Reddit Chief Engineer Quits After Less Than Two Months on the Job - <AUTHOR> https://recode.net/2015/07/13/reddit-chief-engineer-bethanye-blount-quits-after-less-than-two-months-on-the-job/ <comment><USER2> A recurring, and not-commented-on theme in each of these communications is that the board wants more growth. Reddit closed a $50MM round in fall of 2014, and has never had a strong monetization story.

If the investors came in expecting major growth (since this is not a business with a great monetization story) it's not surprising that there's pressure and turnover right now, almost a year later. And, it may well be that what's needed is a CEO with enough credibility to tell the board "you won't get that growth yet, we have some work to do."

Saying that to the board is obviously going to be hard to do for Ellen, or anyone in Ellen's shoes if they brought her in to deliver growth, and she promised to deliver that growth.

So, lots of drama, yadda yadda, but I would bet 100:1 that drama has, at it's fundamental source, intense pressure from the board, and I would also bet you that this kind of pressure is new for reddit as a company.

To me, that's likely at least some of the context for the rumors that Ohanian intervened directly to get rid of Victoria, the former AMA lead at Reddit. AMAs are one of Reddit's most visible branding / marketing measures. If you need to deliver growth, and aren't seeing it, it is completely natural to be looking at your premier product lines and trying to get them to do more. And, I would be surprised if this kind of thinking weren't informing senior management as they're struggling to deliver on these promises.

<comment><USER3> From the outside it looked more like Ellen was focused on improving the monetization prospects rather than focusing on growth. In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers.

Firing Victoria fit the same motive -- monetize the most popular product (AMAs). Reddit leadership wanted to explore ways to monetize that feature, and for some undisclosed reason Victoria didn't fit with that plan.

The return of Huffman signals a shift back to the Cult of Growth, in the hopes that investors won't worry as much about monetization so long as the site is growing. One thing the board won't settle for is _neither_ growth nor profitability.

<comment><USER4> >In particular, placing limits on abusive content and users would make the site more attractive to advertisers.

I see no problem with this. I purposely avoid recommending or even mentioning reddit to the people in my life because of all the horrible content on the site. I won't promote these subs, but there are many, many popular racist subs and subs that promote violence against women and, hell, one that is dedicated to showing photos of dead women who were attractive in life. There's a creeper sub that shows candid photos of women on the street that pathetically skirts the rules by pretending its about "fashion."

My god, reddit is a mess. I can't ever imagine recommending advertising there. I can imagine videos games, e-cigs, energy drinks, etc advertising there as these things already have a lousy reputation, but reddit is not on the path of being this broad forum with lots of members with disposable income. Growth isn't impressive when its just more of the same, largely unprofitable, "manboy" demographic.

This is why USENET lasted so long and was so prolific amongst techies. It never had to make a profit. You could trivially start new "communities", etc. Reddit is pretty much USENET as web, but the problem is, someone has to pay for all those servers and staff. No one is donating or proving access as part of your shell account like they did back in the USENET days. I find it questionable that such forums would ever be profitable. I suspect the next gen reddit will be something that has more in common with torrent-like tech than old school client-server web tech.

<comment><USER5> > I can imagine videos games, e-cigs, energy drinks, etc advertising there as > these things already have a lousy reputation

Holy hell, you need to walk outside your bubble a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To repost my comment from a previous submission:

There's been a lot of meta discussion how Yishan Wong, Alexis Ohanian, and Ellen Pao have been talking trash to each other about Reddit and seemingly ignoring every NDA in the book.

The comments made in the linked interview trashing a former employer seem to perpetuate this culture. It's _weird_. (although if you're planning on starting your own startup after a bad job, burning bridges isn't as drastic)

<comment><USER7> The whole recent controversy has been strange in general. There's this incredibly pervasive sense that the management in general is completely disconnected from the community, only stepping down from on high to dish out shadowbans.

I don't know what to think honestly, but it seems like the reddit administration is walking close to the cliff currently. Maybe the newOld ceo can turn that around.

<comment><USER8> HannibalLecter your comment is dead

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        "The company is growing, and we have the opportunity to
        improve in many areas — including the number of women in leadership
        positions. I am confident in our ability to recruit women at the executive
        level, as we have made a point to do so at Hipmunk, where more than half of
        the executives are women."

I don't know about anyone else, but comments like that make a company less desirable as a place to work because factors like skill, talent, productivity and effectiveness become de-emphasized in recruiting and promotion relative to issues surrounding identity politics.

I don't see how permitting (or worse yet fostering) an environment where office politics or identity politics can flourish is a good thing. I am seeing identity politics issues creeping into decision making more and more often and find it positively toxic.

When you "make a point" to recruit/promote one group over any other on the basis of a demographic box they fit into, you are implicitly discriminating against people who don't fit into that box. Furthermore, when "making a point" goes so far that you've exceeded the 50% mark ("more than half are [insert identifier for someone that belongs to a particular group]") then that certainly qualifies as active discrimination.

I'm 100% in favor of equal opportunity, but ham-fisted hypocritical approaches like this are as bad as what they are trying to fix. Politicking in any form is toxic.

If someone created a petition to now remove Steve Huffman, I'd sign it.

I highly recommend this recent peer-reviewed academic study demonstrating discrimination in Academia:

[http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract)

<comment><USER10> There are so many subtle factors working against non-white-men that it's impossible to be totally aware of them all. Making a point of correcting (even if it's somewhat of an over-correction) is not a perfect solution but realistically its better than pretending there isn't an issue, or saying your for equality as if that's all it takes.

You'd vote to remove Steve because he said _one_ are to _improve_ is in having more women (i.e. more diversitiy of opinion and experience) in leadership positions?

<comment><USER9> It's not longer more. His "making a point" has already exceeded 50% by his own admission. That's over-correction and he doesn't see a problem in that?

I'm in favor of people who try to achieve equality. When you adopt a policy that results in over-correction and don't steer back to a position of equality, then the side effects are indistinguishable from the disease it was meant to cure.

<comment><USER10> Are the effects really indistinguishable? Ok maybe you have a slightly smaller chance of getting a job at Reddit. At least you can take comfort in the knowledge that in almost any conceivable institution or situation you're doing doing pretty well.

I'm assuming your a white man (like myself) but please correct me if I'm wrong. Point is: we've had a good run. If a few extra women get hired at Reddit, we're still doing pretty good in the balance.

<comment><USER9> I'm mostly white and adopt a cisgender disposition, but identify as agender.

If you think this is a change in attitudes that is isolated to just reddit and hipmunk then you haven't been paying attention.

There is someone with whom I work with or worked that often states/stated how much she hates|dislikes white guys|males|bros|dudes. Yes, those exact words or combination thereof. This happens/happened at least once a week if not more often. It is/was not even subtle or discrete. Sometimes these statements would be uttered aggressively in meetings with a bunch of people present. The culture in SV is such that everyone pretty much tolerates/accepts these statements. If the racial adjective where switched with any other to describe a different race and/or the gendered plural noun were switched for one that described women or anyone else on the gender spectrum, that person would already be talking to HR if not out the door already. Furthermore, this person is/was involved in hiring, which means it's likely gender is a consideration in hire / no hire decisions made. If this isn't toxic, then I don't know what qualifies as toxic.

Another example of the toxicity of this was when I saw Rena Kopelman (of the Kopelman Foundation) giving a talk about how to increase diversity and opportunity for under-privileged groups. I was totally on board with a lot of the talk until she start railing against efforts to making it easier for talented individuals with the right skills to emigrate to the US in search of better opportunities in the US technology industry. I don't see how an anti- immigration position does anything but further reinforce barriers that discriminate against those that didn't have the privilege of being born in the right country.

In terms of privileges, my gender and race have been very very minor advantages. By far the number one privilege I enjoy is having had the opportunity to become a native English speaker despite the fact that English was not my first language. I moved to the states when I was four years old speaking another language, but I moved here early enough that no one can tell I'm not American. Speaking English and not having and accent is many times more advantageous than my gender. After that the privilege of having moved to and grown up in the US comes next (growing up in Western Europe would have also been advantageous, but not nearly as much as growing up in the US for the career I have). Next up comes growing up relatively affluent. Far behind those three would be being mixed race, but mostly caucasian (I got enough Anglo- Saxon genes to dominate the South American genes). Well behind my racial makeup is my gender. I actually can't think of a situation where it was a factor in why I have the jobs I had. In my current job, I was referred to the recruiting department by a well known open source developer who works at the company. I got to know him and earned the recommendation by contributing to open source projects of his under a pseudonym.

