurters, period. -- seems to be a good mental hack.

<comment><USER8> _One common thing you notice among highly creative people is how they completely lock down certain aspects of their life_

Yes. I've mentioned this book on HN before, but Mason Currey's _Daily Rituals: How Artists Create_ discusses this point. I wrote more about the book here: [http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/daily-rituals- how-a...](http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/daily-rituals-how-artists- work-mason-currey/).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> He goes more in depth about his personal life philosophy here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKLFcpATPjI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKLFcpATPjI)

Very interesting if you're a fan or if the esquire interview piqued your interest.

</comment><comment><USER10> > If you're born with a gift, to behave like it's an achievement is not right.

Thinking about this quote made me realize something:

By definition, anything received as a gift is not achieved whether or not it was received at birth. I think this quote could have been more elegantly stated as "A gift is not an achievement."

Putting it this way seems to change the implications slightly.

</comment><comment><USER11> > My two teenage girls think of me as ancient. But I'm up before them and wake > them to go to school.

His daughters are teenagers now. Considering he started his relationship with de facto stepdaughter Soon-Yi Previn when she was in her late teens, I'm not sure that is the most reassuring way to start an interview.

</comment><comment><USER12> _A guy will say, "Well, I make my luck." And the same guy walks down the street and a piano that's been hoisted drops on his head. The truth of the matter is your life is very much out of your control._

Does it have to be one or the other, though? A person can control aspects of their life and make themselves successful with hard work and discipline and still have many aspects of their life out of their control (genetics, random occurrences, etc.). I have huge respect for Woody Allen and think he's a genius but I don't really like this quote because it let's people off the hook for their own circumstances which in many instances they can control.

<comment><USER13> You can control a few parameters and improve your odds, but that's about it - you certainly can't control circumstances by definition. Becoming successful is never just a matter of hard or smart work (though it often requires at least the appearance of those as well). Otherwise most people would simply become successful - at which point we would redefine success in any case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself."

I loved this line.

</comment><comment><USER15> He's learned you can letch on your step-daughter from the age of 12 and fuck her the day she turns 17, and get away with it, if you're rich and famous.

<comment><USER16> ...and continue a meaningful relationship with her for 20 years, fathering two children and generally doing what people in love do.

I'm not sure your rhetoric holds up when the full picture is presented.

Love has its way with people.

<comment><USER15> He should have left the family, and attempted to create that relationship when the girl was at a reasonable adult age. But by then she would have been uninterested or otherwise engaged.

He is simply a shitty father and husband, broke a covenant and destroyed a family to satisfy his own needs. That is not ameliorated or erased by making films.

<comment><USER16> Sorry but I still feel like you are playing the man and not the ball.

Forget fame, film and money. Tell me how spending 20 years with the same woman and having two kids together and finding great joy and satisfaction in your family is lechery and not love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how I submitted the exact same link yesterday and it got zero votes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185131](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185131)

<comment><USER18> "A guy will say, 'Well, I make my luck.' And the same guy walks down the street and a piano that's been hoisted drops on his head. The truth of the matter is your life is very much out of your control."

-Woody Allen

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "...if I'm on the treadmill and I'm surfing the channels and suddenly Manhattan or some other picture comes on, I go right past it. If I saw Manhattan again, I would only see the worst. I would say: "Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. I could have done this. I should have done that." So I spare myself."

I'd probably say the same thing if, at the age of 44, I made a film starring myself as a guy in a relationship with an underage high-school kid. Of course if it were Mariel Hemingway (who was 18 darnit!) my biggest regret might have been not filming steamier sex-scenes...

<comment><USER20> _I 'd probably say the same thing if, at the age of 44, I made a film starring myself as a guy in a relationship with an underage high-school kid._

In his case life imitates / imitated art.

<comment><USER19> No offense to Soon-Yi Preven, but she's no Muriel Hemmingway!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can't believe a nihilist would not eat enjoyable food.

<comment><USER22> It seems like he rather enjoy his remaining time working being as healthy as possible. I know if I am unhealthy I cannot focus on anything until I am back to "normal."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Amazing portrait - props to Mark Mann.

</comment><comment><USER23> Mr. Allen has been a student of Marshall McLuhan for quite a while [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWUc8BZgWE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wWUc8BZgWE)

<comment><USER24> Thanks for pointing that out, but it's one of the most famous scenes in his most famous movie.

(I only snark on the weekends, sorry.)</comment></comment>


California Is Deteriorating into a Feudal Society of Inherited Land Wealth - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2018/08/californias-proposition-58-has-created-a-whole-lot-of-second-homes-and-rental-properties.html <comment><USER2> Props like 13 and 58 were passed in the name of poor grannies; when we look at differential benefits, it is actually rich grannies who end up benefiting 10 folds better than a grannie living in San Bernardino county.

This has parallels in other laws: in the name of terrorism, many laws were passed to spy on everyone—ranging from anti money laundering, know your customer, enhanced due diligence, forcing private companies to be active partners in spying.

One way to kill the beast is by partial repeal of commercial properties. Apple claimed its real estate value's worth is $200.

<comment><USER3> > One way to kill the beast is by partial repeal of commercial properties. > Apple claimed its real estate value's worth is $200.

That has nothing to do with Prop 58 - it's accounting rules and depreciation there...

<comment><USER4> Could the government use this as a basis to purchase this property for $200 via eminent domain?

<comment><USER5> Sure. Then Apple would use its money to replace the government. They'd end up with a $2B payday from the government and their land back when the new regime took power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> FTA: "All in all, the state preserves old assessments on 60,000 to 80,000 inherited properties each year"

There are roughly 13 Million homes in California. It sounds like this is a fairly small problem to be evidence of a 'feudal society'. Am I missing something?

"or 2.5 percent of total statewide property tax revenue"

Oh, nope - not missing anything. It is a small problem.

Overheated rhetoric like this article title is extremely unhelpful if your goal is to actually solve small problems. Then again if your goal is to inflame classist tendencies and generate clicks, I guess it'll do just fine.

