Why Violence Against Tech Firms May Only Be Beginning - <AUTHOR> http://www.realcleartechnology.com/articles/2014/01/24/violence_against_tech_firms_may_only_be_beginning_916.html

<comment><USER2> When I saw the title of this article I knew it would mention the Luddites. Yet, this has nothing to do with people fearing the technology. They are complaining about a social phenomenon that is increasing rent prices. Had the prices stayed the same, few would care.

Some personal anecdote: when the company I work for opened a huge chocolate factory in a very small and poor city, and had to hire employees from outside that area, the citizens complained (and still do) that rent and groceries price are very high. People hide their badges when going outside of the factory to avoid any hostilities.

This has nothing to do with technology.

<comment><USER3> I think it does have something to do with technology, in the sense of how technology, which is a neutral toolset, is being used by the powerful.

For instance, Luddite's first paragraph in wikipedia:

> The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested > against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The > stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during ^^the > Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, > low-wage labourers, leaving them without work.^^

Emphasis mine.

What we're seeing is another revolution. A technological/economical revolution that potentially threatens to replace most workers in general with automated machines on an unprecedented scale. I feel like their is a concern here, and that some people within the aggressive group would most likely identify with this concern.

Links regarding this potential revolution: [http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous- tec...](http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21594264-previous- technological-innovation-has-always-delivered-more-long-run-employment-not- less) [http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/half-of-all-us- jobs...](http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/half-of-all-us-jobs-will-be- automated-but-what-opportunities-will-be-created/)

I don't know what will be the case, whether we create new employment for people like in our history, or not, because we're treading in new territory. But regardless of what direction we take, ignoring the masses in terms of basic needs will be met with violence, death, loss of growth...

Another important factor to include regarding new technologies and industries are that normal people create them. This requires economic freedom to do, and stifling future generations with mandatory credentials and debt is not the most efficient way of doing this.

<comment><USER4> You haven't read enough Veblen. Once machines could make things like perfectly machined aluminum silverware, people just began to desire imperfections that were hard to produce by machine.

A carpeted dwelling was the pinnacle of opulence until machines and synthetic fibers made plywood+carpet cheaper than hardwood floors. Once that happened, after a brief carpet opulence arm race going all the way to shag, carpet was for low class people and hardwood floors were the new thing.

In this new revolution you are talking, people will just literally start wearing printed coats made of solved auditable captchas, to prove how important they are and how much labor they can command and put to waste.

There will be plenty of jobs for a while to come. The revolution will be dampened by zero-sum status wars. By the time domination over machine overtakes domination over man as a primary status signal, there won't be any humans left anyway.

<comment><USER5> Veblen goods are the exception, not the rule. Some products are just killed outright by advancing technology: the newspaper industry is doomed, those profits are gone forever now, because there's no market for "hand-written" investigative stories. Ditto music (to an extent), ditto cable TV.

 _Some_ industries can survive being automated, _most_ cannot.

<comment><USER6> Point well taken, but you could argue that news, music, and cable TV are sectors of the information and entertainment industries, which certainly contain veblen goods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The protest in Berkley was only tangentially about technology. It was mainly a traditional NIMBY [meant neutrally] anti-developer [in the traditional sense] protest that happened to ride the zeitgeist of the populist protest across the bay dressed up with a glaze of Berkeley's anti-war activism [ _The past is never dead. It 's not even passed. - Faulkner_].

The proposed condominium project which mobilized these activists is in fucking Berkeley where the poverty rate is 4 points lower than San Fransisco or Oakland (where 1 in 6 families live below the poverty line).

It wasn't about tech at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> For an example of extremist protesting have a look at the animal rights movement in the UK.

For a long time there were a broad range of groups. There were people involved in letter writing and politcal campaining at one end, and lab-raiding at the other end.

Some of the people raiding labs tried to exploit loopholes in English law to get hold of documents. If you have no i tent to permanently deprive the owner it isn't theft, so they would take documents, copy them, and return them. They lost that argument.

And then things got a bit more extreme.

Anti fur campaigners set "smoke bombs" in coats, with the intent to trigger sprinkler systems and cause water damage. The sprinkler systems didn't work and the shops burnt down.

Some people involved in animal industries faked bombs - someone involved in running a hunt claimed activists had set a bomb in his vehicle when he'd done it.

Then anti hunt activists dug up corpses for ransom.

Relevant to this thread is the amount of activity around Huntingdon Life Sciences. Activists used a variety of tactics such as campaigning outside suppliers to HLS. Those suppliers increased their prices or dropped out, which increased costs. Some activists campaigned outside the homes of people who worked at HLS or their suppliers.

While I support peaceful vigorous protest (and I hold a gently anti- vivisection viewpoint) I found a lot of the protesting really troubling.

There was talk of changing the law. I'm not sure if that worked or not. (I'd have thought that English police have plenty of tools to target such demonstrations).

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I think animal rights activists got to the point of firebombing the cars of random low-level employees of the banks that provided financial services to the construction firms that built the buildings the research was happening in, because everyone more directly involved was under heavy police protection and too difficult a target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Page 1: Straightforward, a bit boring, but generally accurate that jobs will be lost, and society will have to adapt. It sucks, but it may lead to a better outcome in the end (my personal hope is that those who can't find a job still make a decent living because we as a society have realized that if society can tick along without everyone working, then that's okay; we can spread the wealth and either create demand, thereby getting more people working, or spread the wealth, still have people not working, but living to acceptable standards, and that -that is okay-).

Page 2: Goes right off the deep end. Speculating what will happen if we manage to get AI is the realm of science fiction. It's fair to pontificate on, but to try and tie it as the next stage from people getting angry over rising real estate prices is incredibly alarmist.

</comment><comment><USER11> Firms? This is targeting engineers. Engineers who have to go through shit like crunch months or deal with ageism.

<comment><USER12> well of course its easy to fire up sentiments against some one who is "different" rather than dealing with the substantive issue.

This is just the "nationalist" strain in American politics for the 21's century and techies are an easy target as we are passive and put up with shit.

If I where Google i would suggest to all the tech company's the they

1 shut down the shuttles

2 give every one a day off and suggest they use it for a mass lobby of the local politicians

<comment><USER13> Why? Shutting down the shuttles is only going to "prove" to the protesters that their protests are working, which will lead to them trying to go farther.

Giving in to and placating the protesters isn't going to make them stop, it's just going to make them try for more, and potentially more outlandish, things.

<comment><USER12> Having what 25/30k techies turn up at sf town hall in a mass in person lobby wont make a point?

You could also do a french solution and have all the shuttle drivers drive their buses into central Sf and shut traffic down.

<comment><USER13> Lobby for what though? That requires a group of typically complacent people (in this context) to come together to say "something is wrong", and point to a specific thing. And they'd probably be asked to offer some solutions.

The problem is that there really isn't a problem. Non-techies are angry that rent is getting higher and that the local government isn't going to loosen restrictions. From what I can tell the techies don't have a problem with the rent, because they can pay for it, or are moving to places they can pay for because they don't have some ridiculous attraction to a specific location.

It seems to me to be entirely one-sided, and the techies don't care, they'll just wait it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Considering humans haven't built a single, intelligent machine yet, talking about far-fetched science fiction ideas like singularity and predicting the future (as if this is ever possible) removes any credibility the author and article might have had. With the sensationalist headline out of the way, we just have the current incidents, something not worth addressing. If it ramps up, these idiots will go to jail. They likely know that and it's likely why they are protesting google busses and an engineer's home rather than executives. The upper class has once again turned the lower class on itself and the lower class is just too stupid to realize it.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's something about the dynamic proposed (and said to exist currently) that I'm not understanding (I know little of economics).

You would think that because of all the automation causing the low employment and the aggregation of wealth into only a small number of people's hands that prices would _not_ go up because most people had less money to spend cause they're not working.