If you are a US citizen (or Australian citizen because of the E-3 visa) and speak English natively, you are already far more privileged than most of the white males in the world in terms of getting a job in Silicon Valley.

Like I said in my other comment, my position here isn't about me or any privileges I personally benefit from, but about the environment that is being fostered that my children will inherit once I decide to have a family. If I were about 50-55 years old today, that could be my daughter that gets a position in academia due to her gender or it could be my son that is turned down for position in Academia due to his gender. My position isn't about "us having a good run" and trying to maintain that for my gender. I agree with the goals, but oppose the means being used to achieve it.

If you want to see other first hand examples of this toxicity in action, just go look up some op-ed pieces from The Advocate discussing the discourse around "white male privilege" from the perspective of a gay or bisexual white male. It's entirely possible to be a white male and know what it is like to be discriminated against. If you happen to experience discrimination for other reasons besides your race and gender, you become aware of how the current attitudes of trying to solve discrimination with discrimination is toxic and counter productive as it breeds resentment and opposition from those who would otherwise be allies.

[http://www.advocate.com/politics/commentary/2011/01/20/im- wh...](http://www.advocate.com/politics/commentary/2011/01/20/im-white- cisgender-gay-man)

[http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/12/08/op-ed- privileg...](http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/12/08/op-ed-privilege- and-advocacy)

[http://www.advocate.com/commentary/tyler- curry/2014/04/25/op...](http://www.advocate.com/commentary/tyler- curry/2014/04/25/op-ed-grappling-what-people-see-my-privilege)

I'm an ally of equality, but I am not an ally of those that adopt tactics to achieve equality like those being promoted by Steve Huffman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I highly doubt that Reddit leadership is/will be responsible for their massive rise or fall in popularity. The people have coalesced around this platform in such numbers that as long as the most basic needs are met for the community to thrive, they will continue to thrive. The few who leave because of this executive turmoil or changes in moderation have already been supplanted by new users who enjoy the system as it is today.

<comment><USER12> People thought the same about Digg.

That said, I do agree that it will take more than just community / company politics to have a big impact, but if Reddit is pushing for growth and make enough missteps in the actual functionality of the site, that combined with the already unhappy userbase could spell trouble in my eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So features were promised that she can't deliver on schedule. Was engineering not consulted before publicly committing to features? If so I'd probably quit too.

Just before her departure Pao set up a process to figure out with the mods what features to build.[1] Did something go terribly wrong with that process? Was engineering approval not required?

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...](https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/)

</comment><comment><USER14> The way she describes it, it was a sensible choice. Various things are being promised that she, as Chief Engineer, does not think will happen. Given what happened with Ellen Pao it's not unreasonable for her to assume that responsibility for those failures could easily be put on her when the inevitable happens.

<comment><USER15> What's the point of being a Chief Engineer if you can't even get some software (the mod tools) written? That seems like an awfully low bar for someone in that position, and to throw in the towel after she barely started seems to speak more to her character than any problems with Reddit.

I mean... you hire someone for a top technical position and they quit when the first bump comes along? That's ridiculous.

<comment><USER2> I would guess it's more like "I will be building out the product we needed all along, but now with intense board scrutiny, half the budget I wanted, a quarter the timeline we need, and a new CEO (who I may not like). I'm rich enough that I don't have to put up with this shit. See you guys."

<comment><USER16> > and a new CEO (who I may not like)

Spez isn't just a "New CEO" he's the original programmer, CEO and co-founder of Reddit. He understands the community more than anyone could fathom someone could. Of all choices I think he's the best choice.

He's focusing on bringing better mod tools, so being the technical lead, I'd be excited for these bumps coming up, not running away with my tail between my legs.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, if I were Chief Engineer the idea of the original programmer becoming CEO would be a potential nightmare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 3 female employees gone from the Reddit team in such a short time. This could create the probably false perception that Reddit seems like a hostile working environment for women. I wonder what they'll do to address this probably false perception.

<comment><USER18> Pao is the only one of the three who left for any reason that _might_ be gender-related, though.

And, yeah, the harassment of Pao was very misogynistic -- and racist to boot (people were calling her a "ching chong cunt") -- but there's nothing to indicate that the other two had any problems due to their gender.

<comment><USER19> I like the idea that the CEO can resign in a hailstorm of racist and misogynist vitriol but that subsequent departures won't have anything to do with gender.

<comment><USER20> It's kind of important to realize that those same users were angry at her for getting rid of a different woman. That was the trigger, being upset about a _well-liked_ woman being fired with no warning.

That kind of destroys your premise, IMO.

The vitriol is terrible, but that's more a function of people being angry on the anonymous internet and saying whatever inflammatory things they can come up with to express that.

<comment><USER19> This would be clever had Pao been the person who fired Taylor. Wait, no it wouldn't. But either way, _Pao 's boss_ fired Taylor.

<comment><USER21> The only person claiming Alexis was responsible for firing Victoria was Yishan who hasn't worked there for 8 months and he based that on the fact that Alexis is Ellen's boss so he's ultimately responsible. Former employee kickme44 pointed out that Alexis actually reported to Ellen, despite his role, and Yishan then back peddles on his claims somewhat.

The fact of the matter is that we just don't know how or why Victoria was fired and we will likely never know. Everything so far is just speculation.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/3d2hv3/kn0thing_says_he_was_responsible_for_the_change/ct1fsoi?context=3)

<comment><USER19> No. Long before Yishan's post, Ohanian posted on Reddit saying he both owned the reorg of AMAs _and_ flubbed the transition with Victoria Taylor. It's not speculation. Consider also that by Ohanian's own direct words, the chairman of Reddit had an operational role over one of the most visible parts of the site. Pao was in a situation that would have been difficult to manage even if things had been going smoothly.

<comment><USER21> Have a link handy? I can't find it. My memory was he's said a lot of things like "we messed up" and "we could have handled it better". Nothing that says he personally is responsible.

<comment><USER19> I'm looking at the text I was talking about right now. You can find it, or take my word that I'm not making it up, but if you're going to debate this particular issue with me, I'm going to ask you to do your own homework. :)

<comment><USER21> You made the claim. I provided a link with my own claim because it's the polite thing to do and furthers the conversation.

<comment><USER19> It's just a pattern (not with you, but with message board arguments):

1\. Person X stridently argues a position contradicted directly by the record, which they haven't taken the time to read.

2\. Person Y rebuts X.

3\. X demands a source from Y.

4\. Y sources their rebuttal.

5\. X recapitulates argument based on dubious, nitpicky reading of source, pretending they'd known the source was flawed all along.

The problem isn't that providing sources makes it harder to win arguments with lazy people, it's that it tends to introduce a _second argument_ , over the interpretation of the source, as a smokescreen for instability of the first argument. It gets tedious.

I'm not saying that's what you did, just that I've been conditioned by message board nerdery to expect that to happen.

In this case, you can if you'd like just take my word for it that Ohanian took responsibility both for the reorg of AMAs and for the handling of the Taylor transition, not in a tea-leaf-reading way, but directly and overtly, prior to Yishan Wong's post, and in a public Reddit comment.

<comment><USER21> One of the joys of the web is being able to easily cite and read sources (it was the whole point of hypertext). Sure, we could all just discuss and debate by shooting from the hip with our opinions and recollections like we are at a wine-fueled dinner party but that's not why I come to Hacker News.

I wasn't trying to win or even have an argument with you. I was just trying to better my own understanding of the situation. I hadn't seen Alexis write that and couldn't find it despite spending way more time than I should be reading about reddit drama.

I don't know who you are or why I should take your word for it. I don't know why you'd expect me to take your word for it. That's something you do for people you know in person and trust, not strangers on the internet. That'd be a terrifying prospect if that's how we all did things online.

I, too, have noticed a pattern:

1\. Person A writes something about a topic.

2\. Person B writes about how bad something is which is related but orthogonal to the actual topic.

3\. Persons C...Y have a heated debate of the orthogonal topic.

4\. Person Z writes thoughtful comments about the topic but nobody reads it because the meta debate has drown out the actual topic.

A good name for it might be The Hacker News Comments Pattern. I'm not saying that's what you were doing.