<comment><USER6> The whole point is it's not about the individual home owners. It's about the trusts and businesses that own huge amounts of property and which pay easentially zero property tax because they were covered under prop 13.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, California's been in the United States a lot longer than any of us.

Back when it was in Mexico an interesting thing about the land grants is that they could be thought of as deliverance from poverty or toward wealth depending on your point of view or actual outcomes.

As a certain amount of wealth or poverty has always been ordained by the ultimate taxing entity whose original claim to authority traces back to discovery of undocumented territory, often including a large component of violent conquest.

Then with the march of time you progress through subsequent entities and add layers of middlemen much more reliably by purchases and dealmaking rather than violence, but the iron fist is never completely off the table.

When taxpaying subjects are traded between jurisdictions the prevailing party can profit handsomely from that point onward with only a small margin added to the perpetual cost for the occupant to remain, or the newcomer to arrive.

Seems to me that's where the exponential growth in non-productive occupancy costs begins, which will always be devastating eventually. And the day of reckoning is accelerated or delayed based on the greed or benevolence of each successive regime. With accompanying incompetence or deception being deducted wholesale from any benevolence, and directly augmenting the damage resulting from the greed factor.

It would have been good if the quaint 20th century propositions had been crafted to excuse all California citizens from the risk of eventual property seizure. Shameful that the politicians were not of adequate caliber. At least they were able to protect their most valuable citizens, the ones who paid to persuade the voters.

My question is when exactly was California improved beyond a feudal society of inherited land wealth anyway?

Documentation please . . .

</comment><comment><USER8> Something I find interesting is that so many states that are heavily democrat have such high income inequality. I've always hoped that states like Massachusetts, California and New York would do more to help the poor considering that they seem to have enough voter support to do that.

[https://www.axios.com/income-inequality-blue-red- districts-6...](https://www.axios.com/income-inequality-blue-red- districts-641c4e96-327c-4237-91a5-6613ad80cff5.html)

<comment><USER9> We do. We send our tax dollars to help support the impoverished red states. ;-)

<comment><USER10> Tossing political flamebait into HN threads like this is vandalism. So is perpetuating the flamewar after you started it.

We ban accounts that do this repeatedly, regardless of which color the flames burn. Please don't do this again.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER9> How was the parent comment not similar?

How is anything politically-related on this forum, supposedly for discussion of startups, not in some way inflammatory? What about the post itself? Not to mention that I and another user backed up my (yes, off-the-cuff) comment with references? I don't see how that 'perpetuates a flamewar'?

Vandalism is a rather strong word.

Feel free to ban this account. I can always make another if I decide there's any discussions worth participating in.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nfstream: a network data analysis framework using Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aouinizied/nfstream <comment><USER2> This would be really cool combined with the new VPC traffic mirroring on AWS.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-vpc-traffic- mirroring/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-vpc-traffic-mirroring/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing.

<comment> VvR-Ox +1 and also I like the readme including live demo very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is pretty much a light Python wrapper around ndpi [1] a C library that contains all the dissectors and protocol support. Probably a very bad idea to use a C library with hand-written parsers for that.

[1] [https://www.ntop.org/products/deep-packet- inspection/ndpi/](https://www.ntop.org/products/deep-packet-inspection/ndpi/)

<comment><USER5> nDPI is used for traffic classification and metadata extraction as it's the currently most reliable state of the art deep packet inspection library. The "Light Python wrapper" is provided as part of nDPI (python repository under nDPI repo).

nfstream is a framework to compute/aggregate network data in an easy manner using Python. The main goal is to shorten the path from networking space to data science space when building for example ML based traffic classification or anomalies detection.</comment></comment>


Bits of history, words of advice - <AUTHOR> https://gbracha.blogspot.com/2020/05/bits-of-history-words-of-advice.html <comment><USER2> "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

[https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/ecc/9/11/s_668011](https://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/ecc/9/11/s_668011)

<comment><USER3> Love that quote. It's amazing how much basic understanding about human affairs was worked out by 500BC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From this article:

" _So why didn 't Smalltalk take over the world?_

" _With 20 /20 hindsight, we can see that from the pointy-headed boss perspective, the Smalltalk value proposition was:_

" _Pay a lot of money to be locked in to slow software that exposes your IP, looks weird on screen and cannot interact well with anything else; it is much easier to maintain and develop though!_

On top of that, a fair amount of bad luck. _"

That's not the "pointy-headed boss" perspective. That's _my* perspective, and I was working in Smalltalk in 1992-4, when "why doesn't Smalltalk take over the world?" was a valid question.

FFIs were a royal pain in the ass, and that was what I was doing. (Somehow, the Digitalk (? Memory is hard.) image we were passing around developed a bug, probably from something in the FFI. It would periodically just crash. No way to fix it---it originally started while our proggy was working but eventually worked its way out until it happened anytime---because something in the image itself was corrupted. We could have filed-out all of our code and started with a clean image....

Source control? Ha! You saved your image to a floppy and passed it around to your co-workers. And you liked it!

Deployment? Yeah, we once had to send our proggy to someone who didn't have licenses for some of the things we used. That was fun. And it still involved shipping the whole language, image and environment.

These aren't just some "nice to have" features; they were significant friction that made doing anything real difficult. (Common LISP had the same issues, although its source control story was much better.)

I haven't looked at Newspeak (or Strongtalk, or Self) (but I will) to find out how it deals with those problems, but as for "Why _doesn 't_ Smalltalk take over the world?", that bus has already left the station.