But in many places (Bay Area) it seems like a _lot_ of people are benefiting from the tech boom, enough that they do drive up prices. But how can such a small percentage of the population (what percentage of the population in the Bay Area works in tech?) affect things so universally?

It seems like there might be enough benefit to the automation to go around but would require people to shift their skill sets?

<comment><USER16> > You would think that because of all the automation causing the low > employment and the aggregation of wealth into only a small number of > people's hands that prices would not go up because most people had less > money to spend cause they're not working.

Prices are determined not by what most people can afford, but by what makes the most money for the seller.

To use a contrived example, imagine you are selling a product with no marginal cost to a population with very high inequality. This population consists of 50 people who can afford to pay $1 for your product, and 1 person who can afford to pay $100. How much do you, the seller, charge for your product? You can sell it to 50 people and make $50 profit, or one person and make $100 profit. Therefore you charge the higher price for the product, even though the population is overwhelmingly poor.

With a more realistic income-distribution, this same phenomena causes prices to be dictated more by _mean_ incomes rather than _median_ incomes. As society becomes more unequal and the gap between mean and median widens, you therefore can have prices increasing even as the vast majority of people get poorer.

(There's a traditional mechanism for dealing with this: price discrimination. In the contrived example above, the perfect solution would be to differentiate your product into a $1 product for poor people, and a $100 product for rich people; this results in the optimum utility for buyers and sellers alike. Unfortunately, this kind of price discrimination is becoming increasingly difficult in today's disintermediated world: the millionaires I know are as happy as anyone else to order off Amazon. So goods and services increasingly tend to have a single price, and that price is increasingly set by the mean.)

<comment><USER17> _This population consists of 50 people who can afford to pay $1 for your product, and 1 person who can afford to pay $100...You can sell it to 50 people and make $50 profit, or one person and make $100 profit._

This is true for a single monopolistic market incumbent. On the other hand, if I (the upstart) want to make money, I'll charge $1. I don't care if I just cost you $100 and I only gained $50 in profit - my choices were either getting $50 (by selling at $1) or $0 (by selling at $100).

The real estate market is pretty competitive - it's not as if a small oligopoly owns all the land. So if rent is going up, you should be asking what what prevents upstarts from buying up a city block and building a gigantic low cost tower block to house everyone. (Hint: insane SF zoning regulations.)

<comment><USER16> I'd love to see San Francisco have much more open zoning regulations. They're clearly a contributor to the high real estate costs. However even if I built a low-cost arcology in the middle of SF, I can guarantee that it would find a ready market of rich people willing to pay premium for it. Until the supply of real estate exceeds the demand of rich people willing to pay for it, the market will cater primarily to the wealthy and prices will remain high. A vasty liberalised zoning regime would probably help -- but not until it had saturated the market to the point where the wealthy were no longer crowding out the rest.

Unfortunately the financialisation of the real estate industry makes this very difficult to achieve, as the wealthy will keep acquiring real estate as an investment long after their need for it as an actual _place to live_ has been sated.

Solutions to this will almost certainly need to include all of the following:

1.) Liberalisation of zoning & development, as you suggest (see Germany for a good example of this).

2.) Ending tax breaks which reward the accumulation of real estate. Probably other measures to de-financialise the real estate sector somewhat, such as requiring significantly higher reserves for banks.

3.) A Universal Basic Income to provide automation-proof social support / monetary redistribution in the face of the end of wage labour.

<comment><USER17> _...the wealthy will keep acquiring real estate as an investment long after their need for it as an actual place to live has been sated._

Negligible problem. SF has a very low vacancy rate. Worry about it if it happens.

[http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco- vacancy...](http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-vacancy- remains-low-despite-building-boom/Content?oid=2622906)

As for (3), we are nowhere near the point where that is necessary. No developer should ever clean their own house unless labor is scarce. Yet strangely, we have people claiming they can't find work, and we also have high costs for domestic labor.

The real problem is that taxes and transfers drastically reduce the incentive for people to do low skill work: [http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and- cliffs...](http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/taxes-and-cliffs.html)

<comment><USER16> > Negligible problem. SF has a very low vacancy rate. Worry about it if it > happens.

But we're not talking about the vacancy rate of housing, we're talking about the availability of housing for those who aren't housing.

Besides, I live in London, where this issue is accutely non-theoretical.

> As for (3), we are nowhere near the point where that is necessary.

We have large-scale structural underemployment and unemployment; real median incomes have been falling for a generation and a half; and half the workforce will be automated out of existence with a decade. We are _right there_.

> The real problem is that taxes and transfers drastically reduce the > incentive for people to do low skill work:

That's almost precisely wrong. It's not the _provision_ of social transfers which disincentivises people from working: it's the _withdrawal_ of social transfers which creates high marginal tax rates. Make the transfers universal and unconditional, and those disincentives are gone. (I favour a flat UBI funded by a flat income tax: equality for all).

<comment><USER17> _We have large-scale structural underemployment and unemployment;..._

And yet you still can't find a maid for $7.25/hour and companies continue outsourcing work because Americans are too expensive. That shouldn't be happening if humans were unnecessary, unless of course some other factor was inducing Americans not to work.

Income has fallen due to a shift in compensation from taxed wages to untaxed benefits and due to composition changes in the workforce.

[http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM) [http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/immigrants_simpsons_p...](http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/immigrants_simpsons_paradox_great_stagnation.html)

 _Make the transfers universal and unconditional, and those disincentives are gone..._

Nope - diminishing marginal utility reduces it.

This has been borne out by experiment - BI reduces working hours by 10% or so. (As is common on this topic, fawning reporters don't cite primary sources. Argh.)

[https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free- money...](https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to- everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Society could, as it always has, adjust to this paradigm shift and life will continue on, with the same arguments to recur in the next generation.

Or

We could be plunged head first into a dark dystopian world where people eat each other's children and burn the remains to stay warm.

These two equally likely scenarios should be given the same amount of legitimacy.

</comment><comment><USER19> It is interesting that violence against newcomers is stereotypically a far right thing, but in SF it's the far left who are doing it.

<comment><USER12> There is a tendency for the far left and far right to merge into their own co joined weirdness

[http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/believing- in-...](http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/believing-in- anything.html)

As Paul Evans says above

 _It 's easy to cloak beliefs. Sloppy thinking results in dangerous allies. Simplifying to gain popularity can be disastrous. Scapegoating is always a mistake._

<comment><USER20> The way I like to think of it is the political spectrum is actually a circle. Go far enough left, and you find yourself on the right. Vica versa.

<comment><USER21> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's not real clear why this article is worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER23> The second half of this is ridiculous speculation. No one knows what's going to happen in the future.

I expect this discontent to grow, but I don't think that most people have an issue with "tech firms". It's unfocused anger about economic stagnation and real estate malfeasance. I doubt the people being priced out of the Mission care strongly about PRISM. People are trying to direct this unfocused anger (which looks like it might be the nebula of a left-wing Tea Party) toward their own pet issues (surveillance) and it won't work that way in the long run. If this dog runs loose, it will go where it wants.

Having traveled pretty extensively about the country, I think technology has a huge problem with "placism", coupled with an unhealthy obsession with pedigree. There's no good reason for technology to be one of the industries where location matters most. It should be the other way. But Sand Hill Road VCs won't take you seriously if you're more than 50 miles away, companies like Google keep the best projects in the Valley office, and having gone to Stanford matters more than a 150+ IQ. (That's not to say that "having a 150+ IQ", alone, should mean that much. But it is self-evident that a noisy signal of intelligence should be taken less seriously than raw intelligence itself.) It's unhealthy for technology, it's bad for the Bay Area, and it's catastrophic for the rest of the country. Now we're seeing pushback against technology's location perversion coming not from the engineers, but from Bay Area locals who are entirely disinterested in technology's placist dynamics, and who don't have strong opinions of technology either way, any more than Parisians in 1793 gave a shit which province got its swamps drained and how such decisions derived from machinations in Versailles.