<comment><USER19> I'm not following. What's the orthogonal (B) point?

(I _seriously_ wasn't saying you were trying to bait me into giving you more ammunition for a stupid argument, but I'm pretty sure you really are implying that I introduced a bogus topic.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a very interesting departure.

I understand that in the media, especially with the litigation around Pao and the scarcity of women in leadership and technical positions in high tech, that this would take over much of the discussion. Bethanye also mentioned a "glass cliff", so it's reasonable that this would be a big part of the discussion.

I am very interested in Bethanye's business-related decisions to leave as well, though. I'm nowhere near her level in any corporate hierarchy, but I am very frustrated with how difficult it often is for engineers, even senior or director (or "chief engineer") level tech workers to operate with the level of autonomy and decision authority that is often explicitly promised.

Maybe when the dust settles, if people are still interested, a journalist will have the opportunity to talk with Ms Blount about this. As a dweller on the lower levels of the hierarchy, although with "senior" in my title and all kinds of autonomy spelled out, I can see now that aggressively asserting this kind of autonomy is essential to a strong career, and you need to be prepared to 1) fight it up the chain, and 2) walk away, if other wings of the business try to cram you in a box and tell you that your job is purely to execute a technical vision that may collapse, and the upper level decision makers don't have your back.

Unfortunately, low on the ladder often means fewer options, which makes it harder to fight this fight. Higher usually means better severance, stronger networks, a better chance of a good placement in the next gig.

Anyway, as an engineer, this is the conversation I'd really like to have… though again, I understand that the issue of women in technical and managerial positions is also very important (and isn't necessarily unrelated, either).

</comment><comment><USER23> _Blount also said she believed Pao's exit was an indirect consequence of gender discrimination_

Sounds like she backed the wrong horse.

</comment><comment><USER24> Apparently reddit has 71 employees. I would really like to know why reddit needs that many employees. It looks to me like an operation of maybe 20 people at most. That includes devops, engineering, social stuff and ads.

<comment><USER21> Alexa ranks reddit at 24. The other user content focused stuff high on the list are:

2\. Facebook (10,082 employees)

3\. YouTube (a lot of employees)

6\. Wikipedia (~250 employees)

8\. Twitter (3,900 employees)

13\. LinkedIn (7,600 employees)

15\. Sina Weibo (unknown employees)

24\. reddit (71 employees)

30\. Tumblr (306 employees)

32\. Imgur (<50 employees)

Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too).

<comment><USER24> _Given this, I think it 's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too)._

In that context, I agree it's impressive. I still don't understand why would one need so many people considering there's next to none (except AMA, and that's gone) interaction with users on site. Code definitely doesn't need that many people (I know this firsthand, because it took me ~two months (less) to make a complete clone from scratch with all of the functionality of reddit for internal use and I'm not much of a coder anymore). Devops might be hairy, I admit that - but even with shifts and redundancy... I've seen sites with much more monetization in ads run on 10 sales people or less. So genuine question is still here, what do these people actually do?

I understand facebook is all over the place and is a lot more than meets the eye on their site, so I can understand their headcount. I can see that with youtube as well, especially if they curate some of the content. Reddit is, well, reddit - next to no interaction with userbase, third party ios app they bought (or something), no android app, codebase already built and not all that hard to build anyways, they did build reddit gold (how much of an effort is that anyways)... and we're left with devops. I'm sure most of those 71 people aren't even technical to begin with and they struggle with ads. I genuinely do not understand need for that many people on board considering the impression of what they do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From what I've seen, being a CEO, CTO, etc is almost inherently a glass cliff. You either keep things running smoothly or you will get let go.

Besides, Ellen wasn't even fired. She resigned no?

<comment><USER26> Ellen Pao resigned under intense pressure from the site's users. There was a petition with 250,000 signatures calling for her resignation, and a board which (according to media reports) was essentially letting her take the blame for unpopular decisions she had not made.

Her position was therefore untenable, even ignoring the vile racism and misogyny directed her way by the worst of the reddit community.

<comment><USER27> The change.org petition got to 213,446 supporters when it was stopped shortly after her departure. Not need to exaggerate the facts to express an opinion.</comment></comment></comment>


George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940) - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzmBhYakPbYtT3k5cDd4Sm1SRUE/edit <comment><USER2> In 1937, Pope Pius XI published a kind of "review" of the ideas in Mein Kampf and the actions of the Nazi Party. _Mit Brennender Sorge_ ("With Burning Anxiety") remains the only papal encyclical ever principally published in a language other than Latin. That is, the official edition was published in German and other translations were derived from the German rather than a Latin original. Apparently, the Pope's harsh critique enraged Hitler.

[http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/docume...](http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p- xi_enc_14031937_mit-brennender-sorge_en.html)

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

<comment><USER3> "Fascism" and "Catholic right-wing" were synonymous at the time. Hitler had signed a treaty with the Holy See to basically allow them to control schools in Germany in exchange for a thumbs up for the regime, and this meant the Vatican was backtracking. Hitler thought they were allies; and the Vatican was important for Nazi power, so yeah, that move pissed him off.

<comment><USER4> Given that they clearly did not have the church on their side, isn't that a massive conflict ?

Also the wikipedia page states that because of the German (pre-nazi) agreement with the vatican that was seen as lending legitimacy to the nazi government, this rebuke by the pope was seen as a great step forward for German catholics, lending legitimacy to an already existing opposition amonst catholics which was then publicly and violently suppressed ...

I'd be interested in hearing more.

<comment><USER3> The timespan between the original Reichskonkordat and this letter was six years. It appeared the Nazi regime did not respect the Vatican, and it became apparent soon that their agreement wasn't going to be upheld as expected by the Nazis. In addition, the differences between Nazism and contemporary fascism (which the Church _was_ mostly supportive of) became more apparent over time and drew some criticism as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From a timing perspective, this was published in March, 1940. Some other noteworthy events with their dates:

* Germany invades Poland (September, 1939)

* Britain, France, Canada, Australia and New Zealand declare war on Germany (September, 1939)

* Soviets invade Poland, which is later split (October, 1939)

* Nazis begin euthanasia of ill and disabled in Germany (October, 1939)

* Soviets attack Finland (November, 1939)

So by the time Orwell published his review, it was clear Germany and the Soviets were mobilizing for war, but it was entirely unclear what would happen next.

In the next six months, Germany would invade Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands while beginning their blitz on Great Britain. The Soviets would take Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Mussolini would meet Hitler in Munich, declare war on France and Britain and Italian forces would take Greece and enter Egypt. The Tripartite Pact would be signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan to formalize their alliance.

It's amazing to me how fast things moved during that time.

<comment><USER6> It's amazing to me that, in all likelihood, had Hitler decided to call it quits earlier, the world would have sat back and allowed him to keep some of his conquests (eg Denmark, Norway or Belgium). Today it would be unthinkable to allow a large nation to invade Belgium with no counter international military response.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps not Belgium, but consider eastern Ukraine.

<comment><USER8> OK so any large nation that isn't Russia, China, Great Britain or the United States.

<comment><USER9> Just FYI Germany was providing training and equipment to the Chinese nationalists to fight at first against regional warlords and then the Japanese until 1941 when the tripartite pact was signed. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino- German_cooperation_until_1...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino- German_cooperation_until_1941)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With what we know today we could see Orwell picture of Germany was incomplete.

People did not want struggling at the time. After the Great depression created by the banks bubble and having everything they could produce taken by countries like France as payment for WWI GERMANS WERE ALREADY STRUGGLING.

Germans were dying in winter because the coal was sent to France as payment. And this is not like winter in Morocco. In Germany you have no energy in winter, with 30 Celsius degrees under zero you die.

Not only they were struggling, but having all what they could make confiscated to pay debts created a very dangerous situation, there was NO HOPE.

They had become slaves. Romans already measured that a slave worked way less than half what a free man did.

So Hitler brought hope. He stopped paying the debt(default), the military occupied the coal areas back for Germany and brought hope.

Is not that he promised suffering, but that he promised that suffering will end.

He also made suffering more tolerable making it social. Hitler created social programs for workers that let them travel and meet other people.

It is probably hard to understand for Westerns, but there are millions of people in Africa or India that are happier than people from the West, even while being very poor, because money is not everything, there are friends, for example, that people from Africa have more than isolated westerns.

