Canadian government gag order in CIA brainwashing case - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canadian-government-gag-order-mk-ultra-1.4448933 <comment><USER2> FYI, this is just one of the known experiments out of MK-ULTRA. Victim testimonies describe being immovably bound to chairs for all of their waking existence and forced to listen to a short, recorded tape on loop while blindfolded for sensory deprivation.

One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like "I did not kill my mother", however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - "I killed my mother".

At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers.

More reading: [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you- turn-a-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a- family-history-of-cia-mind-control-experiments-into-art)

<comment><USER3> Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. We've been experimenting on natives, blacks, minorities a long before the nazis. And we even tested nuclear fallout on pacific islanders long after ww2. I believe the "father" of unethical japanese human experimentation was trained in the US before ww2.

Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.

<comment><USER4> Unethical human experimentation was almost certainly pioneered by the first human civilizations, not the relative late comer from the 18th century.

<comment><USER5> I know. It's really funny how people seem to have a knowledge of history that begins solely with the colonization of the new world. They have zero recollection of the horrors of past civilizations. As if, somehow, the founders of the USA, are responsible for all evils in the world and everyone else was just getting along and hugging up until 1776.

And I recommend those people ask for a refund from their history teachers, because anyone who tells you history is black-and-white, good-and-evil, is selling you something. Humanity is one long stream of moral ambiguity. Any moral lessons derived from it are done by omitting contradictory evidence. A simple cruise through a Wikipedia article offers plenty of moral ambiguity-- and that should be the minimum starting point for considering yourself knowledgeable in a subject.

Even the archtype of evil himself, Hitler, (and likewise Stalin with Russia) still managed to re-vitalize broken countries into industrial titans that we still benefit from today. Russia was literally a pre-industrial society before WW2. And it's interesting how people who believe in rigid good-guys/bad-guys have no problem driving a VW Beetle, or a Mitsubishi--they made the Kamakazi Zeros, by the way. And both companies benefited from slave labor. It's not even hidden knowledge:

[http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/07/world/volkswagen-s- history...](http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/07/world/volkswagen-s-history-the- darker-side-is-revisited.html)

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/mitsubishi...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/07/20/mitsubishi_apology_slave_labor_company_admits_using_american_prisoners_of.html)

<comment><USER6> I can't believe you are getting downvoted for this.

Surely people on HN care more about real facts, right?

<comment><USER7> I think it is a reflection of the zeitgeist - things are once again either only good, or only bad. There is no space for bad people to also have done some good things, and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How can anyone discount so called 'conspiracies theories' so quickly when accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge? I am not saying one should suspend critical thinking and logic to accept anything they are told, but clearly there are some instances where history has proven such conspiracies have taken place and harmed many innocent lives.

<comment><USER9> I used to be of the mind that ideas within the conspiracy theory realm were most likely utter nonsense. After Snowden and the DNC scandal, I've opened up the possibility for a lot more critical thought.

If you take a look at the conspiracy sub on reddit, which became popular after the DNC Scandal, while there is some nonsense, the most-upvoted stuff are often quite interesting. In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum, often being even quite the opposite of the identity politics seen in those places, ie the #3 most upvoted post this year is exactly that.(1)

1 - [https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only...](https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only_power_that_scares_the_establishment/)

<comment><USER10> >" In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum"

I'm confused by this statement. /r/conspiracy has been shown to have been heavily used by Russian bots/trolls to spread propaganda and truly fake news.

<comment><USER9> Can you elaborate, or give an example? What about my example/observation screams 'Russian propoganda?' Russians want us to throw away identity politics and work together to fight against the abuses of the plutocracy?

<comment><USER11> No they want everyone to distrust one another, and tear down instead of reform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The government has tortured its citizens in the past and is covering up that torture in the present. It sounds like a Royal Commission or similarly significant investigation is needed.

<comment><USER9> Quite a few things are a bigger deal than this, but get no attention. For example, the same could be said for our government-funded genocide of Native Americans. I don't know why the denial is allowed to persist.[1] In Germany holocaust-denial can land you prison time. America has the only remaining legitimate government in the world that committed an attempted genocide against its people.

1 - www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california- genocide-20160522-snap-story.html

<comment><USER13> Germany lost the war.

Although it's not true that the victors always write the history. There are cases where the defeated write books detailing all the injustices committed against them and it gets picked up centuries later after the tides of power have changed again, or so much time has passed that everyone involved is safe or dead -- I guess one can say that's how you know about the Native American version of American history and can talk about it safely.

Want an interesting thought? What in the horrors of hell is being done to Middle-Easterners?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd speculate that, after such an age of barbaric experimentation, new and supposedly more innocuous methods that don't require physically detaining/restraining a subject have long since been conceived, implemented, and tried.

<comment><USER15> I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.

<comment><USER16> Many MKUltra documents were shredded, and even those recovered were of little scientific benefit due to the way the experiments were carried out. So many people had their lives irrevocably destroyed, and for absolutely nothing of value.

<comment><USER17> > and for absolutely nothing of value

Nothing of value to society anyway; looking at the 1979 reunion video, it seems like they were pretty happy with the return on investment overall.

[0] [https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra- reunion-...](https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion- party-1979-jan-irvin-joe-atwill/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _" They don't want to have to deal with more applications," Stein said of the government's requirement the settlement details be kept confidential and out of the public eye._

Cooperation is complicity. If you're party to a gag order and it's not obviously geared towards protecting the basic (not political) safety of specific persons, then you should consider whether you have an obligation to circumvent it, and how.

<comment><USER19> Academically, yes. But it's easy to say when it's not you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people.

They must either be hiring really naive recruits, who are blinded by idealism or really ignorant of the history of the organization they're joining, or they're hiring complete and utter scumbags. Or, perhaps the revelations that have been made public about them are false and they're really the stereotypical "good guys" they try to paint themselves as.

<comment><USER21> You may classify this under idealism, but I bet a lot of them would claim to just have realistic understandings of the brutalities that are a requirement to keep an empire running. They would say that those who would hold back from exploring any means neccissary to defeat their geopolitical adversaries are the idealists.

<comment><USER22> ah yes, the pragmatist's prayer-- "it was necessary even if it was immoral, therefore it was right, even if it was wrong, therefore i am noble, even if i have lost my humanity"

everyone jumps to the question of "does the end justify the means?"

a better question: why jump to the most brutal means before questioning whether the end is worthwhile regardless of the means?

is government mind control something we really want them to be able to do in the context of an intelligence agency? no, it is not; it is the apex of the opposite of human rights.

<comment><USER13> You are asking the wrong questions.

Is morality powerful enough to stop actions?

Government thugs can survive with a guilty conscience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I live near Montréal and I never heard about it except from US sources. It's weird that it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Also I'm never sure if the sources are accurate or if it's from some conspiracy nuts.

<comment><USER24> Why would you hear about it from Canadian sources, if they're getting gagged?

<comment><USER23> If I understand correctly, the victims are getting gagged. Not the news medias. They can publish stuff and they did in the past, like that The Fifth Estate thing. So I could have heard about it but I didn't. From the news or from people. Maybe the news don't talk about it often enough or that the population don't care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Coincidentally, I just saw this review of a film about a similar event:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review- er...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-errol-morris- peter-sarsgaard.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> It's not hard to imagine that a government organization capable of this is almost certainly testing out all types of brainwashing techniques online today. (not that many others aren't)

</comment><comment><USER14> Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling?

This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.

<comment><USER27> Facebook performs secret psychological experiments on its users by manipulating their news feed: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook- apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users)

I would say without their consent, but it's likely there is a clause buried in the user agreement that means that you consent to it.

<comment><USER28> If their users did not read that clause in the user agreement and knowingly consent to the experiments, then they _are_ being carried out without the users' consent.</comment></comment></comment>


Total Lunar Eclipse 4/15 at 3:06am EDT - <AUTHOR> http://m.space.com/25487-total-lunar-eclipse-blood-moon-brightness.html

<comment><USER2> Look's like Seattle's a wash. I was looking forward to taking some photos of it tonight. Oh well, at least the mountain made an appearance earlier today: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/13864582454/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/13864582454/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Has there ever been a photo taken of the Earth during a lunar eclipse? I checked the LRO website, but apparently they have to power down the instruments due to lack of sunlight:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f5MUyF_Q78](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f5MUyF_Q78)

<comment><USER4> This is a picture taken by Apollo 12 when the Earth came between it and the sun: [http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption_direct.jsp?phot...](http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/caption_direct.jsp?photoId=S80-37406)

I found the picture on this page: [http://science1.nasa.gov/science- news/science-at-nasa/2005/2...](http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science- at-nasa/2005/20apr_lunareclipse/)

edit: And as a bonus, here's a painting: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eclipse_from_moon.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eclipse_from_moon.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Live video stream here: [http://www.space.com/19195-night-sky-planets- asteroids-webca...](http://www.space.com/19195-night-sky-planets-asteroids- webcasts.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> In your local time: [http://localtime.io/#?d=4%2F15%20at%203:06am%20EDT](http://localtime.io/#?d=4%2F15%20at%203:06am%20EDT)

</comment><comment><USER7> Slooh has pretty good coverage if you're in a cloudy area: [http://live.slooh.com/](http://live.slooh.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I recorded this: [http://youtu.be/zjOYqiVw7nY](http://youtu.be/zjOYqiVw7nY)

Enjoy!