If there is a wave of violence in the U.S., it won't be "against tech firms" because tech is not a day-to-day problem for most angry Americans. (Besides, most cities would love to steal a few tech firms from San Francisco, whose people sense saturation and no longer want them.) It will be broader, less localized, and it will be, toward its end, very differently from what it was when it started. I don't think it's desirable, either; those sorts of processes are too nonlinear and volatile for anyone to hold blanket opinions either way.

</comment><comment><USER24> Rise of the machines? Seriously?

<comment><USER14> I'll take talk about singularity more seriously once we have built at least one intelligent machine. Until then, I just marvel at supposedly intelligent people's delusions of said singularity.

<comment><USER25> How intelligent does a machine need to be for you?

<comment><USER14> Good question. The theory of singularity requires "greater-than-human intelligence" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)). Anything even approaching any kind of intelligence would be mind-blowing at this time, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The flyer mentioned in TFA reminded me more of pro-lifers' postings about abortion doctors. They would list factual information about the person and strongly imply violence (though of course never come out and say it)

I think they had to tone it down or at least take a rest when that one doctor was finally gunned down in a church. I fully expect something along those lines to happen here.

</comment><comment><USER27> You just know that the Adbusters reading fantasists took part in this while having iphones in their pocket.</comment>


The Fine Art of JavaScript Error Tracking - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jico/the-fine-art-of-javascript-error-tracking-bc031f24c659

<comment><USER2> Thanks for summing it all up. Does Sentry provide anything similar to the Telemetry Timeline? This seems like a great feature if done well...</comment>


Teaching Kids to Fail Through Code - <AUTHOR> http://mauryacouvares.blogspot.com/2015/05/teaching-kids-to-fail-through-code.html

<comment><USER2> >> Our students can't afford to move fast and break things ... except that they can in their code.

That's a really interesting point. In other crafts such as art, carpentry, or cooking, there's a distinct cost associated with failure (outside labor) that makes it hard to fail over and over again. That's one of the cool things about coding - it doesn't cost anything to compile and rebuild.</comment>


How to Reclaim Your Attention - <AUTHOR> http://zenhabits.net/2010/03/reclaim-your-attention/

<comment><USER2> A quick and dirty experiment: I find it helpful that when you are aware of a distraction, it is only helpful to let it flower and watch it blossom. That may be challenging to try, but instead keep a text editor or a blank sheet of paper nearby, in which you could write down your "distractions" as they come by. Tell yourself you will attend to this later and keep writing everything down to complete your thoughts. Come back to this paper later and see your "distractions" - I bet if you got rid that paper, you might not have missed that much.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's posts just like this one that nibble at my limited attention resource.

<comment><USER4> It's posting just like this that continues my downward spiral into unproductivity...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> it's not about reclaiming attention, but eliminating distractions -- in fact it recommends limiting distractions from blog posts just like itself.

<comment><USER6> Success: it's not about any particular secret of success, it's about avoiding enough causes of failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> She got my attention.

</comment><comment><USER8> productivity pr0n = productivity fail</comment>


Gitbox 1.5: native undo for git operations - <AUTHOR> http://www.gitboxapp.com/

<comment><USER2> Looks like a solid app, and fast as well. It's clear that the developers care about quality. But I'm sticking with GitX because GitBox is still missing a few key features:

\- It doesn't have a good representation of the branch tree (like GitX). It's a must for anyone who deals with multiple branches.

\- I can't stage parts of a file. GitX makes that really easy.

\- I can't see the contents of a stash (again, easy in GitX). But GitBox makes it easy to see my list of stashes, which GitX doesn't.

\- GitX also wins in that I can see the changes made in a commit by simply clicking the file name. GitX opens a third party app.

\- It's not clear to me why there is a big vertical space on the left dedicated to listing my repositories, while my branches are hidden behind a small drop-down box. I'm more likely to deal with multiple branches than multiple repositories at any one time so it makes more sense to keep my branches visible and hide my other repositories behind a drop-down menu.

On the other hand, I really like that GitBox refreshes it's state automatically. This is one of the issues with GitX that I need to hit Cmd-R every time I switch to it. Overall, great start.

<comment><USER3> Visualizing diffs inside the app is also a must-have for me. Fewer clicks = simpler = easier to use = better.

I also note that the apparent keyboard shortcut for "Show Difference" is just "D". Not command-D. Just "D". Not only is this highly unusual (no keyboard modifier like Cmd/Ctrl/Shift/etc.) but it also doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> is zero-friction undo even a good idea? rewinding in git is something that should be done with care, I'm not sure I would be comfortable with non-experts making "undo commit" part of their everyday toolset.

<comment><USER5> > _is zero-friction undo even a good idea?_

Yes. It's the major missing feature for git. Novices spend more time figuring out how to undo their mistakes than anything else.

If the undo has side effects (i.e. "if someone cloned this branch since you did the action you want to undo, stuff will break"), the tool should display that warning and ask to continue.

Undo on local working branches only would already be a _big_ help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> About a month ago I tried all the commercial Mac Git clients (SourceTree, GitBox, Tower, Gitty) after being frustrated with my old copy of GitX. I just couldn't get into any of them. I was missing the tree views, so I can see where branches diverge, staging of hunks, and overall they were all too "weird" to use in their own way.

I ended up going back to GitX when I found there's a more recently updated fork maintained by German Laullon: <http://gitx.laullon.com/> It has a few bugs, but I find it's much more usable than the commercial alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great UI, much cleaner than GitX. However it seems to be missing my favourite feature from GitX which is the ability to stage hunks.

<comment><USER8> As well as being clean, it can also be nicely keyboard driven. On the whole, a great understated design!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks pretty cool, but for the love of god please slow down your slideshow (maybe 6-8 seconds instead of 4).

<comment><USER10> Or add the ability to pause / control which slide to view.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can click the previews - the slideshow will stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks nice and I'm sure there is a great market for this kind of app. I'd be interested in hearing reports of how things.

As for me though, I still prefer the command line :)

<comment><USER12> I generally think it can be dangerous to build a reliance on tools like these, especially when one doesn't yet understand the command line equivalents

That said, I paid for this app and have used it to manage merge conflicts that would have otherwise driven me nuts w/o a GUI

<comment><USER13> > I generally think it can be dangerous to build a reliance on tools like > these, especially when one doesn't yet understand the command line > equivalents

Good point. I agree.

That's interesting that you use it exclusively for merge conflicts. I will give it a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty nice, though I am a little annoyed that the number of repositories in the demo went from three to one. Other than that, seems like a nice update!

</comment><comment><USER15> I was coming in here to ask what Gitbox has over the Github no-cost alternative, but found out about GitX. When did GitX get a native GUI!?

I've used GitX in the past but mostly as a crutch when the terminal client confused me (or when I needed pretty pictures.); It's X11 foundation always turned me off on the Mac. However, the latest GitX looks really good and might even turn me from my terminal ways. :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmm that is pretty cool, looks like it's a smart front-end for git rebase?

</comment><comment><USER17> It's a lovely app and it's got a beautiful website, too!

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome.</comment>


Tim Hortons app encourages buying a coffee for friends who didn't ask for one - <AUTHOR> http://o.canada.com/2013/02/27/tim-hortons-app-encourages-buying-a-coffee-for-friends-who-didnt-ask-for-one/#.US5SqusjrWE

<comment><USER2> Tim Horton cups are one of the biggest contributors to litter in Ontario already. Now we're handing out cups to people who didn't even ask.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any HN readers on Crimea and can tell us what's going on? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I will try to sum up what is going on. After Ukrainians made government turnover of president Yanukovych ( he and his sons have stolen over 40 billion $ during last couple years), the new government made a terrible mistake and cancelled pretty conditional and stupid law, which allowed russian language to be used in official documents ( Ukraine is mostly bilingual, and everyone understands both russian and ukrainian). Canceling this law doesn't mean that russian language is banned. It is just CANT be used in official documents. After canceling this law, parliamentary representatives told that there will be a new law which will respect not only two languages, but will spread on others which are used on Ukrainian territory.