Today the world is in Great Depression number II. Countries are over indebted, and we have the same problem they had: economies had stop to a halt and will be there until bad debts are cleaned, and defaults are issued.

<comment><USER11> I imagine Orwell knew much of that stuff which was to a large extent predicted as inevitable by Keynes both in his 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace and before. It often surprises me how much suffering could be avoided if people just understood Keynes stuff and used it. WW2 and much of the recent depression could probably be avoided and with pretty much no downside. It's kind of mass unnecessary suffering through wilful ignorance or something like that - dunno. I guess some of the ideas are hard to understand and most people couldn't explain the concept of insufficient aggregate demand leading to lower jobs and investment and hence lower demand still in a feedback loop unless it gets broken some how. But it's not that hard I would like to think. Though I have not heard that concept repeated and dealt with by many of our current leaders. Maybe human brains are not built to grok that stuff even though you can pretty much put it on one sentence?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This sent chills down my spine:

"He [Hitler] had crushed the German labor movement and for that the property- owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything. Both left and right concurred ... that National Socialism was merely a version of Conservatism.

Plus ca change...

<comment><USER13> ... plus c'est la même chose.

The funny thing is that many conservatives think National Socialism was "socialism", when in fact it was just their very own hard right conservatism. Tea Party and Republican candidates are where the Hitlers of the future will probably arise from.

> _Down with immigration! Up with capital! Be a real American!_

Welcome to the past.

Edit: I see the fascists have discovered my comment. Down vote away. It doesn't change history.

<comment><USER14> I'm continually astonished at the ultraconservative meme that Hitler was left- wing (which seems to originate with a book called 'Liberal Fascism' by Jonah Goldberg, although it has doubtless been floating around for much longer). Point out that one of the very first things that Hitler did on attaining power was have all the trade unionists arrested, and you might as well be talking to the air.

<comment><USER15> It's almost as though "left" and "right" are meaningless terms that are just use to split the people into two camps for battle against each other.

<comment><USER14> I think they are good signifiers for significantly different economic/political beliefs. However, fanatacism in politics ends up looking pretty similar regardless of starting point.

<comment><USER16> I think that they are actively hurtful, they shut down rational thinking. Ideas that actually make sense tend not to cluster well along left/right axis, but are scattered all over the spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you guys know a lot about the period, I just transcribed it on Genius and I'd appreciate some help annotating it: [http://history.genius.com/George- orwell-review-of-mein-kampf...](http://history.genius.com/George-orwell- review-of-mein-kampf-annotated)

(full disclosure I work at Genius.)

<comment><USER18> Unrelated to the matter but since you work at genius, can you talk to the geniuses (sic) who thought that hijacking text highlight was a good idea? A lot of us speed readers use text highlight to read along. It is easier on the eyes and the brain.

So please don't hijack it.

<comment><USER17> For technical reasons: we want to allow users to annotate arbitrary segments of text, so what better (or other) way is there than adding an annotate button to highlighted text?

For philosophical reasons: genius is about annotating text, and as a result, about close reading. We'd rather optimize for a close read than a speed read.

<comment><USER18> The annotate button covers the highlighted text. And I don't just highlight text when I speed read, I do it _all the time_ because it is easier on the eyes - it is just a habit common to speed readers as that's where most people pick it up.

Moreover you actually break selection pretty badly along with it. There are other ways to annotate than to pop crap up every time a user highlights text.

I'm in no mood of solving UX problems for a website that has gotten me so disgusted within seconds of opening it. And no, this is not an exaggeration. Imagine if, while reading the newspaper, every few seconds some _really annoying guy_ moved it out of the way and yelled "DID YOU SEE THE SPORTS SECTION?" or similar crap you don't care about. This is the most direct analogy I can find to explain the situation to someone who doesn't highlight- read.

<comment><USER19> So perhaps the more specific ask here is "don't have your pop-up on highlighted text cover other text."

Would this bother you as much if the "Annotate" pop-up was off in the margin?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a great reminder that at one time Hitler was not the caricature of pure evil that he is now. He was real and nobody knew what the future held. Amazing snapshot into that time.

<comment><USER21> Bearing in mind that this "caricature of pure evil" image is basically result of propaganda of the winning side of WW2 it's only natural that it wasn't the case before he lost his war. Far more interesting about this article is the fact _how much it was known_ about what the future held. Sure, Orwell might be somewhat above average in questions of history and politics, but still I'd say it is pretty surprising that he is giving attention precisely that parts of Mein Kampf and Hitler personality which are interesting now, 70 years after. Especially that part about Hitler seeing himself as "Christ crucified". "Hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds". Indeed, wasn't it pretty clear back then, that whatever war he started — he couldn't win? What must had happened in order to make victory possible? Yet his popularity was amazing, and Orwell describes perfectly _why_. I'm not sure I understood the reason so well before I read this.

<comment><USER22> > "Bearing in mind that this "caricature of pure evil" image is basically > result of propaganda of the winning side of WW2"

I'm not sure that any propaganda is necessary to convince 99.9% of people that the instigator of the largest genocide in human history is, in fact, a "caricature of pure evil."

<comment><USER23> Stalin's genocide was larger.

<comment><USER24> >Stalin's genocide was larger.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll) Mao Zedong is believed to be responsible for 34,300,000–63,784,000 deaths and Joseph Stalin for 23,000,000–60,000,000.

<comment><USER23> Yea, Mao Ze Dong wasn't the same thing though. It's estimated as many as 60 million people died in China from hunger. Many others died from the civil war (Cultural Revolution). There may have been some genocide but the term doesn't apply as well as in Germany/Russia.

<comment><USER25> Yes but people were dying from hunger as a direct result of the policies that Mao implemented [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) He is largely responsible for these deaths even if he didn't personally exterminate them.

<comment><USER26> But presumably there was a different intent behind Mao's actions. It seems to me that the goal of central planning was prosperity, not death.

<comment><USER27> Yes, true, but in politics the outcome is all that matters, not the intent. As has often been said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

<comment><USER28> So are you saying that when climate change happens, if it's as bad as many scientists fear, then modern US conservatives will take up the mantle of "largest genocide in history"?

<comment><USER27> I doubt they'll volunteer for that label. Maybe they'll be viewed as the Catholic Church is now viewed with respect to the trial of Galileo in 1633.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone here actually read Mein Kampf? Doing so is probably banned in Germany and I am not sure what there is other than kiddie porn or some al- qaeda training manual that you totally would not want in your browsing history. There could come a time when no living person has read Mein Kampf and nobody would know first hand why it is wrong.

<comment><USER30> Yes, I have (yay protection of free speech!) and it is dreadfully boring.

It is amazing though how it pretty much spells out exactly what he would end up doing once he took power, in all the horrid detail, and yet some politicians of the time believed that simple appeasement would work...

As someone else here said, the lesson is that crazy people sometimes mean what they say, even when it sounds totally crazy.

<comment><USER4> But that is true of all such literature. The little Red Book, The Communist manifesto, Mein Kampf, the Quran, all of these books are boring to the point that despite their historical influence, and the massacres ascribed to them, it is a real struggle to get through them.

Well, at least most of them are really short.

<comment><USER31> The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet and it contains a lot of great quotable passages. The Little Red Book contains contains quotes and proverbs from Mao. The Quran.. you can hardly say that it is boring. Your book comparison is just wrong. If you want to compare Mein Kampf to something, then Josef Stalin wrotes some tomes which are dreadful.

<comment><USER4> Mein campf is ... well, it's rambling. Think one of those internet "we didn't land on the moon, climate is bad, boo immigrants" texts rambling. The quran is rambling too, but of a different kind. "you must do X, you can't do Y, he must do Z, if you do A, B and C you'll be rewarded". It'd be fine, but it's 50 freaking pages of that. Why are you claiming "boring" is an unfair assessment of this ?

I'm unsure what the definition of pamphlet is, but the communist manifesto definitely exceeds what I'd consider length limits for pamphlets.

<comment><USER31> Trying to make some kind of comparison between Mein Kampf and the Quran (and by extension, the Torah and the Bible since they contain much the same content) is beyond idiotic. Have you really read either of the Quran and/or Mein Kampf?

The definition of a pamphlet is an unbound booklet, which is how the Manifesto was originally printed. It's length was 23 pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I wonder if hitler is studied in political sciences.