<comment><USER9> Dat fattest man suggest video... _shudder_

<comment><USER8> It was the first time I observed and recorded a lunar eclipse (been living under a rock). I shared because I thought some people might enjoy watching it especially if they didn't or couldn't see it from where they live. I grew up in a place that was cloudy half of the time. My video is not professional and great looking like NASA's but it's how you would see it from my backyard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Chicago is crystal clear. What a sight!

Freezing my ass off, though. None of my windows have a view.

</comment><comment><USER11> Clear skies for a week... had to be tonight that the storm clouds roll through.

</comment><comment><USER12> It starts at 10:58 Pacific time. Get out there and check it out!!!</comment>


Yahoo Mail to get 'Minty' freshen-up - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20016158-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

<comment><USER2> If they're trying to compete with Gmail here... when do they plan to allow IMAP for free? That's a _complete_ deal-maker for me, because I have a couple machines, some with multiple OSes, and no mail client happily reads + writes with another OS's version of itself (if I can even safely writable-mount the other drive's format), much less an entirely different application.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their spam filter's what needs the most work. A faster and nicer interface would come next in priority, yes, but it was the torrent of spam that lost me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've used the internal beta of Minty and it's really nice. I'm not a Yahoo! Mail user but it's drastically faster then the current version (Candygram). It's also loads much faster than GMail (something the GMail team really needs to work on). It's heavy JavaScript but uses some progressive loading that makes it much snappier than it's predecessor.

Not sure if it's too late for Yahoo! Mail though. This update is long overdue.

<comment><AUTHOR> How did you get access to the "internal" beta? :O

<comment><USER4> I'm an internal :). Employee.

<comment><USER5> _I'm not a Yahoo! Mail user_ Not eating your own dog food eh? I don't blame you. I'm a gmail user, mainly for the better interface, spam filter, and easy integration with other Google products I use (Calendar, Maps, Voice, Android). We use Yahoo Small Business mail at work and it's painful to use. I end up just checking mail on my phone instead of the web interface. Things are counter-intuitive on Yahoo, such as having to actively enable saving sent email instead of having it on by default.

<comment><USER4> My main reasons are spam filter, imap support and inability to use my own domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yahoo Mail has just gotten worse over the years and I finally switched to Gmail. I'd get "Error Code 14" a few times month. Search was constantly broken and you had to contact their tech support to get it reindexed. No HTTPS support (after logging-in). Can't send email through another mail server. Yahoo Mail has become like the Detroit car companies - they've fallen behind the competition.</comment>


Station F, the world's largest startup campus opens in Paris - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/station-f <comment><USER2> I was under the impression that France's heavy taxes makes it particularly hard for startups to grow. I personally would love to know what's been done to help startups VS. in the USA (or Germany/ England)</comment>


IoT on Rails (looking for feedback) - <AUTHOR> We've built/are building a service to help web developers (starting with Rails devs) build end-to-end IoT applications with custom connected devices.  The idea is to let web developers do this using their web dev skills.  We have a video showing how this is done here: https://www.apiotics.com/videos/1 We're looking for feedback on this, and if anyone wants to try and build an IoT on Rails app with us, please let me know: info - at - apiotics.com. <comment><USER2> Looks pretty good. However, how are you going to differentiate your offering from other more established players out there? (e.g. ThingWorkx, AWS IoT etc.)?

Also usually these types of "no embedded code needed" offerings are OK for demo applications, but what happens when a lot of custom features are needed? E.g. how can one add custom biz. logic to the auto-generated code? If this is not clearly spelled out, then customers are going to be hesitant to get locked into your platform I think.

You can msg. me direct if more info needed, I've worked in the industrial monitoring space for over 15 years now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would very much like to get your further thoughts on this. didn't see a way to reach you in your bio. I am at mac - at - apiotics.com

On the custom feature side, there are two options. We think most web developers will be most comfortable implementing custom logic in their web application, which is straightforward to do.

If you need custom functionality running on the device, then you can write a custom driver for your device (which can include substantial custom logic) and use the portal to load it into your firmware image and install it.

I think our differentiation from others is that we assume the developer starts from the web application and wants to add connected devices to their app. Most other players assume a connected device and give you ways to send data from it to the cloud.

Hopefully that makes some sense.

<comment><USER2> OK going to msg. you privately with some more details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks very promising. As a healthcare professional I am interested to know if it can be used to monitor various healthcare related devices such as medical devices or hospital hardwares. Would love to know more on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> subrat_rout, sure! Shoot me an email: mac -at- apiotics.com to talk about what you're looking for?

<comment><USER3> Just sent you an email. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't it a bit of a stretch to run something like this on rails when you need cheap concurrency? Go, Rust, erlang would come to mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> dev360, the use cases we are thinking about are ones where you want to stand up a web app so that your users can interact with your IoT devices. For those kinds of CRUD web apps, Rails is pretty good we think.

What use cases do you have in mind where the cheap concurrency would be particularly helpful?</comment></comment>


Sex, Lies, and Server-side Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://noelwelsh.com/programming/2012/09/03/sex-lies-and-javascript/

<comment><USER2> Even more along these lines, Scala (another JVM-based language) has demonstrated 50 million message sends/per second with their Akka library.

[http://letitcrash.com/post/20397701710/50-million- messages-p...](http://letitcrash.com/post/20397701710/50-million-messages-per- second-on-a-single-machine)

I too like Node for small little tasks, tiny dev web servers, etc.

But the JVM is a far more mature platform for writing scalable, multi-core application servers, especially with modern languages like Scala and Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it was Larry Ellison that once said the only industry more driven than fashion than fashion itself, was IT.</comment>


Ask HN: Is 25 too old to get your first job at a startup? - <AUTHOR>

I live in Los Angeles and I don't have a ton of prior work experience. I worked at a PE type shop for ~8 months and then started pursuing a skillset in technology. I have a BS in Economics and minors in Marketing & Biz Admin (so not tech related at all). I taught myself html/css/sass and am pretty capable with JS and JQuery. I am doing a 3 month bootcamp so I can polish my skills and learn Ruby and about a few different databases. When people come out of these bootcamps they end up working at small web dev shops and frankly that isn't very compelling to me. I want to work for a start up but am worried I am too old for entry level and possibly won't have the right skillset. Anyone have experience interviewing or hiring someone like this? <comment><USER2> Your never too old to join a start up. Want to give yourself an edge above the competition go to Amazon and purchase current physical books on Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML5 CSS3, etc. that you have an interest in. PDFs/EPUBs and other digital content is nice but those physical books and their size will help remind you that you have some serious work to do. As your start to finish each book faster and faster you will have actual produced work you can use for your personal resume that you have created and customized from your newly learned skills. When you have mastered what was in those books you can look back at the thousands and thousands of pages and go wow I know all that by heart, oh man how far I have come.

Bootcamps are a nice general overview but will not take you to the level of mastery that you will get from books created by experts in their field. You may even get a book or few from a master in their field (David Heinemeier Hannson for Ruby on RAILS, Dennis Ritchie for C, Bjarne Stroustrup for C++, Brendan Eich for JavaScript, John Resig for jQuery, etc.).

If you don't want the average Joe Nobody job you have to put in the work to gain mastery of your craft. Don't worry about the money it will come the closer you get to mastery as your skills will be extremely sought after by those wanting ( and needing ) your help and services solving unsolved real world business/technical problems.

You do have to start somewhere; that can be working for someone or working for yourself (recommend end game). All that marketing and business skills you put all that time into learning comes in very helpful in a business, especially those that want to market their products and services. Nothing better than someone with experience in those business units but also knows technology. I would recommend working on product development while working through your road to learning.

If you can build a few production quality products and have active users engaging in them that will skyrocket your chances with joining a start up. Who knows one might just reach out to you, without you having to try and find them. Your confidence in your abilities seem to be low at this current point but that will fade away as time goes on as you start to master certain aspects of the languages.

Key here is you want to insure that you have something excellent to offer to anyone that you are trying to be employed by or if you are going to start a business and work for yourself. Think of a start up as your first business client, what mastered skills, qualities and services can you offer them to make them and yourself better.

<comment><USER3> This ^

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This has to be a joke right?

At 25, you are young enough to do anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't mean pity me I'm old. I mean for a first job is it going to be difficult to get hired at 25 with a pretty entry level skillset. I would prefer to work at a start up but I am going to be applying to jobs in 3 months. I want to source out some targets and am trying to ascertain where I will likely be able to get the most traction.

<comment><USER5> Age isn't the problem. It's whether or not you have the skills necessary for hire

<comment><AUTHOR> right. That is the worry. I am only going to have a portfolio of 4-5 things, and a basic skill-set. I am just going to work really hard over the next 4 months and by that time I hopefully will get to a place where I feel comfortable working with the technologies I am studying.

