Steven Pinker on Language, Reason, and the Future of Violence - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/steven-pinker-language-instinct-evolutionary-psychology-darwin-chomsky-linguistics-b792d7cd2a05#.pr8d00o74 <comment><USER2> The whole "better angels of our nature" optimism thing kind of seems like sticking your head in the sand to me. Of course we should have a sense of perspective about how bad things are currently (which seems to be what Pinker is saying), but we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward), and more importantly, whether there are any forces or incentives on the horizon that might reverse the trend (IMO, no).

Better futures have to be consciously fought for. We can't really rely anymore on the "End of History" theory that the arrow of time inevitably points toward peaceful liberal democracy. Even Fukuyama was iffy about that as he admitted in a WSJ interview in 2014, and things have only gotten dicier since. My current pessimism about the future is not a function of how bad things currently are-- it has definitely been much worse-- but that all the incentives are aligned toward making it worse and I don't see many people or forces aligned toward making it better. Pinker ignores that to his detriment.

<comment><USER3> _we should also carefully note whether we currently appear to be on an upward or downward trajectory (IMO, downward)_

There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of the level of violence in society - it can be, and is, something that we can measure. You don't need an opinion about it. There's nothing subjective to think about and decide on. It's based on information. As such, your opinion is _objectively_ wrong. There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. The only way to make the numbers look like things are getting worse is to cherry pick a short window - for example, you can show violent crime rose in the first decade of the 21st century, but it fell for the previous 5 decades to that, so things are still better now.

<comment><USER4> "There's no interpretative reasoning required when you're looking at a graph of the level of violence in society"

Yes, there is.

Imagine a society without justice/police in which people must fend for themselves. It would quickly deteriorate to the point wherein there would be a fair bit of violence.

Imagine you - the same person you are now - in that situation.

It would be a completely different dynamic of 'violence' and represent a completely different situation - and yet it could very well have little or nothing to do with our moral position (i.e. 'better angels').

Second - I think that 'war' is a completely different kind of violence than regular violent crime.

One could argue that the only thing that has made modern countries less apt for war is MAD, i.e. the fact that there's no real possibility for gain or winning outcomes, with nuclear weapons, the borders are largely frozen. Point being: a weapon, of all things, could have such geostrategic importance that it quashes violence, irrespective of anything else ('better angels') etc..

"There is a wealth of evidence about how bad things have been over the past 200 years or so, and every metric shows that things are getting better. "

This is also false.

From 1960 to 1992 crime in the Western world grew by 800%.

That's almost a 50 year period out of 200 and is not 'cherry picking'.

Violent crime today is still about 600% greater than it was in 1950.

It's a paradox few want to face: that the 'liberation' of the 1960's was also coincident with a massive increase in crime, which peaked in 1992 and has come down somewhat, but still quite high compared to the 1950's.

Anyhow - I don't think it makes any sense to look at violence outside the big contextual things.

<comment><USER5> > Imagine a society without justice/police in which people must fend for > themselves. It would quickly deteriorate to the point wherein there would be > a fair bit of violence.

that conclusion is not warranted by the premise. How about this as an alternative outcome: "Imagine a society in which people actively defend community values for themselves and in cooperation with a community of similarly concerned citizens. It would quickly stabilize into a mostly non- violent community."

What are police, but a group of people specifically dedicated by the community to a specific task? Just because there is no dedicated, professional person filling a role, does not mean the role will not be filled.

<comment><USER6> > Just because there is no dedicated, professional person filling a role, does > not mean the role will not be filled

And thats how you get Somalia. Police was invented for a reason i suppose .

<comment><USER7> Violence happens when there arent enough resources

<comment><USER8> The problem is, there is no upper limit on "enough". Wars have been started on grounds of vital resources like food, water, etc. it's not common nowadays, as technology helped us to produce food more efficiently, and it's enough for the current population of the planet. Maybe it will not be enough for 15 billion people, which is not happening in the near future.

But then there are wars started on grouds of religion (ISIS), or territorial agression for the future generation (WWII), and none of these has to do with current resource limitations. These are based on ideologies that are made up and controlled by few and distributed via media.

Technology has made it possible to spread these kinds of ideologies more efficient than ever. It's everywhere, in news, facebook, even in Hollywood. And it is slowly transforming people to accept a greater level of violence.

<comment><USER7> Greater level than what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The entire conversations with Tyler series is great. He makes an effort to ask slightly unconventional questions and doesn't show off.

Previous guests include Erza Klein, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Haidt and Nate Silver.

[https://medium.com/conversations-with- tyler/all](https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/all)

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf)

Pinker does not know how to count. What is this doing here?

<comment><USER11> I don't think that this paper is the nail in the coffin that NNT or his groupies present it as.

There are a lot of arbitrary transformations in the data that, while acceptable and in many cases enlightening, are by no means the _only_ way of analyzing it. For example, having a bounded function between the population min and max and then a dual function that goes to infinity may help, but it's not immediatly obvious why.

I find the rescaling of the data to be a fraction of the population (as Pinker did) to be more natural than their functional normalization, in spite of their objections. I also think that analyzing data in a cumulative fashion, rather than simply as events that occurred in a point in time (with uncertainty) is far more appropriate in the ease of simultaneously handling both short- duration events (WWII, US Civil War) and protracted violent conflicts (i.e. Mongol invasion, Hundred Years War). Then, breaks in slope in the cumulative w/ time function can be much more easily discerned. (Also do this with your budgeting/accounting instead of your monthly expenditures or whatever to see if your spending habits are changing). But again, looking at the cumulative function is great for getting a running tally through time but has problems with normalization.

The point here is not necessarily that they did anything wrong, but that it's an ambiguous situation with lots of what Andrew Gelman refers to as 'researcher degrees of freedom'[1], and it's necessary to read all of it critically, and realize what researchers are doing and why.

edit: [1]: [http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of- fre...](http://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/01/researcher-degrees-of-freedom/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with people that believe that being reasonable is the reasonable thing to do is that many crucial moments of our lives depends on taking irrational moves. I remember someone saying that the way to win in a game in which both of you are chained together at the edge of a mountain and the first one to take rational moves lose is to dance while singing at the edge of the mountain. Like in poker we need some irrational moves to win in society. Also, America was discovered because someone make a trip to nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> "One of the reasons that often lyricists and poets and novelists will prefer the irregular to the regular when there's a choice — strided versus strode, strove versus strived, hove versus heaved — "

#LiberalArtsMatter

</comment><comment><USER14> Oof, reading through the discussion on English linguistics brought back some pleasant but loud arguments I had with an Editor pal[1]. She was fantastic at grammar, of structural accuracy, and enjoyed that nature of language. On the other hand, I look at words and conventions and prefer the "let's see how horribly we can break and re-assemble these things and have fun communicating" school of grammar-as-fluid. I think it genuinely helped each of us appreciate the merits and contributions of both attitudes toward English and writing.

[1] Disclosure: She's recently become my screenwriting editor on retainer

</comment><comment><USER15> Steven Pinker always reminds me of that Upton Sinclair quote, _" It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"_.

His entire career as a public intellectual seems to be as a defender of the status quo, reassuring tech-inclined liberals that everything is fine, that they can go on consuming, because "the system" is working well.

And he writes gigantic tomes that require gigantic tomes to reply to, so it's a bit of a war of attrition.</comment>


More than 1,000 jobs lost to video game studio closures over the past year - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-09-27-more-than-1-000-jobs-lost-to-studio-closures-over-the-past-year <comment><USER2> In the PC gaming world has also experienced a big drop in quality lately. A lot of games are released prematurely and feel like Betas, lacking polish and filled with bugs. Online delivery of Games made things worse, there's no reason to wait to make things right when the game can be patched easily. I believe this will have a big impact on game sales in the near future if it hasn't already with many consequences for the industry.

<comment><USER3> Because TBH when that last 10% of the game is going to take as much time as the first 90%, you can release the game at 90%, make up some money, and hopefully finish the game if its good, or at least recoup some of your investment.

There are more good quality especially indy games coming out right now than probably ever before, but the envelope pushing games and especially those with new an interesting gameplay is lowering. Genres are starting to really find their limits, and a huge amount of games are just hyper specializations of one mechanic or another, and the rest are playgrounds for many many different mechanics (but most/all of them already invented). Games then need to lean on maximizing story, art style, or precision mechanics and production quality to set themselves apart. Online delivery has made "light" publishers possible which is only a good thing IMO. Games like undertale, minecraft, stardew valley, rez, etc would have been extremely difficult to get going initially without online delivery.

VR can open up some new pathways for sure, but we'll see how that goes.

<comment><USER4> Is that some other game called Rez? I know the PS2 original got a port a couple years ago.

<comment><USER5> I _think_ that was a typo for Fez, which fits what they're describing more accurately.

<comment><USER4> Oh! Of course, great game and soundtrack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Games are risky. Only very few people are competent enough to create an entertaining game that is viable from a technical, creative and financial perspective in a sustainable manner.

Hundreds of quality games are released every day. You could be releasing your game, and simultaneously, a similar and superior game is released and claims all of the user base.

A studio can produce a hit game, have a large hiring push, then fail to follow up with another hit and go under.