Especially his speeches, rhetorics and strategies, and why they worked out how they did.

I hate to feel that hitler is somehow still a little controversial today. I don't really want to watch his speeches or read what he was saying because it's a little depressing and painful to think about, but understanding how he politically convinced people, and the underlying causes.

We're safe from that today, but I'd still like to understand how we protected ourselves from that happening again.

<comment><USER33> Hitler used very simple formula that had been often repeated: You have a nation of people defeated and stripped of wealth and pride. A leader comes up with a extremely strongly held view that these people are the greatest thing on the Earth and they will rise from the ashes. He quickly gains followers, boldly breaks rules and obtains initial victories that fuels his next moves in self-feeding way.

Mein Kampf actually does not have any plans or even hints for the atrocities that Hitler's regime performed later on. There are few words of Hitler's dislike for jews here and there where he basically complains that they are not as sophisticated as Germans, they smell, have unusual rituals, they look different etc. He then complains about they controlling major outlets of newspapers and art. Finally he discloses his real reason for dislike: He believed that jews supported socialist party that Hitler hated truly bottom of his heart, perhelps far more than jews.

One should not underestimate frustration of German people in those days. After WW-I, the peace treaty essentially put Germany in the dumpter. They can't have their army, Austria was broken apart, country needed to pay huge sums as part of the treaty and entire nation was under extreme financial depression. It was difficult to get a loaf of bread during that time for an average person. German people though their nation was sold off to winners of World War by their monarch. They thought they had been forever relegated as defeated people from who winners of the war stole everything. This was quite opposite to their belief of Germany as the greatest nation before the WW-I started.

Hitler promised to make bold moves including breaking the post WW-I treaty and payments all together. He promised to throw away monarch and socialist party which were favoring the status-quo. It was little surprise that he won hands down in elections.

The interesting part of Mein Kamf is that Hitler was rather regular guy without any political connections and even desires during the early years. He had bad experiences with members of socialist party which combined with his belief that nation was being sold by them and monarchs, lead him to rebel without caring about consequences including going to prison. This gave him publicity and outlet to write articles in newspapers as well as his autobiography. This in turn earned him strong supporters and even more exposure. Rest is the history.

<comment><USER32> I still wonder if the more a country is in a financial depression, the more it's vulnerable to extremism, and how do you measure it, and do you avoid it.

I wonder how much anyone care about not going in to war, deep in one's heart, to not let crazy type be in control, especially nowadays politicians.

I believe democracy and moderate, boring, slobbish politics are still the key in having a peaceful civilization. If the CIA is conspiring to assassinate potential war-mongerers, I would feel fine about it. Conspiracists have a point that peaceful and consented exploitation is a sad situation to be in, but it's far better than the many past horrors of conflict.

The more WW2 gets old, the more people don't realize what war really is. Short conflicts in the middle east or vietnam are not the same than when a conflict comes at your doorstep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." George Santayana

Somebody asked, why this document is so high up-voted. I would say, we can't up-vote it enough, when we have the chance to learn from history and especially from the dark sides of history and from people like George Orwell.

Chance is very big, that a new era of darkness could fall on humanity, if we don't stop it at the right time (and nobody knows, when the chance is over).

<comment><USER35> I actually don't foresee another Hitler rising, because the first Hitler ruined it for all future Hitlers. I think what was most damning was the manner in which Germany lost the war. If I thought it was mainly Hitler's values and racism, I would not feel as safe. Hitler bet big on war and he lost in spectacular fashion. I think he forever associated that style of leadership with catastrophe.

<comment><USER36> If Hitler had managed to fight England and Russia separately, he could easily have won. That's the true lesson here.

<comment><USER37> If Hitler had just left Stalin alone the latter would have been happy to let the capitalists destroy each other, and Germany could have conquered all of western Europe.

The USSR was initially part of an anti-fascist pact but made amends with Germany after the western allies' betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

<comment><USER35> It's interesting to speculate on what would have happened if Hitler hadn't betrayed Stalin. Hitler had reasons for doing so (I can't remember what they were), and they probably had some validity -- but the Soviets were certainly uneasy allies with the US and Britain, so perhaps the Soviets could have been kept out of the war, at least for a while. If Germany was weakened, though, Stalin might have seen an opportunity and attacked Germany on his own.

<comment><USER37> Hitler's reasons for invading the USSR were batshit insane. He wanted to wipe the Slavs out, and thought he could do it before winter set in.

If Germany hadn't broken their agreement with the USSR the Soviets probably would have stayed out of the war - remember that they had just been humiliated by the Finns.

<comment><USER35> I took another look at the wikipedia entry [1], and it's inconclusive. Hitler had tipped his hand in Mein Kampf by describing war with the Soviets, and the Germans needed the oilfields at Baku, so completely avoiding war might have appeared impossible to Hitler. If one accepts that war was inevitable, then it probably was better sooner than later from the German standpoint: the Soviets began upgrading their tactics in response to Germany's from the first German action in the war, so the Soviets were becoming stronger adversaries. On the other hand, German observers with cooler heads could see that the odds of success were low and the action was foolhardy. But then, why pick on one aspect when the entire war was foolhardy?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The comparison with Naopoleon in the text is inappropriate and anachronistic. Napoleon WAS fighting against destiny. France was then attacked on all fronts by foreign kingdoms who wanted to crush the republic and restore the monarchy. Napoleon was the one to rise to defend the nation against foreign powers. It had nothing to do with Hitler agressing other countries around.for the sole purpose of establishing a larger German land and destroying its enemies.

EDIT: I can only attribute this silly parrallel between Hitler and Napoleon to Orwell's origins. Being a British writer, he was probably educated throughout his life to loathe Napoleon, presented as the ultimate Evil causing trouble in Europe.

<comment><USER39> I don't see the parallel as intended to put Napoleon down, but instead to attribute the same force of personality to Hitler. As someone who never met either man (perhaps that's obvious :), I'm not sure the connection works with me.

<comment><USER40> The German philosopher, Hegel had quite the man-crush on Bonaparte.

"I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it."

Similarly, Hitler saw himself as being the concrete expression of the soul of the German people. He may not have been aware of the quote, but the ideas it expressed were strong themes in the German romantic movement.

<comment><USER38> Do you have a source for that quote from Hegel ? I'd like to check the actual german version of it :)

<comment><USER35> I found some references, including this one[1]:

"As far as the philosophy of history is concerned, what is the first trait of the Hegelian vision of the Napoleonic hero ? A famous passage is often quoted. It is an extract from the letter Hegel addressed from Iena to his friend Niethammer, October 13th, 1806, when he had just finished writing The Phenomenology of Mind : " I saw the Emperor -this soul of the world- go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it. " (Correspondance, T. I, p.114)."

"Napoleon soul of the world" makes a pretty good search phrase[2].

[1] [http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/napol...](http://www.napoleon.org/en/reading_room/articles/files/napoleon_hegelian_hero.asp) [2] [https://www.google.com/#q=emperor+napoleon+this+soul+of+the+...](https://www.google.com/#q=emperor+napoleon+this+soul+of+the+world)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I assume this is posted and up voted now because of the similarities to Putin?

Anyway, let me recommend "Down and out in Paris and London". It taught me more about the human condition, and why you want to stamp out poverty and let everyone to be able to have a humane life, than most any book I ever read.

Also, imho after learning a bit about Eastern Europe after 1945, I put "Animal farm" along "1984". It is a master piece.

Edit: 'adventured', I really hope you are correct. The problem with your argument is that we see Hitler with hindsight now; he was a joke in the beginning too.

<comment><USER6> Putin is almost entirely lacking the cult of personality, the movement, around him that Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Fidel, etc. all had. He wasn't a revolutionary, he's primarily a gangster, and historically those are relatively short-lived and weak political types. Putin has more in common with Capone than Hitler, he leads a cult of money and theft.

Even Putin's attempts at nationalistic projection have been remarkably pathetic by historical comparison. Putin's dominance of Russia won't leave the mark / impact that other far more dangerous people throughout history have. Stalin would eat Putin for lunch.

I expect Putin to be forced out of office, rather than die in office. If Putin's inner circle wanted him gone, he'd be gone tomorrow. Eventually they'll tire of him.

