What happens when an algorithm cuts your health care - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/21/17144260/healthcare-medicaid-algorithm-arkansas-cerebral-palsy <comment><USER2> FTA :

>>> incentives are not always aligned with easy interfaces and intelligible processes.

I work on such programs. And the level of complexity makes it very hard to explain why a decision was taken (or not taken). We once tried to actually generate a document showing the process behind a decision, for a given person. It took 100 megabytes of Xml data. It was complete, but too complex.

We need better tools to make processes self explaining.</comment>


Why I'm hiring graduates with thirds this year - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/the-wiki-man/8953111/why-im-hiring-graduates-with-thirds-this-year/

<comment><USER2> For those of you wondering what a "third" is:

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

</comment><comment><USER3> GPA or the UK equivalent seems to be like knowing the mean of a distribution, you'd be much better off taking a look at the entire distribution, or in this case, a transcript. Then you would see if a person challenged themselves or just took easy classes to get high grades. Also, you could see if they took classes on a diversity of topics.

</comment><comment><USER4> I knew how wrote the article before I got to the end. Rory Sutherland has a real knack of seeing things from a different perspective.

<comment><AUTHOR> I got the link since I follow him on twitter.

However, I disagree this was game theory. It seems more like entrepreneurship and competition. He sees value where others don't see it. Then does something about it. Like the guy who turned cow manure into organic flower pots and sells them to big chains. (Briefly mentioned on: [http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html) )</comment></comment>


Software of the Apollo guidance computer was hand-woven into rope core memory - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P12r8DKHsak&t=20s <comment><USER3> I thought this was interesting (both that the space shuttle still used core memory, and that the challenger memory was retrieved and its contents recovered):

> Core memory is non-volatile storage—it can retain its contents indefinitely > without power. It is also relatively unaffected by EMP and radiation. ... > For example, the Space Shuttle flight computers initially used core memory, > which preserved the contents of memory even through the Challenger's > disintegration and subsequent plunge into the sea in 1986.

(From [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic- core_memory#Physical_c...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic- core_memory#Physical_characteristics) )

Note that this core memory is a little different than the rope core memory described in the linked article.

<comment><USER4> My dad was a draftsman, and worked on everything from conveyer belt systems to satellite test rigs. This was in the years before CAD and he often brought A1 and A0 paper home from work for us kids to scribble on.

One time I can remember getting this sheet with this wonderful crossed-grid with rings pattern. I remember staring at it for a good ten minutes before turning it over and trying to draw spider-man ;-)

It was several year before I realised that I was looking at a drawing of core store.

One of my life regrets was that I didn't know to save it. I'd love to have it on the wall framed now ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Reminds of the Mayan Quipu system ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu)) of storing information in knots in ropes.

I've read somewhere that they even had simple "computers" made out of stone structures that would then have these knot systems inserted into them, but for the life of me I can't remember what these were called.

So the Mayans did it first! ;)

<comment><USER6> Slight correction: quipu was used in Andean South America (e.g. by the Incas), not by the Maya in Mesoamerica.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a link to the full video:

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxxiij_moon- machines-2008-p...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xxxiij_moon- machines-2008-part-3-the-navigation-computer_tech)

Around 37 minutes they talk about the alarms on approach and how the dealt with them.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is from the series _Moon Machines_ , which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's got interviews with the people who worked on Apollo hardware, testing footage I've never seen elsewhere, and some great anecdotes as well. It really gets down into the nitty-gritty design challenges they faced -- it's the Apollo program as the engineers saw it, not the astronauts.

</comment><comment><USER9> I submitted this a couple years ago but it got no traction then:

[http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html](http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html) (Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience)

Here's some details on the Apollo guidance computer:

[http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch2-5.html](http://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch2-5.html)

Edit: just resubmitted - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657876](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7657876)

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory)

<comment><USER11> > Some programmers nicknamed the finished product LOL memory, for Little Old > Lady memory.

The original usage of the term LOL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I code at approximately the same rate as the core rope memory weavers wove. I wouldn't trust mine to help people fly to the moon, though. That's incredible!

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's how to make some - [http://www.neazoi.gr/coreROM/index.htm](http://www.neazoi.gr/coreROM/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very interesting video. I had no idea.

It would have been interesting to see how the program was actually executed. Do the rings around the rope core somehow create a circuit that allows the processor to "know" in which order the 1s and 0s are in? Or is there some kind of mechanical process?

It must have been very easy to make mistakes with all that manual work. I am assuming the weave must have had to have been checked many times.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure the bytes are sequentially addressed, but the program (memory contents) may contain branching, conditionals etc to load the next address. Just like assembly language. If I recall correctly, the microprocessor logic on these missions was RTL (resistor-transistor-logic) which was the predecessor of TTL.

<comment><USER16> It was sequential but bank-addressed. The AGC had it's own assembly language[1] and was a pretty recognizable general purpose computer[2] for it's time.

1: [http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1689.pdf)

2: [http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/a...](http://authors.library.caltech.edu/5456/1/hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/archive/1717.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Using core RAM (not the ROM in the video, but similar) with an Arduino: [http://www.corememoryshield.com/report.html](http://www.corememoryshield.com/report.html)

<comment><USER18> What an incredible project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> And I thought going through the program, debug, UV erase cycle of a 2716 was torturous!

</comment><comment><USER20> That's a pretty impressive build tool.

Before there was grunt, before there was maven, before there was make...

Worth including on the the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_automation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build_automation) page?

</comment><comment><USER21> please tell me this was a production build and not used to backup nightly builds.

<comment><USER22> Back then "source control" was making a copy of the physical paper copies containing the code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Rope memory is quite beautiful. Seems like an alien technology - <USER2> organic.

</comment><comment><USER24> The show that this clip is from is amazing! The Moon Machines. I highly recommend it

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what word they used at that time to distinguish hardware and software bug?

</comment><comment><USER26> Which television program is that from?

<comment><USER27> That clip is from part 3 of Moon Machines:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Warning: this video automatically plays.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just like every other YouTube link.

<comment><USER29> Unless you have Flashblock.</comment></comment></comment>


I tried out DDG and it didnt work - <AUTHOR> http://duckduckgo.com/?q=breast+cancer After reading the "Giving up on Google" post on robsheldon.com I decided to give it a try.
Unfortunately, my first search, "breast cancer", resulted in no relevant results. Searching for "breast" explains that "safe search" is on.
1. Why, in 2010, would something called "safe search" block breast cancer queries? I could understand if it was 1997...
2. Why am I only alerted if all my keywords are on the black list? Shouldnt people searching for "breast cancer" know that 50% of their query keywords are being filtered out? <comment><USER2> You should try giving feedback about the query, Gabriel's usually prompt in responding to issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> how did it not work?

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing this refers to DDG censoring the search to "cancer" from "breast cancer" since safe-search was on. However, when it's in safe-search the top link is to reverse that setting.</comment></comment>


Cory Doctorow: Our dangerous statistical ignorance - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events <comment><USER2> There's a quote I like that I think came from Marvin Minsky, "the US needs a Department of Homeland Arithmetic." We're protecting ourselves from all the wrong risks.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why Marvin Minsky hates America so much that he wants to put the government in charge of assessing such risks. The government is an incredibly complex device for distilling a tiny amount of individual ignorance from each voter into a moonshine of batshittery.

