Manage Kubernetes Clusters on AWS Using Kops - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/kubernetes-clusters-aws-kops/ <comment><USER2> The Kubernetes team has been doing a lot of work to make these admin tools less and less necessary. More and more pieces of it can be run from within K8s itself. For example etcd used to need to be set up and managed externally, now it's just inside. And extensions are growing up too; see CRD's in 1.7.

And unlike setup & management tools, it appears that we have a clear "winner" for K8s app management: helm. And there's more overlap than you'd expect. For instance I recently typed "helm install prometheus" and not only did it install prometheus but it installed it with all the hooks necessary to monitor the K8s cluster.

I'm not sure why I can't do the same to get an elasticsearch, logstash & kibana stack (or similar competing stack) set up as a cluster logging solution. AFAICT right now you have to have the right flags set on your kubelet startup script to do this, but that's the sort of thing that I hope & believe that K8s is making better.

And setting up a glusterfs cluster to use as a storage provider also did a surprising amount of its setup in k8s.

Obviously K8s setup can't quite be reduced to a simple `apt-get install kubelet`, but hopefully eventually it isn't much more.

<comment><USER3> 100% agreed and looking forward to that - kops is a big part of that effort, actually. If you look under the hood you'll see that kops uses a lot of the kubernetes apimachinery. There's obviously a tricky chicken & egg situation with first creating a cluster specifically, but the hope is that a lot of the post-installation activities you do with kopscould be done through kubectl (e.g. adding groups of nodes of a different instance type) , talking to those same kops API objects on the k8s apiserver. The apimachinery team has been doing great work to enable this, that seems to have to fruition in k8s 1.7.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's such a pity that AWS don't offer a managed Kubernetes cluster as a service.

Our team has "wasted" a fair bit of time researching and implementing all the bits and pieces to build pre-prod prod Kubernets environments, whereas Azure (and obviously) GCE's out of the box solutions make it so much easier.

<comment><USER5> It would be nice, but it's easy to see why they don't.

Assuming the customer set that wants a supported orchestration tool, it would allow those AWS customers to more easily leave for Azure or GCE. Perhaps more importantly, it would allow existing customers to have credible on-prem dev, test, or disaster environments.

When you have the sort of market share AWS has, there's no real incentive to open those doors. I suspect this won't change until/if this market is more balanced.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps for some AWS services (ECS, etc). But I would still stay on amazon for all the other surrounding services that are crucial, SQS, S3, occasionally DynamoDB, Lambda.

I would love to have managed k8s on amazon. It wouldn't move me away because of all those surrounding technologies.

<comment><USER5> That's a good point, though there are on-prem and "other vendor" api compatible services for some of those, like S3.

Minio, for example: [https://github.com/minio/minio](https://github.com/minio/minio) or Google's cloud storage. Both are compatible with the S3 api.

<comment><USER7> It's only a matter of time until these AWS primative replacements are mature within Kubrnetes, which is definitely a good thing.

AWS is wonderful, but you always have to have tooling ready to not be held hostage by a vendor. And any vendor will hold you hostage once they have enough market dominance or enough of your business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is anyone here running k8s in production with kops? Are there any missing pieces that require "manual" work, like rotating certificates? How feasible is it to run, say, 30 clusters out of the box with a 2-person team?

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the kops authors, and I will say that a _lot_ of people run k8s clusters created by kops in production - I don't want to name others, but feel free to join sig-aws or kops channels in the kubernetes slack and ask there and I'm sure you'll get lots of reports. In general kops makes it very easy to get a production-suitable cluster; there shouldn't be any manual work required other than occasionally updating kops & kubernetes (which kops makes an easy process).

But: we don't currently support rotating certificates. There used to be a bug in kubernetes which made "live" certificate rotation impossible, but that bug has now been fixed so it's probably time to revisit it. We create 10 year CA certificates, so it isn't something that you have to do other than just good security practice though.

If you file an issue ([https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/issues](https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/issues)) for certificate rotation and any other gaps / questions we'll get to them!

<comment><USER9> How do you handle that kubernetes requires the eth0 ip in no_proxy? Do you set that automatically?

How do you handle that DNS in a corp net can get weird and for instance in Ubuntu 16.04 the NetworkManager setting for dnsmasq needs to be deactivated?

How do you report dying nodes due to kernel version and docker version not being similar?

Do you report why pods are pending?

Does kops wait until a sucessful health check before it reports a successful deployment (in contrast to helm which reports success when the docker image isn't even finished pulling)?

Do you run any metrics on the cluster to see if everything is working fine?

Edit: Sorry to disturb the kops marketing effort, but some people still hope for a real, enterprise ready solution for k8s instead of just another fluff added on a shaky foundation.

<comment><USER3> kops is an open source project that is part of the kubernetes project, we're all working to solve these things as best we can. Some of these issues are not best solved in kops; for example we don't try to force a particular monitoring system on you. That said I'm also a kubernetes contributor so I'll try to quickly answer:

* no_proxy - kops is getting support for servers that use http_proxy, but I think your issue is a client issue with kubectl proxy and it looks like it is being investigated in #45956. I retagged (what I think are) the right folks.

* DNS, docker version/kernel version: if you let kops it'll configure the AMI / kernel, docker, DNS, sysctls, everything. So in that scenario everything should just work, because kops controls everything. Obviously things can still go wrong, but I'm much more able to support or diagnose problems with a kops configuration where most things are set correctly, than a general scenario.

* why pods are pending: `kubectl describe pod` shows you why. Your "preferred alerting system" could be more proactive though.

* metrics are probably best handled by a monitoring system, and you should install your preferred system after kops installs the cluster. We try to only install things in kops that are required to get to the kubectl "boot prompt". Lots of options here: prometheus, sysdig, datadog, weave scope, newrelic etc.

* does kops wait for readiness: actually not by default - and this does cause problems. For example, if you hit your AWS instance quota, your kops cluster will silenty never come up. Similarly if your chosen instance type isn't available in your AZ. We have a fix for the latter and are working on the former. We have `kops validate` which will wait, but it's still too hard when something goes wrong - definitely room for improvement here.

In general though - where there are things you think we could do better, do open an issue on kops (or kubernetes if it's more of a kubernetes issue)!

<comment><USER9> Nice, thanks. My feeling is that this is about 75% of what we want and thereby may really be the best solution there is, right now. I'll bring your responses into my next team meeting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've setup a handful of K8s cluster on AWS, some of them using Kops. I would say it's the easiest time I've had, and it's what I chose for production. My only real complaint is that it requires extremely broad IAM permissions. Great tool, and a good community.

<comment><USER11> I know scoping the permissions is something they've been working on: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/issues/1873](https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/issues/1873)

</comment></comment><comment> Pirate-of-SV If you're using (or want to use) Terraform and consider running k8s on AWS take a look at tectonic-installer[1] and its `vanilla_k8s` setting. My opinion is that it's far better than kops `-target=terraform` output. It's also using CoreOS rather than Debian which seems reasonable.

[1] [https://github.com/coreos/tectonic- installer](https://github.com/coreos/tectonic-installer)

<comment><USER12> Isn't Tectonic also based on kubeadm and Terraform? Kops and Tectonic felt very similar to me.

<comment><USER13> Tectonic is built on Terraform but is not based on kubeadm. However, a Tectonic vanilla k8s cluster may be similar to a kubeadm one since they both leverage Bootkube to provide self-hosted k8s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently started testing kubernetes using kops and was pleasantly surprised how explicit it was about exactly what changes it would make in AWS. If you get past the testing phase and want to use it conjunction with your existing production infrastructure, I found AWS's VPC peering to be a handy way to let your k8s cluster talk with existing services while keeping the kops-created VPC separately managed.

<comment><USER15> the dedicated VPC approach definitely works. But, in case you weren't aware, kops can launch a cluster in an existing vpc pretty trivially.

1\. create your cluster specifying the existing VPC id and CIDR. do not use the --yes flag (I'm not sure the VPC cidr is really even used with this approach)

2\. edit the cluster definition (kops edit cluster xxxxxxxxx) and just change the subnet CIDRs to whatever nonexistant ones you would like for kops to create and use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We wrote a similar guide a few months back at Datawire.io ([https://www.datawire.io/guide/infrastructure/setting- kuberne...](https://www.datawire.io/guide/infrastructure/setting-kubernetes- aws/))

It's a little bit out of date now but we're working on an updated version that deals with managing upgrades, CI/CD for infrastructure and adding other pieces of cloud infrastructure in a way that the Kube cluster can access it seamlessly.

<comment><USER15> can you comment on why you suggest using a public route53 hosted zone? Using a public rather than a private zone always felt pretty dirty to me.

<comment><USER16> Reducing friction. At the time private zones in Kops were more of a PITA to setup and I would have had to explain a bunch more stuff in the article.

I might look at that again when I redo the guide. Also considering switching to the new Gossip based discovery mechanism so that Route 53 isn't even a requirement. I was recently setting up a cluster for a customer and they complained about having to use Route 53.

<comment><USER15> just learned about the gossip support, pretty interested in it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How are people doing autoscaling clusters on AWS?