<comment><USER6> Look at your other abilities that can add value for people. The goal is to be a linchpin. Indispensable. With only basic programming skills, you need to add other intangibles to the mix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Your energy and willingness to learn mean quite a bit; your calendar age does not. A 20 year old with a couple kids, a wife to go home to, a mortgage and a ton of student loan debt might have serious concerns about the startup life.... while a 40 year old single woman with no dependents might find it suits her well.

Will startup life take a lot of your time and energy? Absolutely yes. But if you have that energy to give, then you're good. Just try not to be to starry eyed: The company is _probably_ going to fail, you're probably going to be overworked and underpaid, and you'll probably get in more than a couple fights with your coworkers. But some people (like me) love that kinda stuff. Whatever works for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not too old, but I'm not sure why you would _want_ to.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think my options will be constrained to web dev shops or start ups. I worked at a start-up private equity shop and got a ton of exposure to all of the business. I think it is a great place to work because you do a little of everything and therefore you learn a lot really quickly.

edit: conversely, where would you start out?

<comment><USER8> I understand that this might go against the grain for the site I'm posting this on, but startup culture is all about founders abusing their employees and getting wealthy off their hard work. There are startups that _aren 't_ like that, but you have to know the warning signs of what to watch out for to avoid it. Given that understanding, I don't see why you'd want to throw yourself into the blender.

<comment><AUTHOR> i have worked for a start-up and feel like I was taken advantage of. However, if I could extract a reasonable paycheck I would love to work at one for ~6 months (if it was a decent opportunity) because you learn so much that if I could survive on the paycheck, the learning experience would be worth it as a first job. You also work on multiple projects so you have a few deliverables to point to on exit. Instead of saying, me and 5 people made a trivial change to some widget you get to actually contribute a lot more because there is a low power distance between supervisors, and a lot more work to go around with many less people to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Startups are going to look at how you improve their condition and whether you can do it consistently, not what year you were born in, especially at 25.

I know it's just a question but it seems you're making a big deal out of nothing. Just start applying while building up work. If you get no favourable replies it's because you haven't displayed what value you can bring to those companies yet, but it won't because you're a "late bloomer".

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. I don't have a ton of previous work experience so I am just going to build a really good portfolio and then market myself and my abilities in the best way I can for each company.I also don't mean is 25 too old, i mean is 25 too old for what will essentially be my literal first job. Cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No, I joined a startup at age 30. You will just have to accept that younger people may be better at you.

</comment><comment><USER11> Even the <foreign country> resumes with false ages put down 27-30. Any ageism against 25 will be of the too-young variety.

</comment><comment><USER12> No

</comment><comment><USER13> No</comment>


Show HN: Example of Oracle APEX App - <AUTHOR> https://apexea.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=10596:LOGIN

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an example of a CRUD app that can be created with the Oracle APEX framework. Very little custom code to create this. Much of the UI and CRUD logic is visually composed. Comments?

<comment><USER2> Well done.

I used Oracle APEX to make a couple of user administration consoles for in- house Windows apps as an alternative to the service desk staff needing to run the app itself to manage user accounts. It was quite convenient for them to use. That was a few years ago.

I like the idea of being able to make a database centric web app using just a web browser, yet I find it hard to get past the clunkiness of it. I've been thinking about writing the thinnest possible HTTP gateway for other database systems, such as PostgreSQL, and then gradually building something like APEX on top of that. But unlike APEX, it should be easy to create sexy consumer facing web apps, not just corporate bags of forms, tables and charts. If someone released such a product today, they could become very rich very fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> by the way, there is a Bootstrap Example here: [https://apexea.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=11175:1](https://apexea.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=11175:1)

Some of the table data is missing.

Here is an example of exposing table data via the RESTFul API (out of the box) Example: [https://apexea.oracle.com/pls/apex/apexlims52/hr/employees/](https://apexea.oracle.com/pls/apex/apexlims52/hr/employees/)</comment></comment></comment>


Drone and Docker, Open Source CI - <AUTHOR> http://blog.drone.io/2014/2/5/open-source-ci-docker.html <comment><USER2> Wow just yesterday I was visualizing and dreaming about what a containerized CI system might look like after realizing:

1) I don't want to pay for hosted CI

2) Setting up your own CI is a pain in the butt currently

Well done. I'm gonna have a look through this!

<comment><USER3> Here here! I saw a demo as well and what he has built as well as what he has planned on the roadmap is great. Love where its going.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had the chance of seeing a demo of this yesterday; it went really, really great. Brad is a great guy with a ton of passion.

Drone combined with some of the features upcoming on docker.io will be an _incredibly_ compelling usecase for Continuous Integration going forward.

</comment><comment><USER5> I haven't really looked closely at Drone yet, but you might also be interested in Strider. [http://stridercd.com/](http://stridercd.com/)

One of the things I like is that it's dead simple to get running on Heroku. Language support is a little weak (Python, Ruby, node.js), but we're working on that.

Another nice feature that's currently lacking which it looks like Drone does well is the ability to provision external services (e.g. DB servers) for tests.

</comment><comment><USER6> So is Docker really a safe alternative to VMs? I was under the impression that you can't run untrusted code in a Docker container yet.

<comment><USER7> Why do people keep pretending this is the purpose of containers?

<comment><USER8> Because PaaSes use containers to isolate customers from each other.

<comment><USER7> Why not use VMs for isolation, and containers for their own distinct reasons?

<comment><USER8> Overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks great! Looking forward to bitbucket integration.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! We posted our go-bitbucket api today as well. [https://github.com/drone/go-bitbucket](https://github.com/drone/go-bitbucket)

The Bitbucket patch should land next week

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So I can run this locally, ensure my test system is dialed in, then scale/automate it with the hosted service? If that's true, it certainly beats having to guess what my test system is actually doing remotely and would definitely help bring some alignment between my prod/test infrastructure.

<comment><USER10> yes! there is a CLI that let's your run your builds locally, on your laptop. Navigate to the root directory of your repository and run `drone -v build .`

you need Docker installed and the .drone.yml file in the root. it's a great way to test locally without having to push to the CI server. As an added bonus, you could even setup a pre-commit hook

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's an article on VentureBeat posted today with some more info about Drone.io: [http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/07/droneio](http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/07/droneio)

</comment><comment><USER13> I saw a demo of this a week ago, and it looked really neat. Kudos for launching!

</comment><comment><USER3> Having seen a demo with Brad @ Geekdom SF. Drone.io is to jenkins what IntelliJ is to Eclipse.

What I see as a benefit is how all the features of this CI system work for you out of the box. Definitely worth a look.

</comment><comment><USER14> Extremely well done Brad. With Drone, we can finally ditch Jenkins. Going to setup Drone open source for [https://commando.io](https://commando.io) right now!

</comment><comment><USER15> Great work from a great Geekdom startup! Yay!

</comment><comment><USER16> Very excited about the Docker integration!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is exactly what I've been looking for, docker + CI, and I'm excited to see the scala 2.10 image!

</comment><comment><USER18> It was about time to see an alternative to Jenkins.

Does it provide the fine-grained workflows Jenkins does?

<comment><USER10> The workflow is pretty basic right now, however, we plan on adding matrix and parallel builds in the near future. Could you elaborate a bit more on your workflow? I definitely want to make sure Drone supports more than just simple use cases.

<comment><USER19> From my experience with Jenkins, as a build/deployment/release engineer the past 6 years, you probably want to:

\- chain jobs - needed for larger projects; ideally this should even allow composing jobs to have nice, modular jobs which can be launched standalone or chained

\- some kind of powerful templating system - needed for reducing configuration duplication; ideally this would keep track of all the "children" in case of updates

\- you also probably need enterprisey features later on, like SSO using AD/LDAP, fine grained ACLs based on groups, etc

But job chaining and job templating should be higher priorities for the workflows since they affect the overall architecture. Jenkins has been struggling for a while to re-architect to allow this, not entirely successfully.

You also want a plugin system if you don't have one, especially one with dependencies (i.e. the Git plugin can server as a dependency for the Github plugin).