<comment><USER42> I thought of Putin too when I first saw this posted a day ago for the reason that Putin has indicated many time that he would like to reestablish the USSR. If he ends up invading Ukraine and other former Soviet states (he already took a test drive through Georgia), we were all forewarned and did nothing to prevent it - much as Hitler's clear statements were ignored. I hope Putin has more foresight as this could be an enourmous disaster.

"The breakup of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century." \- Putin 2005

<comment><USER43> In theory, the break up was good. But for the human beings directly affected, it was a mixed bag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> "However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life."

This seems wrong (with hindsight, I suppose). My mental image of Orwell is that he was quite sharp. How did he manage to get this bit wrong so badly? Does anyone know the reason?

<comment><AUTHOR> Why does it seem wrong to you? I'm not sure if it is right or wrong but it does not seem outright wrong.

<comment><USER44> It sounds completely wrong to me (my opinion). It's a very utilitarian view of people where, as Orwell describes it here, you get to define some "great" goal, and convince people to fight for it, getting them to sacrifice things of their own in the process. It's all very subservient, manipulative, and a bit inhuman.

Given how prosperous and successful such societies have turned out to be in the past (they all failed), I would have expected someone to just reject it outright in favour of all the other ideas like individuality and freedom, as they are clearly better. I mean, you can't say some ideology is "psychologically sound" and have all its adoptees crash and burn everywhere causing untold amounts of damage. That's not sound at all.

So I was wondering if he meant it, or he was just depressed from how the war was going in 1940. Plus, and maybe I'm just ignorant, I always thought he was against totalitarianism.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean you don't have to go too far to find similar themes in say the US. The whole "War on Terror" sure has a very similar feel to it. Not as extreme as in Fascist countries but the general components are still there.

<comment><USER45> The entire "war on X" formulation is a Fascist concept. Though the war on terror involved literal military action, the "War on Drugs", "War on Poverty", and so forth are reminiscent of Mussolini's series of initiatives such as the "Battle for Grain", "Battle for Land", "Battle for the Lira", and "Battle for Births".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Grouply welcomes Ning networks - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grouply.com/grouply-welcomes-ning-networks/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. It's kind of like taking away the funnel that leads to paid accounts. Though you could argue the free accounts that Grouply is taking from Ning are accounts that would never pay anyways... so is there something else Grouply is after, other than growing in terms of users/networks?

<comment><USER3> It's the nature of web applications, for common applications at any one time there will be someone who are prepared to be offering a free service or at least a freemium one. I guess at some point Grouply will look to monetize their platform and someone else will step in and offer a free service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe we can see the process as:

\- Ambitious Startup tries something

\- Some fail, but not completely. A clear demand for a certain service is created, but it does not contain a business model that can sustain the size or investor expectations of the startup.

\- New leaner startups pick up the pieces, providing the service in a now known domain with low costs. The new startup might be able to provide the service even with the lower returns.

</comment><comment><USER5> The question is, what is Grouply's capitalization?

</comment><comment><USER6> Good timing =)</comment>


[Book review] The Art of Debugging with GDB,DDD and Eclipse  - <AUTHOR> http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dgjpk782_142hh396dc3

<comment><USER2> > Efficient debugging can't be done without a debugger(but that sounds pretty > obvious...still... there is evidence of people who doubt this or even > disagree!). Of course, you can use printf and output variable values all you > want, but that won't get you far and you'll still be a blind-foldedly > searching a needle in a haystack.

I strongly disagree with this statement. I only use debuggers for extreme situations and find that a good understanding of the code, thinking about the problem and a few well placed prints is all that's necessary for most debugging.</comment>


Bill Introduced to Roll-Back Recent 1099s-For-Everything Tax Provision - <AUTHOR> http://lungren.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=620&Itemid=86

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_tax_forms#1099_series>

Form 1099 ... is ... an information return to report various types of income other than wages, salaries, and tips (for which Social Security Administration Form W-2 is used instead). The term information return is used in contrast to the term tax return although the latter term is sometimes used colloquially to describe both kinds of returns.

Each payer must complete a 1099 for each covered transaction. Three copies are made: one for the payer, one for the payee, and one for the IRS.

Examples of report amounts paid to independent contractors (in IRS terminology, such payments are nonemployee compensation). The ubiquity of the form has also led to use of the phrase "1099" to refer to contractors themselves. U.S. tax law requires businesses to submit a Form 1099 for every contractor paid at least $600 for services during a year. Although, this requirement usually does not apply to corporations receiving payments, amendments made by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would remove this exemption beginning in 2012.

</comment><comment><USER3> If only the tea party crowd would get worked up about this issue - seems like the perfect overlap of "stuff the right loves to throw fits over" and "actually matters"

<comment><USER4> The right has been having "fits" about this since day one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1099s wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to choose between three layers of carbon paper on non-8.5x11" special paper that you have to order ahead from the IRS weeks in advance, or pay-per-file non-IRS-but-IRS-approved third-party electronic filing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't mind issuing a 1099 every time I fart if I knew where to mail them.

<comment><USER7> Why is this down-voted? If you get Anonymous (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28group%29>) behind such a campaign, it could actually work.

<comment><USER6> some people are just intensely anti-fart. actually, I'm glad they can express themselves, as infinitely holding it in could be catastrophic.</comment></comment></comment>


Flip Title ( ǝlʇıʇ dılɟ) : write upside down - <AUTHOR> http://fliptitle.com/ <comment><USER2> This is a pretty old idea - see [http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/01/flip- text-upsidedown.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/01/flip-text- upsidedown.html) and <http://pne.livejournal.com/398399.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> The fact that this has been upvoted to the front page concerns me greatly.

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.fliptext.org/> has been alive for years.

</comment><comment><USER5> (: ¿ʇuɐʌǝlǝɹ sıɥʇ sı ʎɥʍ

"encrypt your download links to prevent leechers" -- "encrypting" links with this would be a pain in the ass when you can't perform the reverse process.

<comment><USER6> _(: ¿ʇuɐʌǝlǝɹ sıɥʇ sı ʎɥʍ_

Because it's awesome. It may be subjective but it's the weekend and it's a cool site.

It's useful for passwords if you use a password manager or equivalent technology.

<comment><USER7> Every password manager I've used (granted only a few) will generate random ones for you. Is this significantly more secure than a random 18 character string?

<comment><USER6> Of course,

These characters aren't easily type-able and most password crackers that I've seen use common ascii/ansi characters not obscure characters like this... It's all relative I guess. There obviously exists a case where these characters aren't helpful.

<comment><USER7> Can you realistically crack an 18 character random string, even if you know the character set? I mean, I realize that technically increasing the character set would make it harder, but for any web-based service cracking something with 62^18 (or more if other characters are used) possible combinations is impossible in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "create strong passwords"

I'm not sure it's _that_ strong.

<comment><USER9> I'd be surprised if this didn't greatly help you against dictionary attacks. I'm pretty sure 90% of cracking dictionaries don't even touch that range of UTF-8. Once you get out of dictionary range brute forcing a password is much, much harder...

...although now I'm wondering how long it would take as a map reduce job...

<comment><USER10> It would also be trivial to write a program to update the dictionaries to include the flipped / reversed / other silly unicode trick version of everything already in the dictionary.

I wouldn't assume that this would help against dictionary attacks _for long_ , if at all now considering that people have been doing stuff like this pretty much since unicode got "mainstream" status.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Somehow get /ɯoɔ˙ǝlʇıʇdılɟ//:dʇʇɥ to direct to your site.

<comment><USER12> <http://ǝlƃooƃ.com> leads to something that I am sure is not sponsored by Google but looks exactly like Google nonetheless.

[EDIT] <http://ooɥɐʎ.com> appears to be available if there are any interested parties.

[EDIT] Works just like Google so hell maybe it is sponsored by Google. Works too quickly to be grabbing pages from Google's servers on the back-end.

<comment><USER13> It seems to basically be a proxy to google sites, rewriting URLs. It could be a guy just implementing it as a joke, but he could also be grabbing passwords. It's PHP, which Google doesn't use at all. DO NOT LOGIN HERE!

A whois lookup reveals it belonging to Jose, who I don't think works at Google: [http://whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=xn-- loo-w3ac94c&tld=com](http://whois.net/whois_new.cgi?d=xn--loo-w3ac94c&tld=com)

<comment><USER12> I signed up for a gmail account through there...basically just sends you to the official site after you register.

<comment><USER10> After, huh?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh my word, that's awesome..