EDIT

[https://newspeaklanguage.org/downloads.html](https://newspeaklanguage.org/downloads.html)

" _The current prototype is based on Squeak, and contains code that is subject to the Squeak License, as well as the Newspeak sources, which are mostly under the Apache 2.0 license. More details about the licensing of this software are available on the license page._ "

This isn't starting well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hadn't heard of the Perlis quote, so I had to look it up. Source of the Perlis quote:

" _It isn't going to do us a bit of good to throw before them [those for whom FORTRAN is mother 's milk] an APL one-liner that will do as well as 50 lines of FORTRAN. First of all, it will take the people a long time to learn how to use the one-liner and even more to write one, so that FORTRAN will continue to grow and succeed. And I don't think APL will usurp its position; there's no reason why it should. And it certainly shouldn't be a goal of people who use APL to stand forth and say, "Why do you jackasses use these inferior linguistic vehicles when we have something here that's so precious, so elegant, which gives me so much pleasure? How can you be so blind and so foolish?" That debate you'll never win, and I don't think you ought to try._"

[https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm](https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis78.htm)

Yes, folks, Alan Perlis is talking about APL, Greek letters and all.

Another quote from that:

" _As a professor, one of the things I'm interested in doing is teaching people how to program; but it's more than teaching them how to program, because to teach people how to program, any programming language is sufficient. The idea that only one language or any particular language is critical to learning what it means to program is false. If that is your goal, to teach people how to build programs, BASIC is perfectly satisfactory. There are some things you can't do in it; therefore, you invent constructions for doing them; and the invention of these constructions is learning to program. Sooner or later, in all languages, we have to go to constructions which we build laboriously and arduously out of the components of the language. And we curse the fact that the language doesn't have them already. But they are not all there now, and they never will be there. The word that I associate with programming — and I'm sure everybody associates with programming — is: "frustration". Everything is possible, and nothing is easy. We sit down to write a program, and our initial, beautiful thoughts soon get bogged down in the slime of unavailable constructions. And we write procedures, or functions, or what-have-you, and more functions; we invent data structures, and more data structures; and the programs which start out so nice and elegant soon become mired down and have no structure. We find it difficult to describe to anyone else what they do. And we say, "If I programmed differently, if I used, for example, 'structured programming' this wouldn't happen … if I had arrays of arrays this wouldn't happen … if I had a while-statement this wouldn't happen …" Nonsense. If it doesn't happen today, it will happen tomorrow, even with all those things there. Because programming, by its very nature, is a kind of bootstrapping activity. What Iverson and God give you today, you'll find insufficient tomorrow._ "

I love Alan Perlis.

</comment><comment><USER5> About Smalltalk</comment>


Show HN: Dynamic realtime 3d tree growth - <AUTHOR> http://gregtatum.com/poems/growth/#/1-seedling

<comment><USER2> Crashed Firefox. Empty screen in Chrome.</comment>


Feedback on our website http://www.transparentitsolutions.com - <AUTHOR>

We revamped our website http://www.transparentitsolutions.com to help entrepreneurs to build their webapp in 7 days.
Would like to receive your valuable feedback about our offering and website .
Thanks for taking time to help us to serve my customers better.
Regards, Vijay <comment><USER2> Domain name is a bit too edgy, it is quite easily misread as "transparent tit solutions". This certainly needs fixing, because this unintentional innuendo set a completely wrong tone for anyone clicking the link.

Site-wise - two things.

1\. Where is your portfolio? You can explain how great you are all you want, but it's all just empty words if I cannot see what you have done in the past and if it lives up to my own standards.

2\. Every page is a "wall of text", i.e. long lines, plenty of text = visually boring and requires an effort to stop clicking and start reading. You will loose quite a few visitors over this. And since you have no examples of your work, your site _is_ your portfolio and looks fairly bleak.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Vijay...

Thanks for posting your site - for the most part it is quite good, however, I also have some helpful criticism. Before I get started, I'll tell you a little bit about my environment. I am using Ubuntu 11.04 and Chromium.

Good stuff first:

\- your site seems quite fast.

\- I like the 'what/why/how' in your main menu.

\- I like your contact form.

And now onto some things that I think you should fix:

\- when you hover over the main menu, it changes the size of the text. This causes the items to shift to the right. Personally, I find this quite distracting.

\- if your goal is to serve North America, you should check your copy. Please don't be insulted, but there are several grammatical errors. Unfortunately, I find it quite hard to understand, to the point that I would be nervous to send you a requirements document.

\- the site is a little monochrome - if I were you, I would add a little more colour.

\- your call to action is in the bottom right hand corner of the page, if I were you, I would make this a little bit more prominent. I am also almost positive that if you did a round of A/B testing, you would find that 'Get in Touch' is not the most optimal phrase for your call to action.

\- The phrase to the left of the call to action is not formatted very well. Not only is it two separate blocks (when it should be a paragraph), but the word 'talk' appears just below the #9bb8b9 box

\- You should pay a little more attention to your subpages. Personally, I don't think the MVP item belongs in your main menu. And 'what', 'why' and 'how' look like walls of text. Frankly, I didn't read them.

My email address should be in my profile - send me a message if you would like me to check if you have resolved any of the interface problems that I noticed. It is entirely possible that they are just a quirk of my particular environment.

Best of luck

Greg

<comment><AUTHOR> Greg ... Thanks for taking time to provide your valuable feedback and will try to work on those changes and get back to you

<comment><USER3> Thanks Vijay!

<comment><AUTHOR> I have made changes to content layouts and bought new domain as well please take a look <http://www.ileanapp.com> let me know your view

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry, but I really don't like it, especially because you are pitching web site building services. Everything about the site looks very amateurish. You don't even have to get to fancy, just much higher quality. For example, here's a very well respected similar type of company: <http://www.zurb.com>

Also, any information about what this might cost? I've seen people post similar services on HN before for $5-10k.

<comment><AUTHOR> pbreit,

You don't like the website or the service we are offering, I have started this venture in Jan 2010 to build on demand IT Cost Transparency software which helps CIO's to manage the business side of IT but we run out of cash thats why we moved to offering web app building service since as a fellow entrepreneur I love to build things and I will try to rebuild the site with quality and get back to you.. regarding cost it will be less than 5K thanks for your valuable time to provide feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Webapps have to be easy to use and pleasing to the eye. By not having these features as part of your homepage, it sends a bad signal to prospective buyers.