My 2 € cents :)

<comment><USER18> Chaining jobs and parallel ones are both very important. Especially the last one since it saves you a lot of time waiting the tests to complete. Also a big plus is to be able to run certain set of tests only when a specific event is fired eg ran test A when somebody pushes to branch X

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> so I wonder how this impacts the circleCI funding. Looks like some pretty steep competition. [http://blog.circleci.com/we- raised-a-6m-series-a/](http://blog.circleci.com/we-raised-a-6m-series-a/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Love seeing an alternative for jenkins, it's about time!</comment>


Searching for Dark Matter with Cloudant, part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://cloudant.com/blog/searching-for-dark-matter-with-cloudant-part-1/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anybody looking for a more technical dive, Matt Strassler (String theorist formerly from UW, now poached to Rutgers) has an incredibly readable exposition here: [http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and- posts/relativity-s...](http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and- posts/relativity-space-astronomy-and-cosmology/dark-matter/current-hints-of- dark-matter-413/)</comment>


SpaceX targets January 8 launch as explosion investigation ends - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/02/spacex-targets-january-8-launch-as-explosion-investigation-ends/ <comment><USER2> The discussion is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302650)</comment>


GM has no reason to back out of its one-sided deal with Nikola - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/why-gm-is-sticking-with-nikola-despite-fraud-allegations/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also: _GM And Nikola: A Fine Deal For GM_

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/4374438-gm-and-nikola- fine-...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4374438-gm-and-nikola-fine-deal- for-gm)

> The deal shows Nikola doesn't have any technology of its own, be it battery > technology or fuel cell technology. The deal also shows that Nikola is > willing to forego any possibility of an economic return, just to further the > story and pump the stock.</comment>


Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry Ransomware Detained in US After Def Con - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/ywp8k5/researcher-who-stopped-wannacry-ransomware-detained-in-us-after-def-con <comment><USER2> Any direct relation(real or hypothetical) between the arrest and the movement of the ransom coins? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14918545)</comment>


MSPs should consider a self-hosted RMM solution over a SaaS - <AUTHOR> https://opmantek.com/why-managed-service-providers-should-consider-a-self-hosted-rmm-solution-over-software-as-a-service/ <comment><AUTHOR> Especially with the new trend of the toolset being a target now. It would be more favorable to keep as much control over the tool-sets as possible. When self-hosting tools one has better control over performance, monitoring, access restriction, and fine tuning.</comment>


How is Waza different than British Ruby Conference? - <AUTHOR>

How has Waza assembled and almost entirely white and male speaker lineup while escaping the furor that sunk the British Ruby Conference? And for the second year in a row at that? <comment> the-come-ons <https://waza.heroku.com/2013></comment>


Wikileaks on Twitter:pre-commitment 1: John Kerry - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/787777344740163584 <comment><USER3> For the record:

pre-commitment 1: John Kerry 4bb96075acadc3d80b5ac872874c3037a386f4f595fe99e687439aabd0219809

pre-commitment 2: Ecuador eae5c9b064ed649ba468f0800abf8b56ae5cfe355b93b1ce90a1b92a48a9ab72

pre-commitment 3: UK FCO f33a6de5c627e3270ed3e02f62cd0c857467a780cf6123d2172d80d02a072f74

</comment><comment><USER4> Can someone elaborate a little on what this is? What's a precommitment?

<comment><USER5> Wikileaks shared the SHA256 hash of a file they will release in the near future.

When the file is released, people will be able to download the file from Wikileaks and verify their file has the same SHA256 hash as the one in this tweet.

One benefit of doing this is it prevents people from claiming to be Wikileaks and leaking fake files. If someone claimed to be Wikileaks and released a fake set of emails, readers will know they are fake because the fakes will have a different* SHA256 hash than the one shared in this tweet.

(* Note it may be possible to generate two distinct files with the same SHA256 hash however due to the design of SHA256 this is extremely improbable).

<comment><USER6> Another reason for the pre-commit is it proves they're in possession now - <USER2> can be used to show you had something as of a certain date, without revealing what the something is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ecuador? Is this related to the Democrat emails?

</comment><comment><USER8> Hash? Key? What do we think this is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Coulf be any number of things, but likely a hash. Something similar was done prior to the accusations surrounding Jacob Appelbaum.

[https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/73523010215444889...](https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/735230102154448898)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_scheme](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_scheme)</comment></comment>


Email Senator Feinstein - <AUTHOR> https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-me

<comment><USER2> Calling is believed to have a greater impact than emailing. It's a lot easier to ignore an email, which involves passive interaction, rather than a phone call which is much more direct.

It may not be that beneficial to contact someone who isn't your own representative, too. I'm not saying not to do it in this case, but if you do so, contact your own Senators and Representative as well.</comment>


Show HN: Domain-tailored CRDTs for collaboration without server involvement - <AUTHOR> http://archagon.net/blog/2018/03/24/data-laced-with-history/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I wanted to research more elegant ways to enable document sync and collaboration in my apps sometime last year, and ended up discovering a new class of data structure that made it possible to build collaboration into documents right on the data level, completely separate from the network architecture. (Maybe you're already familiar with CRDTs. Well, these aren't just ordinary CRDTs, but almost _meta-CRDTs_ that can represent a variety of convergent data types in a generic way. They also make it super easy to implement things like past revision viewing and delta patches.) As a proof of concept, I built a basic real-time collaborative text editor for iOS that works equally well over regular iCloud sync, CloudKit Sharing, and offline, as well as a simple mesh network simulator for macOS that has support for collaborative text editing and simple Bézier editing.

The code is strictly educational for the time being, but I'm working on a Swift library that can hopefully put this stuff to use in real apps. Hope to start dog-fooding in release software by the end of the year!

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately I wouldn't expect a lot of substantive technical discussion for a post like this on HN -- this post will expire before anyone has time to read it properly and produce thoughtful responses.

(Which is broadly the problem with posting enormous applied CS-research braindumps to HN. Don't know a better place to do it, though. And I see people are upvoting you. Also, the absence of thoughtless responses is itself a great response.)

The key point here, as far as I can tell, is really building a CRDT system as a true platform layer, rather than as a one-off solution for a special-purpose app. I think it's fairly clear that _generic_ sync is a pretty essential part of a modern decentralized computing environment, and I don't think it's clear at all what the best way to solve it is.

But... it seems to me that you've solved a large piece of the problem but not the whole thing. Because the most important document sync and collaboration platform is, of course, source code control. If you have a document sync and collaboration model that doesn't at least generalize to classic revision control, why not?

Now, there's a sensible reason to separate these problems -- CRDT and OT solutions tend to specialize in the zero-maintenance case where a user- resolved merge is just impossible. Whereas if it was possible to build a zero- maintenance revision-control system, which automatically resolved all merges and conflicts, someone would have done so already.

This certainly suggests that the two are different problems. But generalizing across slight differences is what system software does. Maybe one is a special case of the other?

A generalized layer for lightweight collaboration is pretty powerful. But it certainly seems like the case that if you could generalize across lightweight collaboration and heavyweight revision control, you would have something that would be incredibly powerful.

Or is this too ambitious? I don't know so I'm asking you.

<comment><USER3> I suspect you could build such a thing if you could more rigidly define edit operations on source code files. The way we edit code now is roughly "insert/edit/delete string <x> at position <y>", which doesn't really carry enough context to auto-merge.

If edits carried all the semantic information of what they were doing to the source: "rename symbol <x> to <y> everywhere" "perform step <x> after step <y>", then we could probably build a zero-maintenance revision-control system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author is wondering why iCloud Sharing is used by so few developers; I will point out / remind that, in addition to fundamentally being an API whose usage implies "I will never be able to build an Android app which interoperates with this data" (which is already pretty damning for most developers as a door they don't want to permanently close), the first few releases of iCloud were so bad that documents and even entire clients would end up in permanently wedged states that developers could not fix for users and were so bad that at WWDC one year I remember the Apple iCloud person on stage during the "developer state of the union" talk apologizing for iCloud being so broken and begging the audience for another chance.

<comment><AUTHOR> While true, I don't think this explains the disparity between regular CloudKit use and CloudKit Sharing use. For example, this snippet from Apple's CloudKit paper[1] particularly struck me: "We identified the top apps using CloudKit, based on their number of active users in the past month, and examined their use of private and public databases. We found that 20% and 49% of the apps use only the public or the private database, respectively, and 31% of apps use both databases (20 apps use the shared database)."

So few apps from their sample set were using CloudKit Sharing that they didn't even bother using a percentage! That's quite unusual for an Apple framework.

[1]: [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p540-shraer.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol11/p540-shraer.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I admit that this revelation made some wily political thoughts cross my > mind. Could this be the chance to finally break free from the shackles of > cloud computing? It always felt like such an affront that our data had to > snake through a tangle of corporate servers in order to reach the devices > right next to us. We used to happily share files across applications and > even operating systems, and now everything was funneled through these > monolithic black boxes. What happened? How did we let computing become so > darn undemocratic? It had gotten so bad that we actually expected our > content and workflows to regularly vanish as companies folded or got > themselves acquired! Our digital assets—some our most valuable property—were > entirely under management of outside, disinterested parties.

This was such an enjoyable read!

</comment><comment><USER6> > Most obviously, users should be able to edit their documents immediately, > without even touching the network [...]

> The user should never be faced with a "pick the correct revision" dialog > box.

These two goals cannot be reconciled.

If we both synchronize a document with content and then we both go offline and we make conflicting edits then someone will have to resolve the conflict.

<comment><USER7> I think the author is ok with "one of the edits wins," so long as all users agree on the one that will win (without communicating.)

I'm still reading TFA, but this is probably the biggest reason I won't use this system as described. (I will copy any useful ideas, though, and keep it in mind for future projects.)

For my current project, it just doesn't make sense to blindly merge documents. The result will be broken, or worse -- valid but silently incorrect. Having changes you made and saw applied silently vanish is not acceptable to me, and I think having users resolve merge conflicts _might_ be. Not sure, I'm aiming at non-technical users...