<comment><USER7> Risky, true, but also one where outsized profits are taken by the platform holders - Apple, Google, Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and Valve all take 30%. Whilst the console makers do deliver subsidised hardware to the masses and a lot of technical support, the PC and mobile commissions are pure cream.

If a decent PC store game through which mimicked Steams' featureset and charged only 12%, I think you'd see a renaissance in the industry. Hopefully Epic can deliver this on the back of Fortnite's success.

The good thing about software development is that there are basically no capital costs, mostly labour and rent. I'm surprised there aren't more games studios in Asia and Eastern Europe, where those things are cheap.

<comment><USER8> Sadly this is unlikely to happen for anything above indie/niche games, unless the newcomer has some sort of groundbreaking advantage: first, these platforms also act as ad/exposure for game studios with limited advertisement budget by giving them access to a massive existing audience, which you're just not gonna get at this point from a new platform, and second (and more pernicious) they all have some sort of price matching clause, so if you want to take advantage of lower fees to cut the prices on the new platform and attract more people there, by contract the incumbents can adjust the price of your app unilaterally, cancelling out this move. There is also the fact that not all 30% are equal, so to speak : for example, Steam gets a lot less bad rap than the others due to the amount of tooling/services they provide. There is no easy fix to this situation.

<comment><USER7> I'm not aware of any price-matching clause. None of the key resellers would exist if that was the case. Retail stores would be unable to offer sales.

For Steam and Mobile, you need to create your own playerbase. Merely launching onto the platform will get you nowhere. If you are putting a huge effort into advertising and PR to generate an audience - you must think, why not direct them to a platform that charges me less than 30%? Android and iOS are effectively closed shops, but for PC I think its simply that no decent competitor has ever come along.

<comment><USER8> I can't find a source for the price-matching clause (I'm on my phone, sorry) but have read it several times. The lower-priced keys typically come from cheaper markets/regions (e.g. Russia), which AFAIK is kind of a grey area depending on jurisdiction, or from time-limited offers.

I base part of my reasoning on this article, where the author points out there are already cheaper options with good tooling such as itch.io, yet they do not attract a lot of titles: [https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to- compete-with-...](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with- steam/)

<comment><USER7> Keys from those regions are almost always region locked.

What about the Humble Store? Those are mostly Steam keys.

Itch.io has even less curation than Steam. It has less of a feature that people want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How many new studios and jobs created? A Unity study from earlier this year looked at over a thousand studios and almost 50% of the studios were less than 2 years old. Sounds like an industry with high turnover and fluidity, which makes sense given the nature of games.

<comment><USER10> Anecdotally the number of incidences of zero severance pay on being made redundant in the game industry seems way above the software industry norm to me. You read so many accounts of young people who love games building relatively risky careers fuelled by their passion being really pretty badly screwed over.

Just this week Telltale games announces a major studio closure, assured fans that one of their popular product lines will see further instalments all the while again paying zero severance to the humans who formerly made the game in question. It's not a good look.

Another pretty bad example is the whole "will I actually get paid this month?" fiasco that dogged Crytek for years, repeatedly failing to meet payroll on time over and over again.

This wouldn't be half as bad if the working conditions were reasonable, but it seems like working in games dev almost inevitably leads to constant crunch time to hit shipping deadlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly asking. Is 1,000 a large number when I read it takes 1,000 people 5 years to make a game like Red Dead Redemption?

<comment><USER12> The development teams even for AAA games are nowhere near 1000 people.

The whole of Take Two Interactive is 4000 people Rockstar is just one subsidiary.

Rockstar San Diego which developed RDR has about 150 employees.

<comment><USER11> This was a stat in "Indie Game: The Movie", IIRC at least.

<comment><USER12> I have high doubts that a quarter of Take Two was involved in the development of RDR even if you count all the internal testers, marketing and non technical support staff.

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V)

First line: "An approximate 1,000-person team developed Grand Theft Auto V, an action-adventure video game, over several years."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Last few years have been incredibly rough for the industry, after the amazing growth with social games and mobile games. Will be interesting to see what the industry looks like 3-5 years from now...

<comment><USER13> I think closures are linked to that.

Game houses are still shifting to casual mobile games and some fail to do so succesfully.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And nothing of value was lost?

Not personal to the jobholders, but the market has clearly shown a healthy appetite for hastily thrown together games on every platform. There's no need for artistry or polish or craft.

In the digital age, there's just one big landfill and every eyeball and click is monetized equally.

Just wait until we can synthesize all music and video in a blink.</comment>


MSDAT – Microsoft SQL Database Attacking Tool - <AUTHOR> https://howucan.gr/scripts-tools/2900-msdat-microsoft-sql-database-attacking-tool <comment><USER2> Great tool, but website includes coinhive.js. Also appears to use Cloudflare's Rocketscript to bypass uBlock.

Direct page for the tool: [https://github.com/quentinhardy/msdat](https://github.com/quentinhardy/msdat)</comment>


Urban Train Track Doubles as Shopping Alley in Thailand - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/article/railway-market-urban-train-track-doubles-shopping-alley-thailand/ <comment><USER3> Ohh, my...

I wonder how many people buying there know the mineral oil and the brake disk dust trains release are highly carcinogenic given that food is placed directly under the train.

When I was a kid I used trains for making arrowheads from coins(using train wheels as presses) and oil residues are everywhere.

<comment><USER4> Life is a fatal condition.

You can enjoy it while it lasts or spend your minutes agonising over every danger.

<comment><USER5> To be frank, something like this can't happen in the US.

Then again, we can't even deliver clean water to all of our residents. Not that we aren't on net, better, but we could be.

<comment><USER6> Kids can't walk 2 blocks to school in the US.

<comment><USER7> Source? In a town I grew up in kids walked as far as 2 blocks to school.

<comment><USER8> Or further..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was there last month. It's truly surreal.

One thought that occurred to me as I watched the train pass was how many safety regulations and zoning laws such a market would violate in most Western cities.

Then I realized: laws and regulations can have the unintended side effect of "sanitizing" the more interesting parts of our culture, to the point where everything becomes standard and boring.

It's the reason Seattle's Pike Place Market is a tourist attraction even though open-air fish markets are incredibly common all around the world.

<comment><USER10> Zoning laws making everything standard and boring and unlivable is a specifically American problem.

<comment><USER11> Houston has no zoning and it's none the more interesting for it.

<comment> vertex-four Could that be because it's the same people and companies building things in the city, based broadly on what's done elsewhere in America? It's very, very hard to develop a culture completely independent of the rest of the country, especially when large amounts of money (and therefore the need to interact with national entities like banks) become involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I went to Mae Khlong a few years ago, the long way round: a train to Mahachai, ferry to Ban Laem and finally the train that actually rolls through the market.

Other than the train that barrels through every now and then, it's much like every other market in Thailand. That said, it's a good day trip, especially if you take a tuk tuk over to the floating market at Amphawa afterward.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not as extreme, but I used to live in this building: [https://goo.gl/maps/wqrAnDrxZjs](https://goo.gl/maps/wqrAnDrxZjs)

If you look down, you'll see there's a lively market in the street - <USER2> and household stuff on one side, food on the other, including live poultry when I was there. If you look a little further down, you'll see the tram tracks running down the middle of the street. Unfortunately, the Street View cars didn't catch a tram, but they do run down that street pretty regularly...

</comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of the virtual subway store that TESCO implemented in South Korea - [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile- phones/8601147/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile- phones/8601147/Tesco-builds-virtual-shops-for-Korean-commuters.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised that there isn't even a painted line to indicate how far back you have to stand to be clear of the train.

</comment><comment><USER16> In Japan a lot of traditional shopping districts are the ground-floor component of elevated train tracks.

</comment><comment><USER17> Elevator pitch: AirBnb for markets</comment>


Motorola Buys Psion For $200m - <AUTHOR> http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/motorola-buys-psion-for-200m-82951

<comment><USER2> It's actually Motorola Solutions. It's a different company from the one Google bought now.</comment>


Rabobank, U.N. launch $1B fund to boost sustainable farming - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rabobank-sustainability/rabobank-u-n-launch-1-billion-fund-to-boost-sustainable-farming-idUSKBN1CL2Y2 <comment><USER2> The Rabobank is a bank that gave very stupid guidance to our own farmers here in The Netherlands, its home country. When the milking quota came to an end, it told dairy farmers to invest in more production, while everyone knew production would rise anyway and prices would go down. At the time it would make more sense to invest in things that could lower cost. Or, you know, invest in growing products where demand is growing, like sustainable milk.

They were cocksure investing in more production was the way to go. If you came to them with a business plan that foresaw in lower milk prices they would flat out tell you you were wrong.

When the prices for milk came crashing down they acted like it was something nobody could have foreseen, while it's basic economic theory.

Great goal. But I don't trust them.

</comment><comment><USER3> My bank! the only Dutch bank that did not need any government support during the crisis. They also don't have shareholders but are formed as a cooperative structure. And I think they stopped handing out bonusses for their top executives after the baking crisis.

They are pretty big on farming here in NL, and abroad.