<comment><USER4> It's presumptuous to say that voters effect any real change in government policy.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you have more effect by voting (i.e. switching) TV channels. The public opinion seems to be very important for government policy - and popular shows can be and are seen as a barometer for it, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Here's how that works: imagine that you've got a disease that strikes one in a million people, and a test for the disease that's 99% accurate. You administer the test to a million people, and it will be positive for around 10,000 of them – because for every hundred people, it will be wrong once (that's what 99% accurate means). Yet, statistically, we know that there's only one infected person in the entire sample. That means that your "99% accurate" test is wrong 9,999 times out of 10,000!"

No, it means that the "99% accurate" test is wrong 9,999 times out of 1,000,000. It would be clear to anyone when stated that way. What's counterintuitive is the author's statement of the result, not the result itself.

<comment><USER7> A better wording is that your chance of having the disease if given a positive result from the test is 1/10000 (0.1%).

That's a huge increase from a 0.0001% chance of having the disease, but it's still not flat out terrifying. Repeat testing can weed through the false positives at a speed proportional to its accuracy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not necessarily. If you get the same results every time, repeated testing provides nothing.

<comment><USER8> It depends on what causes the false positives.

If the test is picking up something in the person being tested, then yes, you'll get the same result every time and repeated testing proves nothing. But you can still repeat using other tests.

If the test gives false positives purely at random, then repeated testing will help. Say the test is wrong 50% of the time, and you do the test five times. If you get the same results every time, then you can be 100-(50/100)^5*100 = 97% sure of the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative."

Maybe that statement is true in today's world. But for tens of thousands of years, while our brains evolved, I would guess attacks from strangers were a lot more common.

<comment><USER7> The causation implied here is unlikely at best. More likely might be that until the last century no one had to deal with numbers large enough to need these kinds of statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As someone who deals in diagnostic tests all day, nobody's diagnosed on one test. There's a similar problem I worked out on the odds of getting into medical school, I'm sure this is elementary stats and has someone's name on it, but I'll call it the acceptance problem: how many medical schools do you have to apply to in order to have 90% chance of getting into medical school? For any school there is a acceptance quotient: Q = (acceptances sent out)/(number of applications received)

For any given student applying to some schools 1 thru n, the goal is getting at least once acceptance, and applying to more schools, mathematically, can't possibly hurt in the closed case (neglecting social engineering, time spent on applications, etc), so the chance of acceptance, Ca, approaches 1 with every new application in the following fashion:

Ca = (1 - (1 - Q1)(1 - Q2)(1 - Q3)...(1 - Qn)) _100

There's a visual and some worked out examples here: <http://nielsolson.us/MedSchool/>

Similarly, if the sensitivity of a test is 90%, that means the test identifies 9 of every 10 people with the diagnosis. If I administer n different tests each with a sensitivity of S, then the chances of accurately diagnosing the disease, Cd, _goes up* with each additional positive but never gets to 1.

Cd = (1 - (1 - S1)(1 - S2)(1 - S3) . . . (1 - Sn)) _100%

So lets say you are doing, say, genetic testing, and any one gene is 1% sensitive for the disease. If you tested 300 genes you could be no more than 95% certain of the diagnosis.

(1 - (1 - .99)^300)_100 = 95.09591...%

Now, if your genetic tests were 5% accurate, you're panel could be no more than 95% accurate with 59 tests.

If your test was 50% accurate, you're panel could consist of 6 tests and be no more than 95% accurate.

Of course, if some of the tests are negative, things get more complicated. One of the problems with these data sets is that we have no idea how predictive they are. You can't even calculate the predictive power of the database. There simply haven't been enough events. Then we get into surrogate measures (how many were positive on tests 1 - n and were found to have razor blades in their homes, etc).

The claim that these databases can't be effective isn't true. They could be. P might also equal NP. Whether the hypothesis is strictly true or not, the vague but real set of 'practical concerns' suggest that the truth of the hypothesis is sufficiently difficult to test as to render the null hypothesis the de facto assumption until proven otherwise.

<comment><USER11> The assumption of independence underlying the math you're doing is probably outright false (albeit mathematically simple). As one example, imagine the case where all n schools use the exact same admissions criteria. Unless you're applying with a random application to each school, your math is shot; you will either get into every school or none of them. I won't even go into the genetic independence issue.

<comment><USER10> Every mathematical model is a false representation of reality. The predictive accuracy must be validated by experiment. And using the link I reference, you'll see there's actually some pretty strong data to start from in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I believe the worst damage to statistics is specious reasoning. My favourite chocolate promotion is Mars' '1 in 6 Wins a Free Bar' (on currently here in Oz). If I buy 6 bars, most people would assume I would win once. In fact, I have only a 2/3 chance of winning a free one

1 - (5^6/6^6)

Buy 12 bars, and there's still a more than 10% chance I won't have won yet...most of the chocolate-buying government-voting lottery-praying public would be stunned.

<comment><USER11> Although the average number of bars you'd need to buy before you win is indeed six. I think almost no one would put the odds of actually winning one by buying six at 100%.

<comment><USER12> "Any 6 bars may not contain a free bar"

You're probably right, and I hope that you are. Still, funny to note that Mars has even put this disclaimer on the bottom of their promo site!

<http://www.marsfreebars.com.au/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I had an intuitive grasp of statistics, I may not have a start-up!

<comment><USER14> Why not? It's a one-in-four (or one-in-three, depending on who you believe) chance of being rich in a few years--that means that in the worst case scenario, if you keep at it, starting over when you fail, in about 10-15 years you're very nearly guaranteed to be rich. And you almost certainly won't starve in the process.

Of course, that assumes a reasonable level of intelligence, education, and drive.

Startups are about the best game going, as far as I can tell--I wouldn't be playing if the game was rigged against me (more than a little, anyway...sure, small companies have higher relative regulatory burden, but on the whole the technology game is actually rigged in favor of new companies, from a growth perspective).

<comment><USER15> I don't get how you're guaranteed to be rich in 10-15 years. If it's a 1/4 chance of being rich every x years, it's still just 1/4 chance over the span of 10-15 years, right?

However, I'm going to guess that you mean every time you try is going to influence the next time you try for the better (as evidenced by some paper about higher success rates for 2nd+ time entrepreneurs I remember on here), which makes sense. You learn from your mistakes, you make contacts, you have a better view of the market--so it shouldn't stay one in four every time you try.

<comment><USER14> "If it's a 1/4 chance of being rich every x years, it's still just 1/4 chance over the span of 10-15 years, right?"

So, no matter how many times you roll a die, you've only got one in six chance of rolling a 1 in all of the rolls?

Somehow, I think your math is slightly off.

<comment><USER15> No, just a mismatch with understanding your wording. With your original wording, it didn't make sense, since each roll would have the same prob, no matter how many times you rolled. That's why I figured you meant that rolls weren't independent from each other.

But it seems that you mean, what's the chance that given x number of rolls, the very last one is a "1" (assuming you only need/want to get rich once). As the number of rolls increase, the chance of that scenerio (a string of non-1s with the last one being 1) becomes smaller and smaller when taken as a whole.

<comment><USER14> How else could I possibly mean "keep trying for 10-15 years"? One can't take 2-5 year increments of your life in isolation, since, as you've noted, you only need to get rich once to be rich.

But, I'm glad we're all clear now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Riding on the subway earlier today, a guy got on an starting preaching how "the lord saves" and "you must embrace Jesus." I wish math could create equivalent evangelism. I'd love to live in a world where a guy gets on the subway and starts preaching the Pythagorean theorem?

<comment><AUTHOR> That one's not the problem. Perhaps Bayes' theorem?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with all of his points, but it was a very slim article-- I was kind of hoping for a more profound analysis from someone like Doctorow.