I just want to create a simple, single-AZ cluster with one master, and one autoscaling group for workers. Ideally when there are no jobs to run, the ASG scales down to zero.

(I have a Jenkins service that can spawn pods, and it works great on the single-master-only cluster with no workers. There's even room for it to spawn one pod alongside it on the master node. I just removed the dedicated taint annotation. But as soon as I schedule one more pod, I wish I had an ASG for worker nodes because I'm requesting more CPU and RAM than is available, so stuck waiting for the first pod to complete and resources to free up.)

If I had more nodes (or the possibility of more nodes), I'd likely put the dedicated taint back and give my Jenkins master server pod a tolerates annotation so that it can land there when the resources are available, or use a label selector in the pod spec to ensure it winds up on the stable master, or both. I think I know enough to put this combination together, but I am sure I can't be the first, and I don't want to miss the "golden path" if there is one, this thread seemed like a good place to ask about it.

This seems like it would be a really common configuration, but I haven't been able to find a lot of documentation or even blogs about setting up ASGs this way.

I found kube-aws[1], which seems to be the only K8S orchestrator that actually mentions creating AutoScaling Groups for worker nodes in the setup docs (??). I found cluster-autoscaler[2] which appears to be the piece you need to get the cluster to scale up an ASG when unsatisfied K8S resource requests have left pending scheduled pods waiting, or scale down when nodes are idle for too long. I'm totally mystified why this does not appear to be a supported configuration of Tectonic or Mantl or Stackpoint, or... what's your favorite K8s orchestrator and how does it handle this?

[1]: [https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kube- aws](https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kube-aws)

[2]: [https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster...](https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster- autoscaler/cloudprovider/awshttps://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/tree/master/cluster- autoscaler/cloudprovider/aws)

<comment><USER18> kops creates an autoscaling group for the worker nodes as part of the cluster creation process. Adding the cluster autoscaler is simple as deploying the autoscaler (as mentioned in your linked docs) pointing to the correct ASG. The IAM permissions for the autoscaler can be added with `kops edit cluster $CLUSTER`.

<comment><USER17> Thanks! I have been using kubeadm for my "cluster" with some home-made ansible playbooks so I hadn't just gone ahead and tried it out yet. Good to know I'm headed down a path that others have already been down.

<comment><USER15> I've spent a solid amount of time reading docs and looking in to this. It sounds like this might not be an issue for you, but the major gotcha is k8s does not support rescheduling pods when new nodes join the cluster yet to re- balance things (there was some stuff in proposal phase to address it though).

So, if your workload is made up of lots of short lived ephemeral stuff you are good to go, but otherwise you may have to manually step into rebalance stuff to new nodes.

The autoscaler addon might have addressed some of this, but I'm not seeing anything obvious after a cursory overview of the docs.

<comment><USER18> The autoscaler will add minions when there is a pod that cannot be scheduled. It doesn't help in balancing existing things, but at least the new pod should be able to go there.

<comment><USER15> I saw that and was confused, I thought that would work out of the box with k8s since (I think?) it continually tries to keep scheduling pods; I must be wrong though.

If balancing gets implemented, am I correct that it would probably happen in k8s core?

<comment><USER17> I think I wouldn't assume that, myself; at least not after my stint in VietMWare (PTSD from a prior vSphere/vSAN experience)

We had VMTurbo/Turbonomic and VMWare's internal DRS that would sometimes compete against each other to decide where VMs should be scheduled.

You could handle balancing from inside of k8s core, or not. All you need is to evict the pod on the over-provisioned node, and to arrange for provisioning of the replacement node before the original pod is fully evicted. It should be the same for Kubernetes, if I had to guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you need a management system that's not tied to AWS, I'd recommend folk look at Kubo. We (Pivotal) and Google have been working on it for a while now.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOFW_0J9q70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOFW_0J9q70) for the motivation (tl;dr Kubernetes solves container orchestration, but doesn't solve its own management).

[https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/kubo- deployment](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/kubo-deployment) for the main repo.

Disclose: I work for Pivotal.

<comment><USER3> kops isn't actually tied to AWS; there's early support for GCE and very early support for VMWare, with more on the way.

<comment><USER19> I didn't realise! That's good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Running K8s on AWS isn't a new concept to me. Obviously lots of people are doing it with Kops and other tools (Ex: Tectonic). What I find curious is that Amazon is advertising this on their blog. K8s is essentially a direct competitor to their own ECS service. Arguably K8s is much better, much larger community adoption and has significantly faster improvement.

Maybe AWS is gonna give up the ECS ghost? Or at least offer K8s as an option. After all GCE offers it in GKE, so does Azure.

</comment><comment><USER21> We (www.startopsgroup.com) have been rolling out a lot of Kops clusters lately for clients that need COLO + Cloud or multi-cloud environments. So far we haven't found a better tool for the purpose, even if there are a few rough edges.

</comment><comment><USER22> wish there was some solution to not using the AWS Route53 - [https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/issues/794](https://github.com/kubernetes/kops/issues/794)

<comment><USER3> We should update that issue. There is support for private route53 domains, which means you don't need a DNS domain name, and there is early experimental support for gossip discovery (i.e. no Route53 at all) - just create a cluster with a name of `<name>.k8s.local`.

<comment><USER15> unsolicited feedback: I know you guys beefed up the documentation with one of the most recent releases, but this is an area that probably needed some work circa v1.5. Most of it is pretty self explanatory if you are familiar with Route 53, but It would be nice to have some more examples of stuff like "here's what a reference cluster using a private route53 hosted zone and private network topology looks like, and here's why you might want to do that".

is there documentation on the gossip support anywhere? I'm not seeing much aside from "just name your cluster with a k8s.local suffix and you are good to go"</comment></comment></comment>


Inventing an algebraic knot theory for eight year olds, part 4: Equations - <AUTHOR> http://researchblogs.cs.bham.ac.uk/thelablunch/2015/05/inventing-an-algebraic-knot-theory-for-eight-year-olds-iv/

<comment><USER2> Site promptly collapsed. I'll need to have a word with admins. Meanwhile, here's a link to a text-only cached version: [http://bit.ly/1dbgW1J](http://bit.ly/1dbgW1J)

<comment><USER2> In fact, by considering diagrams left as exercise you will learn even more! :)</comment></comment>


The Benefits of Sharing Your Salary - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/smarter-living/the-benefits-of-sharing-your-salary.html <comment><USER2> Sharing your actual salary might increase your earning potential, especially if you're currently making below the market rate for your position.

<comment><USER3> What sharing a below market salary with a future employer gets you is a slightly higher but still probably below market salary. If market is $150k and you make $100k, they know you will be happy to get $115k. Never name a number despite what feel good stories with no basis in reality may tell you to do.</comment></comment>


Stripe Is Offering $20k Bonus to Employees Who Relocate - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2020/09/15/stripe-is-offering-20000-bonus-to-employees-who-relocate-to-less-expensive-cities-but-it-comes-with-a-pay-reduction/#7513910f3072 <comment><USER2> This is a cost-reduction exercise for Stripe and, as usual, people ought to be careful of the headline one-off incentive versus the recurring cost.

It would have obviously be more attractive, and perhaps fairer, not to cut salaries. The company still saves on cheaper office, etc. and can adjust gradually by slowing down salary increases, and the employees gain increased purchasing power.

<comment><USER3> How fairer? If you take a pay cut, but the region to which you re-locate has a substantially lower cost of living, are you not, in effect, getting a raise? Sounds like a win for all parties involved (except the Bay area, of course).

<comment><USER2> You are not getting a raise, you are getting a pay cut.

The company wins and tries to convince you that you also win because "cost of living is lower". You buy it at your perils.

Also note that, in any case, once you have moved the company will then have an incentive to put the brake on salary increases because "you earn above the local area's average", which may further be an area will less opportunities.

People move from lower income to higher income areas/countries for a reason, even if the cost of living also increases. That's because in the end you keep more in your pocket then can do what you want (e.g. _once_ you've made your money you can move back to a lower income area and buy a huge mansion and enjoy).</comment></comment></comment>


Research perversions are spreading. You will not like the proposed solution - <AUTHOR> http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/12/research-perversions-are-spreading-you.html?spref=tw <comment><USER2> Should have called it 'Research peer-versions are spreading' or 'Research peer-perversions are spreading.' It would have been more accurate. Its this kind of group think that limited research and new ideas in the dark ages.

</comment><comment><USER3> A hundred years ago and more, Universities (particularly in Europe) prided themselves on how different their ideas and research programs were from other Universities studying the same subject matter. No doubt the cost of travel and communication made this inevitable, but it was regarded as a high virtue. Now cognitive herding and intellectual fashion is all. Our centrally-planned science funding programs are a very big reason why.</comment>


The poor don't work because they are economically rational - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/why_the_poor_dont_work.html <comment><USER2> Did you filter retired people? Adjust for the disabled? It doesn't sound like you did any of these things (if you did, you should mention it).

Did you adjust for students? Doesn't it seem odd to you that in the BLS data the 'less than 5000' group is second only to the '70000 or more' group in the amount spent on education? And that more of them have college until you reach the 40000+ groups.

Then you draw conclusions from your faulty data.