Your website is the most important advertisement of your company's abilities. Its very important that you fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that I am doing rework to reflect what you are saying

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First of all I would like to thank you for all to make my website cool, I have fixed all the issues you guys reported and bought new domain <http://www.ileanapp.com> please share your views now

</comment><comment><USER6> Vijay - good idea - but i am not sure anyone is going to take you up on this offer. Good luck though.

</comment><comment><USER7> You appear to have made a domain name mistake; "transparen _tit_ ". The site looks fine.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure they mean Transparent IT Solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we meant Transparent IT Solutions</comment></comment></comment>


Fate of the book - <AUTHOR> http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/07/fate_of_the_boo.php

<comment><USER2> I think his ideas apply on very broad terms to lots of institutions and organizations that relied on certain forms of information transmission which the internet is now competing with or that could control what information got transmited.

Forms of information trasmission Audio radio, music, telephone Images tv, movies, animation, pictures Text newspapers, magazines, books, software

What information got transmitted Price tickets, car dealerships, advertising, hotels, housing Location maps Services yellow pages Work headhunters, recruitment agencies

and more ...</comment>


Principles of UI design - <AUTHOR> http://bokardo.com/principles-of-user-interface-design/ <comment><USER2> No examples and prose combining platitudes with vague, hand waving grandiose manifesto language is a big red flag.

It's got some horrible advice from the get-go: "One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one." is terrible advice. One hundred screens for a task is an absolute disaster.

<comment><USER3> I think you are being too critical. Yes, examples would be nice but all of these principles seem very reasonable. Also the design is beautiful.

Of course "One hundred clear screens is preferable to a single cluttered one." should not be taken literally. The point is that clear screen is much better than cluttered screen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Respect your users

2\. Respect their time

3\. Respect that they are different from you

If you find yourself thinking "now I have to change it so stupid people can use it" then you will never make a UI worth a damn.

</comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I read an article like this, I immediately check out the designer's work afterwards.

<http://www.hubspot.com/pricing/>

This page, does not really follow "Conserve attention at all costs" when there's a 4x7 pricing grid with confusing information scattered about it. The rest of hubspot's design is equally banal, perhaps the author has some other role in the company than design?

<comment><USER6> Joshua Porter works at HubSpot because they bought his previous startup, Performable. That pricing page design may have preceded him.

A Google image search for 'Performable' turns up lots of screenshots.

<comment><USER7> Indeed, Josh works at HubSpot and the pricing page on our website preceded his joining. So, he shouldn't be blamed for it.

Having said that, HubSpot has spent a lot of time on designing our pricing model (vs. the pricing page).

For our first 2 years, HubSpot had a single price ($250/month). We've since run many, many pricing experiments and though the complexity bugs me sometimes, it's working.

But now that this thread is going, I think there are things we can do the improve the pricing page (even if we leave the pricing model the same).

<comment><USER8> This is a great reminder that it is important to run experiments to test your hypothesis. It's easy to fall into the simple, simple, simple mindset when designing but sometimes that doesn't drive the most sales. If a more complex design makes more money then that is the "right" design. After all, at the end of the day HubSpot is a business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I found this article a tough read.

I like Jef Raskins 2 principles :

First Law: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inactivity, allow your work to come to harm.

Second Law: A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

IMO everything else follows from these

<comment><USER10> But it doesn't always follow obviously. All of math follows from set theory, but we still teach most of it explicitly. You don't always want to be deriving details from broad principles like "don't waste the users' time".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a decent list, but visual examples would help.

If anyone's interested, many of these ideas are derived from Nielsen's heuristics [1] as well as Tognazzini's [2].

[1] <http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html>

[2] <http://www.asktog.com/basics/firstPrinciples.html>

</comment><comment> saint-loup Yet another loose collection of vague "principles" for UI design who are, in fact, just rules of thumb.

</comment><comment><USER12> While most items are sound in principle, this is very much focused on _web interfaces_ , not user interface design as a whole, and even then on _websites_ and not _webapps_.

There are different kinds of UIs, some focus on productivity, some on specific goals, some on fleeting interactions; some for a general audience, others for people with very specific domain knowledge. These principles are far from general, naming it a more casual "20 rules for web design" would be more appropriate.

For all we know, despite not pretty this could be a very efficient interface: <http://www.apcconsultants.com/TCAR%20Control%20Screen25.JPG>

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm seeing a lot of criticism (mostly unfair IMO) of these principles, but I'll say that Josh Porter's book "Designing for the Social Web" is a must- read. Easily one of the most accessible, practical, and insightful design books I've read.

</comment><comment><USER14> This could enjoy some concrete examples. I tend to stay away from articles and books that make me feel like I've learnt something, but unless examples follow closely, I've just fooled myself into thinking that I've acquired new knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER15> The "axiomatic" approach to design (and art) is usually backward. Even if you arrive at some sort of basic principles after a while, someone else cannot read them and know what it means to apply them until they have tried to design many things. There is a rich context to what everyone says about design, and you cannot learn it without repeatedly trying to design and improve things.

</comment><comment><USER16> principles of being a good ui designer: stop trying to make a name for yourself

these sorts of lists drive me nuts because they merely serve to direct attention to the author instead of allowing the audience to find much more reputable and proven information (e.g., the raskin rules mentioned below)

i am happy to see the comments here indicating others agree.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm always a bit disappointed by these kinds of UIX posts. As droithomme pointed out it's vague, but still in a way too specific.

I've found that pretty much all of these guides are extremely specific to blogs and the web in general (with good reason I realize). It would be nice to see more information about generalized interface design. For example, I work in home automation and a GUI can make or break the system. I know there have been books written on the subject. I'd really like to see contributions from contemporary designers that are useful enough to be employed in a variety of settings.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this should be the #1 principle: "Define success in terms of your UI." Before you set out to design an interface you must decide what actions that interface should expose and facilitate, and which of those actions constitute success.