Putin's propaganda presented this as infringement of ethnic Russians and that new government are fascists which made illegal turnover.

Three main nationalities in Crimea are ethnic russians (1.5m), ukrainians (500.00) and tatars (who actually lived in Crimea, before Stalin repressed them in 1944-1950). Also Russia pays Ukrainian government for keeping part of their fleet in Crimea.

So, these forces "invaded" Crimea, but the had no russian markings and it was again presented, as these are volunteers who help to protect Crimea from west- ukrainian fascists (yeah, right, volunteers with guns, helicopters and armored cars). The Crimea parlament was capruted and now is ruled by pro-russian marginals who declare Crimea autonomy and that is should be a part of Russia. The officially request help from Putin to protect themselves. And yesterday Russian Council of federations allowed Putin to invade Crimea. But post-faktum it already happened.

<comment><USER3> You forget to say about new "power" in Kiev and west Ukraine:

BBC video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkiSPMpTp_I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkiSPMpTp_I) Sasha Biliy @ Rovno government meeting(UA language): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01is0p0mzJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01is0p0mzJQ)

(and much more)

Of course, people of Crimea, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Lugansk, Odessa see that violent nazi power and want to detach from the new Ukraine.

<comment><USER2> Okay, i will say this only once - there are NO nazis in ukraine.

Sasha Biliy is not the whole country or doesn't represent even a city. He is just a mad guy who walks city streets with empty machine gun. This video made a huge resonance in Ukraine, so even our Interior minister [secretary of state] (Arsen Avakov) reacted to this on his FB page saying that this is absolutely inappropriate. And i am sure, that this man will be in jain really soon.

I ask this question every person who speaks about nazis in ukraine. IF there are nazis, who hate russian people - WHY there was NOT A SINGLE attack on russian embassy in whole ukraine? Why not a single russian was killed by evil ukrainian nazis?

<comment><USER3> If Ukraine is against nazis, Biliy & Yarosh should be in jail already not walking on the streets with empty(??? how did you check that?) machine gun. And we already see violence against jews [http://www.haaretz.com/jewish- world/jewish-world-news/.premi...](http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish- world-news/.premium-1.576230) and communist party offices. Remember history, german nazis started with jews & communists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not HN (edit: or specifically from Crimea), but there is a Reddit post by a self-reported Ukrainian protestor which I found interesting: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1z9pkm/iama_ukrainian_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1z9pkm/iama_ukrainian_protester_of_euromaidan_our/)

There is also another series of interesting posts here: [http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1zad2p/ukraine_pu...](http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1zad2p/ukraine_put_its_armed_forces_on_full_combat_alert/)

It's not HN, but it beats the worthless commentary that I've seen on TV while they show stock footage of tanks rolling around (which I haven't heard is the case).

<comment><USER3> But he is not in Crimea! He's engaged a much as EuroMaidan protester living in Kiev

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a friend in Sevastopol. He states almost all people there are suppose Crimea independence & Russia(though he personally doesn't share that).

<comment><USER5> The sentiment is for an independent Crimea or to become part of Russia?

<comment><USER3> He says it depends on how referendum question will be formulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area It's weird the way any stories to do with Ukraine are being flagged off the home page - I'd understand if they were taking over the homepage, but this request seems like a useful one to me, and the topic one of interest for everyone here - plenty of things to discuss other than politics or tribal allegiances, here are some:

The reporting of wars and revolutions by the people involved themselves is causing a huge change in journalism - some news journalists I know are starting to question how to involve reader stories and reader opinions in reports without ending up with an incoherent cacophony of people shouting their opinions, with those the loudest to shout being those who are heard. Scepticism, source checking and editorial independence are needed more than ever when you are able to hear an entire crowd at once.

The use of twitter is also growing to cover conflicts like this - I find it really interesting just how far newspapers are now going in using twitter as a source (and verifying afterwards). Look at all the twitter refs in this live feed. [1]

Web images/video of conflict, and message boards such as this one have become the new battleground in establishing what the world thinks about a conflict, and techniques of manipulating them with false comments, hacking and false information are growing more sophisticated - RT was hacked today [2], and some protests have been reported as fake [3].

I have no position on the conflict that I'd like to share as I don't know enough about it, but an informed public is more essential than ever if the world is on the edge of war.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/02/ukraine- warns-r...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/02/ukraine-warns-russia- crimea-war-live)

[2] [https://twitter.com/RT_com/statuses/439981255052898304](https://twitter.com/RT_com/statuses/439981255052898304)

[3] [https://twitter.com/howardamos/status/440128242620825600](https://twitter.com/howardamos/status/440128242620825600)</comment>


Xooglers - <AUTHOR> http://xooglers.blogspot.com/

<comment><USER2> The original Xoogler blog was phenomenal, not only lots of informative content about the early days at Google but a great literary achievement. Each post was a veritable essay and well worth reading.

Sadly doesn't look like it has maintained the same signal to noise ratio over the past couple years.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, I appreciate the kind words about Xooglers 1.0. I'll admit that I'm rehashing some old posts and that I saved a lot of the best bits for my book (<http://amzn.to/gVwlNz>), but I'll see if I can't throw some meat into the stew in the coming weeks. Now that I know people actually care.</comment>


Notice HN: The Review System on most major sites is broken - <AUTHOR>

I was going to blog about this, but I'm short for time, so I thought I'd just post here.
I was poking around my server logs, seeing what folks bought after visiting hn-books, and I found this author, Tim Ferriss. He has some book out about how to become superman, lose gads of weight, put on super muscle mass, all while picking your nose and watching Oprah. Or something very similar to that. (For all I know the man is a miracle worker. His pitch seems a bit over the top, though)
When I click over to Amazon, one of his books has 1062 reviews, all positive! http://bit.ly/fVCXNM
Geesh! Look -- I've been poking around Amazon, both as a new affiliate (the above link is an affiliate link) and as a customer. I like reading reviews for stuff I buy before I buy it. Both the good and bad reviews help me make an informed choice.
But something is really wrong here. As several reviewers noted on his most recent book, the number of positive reviews is just crazy. Books with tremendously great reputations don't have anywhere near the reviews as some of these books do.
There may be an innocent reason for this. Perhaps just a big fan club? Or more darkly, perhaps folks are starting to game the review systems. This isn't the first time I've suspected something is seriously wrong with the review systems on ecommerce sites. It's like a hidden form of spamming where you never realize you're being spammed. Hopefully some aspiring startup can help fix it. Maybe some kind of weighed meta review site? Because as more hacking takes place, more and more this pattern of selection isn't going to work at all for the consumer. <comment><USER2> Given the lack of barriers to entry to reviewing on the internet, _The more positive reviews a service has the more likely they've had to actively incentivise people to review it_ , which tends towards an unwritten law of the internet that the quality of a product is almost inversely proportional to the quantity of unsubstantiated glowing testimonials they're able to point to. Don't believe me: Google "home business opportunities" and compare the Ponzi schemes to the franchises...

In Ferris' case, he could probably have achieved his astroturf effect simply by sending hundreds of advance copies to bloggers in the "lifestyle guru" market who'd be salivating over the content even if they weren't affiliate- linking their shill blog entries to it, which isn't that different to what any other publisher does save for the scale and the profile (though I certainly wouldn't rule out the alternate hypothesis of him paying someone in the Philippines to do it for him).