Also, where are your references for this. You put footnote numbers in the article, but didn't include the actual references.

This is what I came up with in 5 minutes. What are your qualifications?

[Edit: just to emphasize how odd the BLS data is without adjustments, it says that the AVERAGE person in the 'less than 5000' income group spends almost $1500 on education... more than double any other income group except the '70k or above' group)

<comment><USER3> _You put footnote numbers in the article, but didn 't include the actual references._

Weird, huh? Anyway, since I couldn't readily find substantiation for that 24% number, and the added dubiosity coming from the fact that he doesn't even mention whether it's adjusted for students, disabled, etc (as is standard practice in econometrics), I didn't even bother with the other charts or arguments he was trying to make.

<comment><USER4> _I couldn 't readily find substantiation for that 24% number_

That's because you didn't read the first paragraph of the source I cited.

<comment><USER3> The point is, if you're going to make not only highly charged, but basically, incredibly insulting assertions about a very large group of people (that also happens to be much weaker than yourself) -- especially assertions that are readily seen to be based on flawed selection biases and other sloppy reasoning -- then you had better make at least the numerical parts of your claims _instantly_ verifiable from the sources you cite.

It's just as in academic research -- yeah, _maybe_ it's buried in the source somewhere, but no one has time to parse paragraphs, and divide numbers for you -- especially when you're already trying their patience by making such structurally weak arguments in the first place.

Pointing fingers (and, implicitly, accusing people of being lazy or unable to read) to distract from the fact that don't seem to have an answer for their main criticisms of your "argument" doesn't help, either. It's just grasping at straws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _TL;DR_ , starting with Line 1:

 _It's a fairly pervasive myth within the US that the poor work very hard at unpleasant jobs. But this is nothing but a myth - according to the BLS report A profile of the working poor, 2009, as of 2009, only 24% of people below the poverty line were in the labor force (this means working or looking for work) for at least 27 weeks /year._

Even if one knew where in the BLS report to dig for that 24 percent figure (and independent of the fact that the author doesn't even _mention_ whether it was was adjusted for traditional non-working categories -- e.g.. students, seniors, disabled, in or recently out of detention -- or not, as is standard practice when talking about unemployment numbers) there are so many plainly illogical (and just plain weird) assertions jumping out of this rant that you kind of have to wonder why he bothered.

For starters: that

        "below the poverty line" === "poor in the U.S."

or, my favorite:

        "in the work force at the moment" === "willing to work in general."

Really now?

<comment><USER5> don't forget in the middle of the article: 'wanting a day off' = 'want to be long term unemployed'

<comment><USER4> Please re-read the article - the 75% or so of the poor the article concerns itself with are not unemployed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This phenomenon is well known and usually called a "Poverty Trap" or a "Welfare Trap".

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

One of the things that can mitigate this is the Earned Income Tax Credit ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit))

Also, it is misleading to claim that "the poor don't work". This article only discusses people below the poverty line ($11,490 for an individual). If you work 1600 hours per year at the federal minimum wage, you earn $12,000. That's definitely poor in my book.

<comment><USER7> Or make jobs paying Walmart-style salaries pay somewhat more... ? Although I disagree with the conclusions of the article (it doesn't take lots of complexities into account, education level, family issues, disability, etc), the logic behind choosing welfare over a dismally paying, soul-crushing menial job is totally sound.

<comment><USER6> Yes, raising the minimum wage would help, but part of the problem is that when the very poor start working, they're no longer eligible to all kinds of subsidies (food stamps, medicaid). Greg Mankiw explains it very well here: [http://gregmankiw.blogspot.nl/2009/11/poverty- trap.html](http://gregmankiw.blogspot.nl/2009/11/poverty-trap.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Assuming your numbers are correct, a more accurate title would be "An economically rational poor person would choose not to work a minimum wage job."

If it is true, it is a problem that would need to be corrected. However, even if it were true and corrected, it would not eliminate poverty, or even necessarily change the work habits of the average poor person. Only the poor person who makes solely rational economic decisions.

If I could find a poor person who I could be guaranteed made wholly rational economic decisions, I would certainly employ them (and at a good wage), because I don't even make wholly rational economic decisions and I could benefit from it.

e: This comment doesn't really present the tone I was going for.

Poor people are in that situation for many reasons. Maybe they were born into it, maybe there's systems that keep them from improving, maybe they don't have educational opportunities, maybe where they live has no opportunities available, maybe they have a mental health issue, maybe they have a physical issue. There's a ton of social, psychological, and economic issues that can make or keep someone poor. Rarely would I ever call it the fault of the poor person, because rarely does someone choose to be poor.

If there's a situation where a healthy and clear headed person who can always make the right financial decision, and they choose to not work because it's economically smarter for them to do so, then there's a real systemic problem. However, I don't think that's the case, because anyone that perfect would be able to find some employment at a better than minimum wage position at the moment.

Therefore, I think the issue of poverty needs to be addressed from a combination of education, social, economic, psychological, and systemic angles.

</comment><comment><USER9> This analysis is flawed because it assumes that there is work for the poor to do - that there are "good jobs" for them to go to. The idea that the poor are "consuming leisure" is also a myth, and shows that the writer has never lived that sort of life and has no knowledge of what poverty is really about.

<comment><USER10> Idle time spent in poverty is not consuming leisure, the time CONSUMES YOU. Every day that passes leaves you haggard, more lumpy, less inclined to make clear minded decisions that have a positive result in your life.

This myth you speak of needs to die a horrific death in some back alley, but won't as long as those better off than poverty stricken continue look at data- sets of numbers and opine about the people those numbers represent. While ignoring how we are all living creatures heavily impacted by our local environments.

There is a good reason why the working man often has a thousand yard stare and an alcohol problem.

<comment><USER3> You mean the time that the unemployed spend looking for work? It's just another "day off", like the original poster says.

<comment><USER4> The article is specifically about the poor who are _not looking for work_. The 24% includes the employed and unemployed, which you'd know if you read either my blog post or the source it cites.

<comment><USER3> But you never really substantiate this idea that they're "not looking for work."

I mean, yeah, you made a line graph and such. And you cite mysteriously precise figures like $22731 and $23706. But to conclude that people with net expenditures in these brackets who also aren't presently working _just aren 't looking_ (let alone that they _just don 't want to work_) requires a far deeper (multi-factor) analysis than you're making.

It's also very hard to reconcile with the sheer length of the waiting lines at some of the daily employment agencies I've seen _at 6AM_ in my own neighborhood. Or the utterly dour, resigned expressions sewn into the faces of some of the long-term unemployed that I'm sharing seating space with at this coffeeshop, right now.

I know that observation carries no statistical weight; but it's meant to be illustrative -- if you're going to make sweeping generalizations about a class of people that contradict the day-to-day observations that most of the people reading this thread seem to have about this topic -- and which are also, BTW, rather insulting to the intelligence and character of this class of people -- you're going to have to be a lot more rigorous in arguments you're offering.

<comment><USER4> _But you never really substantiate this idea that they 're "not looking for work."_

The claim that the poor are not looking for work is supported by the first paragraph of my first link. The "mysteriously precise" figures are taken the BLS consumer expenditure survey, also linked. But I guess that's just "academic gobbledeygook".

Now it's pretty clear that you didn't actually read the blog post. But if you had, you'd also realize that I assumed the _character_ of the rich and poor is identical and that only their _incentives_ differ.

In any case, a year after I wrote that, John Cochrane wrote a much better blog post on the topic. My rough calculation is more or less in line with CBO numbers. So it looks like my rough estimates were not too far off.

[http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and- cliffs...](http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Mr. Stucchio isn't the first one to present this type of argument which is explicit in that people are choosing to be poor. That probably doesn't feel right to most of us, and that's because it's ridiculous. Jamming a complex social problem into a simple economic model may be fun and even valuable at times, but only if you don't buy your own BS wholesale.

I'm admittedly struggling to understand how he's drawing this conclusion, as I think he's equating utility with expenditures? If so, this is completely wrong. Your first few thousands of dollars are used for things like food, shelter, and basic healthcare, and they generate massive utility. It isn't constant.

But I also take issue with the first assumption, that each hour of leisure time provides constant utility. Is that true? Does a poor person get more marginal value from that last hour of "leisure time" on the streets? What about poor people who go to bed hungry, are they doing that because they're rationally basking in all these extra hours of leisure time?

There are many reasons people are poor, but people choosing to be poor as an economically rational decision sounds crazy, and that's because it is. Just measure the happiness of the non-working poor vs. people making 30k, and I think you can put this one to rest.

<comment><USER4> _Your first few thousands of dollars are used for things like food, shelter, and basic healthcare, and they generate massive utility. It isn 't constant._

This is irrelevant. As long as utility is _monotonic_ (more consumption => more utility), the conclusion holds.

 _But I also take issue with the first assumption, that each hour of leisure time provides constant utility._

The blog post only assumes utility is monotonic in leisure (i.e., more leisure => more utility).

 _...measure the happiness..._

How do you reliably do that? The only thing I'm aware of which comes remotely close to this is revealed preferences.