First you decide what the user should do - then you design around that. I know it sounds obvious and practical, but 9/10 companies I've worked for started designing the interface before they decided on what the interface should accomplish.

<comment><USER10> Mightn't that be better phrased "define your UI in terms of user success"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It seems like the same principles apply all over the place. Keeping things clear and simple whether you are designing a web page, an algorithm or some module is always the best way to go. In what situation would making something convoluted and overly complex be a good idea.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a rule that was broken: Try to not present more than 7 to 10 choices or items at one time (and yes a list of 20 bullet points that scrolls under the fold breaks that rule)

</comment><comment><USER21> why is FixThisPOSSite comment so downvoted?

I feel like he contributed to the discussions.

</comment><comment><USER22> TLDR: User interfaces should follow the principle of least surprise.</comment>


Ask YC: What happened to Thinkature? - <AUTHOR>

I thought this was one of the best YC startups and it looks like they're now defunct.<p>Anyone know? <comment><USER2> I know the founders personally and definitely agree that it was one of the best (or at least most useful) YC startups. I don't know the whole motivation behind it, but I know that the founders decided to pursue other paths and to stop actively developing new features a while back but will keep the site running in it's current state. I still use the site to brainstorm whenever I start a new project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess your observation is a bit late...their blog hasn't been updated since Dec 2006...and their frontpage content is the same since the last time I've visited it (and it's been long time since then).

I guess it's weird since enterprise collaboration software actually took off the past 2-3 years...They should somehow be part of that market...

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this seems exactly what people would want in a simple, widely accessible package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hired one of the founders at GreenMountain Engineering. I'll point this post out to him. The other guy is in grad school (still).

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah it has a lot of potential! I wondered the same myself and posted on their forum asking....

Maybe the founders are focusing on other aspects of life - wife and kids maybe?</comment>


VW engineering executive sentenced to 40-month prison term in diesel case - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-sentencing-idUSKCN1B51YP <comment><USER2> Not questioning his innocence, but will the executives involved be held to the same legal standard?

EDIT: FTA

> U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives > in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the > lowest-ranking executives charged so far.

> Another VW executive, Oliver Schmidt, has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to > be sentenced in Detroit on Dec. 6. Under a plea agreement, Schmidt could > face up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 > after admitting to conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violating clean > air laws.

<comment><USER3> > but will the executives involved be held to the same legal standard

Yes, they will, but Germany will not extradite them. They already made that clear. And it is very unlikely that the german court system will prosecute them. Haven't heard anything yet, because this might inflict the politicians who backed this Diesel emission testing system for decades. They didn't even go to the technical root yet.

Only one made the mistake to go for his holidays to Florida, so he was caught.

<comment><USER4> Why will they not, do they fear they will not get a fair trial in the US or will be punished worse than their crimes dictate?

<comment><USER5> In the land of "rolling coal" (0.0), and no TÜV+AU (0),(1), any sudden punishment of violators from outside reeks of market protection.

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

(1) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abgasuntersuchung](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abgasuntersuchung) (non english WP link, basically it means "emission checking")

Edit:

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

<comment><USER6> There's a big difference between a few rednecks illegally modifying their personal vehicles and a company selling millions of vehicles that fail emissions standards and trying to cover it up.

<comment><USER7> > selling millions of vehicles

VW sold approximately 475000 affected diesel vehicles in the US (compared to approx. 84.5 million car sales in the same time period).

<comment><USER8> This has always been my problem with the whole case. Yes they violated the law and yes they probably should be some punishment but the real impact was almost nothing, the vehicles would have met the restrictions of only a few years prior, and the limits are almost entirely arbitrary and politically motivated.

<comment><USER9> I agree. If we weren't on a forum filled with mostly people from CA who take for granted things like byzantine HOA rules and intrusive bylaws we'd be questioning why emissions requirements made "screw it, we're cheating on this one" a defensible decision for anyone at VW. You shouldn't have to break the law to be competitive.

<comment><USER10> "Screw it, we know how to meet the law, but we want to save money" is what VW did. Not only did it result in people dying from air pollution, it also left their competition wondering how VW did it so inexpensively.

<comment><USER11> the competition didn't get caught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The German automotive industry has a very aggressive culture. Our (German) managers put enormous pressure on us to do _whatever_ it took to win deals. I can clearly remember watching one of our engineering managers turning a very unhealthy shade of green (~= #d2dbc9) as her boss turned the metaphorical screws to pressure her to win our segment's first big deal -- Ironically with VW as the customer.

Shamefully, I stayed silent as I watched my colleagues lie through their teeth to the customer: claiming, for example, that a range of functions were already mature and in series production when in reality they were little more than vapourware at that point. I have worked for enough startups to understand the concept of "fake it 'till you make it" \-- but there are limits. In particular, the organisation needs to be prepared to follow through and make good on promises made -- or come clean when it becomes apparent that something cannot be done.

One needs to be especially careful when we are dealing with safety-involved automotive autonomy functionality where the consequences of hastily engineered and inadequately tested algorithms can sometimes be serious. I can well remember getting the distinct impression that the engineering team for these early products were essentially being set up as "fall guys" \-- we took tremendous risks to win that early business, but it was clear that we would be very much isolated and alone when or if any of the potential downsides were realised.

<comment><USER13> > I stayed silent as I watched my colleagues lie through their teeth to the > customer: claiming, for example, that a range of functions were already > mature and in series production when in reality they were little more than > vapourware at that point.

I worked for a guy like that. When I finally decided to call it quits he got physical (chased me through the company premises with an iron bar, not kidding).

Nowadays I would tell someone like that to fuck off at the first sign of such behavior, when I was young I could still be bullied.

The frustrating part of all this is that I did some of my best work for this asshole, simply because he'd promise the impossible to the customers and would then rely on me to get his ass out of the fire, which I inevitably found a way to do. Even so, it wore me out to the point where I had serious physical side effects from the stress and it messed up a lot of my private relationships.