They did have a scandal of Libor fraud rate. But they responded with a big apology and the guy in charge resigning. The current chairman has a background in Mechanical Engineering I think, in stead of some Wall Street / City guy.

Might not be perfect but they're a pretty decent organisation as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER4> The Libor fraud was pretty serious. But it seems they've learned.

I'm their customer (I've got my mortgage there; they're the largest Dutch mortgager), but they are also my customer: I'm currently working on a redesign for their international website at rabobank.com, the first part of which just went live this week as part of a big campaign to refocus on food and agriculture (they started out as a bank for farmers), that this is probably also part of.

It's pretty cool to finally see something (indirectly) related to my work appear on HN.

<comment><USER5> Libor is fraud by design. Nobody learned anything from the scandal.

<comment><USER4> The Libor fraud was done by a fairly new London office that was created to join in the fast high finance world in London, and that office operated mostly outside the view of the central office in Netherland. From what I read, they seem to have learned not to do that anymore. It was stupid and greedy and blew up in their face.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Linux Doesn't Spread - the Curse of Being Free ("free = not valuable") - <AUTHOR> http://blog.anamazingmind.com/2008/02/why-linux-doesnt-spread-curse-of-being.html

<comment><USER2> This is way off. Free always beats paid. Your example of champagne is somewhat accurate (i.e. [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_dri...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article3177658.ece)), but I don't think the same concept applies to software. When some alternatives cost money, consumers will almost always choose free. Why do people use Windows?

(1) It is pre-installed on machines - note: Linux is no longer "free" when you need to install it yourself

(2) It is included in the PCs price or consumers aren't aware of or given "free" alternatives

(3) Historically, *nix has been too difficult to install/use, lack of software, etc

Think about this: how much did MySQL just sell for? How much does MySQL cost?

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm. You still have to consider the distributions of linux that are in fact very expensive. Look at Novell's distro. It's so fancy you can only rent it a few years out. That common man's XP you can keep pretty much forever. It will still be interesting to see the results of his experiment, though I think he will need more time to make a solid conclusion. One week doesn't seem like enough to me.

P.S. I know my argument about Novell ignores the fact that he was using pirated examples. I'm pointing out that even similarly priced OSes don't get as much market share as windows.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I buy into this argument. Most non-techy people I know have no idea how much a Windows license costs.

I'm often asked whether a specific offer for a PC "is a good deal" - invariably this is something off eBay which comes without an OS. When I mention how much a Windows license will cost on top of that, I'm usually accused of lying. (until I prove it)

Roughly as many times, I've been consulted when people "can't find Word" on their brand-new PC. For some reason everyone seems to think it comes free with Windows.

The most frequent piece of computer-related advice I get asked, though, is what "good, free virus scanner" I recommend.

I know the human mind is irrational and backwards, but is it really _that_ backwards?

</comment><comment><USER5> I really think it's mostly because Linux still requires a high degree of techyness, and the product and hardware support isn't great unless you really know what your doing.

It's still a pain to get flash or java on ubuntu, openoffice won't deal with docx formats, powerpoint isn't available, printers are a pain to set up, even modem support is complicated and bad out of the box -- I had to setup a virtualization layer just to get my wireless working.

It really shouldn't be any wonder it's not getting widespread adoption; there are confounding factors, but I don't think we need to posit price signaling to make sense of this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This post reminded me of Kopelman's "Anti-penny gap" <http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/some-thoughts-o.html>

Price signaling is very real. High price almost always signals quality. Just look at luxury industry and how they can sell $30 worth of goods & labor for $1000s of dollars.

<comment><USER6> See also Veblen Goods:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main hurdle I experience on a daily basis is not the perception of value but the fact that being free creates mindshare battles that work against distributed collaboration and contribution. It is MUCH more difficult to organize collaboration around content that can be freely replicated.

Why? Users tend to migrate towards interfaces that focus on content presentation rather than those which focus on getting stuff done. This works in favour of WYSIWYG style projects like Wikipedia but works against OSS- driven web services.

One solution would be for major search engines like Google to skew rankings based on the presence or absense of generic AdSense-style advertising. This is unlikely to happen as long as search functionality is tightly knitted to ad networks.</comment>


Hewlett-Packard to Cut About 30,000 Jobs (9% of workforce) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/technology/hewlett-packard-plans-job-cutbacks.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto <comment><USER2> This would be roughly 9% of HP's workforce. It's always much more interesting to see layoffs in terms of percentages rather than absolute numbers.

"Walmart to cut 10,000 jobs" = 0.5% of their employees, probably nil effect.

"Instagram to cut 10 jobs" = complete destruction of the company.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I edited the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For you guys wondering how it is even possible to fire 30k people at once:

In every organization of that size there is cruft. Mind-bogglingly large cruft. Working with those behemots will teach you that you could fire entire departments and no one would notice. There is so many people simply tasked with completely non-customer relevant things like reviewing HR review forms, etc. - they get their pay, produce no tangible value.

Now mind you, every company needs people to keep the whole structure going. HR, IT are never profitable, of course. But at some point during the growth phase of a company these start to metastasize - they are cancer, feeding themselves, leeching of the company that hosts them. And not just money, but also power. Suddenly managers of those areas have a say in company direction. Block innovation because of 'processes'. Have never seen a customer, never produced anything in their life, have no shred of idea of the core business of their company.

And just like cancer treatment, past a certain stage you need to cut deep and wide.

Prahalad and Hamel laid a bit of groundwork for more effective org-cancer treatment with their core competency definition.

You know your cuts were deep enough when a few months in you notice pain. People not being able to service customers effectively. And you'd be surprised just when this really happens at places like HP. 9% is laughable. If you have lots of layers in an organization, every employee laid off has a ripple effect. Need less HR, accounting, IT, etc to service less employees. Even less layers of management as you can combine teams.

Looking at certain country hubs of HP here in Europe I'd wager you could easily cut 50% of the current workforce without any negative impact on customer relations.

<comment><USER4> > _You know your cuts were deep enough when a few months in you notice pain._

There is always a layer or two of cruft in any large organisation, and I'd throw numbers like 10% out of thin air so 9% seems pretty reasonable. But cutting yourself until you bleed doesn't seem a healthy behavior.

Added to that, in an organization where power games are all the rage and completely unneeded divisions have gained a say on important matters, the 9/10% you are cutting might not be the ones you really wanted to get rid of.

P.S: At the exception of cutting an entire location or activity, It feels to me like you won't see much companies successfuly cut 10% of their workforce and turn the ship around. Not that it's a bad move, but it feels like you'll hit the bottom anyway when you come to this point (now once you touch the bottom you might actually be able to come up again, who knows).

<comment><USER5> > But cutting yourself until you bleed doesn't seem a healthy behavior.

(To take the analogy probably too far) Due to any number of legal/psychological/morale/etc issues, sometimes you need to draw a little blood just to make sure that you got it all. If you hit an artery, well, you're screwed, but if you have a couple of good people stuck in a terrible department, you can nuke the whole department and re-hire the good ones back (often as contractors, then as FTE). This seems silly but compared to the costs of selectively choosing 30k people and it's probably far cheaper.

<comment><USER4> That's a good point. I was thinking about how hard it can be to get rid of corrosive elements that are entrenched in your organization (by definition you can't count on them to filter the wheat from the shaft). Cutting a bulk of your employees and try to get back the good elements afterwards is an interesting solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is there a CEO job if the only solution to problems is doing a layoff? Any fresher can do that for a small percentage of the CEO salary. Shouldn't an efficient company make layoffs part of their process if share price is the only goal and implement bonus reductions to CEO whenever that happens.

<comment><USER7> There are different kinds of layoffs, not all of which are bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, this morning it was quoted as 25,000 jobs.

I'm actually quite surprised to hear that 10,000 of the cuts will come in the enterprise area, since I was under the impression that it was an area that HP was going to focus on, squaring off against IBM and Oracle.

<comment><USER9> My guess is it's the area they were going to focus on _under apotheker_ until he lost all support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They really are decimating their workforce. Ouch.

</comment><comment><USER11> HP has been cutting their workforce for a long time, at least since the Hurd days. Back then I suspect cuts were made based just on the numbers. Some people were expensive and I saw a lot of very capable people get let go. Eventually it became hard to find capable people and now, many years later, I suspect continued cuts wont matter. The good engineers that would have made their next generation of products were disposed of and wont go back. The good engineers of the future aren't being drawn to careers at HP. And the current management is getting theirs, while there is still momentum in the system. HP's time is past.

<comment><USER12> I worked at HP briefly in 2007 and it was possibly one of the most poisonous work environments I've ever dealt with. Layoff rounds were a regular thing and you spent every day wondering if it was your last. Shortly after I left my entire department were told they could quit or be given a 50% paycut. I'm glad I got out when I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's a _lot_ of jobs, even accounting for the fact that companies of that size often announce X number of positions eliminated to make investors happy but a lot of attrition ends up being "internal displacements" and accelerated retirements with chunky severance packages. Nearly 10% of a total workforce is nothing to sneeze at.

</comment><comment><USER14> Keep in mind that EDS, when HP acquired them, had 139,000 employees.