<comment><USER11> That is not correct. You are looking for the intersection of marginal utility of the dollars earned through work, and the marginal cost (in utility) of giving up leisure (while hungry and cold, perhaps). You are arguing that the marginal utility of those dollars earned through work are lower than the utility of that final hour of leisure.

But both of those utility functions have sharp curves, and those first dollars generate huge utility (food, shelter, etc.), while the negative utility is very modest when you've already used 167 of 168 hours that week on leisure.

<comment><USER4> _But both of those utility functions have sharp curves, and those first dollars generate huge utility (food, shelter, etc.)..._

The first dollars of _consumption_ (which pay for food and shelter) have high utility. The first dollars of _earned income_ do not increase your consumption. Work or don't work, you won't be hungry and cold either way.

Or are you trying to assert that people gain huge utility by working for no material gains?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "This means that in total, about 17% of people below the poverty line are willing to work full time"

LOL:

% people working != % people willing to work

It seems the author has never met and talk (let alone be or lived among) poor people.

<comment><USER4> When I live in the US, I live primarily in poorer neighborhoods. It's cheaper and I'm not particularly worried about getting jacked - I'm 6'5", somewhat muscular, and don't look like I'm carrying more than $12.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is something _very_ wrong with the logic of this article.

The author claims that people rational people only value money because it allows them to consume.

But that graph shows income vs consumption in a given time period. But whatever is left over, will be consumed in the _future_ , which people also value (and if they didn't, it would be irrational to save any money in the first place!)

They key error is in the phrase

>I propose that utility is a monotonic function of spending - this means that people prefer to increase the amount of goods and services they consume. A green piece of paper doesn't make me very happy, but the burrito I trade it for does.

This is in itself true, but again, money allows you to consume in the future, if you don't spend it.

A more relevant graph would be income vs post tax/welfare income. But that is a different matter.

</comment><comment><USER14> This also doesn't get into the fact that transportation is a huge part of this. If you can't get to your job then you can't work it. Many minimum wage jobs are in strip malls with no public transportation. You can't afford to own a car on a minimum wage salary, so if you can't live close enough to a minimum wage employment center to walk, you may not even have the option to work.

And since most businesses and neighborhoods see apartments as undesirable in their vicinity, they're frequently not within an appropriate range of employment centers.

<comment><USER4> 75% of people below the poverty line have a car. 25% have two or more cars.

[http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf](http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf)

Most poor people earn more than the minimum wage - only 3.6 million workers earn the minimum wage and there are 10 million working poor.

[http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012.htm](http://www.bls.gov/cps/minwage2012.htm)

[http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf](http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf)

In fact, only 11% of min wage workers are below the poverty line.

[http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba792](http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba792)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the article: "all else held equal, the poor would rather not work than work"

I just don't buy that for a fraction of a second. So much of self-worth is tied to employment, and that's besides the creative urge that most people feel. Even if they can't use that in the workplace, I know plenty of very creative people that work lousy jobs and get their creative fulfillment else where. According to the OP, they'd stay unemployed.

</comment><comment><USER16> The assumption that people work simply so they can consume seems a bit flawed. The premise that they don't work because they are economically rational has more basis.

Maybe a better explanation is that the underemployed impoverished are less motivated to work since by doing so they are not in any better position to improve their outcome. If you make minimum wage and can only find part time work, the rent isn't being paid either way.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very disappointed by this. I thought there would be a much more clearly developed theory addressing some kind of systemic issue that made not working economically rational (my first thought: if state assistance given to someone not working is close to the same amount someone would get working a minimum wage job, then it would be economically rational to not work, simply in terms of dollars generated by energy exertion).

<comment><USER5> or the cost of day care after taxes roughly equals a minimum wage job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Most people don't want to work because everyone enjoys a day off? Right...

I don't know very many people who would not want to work and a lot of those (including me) don't have to work, ever, but still they work 10+ hours/day, most days of the year.

</comment><comment><USER19> The poor that don't work don't work because their labor isn't necessary. Due to their ability and overhead, to pay them enough to eat is not profitable.

That's why we feed, clothe, and house them as a society - or at least we should.

</comment><comment><USER5> couple things you don't seem to address. child care cost about as much as working a minimum wage job. people not being able to find a job. also money "under the table"

</comment><comment><USER20> typical classy yummyfajitas rant. nothing much to see here

</comment><comment><USER21> What absolute horse shit.

</comment><comment><USER10> Giggle, this article is hogwash.

Lets take some numbers and opine about poor people. I'm sure a few paragraphs can cover the social complexities and giant boulder on-top of soul feeling that is poverty.

Edit: No I am not going to do an extensive write-up myself.

Try out this experiment, be born into a poor county where you produce actual goods like automobiles. Then watch as your family has their pensions attacked by blood thirty wealthy fucks that have think-tanks put out articles in Fox News and WSJ how your family doesn't deserve the monies contracted to them. How the unions they belong to, made to counter the ultra-monied's inherent power, are "Killing America™."

All this while putting 10 hours shifts to cover you and most likely your elder's bills. This is what the author is writing about, yet twists it into some dry cut about why the poor don't work because they lack incentive or are 'economically rational.'

...

What's that? You can't be reborn into poverty to experience from childhood on up? OK don't bloody write about it then.

<comment><USER22> > I'm sure a few paragraphs can cover the social complexities and giant > boulder on-top of soul feeling that is poverty.

By that logic we might as well throw out all social commentary.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Most social commentary like the parent article here is essentially worthless. A point to start discussion, but on it's own almost completely void of meaning.

Correct, throw it out.

<comment><USER13> No, he mean _all_ social commentary. Almost all of the journalists and professors who preach the point of view you advocate (big bad corporations and fox news stealing from the poor) did not themselves experience poverty. And some right-wingers experienced it too. So "throw out stuff I don't like" does not follow from your claim that only people who have experienced poverty can speak about it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Cheap laptop for Rails web development? - <AUTHOR>

Recently I've found that working on projects from home on my desktop is just killing my productivity.
I'm looking for a laptop competent enough to do Rails, but not much past that - I don't need to be able to watch HD video or anything. Something that will be compatible with Ubuntu.
I've read that you can request a refund from Microsoft if you buy a laptop with Windows 7 and decide not to use it. Is that true?
I'm looking at spending under $400. Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Do two days of Rails freelancing from your desktop then buy a machine with:

An SSD drive

8 GB of RAM+

Your productivity will thank me later, particularly if like most Rails programmers following the happy path you decide to run unit tests virtually continuously.</comment>


Show HN: Feedbridge – RSS feeds for sites without one - <AUTHOR> https://feedbridge.notmyhostna.me <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, author here. I built this as a weekend project over the last weekends. It's open source and the direct link to the repository is here: [https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge](https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge)

</comment><comment><USER2> Pretty cool, there's a few services out there that do similar things, but haven't seen a open source version yet. Any plans to create a (visual?) tool to aid with creating a new plugin? Where you could click/select elements and the tool generates XPath/RegEx?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet, but I'll think about it if I get tired of manually implementing plugins.</comment></comment>


The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/ashlyn-blocker-feels-no-pain.html

<comment><USER2> Why do they hate single page?</comment>


Hume the Humane - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/hume-is-the-amiable-modest-generous-philosopher-we-need-today <comment><USER2> > 'Be a philosopher,' advised Hume, 'but, amidst all your philosophy, be still > a man'

...is by far one of my favorite quotes of his, and I'm glad they included it in the article.

EDIT - they also got 'Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,' which is another one of my favorites that I'd forgotten!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always been a big fan of David Hume and, in general, empiricism. It's nice to see that there is attention made to his point that a healthy human life consists of a 'mixed kind' between higher intellectual activities as well as common mundane activities.

Often times, at least in academia, his philosophical skepticism is presented as the main and only point. From my perspective, his skepticism is way of targeting those _already_ reading philosophy (and thusly more likely to favor pursuing intellect over the body) in the hopes of persuading them into more healthy balance. Because of that tho, I almost never suggest reading him as a first introduction to Philosophy for new students. Instead, he seems a nice counter point to the works of philosophers who are better suited for introductory texts (Plato, Descartes, Aristotle, etc)

<comment><USER4> Totally agree. He was one of the few greats that really understood the importance of balancing intellectualism with real life.

Will also add that his skepticism (which I love about him) by nature requires understanding what it is that he is skeptical about. It's very dialectical in nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My view on Hume is that his philosophy was a version of Pragmatism. I mention this because he is generally seen by analytic philosophers as some sort of materialist or radical skeptic.

</comment><comment><USER4> I do wish Hume was more included in academic philosophy curriculum. My first encounter with Hume was more based on following a footnote. Hat tip to Philosophize This! podcast for including Hume front and center.

<comment><USER6> He was very much included when I was doing undergrad philosophy. (UK, ~30 years ago.)

<comment><USER7> I finished my undergrad in philosophy at a religious uni in the US about 20 years ago. We had a bit of Hume. The monks (most of the philosophy professors were monks) were more into ancient and medieval philosophers, with the exception of Nietzsche and Heidegger. One monk in particular loved teaching Nietzsche and Heidegger.

I would have preferred more Hume, as I later discovered.

<comment><USER6> We were almost the exact opposite; I don't think we really touched on ancient and mediaeval writers at all. Not much in the religious vein either, we more topic-centric (personal identity, ethics, formal logic etc) than philosopher- centric.