After that I took it easy and ran a start-up of my own. It seemed like a vacation in comparison and only became stressful when it took off in a manner that we had never foreseen. Still, the stress levels never even approached what happened in those few years at that earlier company.

<comment><USER14> >he'd promise the impossible to the customers and would then rely on me to get his ass out of the fire, which I inevitably found a way to do

I think sometimes about this relationship between assholes and engineers. On one hand it's entirely manipulative and destructive to the engineer on multiple levels. On the other hand it has a track record of leading to achievements engineers probably wouldn't even attempt otherwise (or of the task actually being impossible).

But looking at the positive outcomes, how do we get those achievements without assholes exploiting engineers? The sort of achievements that a reasonable engineer wouldn't even attempt because the demands seem unrealistic?

<comment><USER12> You can lead from the front, carrot in hand, rather than sitting in the back with a whip. I've worked every bit as hard, and far more productively, for technical leaders who were visionary and inspirational rather than cruel and machiavellian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There was much more information about his role in Bloomsburg last year. He was head of the diesel competence unit in the US, and appears to have been directly involved.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-09/veteran-v...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-09/veteran- vw-engineer-is-first-charged-in-u-s-in-emissions-scandal)

</comment><comment><USER16> I was watching a german program on the VW scandal and was surprised to learn that the German government allowed VW to issue a software patch to correct the problem instead of offering to repair or compensate owners for the cars they purchased. Even with the software patch the vehicles still released emissions that were well above the norm.

Also, I don't believe any VW executives have ever been charged in Germany.

<comment><USER17> I was also very curious how they managed to get my '09 "fixed" somehow via a simple software patch. I would have understood it if it had lost 20% performance or got 20% higher fuel consumption - but that didn't happen.

So: if it was _that_ easy to fix legally why did they cheat in the first place??

Of course it can't be that easy. So of course my car is still polluting over the limit. And I think this is a story that isn't getting the coverage it needs. A proper fix for my car would have been to install an AdBlue system into it, at great cost. Had they been forced to do that - or buy back the car - they would be in serious financial trouble.

That also answers why the German government is giving them some leeway here: it's not exactly in their interest to kill Volkswagen.

<comment><USER7> > That also answers why the German government is giving them some leeway here: > it's not exactly in their interest to kill Volkswagen.

While the federal government does not have a direct stake (apart from all the tax euros), the fine state of Lower Saxony holds a 20 % share (which actually causes the MP and his economics minister to always be on the board of directors).

<comment><USER18> Why would prosecuting the executives kill WV, though?

<comment><USER19> If VW is forced to make all regulations-breaching cars to be compliant and compensate the owner for down-time and loss in fuel-efficiency or performance, that might mean the end to VW. VW is touched softly, just like Intel, for example. I think both the car and the IC industries should be more regulated, and the regulations should be effectively enforced.

<comment><USER18> As far as I know, they _did_ have to make the cars compliant. At least my colleague, who had an affected Skoda, got it "fixed" for free, including a temporary replacement car.

<comment><USER17> If there was a demand that the "fixed" cars were actually tested and were now under the limit while not losing more than say 5% in economy or power (or else owners would have to be compensated) it would likely find that the cars fail one or more of these requirements.

I believe it's now a middle ground: cars lost "only" about 5-10% performance/fuel eco, and they are still only half way to the NOx limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So purposefully modifying cars to illegally pollute to huge levels, causing deaths and disease from said pollution gets a few years in prison? The range of time people are charged with is so arbitrary and usually inconsequential with mass scale "white collar" crimes, and totally excessive for the poor and/or minorities. It's insane.

<comment><USER21> > causing deaths and disease from said pollution

Has that been proven? Serious question, I've not kept up with the ins and outs of the case.

UPDATE: I should clarify, I mean specifically the increased pollution these VWs created not just pollution in general.

<comment><USER20> It seems reasonable to extrapolate given it's 40x over the limit and we already know pollution kills (both directly as a toxin and indirectly through climate change).

<comment><USER22> NOx contribute wery little to climate change though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can we get the title changed to "VW engineering exec"?

As it stands, I think it's a bit misleading

<comment><USER24> Agreed; done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far.

While I approve of strict punishments for such terrible actions, I worry that this is a case of a "scapegoat" being advertised as punished, so that the real decision makers higher up can go with lighter reprimands. Since the scapegoat _is_ guilty of the crime, the deception is much easier.

<comment><USER26> He's welcome to testify about the CEO's involvement, I'm sure the Justice Department would be more than happy to make that case. But sometimes the only evidence can only convict those most directly responsible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I worked on a 'sharing economy' service writing software. We had a project that boiled down to "we've found a legal way to start skimming tips without the users realizing it". It was technically legal. It was completely unethical. It was bullshit.

I called management out on it, said that I did not want to wind up like a "rogue engineer" at VW when the shit hits the fan, because I felt our upper management would gladly throw us all under the bus. "Don't worry, this is all perfectly legal within the contracts". They didn't understand the difference between "this is illegal" and "this is unethical".

I quit the company. I won't put loyalty to a company head of ethics, morals.

These VW engineers? Maybe the executives were the big fish who made the call, but they were the ones who agreed to make it happen. They are just as liable, in my view.

(I hear the project was eventually canned. The users who were beta tested on it immediately realized what was happening and threatened to quit.)

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if he could win a civil suit against VW and their role in coercing him down this road.

<comment><USER29> Doubtful. He made his decisions as an adult, fully aware of what was right/legal - he could have refused but chose not to.

<comment><USER28> True, they did make a choice. The nuance I'm interested in is whether a person in this situation would reasonably assume they would lose their job, or promotion opportunities, etc, if they didn't do the illegal task as asked. And if so, does that create a civil liability?

<comment><USER30> Sounds a bit like "Superior orders" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders).