It's relatively easy to algorithmically penalise astroturfing in the overall rankings, remove duplicate IP entries altogether and normalise scores for reviewers that only give out top marks and order reviews by some form of reviewer quality score rather than (primarily) date. They've probably also got enough data to offer a "People that buy and rate things similarly to you thought" selection of reviews to their regular customers and wishlist users. The real problem is that however much Amazon feel inclined to penalise obvious astroturfing and , _it's manifestly not in their interests to do so_ given that the book is a guaranteed bestseller. Even if people really hate the book it probably isn't going to put them off Amazon as a vendor.

Hunch might help because it's simply too big and vague to easily game; but it's non-specific by design about _why_ you might be interested in a service. Peer recommendations via Facebook are a possibility - though I'm not sure I really want to give out or get _unsolicited_ product recommendations from my friends. The best solution is probably that venerable dinosaur; traditional media and reviewers that actually have some sort of reputation to stake. I'd place rather more trust in reviews linked to by Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic than I would in Amazon or the IMDB.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's absolutely a ton of room for improving review systems. Right now I have a fairly standard "how many stars + written comments" review set up on my startup (example link below), but I'm planning to test some ideas, such as giving people with different levels of karma different numbers of "points" to review with, to try to get the distribution of ratings closer to a standard bell curve.

example link: <http://www.parkgrades.com/parks/rio-montana-park>

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's helpful to look at a reviewer's review history. Urbanspoon prominently displays the reviewer's number of reviews next to each review. I generally ignore reviews from people with fewer than ten. A similar system could be helpful on other sites.

It can still be gamed, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's another example.

I went looking for sci-fi books for my kindle for the Christmas holiday season.

It was really difficult: all I wanted was a good stand-alone book that was readable and thought-provoking. What I ended up getting by looking at the reviews were lots of books that were in some kind of 20-part series where the only reason they got so many good reviews was because the author/series had a huge fan base. It took an hour to de-tangle the fanboy reviews from the ones that were helpful, and that was even paying attention to Amazon's meta-review system.

That's not really very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1 item cited? Seriously?

It's not broken.

People are incited to review something for either because the like it or hate it.

How can nobody hate his book? Maybe because the only people who bought it are the ones who already drank the koolaid. They want to think it's great, so they post saying it's great. People who wouldn't like the book knew so before buying, so they didn't waste their money and feel cheated.</comment>


Learn MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://mongly.com/ <comment><USER2> I ran into a glitch on lesson 19 that would not register my input properly. It was fine... i just advanced to lesson 20 manually, but might want to take a look there.

Also, I found myself typing "db.unicorns.find()" a few times in order to remember the schema. It would be easier if this data persisted in the scrolling history or something so I didn't have to reexecute this command a few times.

Great job though, I did the 15 min tutorial and felt like I had good control of the basic CRUD syntax by the end of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was fun. Granted, if I ever use MongoDB it'll probably be in Rails with either Mongoid or MongoMaper, but this is a great intro to the underlying operations.

And the linked book was concise, clear, and definitely worth the read.

*nitpick: I also ran into a glitch, and wound up redoing 18 lessons. On the bright side, I think this helped.

</comment><comment><USER4> What an awesome interactive tutorial! It was actually fun going through that.

This would be a great format to help learn programming languages (thinking Zed's Learn Python the Hard Way).

</comment><comment><USER5> I just went through some of the interactive tut. Was really good.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks so much for making these! Doing IS truly learning.....

</comment><comment><USER7> awesome work!!! love it...learning as we speak

</comment><comment><USER8> Karl Seguin FTW! :D

</comment><comment><USER9> cool thing! can one make such lessons for some system other than Mongo?</comment>


Starbucks Will Close All Its Stores in May for Racial-Bias Training - <AUTHOR> http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/04/starbucks-closing-all-stores-on-may-29-for-racial-training.html <comment><USER2> I don't understand the furor. If you go to a cafe, you are expected to order something. When the manager asked the two men to leave, they should have either spent a few dollars or left. If they were planning to meet someone, they could have waited outside.

<comment><USER3> No, you're not expected to buy anything at Starbucks. Other customers in that store had been waiting and hadn't bought anything, and they hadn't been asked to leave.

It is very common for people to meet at Starbucks, and it's totally normal for people to wait until everyone is there before they buy drinks.

That's all behaviour that has been encouraged by Starbucks.</comment></comment>


How come Facebook is so secure but Twitter is not? - <AUTHOR>

How come Facebook is so secure but Twitter is not ? <comment><USER2> Speculation: some of Twitter is still written in Ruby (I know they are rewriting their Ruby into Java, but don't know whether they've completed that yet), and the attackers got in using one of the recent Ruby exploits.

Whereas Facebook don't use Ruby (afaik they use their own custom PHP implementation).

</comment><comment><USER3> Your question is misguided. The real question is why are some technologies subject to particular exploits and others not ?

And the reason is that technologies are implemented differently.</comment>


Show HN: Initial Experiments with Automatically Generating Ironic Statements - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtsonirony.blogspot.com/2016/03/initial-experiments-with-automatically.html <comment><USER2> In keeping with the spirit of the "Show HN" guidelines, is there a demo or repository or something for people to play with?</comment>


How Gas Price Fixing Is Screwing Cab Drivers And They Don't Realize It - <AUTHOR> http://iamvictorio.us/post/35641468958/gas-price-fixing-effect

<comment><USER2> For a counterpoint, see here: [http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/11/why-does- odd-evengas-ra...](http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/11/why-does-odd-evengas- rationing-work/)

"And post Hurricane Sandy, we have the issue of Government mandated gasoline rationing. On any given day, 50% of customers cannot legally tank up their cars due to the last digit of the license plate number.

Experience in NJ and NY shows that rationing has worked tremendously well. Gas lines have gone from 3 hours down to [crossed-out]15 minutes[/crossed-out] nothing, even as many stations still have no power and fuel deliveries are not back to normal."</comment>


Former contractor says FBI put back door in OpenBSD - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/121510-former-contractor-says-fbi-put.html

<comment><USER2>
      Access Denied
      You don't have permission to access

"[http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/121510-former- contract...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/121510-former-contractor- says-fbi-put.html)

      on this server.
      Reference #18.4d96e753.1292415004.1e78639b

Also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2006128> \- marc.info - Many comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007694> \- Ask HN:</comment>


The big sleep - <AUTHOR> http://www.canberratimes.com.au/interactive/2016/the-big-sleep/ <comment><USER2> I just turned 43. At times I can't hold in my head the notion that I could die today, or I could live another 60 years. The only answer is to live fully each day.

My heroes are people like these. Live a full and active life, and accept death as part of life. I hope we sort out end of life legalities so more people can be as involved in their own deaths as they are in the other major decisions in their lives.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure, as a millennial, I'm supposed to agree wholeheartedly with this sentiment. But this "individuals should be able to do whatever they want" mentality is harmful to society as a whole. Society is made up of individuals. The actions of individuals do in fact affect the rest of society, even when it's not immediately apparent how they do. We don't live in a vacuum.

<comment><USER2> People making intentional, reasoned end of life decisions is beneficial to society. Viewing death as something to put off as long as technologically possible is not a universally good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am young, and very scared of this 'death' thing. It is so humbling to read of those who have transcended that fear.

<comment><USER5> When I had children I experienced a significant drop in fear of death. Now if, say, someone were pointing a gun at me, my greatest emotion would be fear for how it would hurt them.

Fear of death is just a piece of hard coded programming to make sure we successfully reproduce and raise healthy offspring. It's not an intrinsic part of being sentient or conscious. It's possible that intelligences that reproduced in some other way would lack it entirely, e.g. AIs that explicitly create their offspring or hive like aliens. For ants only the queen might fear death, and we indeed see ants behaving this way.

I think this explains why radical life extension tech is underfunded. Even being a billionaire doesn't change this. Bill Gates has kids.