<comment><USER7> I did one of my four years at a very large public university, and my experience there was much more like you describe. I would have preferred that, ultimately. I didn't know at the time.

Possibly, college kids (or secondary school kids heading into college) don't commonly understand there could be a significant difference in instruction. Or maybe it was just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article used so many words, I still don't know what makes Hume unique or interesting. I wish the author had more time, to make it shorter - or whoever is paying him, the wisdom to not pay per page of text.

<comment><USER9> Maybe so, but can you please not post shallow dismissals to Hacker News? This is in the site guidelines:

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


The Eavesdropping System in Your Computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/the_eavesdroppi.html

<comment><USER2> Note that despite the title this is about servers rather than PCs. But in some ways that is even scarier.</comment>


The Science of Functional Programming [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/winitzki/sofp/blob/master/sofp-src/sofp.pdf <comment><USER2> Here's the direct download link:

[https://github.com/winitzki/sofp/raw/master/sofp- src/sofp.pd...](https://github.com/winitzki/sofp/raw/master/sofp-src/sofp.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I put together a list of links that helped me get a hang of things on my journey understanding the theories behind languages and their design - [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFch8y9RVab9A7U6ocUzfmPQ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hFch8y9RVab9A7U6ocUzfmPQVOJSEoki4AF7Z2vE6X8/edit?usp=sharing)

The list isn't ordered or complete yet. I just started the doc today. I'll be adding stuff as I move along.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone please comment on the book as a learning material for practical functional programming? All of the comments here are going on tangents (which is ok, but please also comment on the source material).

</comment><comment><USER5> It hang my PC and I had to use the reset button. The CPU load went 100% and never fallen back (I waited for about 15 minutes). The PC became so extremely slow I couldn't even log-in to another Linux console.

I retried on Windows an it (the download button) worked just fine however.

<comment><USER6> This page completely hung my Android phone too

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a real question for anyone who might know: Have mathematicians as a whole ever thought about moving from the age-old formulas using various Greek symbols to something more akin to a programming language? What I mean is, instead of writing π to instead use "pi", or "summation()" rather than using the capital sigma? Functions like sin(), cos(), etc. already look like that, I wonder why the derivative sign and others haven't been changed. Superscript and subscript as well, and prime marks. It all seems superfluous.

I guess what I'm asking is there an alternative to traditional mathematical notation that's commonly used?

<comment><USER8> MIT SICM book does try this.

Iirc sussman (and maybe Steele), weren't happy about the syntax. Thus re- expressing Lagrangian mechanics in a scheme.

<comment><USER7> Nice, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Perhaps pedantic, but mathematics is not science, and neither is functional programming.

See: [https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/mathematics](https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/mathematics)

> Mathematics is such a useful tool that science could make few advances > without it. However, math and standard sciences, like biology, physics, and > chemistry, are distinct in at least one way: how ideas are tested and > accepted based on evidence. Math doesn't rely on testing ideas against > evidence from the natural world in the same way that other sciences do. > Mathematical ideas are often accepted based on deductive proofs, while ideas > in other sciences are generally accepted based on the accumulation of many > different observations supporting the idea.

<comment><USER10> Extremely pedantic. In fact, contradicted by your own reference.

>The answer depends on one's philosophical views on the nature of mathematics — and in this area, philosophers and mathematicians have not reached a consensus

>...

>Now it's up to you. How is math similar to and different from science?

<comment><USER11> Science is an investigation of the empirical, and as such relies on induction, whereas math is deductive and non-empirical. Even if Platonism is true, we don't gain knowledge of math via the senses (mathematical truths are not out there in the world but rather some non-material realm).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The web page kills a chromebook.. wtf

<comment><USER13> It choked my Mac too. Apparently there's an embedded PDF viewer or PDF->HTML viewer in the Github page, and clearly it is not designed for a 450+ page PDF file.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> i haven't read this book but in undergrad I skimmed his linear algebra and it was great. it's still the clearest introduction to wedge and exterior products I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER15> _It requires a certain amount of mathematical experience and is not suitable for people who are unfamiliar with school-level algebra, or unwilling to learn difficult concepts through prolonged mental concentration and effort._

Why do materials on functional programming always have to be at least somewhat condescending towards the reader?

Or maybe: why such sentences seems to appear only in them?

<comment><USER16> To understand how and why a C compiler works you don't need all that much algebra. If you thoroughly understand assembly, you're basically good to go.

To understand how and why an FP language compiler works you need to grok the lambda calculus (as a bare minimum). I'd call that algebra. To even understand what problems are being solved by closures, I really had to " _learn difficult concepts through prolonged mental concentration and effort_ ". Giving newbies a heads-up that competent use of such a tool requires nontrivial knowledge is only fair.

<comment><USER17> eh, i dunno. i think anybody with a decent grip on any language can whip up a scheme compiler way faster than a C compiler. [1] is a very readable guide to scheme and its implementation. Will it be the fastest gun in the west? no. Is it a simple workable foundation that, like, anybody who can put together 100 lines of working code, in any language, can build? for sure. Compilation isn't magic.

Lambda calculus won't hurt. Implementing scheme (which imho is pretty darn close to the lambda calculus) really just requires understanding some operational semantics and you're good to go.

[1] ([http://agl.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three- imp.pdf](http://agl.cs.unm.edu/~williams/cs491/three-imp.pdf))

<comment><USER16> Quite. But pretty darn close is still not close enough to support partial application via curried functions out of the box.

<comment><USER17> Absolutely.

I'd argue, if somebody has written their own interpreter and compiler, leveraging the interpreter at compile time first for constant expression evaluation and then something more sophisticated for partial function evaluation is a lot more intuitive. You can kinda climb a hill of difficulty rather than be teleported to the top and wish them luck.

(To be totally fair i keep trying to open the pdf, but the browser tab locks up. So maybe my observations are meaningless)

_edit_

There is no royal road. but some roads are perhaps longer, but a little easer to travel.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Never-Ending War on Fake Reviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-never-ending-war-on-fake-reviews <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: Not speaking for my employer, and my experience was several years ago and may be out of date.

My first project at Google was working on fake reviews on Maps. ML was certainly useful for some things, but at the end of the day sometimes you literally have no practical way of knowing if a review is fake or not. Was this written by a customer or by the business owner's brother in law? Or by his competitor down the street? Who knows? Which means it's pretty hard to get good, complete training data to train your model on.

Of course, there are classes of fake reviews that are easy enough to detect. But as the fake review-writing AIs get better, I don't know how the anti-fake review AIs can win.

<comment><USER3> > at the end of the day sometimes you literally have no practical way of > knowing if a review is fake or not

Can't you check the account itself? If the account's behavior over time shows signs it's an actual human user instead of a bot.

This can't filter the owner's brother in law, but if bot accounts can be filtered then they cannot leave lots of reviews either, because the owner does not have hundreds of relatives.

<comment><USER4> (I probably worked with one of GP's predecessors on his job.)

Account level signals are nice but insufficient. There's a very long tail of low activity accounts that are difficult to distinguish from a bot. You can't really classify them as bots without generating a ton of false positives, and in general you'd rather let a possibly fake review through than piss off a genuine first time reviewer.

<comment><USER5> I imagine Google has big advantage here, at least for brick and mortar places since they can use location data to determine whether the account connected to a device has physically been in a place. It would also explain why they always ask me to review/rate businesses 5 minutes after I walk in.

<comment><USER4> All the real-time location based stuff is after my time, but it definitely looks like an attempt to generate more known-good reviews. Possibly for better training data for modeling. I'm not sure that the historical location data is as useful as you might think - there's often a large temporal gap between the experience and the review writing.

Google does have a big advantage in verifying good accounts through other activity, but that advantage shrinks dramatically for new accounts. There's still some things you can do, but at the end of the day you're only willing to assign so much risk to a brand new account based on metadata.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm starting to think that the solution is not to reduce fake reviews, but to increase verified accounts who give reviews.

I think in increasing the number of reviews from verified accounts (this account verified to be connected with human of name X), the rest of the anonymous or pseudonymous reviews may be looked at with more scrutiny.

Right now, let's assume that the default for social networks and other places of interaction on the internet is something like 10% verified accounts and 90% unverified. We know that within that 90% unverified, there are many real humans with their real names. So we spend a lot of effort to parse that 90% to find the real humans, the ones pretending to be others, the bots, the anonymous ones, and others. Companies are using ML, individuals like me just guess and try to only accept people that I've met in person and avoid platforms where bots seem to hang. However, with sites like Amazon, I have to hope that Amazon has filtered out the reviews from the fake accounts. Yes, there will be fake reviews from verified accounts, and that seems like another issue, and maybe less prevalent, I'm not sure.

If the percentage of verified accounts flips, from 10% verified / 90% unverified to 90% verified / 10% unverified, I think many of these fake reviews filter themselves out. We would trust that this specific person is saying this, and still leave room for pseudonyms and anonymity, but be more clear that one is using such measures to hide their identity.