<comment><USER18> If you want a profound analysis, he wrote a (fiction) book recently on this subject, and put it out on the internet under a CC license. It's an enjoyable read; he pretty much distilled a few bits from the book to make that article.

Here tis: [http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_- _Little_Br...](http://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_- _Little_Brother.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Something doesn't seem right about Doctorow's example of attacks on children. He writes, "But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent)."

I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't answer the real question. For most parents, the question is: _given my child's particular environment, what is the greatest threat to him?_

Doctorow is saying: _given that your child was attacked (and no additional information), the attacker is more likely than not to be a relative._ That seems backwards.

<comment><USER7> He's stating that the evidence is P(Was Relative | Child Attacked) is relatively high, especially compared to P(Was Total Stranger | Child Attacked). This means that it should, if you use Bayes' Theorem correctly in everyday life, shift your suspicion away from the random photographer.

Of course, since P(Child Attacked) is so very low it's still not a huge deal.

It's not really backwards. That sort of inversion is exactly part of Bayes' Theorem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Statistician Peter Donnelly on the same subject:

<http://youtube.com/watch?v=kLmzxmRcUTo>

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not just the probability of an occurence that leads us to behave in an unreasonable manner. The other important thing is the impact of that 'rare occurence'. Most critics don't seem to take that in to account at all...

</comment><comment><USER22> good case against data mining... and the "if it saved one life, would it be worth it?" argument doesn't change my mind.

</comment><comment><USER23> a more basic problem is just plain ignorance.

many if not most citizens of the USA do not understand the basic organization and functions of their government. most of them cannot name a single sitting supreme court justice, have never read the constitution, do not know how a bill becomes a law.

and these people vote.</comment>


Hack News has changed its front-page style - <AUTHOR> It has added a thick black line at the top of the page. What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> Default when someone prominent in the community dies. In this case: [http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in- memory/papert](http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert)

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't notice it until you mentioned.</comment>


The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people <comment><USER2> It looks like the Norwegians have gotten over the fundamental problem that we have in the States (and presumably in other countries): the idea that people should be made to suffer for perceived transgressions even if it costs the rest of society more (and yes, I do mean after accounting for the accompanied reduction of the undesired behavior by making an example of offenders).

Apparently we're too primitive to get beyond the juvenile practice of cutting off our nose to spite our face, and it informs our drug policy, the way we deal with the homeless, our prison system, our views on social welfare, etc.

<comment><USER3> I imagine I might agree with you on many things -- there is much to be admired in this Norwegian system and an there is much to be lamented in the US system. However you lose me when you say 'perceived transgressions'. The transgressions are real -- you might think that certain drug laws are injust (I certainly do) but the transgression is not simply perceived. And certainly I'll grant you that people have been wrongly convicted -- but that is a very small part of the prison population.

That being said, our prisons aim to punish, incapacitate and rehabilitate. Punishment is a legitimate role for society; it is not juvenile.

<comment><USER4> > Punishment is a legitimate role for society; it is not juvenile.

What's your rationale for this? Personally I can't agree. I can see the logic behind punishment-as-deterrent (but then it creates perverse incentives), but punishment as an end goal itself isn't an appropriate concern for society.

<comment><USER5> So, imagine a violent crime; a robbery attempt goes awry, and a convenience store clerk is killed. The murderer (in a perfect incarceration system) is "rehabilitated" in a year. Should he be freed after 365 days?

<comment><USER6> > _So, imagine a violent crime; a robbery attempt goes awry, and a convenience > store clerk is killed. The murderer (in a perfect incarceration system) is > "rehabilitated" in a year. Should he be freed after 365 days?_

I read about a case like this in Sweden. Kjell-Eric Eliasson, who was a soldier at the time, was sentenced in 1986 for a sadistic murder of a young single mother. He butchered her and dumped the corpse into a well outside his mother's farm.

The man was sentenced to a mental institution. He was treated for a single (1) year and then released to as "cured", much to the horror of the relatives of the murdered woman. Some 25 years later, in 2010, he lost his job as a highly paid government official, when the truth about his dark past hit the internet.

Was it right to release him? It seems he lived the next 25 years well, with a great career and paying his taxes. So society didn't need to be protected from him any more. But was it morally right? There is a perceived need of revenge, of punishment. Of some _justice_.

\--

Details of the case are here (use google translate to read) [https://www.flashback.org/t1287612](https://www.flashback.org/t1287612)

<comment><USER4> Justice is just a fancy word we use to mask that what we really seek is "eye for an eye" retribution. We can and should attempt to move to a more enlightened view. Society should definitely not be meting out retribution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > anything up to the 21-year maximum sentence (Norway has no death penalty or > life sentence)

One thing has to be noted every time: Norway has no life sentence (well it does, for the military) (and it has a 30 years sentence for crimes against humanity as required by the Rome Statute) but it has _forvaring_ , "preventive detention".

It is _indeterminate length_ sentence tacked onto initial 21 years, which translates into the ability to extend the imprisonment by increments of 5 years if the prisoner is still considered a danger to society. The prisoner can petition for parole every year during forvaring, but there is no limit to the possibility of extension, so forvaring effectively allows for life in prison.

<comment><USER8> This is good because in effect it can be life in prison, but the case is revised every X years - as opposed to being sentenced to life in prison beforehand, then making a lawyer rich trying to make a judge revisit your case.

<comment><USER9> People sentenced to life in prison don't typically have the means to make a lawyer rich.

<comment><USER10> That's not where their pay usually comes from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've never been to prison but years ago I went to jail in the US for violent acts and weapon charges and wouldn't wish that on anyone. My co-defendant in the trial was charged with greater crimes and did 8 years in prison out of 13. I went to visit the guy about once a month and I can say one thing for certain - he will never be the same. And not in a good way.

I know a lot of guys like him. The US prison system is not worried about rehabilitation. It's about punishment and removal from society, regardless of how you come out. It's a terrible place meant to scare the crap out of you and that's basically it. And now it's one big industry.

<comment><USER12> has that experience served as a deterrent for you in any way?

<comment><USER11> Yes definitely. I was a different person back then but that experience in particular helped change me. I fear going to jail now more than before I ever went in. The sheer boredom of it all is enough to drive you mad. Concrete walls, hard metal beds, lights never go off, constant yelling, just enough food to make sure you don't starve, and of course the other inmates that are all criminals and a lot are willing to commit violence to get their way. You've haven't seen the true depths of human depravity until you see two grown men try to kill each other because one wanted to watch a different soap opera or sought revenge for some supposed sleight. And I had it _easy_ compared to prison or the penitentiary.

<comment><USER12> In my misspent youth I got into an altercation that escalated to the point of me being charged with attempted manslaughter[1].

The police picked me up late on a Friday and I spent the weekend in a Nassau county jail. It changed my life...

When I hear people dismiss the power of deterrence it makes me realize they don't have the particular category of cognition that was thrust upon me by my own impulsiveness. Seems like you have a similar context as I -- now may we both never lose it.

\----

[1]: yes; attempted manslaughter -- in New York Penal Law, "Attempt" is a separate article that can be applied to any crime: "§110.00 -- Attempt to commit a crime. A person is guilty of an attempt to commit a crime when, with intent to commit a crime, he engages in conduct which tends to effect the commission of such crime."

<comment><USER13> Extending your anecdotal case, doesn't this mean that prison isn't a deterrent at all until one has committed a crime and experienced it?

<comment><USER12> firstly; jail and prison are two different things. secondly, it's a spectrum; different people are deterred at different points and some not at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a movement in some law circles towards "Restorative Justice" which I think is even more forward thinking than Norway's prison system. It focuses on the victims interests instead of the governments (imagine this applied to Aaron Swartz).