We wouldn't accept this for code, though. If that is a principled stance, and not just a side-effect of traditional code syntax being brittle, we should wonder whether our users deserve the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice overview of the state of the art on CDRTs. Like the op, I agreed that we are more likely than not to see large clarity brought to the field thanks to the latest compsci research. In the future we may wonder how we lived without the ability to do distributed sync of data structures.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wonderful article, appreciate the detail. I've had great success in the past using event sourcing, so anything that is even remotely similar is always a fun read. Thanks!</comment>


Physical attractiveness bias in the legal system (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelawproject.com.au/insights/attractiveness-bias-in-the-legal-system <comment><USER2> I was interested to see the section, "A lawyer's physical attractiveness" \-- it reminded me of a few years ago when my wife was supporting a friend during a messy divorce by being present in court with her. Both parties' lawyers were women, but the husband (who had a lot more money) had hired a very sharp, very expensive, dressed-to-the-nines Manhattan lawyer. But the wife's lawyer was a relatively inexpensive lawyer from Long Island, comparatively unattractive and frumpily dressed. Obviously it helped that the Manhattan lawyer was very quick on her feet, but my wife commented at the time that "even from the way she was dressed, the Long Island lawyer didn't have a chance". It makes me sad how much of an influence money and appearances are in the justice system. Maybe all the lawyers and jurors should be literally blindfolded, like Lady Justice.

<comment><USER3> > Obviously it helped that the Manhattan lawyer was very quick on her feet, > but my wife commented at the time that "even from the way she was dressed, > the Long Island lawyer didn't have a chance".

This is one of those veeery subtle class things. People don't realise how much they signal to establishment institutions that they don't belong through through things like how they dress. And because they don't realise it they don't even know they're being disadvantaged.

I've seen people turn up to social events with what is very clearly to an insider the 'wrong type' of suit (wrong fabric, wrong cut, buttoned incorrectly, wrong shirt, wrong tie, wrong type of shoes), with people silently judging them, but they would have absolutely no idea how much they stand out and how they're being disadvantaged by it.

Hard to tackle because it's all silent, the victims are oblivious, and there's not really any concrete action you can point to and criticise.

<comment><USER4> The great thing about dressing one or two steps above a hobo is that if anyone cares you know they're an asshole.

<comment><USER5> It's not that simple though. I see it can help us cope better if we label them as assholes, but the fact remains that the filter is there and it is silent. Nobody will tell you these things to your face, you just go through life and never get told the insider infos that people with the right background get access to. And as others have written, faking it is almost impossible anyway. Even if you have your clothes perfectly, you won't have all the right manners and mannerisms, tone etc. As someone coming from Eastern European village folk I know I will most likely never be an insider to those circles in Wester Europe or America (lawyers, doctors, professors, intellectuals etc). I feel it in every little bit fancier dinner event (academia or industry) or other similar stuff that I'm a bumbling outsider. It's not just "assholes", normal people to whom these things come naturally judge you too.

But it's ok. I did learn in my upbringing that my only value will come from studying and skills and being useful. While rich upper class people are seen to have intrinsic value by belonging to the elite tribe, through a deep web of generation-bridging connections, us plebs must deliver and are only valuable as long as we produce.

Software development and CS are good areas for this, as it requires a lot of effort beyond theatricals and signaling and there is a lot of demand so the elite does pay us through their teeth because they have to, even if they resent our nature in their bones. Although there are definitely restrictive interpretations of "cultural fit" at certain tech companies. But even as an immigrant, work in tech is one of the best ways to a comfortable life. It can be materially comfortable, but integrating to the high circles is practically impossible. We must learn to embrace and find pride in who we are I guess and stop pretending. Being authentic may be a better choice even if it goes with sacrifices.

But overall, dismissing it as just assholes does not reach deep enough. It is an issue to grapple with and process. There is a silent glass ceiling for most of us and it's definitely even a lot lower than mine for many others.

<comment><USER5> Upon re-reading my post I think I have add that the concept of "elite" is tiered. I myself am part of a circle of white collar workers and get at least sometimes to fancy dinners where I'm not quite confused with the janitor etc. And even if I was born into the next higher class, there would be next higher circles I couldn't reach. Being, say,in a lawyer dynasty doesn't may not be enough for certain things, but I have to admit I don't know the distinguishing signals at those levels.

The point is that it may feel frustrating to feel excluded, but everyone feels that except multi-billionaires. I'd say therefore that after ensuring a Western middle-class level of comfort, the rest is mostly a mental game of accepting one's place, as there's always something higher that you can frustrate yourself over.

<comment><USER6> The point is that even a Western middle class level of comfort is beyond the reach of most of the population.

It would be interesting and possibly revealing to research the source class of tech workers to see how many don't come from a middle class background.

The only research I could find at short notice was this from the UK:

[https://www.bcs.org/media/1652/social-mobility- report.pdf](https://www.bcs.org/media/1652/social-mobility-report.pdf)

The UK and the US both have poorer social mobility than Europe, so the figures in the US are likely to be even lower than here.

<comment><USER5> > The point is that even a Western middle class level of comfort is beyond the > reach of most of the population

Depends on the country, and I'm not sure it's the same effect, ie not being able to pass culturally due to upbringing mismatch. Probably true for those growing up in very poor, crime ridden places where they can't learn the basic hygiene, punctuality etc needed for work.

As for social mobility, anecdotally, from who went where in my circles, tech and engineering are definitely higher in this than law and economics. Whatever is more concrete and harder to muddle the waters, is better suited for outsiders as a ladder. But the really big money is always in softer things but they a better gate-kept. I don't really think anyone tries to gatekeep the hard fields or trades too much. It's also why "the Polish plumber" is a meme. Easter European immigrants can take up such jobs and often reach a middle class income. I know many simple hardworking people who couldn't progress much due to cultural fit, but do make decent money in England/Germany etc. with physical work (like transporting stuff, setting up stages, cutting trees). Their kids do have a chance to enter the cultural middle class then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Generally, attractive people are perceived as more intelligent, more > socially skilled, more appealing personalities, __more moral __, more > altruistic, more likely to succeed, more hirable as managers, and more > competent.

I am always astonished by how much we humans mix how moral is someone and how horny that someone makes us.

And it works both ways. To tell someone that you are not attracted to them is perceived as a judgement of their value in society and morality. When we actually decide if we are horny for someone in just 1 second from a picture and zero knowledge about that person.

Many years ago, I worked for a company that hired the hot one instead of the competent one. And it was amazing to see the twisted justification. But, I believe that the hiring manager was not aware and was convinced that the decision was based on the bogus conclusions.

> Some researchers are skeptical that real jurors will have the same biases as > the studies in simulated juries.

I would expect even worse bias when you do not feel observed and you are not a student that may have knowledge about the concept of biased decisions.

<comment><USER8> I believe the science is, unfair as it might be, that more attractive people _are_ , on average, more intelligent, more socially skilled, more etc than the opposite.

What we find attractive has formed through eons of evolution, and we retain the preferences of those who managed to leave more descendants.

That's not the _same_ as being more intelligent etc, but it's not completely unrelated either.

<comment><USER9> There's also the simple fact that attractiveness is endogenous. An intelligent, hard-working person will realize that attractive people get treated better and work to make themself attractive.

<comment><USER8> Like I've heard several gorgeous people say:

"Do you think this _just happens_?"

<comment><USER10> To be fair, you also hear rich people inheriting money saying the same. Nobody wants their success to be based on the luck of the draw, everybody wants it to be because of their hard work and perseverance because otherwise it's not an accomplishment.

<comment><USER9> No one who has a full time job _and_ is in good shape, with well-maintained hair, healthy skin, and a nice wardrobe, stays that way by accident. It's a ton of work.

It comes more easily to some than others, but an hour at the gym is an hour at the gym, whether you enjoy it or not.

I say this as someone who mostly doesn't do the work, but I have plenty of friends and colleagues (and a spouse) who mostly do. It's effort and money and time and stress for them.

<comment><USER10> Sure, and there's probably some that you wouldn't ever notice as attractive if they didn't spend an hour on make-up and another hour on tuning their abs each day. But most of it is genetic lottery, not hard work.

The same is true for money. It's still work to turn a million dollars into two million, but it's not anywhere close to the work required to turn a dollar into a million dollars. But nobody wants to be successful because of a lottery, so they'll argue that their father gave them "a small loan of a million dollars" but they made it big themselves.

<comment><USER9> > But most of it is genetic lottery, not hard work.

The luck part isn't primarily about genetics [1], it's about whether you enjoy (or at least don't hate) the routines necessary to be attractive.

For instance: my wife sticks to a strict diet because she doesn't like having to make decisions about food. If you're lucky enough to be wired like her (I'm writing this next to an empty pizza box...), you can hit any goal weight and stay there. Our bathroom is covered in lotions and creams that she spends an hour applying before bed every night. I could not tell you their names, to say nothing of their purposes. She goes to the gym _every day_ except for planned rest days, and does a workout routine that was decided on weeks ahead of time. I maybe go for a jog, if I remember to and I'm feeling up to it.

I've tried copying what she does, and I can't even stick to it for a day. But most women I know do some version of this, and all of the really attractive men do, too.