<comment><USER6> I don't have kids, but I find it curious when parents have that mentality. If you're kids feel the same about their kids, and so on, then we're not much different than apples, existing only to spread our seed.

<comment><USER7> Save for the very few who do something significant to advance the species, how are we that different to apples?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wonderful. I can definitely relate to being more afraid of being an incompetent old man than actually dying.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is so beautiful. I wish I have the opportunity and courage to make the same rational decision when the appropriate time has come.

</comment><comment><USER10> I found this book to be a very interesting and affecting discussion of the end of life. Unfortunately it gives fairly cursory attention to the topic of suicide, assisted or otherwise. Otherwise highly recommended. [http://atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/](http://atulgawande.com/book/being- mortal/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Their downfall was pride: they were so proud of their intelligence and competence that senility and incompetence seemed to them worse than death (I wonder if they would have supported killing the young mentally deficient as well, but that's a different subject).

But I've had relatives who were senile and incompetent, and it's not actually bad, when one is surrounded by family and friends. We were all born dumb and helpless, and many of us die that way. A senile, frail old man is no more worthless than is an infant. Sure, he won't ever grow out of his state (as an infant will), but he once was otherwise and has hopefully earned some love and respect.

There are worse things than helplessness. I think hubris is one of them.

<comment><USER12> Your comment clearly assumes they have lost something by taking the action they did. Can you articulate what it is you think they lost?

<comment><USER13> They lost nothing more or less than some years (or months?) of their lives.

<comment><USER14> But, getting perhaps a bit philosophical, if you don't experience a loss, did you really "lose" something?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does YC contact your YC employer during the application process - <AUTHOR> I currently work for a YC company - I was wondering would YC contact the founder of the company I work for, if I'm still working there during the application process?
The only reason I ask this is because my coworker and I have been working on this project are thinking about applying in the Fall batch. I'm just worried that the YC founder wouldn't want 2 core people from the engineering team to leave and that would hurt our chances of getting in.
*our software is not related to the YC company.
maybe im just overthinking things?
Thanks for offering advice in advance. <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I'm a founder of a YC company, but am not on YC staff and have no internal knowledge so don't read this as an official YC answer.

Reference checks aren't normally part of the selection process, so it's not a normal occurrence for your employer to be contacted, whether or not they're a YC-funded company.

I have heard of a case years ago when a founder of a YC company got upset that a newly-appointed employee was applying to YC as a founder of another startup, without revealing he would be doing this when he applied and accepted the job. In this case, YC partners played a role in resolving the dispute, but I don't think it was YC staff who initially alerted the employer. The dispute was more about the perceived dishonesty of the employee in committing to a new role while having a strong intention to leave soon if his own startup was accepted into YC, so it was more about honesty and integrity than merely losing a team member.

YC does look for founders with decency and integrity, so it will matter to them that you've been upstanding in how you handle things with your employer.

Equally, you are entitled to follow the path that seems best for your long- term interests, and indeed a really good employer will be supportive and encouraging of you pursuing your ambition to become a founder just as they've done themselves. Ideally they should be willing to recommend you to YC and be a mentor for you, but it's more likely to get this kind of support if you're transparent and good-natured in the way you conduct yourself.</comment>


Patent grants remain at all-time high - <AUTHOR> http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/06/patent-grants-still.html

<comment><USER2> Wonder if this is related to the new incentives Kappos pushed through for examiners. I've heard no acceptable explanations yet.</comment>


Ask HN: Need advice on my website. - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on my website for quite some time and I designed/redesigned it multiple times to get the users to interact with it. At the current state it has a lot of call to action buttons and I have tried to engage users over the page, but I still don't see a lot of conversions as I would want.
Any help/suggestions/ideas would be welcome and appreciated. Here is the link to the website:
http://www.findero.us
About finderous: It is a simple location based question and answer site, where users can chose a location and post their questions to get answers from followers/users of that place.
Thanks <comment><USER2> I think the idea is not bad, but there are a few off-putting things.

First, it asks me for my location before I know what it's about at all. Maybe delay the geolocation request until after I click something?

The description of what the site does should really be up there under the logo and not in between content elements, it's slightly confusing.

Random question / change location buttons should get some more attention. Especially random question.

Alignment/padding inconsistencies make the site look cluttered or messy. Border colors do not work well with the background green.

And as mentioned by oinksoft, the logo _is_ confusing.

Otherwise good idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your suggestions, daveid. I think you are right in postponing the get location button until the users start interacting with the site. I will put on the change location and random question button more prominently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As a starting point, your logo is confusing ... I thought you had used some fancy unicode "F"-like character ... but you are substituting a ? with a "-" for "F"? Seems off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I think I will have to hire a designer to do a logo for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could do a design audit. I do them for other startups, no charge.

<http://byjess.net/posts/design/audit/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That is great. How do I submit my site for a design audit?

Thanks</comment></comment>


Evidence SARS-CoV-2 Emerged from a Biological Laboratory in Wuhan (Updated) - <AUTHOR> https://project-evidence.github.io/ <comment><USER2> >>An earlier version of this document referred to us as "Project E.P.S.T.E.I.N." (Evidence Plausibly Supporting Theories Explaining Infection Naturality). It was intended be a humorous backronym. After receiving feedback from several readers, we have decided to change our name to "Project E"<<

this new project title could also be taken as an insinuation [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902747](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902747)

I can see someone has spent a bit of time with this particular site, however no authoritative conclusions are provided, leaving the reader to make inferences that may or may not be a product of critical thought

</comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone actually read this full webpage?

It seems legit, but I feel like we need an independent group of scientists that are familiar with this particular area of research to tell me whether this is actually legit or just seemingly legit.

</comment><comment><USER4> What a coincidence</comment>


Powerset and Natural Language Search Talk by Barney Pell (Powerset, Founder and CEO) - <AUTHOR> http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-post/unrestricted/colloq/details.cgi?id=613 <comment><USER2> After watching the entire video, it sounds like the system they are building fundamentally operates at a linguistic level with no attempt to really model underlying concepts and relations in a human way. A questioner asked how their approach compares to CYC (The company trying to model all human common sense knowledge with bad epistemology and contradictions), and he explained that they aren't even trying to model concepts in that way, but rather finding relations through linguistic analysis. I think the way to think about what they're doing is a very advanced pattern matching approach with definite limitations. For example, you can't ask their system to find contradictions between what someone said as it doesn't "understand" contradiction, etc. He said there would be a 5 minute tutorial on the kind of questions you can and can't ask.

I think that there is the danger, and he mentions it as well, in people having too high expectations when using NL to query their system. They apparently have exclusive license to use PARC technology finally finished in 2003, so I'm sure that there will be some interesting results. The question is will it frustrate people by its limitations so much that they move away, or will it excite people about the possibilities of a system that could actually "understand" what the concepts mean that they are expressing. The latter would be great news for Organontech.

<comment><USER3> I think they do have some modeling of underlying concepts. I think if I remember correctly they had a search where "politician" matched "mayor", so they at least have synonyms. I think they obviously would like to have understanding--it's just that NLP isn't there yet.

<comment><USER2> I agree, they do have concepts, but not in a _human_ way. One questioner asked what their conceptual schema looks like, and the CEO said that it is basically the same as typical ontologies out there but with a few more links between concepts. We looked closely at OWL and RDF and CYC and all the other ontology languages we could find to see if it was possible to meaningfully capture _human_ like conceptualization with these languages, and it isn't - they are extremely far from providing a framework for successfully doing it. A radically new framework is needed to make progress conceptually - which is what we are working on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some questions:

\- For the sorts of queries he mentions in the talk, can't you just use Google's wildcard queries to get similar results?

\- Can you use a more social web 2.0 approach to address difficult and/or natural language queries? If so how?

\- What if you allowed the system to get back to you later with answers (possibly several hours later)? Is a social approach more feasible then?