The cloud has fangs. Just a matter of time for the big IT strategic outsourcers to feel the pinch (looking at you, IBM, CSC, Infosys, TCS, etc).

<comment><USER15> Is it a cloud issue, or is it just that HP has lost their "touch"?

<comment><USER16> HP's "touch" is now called Agilent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would a company ever cut 30,000 jobs at once, instead of smaller amounts of jobs incrementally? Presumably their desired number of employees did not actually change overnight by 30,000.

<comment><USER18> They're looking for a headline. 30k gets you headlines.

The cut is for Wall Street.

<comment><USER19> Also, morale. Remaining employees will have a hard time focusing if they're worried about losing their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does a 9% job cut actually work? How do you reliably pick 30,000 people who are less valuable than others? Is it just by department? Do middle managers make arbitrary lists? Dice?

<comment><USER21> It depends on the situation, but it's usually a combination of a) entire organizations being gutted and b) specific individuals or small teams being let go. The former cuts broad swaths and the latter is to fine tune (a RIF is a great excuse for cutting unproductive employees that would otherwise be allowed to continue to be mediocre).

Yes, I fully understand how ridiculous all of this sounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been through so many rounds of layoffs and it's always hard. I remember we lost about 15% of the workforce one year across the board which was tough. It was indiscriminate, friends you had know for years were gone all of a sudden. Then the next year we lost another 10%. That would've hurt too but by then I was just numb to it, and in some weird way I felt that those who were laid off were the lucky ones.

<comment><USER23> I feel for you, especially with the looming "when is the next lot going to be let go".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good luck to any of you who work at HP.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's kind of mind boggling that HP has nearly 350,000 employees.

Facebook is soon to be worth twice (maybe three times) what they are, with a mere 3,500 employees, despite HP earning seven times more profit. Something will have to adjust with that math.

<comment><USER25> It's not current revenue that determines price. It's prediction of future value.

<comment><USER18> If we're going to be pedantic about it, it's not revenue that determines price, it's earnings, and specifically the expectations of future earnings.

And it still makes absolutely no sense. HP has a great track record over the last decade of generating solid profits. I understand why they have a low PE ratio, the market is anticipating very slow growth.

However, Facebook's growth meanwhile is slowing significantly, and they're IPO'ing at perhaps 120 times earnings (or more). That's a very large bet that Facebook will figure out how to accelerate their growth again. The market is wrong in its pricing of Facebook, and retail investors are going to suffer for it.

Facebook is a compression trap. You slow their growth to 35%, peg their PE ratio to 35 times, and they need $3 billion in profit to justify their IPO price. Growing at 35% it would take Facebook about five years just to trade at a reasonable valuation. These things correct themselves one way or another; either FB accelerates, or the market will slice it in half in the next year to 18 months.

<comment><USER26> Future earnings isn't correct either (through pedantic glasses), because it doesn't handle cases where companies build value and then are acquired for a strategic reasons (think PA Semi).

Expectation of future value and dividends is probably the truely pedantic thing to say, since (earnings - dividends) accrues to value. That way Walmart is covered.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deep tour of game design and analysis in 63 minutes (skip to 1:45) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/9989216

<comment><USER2> I actually uploaded the linked video as a bit of constructive criticism of the somewhat annoying March 4th "Day of Action" protests on campus. I can't get behind closing off streets in demonstration as a way of addressing the high student costs of education when I haven't yet expended the option of digitally pirating said education.

I think this video is a surprising dense sample of what students are exposed to in our intro game design class. If simply viewing this video, for free, on your own computer gets you to think a little more deeply and objectively about game design, then I am successful. I have just reduced the average cost of education through rational, non-destructive means.

<comment><USER3> Hm... this is a very interesting argument. I'm up at UCSC, and so this is a relevant comment for me. I'll bring this idea up at the University Café tomorrow. (Kresge Town Hall, 6:30)</comment></comment>


How to Save Apple from 1997 - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple_pr.html

<comment><USER2> I read the headline as: 1997 is somehow threatening Apple.

<comment><USER3> I read it is being: How to save Apple from making the same mistakes that lead to it being in such a bad state in 1997.

The current iPhone vs Android battle could turn out to be a repeat of 1995. Only time will tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Chrysler nearly went under in the late 1970s and came back to lead its industry_

Uhhh...

</comment><comment><USER5> "97. Have Pixar make 3001, A Space Odyssey, with HAL replaced by a Mac."

Looks like some of that found its way into WALL-E.

</comment><comment><USER6> _60\. Abandon the Mach operating system you just acquired and run Windows NT kernel instead._

Bwa ha ha. Funny how that bit worked out...

</comment><comment><USER7> Umm, if anyone is troubled its Dell. I have tried ordering servers, monitors and UPSs from them multiple times this month and their website failed. I was able to place an order with them today via the phone, but it took over and hour and had to repeat all of the data they already had on my online account.

<comment><USER8> I would have to agree with that. I buy a lot of Macs, but Dell was always my goto PC / Windows server company. They seem to have lost there way and actually make it hard to buy stuff from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> eerie premonition:

      We'd all feel better about shelling out the bucks
      for a Power Mac 9600 if we could get a tower with leopard spots.

<comment><USER10> That Blue Dalmatian iMac ([http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/stats/imac_500_fp...](http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/stats/imac_500_fp_bd.html)) must've been the ugliest computer Apple ever sold...with the possible exception of the Flower Power iMac ([http://www.applegazette.com/imac/flower- power-imac-named-one...](http://www.applegazette.com/imac/flower-power-imac- named-one-of-the-ugliest-tech-products-ever/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You might think it's funny, but a lot of the advice that people are giving to Apple right now will look like this in 10 years.

<comment><USER12> A lot of it looks like this even today.

It's funny that people, even _today_ , are giving Apple advice on how they should change their business strategies, considering that Apple is hugely successful and extraordinarily profitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> 93\. Develop a way to program that requires no scripting or coding.

I was going to come here and comment on how stupid and impossible this idea is. I then remembered that prototypes of many of my first mac applications where simply Interface Builder and bindings.

<comment><USER14> I think since Interface Builder had been around for many years by the time the article was written, we can write this one off as author ignorance rather than give him the benefit of the doubt.

<comment><USER13> Very good point. I had forgotten my timeline, IB was clearly a part of NeXt which had been recently acquired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you remove all the jokes in the list, you basically get the Apple corporate roadmap for the past ten years.

<comment><USER14> Really? It seems to me that half of those items are the exact opposite of what worked well for Apple, and many of the things from the list that Apple tried didn't work out so well (eg. 63, about embracing Java).

I think Apple's formula for success over the past decade boils down to three key elements:

1\. Throwing out all the old hardware and software designs

2\. Taking NeXTSTEP mainstream

3\. Jonathan Ive

Number 1 in my list was only weakly expressed by the Wired list, number 2 was said in some ways, but there were also some conflicting suggestions, and number 3 was completely unanticipated, despite being by far the most important factor.

<comment><USER16> What do you actually know about what Jonathan Ive has done at Apple? I've never read any books or insider accounts of what kind of contribution he makes, so I don't know much about him. I find it mystifying that he's built up such a reputation that some consider him the most important factor in Apple's resurgence.

Even if he is the best industrial designer in the world, does that really account for Apple's success? What about the people designing the software and the hardware internals? Aren't those roles _at least_ as important?

<comment><USER14> I was being a bit facetious in listing just Ive, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that his industrial design department has been that important to Apple's success. Most notably, the iPod is almost certainly the product that gave Apple the financial stability to develop OS X into what it is today, and to undertake the Intel transition that enabled them to take over the high- end computer market. If the iPod had been only slightly better than the other mp3 players of the time, Apple probably wouldn't have been able to make much profit off it or the iTunes Media Store.

<comment><USER17> The iPod was the big driver, but it was the software/hardware ecosystem, the content, the ads, as well as the design that made it a success. There were full/touchscreen phones before the iPhone. I don't think it was the clunky ID that kept them from being successful. It was poor feature design, implementation, and crappy software.

That said Ive is awesome, the products are lustworthy, but too much credit for the "design" is given to the ID team.

<comment><USER14> I think you're confusing the circumstances of the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone. I certainly agree with you that the iPhone's success is only minimally related to industrial design, and mostly due to a well-designed operating system and ecosystem.

The iPod, on the other hand, was on the market for a year and a half before the iTunes store opened. Its competitors were the likes of the Creative NOMAD players, which were very much clunky, some even in comparison to portable CD players. The iPod software certainly wasn't revolutionary. It was the physical interface, centered around the clickwheel and far simpler than the competition that was so groundbreaking. As slashdot so famously and bluntly put it, the iPod was downright lame in most other respects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> They seem to have taken this advice to the extreme:

Buy a song. Last year, it would have been "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. This year, maybe it's "Ain't too Proud to Beg."</comment>


Marketplace.visualstudio.com is down - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/57867 <comment><USER2> [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/57851#issuecommen...](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/57851#issuecomment-418447425)

</comment><comment><USER3> its been down for most of the day :(</comment>


Ebay Fees take 80% of Seller Profits - <AUTHOR> http://elliottback.com/wp/selling-on-ebay-sucks/

<comment><USER2> Is it fair to say that eBay is taking the profits? Or have they just created an efficient marketplace with such a low barrier to entry for both the seller and the buyer that profit margins are getting pushed smaller and smaller.