How do you think this would impact fake reviews on Amazon? What secondary impacts do you see more verified accounts on Amazon and on other platforms having on discourse? I hope this post wasn't too long, again, I'm new to HN and hope I'm staying within bounds.

<comment><USER7> Even for verified purchases, Amazon's over-eager review beggary is just bonkers.

You buy something, and regardless of what it is, you get automated requests to review the purchase. Sometimes before the item has arrived. Practically always well before you have managed to establish whether the purchase was any good or not.

This is why I ignore pretty much every single please-review-me prod from Amazon and their retailers. Send me a request to review before I could have had proper time to evaluate the purchase in practice, and you get bucketed with other entitled f--kwits. You are also likely to lose my future business.

I believe Amazon could improve the S/N ratio of their reviews if they actually considered how long it takes to test out any of their purchases.

<comment><USER8> There are facebook groups where Amazon sellers will post an item. Then you purchase it and write a review, and seller will send paypal or an amazon gift card for the price of the item and maybe a few more bucks.

Hiring a few interns to sign up for all of these facebook group and track who is participating would go a long way. Doesn't seem like Amazon really cares much.

<comment><USER9> A few years ago during a business trip I ate at a relatively upscale restaurant with work colleagues the waitress offered our table a discount if we'd all leave positive reviews online. Seemed very dishonest to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I actually wonder why crowd-sourced reviews have become so ubiquitous, to the point of almost being necessary (along with five-star ratings). Has anyone legitimately attempted to challenge the status quo here?

I'm reminded of videogamedunkey on YouTube and his video about game critics[0], where he goes into some detail about the preferences and integrity of the critic being just as important (if not more) than the review and rating.

Professional critics build a strong reputation around their taste and preference and they gain notoriety from doggedly sticking to those principles. So you'd likely trust the opinion of Roger Ebert or Mark Kermode if you share their taste in cinema, and even watch something you normally wouldn't if even they recommended it. You're very likely to subscribe to a publication whose critics align with your own tastes because they're effectively curating content for you in the form of recommendations.

None of that applies when you have reviews from a succession of total strangers - you're not going to research dozens or hundreds of commentators to establish a logical consistency in their point of view and decide whether or not their tastes align with yours. More often than not the reviews are low quality and low value, spread across a five-point scale but essentially treated as a binary like/didn't like system.

At that point, crowd-sourced reviews tell you nothing you didn't know already: some people enjoyed it for one reason and others didn't for a different reason. How do you know if those reasons are legit or authentic when they're not fake? How do you know if they weren't gamed or incentivised somehow to inflate expectations? Which ones can you trust?

I suppose they boost sales but just like advertising, that doesn't mean they're automatically beneficial to the consumer. It's just another attempt at manipulation.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2dXobAXLI)

<comment><USER11> I think one of the biggest challenges is scale/breadth. For some things like Movies, we have lots of critics and there is demand for it. I work in web hosting reviews. Everyone technical has an opinion and non-technical too. The average HN reader and a non technical person starting their first blog are very different use cases and demands. I see way too often the 'why don't you just get a VPS and do it yourself it's cheaper' advice to basically anyone. Those are the kinds of people quite actively trying to 'help' newbies. And the reviews, well, it's not a product most people try a lot of different companies nor have any sense of how theirs might stack up. I've got to be one of the most experienced people in terms of number of companies used (I probably had accounts at ~50 companies this year), and I still wouldn't be comfortable writing reviews. It's too subjective and biased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm starting to despair of the possibility of ever having a reliable way to gauge product quality on the Internet. It seems to be a huge asymmetry problem where, as soon as a trustworthy system appears, the rewards of gaming it are so big compared to what consumers are willing to pay to have it stay trustworthy, that sellers will throw unlimited money at the problem until they have captured it with useless garbage.

About the only thing you can do is find a particular writer or site that has a reputation you trust, but they might never review the specific product you're interested in. And when you're trying to buy something in an entirely new category you're not familiar with, it's hopeless.

<comment><USER13> All we need is a web of trust that is easy to use and so many of these problems go away.

<comment><USER14> Then you run into the same issue gpg has: it is hard to get up and running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Fake reviews can be seen as an instance of Goodhart's law, where the metric is the rating or score of the business. Initially those ratings may have high correlation with something real, let's say the "quality" of the business. But the more people rely on those scores and the reviews underlying them, the more incentive businesses have to game the system— which destroys the original correlation between ratings and quality.

A big part of the problem with review systems is the one-to-many nature of nearly all of them: when a person posts a review, that review and its score can be seen by _everyone_. This leverage makes it very efficient for businesses to game the system, as a small amount of fake information can "infect" the purchasing decisions of a large number of users.

So, one alternative might be a many-to-many review system where you only see reviews and ratings from your network of friends/follows (and maybe friends- of-friends, to increase coverage). So essentially Twitter, but with tools and UI that focus on reviews and ratings. That way, fake reviews could only affect a limited number of people, making the cost/benefit calculus much less attractive for would-be astroturfers and shills.

</comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't this already violate a bunch of laws? (undisclosed advertising, wire fraud or something like it, etc) Just enforce them. Can't do much about overseas people but you can penalize the businesses that purchase fraudulent marketing. E.g. if doctors started getting medical licenses permanently revoked for buying fake "testimonials" I imagine it would end fairly quickly.

</comment><comment><USER17> [https://douglas-fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html](https://douglas- fraser.com/FakeReviews/index.html)

I did my dissertation on this topic - text only analysis. I used a dataset that was commonly used in the beginning, but there are some issues with it. I plan to extend this to real reviews, as in 80 million Amazon ones (when I get the time).

Text based features are useful, but non-text based ones are even more so. Even spamming groups can be detected; at least there has been research into that. Combining all the techniques in an ensemble would be productive - but is it really in Amazon's interest? My sense is whatever they do, they pick the low hanging fruit and trying to process every review that comes in would require a lot of CPUs perhaps. But stuff like floods of reviews for new products that are fairly similar should be easy to detect. Perhaps they are relying on Fakespot and reviewmeta to do the heavy lifting.

</comment><comment><USER18> curious if all the fake reviews will end up creating a market for certified reviewers or something like consumer reports. Sure we can't trust cnet or wired or pcmag but maybe if the incentive is high enough there will be a market for honest reviews including an incentive for auditing and verification?

could start a reviewer guild and use crypto signatures to verify their guild membership is up to date and still valid. hoping the guild has the incentive to stay honest etc.

<comment><USER19> There was always a problem with misaligned incentives. If you're not paying for the review, they have no loyalty to the reader.

e-commerce websites pay lip service to deleting fake reviews but higher product review scores result in more sales. Even if this doesn't result in intentionally ignoring fake reviews in pursuit of short term sales growth, note how Amazon.com like all other five star rating systems suffers from massive score inflation. Most have a 4.5/5.0 rating. 4.0 indicate some potential problems (or less sophisticated customers), and 3.5 means it's sub- par.

A lot of online stores simply have no customer review section because they have rationally determined that for them decreased conversions due to bad reviews and moderation costs exceed increase in conversions due to good reviews.

<comment><USER7> > _five star rating systems suffers from massive score inflation_

Indeed.

I liked how Goodreads had their _original_ rating scale done: 3 was good, 4 was very good, and 5 was truly exceptional. You weren't supposed to give 5 to more than maybe 2% of the books you'd read.

Then the got bought out (by Amazon) and the scale got soon enough devalued.

I still think that one potential solution to the scale inflation would be to consider the grade distribution a person uses. If all they give out is ones or fives, their reviews should have near zero weight. If they give out a more balanced (on a ~Gaussian curve) reviews, then their rare extremes should be weighted much higher.

<comment><USER14> Honestly just make it thumbs up or thumps down. Five star ratings are quite pointless.

<comment><USER19> I like Rotten Tomatoes's system. Individual critics give a thumbs up or down. A movie is "certified fresh" if at least 80% think it was worth watching. It doesn't mean the average rating was 80% or that that number means it was amazing or excellent, it just means the vast majority thought it was worth your time and money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Of course if the reviews you saw were only from people whose prior reviews you agreed with or who posted reviews which matched up with the reviews you yourself posted, then the system just wouldn't be game-able. But that's involve getting users actively involved in writing reviews as well as actively agreeing with the views of others. But when it comes down to it, until you have a review system that will tell me that the Super Bowl is garbage and not worth watching because it knows my tastes and doesn't give a shit about what other people that are nothing like me think, your review system is a piece of garbage. Of course it's gamed. It's trash, and it's not going to somehow be magically not-trash even if people don't actively seek to game it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the bigger problem is reviews written by stiupid people. I seen a mosquito killer lamp that had very low reviews - when you show only one star, majority reviewers were complaining that the blue light lamp doesnt kill roaches and it inly attracts mosquitos, so it must be fake.

<comment><USER19> I prefer the term insufficiently savvy customers. Products that are not universally compatible or required specific actions to be taken tend to review poorer. Cheap items tend to review better as customers are more forgiving.

The customer ultimately determines their satisfaction level, even if they are complaining that a software product clearly described as Windows only is incompatible with their Mac. Or their "wireless" machine doesn't work without the power cord inserted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use fakespot.com regularly for Amazon purchases.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think video reviews will become more and more important. Sure, people can lie on camera, but I think it's harder to fake convincingly. And AIs/spammers can't present on camera with the same ease that they throw up blog posts.