[1] sure, it is possible to really lose the genetic lottery, but unless you would've been a 19th century circus freak, the bottleneck is probably how hard you're trying, not your genetics

<comment><USER11> You can be highly attractive and not very fit. And you definitely don't need to have a skin care routine to be considered attractive.

I'd also argue that there is a feedback loop, i.e. attractive people are told they're attractive starting at a young age, and so a large part of their self- esteem comes from being attractive, so they feel more pressure to do the things you mention, i.e. skin care, working out.

<comment><USER9> Definitely agree that there's a feedback loop and strong long-term effect of initial level of natural attractiveness when you're young.

One of the advantages of not starting out on the "is attractive -> gets self- esteem from attractiveness -> tries to be more attractive" cycle is that as you get older you don't feel like you're losing anything. It's no fun when you're young, but that's a small minority of most people's lives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Liking What You See: A Documentary" is an excellent short story by Ted Chiang (these days best known for the story behind the film "Arrival") about this topic.

In the story, a highly-targeted brain treatment exists that can make it so that one is unable to perceive physical attractiveness. The story explores the ethics of such a treatment.

Here is a pdf, but if you like it, I highly recommend supporting the author and getting both of his collections, "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation". You won't regret it.

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnvgBqIgJ:https://canvas.wayne.edu/courses/102861/files/3959556/download%3Fdownload_frd%3D1+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d)

<comment><USER13> Someone should write a story about speakism, judging a message based on how it's said instead of the content of the message. They can posit some AI that extracts the facts from each person's message and removes how it was expressed. This would be see to help people who are not proficient in the local language, people who have accents that are perceived as less intelligent/trustworthy, people who deliver their message in harsh ways (Linus was apparently an example)

<comment><USER12> That exact topic actually comes up in the story I linked.

SPOILERS BELOW (though knowing doesn't really detract from the story)

In the story, one of the central discussions is the debate to make the procedure mandatory for students at a college campus. The procedure is non- invasive and reversible, similar tot an MRI or something.

Fearing that this sort of public debate will spread, a cosmetics lobbying firm (who wants to maintain the status quo) publishes a video with a persuasive counter-argument.

It is later revealed that the video had been manipulated by software "capable of fine-tuning paralinguistic cues in order to maximize the emotional response evoked in viewers. This dramatically increases the effectiveness of recorded presentations."

Some people get a further brain tweak to mitigate this effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Disclaimer: I've only read the 'Key takeaways' in the article.

Should we consider a system where the judge and jury do not see the defendant (and suer if applicable) in the pursuit of objectivity? I think the bias towards attractive people is quite obvious in so many spheres of life. For employment, for the way people treat you as a customer, colleague or day-to- day, for housing, etc. We are actively fighting many -ism in (rational) societies, but "unattractivism" is more taboo. I am not sure what the solution would be at societal level. My feeling is that a societal movement for this inclusion is more unlikely than the other ones, but that would require to acknowledge an implicit scale of attractiveness which is divisive in the first place (as opposed to gender, sexual orientation, ethicity, religion, etc which are either obvious or self-decided). But I could be misreading the situation obviously.

The judicial system is different, and with radically impactful consequences, you do not have to eliminate human bias (which probably isn't even possible), you just have to make the decision-maker blind just like peer-reviewed papers. While we can't really hide identity for employment or housing, but a judge and juree do not need to know the name or see the person. To go further, please could be read by impartial narrator which would also take care of emotional bias (should a good actor have a more lenient sentence?). In a way, the justice system should seek ultimate objectivity for the sake of fairness. On the flipside however, it would have a dehumanizing effect on the deciders to have zero connection with the convicted and perhaps lead to an increase in sentencing lengths, which I'm not particularly in favor of.

<comment><USER15> I actually just finished a stint of jury duty last week and got picked for 2 trials. A couple of observations:

1\. One of the trials was an underage rape case and there was essentially no physical evidence. Mainly all we had to go on was 3 police interviews (2 from the alledged victim, one from the accused). As a jury, we relied on those videos to determine who we felt was telling the truth and the trust worthiness of what they were saying. I'm not saying this was a good thing necessarily, just an observation that this is what we did. I'd like to see the results with a parallel jury that relied only on written transcripts etc.

2\. The judge actually gave us guidance at the beginning of both trials that in addition to what witnesses said, how they appeared to us (their demeanour) was also evidence that we could use in assessing the trust-worthiness of what they said. My understanding was that we should use our general life experience that we had acquired in our day to day living to assess the evidence of the witness. I guess there are good sides (eg. intuition based on non-verbal communication/body language) and bad sides (eg. biases) to using this approach.

<comment><USER16> This might be a silly question, but how come there was no evidence?

I thought that the hard part with persecuting (adult) rape is that the physical act is the same as sex - so there's no "obvious" proof that the crime even happened (like a dead body), only different interpretations of _why_ sex happened.

That goes away if it's _statutory_ rape, where even just sex is evidence of crime.

<comment><USER15> So she claimed she had been raped while sleeping over at a friend's house by the father of the friend. He claimed it never happened. She only told her mother and step-father around 2-3 weeks afterwards about it.

She was forced (she was not able to choose) to take pregnancy rejection medication but refused/declined to have a physical examination/rape kit done (she had a choice in this). So essentially there was no physical evidence (in the trial at least) that sex had ever occurred. Also, the trial was taking place around 6 years after the alledged incident.

What we did have was a very detailed, consistent, plausible, and compelling recount of events leading up to, during, and after the rape from the 13 year old victim in a police interview about a month after it occured and also another interview around 2 years later. Watching the interviews, and based on the type emotion she showed at particular points, the language (including body language) she used to describe the events etc it was difficult to not believe her, it was in fact heart breaking to watch and listen to.

I guess my point is that all that "soft" information that we received from the video recorded interview was indeed information that we used to assess whether we thought she was telling the truth or not or whether she was coached or was making it up, for whatever reason. We were in fact instructed by the judge to use that information to make our assessment whether there was reasonable doubt or not.

I'm not sure how you separate this type of information from other information we also receive eg. the physical attractiveness of the accused and defendant and how the legal system can remove this type of bias. Based on other comments here, I'm also no longer sure about whether we, as a jury, should be using that soft information, and I'd love to see results from studies about how juries assess evidence when it is presented in different ways as suggested here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me when I once remarked that Elon Musk's various procedures to change his appearance likely were an ROI of >1,000x for him and have probably increased his net worth by billions if not tens of billions of dollars, just by making him seem more attractive.

It's unfortunate that appearances are always so important, but it's definitely ingrained deeply into reality. Also see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect)

<comment><USER18> One wonders how much wealthier Bezos would be if he had the same procedures done.

<comment><USER17> He definitely started eating and exercising better. I personally think he looks great for his role.

<comment><USER19> lol yes he started eating and exercising better... and taking supra- physiological amounts of testosterone. he had a second puberty in his 50s that was more androgenic than the one he had in his teens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ted Chiang (wonderfully talented sci-fi author, wrote the story Arrival was based on) wrote this great short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" that explores a device that causes people not to see physical attractiveness, by inducing something like prosopagnosia (a medical condition where people can't recognize faces) in the wearers. It's written in short snippets of people arguing for or against device and whether it should be mandatory. It didn't consider the legal system angle though!

<comment><USER21> PDF: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnvgBqIgJ:https://canvas.wayne.edu/courses/102861/files/3959556/download%3Fdownload_frd%3D1+&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's kind of funny that the article, and most, if not all of the comments imply that basing sentencing on physical attractiveness is "unfair".

Yet our current society tends to consider it completely fair that success should be a function of IQ.

IQ is no less a given than face symmetry. Grit too. Nothing's "fair".

<comment><USER23> Giving an IQ test for a job is illegal.

<comment><USER24> > Giving an IQ test for a job is illegal.

No, it's not. Using any criteria that creates substantial disadvantage to a protected class is illegal if you can't show a sufficiently close nexus to bona fide job requirements/performance, which happened to be found to be the case with the IQ test that was adopted as a direct replacement for overt racial discrimination in the _Duke Energy_ case. But the _legal_ rule that comes from that case is not "IQ tests are illegal", and in fact IQ tests are used in a number of places in hiring (including, as became notorious in another case where the practice was upheld, being used where a score _above_ a threshold was disqualifying in a particular police department.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> DC-3 It's funny, in a society with an intellectual obsession with recognising and deconstructing systems of privilege, we largely overlook what is possibly the single most powerful inborn advantage one can have - attractiveness. It's rightly considered abhorrent that people could be treated unequally based on their race or gender, but I think that we are on some level accepting of the fact that attractive people have it easier in almost every field of endeavor.

<comment><USER25> Someone, I think Sonja Starr, did a series of studies on racial bias on sentencing. Unsurprisingly, it existed. Here's the shocker: the male versus female bias on sentencing was _enormous_ by comparison, using the same methodology.

I remember a very left forum in which someone bemoaned that one out of four homeless are women, and that's why we should care about homelessness.

Overall, I have begun to look at _which_ privileges are examined and which are ignored as the real three card monte.