> Restorative justice (also sometimes called reparative justice) is an > approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the > offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract > legal principles or punishing the offender.

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

<comment><USER15> 0_o Focusing on the needs of the offenders? Really? Why?!

"Your Honor, I did burn down that orphanage, but I really need a new car. And prison is too punitive!"

<comment><USER16> I would say the focus is more on the offenders' enlightened self interest. Not everyone is aware of the best course of action given a situation. That goes for both offenders and the people who have decided to perpetuate our punitive prison system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Norway doesn't really have a permanent criminal class, and the main aim of the criminal justice system is to keep it that way. Whereas the US (and many others) have an enormous criminal social class, firmly-rooted criminal organizations seemingly in a prepetual state of war with law enforcement, and so on. That stuff isn't going away even if you did liberal prison reform. The circumstances are very different, maybe it's appropriate that the aims and methods of law enforcement are too?

<comment><USER18> They're not going away without doing liberal prison reform either.

#

I honestly don't see how much good can come of the current setup. Maybe that say more about me than it does about the setup - but what good can come from brutalising these people?

When you try to use pain to make someone comply, the underlying message is that when they start complying the pain will stop. But ex-cons are effectively black-listed from most respectable jobs, they generally have very little by way of life skills, their social network is generally tied to criminals, there's no real welfare system to speak of to support them.

The pain doesn't sound like it really stops, changes intensity maybe. Meanwhile there's lots of relatively easy money to be made from drugs, slavery and the like.... I suspect you need a very strong character to work your way up decently from that sort of starting position - I just don't see how effectively torturing people would give them that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm sure we have a country like Norway somewhere in the United States. Perhaps New Hampshire? Just like we have a country in these United States to match any small European country whose statistics are brought forward to push some kind of social agenda.

<comment><USER20> Hej from Sweden! Find me a US state (or area with equivalent population) with

\- national health care (dental might be exempted, but still capped after a certain amount)

\- stable, cheap, state-subsidized public transport with great coverage

\- school system equivalent to Sweden (though Sweden does arguably not have the best one in Europe I still encounter many shocking things when speaking to Americans)

\- included in that: ability to go to university without being in debt for the rest of your life / without scholarships / without rich family

\- clean cities, low crime rates, low to non-existent amount of guns in circulation

\- widespread atheism, embracing science

\- widespread high bandwidth, affordable internet access

I could list more things but I think this is enough for now. I'm not saying that all of these are without flaws or that we are the best at them, but the US lacking so many of these in a widespread manner makes me not consider it a first world country.

 _Edit_ : I forgot a big one!

\- Employment security: No unfair terminations, regulated pay, overtime/nightshift/weekend pay regulated ...

 _Edit 2_ : This is in response to a "dead" comment I got. In case you've got show-dead disabled here's the comment

"..And where your tax rate is up to 60% of your income. [http://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax- burd...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-burd...") \- polaris9000

Yes, our tax rates are much higher but that's not the whole story. If you compare average personal income between Sweden and the US (I couldn't find a source on median income) you have approximately 10k USD more in net-income in the US. I'm not an expert in finances so I won't try to adjust this for things like the gap between poor&rich (which would pull the US down a bit).

How much of these 10k are gone after spending them on all the things we get delivered through our taxes? (Health care, subsidised public transport, education and so on)

And one thing that doesn't directly affect everybody's life quality: How much better is our infrastructure (paid for / subsidised by taxes)? I'm speaking about everything ranging from streets to power grids to internet connections.

How much more stability do we have in our lives and how much better is the average life satisfaction?

I'm sure there is no canonical answer to any of these but I'm also sure that Sweden scores better on average (and remember that this was originally about Norway, which is doing much better than Sweden)

<comment><USER21> > but the US lacking so many of these in a widespread manner makes me not > consider it a first world country.

Cute. The inferiority complex is palpable. You create very specific custom goalposts for being a first-world country and then you just happen to meet them. Cheers mate, congrats on making your small nation a good place to live. Don't be so insecure.

<comment><USER22> If that is a sign of an inferiority complex, what is American Exceptionalism[0] a sign of?

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

<comment><USER23> Quoting that article:

> the term does not necessarily imply superiority

Those for whom the term does imply superiority lie largely on the right, politically speaking, while those on HN lie largely on the left, in my experience. It seems to me that there is a difference between calling someone out on an inferiority complex, and calling someone out on sharing a country with people who have an inferiority complex.

<comment><USER22> The term itself suggests superiority, by using the word "exceptional". That isn't a word reserved for comparing different things that are different but not objectively better or worse.

> It seems to me that there is a difference between calling someone out on an > inferiority complex, and calling someone out on sharing a country with > people who have an inferiority complex.

And that person didn't say that he's from the US, for that matter. But you can read a personal attack into it if you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> chestnut-tree This is a really insightful article into Norway's prison system. I wish it had also gathered opinions from the victims of crime. I presume there is broad support among the Norwegian population for the length of sentencing.

In the UK, the press often goads the public with stories of "soft" sentencing. The article mentions a young man serving 11 years for murder. That pain will last a lifetime for the family of the murdered person. If I wondered if I could accept a sentence of 11 years as suitable punishment for the murderer? Would I be so bitter and angry that I'd wish for more? (Yes, I know this is why we have courts to make judgements).

</comment><comment><USER24> not an easy topic though.

some crimes are easier to stomach than others. some sentences are not meant to help the person going to prison, but protecting the population from that very person.

the lax practices in western europe have led to numerous cases where prisoners where able to rape/kill people while they were on "prison vacations", in german called "freigang". very often an expert psychatrist had deemed the prisoner to be stable and reformed.

a guy in austria has just killed 3 policemen plus 1 ambulance driver. if he doesn't kill himself (standoff is still ongoing) - what exactly is there to reform? 4 people are dead, the lives of their families are forever impacted by this. why should the assailant have any right to return to society? he decided to deny this right to 4 direct victims.

should marc dutroux ever go free? breivik? why do they need to be reformed? should the gangrapers in India go free?

the victims and their families should come first. you rape, kill, maim? consciously? ok, face the consequences. this reformation BS is ignoring the plight of the victims and their families.

<comment><USER25> I recently kayaked around Bastoy (prison), it's a great place; nice beaches; great view on all sides; rapists and axe murderers shuttling to or from places on their bikes. Does sound like I'm making a joke doesn't it? It's not, it's how it is and I like it and am proud of it.

For cases like Breivik we have forced psychiatric admission, which can be a life-sentence. In fact this was the key point of the Breivik case: Whether he was in a psychotic state of mind, and even more importantly, whether his extreme (religious) views could be deemed delusional.

Revenge is barbaric, and granted some degree of barbarism simply exists within all of us, some more than others. The court system shouldn't be based around barbarism, and the american use of "justice" really is just a synonym for revenge. Pure and simple. I don't want this. I don't want to live in a country where our flaws doom us, where mistakes are never forgiven.

Norwegians live in a country where all the money in the world cannot have a man (legally) killed or sentenced to life. Norwegians live in a country where men and women who take wrong turns in their life are given the opportunity to redeem themselves (and they do, almost always.)

I live here, I love it here, and I love it for reasons US citizens see in movies, but not in society.

<comment><USER5> "Norwegians live in a country where men and women who take wrong turns in their life are given the opportunity to redeem themselves (and they do, almost always.)"

Redemption? Or lack of recidivism? The former is hard to quantify, the latter claim is lacking attribution.