<comment><USER24> This reminds of an article I read many years ago about the Facebook's and Google's approaches to organizing information. The article argued that Facebook seeks to organize data in the context of human relationships. I wonder if the future of online reviewing will be one where people on trust reviews left by people they know. Facebook supports leaving reviews on company pages (AFAIK) but overall it seems like they haven't put much effort behind making a robust reviewing system. I can easily see them coming to dominate this market though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This area of the internet seems poised for a massive disruption as AI starts coming in. In fact I'd be a little surprised if it wasn't already a somewhat influential thing.

You could imagine a GAN-like ecosystem appearing, where you have loads of algorithms both writing and identifying fake reviews.

And with that, poor old humans like myself can surely not compete. You'd always have to have a healthy scepticism towards reviews. I already do, in an era where most of the fakes are probably (?) still human-authored.

<comment><USER26> The AI will make it worse. AI will be able to write reviews indistinguishable from humans by other AI's.

<comment><USER27> I agree. A proper solution should probably work with the notion of a trust network, i.e. an extension of a social graph.

<comment><USER19> And hopefully not one owned by Facebook. Blogs with FB login commenting still have at least one "earn $$$$ working from home" comment and sometimes a flood of them.

<comment><USER27> I imagine that you can say that you don't trust Facebook, and then those reviews will be automatically excluded. Or perhaps that will automatically happen because all your friends don't trust Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://reviewmeta.com/](https://reviewmeta.com/) is very useful to detect fake reviews on Amazon.

<comment><USER29> There is also [https://www.fakespot.com/](https://www.fakespot.com/) . I wonder if fake review generators are already working around these fake review detectors or if the detectors are not utilized enough for it to be worth the effort. Either way, some sort of arms race will ensue leading to a Touring- complete trans-human post-life review AI extolling the virtues of some generic USB hub.

<comment><USER19> Bot detection can be trumped by paying people per review. Even pegging user accounts to a cellphone number has been circumvented by sock puppet farms buying SIM cards by the bag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Has anybody considered that fake reviews might be part of the system, not part of a problem? Of course it's not in our interests as customers, but then again I have never paid anybody for a fair review, but I bet a lot of wealthy review targets are willing to pay a lot for a clean public appearance. Would a review collector or shopping site really be willing to not help with that?

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm starting a new project for verified reviews: reviews that are "peer reviewed" by others in the community. I am still in stealth mode but I'm working to solve this: [https://thepeerreview.com](https://thepeerreview.com)

<comment><USER32> How do you deal with collusion rings?

<comment><USER33> ask dang!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> One solution I just thought of (a bit scorched earth maybe) would be to stop allowing written reviews. Only allow video reviews and enforce showing a) the reviewers face b) the product and c) the proof of purchase (could be blurred afterwards for privacy). An automatically created transcript would be shown with the video.

This would make it more difficult/obvious if one person were to submit many reviews (use face recognition), raise the barrier for fake reviews, and give a lot more 'signal' to people trying to determine if a review is fake.

Of course, with Deep Fakes and such this could be bypassed still, but it could still have an impact.

<comment><USER35> One of my dream projects would be to create a movie review app where users have to upload a photo of their ticket stub in order to be able to review a film. Maybe also require a GPS tag.

<comment><USER36> Plot holes galore in your idea. Ticket stubs are different everywhere, impossible to verify, easily faked. Movies can be seen online or rented. I rate your idea zero stars.

<comment><USER37> > I rate your idea zero stars.

You might want to but you are forced to provide a one star rating instead. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Detecting fake news, reviews, astroturfing, fraud after the fact is too late, futile, confusing.

Correct answer is to have verifiable sources, citations.

What we used to call "journalism".

<comment><USER39> That's all well and lovely, but the reason reviews have always been popular is that in many domains people trust the man on the street more than they do a journalist or reviewer, for often perfectly valid reasons.

If a restaurant site removed all user reviews and replaced them with a food critic's opinions I would trust it less, not more, fake reviews notwithstanding.

<comment><USER6> I think what the poster of the comment (new to this, not sure what the correct acronym is) was aiming for is something akin to verified accounts. Not that the person is an expert in reviewing, just that I know the person who is replying is a real human and has name X.

I love getting reviews from locals and non-experts, I'm just really tired of having reviews, comments, and other interactions online with bots or people pretending to be other people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Facebook page reviews is a good example of this.

~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe

<comment><USER41> Hey I don't mean to be a jerk, but please don't sign your name on every comment you write. Your username is right there, if I want to know who you are I can just look up a centimeter from your comment.

<comment><USER40> You're pointless and my signature is none of your business. You're a jerk and a troll as well. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe

<comment><USER42> > You're pointless and my signature is none of your business. You're a jerk > and a troll as well.

And you have poor diplomacy skills. You lashed out, called someone pointless, a jerk, and a troll. This was directed toward someone who criticized you in a neutral tone.

<comment><USER40> And you have good diplomacy skills? He's clearly flaming pointlessly about my signature. Why was my signature a big deal in the first place? Just grow the eff up and stop minding too much about trivial things. You're wasting too much energy criticizing about non-issues. Just because you write it that you don't mean to be a jerk doesn't mean you do, it's just a way to bowdlerize your harshness and attempt to sound civil while actually being pointless in your criticism, which is otherwise called trolling. Calling a spade a spade or plainspeaking is in no way undiplomatic. I just do not sugarcoat it unlike you who try to be pointlessly hypercritical.

// Contacting the mods via email to take a look at this issue.

~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe

<comment><USER41> The reason why I pointed this out to you is because the site guidelines _used_ to have a rule against signing comments, and I was operating on that assumption. I'm frankly surprised it's not in the current version, but you can see it here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160310014355/https://news.ycom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160310014355/https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Just CTRL + F for "sign."

More to the point, I'm sorry you feel like I was flaming/trolling you, I wasn't trying to do that. My memory of the guidelines is technically out of date, but in principle it still doesn't really make sense to me to sign your comments even if the explicit rule has been removed. If you had just done it once I wouldn't have said anything, but I looked at your comment history and noticed that you're relatively new to the community and have signed almost all of your comments.

I just figured I'd politely ask you not to do it since it _is_ pretty redundant - your username is effectively being written twice for every comment you write, you're just adding the full last name explicitly. Sorry you felt attacked.

<comment><USER40> So it has been sustained that the criticism is pointless.

The excuse is also pretty lame. Judging by your profile, your account is new (less than 50 days old) and the Guideline you're referring to is wayback to 2016. There seems to be an inconsistency there. Whether you have older account or not, there is still a clear intention od flaming here. Using a two-year old archive of the guideline is pointless to justify your behavior. New accounts will naturally folllow the latest version of the Guidelines so again it is pointless to refer to old version of the Guidelines.

It is imprudent that you never tried to re-read the Guidelines since 2016, and that would be impossible either because any update to the site, it turned out, is properly published as a news in the front page.

So, again, the elements of trolling, flaming, pointlessness and dishonesty has been sustained.

I perceive this incident as an instance of how old users game the HN system by trolling new users using provocative behavior, virtue signalling and downvoting comments.

But I guess the problem lies in how HN fringe perceives "civility" and "diplomacy" which is at the level of a crude AI that doesn't get past beyond mere keyword bypasses and bowdlerizing techniques. Humans thinking and acting like machines.

~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The term itself is problematic - haven't we learned from "fake news" that said accurate description of literally whatever gets the most clicks will rapidly be turned into a rhetorical cudgel that means "news that I don't like"?

Given the sheer potential for abuse I would advise great caution with measures to remedy. This problem is ancient given that it has been around for literal centuries at least. Just in the article a contemporary of Oscar Wilde used the technique!

<comment><USER44> I don't think there's any comparison to be made. The term "fake news" was primarily popularized by a guy who was blatantly lying and who's grasp of the English language barely extends to 5 letter words and who doesn't even really bother with the grammar. "Fake reviews" are literally just fake reviews, it's not even really a technical term, it's just what they are.