Snore.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some of the characters look a little bit funky (I understand the look is not the point but still pretty cool). For example, 'b' just turns into a 'q'.

Try 'a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z'

Also, textarea's on all of my web pages are screwed up (in Firefox).

</comment><comment><USER15> ˙ʎɐp sʍǝu ʍols

</comment><comment><USER16> That's very cool indeed. However it doesn't work well with my survival utf-8 characters: The flip of à é è ç ô " " ' ' € £ is £ € ' ' " " ô ç è é à Great idea nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER17> I could see this being pretty popular for Facebook statuses, etc. I'd change the download links suggestion for one about Twitter, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> I ripped you - <http://flippingmania.blogspot.com/> lol

</comment><comment><USER19> Anyone know some place that lists similarly funky Unicode features?

</comment><comment><USER20> "Freak your friends" ...

</comment><comment><USER21> lame, it doesn't do CAPS

</comment><comment><USER22> Failed to flip </comment>


Know Who's Calling: Tactile Design - <AUTHOR> http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/know-whos-calling-tactile-design/

<comment><USER2> This article seems to imply that there are two groups of people who call you: people who call you where you WOULD fish the phone out the pocket to answer, and people who call you where you wouldn't do so.

Personally, I don't care who is calling me. If my cell phone rings when I am engaged in a conversation with someone else, I don't answer it. I don't even fish it out of my pocket to see who's calling, because it doesn't matter who is calling, really.

What is more pertinent to me over who is calling, may be what the context of the call is. But how do you know the context of the call is. If your wife is phoning you, is she phoning you to see if you're still picking up fish for dinner? Or is she calling you because your daughter hit her head at soccer practice and she's at the hospital? The solution to the problem of context may be to have intelligent voice menus that people hear before they reach you. For instance, I may have a voice menu when people call me that say, "Press 1 if this call is of normal importance. Press 2 if this is a personal emergency." -- with different vibrating tones for each option. If they dial 1, you get a distinctive vibrate that goes to voice mail if you don't answer. If they dial 2, you get a distinctive vibration that indicates it's an urgent call that maybe requires that you break your attention from what you're doing.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever noticed that everything is always urgent if it has the option to be?

<comment><USER4> That's what the setting is for in which you flag the maximum urgency a caller is permitted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this could be done with a separate bluetooth device with a vibrating motor built in.

It would be a similar product to trying to solve the other major issue with phone calls being heard. If someone often stores their phone in a backpack or purse instead of their pocket, vibrate is useless. Also, most of the time these people do not hear their phone. It can be kinda annoying when your trying to reach them in a noisy establishment.

Why not make a super thin bluetooth/vibrate device that can hook onto a pocket (or whatever) so calls are detected every time! (and could be a pattern as well so you know who is calling)

There would also be a different alert with text messages.</comment>


Why Free Email May Not Be Such A Good Idea - <AUTHOR> http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2008/10/13534/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the gist of the email, but... most people don't control a domain, and most people are incapable of setting up email for themselves. I also would think that most people don't care enough about the possible risk to abandon free email entirely.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this any different than any other email provider being unavailable suddenly?

<comment><USER4> I think they're suggesting that if you're paying for email,

(a) you have a number to call if it suddenly stops working, and

(b) you can threaten to stop paying them if they don't sort the problem out.

Personally, I use GMail as my main account, and it doesn't worry me that there's some (probably miniscule) risk of being locked out of my account. If anyone wanted to get hold of me, they could still reach me via my work email address, telephone, or Facebook.

I'm slightly more worried that they could lose all my past emails - in which case there would be very little I could do to get any sort of redress from them - but I'm pretty confident that I'm more likely to lose my own data than Google. It is possible to back up your GMail messages to your local machine, and I have taken this precaution, although I don't do this very frequently.

<comment><USER3> Ostensibly, yes; but with catastrophic failures, you're just going to get your monthly fee back. Which isn't really solving the e-mail availability problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not having someone to call and Google's poor reputation for responding to Gmail issues (plus data loss) is why I try and stick with domains under my control for (at least important) email. Even if my email provider goes under, I can repoint the domain to another email server and at least recover easier than having to start from scratch, as would be the case if my email address was under Gmail and suddenly was locked.</comment>


The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-man-who-invented-scotch-tape/ <comment><USER2> >>so he bought the machine in parts in a series ... then constructed it himself. When Drew's boss later found out what Drew he'd been up to, he rewarded him

This is more or less impossible in any organization I know of today. There might be a few exceptions, but by and large _' Im going to prove them wrong'_ strategy will only attract enemies from the political cartels in middle management these days. You will be marked as some who frequently indulges in insubordination, kind of guy who generally unionizes and can become immediate threat to their own job.

Most managers these days will likely let the company go in loss than have some one below them look smarter to people above. I even seriously doubt if the 20% innovation initiatives in Internet companies work anymore.

>>"He didn't even know exactly what was needed, but he had the optimism of youth."

This too is impossible in most places today, even start ups. Which won't hire you until you know some 100 math theorems by heart or have a degree from Ivy leagues.

<comment><USER3> Oddly, one place where innovation unquestionably happens is in sales, especially in the early days of a company. A young company trots out its cute new puppy, and the field people (CEO or otherwise as the case may be) and the customers collaborate in making it into a wolf or plowhorse or cheetah or something else very different from what it started out to be.

See also the much-admired concept of "pivot".

<comment><USER4> Actually, the need for sales to be flexible and innovative is one of the reasons customizability is so important for CRM systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a Scot I was interested as to why it was called Scotch tape:

 _The use of the term Scotch in the name was a pejorative meaning "stingy" in the 1920s and 1930s._

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

[NB In the UK the equivalent product is _sellotape_ ].

<comment><USER5> >In the UK the equivalent product is sellotape

It's true that Sellotape has become the generic name for adhesive tape, but Scotch tape is a well established product in it's own right in the UK market.

<comment><USER4> That's true - my favourite kind of sellotape is Scotch Tape! :-)

<comment><USER6> Actually we usually use the word "sellotape" for the clear "Scotch® Brand Cellulose Tape" they describe in the article, or certainly everyone I know does. The UK English term for "Scotch Tape" would usually be "masking tape" I think.

I was also surprised to see they didn't cover why it was called "Scotch" tape in the article as I find it pretty comical even though I'm also Scottish.

<comment><USER7> Masking tape is the easy-to-remove paper tape you use for decorating, rather than the clear cellophane stuff.

I've always known Scotch Tape to refer to Scotch Magic Tape, the slightly opaque, better-quality sellotape, rather than just generic sellotape. More expensive as well, so I always got told to use it carefully & in moderation when I was a kid. It has a little tartan-pattern strip of paper at the end of the roll so you can find it, I never really thought about why it was named beyond that.

<comment><USER8> The magic tape isn't great for general use. The benefit is that it peels cleanly, even off paper. It was beloved in drawing offices back when they worked on paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sellotape isn't perfected yet

1: the new start point after every dispensing should be easier to get hold of

2: when the tape starts to tear at an angle it can be really difficult to get back to a full width strip

I wish the skunkworks would focus on these scourges :-)

<comment><USER10> Easily done:

Perforate on an a regular interval/length - e.g., like paper towel rolls. The perforation would help resolve both issues.

I assume we haven't seen exactly this because of the edge cases that it brings up.

<comment><USER11> Perforation would most likely increase the chance of tearing very significantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Competing company DuPont had just invented cellophane

This is not true. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane#History)

<comment><USER13> The author may have, mistakenly, attributed a quote as fact from one of the interviewees.

Interestingly enough, from the same link, Dupont appears to have invented/optimized a moisture-proof cellulose, which may have been what the author was referring to?

<comment><USER14> It's probably fair to say Dupont introduced it into widespread use in the United States given that they were the first to manufacture it there.</comment></comment></comment>


Living in the Bay Area for under $400 - <AUTHOR> http://khamoud.com/

<comment><USER2> I spent a few months living in a coworking space as well. Exhausting is right. I managed to keep it a secret but the most exhausting part of the entire thing was lying to each and every person that I knew- (I was ashamed to be in that situation in the first place so I didn't tell anyone, and would pretend to live one town away.)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty much how I felt too. It is humiliating and humbling at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, I'm the Director of Development for Hacker Dojo. I know your pain, I've been homeless before too, but we seriously just got out of zoning trouble with the city of Mountain View, so to everybody who might be temped to take a similar leap of faith: please don't crash in the Dojo. I respect that we all have problems, but heaping them on somebody else is pretty unexcellent.