<comment><USER3> The answer to your first question is no. For example if you wanted to search for "What did Al Gore say?", a google wild card search for "Al Gore said wildcard" (the markup won't let me put an asterisk) would not match things like "blah, said Al Gore" or "he said blah" where he is referring to Al Gore, or "Al Gore told someone blah". For the search engine to match those results, some level of parsing is needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but if this is an an important news item, what he said would probably be mentioned on many web pages in many forms, including a form that matches your query.</comment></comment></comment>


The crushing lameness of April Fools Day on the Internet. - <AUTHOR> I have a sense of humor.  Really I do.
I just don't find being pounded with systematic absurdity for an entire day every year as being very funny.
I don't know how to solve it.  It seems every single company and publication that communicates via the web has a corporate communications department or something that thinks it's a corporate priority to come out with something for April Fools. The Internet systematizes, amplifies, focuses, fully resources, funds, schedules, plans and implements high production value foolery.  Corporate drone: "Larry, Sergey, have you signed off yet on this years $4M April Fools budget? How are we going to attract and recruit the best engineers unless we've got a reputation for the very best and most foolish April Fools trickery?" Ugh.
It's just kind of silly and boring and makes we wish April 2 would come as soon as possible. As I read the Internet on April 1 I just try to self filter out all the silly unbelievable garbage. Most news sites (including HN) are hardly worth reading April 1.
You know when someone who thinks they are funny insists on telling lame jokes, and the audience feels an obligation to give an acknowledging guffaw? It's like an whole Internet day worth of that.
I feel like the Grinch Who Stole April Fools but really it has to be said.  If you've got it in mind to do some fine ol' foolin then maybe the classy thing to do is leave the foolin to others and spare us one more depressingly lame absurdity. <comment><USER2> "I have a sense of humor. Really I do."

Are you sure? I think you're taking yourself and the internet a little too seriously. If the jokes aren't funny don't laugh and don't click. If it really bugs you go ahead and spend a day without reading news on the internet, you'll survive, I promise.

April Fools is interesting on the internet because attention is rewarded and that encourages companies to put real effort into silliness. It's okay to be silly sometimes, it's actually important. The fact of that a company like Google still has a sense of humor about itself renews my faith in them a little bit.

Look at Blizzard's April fools:

[http://eu.blizzard.com/en-gb/games/outcasts/](http://eu.blizzard.com/en- gb/games/outcasts/)

The credit card slots in the controller to make for easier microtransactions. With the new business models they're using for Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm it's actually pretty funny. The fact that they're acknowledging it softens me to them even just a little bit.

Some of us look forward to April Fools on the internet, maybe the jokes are lame but the effort makes the event interesting.

<comment><USER3> > It's okay to be silly sometimes, it's actually important.

I agree with this entirely, but I think the argument here is that none of these corporate April Fool's jokes are silly, or funny, or clever, or interesting. They're the minimum effort to justify being a "gag" in order to farm page hits. Honestly, when was the last April Fool's prank that "got you" or made you laugh?

<comment><USER2> Blizzard's made me laugh. I think the Google Pokemon map was funny. The celebrity photobombs on the front page of Google. These are nerds making these not standup comedians. Pretty much every internet April Fools gag is funnier than SNL these days...

<comment><USER4> Pokemon and other Google's "jokes" were just pathetic. Apparently, typical Googler has a sense of humour of a 5 years old.

<comment><USER5> you, sir, appear have the chubby fingers of a five year-old

<comment><USER4> hahaha, you're so funny

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _It seems every single company and publication that communicates via the web > has a corporate communications department or something that thinks it 's a > corporate priority to come out with something for April Fools._

It's not really the lameness of April Fools Day, it's the lameness of internet businesses, social media marketing, or marketers and salesmen in general. They need to take over, trivialize, devaluate and destroy every thing that becomes special in society, in hope to get some additional sales. I also don't know how to solve this, but April Fools Day is only a more visible than usual demonstration of a problem that happens every single day.

<comment><USER7> _in hope to get some additional sales_

That's a copout, like blaming the legitimately elected political leaders in a democracy.

_People_ do this to holidays and special events because they are easily impressed and inclined to follow social trends like lemmings.

If people weren't so impressed by lameness, then the advertisers and marketers would attempt other ways to gather eyeballs.

I shudder when I think of how unreadable I used to find Slashdot every April 1st (back when I was reading it).

<comment><USER6> > _If people weren 't so impressed by lameness, then the advertisers and > marketers would attempt other ways to gather eyeballs._

It's a feedback loop; one that is arguably easier to break on the marketer's side. OTOH posts such as OP's complaint are attempt to break that loop on the side of people by signalling that well, we're fed up with crap. I doubt any marketer will listen though.

<comment><USER7> It would seem to be easier to break the cycle on the marketer's side because you're viewing the problem at the choke point where marketers are ostensibly in control - but really it's a systemic problem with people that would have to be fixed. Fix a couple of marketers and a couple of other marketers step in to fill the void.

Plugging a couple of obvious holes in the dike does no good when the dike is fundamentally unsound.

<comment><USER6> I think you're right.

So this leads to an obvious question: _how do we fix the dike?_

<comment><USER8> Simple - stop giving them your attention. If no one paid attention to it, it wouldn't work. If it didn't work, no rational management would foot the bill for it.

<comment><USER6> You're missing the feedback loop. Marketers will keep trying stuff until they find something we pay attention to. And they will destroy its specialness in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> April Fools' Day is amateur hour for people who aren't funny the other 364 days of the year. It's much like New Year's Eve for people who don't party or Valentine's Day for people who aren't romantic. They feel like they have to do this on this exact day, which of course leads to an embarrassing situation for everybody.

<comment><USER10> All of these holidays are also amateur hour for people who view themselves as intellectual social critics--people like the OP.

I contend there are worse things that businesses can do with their time than think up bad jokes. Let's keep some perspective here, people.

<comment><USER9> Oh, I agree. But realizing what they are can help you deal with them better. My GF and I are pretty romantic, we like to go out and love fine dining... So on v-day we have steak dinner and watch a movie at home. If we don't have a great house party to go to on NYE, we'll head out of town and just spend the night wandering around some other city.

The one time I went to an organized party on NYE, the bathrooms were all vomited over by 11pm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is the second post about how people don't like April Fools Day. Are we replacing the actual April Fool jokes with posts moaning about them? I'm not sure that's much of an improvement.

<comment><USER12> Well, at least we aren't being sold anything!

<comment><USER13> Not yet. Give it some time.

<comment><USER14> [http://foolsblocker.io](http://foolsblocker.io)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 20 years ago, the average person was exposed to a handful of media channels. So, if they each produced one April Fools gag, they wouldn't have been annoying.

Now, our media diet consists of hundreds of channels, sites and blogs, and it seems like _every single one of them does an April Fools gag_

The result is tired, formulaic humor, repeated ad nauseam.

</comment><comment><USER16> >I have a sense of humor. Really I do. I just don't find being pounded with systematic absurdity for an entire day every year as being very funny.

I don't know why its so funny to think of you getting irritated by this, but it is.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't forget to spend all day of the Super Bowl telling everyone on the Internet how you don't watch football.

<comment><USER18> Except we didn't subscribe to the LameJokes channel, so why should we receive jokes instead of whatever the channel was supposed to give us?

You should realize that this is the internet, not America, and April's Fool is an American tradition.

<comment><USER19> This is completely incorrect. It's celebrated widely in European countries & elsewhere. April Fools didn't even start in the US.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day)

<comment><USER18> It's not celebrated in Asia, Africa, South America, and in most European countries. Probably your propagandized media and education system lead you to think that everyone celebrates American holidays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Matt Cutts had the perfect saying on this one. [https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/450741899146440704](https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/450741899146440704)

"Hate April Fools? Consider taking a 24 hour offline holiday instead of telling everyone over and over how much you hate April Fools."