[EDIT] for a typo...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just crunching some numbers here, and these are rough estimates, presented without comment:

\- Norway: 4,000 prisoners / 5M population (0.08% incarceration)

\- United Kingdom: 84,000 prisoners / 63M pop. (0.13%)

\- United States: 2,270,000 prisoners / 317M pop. (0.72%)

The US prison population rises to about 7M when you include everyone "under correctional supervision" (e.g., in probation, on parole, in jail, etc.), increasing to a >2% figure. But I don't have apples-to-apples figures for the UK and Norway in this regard.

<comment><USER27> The usual way to refer to incarcerated population is per 100k population.

Norway is around 70/100k, 'first world' countries in general are around 70-150/100k, New Zealand is an outlier at 200/100k and the US is an extreme outlier at ~720/100k. The US really is way out of step with its contemporaries on this issue.

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

<comment><USER26> Got it, thanks for the clarification. But either way, the US looks pretty bad on this metric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Prisoners are people. Thus, the question becomes, how do we treat our people?

<comment><USER29> Someone who rapes your wife and stabs her is no longer a person but a primitive animal. A man who has reverted to a baboon and devolved.

Grouping everyone together sounds nice and mushy and makes you look like a good hearted person but is unrealistic.

<comment><USER27> _Grouping everyone together_

You just implied that all inmates are rapists and stabbers. Herein lies the problem of the anti-rehabilitation crowd: they argue against rehabilitating prisoners using the worst examples they can find, ignoring that most prisoners don't fit their description.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Well, America still doesn't deal with non-inmate populations humanely, so we have quite a ways to go.

</comment><comment><USER31> This article digs up the age old question: is imprisonment intended to punish or to protect society? Or a little of both?

<comment><USER32> I'd always thought of it as kind of being both. You don't need to subject inmates to the equivalent of torture and humiliation in order for them to become institutionalized, to fall behind on the world around them, to disrupt their careers and family ties.

Those things alone are pretty terrible. And that's before you get into the whole "solitary confinement/tacitly accepted rape/etc" things that plague prisons.

<comment><USER33> I personally think those things are pretty terrible, but someone without a family, a steady career, and who is already behind the curve (out of work, remember?) might not particularly mind losing those liberties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The thing I love most about this, is that it shows they still hold faith in human kind. They sincerely believe they can help people change, and people are changing.

This is a seriously heart warming story.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands The statistic mentioned in the article for recidivism was around 16% "the lowest in Europe"

That's interesting considering the US had the same rate in 2007 and we have treat our criminals completely different. This would lead me to believe treating criminals like people isn't the key to successful punishment and eventual rehabilitation.

"During 2007, a total of 1,180,469 persons on parole were at-risk of reincarceration. This includes persons under parole supervision on January 1 or those entering parole during the year. Of these parolees, about 16% were returned to incarceration in 2007."

source: [http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17](http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=17)

<comment><USER35> Isn't that the % of people breaking parole, not the total recidivism rate?

Elsewhere:

> recidivism rates between 1994 and 2007 have consistently remained around 40 > percent.

[http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Repor...](http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/sentencing_and_corrections/State_Recidivism_Revolving_Door_America_Prisons%20.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That article is one of the most thoughtful I've read -- at its heart it is not a simple or obvious problem.

"For example, why do Wyoming and Oregon have the lowest overall recidivism rates for offenders released in 2004, and why do Minnesota and California have the highest? Why does North Carolina return relatively few ex-offenders to prison for technical violations of their parole, but reincarcerate a comparatively large proportion for new crimes? What drove the recidivism rate down by 22.1 percent in Kansas between 1999 and 2004, and what drove it up 34.9 percent in South Dakota during the same time period?"

"Florida and New York began the twenty-first century with nearly the same size prison population (about 70,000 inmates). During the ensuing decade, Florida added 30,000 inmates and now has more than 100,000 persons behind bars. Meanwhile, New York's prison population fell below 60,000. Yet the crime rate dropped in both states by about the same rate. In fact, New York's crime drop was slightly larger (29.2 percent) compared with Florida's (28.2 percent)."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> And the American inner city streets where people are treated like savages.

</comment><comment><USER37> This would never work in South Africa for example. The conditions of such a prison are orders of magnitude better than what half the population have at home. Just having food, a bed and a flushing toilet would be a step up. Everyone would be lining up to go to prison :)

<comment><USER38> I don't think the equivalent in South Africa would necessarily have the same standard of living, but the emphasis on work opportunities, integration, etc would likely be emulated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can't speak for Norway, but I imagine is as being about as lax as Swedish prisons: here the "prisoners", if you may call them such, even though they are murderers, assualters and other kinds of violent criminals, have better accommodations and food than the elderly. And school children.

(Better as in: more money is spent per prisoner than per child or senior in government care [1]).

Also, prisoners are given free health care and dental work, something that "free" Swedes have to pay for. Coincidentally, illegal aliens are also given free dental work (they pay 5$ per appointment).

Something is seriously wrong with Sweden when criminals are taken care of better than [law-abiding] citizens.

1) [http://www.pitea-tidningen.se/nyheter/varfor-far-fangarna- ba...](http://www.pitea-tidningen.se/nyheter/varfor-far-fangarna-battre-mat- an-skoleleverna-6052081-default.aspx)

<comment><USER40> You can't seriously expect that link to be meaningful. These were questions asked by 11-13 years olds to local politicians. There's no actual analysis there, and the only mention of money spent on prisoners is:

"Varför får fångarna på fängelser bättre mat än oss i skolan? frågade John Edin." \-- "Why do the prisoners in prison get better food than we do in school? asked John Edin"

The response by the local politician Christer Lindström was:

"Jag har ingen aning om vad internernas mat kostar. Men i skolan kostar en portion 30-35 kronor. Det är ointressant vad andras mat kostar, det viktiga är vad vi erbjuder." \-- "I don't have a clue on what the internees' food costs. But in school a portion costs 30-35 kronor. The cost of others' foods isn't interesting, the important thing is what we offer."

So from that dialog we don't know: 1) is John Edin correct? 2) what does "better" mean? and 3) is the price difference unreasonable?

Regarding the last, children on average over the 12 or so years of school need fewer calories than adults, so I would expect that less money is spent per person in feeding a child than an adult.

As for "criminals are taken care of better than [law-abiding] citizens" .. okay, that's where I know you're being deliberately obtuse.

How good is the public road system for the criminals? How good is the mass transit system? How much parental leave time do criminals get, and how much are they paid for it? Do prisoners get paid sick leave? And so on through a long list of public services that prisoners don't get or can't use.

Or more concisely, why not also complain that prisoners get free housing, free food, and free heat, while law-abiding citizens have to pay for those themselves?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> What works for a tiny ethnically homogenous country situated in the far north might just work for ANYONE!

Or, not.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you record videos or screencasts for work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> If you're using macOS, you can use Quicktime Player to record your screen (File > New Screen Recording). If you need more advanced features like mouse click effect or keystroke display, ScreenFlow is a very good (paid) alternative.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use them for bug reports to prove that something "works on my machine"

</comment><comment><USER4> Camtasia works great!</comment>


Why I think FuelPHP will be the new PHP's framework leader - <AUTHOR> http://jaequery.tumblr.com/post/12152767918/i-think-fuelphp-will-be-the-new-phps-framework-leader

<comment><USER2> I worry that PHP's problem is that all these various frameworks are fragmenting developers, while Ruby on Rails is like a single beacon for Ruby devs.

I've just spent ten minutes going through the docs and I can't see anything that improves on what Yii has exactly the same functions for at least the last five months. That's not a criticism BTW, but I can't see any reason why FuelPHP would suddenly be a framework leader.