And Kris: have a super awesome day bro, and best of luck with CrowdDare.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome story man, props to you for taking a leap of faith. Slightly questionable morals living out of the hackerspace, but it sounds like its working out for you. Best of luck with your site and everything!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks man! I do feel bad about the hackerspace so I plan on donating and getting a membership when I get more money. It is an awesome group of people that I genuinely enjoy being around so I would like that place to stay open and free for everyone else the way it was for me.

<comment><USER4> Awesome man, glad to hear you are planning on paying it back. What else do you want to do with CrowdDare? Any other ideas for getting PR for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would really like to use it for charitable purposes although the users can use it for whatever they like. In terms of PR I think I might do a dare that raises money for The American Cancer Society. I need to come up with a dare that is worth people's donation though. So far I haven't come up with anything I think is good enough.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Research: It Pays to Be Yourself - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2020/02/research-it-pays-to-be-yourself <comment><USER2> Francesca is excellent, thank you for sharing.</comment>


Seattle tech leaders scuffle over proposed change to non-compete clauses - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/seattle-tech-leaders-scuffle-over-proposed-change-to-non-compete-clauses/ <comment><USER2> These same VC's that are pro non-competes won't sign Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA).

Founders would like it if VCs would sign an NDA so the investor won't take their secrets to someone else. (VC's won't sign NDAs for good reasons and I don't have a problem with that.)

VC's would like non-competes to keep employees from taking their secrets to someone else.

Here's the thing: if you won't sign an NDA to protect someone else's secrets, why should you expect someone to sign a non-compete to protect _your_ secrets?</comment>


Men are 50% more likely than women to support whistleblower Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://survata.com/blog/men-are-50-more-likely-than-women-to-support-whistleblower-edward-snowden/

<comment><USER2> Except everyone just lies to surveywall spam to get to the next page, so who knows if that's the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Larry - I'm a Survata co-founder. Our system screens out respondents who answer too quickly, answer in a suspicious pattern, fail "trap" questions, etc. So individuals not taking the survey seriously do not impact our data collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> He did leave his girlfriend behind in Hawaii.

As much as I hate how the media is focusing on Snowden rather than the actual leaks, I can't help but wonder what the deal is with that relationship.

<comment><USER4> Given it was just his girlfriend, why would you expect the level of commitment that would even strain a marriage?

The guy basically made himself target #1 of one of the world's super powers and he's on the run. Why would he force anyone to tag along with him, just based off some temporary notion of companionship? If they were married, with children or had some undying level of commitment, I could see some bewilderment.

So far it just seems incredibly logical and reasonable she would stay behind, on both their parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Men are 60% more likely to complete a survey Disclaimer: I just made that up</comment>


systemd-networkd DHCP performance - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/114015603831160344127/posts/eztZWbwmxM8 <comment><USER2> The most interesting bit, to me, is actually in the comments.

You don't have to recognize Ted Lemon's name, or know of his work, in order to read the tag that G+ put next to his query. But even if you completely ignore that and treat him as a random person, the LMGTFY response was rather rude.

Is this endemic to the systemd project? Because I keep seeing similar rudeness whenever I look at their mailing lists.

<comment><USER3> It's endemic to a lot of open source projects. But yes, it's very present around systemd/gnome.

I'm not a huge gnome fan but I love systemd and I hugely respect both projects in many respects. I've met several of the people in both projects as well and I like some of them (not all, but that's not to be expected). The attitude though, oh god the attitude.

In those very comments, Ted Lemon put it extremely well into words: "I've worked with people who respond to questions this way. It makes for a stressful work environment—you're always wondering whether they're going to try to score points off you when you ask a question."

I don't know how to qualify this attitude as. I'd say "holier than thou" but that kind of lost its meaning along the way. At their core, most of the people working on these projects expect near-perfection from others and are not willing to assist those they demand perfection from. Anyone who fails to achieve their demands simply gets dismissed. Very few of the people who are interested in the project end up contributing because of the toxic attitude... it's all some sort of project-wide social filter bubble.

This seemingly has the effect of getting brilliant people interested in those projects, but just as many fall through the cracks. I've not thought about all of this long enough to talk about the long term consequences but what I do see is that while GNOME may be a great feat of desktop engineering, it's meaningless if everyone despises the developers (and consequentially, the name). Funny, too, UX people don't really fit into this monoculture.

This really breaks my heart. I see it as a form of bullying... You either help, or you don't help (don't reply). You don't go around making people feel like they are lesser men because they don't have the knowledge you nurtured over years or even decades. I bet Mozart sucked with computers, too.

PS: I apologise for going off-topic. This work on dhcp performance is really damn awesome and those issues have nothing to do with the topic at hand.

<comment><USER4> I think you're inverting the direction of causation here. GNOME and systemd get a lot of criticism and hate on largely non-technical grounds. I think any project could develop a dismissive attitude if they were hearing constantly about how their project was destroying everything beautiful and true. It's unfortunate, and bad for them in the long term, but totally understandable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Related classic blog post: how do Macs get on the network so fast? [http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do](http://cafbit.com/entry/rapid_dhcp_or_how_do)

</comment><comment><USER6> It is bit odd that network management is one of those things that gets iterated on fairly often. What makes this something that has difficulties converging? It seems like almost every distro has it's own solution, or several of them.

<comment><USER7> Fortunately this network management solution is now part of systemd, and systemd has been adopted as default by all major distributions except gentoo.

<comment><USER8> For those who missed it, Ubuntu is also moving to systemd as default : [http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316)

<comment><USER9> I was really hoping Shuttleworth would hold out on this. I've got serious concerns about systemd still. Ted Ts'o's recent G+ post, while generally supportive, gets into many of the issues involved:

 _A realization that I recently came to while discussing the whole systemd controversy with some friends at the Collab Summit is that a lot of the fear and uncertainty over systemd may not be so much about systemd, but the fear and loathing over radical changes that have been coming down the pike over the past few years, many of which have been not well documented, and worse, had some truly catastrophic design flaws that were extremely hard to fix._

Quite.

[https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/4W6rrMMv...](https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's nice to see this specifically treated as an optimization goal. This is one of those cases (much like git for version control) where sufficiently good performance enables new uses that would not otherwise be possible. For instance, consider getting a decent network connection over an intermittent link.

</comment><comment><USER11> Piece by piece, Linux is becoming an OS that we don't constantly have to defend for its small deficiencies. Loving it.

</comment><comment><USER12> thankfully we have systemd to manage these kinds of module dependency startup problems in linux now.</comment>


Ask HN: At what karma can you vote down and create polls? - <AUTHOR>

I know it used to be 100 to vote down, but that has clearly changed. At what karma can you vote down and at what karma can you create polls? <comment><USER2> 500 karma points is needed to vote down.

to create poll go here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the poll info. I needed that a week ago but was too embarrassed/shy/thought it wasn't worthy of an Ask HN to ask.</comment></comment>


What is SSL and how does it protect you online? - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackthis.co.uk/articles/what-is-ssl-and-how-does-it-protect-our-online-transactions

<comment><USER2> Nice article, always wanted to know the details of SSL</comment>


Evolution of Cooperation, by Nowak - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/conversation/evolution-of-cooperation-nowak

<comment><AUTHOR> It's long, so some choice quotes:

"So you've got to always cooperate by random drift. But if we'd always cooperate, now we can guess what happens next: we invite Always defect. You have oscillations here, you have a mathematical model of human history, of economic cycles, of ups and downs."

"There is one thing that I have learned in my studies of cooperation over the last 20 years: there is no equilibrium. There is never a stable equilibrium."

"In an experimental study, people go up and down in trains in Britain and listen to what people are talking about, to find that about 60 percent of the conversation topics fit into this general framework of indirect reciprocity."

"What is very important for efficient indirect reciprocity is language. Indirect reciprocity leads to the evolution of social intelligence and human language. In order to evaluate the situation, you have to understand who does what to whom and why. And we have to have a way to talk about what happened, to gain experience from others."

"As my friend David Haig at Harvard put it very nicely, "For direct reciprocity you need a face; for Indirect reciprocity you need a name."

"If too many others imitate it, it starts to become a losing strategy."</comment>