If eBay cut their fees in half, wouldn't sellers lower their prices to compete against each other?

I think this is the natural consequence of efficient consumerism where the sellers offer no valuable differentiation of service. I appreciate it when I get fast shipment, and maybe some free candy included with my purchase, but that hasn't yet inspired any 'brand-loyalty'.

On the plus side, I think this helps build a market for sites like Etsy where there's a clear scarcity of merchandise.</comment>


Everyone has ideas.  It's really the execution that matters. - <AUTHOR>

There are two problems here.
First, yes, everyone has ideas, but some ideas are more interesting than others.  Common sense, peer review, social news sites, and/or prototyping can tell you which ones are particularly compelling.
Second, execution does matter but that's often beside the point because in many cases the execution is pretty simple anyway.  This is particularly true with more original ideas where you don't need to compete on execution -- at least initially. <comment><USER2> > execution does matter but that's often beside the point because in many > cases the execution is pretty simple anyway.

This doesn't square with my experience of the world.

Execution is hard, hard, hard.

If it were trivial, everyone would be a huge success.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think most people reading Hacker News generally find the programming easy. For me, the hard part is graphics and sound.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, programming is the easy part of execution. It's naive to think that's the only part of execution. Getting customers is execution. Scaling your business is execution. Monetizing effectively is execution.

Why do you think so many startups fail to get any traction? It probably has little to do with the quality of their code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> great ideas help, but great execution helps the most.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder why we often have this debate.

Probably most people who read this site can write reasonable code. So what is the problem?

I think it might help to be more specific about which aspects of the execution are difficult.

<comment><USER5> "Probably most people who read this site can write reasonable code. So what is the problem?"

Business is not _just_ code. Ask yourself these two questions: if ICANN or the FSM yanked your domain and the cloud/linode/dreamhost/datacenter went belly up tonight, and nobody was able to reach your website, will you still be in business? that's the difference between a website and a business.

The other question: if you invested a few grand and flew to a conference and paid all your expenses to industry cocktail parties, how many actionable contacts are you able to bring? a business idea can be realized off-line.</comment></comment></comment>


Dirty Secrets of College Admissions - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-09/dirty-secrets-of-college-admissions/full/

<comment><USER2> I'm curious about what HN readers would suggest for a better approach to college admission. Of course, pg recently put himself on record

<http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html>

as favoring reducing the role of family wealth in college admission decisions. _History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. It's a fine thing for parents to help their children indirectly--for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful. The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children's qualities._

What specific changes would help college admission practices improve in this regard?

<comment><USER3> _I'm curious about what HN readers would suggest for a better approach to college admission._

Maybe I'm biased because I code systems for Japanese universities for a living, but I've always really liked examinations.

We have a system we sell as consultingware to many Japanese colleges, installing the base of what is considered acceptable here, with customizations per request. By default, it provides:

1) No way to even tell if a student is legacy, plays soccer, etc

2) Strict auditing of everything. First text in the design document, in 48 point font: OUR OVERIDING PRIORITY IS TO NOT COMPROMISE THE PUBLIC'S TRUST IN THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE EXAMINATION.

3) Affirmative action? Not supported or encouraged (I won't say impossible, but its pretty close -- you'd have to use manual overrides of examination results after turning off the failsafes preventing you from doing so accidentally, which causes BIG RED ANNOUNCEMENTS to appear to the other people responsible for the system).

4) Some schools have particular needs for X number of Y students. (For example, a school with a historical association with a particular church/temple might need X priests per year). They can accomplish it in one very transparent way: say "We are looking for X priests. Please apply to the I Want To Be A Priest exam if you're interested", and then the top X wants-to- be-priest candidates are accepted. Note that, importantly, this has absolutely no effect on the general applicant pool, and is not an effective way to get out of the general admissions standards (since if you elect that sort of treatment, you WILL be tracked straight into the Becomes A Priest major and you will not really be allowed to change).

5) Transparency for everything. The school starts the year by saying "English Department seeking 12 students. History Department seeking 16...." Then, after the exam is over, all scores are published (anonymized) with aggregate statistics: the English Department filled 12 spots out of 127 applicants having an average score of 187 points. The minimum passing score was 214, and students scoring above 212 were added to the wait list, from which 2 were offered admission.

The stats are also broken down by test load: say you're told to take two subjects out of three, your pick. The University will publish the distributions of scores for every possible combination (3 in this trivial case), letting you know if any combination was harder or easier than others (which they do A LOT of work to avoid, incidentally).

And the icing on the cake of full transparency: the university maintains five to ten years of these stats and prints it right in the bloody admission handbook itself. Because that's how confident we are that the process is not corrupt.

I want American universities to be like that. Heck, fine by me if they want to put a thumb on the admissions scales. Just publish how big the thumb was:

"15 black students admitted with average SATs of..."

<comment><USER3> Incidentally, in the category of "I'm not exaggerating, really", here's one of hunreds of pages provided by Tokyo University, who I am using as an example because they're indisputably the #1 university in the country and not because they're a client of ours (which they may or may not be).

<http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stu03/e01_01_j.html>

What it tells you:

Last year, for these majors, we had X applicants, Y students pass the exam, and Z students accept the offer of admission to the University. A special examination was offered to graduates of foreign high schools. The number of students taking the special examination is reported in two groups: Japanese/permanent residents of Japan and everybody else. (The numbers are less than one percent of admitted students.) We additionally allowed Q students into this major as a result of the government-sponsored Japan/Korea Engineering Student Exchange (and two other exceptions).

The full exams from last year:

<http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stu03/e01_04_07_j.html>

And on the subject of ballsy transparency: "Here's how many students got jobs, how many went into further schooling, and how many have neither jobs nor education prospects as of graduation, broken down by major and industry employed in."

<http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/stu04/e09_01_j.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Best comment to the submitted article:

 _This is yet another fairly shallow treatment of the college admission process._

</comment><comment><USER4> For every single not-as-qualified VIP or preferential student they admit, at a highly competitive school like Harvard that means they have to reject _nine_ qualified non-VIP candidates.

Read that in an article, don't have the link handy.</comment>


Ranking of HCI conferences based on average citations per paper - <AUTHOR> http://oulasvirta.posterous.com/81433178

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

"Request: Please don't email me to educate how this analysis should've been done. I know that it's limited. Instead, can you please do the analysis yourself and share the results in order to benefit everybody?"</comment>


Is fiat money to blame for the Iraq war, police brutality, and the war on drugs? - <AUTHOR> https://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2020/06/is-fiat-money-to-blame-for-iraq-war.html <comment><USER2> Shouldn't we call it The USA war on Iraq, or the USA invasion of Iraq etc? It is a war the USA and its allies started on false pretense after all. The attacker is the USA the victims are Iraqis, not the other way around. Same goes for many other wars the USA started of course, for which we are all paying the price.</comment>


Tell HN: App idea that should become reality - <AUTHOR>

I would pay for an app that allowed me to take a picture of a reading/pages of a book and get a summary for it. This would be incredibly useful for schoolwork. Basically like summly, but the summarized text isn't from some news site, but from the place you want it from (preferably a picture). If you make this and have it as an iPhone app, please tell me about it, and I will definitely buy it: firstname.lastname@example.com <comment><USER2> I would like an OCR app that, when launched, just OCR's the latest photo i've taken and put the resulting text in the clipboard.

Example use case: You're in a hotel and want to connect to the WiFi so instead of looking at their sign and typing in the password by hand, you just take a photo and launch the app and then paste the password where needed.

Would also be good for power users with apps like Launch Center and pythonista.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or go one level down - I'd pay for a good OCR library and a good summarization library. The current OCR offerings are too difficult to get working well, and summarization tech is way too specialized at the moment.

<comment><USER4> What sort of challenges have you had with OCR? I'm working on an easy to use OCR sdk (iOS), we're going to start beta in a few weeks.

<comment><USER3> Tesseract is really difficult to tune such that you get decent results from camera images instead of cleanly scanned text.

Ocropus is really slow, but does seem to work better than tesseract out of the box. It's still quite bad with camera-captured images and IIRC doesn't give you any hooks to improve the results.

I couldn't find any other viable options when I was looking about six months ago.

I want an SDK that gives me an easy way to train the OCR engine. That means being able to view the images which performed badly, with text bounding boxes and the OCRed text overlaid that allow me to manually correct the results which it will then learn from. And, perhaps most importantly, good defaults for the common cases of document scans & camera captures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an interesting idea, but what exactly do you mean by "summary"? Do you want an app to detect the most important parts of the text, and give you just those parts? Or are you interested in an app that detects what it is you would like summarized, and then find summaries on external sites like SparkNotes?

</comment><comment><USER6> Not really a mobile developer myself, but Im guessing it would require parsing the text from a book with something like OpenCV, and then passing it through Summly's or clipped.me's API.

<comment><AUTHOR> Where do you get Summly's API?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even better - auto summary of everything you see through Google Glass.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd already be interested in one that just reads out the full text to me in a way that sounds natural enough that it isn't distracting.