Compare the docs contents:

Fuel: <http://fuelphp.com/docs/general/tasks.html>

Yii: <http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/basics.mvc>

<comment><USER3> I agree. From reading the docs, and also having my head in several frameworks (including one I've developed) for over five years, Fuel really doesn't seem to bring a whole lot more to the table than is already there.

While it may turn out to be a grand success (and I truly hope it is), I think PHP is, as you mentioned, much too fragmented to have an end-all-be-all framework of choice. Another successful framework will not unite PHP as much as add more fragmentation. This isn't necessarily bad (having more choices is fine), but a "one framework to rule them all" attitude seems a bit far-fetched (not that Fuel has this attitude, more the author).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure why this is on the front page.

I will bash Zend Framework. I will push fuelPHP citing only 2 redeeming features (Clean OOP implementation and decent Docs). I will then discard Symfony2 because of personal preference...

If anything Symfony2 is in a good position. There is already a strong job market for the framework. If I was a ZF developer looking to move I wouldn't jump into FuelPHP. I would go where there are already plenty of jobs.

</comment><comment><USER5> Poor article. The author only compares FuelPHP to the Zend Framework and bases the whole decision on why it is better with documentation.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks inspired by Rails. However, if you like the approach of Rails, why not just use Rails? It's similar to people who put the OSX skin on their Windows machines. If you like the OSX look, use OSX.

PS: I get there are many reasons to use PHP over Ruby, just as there are many reasons to use Windows over OSX. I'm just making a point by going to the extreme.

<comment><USER7> For a long time I experimented with PHP frameworks to see if I could capture the rails magic, but so much of it has nothing to do with the code/API itself (and more to do with the culture and community around the technologies). I'm now a full-time rails dev and hope that I will never have to use PHP again.

<comment><USER8> i do rails and php and frequently switching between the two made me write halfmoon (<https://github.com/jcs/halfmoon>). it's basically a tiny framework for php that has a syntax like rails (where php allows it - php 5.4's new short array syntax should clean things up quite a bit once it comes out). it uses an existing php port of activerecord (<http://phpactiverecord.org>) so all of the finders, associations, and validations work much the same.

as you can see by the code, it doesn't aspire to be a full port of rails, but it does routing, controllers, models, and views similarly enough. it's probably closest to the syntax of rails 2.2.

i use it in production for a handful of low-traffic sites (<http://hntrades.com>, <http://4m.blandroid.org>, <http://domainical.org>) and mostly hack on it when i'm working on a project and need a new feature or find a bug. it doesn't have any community or documentation outside of the README, but the project works well enough to keep me sane when i'm writing php.

<comment><USER7> I'm genuinely interested in your reason for not just using rails full-time. Is it because of the perceived deployment difficulty?

<comment><USER8> sometimes the project needs to use existing php libraries or code, sometimes it needs to be portable and php is easier to host and maintain, and sometimes i just don't want to deal with setting up and maintaining another rails site.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Good and Bad Reasons to Pivot - <AUTHOR> http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2015/07/20/good-and-bad-reasons-to-pivot/

<comment><AUTHOR> key points:

Much has been written about a startup making a pivot in direction after Eric Ries first coined the term in a 2009 blog post "Pivot don't Jump to a New Vision." The word pivot has attracted almost as much wordplay as the word lean.

A pivot is recognition of two requirements for success in a startup:

1\. You have to continually re-evaluate and refine key hypotheses in your business model, remaining alert not only to the possibility of failure but also improvement.

2\. As you make this change you have to do so in a way that you continue to explore new market and technology possibilities instead of traveling in circles (or playing "rock paper scissors" with yourself where you cycle through a series of options such that each new one appears superior to your current one but if you are not careful you discover you have return to an earlier point of departure).

Three principles:

1\. Recognize Need For Change, But Make Sure it's Progress

2\. Good Pivots Build On What You Have Learned and Accomplished

3\. Fix What's Not Working</comment>


Amazing new css and 3d features - <AUTHOR> http://www.browserinsider.com/148/amazing-new-css-and-3d-features#

<comment><USER2> Wow effects one can only dream of, if you live in 1990.

HTML is lame

</comment><comment><USER3> Blatant blog spam. At least 2 of the 3 original links have already been posted here.

</comment><comment><USER4> And the point of that is?

<comment><USER5> The point (apparently) is to slowly reinvent OpenGL on web, since no one has (yet) added it to Javascript.

<comment><USER3> Au contraire: <http://github.com/philogb/v8-gl>

Granted it's not in the browser, but it is JavaScript + OpenGL.

<comment><USER6> One better: OpenGL in Firefox via Canvas:

[http://blog.vlad1.com/2007/11/26/canvas-3d-gl-power-web- styl...](http://blog.vlad1.com/2007/11/26/canvas-3d-gl-power-web-style/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IronPython 2.7 released with VS integration, full Python 2.7 support - <AUTHOR> http://ironpython.codeplex.com/releases/view/54498

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the new release. Glad to see the project alive and well.

I've been using IronPython at my day job, an all-MS hospital, to write scripts and utilities that integrate with the rest of the ecosystem and supports the work of the main medical applications(.Net based). Using Python for scripting allows me to iterate quickly and saves a lot of boilerplate code.

I use a bunch of IronPython scripts for stuff like pre-generating cache records from our dead-slow database and determining usage patterns. I also use MongoDB for offline processing but i use cPython for that.

One thing that annoys me though is the startup time and I really hope that someone is working on this. The articles mentions a small decrease and so hopefully that's just a step forward in the right direction.</comment>


Ask HN: Tools to keep remote teams on the same page? - <AUTHOR> What tools do you use to keep remote teams on the same page when it comes to projects information, company announcements, documentation, document search? When I ask people around me I get all different answers: from Slack only, to having a wiki like Confluence to a SharePoint Intranet to internally developed tool at larger tech companies. <comment><USER2> This might be useful, I've reviewed 24 remote work tools [https://workremote.us/24-new-remote-work-tools-of- february-2...](https://workremote.us/24-new-remote-work-tools-of- february-2020/)

</comment><comment><USER3> A reliable wiki with a newsfeed like feature - pretty much Confluence (on- demand or on-prem) Slack or Teams for live chat. But more important than tools, process. People have to use them consistently for them to matter.</comment>


Europe Wants a Supercomputer Made From Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/europe-wants-a-supercomputer-made-from-smartphones/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why you'd want this. ARM may have low power consumption per CPU, but not per flop, and they're not cheaper per flop either. If this were a toy project, then fine, but they're talking about a thousandfold increase over the current state of the art. Surely this would cost a truly unholy amount of money?</comment>


Ask HN: How would you build a better auction site? - <AUTHOR>

aka. how would you beat Ebay?  I know this one was on PG's list of ideas he would be interested in funding and I started thinking about it a bit more yesterday and inherently ran into the issue of the ecosystem/platform moat that Ebay+PayPal has built. <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some weaknesses I see that may be good openings:

\- Ebay has horrible design IMO and there's an opportunity to build a better way to browse and discover. \- Discovery/Exploration is lacking and simplistic based on categories + filters. Most people have already done their product research before they get to Ebay. A better site could attempt to build a better product discovery engine. \- Fees - Maybe undercut them on fees or move to a flat rate model to encourage platform adoption and growth.</comment>


Angelsoft Lets Startups Find Funding Through New Investor Filtering Tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/08/angelsoft-lets-startups-find-funding-through-new-investor-filtering-tool/ <comment><USER2> Never ever pay to pitch. Not in the tech world at least.

Angelsoft is trying to monetize the introduction business from exactly the wrong direction. If they add value to Angels, let them pay.