> that the defense of superior orders was no longer considered enough to > escape punishment; but merely enough to lessen punishment

<comment><USER28> Not really. It wouldn't change the person's criminal sentence. Just give them a path to recover lost wages, etc, from the employer, in a completely different venue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> What about the banksters from 2008? Inspite of trillion dollar frauds, money laundering and what nots no banker has been prosecuted.

Is it because the engineering companies do not bribe the legislature enough, or because there is no threat to the stability of the financial system if they are prosecuted?

The moral of the story is if you are going to engage in major fraud, make sure the economy will be seriously destabilized if you and your cronies are prosecuted.

</comment><comment><USER32> James Liang engineer for VW was sentenced to 40 months in prison and ordered to pay a $200,000 fine.

OTOH Michael Horn CEO of VW and person who signed off on the emissions testing cheating walked away with a 50 million pension.

Of course, you often get no choice in what you do when upper management says 'just do it'. It's that, or asshat exec decides to wreck your career, fire you, etc, etc,

A federal judge in Detroit ... of course..

<comment><USER27> In regards to the execs and CEO: I completely agree that it's terrible.

> you often get no choice in what you do when upper management says 'just do > it'

You always have a choice. You can quit.

If your boss told you to rob a bank, would you do it? It's a more severe crime but it's still your boss saying "break the law or I'll fire you". It's simply a matter of where you draw the line, of how far into unethical territory you're willing to go for money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Engineers should really get (remedial) classes on telling management to fuck off politely. On company time.

</comment><comment><USER34> Seems like a lot of nerves were struck with this article.

</comment><comment><USER35> How do we the title changed so it says this guy was an executive?

At the time I write this post many comments are claiming the execs will go free and this guy just took a fall. The article clearly says this guy was a low ranking executive, other executive were charged and this guy plead guilty, implying he rolled on them (but not stating that).

<comment><USER36> The article does not make that obvious -- it only mentions that Liang was an executive in the third-to-last paragraph, after referring to him as a "former engineer".

It's also possible that Liang was an engineer at the time of the crime, and then was moved to an executive position:

> Liang is still employed by Volkswagen but no longer works as an engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Shouldn't there be a distinction between the person writing the code and the person who chooses to use the code? An engineer shouldn't be responsible for knowing the law and doesn't have access to corporate lawyers that executives do. You could argue that there are legitimate reasons to write code that's illegal for research purposes but never implemented. Why should an engineer be responsible for that?

<comment><USER38> I'm in favor of punishing the people in charge, but I'm reluctant to overlook rank-in-file just because they were just following orders. It feels hypocritical, as an engineer, for me to say that engineers should be recognized not just for raw technical experience but for their ability to be creative artists and humane leaders, and then argue that senior engineers and their ideas and work have no agency or worldly responsibility beyond a requirements document.

According to the OP:

> _Federal prosecutor Mark Chutkow countered that Liang was a "pivotal figure" > in designing the systems used to make Volkswagen diesels appear to comply > with U.S. pollution standards, when instead they could emit up to 40 times > the allowed levels of smog-forming compounds in normal driving._

This wasn't just someone who wrote some code that he didn't intend to be misused. This is someone who used his expertise to direct the implementation of an unlawful system. To be successful in that, it seems you'd have to have a decent understanding of the law that you intend to break.

<comment><USER39> In addition, I would say there is value in trying to tell people, "Don't stick your neck out for corporate boss! Otherwise you may go to jail and they may go free."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> There's a flip side implication of this decision: it gives tremendous autonomy to engineers to stand up to management. It can empower legions of engineers to do the right thing when faced with pressure to do wrong.

Maybe I'm trying too hard to find a silver lining.

I'm angered at the hypocrisy of the management getting to sleep in their own beds for the next 40 months and their kids having no indication of their parent's role in this crime, while this engineer's reputation gets smeared for life. Not that he was innocent, but being the lone fallguy for a billion dollar corporation doesn't particular feel like justice.

<comment><USER35> Read the article. This guy was an executive and 7 or 8 other executive were charged as well.

He happened to be the executive in charge of engineering. He also plead guilty.

<comment><USER41> Indeed calling him an engineer, while technically true, suggests something different than what happened. He is an executive, not a line engineer.

<comment><USER24> Ok, we've put "engineering executive" in the title above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's a case where a guys boss instructs him to write code that lets the company cheat emissions tests and to keep quiet about it. I wonder if he's thought that it would have been far better to have refused, even if it meant losing his job.

<comment><USER42> Not only that, but the dude apparently cooperated with the investigators.

Fuck the judicial system in the US.

<comment><USER29> Given the typical pattern of cooperation and plea deals, I assume his cooperation was in exchange for lesser charges and/or a relatively lenient sentence, i.e. it could have been much worse without.

<comment><USER42> Sure, but that doesn't mean it's any better.

"I'll only break your hand instead of cutting it off" doesn't mean you're getting a good deal.

<comment><USER39> Well he still broke the law(and not unjust ones either). Just because you cooperate doesn't mean you should get off free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Clickbait title. This was not a lowly engineer. This was an executive engineer.

<comment><USER24> Indeed. We added 'executive' above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Note to engineers: managers will throw you under the bus as they see fit.

<comment><USER45> If you don't have the time to read the actual article, read the other comments - the managers are also facing jail-time. Also, this guy wasn't a regular engineer, he's also an executive, the title is misleading.

<comment><USER44> That's an interesting definition of "executive". I guess journalism these days can make an exec out of anyone - can't wait to read about e.g. a toilet cleaning executive.

<comment><USER46> In another article his role is described as "head of the Diesel Competence unit in the U.S."

Maybe not directly comparable to a janitor.

<comment><USER44> It was a hyperbole; anyway, his current position is irrelevant, important is what positions he held while developing this software (which was deployed for many years). Article mentions "Liang is still employed by Volkswagen but no longer works as an engineer".