</comment><comment><USER9> With an ISBN it wouldn't be that hard to pull it from amazon.

<comment><AUTHOR> With printings from school, you often get short passages or short stories that are not in books or very difficult to find within books. But just being able to take a picture of it would make it so much easier.

<comment><USER9> Identifying the text isn't that hard, generally 10+ word excerpts pasted into Google will give you a source. The reviews/summaries though... for books you have amazon and good reads, for short stories though I don't know where you would find them. The search: '"no advantages" review alice munro' for instance only turns up material related to the collection that it is a part of, not for the story.

btw, I'm kind of just brainstorming now.</comment></comment></comment>


Lawyer's Heirs Fight Insurers in $56 Million Policy Intrigue  - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704247904575240201550608376.html?mod=WSJ_hps_MIDDLEForthNews

<comment><USER2> "Days after New York attorney Arthur Kramer died unexpectedly at age 81"

I can't really consider any 81-year-old's death to be unexpected. Which makes me wonder why anyone was underwriting life insurance for him.

<comment><USER3> I had a chance to look at death tables recently and the drop off is rather dramatic for men starting at around 75 (for women it is noticable at 85 or so).

That said, I am sure insurance companies knew what they were doing.

Therefore, what this scheme amounts is in effect investors thinking they are smarter than actuaries(or willing to take a lesser payout, or some bizarre tax advantage).

Let's assume one 80 year old can buy a 10million dollar policy(for simplicity we assume all premiums paid to the end of life) for say 5 million.

Then investors offer 5million 100 thousand for the said policy. Person is richer 100 thousand out of this. That is investors think that the person will die sooner than the insurance company has calculated.

If the investors buy sufficient number of policies, they are guaranteed a pretty steady income, but as the article shows it is not risk free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You have to really trust your investors when you are worth more dead than alive...

Lots of psychos in this business. Someone will eventually consider the use of bullets to make the... payoff date more predictable.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I agree, this is not for me. Too scary from those afraid to lose their shirt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any way you cut it, "investing" in someone else's life insurance policy is ghoulish.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is not really hacker news IMO, belongs more on Fark.

</comment><comment><USER8> _"From 2004 to 2008, tens of thousands of older people sought to make some fast cash by taking out multimillion-dollar policies on their own lives and flipping these to brokers, who resold them to investors like hedge funds and investment banks."_

That's amazing.

And these are essentially no-risk investments. Am I understanding this correctly?

<comment><USER9> The investment is only good if the actuarial tables prove to be correct. For a counter example see:

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

In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died, an agreement sometimes called a "reverse mortgage". Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death.

<comment><USER10> Calment was still alive in 1995? If my math is right, that makes her at least 130 years old.

<comment><USER11> You are off by 10.

90 + 1995 - 1965 = 120

She died in 1997 at 122 years according to above link to wikipedia.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do venture capitalists make decisions? - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X19301680?via%3Dihub <comment><USER2> This is intresting:

% of investments exited 484 71 58 77 89 22

I guess that on avg, 70% of startup exit, vs the common belief of failure rate of 90%.

I.e the failure rate is 30%.</comment>


The UK's online ID plans: expensive, intrusive, unnecessary - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/06/uk-online-id-pandemic-digital-identity-system <comment><USER3> >. Introducing one in the UK would fundamentally reshape our relationship with the state

Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and philosophizing. Virtually every democratic country on this planet has national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, South Korea does, Germany, does, if you emigrate from the UK to Switzerland, does anyone feel they've now entered a fundamentally new relationship with the state because of an ID card?

National identity needs to be tracked in any country, regardless whether you have an ID card, and all the systems the UK has in place prove that point, the card doesn't change anything other than actually guaranteeing some standards and safety and consistency and providing some utility.

If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and your age is verified within a minute, and the standard actually demands that those requests are ephemeral. Can anyone tell me why that's worse than some patchwork of private verification industries who leak your data every two months or sell them to god knows who?

In the US government agencies buy license plate data from private firms because they can't collect it legally, I assume UK agencies (would) do similar things if they want identity data.

Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from unifying data? What are all those UK government contracts with Palantir for? Great now you're under surveillance _AND_ you get the privilege of paying a private American firm with taxpayer money for it

<comment><USER4> > Good grief I have no idea why these debates always descend into alarmism and > philosophizing. Virtually every democratic country on this planet has > national id cards. Switzerland, a bastion of democracy does, Israel does, > South Korea does, Germany, does, if you emigrate from the UK to Switzerland, > does anyone feel they've now entered a fundamentally new relationship with > the state because of an ID card?

What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay?

> If you buy booze online in Germany on Amazon you can type in your ID and > your age is verified within a minute, and the standard actually demands that > those requests are ephemeral. Can anyone tell me why that's worse than some > patchwork of private verification industries who leak your data every two > months or sell them to god knows who?

Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

> Does anyone seriously think not having an ID card stops the government from > unifying data?

Absolutely.

<comment><USER3> >What is your argument here? A lot of countries do it, therefore it's okay?

no, therefore it doesn't meaningfully change the relationship to the state, unless one agrees that those countries are somehow qualitatively different than the UK or before they had IDs. The author tries to appeal to fear and is being dramatic. Arguments along the lines of "this will fundamentally change X" are just rhetoric to use people's scepticism of change. It's the same kind of thing you see in US politics when some politician goes "and they'll take your freedoms, and your meat, and your guns" regardless of what the actual legislation says

>Can you tell me why this is preferable to having someone look at an ID and verify it with their eyeballs?

because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs, and to be honest I trust an (ideally open) algorithm more than a random person. Just a year ago[1] a cop was caught sniffing around in a database and stalking women under the guise of police business. So if you ask me, eliminating people from data processing is a feature.

[1][https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on- ove...](https://gizmodo.com/cop-uses-police-database-to-creep-on- over-100-women-in-1833156806)

<comment><USER5> >because when I order something online there's not necessarily anyone there to look at it with their eyeballs

Isn't that problematic because all Timmy has to do get his hands on booze is to lay his eyes on someone's ID? I don't see how the scheme is any more secure than validating the order wasn't placed with a prepaid credit card (presumably only adults have access to non-prepaid credit cards). It makes much more sense to do the verification on delivery, rather than when you're placing the order.

<comment><USER6> It's not that easy. To use someone's electronic ID as verification you either need their ID card and their ID pin code and probably access to their computer as well or mobile phone (+ access to it) and their ID pin code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This isn't about a philosophical position on privacy. It's about who the > government shares our information with, and how it treats us based on what > it thinks it knows about us.

The article mentions just one incident in India in passing, but whole books could be written on the resident (not citizen) ID scheme and the problems it has created in India. Now there's a push in India for a new national health ID to help private companies gather more data in a country with no data privacy laws.

Unlike the UK where the national ID project was junked a decade ago (as mentioned in the article), in India the story of rights being trampled while an uncaring judiciary spends time on more trivial matters should be a lesson to people in other countries.

Keep the fight against mass surveillance on. Times of crisis, like the current pandemic, are great opportunities for governments to push policies that will have long term negative effects.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty!"

<comment><USER8> > Times of crisis, like the current pandemic, are great opportunities for > governments to push policies that will have long term negative effects.

Those times are great for pushing change by anyone. Don't shoot the messenger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More opportunity for the British government to spy on its citizens and repress them. You have to understand that the UK is probably the most surveilled country that claims to be a democracy. Countries like Germany do ID cards for the benefit of citizens. The UK would do it to subjugate the population.

</comment><comment><USER10> A digital ID, if done properly, can actually increase privacy and anonymity, not decrease it.

Without digital ID, everyone who needs to verify your identity for legal reasons needs to get a lot of data about you and verify that manually. This increases costs, friction and the chances of a leak, after all, most of your data lives in dozens of private databases, some of them possibly insecure. Over here (in Poland), phone carriers need to verify your identity before selling you a SIM (for anti-terrorism reasons). The carrier me and my family have used in the past has recently had a leak, and we had to scramble to change our ID numbers and report the leak everywhere we could. Just because they had lots of data and pictures of our ID.

With a digital ID, a company can just ask the government to perform the needed checks, without ever storing any information about you. You want to do something that's only allowed for people over 18? The government can respond with a true/false response, without revealing any of your data to a company that has no business processing it in the first place.

Same for all kinds of verification. Instead of storing lots of personal data about you on company servers, store a unique, government-issued token that is tied to your identity. No one but the government knows who this token is tied to, or even what company requested it. You're effectively anonymous. Only when you commit a crime, a company passes the token to the court, which is able to retrieve the actual identity from government servers.

Those systems are far more secure than the mess we have now.

<comment><USER11> You can only hope they would do build something like that. With their recent IT projects, I have severe doubts.

It's like we've gone backwards from the start of the digital transformation the UK was leading...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ignoring my main concern that any digital project led by the current government will no doubt fail and be used as another excuse to funnel billions to "friends" (not alarmist, but fact), as someone else comments:

"It's not just about government. Introduce a digital ID and instantly it'll become a requirement to give your digital ID to do anything at all - <USER2> a mobile phone, a bank account, an online shop, a library, a pub ... anything. Thus, as the article says, your whole life can be linked together and surveilled, not only by government but by dozens of unaccountable corporations."