The good Angels (and VCs) will always talk to you for free.

<comment><USER3> You should take a look at our new Investor Search Engine (<http://angelsoft.net/startup-tools/investor-search>), the new feature this article is actually about, which is totally FREE.

We aggregated about every VC and Angel Group in the country, built profiles for them containing key metrics, and made a "Kayak" like search engine for them. I think it's the best single resource for entrepreneurs seeking funding on the web now. And as I mentioned at the top, it costs nothing to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My angel group uses Angelsoft to organize the deals we receive from startups. I believe we pay Angelsoft for the privilege and get to use their tools to discuss and evaluate the deals that come our way. It is useful.

There is also tons of crap listed from other cities and groups. I guess these guys pay Angelsoft to pitch, but that part of the site is a complete waste. There is so much noise in those deals that I never look at them.

</comment><comment><USER5> And how many companies we know have scored funding by paying these people?

<comment><USER6> > According to Angelsoft, 2.6 percent of the applicants ultimately get funded

Charging poor startups to pitch seems like a pretty backwards business model, and ultimately provides poor incentives for Angelsoft to operate on. They should just take a percentage of funding or equity from each completed deal, so they, you know, only get paid if they actually do something helpful.

<comment><USER7> <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=evbart>

There's been considerable discussion on this already. If you feel that it's worth the chance to pitch for the amount they charge, take it. If not, don't.

I think it's a bit opportunistic - there's very little value add for the entrepreneur's point of view. But they've made a value-prop, good or bad.

That said, a small percentage on overall funding might not be a bad idea from a feel-good stance. I wonder if it would be enough to compensate for revenue lost from its current model, and how they would deal with people going outside of the system to close deals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Um... Angelsoft = toilet paper? Symbolic? Ironic? Just unfortunate?</comment>


The Present State of Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@intenex/state-of-covid-19-2-974ab4c67973 <comment><USER2> Sadly enough, Sweden repeats German mistake of 1930s - listening to an overconfident charlatan, killing thousands of people.

<comment><USER3> Is the swedish politician attempting a coup for dictatorship, killing political opponents, gleichschaltung, war of nations and genocite exterminating a whole race? Or is the Nazi comparison maybe overblown?

<comment><USER2> No, the scale is much smaller, the idea is exactly same. Most victims in Sweden are minorities and senior people; people are "not worthy" of preservation.</comment></comment></comment>


Opnieuw: A simple and intuitive retrying library for Python - <AUTHOR> https://tech.channable.com/posts/2020-02-05-opnieuw.html <comment><USER2> What's the difference between this one and tenacity?

[1] [https://github.com/jd/tenacity](https://github.com/jd/tenacity)

<comment><USER3> At least a good readme, which is always a good sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally I would avoid this kind of npm-esque micro-dependency in my Python projects. I've written essentially the same decorator for many of my projects; it takes ten minutes and a few dozen lines of code.

<comment><USER5> Would you really want to roll your own exponential backoff w/jitter for every project though? It's not the easiest to get right, and since you're looping in a somewhat complicated way, it's definitely prone to accidental infinite loops in my experience.

Retrying seems perfect for a library to me. For instance, Haskell has a popular retry library [https://hackage.haskell.org/package/retry-0.8.1.0/docs/Contr...](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/retry-0.8.1.0/docs/Control- Retry.html) and I wouldn't consider it bad to just bring it in.

Is this more symptom of Python deps being "riskier" than Haskell deps due to types or versioning or something?

<comment><USER4> This library posted here is only ~150 loc without docstrings, and it's more complicated than my typical equivalent decorator factory with basically the same features, sans logging.

I just don't find this tricky. If only every problem I need to solve is as simple as this one.

> Is this more symptom of Python deps being "riskier" than Haskell deps due to > types or versioning or something?

No, it's a distaste for tons of small third-party packages that could easily be done in place. If anything I found Haskell deps more prone to breakage with upgrades compared to Python deps (given my limited experience with Haskell), at least with the set of popular packages I tend to use. Part of that is Python packages tend to _not_ depend on a ton of other packages.

<comment><USER5> By "breakage with upgrades" do you mean bugs introduced due to compiler/library bumps or just PVP constraint violations?

<comment><USER4> The latter — not necessarily PVP constraint violations though, but rather dependency hell situations. One example that pops to mind: packaging git-annex for Homebrew was always "great fun" until we settled on resolving with LTS Haskell (IIRC).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thing that always gets me with retries is error handling.

What errors should be considered retryable, vs raise immediately?

Do you log a retryable error? I've had systems mysteriously "hung" before which on closer inspection were infinitely retrying with a retry library that didn't log anything...

And if you do exceed your max retries, which error do you raise? The first one? The last one? There's no guarentee they'll be the same. A completely different "TooManyRetries" error?

These are the concerns I'd like to see addressed in a high level overview of a library like this one.

<comment><USER7> Also: what if you get different retriable errors every time you re-try: should you have different retry count for each distinct retriable error? When you finally give up, should you report _all_ of the distinct errors or just the earliest or latest retriable error, or ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would be interesting to read more specific comparisons with existing mature libraries, e.g. backoff [0]. Feeling I get from reading the motivation behind a new library is that most of it can be achieved by using backoff and perhaps a custom delegating decorator that remaps parameter names and does extra checks if necessary.

[0] [https://github.com/litl/backoff](https://github.com/litl/backoff)

</comment><comment><USER9> The title is a dutch word, in English translated to "again" or "repeat".

<comment><USER10> The vowel combinations always trip up foreigners. Nieuw is Dutch for new and it is pronounced essentially the same. The ew sound basically transliterates to ieuw. Op (on) combined with Nieuw, basically means "on new", or 'again' in proper English.

<comment><USER11> I'll be the pedant and argue that if you want to figure out how to sound proper Dutch, there's a difference.

"new" sounds like "neeuuuuu" in US English, and a diphtong "nuuu" in British English.

"nieuw" sounds like "niii" followed by a very short "oooo" as in "do" followed by a slightly more pronounced "w" at the end.

I'm aware that there are proper ways to codify pronunciation, but it's more fun this way and I know nothing of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Still seems a decent company. Nice that you take the time to properly deal with technical problems instead of just doing the whole 'plough forward even though you're just ploughing air' thing that happens just about everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't have a better solution but I was taken back by the length of the very verbose / descriptive param

retry_window_after_first_call_in_seconds

Am I the only one that thinks that is a bit excessive?

<comment><USER14> If you're using something like this, then the details of when, what and how you retry is probably something you care about, so having the library be explicit about it and making it possible to know what something means without having to look at the docs seems sensible to me.

<comment><USER15> This is some Java-level explicitness. Maybe, drop the `_seconds` suffix and replace it with something like `retry_window_after_first_call = '60s'`?

<comment><USER16> 60s. was wondering how we could add physical units to python? highjack the number literals and variables like this: 1.s, pi.radians? or maybe the way golang does it: 1 * time.seconds?

would be nice to have

<comment><USER17> I also found this package: [https://github.com/sbyrnes321/numericalunits](https://github.com/sbyrnes321/numericalunits)

Which uses the interesting approach of setting all "units" to random floats: _A complete set of independent base units (meters, kilograms, seconds, coulombs, kelvins) are defined as randomly-chosen positive floating-point numbers. All other units and constants are defined in terms of those. In a dimensionally-correct calculation, the units all cancel out, so the final answer is deterministic, not random. In a dimensionally-incorrect calculations, there will be random factors causing a randomly-varying final answer._

Which presumably is done to avoid overhead from carrying around units with each number, but forces you to run calculations multiple times (with different random seeds) to verify the result is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you are not familiar with how retrying is used and why exponential back off, jitter, etc are useful here is a shameless plug to a blog post I wrote recently [https://blog.najaryan.net/posts/autonomous- robustness/](https://blog.najaryan.net/posts/autonomous-robustness/) (the first half pretty much is about all these things).