<comment><USER26> > I remember a very left forum in which someone bemoaned that one out of four > homeless are women

That sounds like an extreme mischaracterization. The concern about homeless women is the extra suffering the endure at the hands (and other parts) of homeless (and other) men.

Much worse is the horrific (and never retracted) Washington Post article fretting that murder at work is a female epidemic because _even though men are murdered_ _more_ often than women at work, men die so much in other ways that murders of men aren't important*.

It was absolutely gobsmacking to read the utter disregard for men's lives.

"more men are murdered on the job than women. But that's because [450%] more men are killed on the job overall."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/27/murde...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/27/murder- is-second-most-likely-way-for-women-to-die-at-work/)

<comment><USER25> Nope. That was the thrust of their argument: we should care about the homeless because some of them were women. I've seen it elsewhere, there's even some handy samples on imgur if you search for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This reminds me of another study that showed that "90% of CEOs are of above average height." (source below)

I also wonder if the WFH revolution will reduce the advantage a tall, handsome guy has over a more productive, short guy.

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

<comment><USER28> Interestingly if you account for height discrimination, it causes women to be _over-represented_ in management roles, implying that what's normally ascribed to sex discrimination is really height discrimination and the sex discrimination, if anything, goes the other way. A 5'6" man is less likely to be in management than a 5'6" woman.

It also implies that if we solved height discrimination there would be a lot more female CEOs.

<comment><USER29> " A 5'6" man is less likely to be in management than a 5'6" woman."

Maybe a better way to put it, an 'average height female is more likely to be in management than a below-average height male'.

<comment><USER28> 5'6" is the average height in the US, so they're both of average height. Someone engaged in height discrimination and not sex discrimination is, by definition, looking at their height and not their sex.

<comment><USER30> This website says 5ft 9in for men:

[https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men- and-w...](https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-women/)

Based on my life experiences in the US, I would not believe half of all adult males were below 5ft 6in.

<comment><USER28> > Based on my life experiences in the US, I would not believe half of all > adult males were below 5ft 6in.

That's because they're not. The average height of adults in the US is 5'6" and half of them are women.

<comment><USER30> Oh, oops, I thought you meant men.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is an unfortunate reality in most aspects of life. Physical attractiveness _does_ matter, and has many advantages. Whether in job interviews, relationships (non-romantic ones too!), performance assessments or even the judiciary system: attractive people are seen more favorably.

<comment><USER32> Ask any girl and they will say that people who wants to be friends with them greatly depends on the current attractiveness of her. I think it is less true for males, but nonetheless I feel like there is correlation.

<comment><USER33> I think males are subjected to the same appearance biases, but it's not necessarily pure attractiveness. Height and size, for example.

<comment><USER32> I still think the effect of attractiveness on female-female friendship is much much more than male-male friendship. I don't know if there is some known theory or reason for it, but you can see in a group of female friends, the attractiveness level is in similar range more often than not(of course speaking from anecdotes, nothing to prove).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wow, a huge effect on sentencing (fine amounts, prison term lengths) but _no_ effect on conviction rate? That seems hard to believe.

If true, it means that this bias could be fairly straightforward to correct in theory, though in practice I doubt people would accept the necessity or fairness of such corrections.

<comment><USER35> With the exception of mandatory minimums, sentencing usually is broadly subjective with judges having significant leeway. In contrast, convictions are based on juries who are provided strict instructions on how they must arrive at a verdict. Swaying the judge can you get you lighter sentencing but has no impact on the verdict.

<comment><USER34> Of course that's how it works in theory. I'm just surprised (and encouraged) to find that it appears to be true in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This should be obvious to anyone who isn't gifted with top ~10% looks. Not just in the legal system but in the way the really attractive just have things easier. The person who just smiles and avoids trouble, etc.

</comment><comment><USER37> A huge confounding factor is that socio-economic status and life history can significantly affect attractiveness.

For example, in the US at least, a lot of people consider having nice, straight teeth attractive. But getting there requires good dental care and perhaps orthodontics such as braces which can be expensive. Thus, not only are straight teeth attractive, they can be a signal of socio-economic status.

Another thing is that life situations alter attractiveness. For example, I have seen people who were attractive once, but after a few years of using meth, they would not be described as attractive by a lot of people.

Also, in at least one of the studies, photos of the criminal were used to judge attractiveness. These may have been mugshots. However, how someone looks on mugshots can be significantly different if one has been living on the street for sometime vs living in a wealthy home, and their lawyer arranged their client to turn themselves in to the police.

</comment><comment><USER38> Physical bias is inherent in everything. All human interaction.

Being "beautiful" or "ugly" can be a pro, it can be a con, it can lead to jealousy. Awkwardness, feeling low self-esteem, confidence, tension, etc. A lot of it is subjective.

We're animals, and we often forget that fact. We try to normalize as much as possible to remove these biases (thankfully), but it's completely impossible to remove outright.

I'm waiting for the day we have Matrix-like capabilities and can change our avatar on a whim. :)

<comment><USER39> Totally true, but physical bias should not be a factor in the legal system.

<comment><USER38> The only way to completely remove it is to present and rule on cases blind.

But even then, a lot depends on judges' and juries' emotional variance throughout the day. Did they have a meal that gave them indigestion?

It's imperfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> A coworker came back from jury duty. She said, "He was totally guilty." "How do you know?" "Because his lawyer had greasy hair and shifty eyes." "So he was guilty because his lawyer looked untrustworthy?" "Yes" "Okay..."

</comment><comment><USER41> This reminds me of a study of cases where judges pre-screened cases looking at the evidence and charges without ever seeing the defendant or demographics about them and predicted the outcome. Their expected verdicts and sentencing was far more uniform and _accurate_ (taking appeals into account) than the in- person trials that followed.

</comment><comment><USER29> Welcome to the real world?

This is in everything.

That said, you don't want to be _too_ attractive - rather, nice symmetry, good proportions, healthy looking, but generally not attractive like a model.

Height and even girth for men, but only height for women as weight is a negative for them (I'm loathed to find the source for this, sorry).

One of the only fields where 'well turned out' folks are naturally viewed with scepticism ironically is software! Either by way of reason (ie nobody who spends that much time looking good has spent enough time on algorithms!) or by jealousy (ie it's unfair that this attractive person is as smart as me!) I think we tend to love 'true geek' flair. It's probably mostly a healthy bias ...

Edit: I should add 'nice teeth'. Seriously, 'nice teeth' are the ultimate mark of class in an ostensibly classless society. Like in the UK, the oddly huge variety of accents immediately projects one's origin (and thus class, however totally unfair it seems to be that way, at very least subconsciously), 'perfect teeth' are generally uncommon in nature, more likely it means one's parents could afford the $5K in braces etc. for their kids, which is still not entirely widespread. It's not something I think we think of consciously, but my gosh 'nice teeth' make a really 'nice smile' and it has such a big social impact without us ever really realising it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Another think that affects justice system is blood sugar.

Court rulings depend partly on when the judge last had a snack [https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2011/04/14/...](https://www.economist.com/science-and- technology/2011/04/14/i-think-its-time-we-broke-for-lunch)

The paper: Extraneous factors in judicial decisions www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1018033108

<comment><USER43> I think that one was debunked, cases weren't scheduled randomly.

<comment><USER44> Yes:

[https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833](https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833)

[https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly- hungry-...](https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/07/impossibly-hungry- judges.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The only section I needed to read was "causation". Essentially, there's no evidence that this is a causal effect of attractiveness on sentencing, and there are many alternative explanations available.

So do an RCT please.

<comment><USER46> If you lead a tough life of crime or had an abusive childhood that led you to crime, etc - I would expect it to be hard on your body - and looks.

Whenever I see correlation assumed to be causation I like to wonder why they excluded causation in the other direction. In this case, maybe sentencing someone heavily is hard on their looks, and we know once you go to jail you're likely to reoffend, and that continues, until you have the correlation you observe, perhaps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> My opinions are quite controversial, but I think that for most jobs, interviews should be conducted fully in text, through a platform that doesn't reveal anything about the interviewed. This is the only way to combat this kind of bias in recruitment, where it exists too. Teaching people not to discriminate is just the beginning. Changing the system to make discrimination impossible is much, much more important.

<comment><USER48> How do you see cultural match and the person's mentality that way? Many brilliant engineers simply wouldn't fit into my team and would be a net negative. Most of the time it's obvious to the person being interviewed too, but how would we know if we don't talk about non-technical things or don't even see each other or talk at all?

<comment><USER49> Would it help if the work itself were also done fully remotely using only text? I'm with miki123211 on this.

<comment><USER48> However it is not, at least not if we are talking about (agile) software engineering and related disciplines that other team members do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I find it surprising that, according to the article, attractiveness affects the severity of the sentence, but not whether someone is judged innocent or guilty. If the former is true, the latter seems too good to be true.

If both _are_ true, it's fascinating. We should then research the mechanism that makes judgements more fair, and see if we can't change the way the sentence is determined to match that.

<comment><USER29> It is fascinating because the notion of guilt may be difficult to apprehend.

It could be that the investigation of guilt is very carefully pursued, with a lot of rules, a lot of evidence.