<comment><USER13> > Introduce a digital ID and instantly it'll become a requirement to give your > digital ID to do anything at all - register a mobile phone, a bank account, > an online shop, a library, a pub ... anything

 _Sighs_.

4/5 of these examples already require proof of identity in various circumstances.

The required identification often comes in the form of either one or a combination of a recent utility bill + driver's license and/or passport.

This can make moving house (as an example) a massive PITA -- now I need 3 documents instead of one.

\--

On data storage / privacy.

Pubs/bars/clubs have already trialled schemes where the provided Photo ID is stored for a certain amount of time. (I believe fabric had to do this under the terms of their new license). I've not heard of any breaches yet...?

I doubt a digital ID would be very useful in pubs as it can't be linked back to a biometric feature (your pretty face).

Online shops... Meh. Does it _really matter_ if Tesco's knows that I prefer low fat mince to high fat?

Banks, well.... There's not much hope there. They'll use it and the game will change. C'est la vie. I'll either adapt so I can get a mortgage or I'll continue renting.

Edit: on a even deeper level, the reality is that nothing changes. Everyone has some form of UID for me (usually emails). Now it just becomes a standardised identifier across the board.

__

I too have low confidence in the current government's ability to do something useful with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is a precedent in the UK. ID cards were introduced during WWII and originally were used for four tasks. By the end of the war and afterwards the scope creep had increased to something like 37. Police were demanding to see Id when driving and it was one motorist (Harry Willcock) who refused and when it came to court the Judge agreed and ID cards were scrapped.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Registration_Act_1939)

</comment><comment><USER15> A good ID scheme can preserve privacy when it includes functions to do anonymous attestation. For instance if you are required to prove age or residence, but the other party does not need any other information about you.

A scheme which supports hashed identity (e.g. hashing your ID number along with the ID number of the party requesting, resulting in a unique identifier) can be used for services that require one account pr. person.

When this is available out-of-band (e.g. a smart card or app [not requiring going through government servers each time]) no leaks can occur.</comment>


Catlab.jl: Experimental framework for applied category theory - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/epatters/Catlab.jl <comment><USER2> Seems a good time for adding a Julia flavor for Category Theory for Programmers[1] book. Similar to what was done recently with Scala[2], and now work-in-progress OCaml[3] flavor.

[1] [https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp- pdf/](https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp-pdf/)

[2] [https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp- pdf/releases/tag/v1...](https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp- pdf/releases/tag/v1.2.1)

[3] [https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp- pdf/issues/169#issu...](https://github.com/hmemcpy/milewski-ctfp- pdf/issues/169#issuecomment-485222964)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice to see more symbolic work going on in Julia. It's kind of the wild west where tons of fast computational algebra libraries are being generated, and each does something unique and specific. I think someone might need to take them all and generate a SAGE-like pure Julia system sooner or later.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's it for -- that is, what is applied category theory? Could using this library help me understand, say, prisms and traversals in Haskell?

<comment><USER5> Here is a short course on applied category theory: [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s097-applied- cate...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-s097-applied-category- theory-january-iap-2019/)</comment></comment>


Reddit's Battlefield 5 community bans 'historical accuracy' arguments - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/reddit-battlefield-5-community-bans-historical-accuracy-arguments/#ftag=CADf328eec <comment><USER2> Reddit needs to just get rid of mods entirely. Or at least have mods like the ones over at /r/libertarian</comment>


Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/16/twitch-is-acquiring-popular-video-game-community-and-software-maker-curse/ <comment><USER2> Curse is terrible. It's like the (current) Sourceforge of gaming sites. I seriously don't know why Twitch/Amazon would consider acquiring it.

<comment><USER3> Discord is starting to reveal their ability to pull streamer communities off of Twitch.

This is most likely a bulkhead acquisition to anticipate the growth of Discord and to try and keep those same streamers in the fold.

Twitch gets the massive community reach of Curse, plus they also get all the current momentum Curse has to be a Discord competitor.

It's a fantastic acquisition, if a little defensive.

<comment><USER4> I'm not familiar with it, so how is discord a competitor to twitch? It looks like a newer TeamSpeak to me.

<comment><USER5> Are streamers hosting their chats on Discord as opposed to Twitch's chat system, which tends to break down after a certain level of activity?

Only thing I can think of.

<comment><USER6> Full Disclosure: I really like Discord, and use Twitch daily.

Discord has more easily manageable chat roles, eg: Moderator, Helper, Regular, Supporter, etc. Twitch chat is nothing more than simple IRC, and relies almost entirely on bots for the more complicated stuff. Discord also has voice chat built in, whereas Twitch has none for their chatters.

Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.

<comment><USER7> "despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype.

Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER8> I don't like browser based desktop apps. They have all the disadvantages of native apps but lose most advantages of HTML5 apps by being platform specific (apparently these is no discord desktop for linux) and require you to download an entire browser engine along with your app. You have to install them as opposed to just visiting an URL. They are not as lightweight as conventional desktop applications and don't perform as well. I'd rather see the browser getting more powerful. The cat is out of the bag already. If they're going to use a browser anyway, why can't they just run in my browser of choice along with all the other websites?

<comment><USER9> > apparently these is no discord desktop for linux

The Discord developers are working on this. It's not just web components but also native dependencies as well, so it's understandable I think if the Linux version comes in a little bit behind macOS and Windows versions where the majority of the gamer market is.

Next up, I'm starting to like when companies use desktop HTML5 apps. HTML and JavaScript does enable developers to move quickly with their interfaces, and I find them to be generally much more well-kept than native counterparts, where there's more inertia in making interface changes. A good comparison gamers will be familiar with is Steam. The Steam UI is written in a valve- proprietary, CSS-like language that I imagine is less performant than CSS. It's also REALLY buggy, so much so that I'm surprised that Valve has not already moved to an Electron app for Steam. If they did they'd be able to iterate quickly on interface improvements which they certainly don't do now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Twitch is dying? They had 258k+ people watching The International. There were 130k watching an EULCS quarterfinal today. And those are just a couple of streams of the thousands that are online at any given time. Not to mention the popular streamers who have 10 of thousands of subs who pay $5+ a month which Twitch gets part of. Twitch is most definitely not "dying."

<comment><USER11> People pay $5+/mo to watch gamer streams? That can't be right.

Edit: Found an example, [https://www.twitch.tv/products/leagueofgeeks/ticket](https://www.twitch.tv/products/leagueofgeeks/ticket)

$5/mo for some random features and no ads, with "limited exceptions", so not actually ad-free. What are you paying for?

<comment><USER12> They don't pay to watch, they pay to support the streamer.

Most streamers have subscriber/donation/cheer notifications appear on-screen in some way. Making partner on Twitch (which enables subscriptions) requires the streamer to have a consistent number of viewers each time they stream, and they must stream fairly often.

It's not uncommon to see streamers with a fairly sizeable number of subscribers any given month.

<comment><USER11> Alright, I understand that. You suggest it's an ethical decision rather than economic; that streamers _deserve_ the support. But why?

I fund a few YouTubers on patreon, because they create content in the traditional sense, e.g., research, writing, filming, editing, etc. That's hard work.

Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and play video games all day. Why do they need support?

Sure, watching a stream is entertaining, but when I think "supporting a content creator", I have to imagine that my support enables their creativity in some way. Does a streamer with more support produce better content than a streamer with less support?

The only thing I can think of is more support might allow a streamer to devote more of their time to streaming.

<comment><USER13> > Streamers don't do any of that; they literally sit in their basement and > play video games all day.

You seem to be missing what they do: they are _entertainers_. They aren't "playing video games" all day; that's just the medium. People come to see the entertainer. The most successful streamers create a unique character that people want to see, often regardless of the specific game being played.

Some people also integrate legitimate review and and critique into some of their shows (not to be confused with the current plague of "reviews" that are actually paid native advertising).

> Sure, watching a stream is entertaining

See, you do understand. Being an entertainer is work. Just like the standup comic, the better streamers/youtubers know they are putting on a _show_. It may be unscripted, but that may make the job harder requiring a quicker wit.

> The only thing I can think of is more support might allow a streamer to > devote more of their time to streaming.

That's the point. If you like someone's work and want more, paying them so they can spend more time creating is a good idea.

(as others have said, some are also a kind of club/community manager where they also maintain other things such as a community game server or website/forum)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Discord will likely grow to the value of Twitch was at (when it was acquired by Amazon) in the next couple years, it's a really big space.

<comment><USER15> I feel this way too. I was amazed at how much better Discord is in comparison to Ventrilo and Mumble when I first used it.

<comment><USER16> I feel like Ventrillo and Teamspeak were marketing themselves to businesses and tried to cram in enterprise features instead of polishing their interface or smoothing out rough edges. Conversely discord markets to gamers and if you've ever talked to an indie dev you'll have had your ear chewed off on the value gamers put on "polish".

Regardless, props to discard. I've never used it but I downloaded it today due to this thread (which is ironic because Twitch purportedly bought curse to prevent that very thing!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Previous; announcement from Twitch: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300381)

</comment><comment><USER18> Was this basically an acquihire? No price disclosed. I would be very surprised if this was any kind of successful acquisition, given Curse has taken $60m in funding.