</comment><comment><USER19> I like the name. Maybe this should be merged into requests at some point?

<comment><USER20> Do you speak Dutch? It's like the Python Zeep (SOAP - API protocol) client is Dutch for soap, Opnieuw is Dutch for again.

I always wandered if that was a nod to Guido Van Rossum that people like naming python packages in Dutch?

<comment><USER21> Channable is a Dutch company, and a lot of people who work here speak Dutch. I don't remember where we got it from but it is possibly a nod to Zeep.

I joked that we should name our library such that you would have to do

      from driemaal import scheepsrecht

<comment><USER22> "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch."

\-- Tim Peters, The Zen of Python

O:-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think I'll try this, but for devs:

a simple while True + try/catch + time.sleep(n*2) will do exponential backoff pretty easily.

<comment><USER24> The post clearly states the problems they were trying to solve, none of which are taken into account here (consistency, ease of parameterization,..) It seems like people are reading too many "X in Y lines of code" posts :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://github.com/invl/retry](https://github.com/invl/retry) works well for me. only problem is that logging issue that's still open i believe.

seems to me that the authors wrote their own library instead of trying to make the ones that didn't meet their need better. well, they never mentioned they tried...

anyways, some of their choices like that long variable name are odd to me. i can understand the unit problem though. golang solves that so nicely!</comment>


Facebook's new 'highlight' feature, lets users pay to promote status updates - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/11/facebook-highlight-feature/ <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3957347></comment>


What flesh eatest thou? A missing child and a suspicious meat pie in 1645 - <AUTHOR> https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/what-flesh-eatest-thou-a-missing-child-and-a-suspicious-meat-pie-in-1645/ <comment><USER2> "Global Crisis" ([http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe- Seve...](http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe- Seventeenth/dp/0300208634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1433228609&sr=8-1&keywords=global+crisis)) is a good history of the world-wide climate-driven castastrophe that occurred in the 1600's, which may have killed as much as 1/3 of the human race.

The Little Ice Age was not a good time to be alive, because human economies are tuned up to be optimal in the current climate, whatever it happens to be, and when things change suddenly it takes a generation or two for people to adjust, and since food and other resources are in short supply the natural "solution" the problem is to take up arms and kill people and destroy things, because there is really no better way to ensure a return to surplus conditions than by obliterating the means of production.

There were fairly widespread reports of cannibalism, and although some--like this one--may have been baseless (because it is based on nothing but a gut feeling, and the epistemic utility of our organs of digestion is limited at best) it's pretty clear that it did happen on multiple occasions in both China and Europe.

<comment><USER3> According this a recent paper ([http://www.voxeu.org/article/myth-europe-s- little-ice-age](http://www.voxeu.org/article/myth-europe-s-little-ice-age)), Europe's little ice age is a myth.

<comment><USER4> The existence of the little ice age has become a pawn in the arguments about global warming.

I don't know enough about the topic to say what the truth is, but I can tell you that arguments for and against it have little to do with the little ice age itself, and everything to do with belief for or against global warming.

Here is one conservative report on the subject: [http://www.wnd.com/2009/12/119745/](http://www.wnd.com/2009/12/119745/)

<comment><USER5> "I don't know enough about the topic to say what the truth is"

Thanks for confirming for those of us that were not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interestingly enough, the story about the barber who killed strangers to be baked into his neighbor baker's pies also exists in Paris, in the rue Chanoinesse. There's no specific motive to the crimes, but it's clear that the baker sold said pies. What makes this funnier / ironic is that this shop is located near Notre-Dame, in a neighborhood that used to be reserved to members of the clergy. The baker thus made some of them unwitting cannibals.

It is said to have happened in 1387 and is described in a 1612 book.

</comment><comment><USER7> This proclivity towards cannibalization is a real tragedy of we the human species, and it of course has its effects on software.

Often times one might find a customer of software who simply doesn't understand the way the system works, or is to be constructed, and they become suspicious of what they are being sold.

Other times, its quite possible to 'eat ones own dog-food' and be fed back a refactored version of an asset they already owned, if not controlled properly, albeit slightly cooked up.

From the customers perspective, it is perfectly reasonable to experience a plethora of these kinds of cannibalistic effects. If you get it on your plate, to save the project: invite the customer to the table. Software system implementation and usage, constructed though a meat pie, are key factors in success, its true, but if your customer does not at least have one finger in the tray, they won't know how fine it tastes. Educate your customer on software systems and why things are, not just that they are, take care of the bad smells with thorough enlightenment, and voila .. dinnertime.

<comment><USER8> Trolling or a sophisticated bot?

<comment><USER9> Trolling/confused/off-topic. seems to have other credible non-bot-like comments

<comment><USER7> Hint: if someone else is being eaten, in reality or as a social- construct/bearing-metaphor, it is cannibalism. True enlightenment means we're both meat. Or, not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, mentioned in the article, is well worth reading.

It is a gruesome and utterly deadpan joke.

<comment><USER11> It's quite funny. I didn't know what I was reading when I read it, so I didn't catch on until he suggested he should have a statue in his honor lol.</comment></comment>


Facebook Can't Fix Itself - <AUTHOR> https://time.com/5847963/trump-section-230-executive-order/ <comment><USER2> I like this analogy from the article: "Where industrial companies dumped toxic chemicals in fresh water, Internet platforms pollute society with toxic content." Indeed, but it's not quite so simple to identify toxic content, as one person's trash is another's treasure.

<comment><USER3> >it's not quite so simple to identify toxic content, as one person's trash is another's treasure.

The utility in the word "toxic" is it's vagueness and ambiguity. You can get so many people against toxicity because everyone can find someone they consider toxic.

Any adjective with more precision than "toxic" would start subdividing the category in a way that no longer hides all the mutual exclusive definitions of toxicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They would have to go private to 'fix themselves' it's that simple as a starting position.

</comment><comment><USER5> Zuckerberg is positioning Facebook's stance as a bet that Trump winning a second term is at least somewhat likely. Why?

Google bet the farm on a Clinton win (Schmidt was on the campaign), and now they're staring down the barrel of infinite anti-trust investigations.

Amazon bet the farm on a Clinton win, and now they lost a giant cloud computing contract.

<comment><USER6> I think your analysis is a little over-simplified but I generally agree. Facebook is clearly betting on American conservatives retaining power given their "light handed" approach on political advertising. Progressive and even moderate politicians are calling for regulation or even a break-up which makes it in the best interest for Facebook to support conservatives.

Regardless, if American conservatives lose some or most power in November, Facebook will simply move the dump truck full of cash to the other side and sadly things won't change.</comment></comment>


How many NSA spy hubs are scooping up your Internet data? I counted 7 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/internet-surveillance-map-nsa-gchq/ <comment><USER2> Seems like this post has been taken down

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WEvXTu...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WEvXTuz7I3wJ:https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2017/03/internet-surveillance-map-nsa- gchq/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER3> So it doesn't go down the Memory Hole: [http://archive.is/NqsAk](http://archive.is/NqsAk)

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny how that works</comment>


Laser camera can track hidden moving objects around corners - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28628-laser-camera-can-track-hidden-moving-objects-around-corners/ <comment><USER2> other articles:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695922](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695922)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695595](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10695595)</comment>