<comment><USER45> I think it was more heavily popularized immediately after Wikileaks' DNC email leaks by the people who opposed the guy you're talking about. Then, the guy you're talking about adopted it as a counter-attack in order to devalue the term. His campaign turned the weapon back on its source. If you were paying attention to how the term "fake news" evolved, it started as a weapon for the left and then was adopted by the right. It's a great way to censor or discredit information that is inconvenient for you, regardless of your political leaning.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-05-01%202...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-05-01%202018-05-31&q=fake%20news,podesta)</comment></comment></comment>


The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone's Feelings - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2015/09/the-real-reason-we-need-to-stop-trying-to-protect-everyones-feelings/ <comment><USER2> Definitely there is a trend of "I'm offended, now institutionalize protections for my feelings" and generally an overriding concern not to offend these days and it is scary.</comment>


We Know Hollywood Is This Dumb. Et Tu, Netflix? - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/10/AR2009111000676.html?wprss=rss_health <comment><USER2> As it says, this is from TechCrunch:

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/10/we-know-hollywood-is- th...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/10/we-know-hollywood-is-this-dumb-et- tu-netflix/)

and already submitted:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932841></comment>


Interactive Science Fiction Film for the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.rememberspook.com/ <comment><USER2> I have bookmarked this for later mainly because the story was written by Jeff Noon. He wrote some of my favourite books ever (Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice amongst others) although he went in a very different direction later in his career with Cobralingus, Falling out of Cars and Needle in the Groove. I am looking forward to watching this.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you come up with hobby projects? - <AUTHOR>

I have a hard time getting ideas for new hobby projects that will keep me interested and teach me new stuff.
To get started i have tried several things like Project Euler(and a-like), re-do work related systems in new languages and following tutorials.
Non of those keeps me interested for long, and i think it is because they don't serve any purpose, other than keep me coding. <comment><USER2> I find my interest is most piqued by non-programming fields. So, for me the answer to this question has been: listen for opportunities in the communities around fun, non-programming fields. In my case, listening to a NASA Twitter account led to a weekend hackathon that showed the possibility of programming around live telemetry from space vehicles, which I've been noodling with ever since: [https://github.com/sensedata/space- telemetry](https://github.com/sensedata/space-telemetry)

Another idea I've been messing around with for ages is a mobile app to support bicycle wheel building; something else seemingly non-programming that I love doing and so looked at specifically to see if I could invent a way to a hobby project.

And, games are another arena that have worked well for me, i.e., programming around them is fun enough to keep me well enough engaged to learn and understand new things. Mods, play-support tools, and of course actual (mini) games. If this sounds interesting, I recommend finding a moddable indie game to start with; micro-studios can be very friendly and supportive of modders in ways that keep you coming back for more.

PS From the OP's context, I'm assuming the real question is "How do you come up with hobby, programming projects that keep your professional abilities fresh and varied?"

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm much the same, a lot of the time I find it hard to do things like Project Euler or redoing work in a new language because it's not interesting to me.

I have found that watching videos from things like GDC/TED talks about particular software techniques has given me motivation to try and copy them. Yeah, I'm not pushing the boundaries of human knowledge or making a killer app but it's a new piece of technology or technique that I've never done before.

Perhaps look to implement something that you haven't done before in a way you haven't done before. Personally, my current project is a Fiber based raytracer. Having never done either before, it's an interesting problem to solve when you don't look at anything but documentation on MSDN for functions.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think there is a method to it : as a developer you should see a lot of opportunities to automate things in your daily life. If not you probably need some hobbies outside the dev world.

I started coding about 10 years ago because I wanted to make a better bot for World Of Warcraft than what was available. Literally if it wasn't for WOW and an obnoxious coder that wouldn't share his bot code I wouldn't be a developer today !

Among more recent projects, I made a "green" script to encode videos at night while electricity is cheaper, a tool to extract, rename and classify rared / ziped nested ebooks (obtained from dubious sources ;-), another tool to analyze and optimize my chances at winning on football (soccer) bets (let me say it didn't work very well).

<comment><USER5> Sorry that sounds a bit nonsense to me. All the things I enjoy doing outside of work involve getting away from the computer as much as possible. Mountain biking, kayaking, drinking. Cooking is about the only hobby that could involve something, but there are a ton of cooking related websites.

<comment><USER6> The fact that there's a ton of related websites shouldn't ever stop you from doing a simple side project, since it's for learning purposes anyway. And a "copy" of something can always shift into something original.

<comment><USER5> I am doing a work related side project, as I think there might be more business opportunity in it. Plus its what I know well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyday interactions present opportunities for further exploration. I get my projects from problems I encounter during my normal interactions with people. Then I try hack something together for fun. My most recent project is hacking a thermostat with a Raspberry Pi 2 and mobile app to notify small shop owners when their freezer temperature has risen above a certain temperature. This project came about from a interaction with my local grocer. I grabbed some Ben&Jerrys out of the fridge a few weeks ago and the shop attendant apologised. He couldn't sell the ice-cream because the freezer power was cut the night before when a cleaner accidentally tripped the power cord. The ice- cream had melted and was a write off. The shop owner had to leave the stock in the freezer until the insurance delegate arrived to confirm the write off. The shop owner gave me the idea of an app that would notify him if it ever happened again. He wanted to do it himself but didn't have the technical ability. I didn't either but that was an opportunity to learn on a real life problem. It doesn't matter that there are commercial alternatives available. It's something fun to program and I have a willing participant to trail it on. Keep your eye's and ears open. Real life problems are often more rewarding to solve than projects on hobby sites.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think it's ok. I've started, stopped, finished, paused, abandoned a plenty of side projects over the years. But I see them as more of a learning exercise and I suppose I learned much of my current skill set from these projects.

Having said that, getting the project done to a level where you can show other people is a good objective.

[shameless plug] - I run a site called sideprojectors ([http://sideprojectors.com](http://sideprojectors.com)). Take a look at all those side projects people started and maybe it might inspire you to find something that you'll like!

</comment><comment><USER9> Would say general brain storming and inquisitiveness, i.e. how does this actually work and can I improve on it.

As an example of this thinking, I looked at ghostery a while back and thought it could be cool to work out what I would have leaked and to which websites. "Would have been tracked" was born, though still got to get around to coding, feel free to take it you want.

As a few other high level project suggestions; cloning programs for different languages, play around with electronics (there's years there) or pick a few open source projects to contribute to.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hobby projects, usually solve a problem that I'm experiencing, the proverbial itch that needs scratching.

If I happen to be looking to try out a new library or programming language I give it ago, even if its not the best choice, because its just a hobby project.

I've done this with recently with: [http://optionsworth.com/](http://optionsworth.com/) and [http://dailyriver.herokuapp.com/](http://dailyriver.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Mine are usually derived from my non-technical (non-computer) interests and scratching my own itch. For example, my need for a source for quick at-a- glance recap of NBA games (when I found myself with less time to follow sports) is what spawned Recapp'd (which was also my "learn Rails" project).

Shameless plug: [http://recappd.com](http://recappd.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm on the opposite side. I've got dozens of hobby-code projects. I can't go a month w/o some idea. The idea comes first then I pick technology I'm not familiar with to build it as a method to learn.

I spend a bunch of non-work time mentoring/advising early tech-founders so there is constant ideation around me which keeps my imagination going.

</comment><comment><USER13> I talk to people. Pretty much every side project I've ever done has come from a conversation about something that someone finds annoying, or an idea that they think is brilliant, or that I think is brilliant. For me, the key to coming up with a project I won't abandon easily is to have other people involved pushing me to work on it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Shameless plug: I started the [http://hashbang.sh](http://hashbang.sh) network with this in mind. Show up, get a free shell, and work on the network itself. Plenty of people from all over the industry noob/pro alike hacking stuff out together and exchanging open project ideas. ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> Hang out with people who run businesses and listen to their complaints about the apps/systems they use, should give you plenty of ideas!

</comment><comment><USER16> I just think of stuff I would like to build, found interesting or useful. If you are the intended user, it's a lot easier.

<comment><USER17> totally agree with this. if you are using linux, install a few window managers and start playing around with them...fvwm, xmonad, fluxbox, etc...then start thinking about what you would like to do better...look at the code for some of the utilities...bbpager, dmenu, etc...well, that's if you're interested in this kind of stuff ;-)</comment></comment>


How Free Speech Died on Campus - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323894704578115440209134854.html

<comment><USER2> 1) Silencing people is done in many ways - you can shut them up, shut them out, or shout them down. In several examples given in the article, the Colleges are clearly allowing free speech by allowing voices, information and views which get drowned out from being heard.

In Islamic awareness week, stopping people from talking about how bad Islam is, how terribly women are treated. They were stopped. Someone repeating the status quo really has only been silenced on that instance, and in order to allow another view point to be understood and examined. That is the essence of supporting free speech.

2) Vis-A-Vis Ann Coulter, this is the WSJ:

>To be clear, Mr. McShane didn't block Ms. Coulter's speech, but he said that her presence would serve as a "test" for Fordham. A day later, the students disinvited Ms. Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised them for having taken "responsibility for their decisions" and expressing "their regrets sincerely and eloquently."

Not mentioned there, is the letter sent out by College Republicans

> The College Republicans regret the controversy surrounding our planned > lecture featuring Ann Coulter. The size and severity of opposition to this > event have caught us by surprise, and caused us to question our decision to > welcome her to Rose Hill. Looking at the concerns raised about Ms. Coulter, > many of them reasonable, we have determined that some of her comments do not > represent the ideals of the College Republicans and are inconsistent with > both our organization's mission, and the University's. We regret that we > failed to thoroughly research her before announcing, that is our error and > we do not excuse ourselves for it. Consistent with our strong disagreement > with certain comments by Ms. Coulter we have chosen to cancel the event and > rescind Ms. Coulter's invitation to speak at Fordham. We made this choice > freely, before Father McShane's email was sent out and we became aware of > his feelings – had the President simply reached out to us before releasing > his statement he would have learned that the event was being cancelled. We > hope the University community will forgive the College Republicans for our > error, and continue to allow us to serve as its main voice of the sensible, > compassionate, and conservative political movement that we strive to be. We > fell short of that standard this time, and we offer our sincere apologies.</comment>