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems like yesterday when Twitch was on the verge of closing down. Is it profitable yet ?

</comment><comment><USER20> twitch web client sucks and breaks every time. discord > curse too. amazon is full of ego

</comment><comment><USER21> That doesn't sound terribly promising for Wikia / Fandom.

</comment><comment><USER22> spend the money while it lasts!</comment>


Show HN: Domino, a PaaS for data science - <AUTHOR> http://www.dominodatalab.com

<comment><USER2> Not, perhaps, a little concerned with the naming conflict with IBM (formerly Lotus) Domino? At version 9, it's not dead yet (despite rumours to the contrary going back to R4.5).

</comment><comment><USER3> I have used the Domino platform a number of times when I needed access to high-end hardware to build some large scale models (in R). They have cool technology and are pretty reasonably priced.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm interested in the "Version control for data" feature. How does that work? I have data that is still changing in both content and structure. As the test suite grows, it is becoming a burden to maintain every time there is a change to the data. It would be great to be able to write tests against snapshots of the database, and be able to rollback to a different point for each test seamlessly.

<comment><USER5> From my reading of the getting started guide, it looks like it treats your "working" directory as a git repository, with each run basically doing a commit & push.

This means that your data (in files) needs to be in the working directory, and is versioned along side your code. Sounds pretty cool, but I am not sure how it would scale for large / constantly changing data sets.

<comment><AUTHOR> siganakis's explanation is correct, with a minor caveat [0]. We do some clever things (diffing, compressing), but if large amounts of data are always changing, the network transfer will take time. We have folks comfortably using Domino with about 50GB of data in their project directories. And it's only the amount of data in the current revision -- not cumulative across all revisions -- that matters. Anyway, if you have a use case with more than ~50GB, let us know, we're eager to engineer a more advanced solution -- just haven't had the need yet ;)

If your code pulls data from a database (e.g., kelv's test cases), one option is to save the DB snapshot out to a file when the code runs. After we finish executing your code, we snapshot all the new/changed files in your working directory (we call those the "results" of the run). Using this approach, you'd have a record of the DB snapshot for each run of your tests. But, again... if your snapshot is more than 10s of GB, the network transfer time could get annoying.

[0] We treat the working directory as a git repo, but since git breaks down with large files, we only use it to track your directory structure; we store actual file contents elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the case study, [http://www.dominoup.com/buzz.html](http://www.dominoup.com/buzz.html), you have an orphaned sentence:

        Second, it centralizes the storage of project data, enabling.

And the next sentence should be And third, not And second:

        And second, Domino automatically

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> C, you need C. Otherwise it's just a toy.

<comment><AUTHOR> We let users run arbitrary shell scripts, so you can use that to run C code -- either by compiling binaries for x86-64 and including them in your project, or by running a shell script that first compiles your code, and then executes the resulting binaries. It hasn't been a common use case, but we definitely have some folks doing that.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the quick reply! Would you be willing to provide some more details about your service? Just so I understand: I can just upload my C code and you will run it...can you tell me how to do that? As in, prove that this is possible by at least mentioning this somewhere in the documentation? Or perhaps giving me a link to the appropriate reference material at dominoup.com? The website is very slick.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there. I've made a sample public project you can check out to see an example of running C code [0]. I just wrote a shell script that compiles my C code and then executes the resulting binary. Then I tell Domino to run my shell script. Voila. Let me know if you have any questions.

We allude to this in our FAQ ("What if I want to run C++ code...") but we'll update the docs to make the specific instructions more clear.

[0] [https://app.dominoup.com/nelprin_at_mac/c-example](https://app.dominoup.com/nelprin_at_mac/c-example)

<comment><USER7> c++ LOL! I love it. Thank you so much. I don't mean to hate on C++ too much.

much love!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Growth Hacker of the Century - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/andrew.rauh

<comment><USER2> He's hands down the best Growth Hacker I've ever met. He already has job offers from some of the most coveted tech companies, but I would encourage any startup to reach out to him if they want to increase their viral coefficient.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've heard great things about this kid. It you're a startup looking for growth, hire him.

</comment><comment><USER4> Straight boss. 10/10.</comment>


Reddit CEO says racism is permitted on the platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/8bb85p/reddits_2017_transparency_report_and_suspect/dx5fl90/ <comment><USER2> To clarify - he's putting the onus on individual subreddits to set policies regarding language.

Here's the full comment, in response to the question: "Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddits rules or not?"

> It's not. On Reddit, the way in which we think about speech is to separate > behavior from beliefs. This means on Reddit there will be people with > beliefs different from your own, sometimes extremely so. When users actions > conflict with our content policies, we take action.

> Our approach to governance is that communities can set appropriate standards > around language for themselves. Many communities have rules around speech > that are more restrictive than our own, and we fully support those rules.

</comment><comment><USER3> And there's the last straw. I've been a member of Reddit for around ten years. Today is my last day.

Racism is unnaceptable. Contrary to what their CEO says, there is no value in the conversation and this is not a complex topic.

Reddit has amassed a treasure trove of useful information over the years, so I can't avoid it entirely, but I will no longer participate. I'm done.</comment>


WeWork, the company that simulates startup life, is worth more than $20 bn - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/wework-tops-20-billion-valuation-2017-7 <comment><USER2> I am looking forward to the event in Tokyo ([https://hellotokyo.splashthat.com/](https://hellotokyo.splashthat.com/)) related to this news. Rumor is that there may be a story saying it will open in Japan.

Sometimes I use this working space for events to be done at the company, but I am bothered by choosing the venue.

Criteria for selecting a venue Capacity: Approx 100 people Venue: where you can work in an atmosphere different from the office and where engineer events (presentation, code battle, etc ..) are possible

Since the atmosphere and condition of the venue of WEWORK is very interesting, does anyone who used WEWORK experience the above conditions?</comment>


How to kill zombie instances and lower your AWS bill - <AUTHOR> http://blog.launchdarkly.com/zombies-eating-your-aws-bill/ <comment><USER2> Having instances that are running wrong version of code is a symptom of brittle administration process. You should not put a bandaid, but develop a process that can't go awry (which probably means you need a seasoned sysadmin to help you with that).

</comment><comment><USER3> Great idea!</comment>


FBI Releases Document Labeling Photographers as Potential Terrorists - <AUTHOR> http://www.photographyisnotacrime.com/homeland-security-and-fbi-release-document-once-again-labeling-photographers-as-potential-terrorists/

<comment><USER2> Redditworthy. (1) No it doesn't; it says terrorists use photography, not that all photographers are terrorists. The basic logical error here is obvious. (2) Photography is one of a whole bunch of "suspicious activity" markers the FBI is publishing, including "materials acquisition" and "flying small aircraft around cities". (3) The FBI alert is factually accurate (if useless): terrorism operations (and criminal efforts of all sorts) do in fact involve detailed photographic documentation of targets.

I hope nobody on HN disputes the fact that local law enforcement and security personnel have a problem jumping the gun and denying people their rights to document public spaces photographically. But this memo wasn't an effort by the FBI to "label photographers as terrorists". This post sucks oxygen out of the room, not to mention the fact that it's not germane to HN at all, and I've flagged it.

<comment><USER3> > The basic logical error here is obvious

It's too bad that having at least a qualitative understanding of Bayes' Theorem and Bayesian inference is not a requirement for graduation from high school. That would make it a lot easier for the general public to spot those logical errors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is from a site with a clear agenda rooted in identity politics. I would not treat it as unbiased.

Personally, I think that photography is essentially surveillance, which should be considered a potential threat. In this respect the report is accurate. The key word is potential. The FBI needs to catalog all potential threats, but not all of them are equal. As in most all of life, discretion is needed to properly weigh the threat of an activity in any particular situation.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I wonder what this tells us about people who are dreaming of 24/7 _video_ surveillance of the whole planet.. ? I mean, if a photo is worth a thousand words, then surely hi-resolution video is worth a lot more. So you see...</comment>


In 1964 a Band of Surfer Dudes Pulled Off New York's Biggest Jewel Heist - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/nyregion/natural-history-museum-jewelry-heist.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if W. Peter Iliff, the screenplay writer for Point Break, was aware of and inspired by this 1964 surfer-led heist.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Roland_Murphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Roland_Murphy) they were led by "Murph the Surf"

<comment><USER4> So Murph the surf led to point break which led to fast and the furious franchise the total gross revenue of which dwarfs the original crimes

<comment><USER5> The Fast and Furious was not inspired by Point Break.

It was inspired by the director (Rob Cohen) having watched illegal street races in Los Angeles.

<comment><USER6> Come on, Fast is almost a scene for scene remake of Point Break.

<comment><USER5> It is not. Both Point Break and Fast are simply following the standard cop infiltrates crime organization script.

Unless you're now also claiming that The Departed is just a remake of Point Break?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191019121531/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191019121531/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/nyregion/natural- history-museum-jewelry-heist.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Title should probably mention this was in 1964 unless I'm misreading the article.

</comment><comment><USER9> paywall...

<comment><USER4> Click the "web" link above.</comment></comment>