It could also be that for 'most cases' the outcome is actually fairly straight foward?

Also, once someone is found to be 'guilty' \- then we are free to 'loathe and pity then'. Whereas guilt/innocence is mostly a black and white affair, subject to objective guidance ... the sentencing may not be, which is to say, it's maybe hard to reference 'what is a little and what is a lot' in any given scenario, so are bias are more likely to run free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> These are eye opening results: minimum 2X to almost 4X increase in fine for unattractive people! In a way attractiveness plays out everywhere starting from college admissions to careers to finding mate. We don't want to admit it but then we are fighting against biology and evolution. I guess it doesn't matter what other attributes one has in long run. Evolution doesn't care anything but propagating the best genes which apparently attractiveness is a statistical proxy.

Another irony: Virtually every object of value in modern world is made by scientists and engineers but guess who is million times more worshiped, popular, paid, followed, protected and cared about: actors! Most actors simply act out a scene someone else designed, someone else shot, someone else wrote, someone else directed. None of the behind the scene people matter much or even get fraction of a credit because they are often not as attractive as these puppets to put on the screen. That's humanity for you in its raw form.

<comment><USER24> > Virtually every object of value in modern world is made by scientists and > engineers but guess who is million times more worshiped, popular, paid, > followed, protected and cared about: actors!

Not really. It just seems that way because of the a tiny, highly visible slice at the top of the field. The 2018 median pay for an actor was $20.43/hr, there were only 64,500 of them working in 2018, and there's about 1% projected 10 year growth in the field.

[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and- sports/mobile/acto...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and- sports/mobile/actors.htm)

The median pay for a software developer in 2018 was $50.77/hr, there's almost 1.4 million of them, and there's 21% projected 10 year growth in the field.

[https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/...](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information- technology/mobile/software-developers.htm)

> None of the behind the scene people matter much or even get fraction of a > credit because they are often not as attractive as these puppets to put on > the screen.

Directors, Producers, Screenwriters, and Composers, among others, often are as prominently, or nearly so, credited as stars, paid quite well, and quite well known; definitely moreso than non-star actors.

And star actors very often have a _much_ bigger impact on productions than just presenting what others have written, actively shaping their characters and often other parts of the production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> "Attractive people tend to have better physical health, better mental health, better dating experiences, earn more money, obtain higher career positions, chosen for jobs more often, promoted more often, receive better job evaluations, and chosen as business partners more often, than unattractive people."

Could some of those correlate with things relevant in court? Prior criminal history, for example? (That explicitly and deliberately _does_ factor into sentencing, where the main difference is reported.) Are they controlled for? The article doesn't use the word "control" or "history". I only see a couple of studies about mock juries, where the subjects are merely given a photograph and a packet to read, which _does_ control for everything (except for details that the subject's imagination is left to fill in).

</comment><comment><USER53> If you haven't read "Liking What You See", a short story by Ted Chiang, do yourself a favor and check it out. It is one of the most interesting works of fiction focused entirely on this subject. It is part of the book "Stories of Your Life and Others".

</comment><comment><USER54> Eventually we'll have an equality movement for the very real effects attractiveness / unattractiveness have on things like job performance. It will be a more subtle equality movement than civil rights, gay rights, trans rights, but it will happen.

<comment><USER55> Already happened. Kurt Vonnegut described it in Harrison Bergeron.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> So many people in this discussion seem to think that "attractiveness" is a scalar value. This makes no sense to me. Quite apart from this being highly subjective (different people having different opinions) I couldn't even state my own opinion on something so vague. If you asked me which of two people is most "attractive", I wouldn't know what's meant. If you asked me which looks more intelligent, or more friendly, or more trustworthy, or more healthy, or more fun, I could perhaps give some kind of answer, but, seriously, what is "attractive" supposed to mean?

<comment><USER57> It sounds like you have a kind of impairment in this regard. Most of us don't need anyone else to define 'attractive' for us. It is something we all feel when we see a face that represents certain ideals of aesthetics. For me it is a small round flat doll-like face with large widely spaced and elongated and ideally slightly upturned eyes close to the edge of her face. When a girl has a face like that I feel a kind automatic love for her. I think that is what it really is: a kind of aesthetically based instant love. Every time you find someone attractive it is a variant of love at first sight differing only in degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> "Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society." \- Mark Twain

Mostly a joke, but also completely true. We are physical beings in a visual world. The way you present yourself matters.

</comment><comment><USER59> Makes me think of this SNL sketch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvgBKO7CGzY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvgBKO7CGzY)

</comment><comment><USER60> This got me thinking of the connection to ageism. Sure, a younger person might be hired over an older candidate for reasons that are legitimate: maybe the more senior person wants too much money, or maybe the hiring powers-that-be want to bring in someone who can "grow with the company".

But occasionally, I suspect these reasons become convenient excuses to go with the younger, more attractive, reasonably-qualified candidate.

</comment><comment><USER61> The article mentions that felonies did not produce a sentencing bias. Perhaps this is because sentencing guidelines for more severe crimes are also more closely defined by the points of the case and judges have less latitude in sentencing. If so, could other forms of bias be mitigated by providing additional guidelines for sentencing in those cases? Do they simply suffer from lack of attention to the guidelines?

</comment><comment><USER62> Hmmmm... physical attractiveness is highly subjective. What was the methodology for determining it? I didn't see it in the article.

And physical attractiveness can vary by setting. Dressing business professional helps attractiveness in a court room, but if you were dressed like a stripper, you might still be highly attractive, but cause a negative perception in the court room.

<comment><USER63> > physical attractiveness is highly subjective

There's always sociocultural dependencies and personal preferences, but beauty can certainly be quantified. Facial symmetry, body proportions, etc.

Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but only up to a point. There are some markers that, when you increase or improve them, objectively increase beauty.

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

<comment><USER62> There are trends in what is considered attractive, but I would imagine you're looking at a +/\- 30% variability.

Would love to know how these studies measured it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Looking for something unrelated (retcons), I somehow ended up in this TV Tropes article that contains quite a few examples relevant to this topic: [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeautyEqualsGood...](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BeautyEqualsGoodness)

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, after all the professional, personal, and legal information that's been related here, I feel pretty badly. Is it really that important to go get plastic surgery? I exercise and take care of myself, but have an exceptionally asymmetric face, so might it improve my prospects personally and professionally?

<comment><USER9> Ignore the studies and anecdata. Attractiveness is substantially a reflection of personality, so it's hard to disentangle them in studies and anecdotes.

Being unattractive can be superficial, or point to deeper issues. In general it'll hold you back to the degree that it points to deeper issues, because people mostly won't care if your face is a bit asymmetrical if they can depend on you and you are pleasant to be with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Really hate to be the overanalyzer here, but just wondering how is physical attractiveness defined in these studies?

And was charisma considered as a variable?

(I'm just thinking of the courtroom scene in "My Cousin Vinny". Joe Pesci is not conventionally good looking but has a personality that is very persuasive)

<comment><USER66> There are many scientific studies.

For all the variables, check table 1 of the following for "Zero-order Pearson's correlations between facial appearance and health, with the corresponding p-values and sample sizes":

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5290736/)

If you want more example for a given variable, for example the effect of adiposity (we know it's quadratic), read one of the original papers:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6308207/)

All this is well known now, as the first study was about 22 years ago:

Perrett, D. I., Lee, K. J., Penton-Voak, I., Rowland, D., Yoshikawa, S., Burt, D. M., … Akamatsu, S. (1998). Effects of sexual dimorphism on facial attractiveness. Nature, 394(6696), 884–887. doi:10.1038/29772

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> If curious see also this similar thread from 3 weeks ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23821125](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23821125)

</comment><comment><USER68> Wonder if this controls for severity of the crime? It could be the case that attractive people don't tend to commit crimes as serious (within each category, ie misdemeanor)

</comment><comment><USER69> What about tech? Are physically attractive software engineers more likely to receive jobs and promotions than engineers of equivalent skills and experience?

<comment><USER70> Almost certainly yes, unless tech is different from the job market at large.

An interesting point on attractiveness in the job market is that people who are extremely unattractive tend to also perform very well. It's mildly unattractive people who do the worst. My pet theory is extremely unattractive people have to work their asses off to make enough money to be sexually competitive in any way.

<comment><USER71> Exceptions stand out from the crowd, good and bad. If you are a competent dev, nobody cares about that if no one notices you.

If people notice you, they'll next notice if you are competent or not.

<comment><USER72> This carries the assumption that competence is something that is purely objective. I find it more likely that what is perceived as competence is still subject to bias.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> The bias does not exist only in the legal system...

<comment> site-packages1 No one made the claim that it did exist only in the legal system. This article is just about bias in the legal system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> It's wack as hell to go along with this kind of judgment and then just shrug and say "that's how it is!"

</comment><comment><USER75> It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. \- Leo Tolstoy

</comment><comment><USER76> Not sure how this was done but this needs a 2017 tag. Old paper.

</comment><comment><USER77> I wonder how much of it is the DA team as opposed to the judge.

</comment><comment><USER78> Correlation is not causation.</comment>