<comment><USER46> The article I got that from was from when he entered his plea, I'm pretty sure it is describing the role he had that was related to the charges.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-09/veteran-v...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-09/veteran- vw-engineer-is-first-charged-in-u-s-in-emissions-scandal)

<comment><USER44> I remember when this erupted first; VW management immediately started talking about "rogue engineers" adding such a functionality and promised punishing them. There was uproar over it here on HN if you look back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> No. Nothing will happen to top executives.

There's a lot of insight as to why from "The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives"

<comment><USER48> Your cynicism apparently outweighs your reading skills:

Quoting directly FTA: "U.S. prosecutors have charged eight current and former Volkswagen executives in connection with the diesel emissions cheating probe. Liang is one of the lowest-ranking executives charged so far.

Another VW executive, Oliver Schmidt, has pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced in Detroit on Dec. 6. Under a plea agreement, Schmidt could face up to seven years in prison and a fine of between $40,000 and $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead U.S regulators and violating clean air laws."

<comment><USER35> The article flatly says that this person an executive and that several other executives were charged.

This thread is fulling of people who didn't read a tiny well written article.

<comment><USER47> Oliver Schmidt is a low level manager in the Detroit office.

Not what would come to people's mind when "executive" is mentioned.

But I'm sure VW wants you to think their high level executives are being punished.

<comment><USER35> The article called him an executive, it might be wrong.

If the article is wrong then we should be talking about that (and the other executives that the article claims were charged) and not just presuming things.

<comment><USER47> What is an "executive"?

If a sales executive considered executive?

If a person has 5 reports, is he/she an executive?

It's impossible to be wrong to call everyone working in a company "executive", and both VW and DOJ know this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Great news! Now everything goes. Executives doesn't need to have moral obligations to oversee their employees. Any problem, send them to jail.

<comment><USER48> He just happens too be the first person sentenced - there are many others, and the execs above him are facing higher fines and longer sentences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> A good lesson to learn.

"I was just following orders" is just as poor of an excuse for engineers as it was for nazis.

<comment><USER24> Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? (Especially with Nazis.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Less time than he'd get for robbing a gas station.

</comment><comment><USER51> So instead of fining the company out of existence, they're putting a random engineer in prison?

<comment> drunken-serval VW has agreed to pay out up to $25 billion in buybacks and fines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> In these comments: A bunch of people who clearly didn't read the article.

<comment><USER24> Would you please not post unsubstantive comments here? Just because a thread is bad doesn't mean you should worsen it.

If you know more than others, don't put them down; teach us.

Edit: your recent comments have been crossing into incivility and you've done that (and we've warned you) many times before. If you keep doing this we will ban you, so would you please (re-)read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and start being scrupulously civil when commenting here? We'd greatly appreciate your help to stave off the decline of this place at least a little longer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Corporations aren't democracies, closer to tyrannies (Chomsky). You refuse work, look for new one...

Waiting for his boss to get 400 months, and 10x until CEO level. They killed people ffs.

<comment><USER9> >They killed people ffs

You say that as though they shot them or discussed the possible body count in a meeting.

Sure, people died as a far downstream result of a bunch of cars polluting a lot more than they supposedly did. The effect is far enough downstream that it's not really relevant. The alternative to VW breaking the law was not a pollution free world. People die as a result of things that are technically preventable all the time but society does not have the resources to allocate to preventing every "preventable" death or disease.

We as a society don't judge people by every downstream effect of their actions.

The lithium mine required to supply some of the materials for the computer or phone you typed that poorly thought out comment on probably isn't doing good things to the people that work at it.

I'm sure you own a few products that "fund terrorism" (or some other boogeyman) somewhere up the supply chain.

The world is a dirty place. Trying to make an example out of everyone who contributes to it just makes it dirtier.

<comment><USER53> >Sure, people died as a far downstream result of a bunch of cars polluting a lot more than they supposedly did

Breaking antipollution rules was pretty close upstream. Say boss wants to dumps cyanide into water supply, asks you to switch samples used for testing. Close enough for me to blow whistle.

It's pretty well known NOx shorten our lives (NOx + H20 = nitric acids in lungs)

>a bunch of cars polluting a lot more than they supposedly did 40x in NOx

They knew and pushed us into them (anyone else advertised diesel?) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNS2nvkjARk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNS2nvkjARk)

Lastly it's the particles Pm2.5 Pm10. Especially dangerous to children

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25947213](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25947213)

<comment><USER54> I might be wrong, but isn't using EGR (to reduce NOx) actually increase particulates in exhaust?

<comment><USER7> Correct, EGR increases particulates across the board. Another alternative is to reduce NOx creation in the burning process, which also increases particulate emissions and DPF clogging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The worker goes to jail? What about the exec

<comment><USER56> Every single boss that the engineer had ( all the way to the CEO ) should be go to jail for that if that engineer went to jail.

<comment><USER57> Why? Is Pizza Hut's CEO criminally responsible if I run a red light to deliver a pizza because I'm afraid of being late?

Edit: Please explain how the VW case is any different than my analogy

<comment><USER58> Actually, he should be. Unless he can show you had the training and the incentives to not do that, so it was entirely your fault.

If you're afraid with a reason, someone else did that to you.

(Those people have spreadsheets with everything weighed. Raise their costs, they'll cut out the psycho.)

<comment><USER59> Obeying the traffic laws is your responsibility, not the company's.

Otherwise the next time the CEO asks you to destroy the competition you'll say that he didn't specifically told you to not actually take that literally so it isn't your fault that you shot a guy in the head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Aren't the ones in charge (e.g. executives, managers, etc.) responsible for the wrongdoing and not the workers carrying out the criminal activity? I'm surprised his lawyer didn't make a claim that he was just "following orders." There have been countless recreations of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment and its results have been consistent. People are willing to obey and comply to authority figures, even if it's for a detrimental cause. Isn't it unlikely that the engineer acted on his own?

<comment><USER61> Just "following orders" doesn't even work for soldiers, let alone criminals.

<comment><USER62> And it can't, because that would enable a huge loophole.</comment></comment></comment>