[I'm going to take his advice and get off HN for the rest of the day.]

</comment><comment><USER21> > How are we going to attract and recruit the best engineers unless we've got > a reputation for the very best and most foolish April Fools trickery?

I would actually discourage anyone from taking a job from any company that takes April Fools too seriously. Having to put in extra hours to get the April Fools out in time is the only thing that's more soul-crushing than the stupid corporate joke itself.

<comment><USER22> Spending some time to actually raise the mood of your clients is a no-go place for you? I assume your preference is to work for a no-emotion company 100% dedicated to the product, and a casual chit-chat is a strong NO policy.

The question is whether a joke is funny and made you smile of course.

<comment><USER21> You're reading stuff that clearly wasn't in my comment. I just said I didn't want to spend _extra_ hours on something that is just a one day joke when I have proper bugs to fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I totally agree with you. April 1st renders my local, personal experience of the internet completely useless. This goes on almost for a week, because people will repost the clever 'jokes' for a couple of days. April fools day on the internet is, as it feels to me, a Marketing Department Slack-Off Day. Every company feels they have to contribute, because the others are doing it.

Some tech sites will do the same with ridiculous stuff. 04/1/14: Python 2.8 to lose the GIL. HAHAHAHAHAHA DO YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY?! It doesn't even make sense.

I would like to point out that this issue extends to other, especially North American happenings. As soon as Haloween, the super bowl or "the Oscars" are up, the internet becomes almost unusable because all the sites with user-"shared" (let's be honest, it is rarely really generated by them) content have no other topics and half of the news sites appear to have nothing better to do then to comment on the obvious real life events; even worse, the European news sites will start commenting on the American stuff as well. It is times like this when I get out old 90's PC Single Player games just to be away from people for a while.

I have the dumbest sense of humor and will laugh about almost anything but April 1st is just gear-grindingly annoying...

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, I guess we've reached the ultimate in meta: an internet rant about internet humor.

Next I guess somebody should parody this? Then a rant about the parody?

Seriously, the internet is full of annoying things, and April Fool's, where folks actually try to have fun with each other, is what's bugging you? I'd place "having to be upset about something 24/7" as much higher on the list than a bunch of bone-headed PR stuff.

I'm really happy HN is mostly humor-free. PG made a smart move there. But one day a year where companies compete to be funny? I can think of a million other things to fret about. Seriously. Trust me, somehow you'll live through it. A day without Erlang innards will leave you mostly scar-free.

<comment><USER25> DogeRant 2048

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used to be into online retail sales before I got fed up with all the money grubbing. It was all about Black Friday and if you weren't ready with a major production by then or at least Cyber Monday you'd miss the boat on a huge influx of potential revenue. If your Black Friday effort went viral you'd be riding the gravy train all holiday season. I get the sense April Fools has become the Black Friday of social media. If your joke goes viral you've got a huge opportunity for viewership and brand awareness. No thank you. My site doesn't celebrate any "holiday".

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this post an April Fools joke? I cannot imagine anyone actually getting this bent out of shape about one day of sometimes lame jokes.

The lameness is "crushing"? Really? If something this inconsequential affects you this much I hope you don't ever encounter a real issue.

</comment><comment><USER28> April Fools Day is funny the first couple of times you experience it. Then it's just soul destroying.

</comment><comment><USER29> If we could ignore April Fools Day and treat it as any other, that would be fine.

If we could _dismiss_ anything we hear on April Fools Day and treat it as a lost day in the news cycle, that would also be fine.

But we're in a situation where 90% of news is everyday pablum, 9% is AFD BS, and 1% is the creation of GMail, changing the Internet forever.

</comment><comment><USER30> If your hypothesis is correct and the reason that April Fool's jokes are lame is because there's one day dedicated to them every year, " _an entire day every year_ ", then a rational proposal for a solution would be for companies to put random funny things out more often. If we had a "Fool's Day" every month then there wouldn't be such a shock, and they'd start to be something enjoyable rather than laboured.

Additionally, we'd need people to make them, so employment would increase, and people could sell merchandise promoting the best jokes, services to quantify what's funny, and so on, so there'd be business opportunities created too.

This could be the start of a whole new industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think people who are good at being funny are the ones who should do the job of being funny.

<comment><USER31> Oh dear god. I hope I never have the misfortune of working with you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why don't you have some fun, instead of being that god awful internet pedant that thrives off hating on the way other people do every little thing. Go back to posting about why you think some obscure javascript library is superior to the rest - get that feeling of enlightenment somewhere else instead of hating on people who are having harmless fun.

God I hate hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER32> No. We should have fun. This is geek humor, maybe some take it a bit too far, but still.

<comment><USER12> Geek humor? More like PR humor.

<comment><USER33> Exactly.

<comment><USER31> Chemtrails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Some of the April Fools jokes are quite funny and some of ThinkGeek's in particular actually turn into real products. I could imagine this one becoming real:

[http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1ba1/?pfm=af14_homepage_Fea...](http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/1ba1/?pfm=af14_homepage_Featured_4_1ba1)

Sure, it's silly... but it's fun.

<comment><USER25> It kind of underlines the point though - most of these joke products aren't any more ridiculous than their real products. Is that really a joke?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you dont like it, dont spend your energy and attention onto it.

As a response: Lots of people do like it, creating those jokes, and cunsomers reading those jokes. Its (almost) free publicity.

Get over it

<comment><USER36> seriously, these people complaining about april fools are probably the ones telling others to change the station if they don't like the violence from their favorite breaking bad characters, yet can't follow their own advice when it comes to the internet

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I want to thank most of you for making this one of the funniest threads I've seen on HN.

Your theories as to why corporations and the people around us succumb to societal pressures pushing them to take on disingenuous facades of unfunny silliness for profit and attention are deeply profound -- April Fools!

</comment><comment><USER38> What cruel fates conspire to tease man with this fool's existence? The solemnity of the grave seems a comfort when faced with the endless torments of a life of gaiety. If only the dead could speak aloud their regrets, that we might continue our sermons long past the crumbling of the mount.

Tis but a season's breadth afore yet 'nother trial befalls the stoic knights of castle hacker. Stay true in your labors, lest mirth's foul hand stir your mind to thoughts impure and sundry! Death's grip closes, and time is short, tary not along the path but stride through and bask in the righteous exultations levied upon the earnest and forthright! Down with the usurper, that lowly succubus whose poisonous impositions distract the holy from their cause!

</comment><comment><USER39> This is obviously an April Fools Day joke. Well played, sir/madam...

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm with you man, but then again - I'm busy with doing some actual work, and the pranks that I do encounter are either from Google or a mindless click on a link, few times at most.

We should be allowed to have fun, but this is hardly funny - it's painful.

</comment><comment><USER41> When Google first started doing this, it was great. A welcome respite from our expectations of corporate monotony. Plus, it was genuinely unexpected, and therefore more funny.

Now that every company _has to_ do something, or risk being labeled uncool by users/potential recruits, the humor seems forced (and therefore less funny).

Perhaps the best April Fools Prank Google could pull now would be to treat this day like any other. Imagine the irony of billions of people waiting to be "surprised", anticipation slowly increasing throughout the day, wild speculation about any normal announcement that Google makes.

Now _that_ would be funny.

<comment><AUTHOR> No April Fools tricks? That's a very big risk for a company the size of Google to take.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> _" This is the day to be mandatorily funny. Go out there and do something funny. That's an order"_

<comment><USER10> In the grand scheme of bad orders throughout history, I'm having trouble getting upset about this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you want to read anything on the Internet, April 1 is a very exhausting day due to all the filtering you have to do. You waste time reading the minimum necessary to detect if it's a joke or not and move to the next thing (hoping it's not).

It's better to just ignore the whole thing. If a company/person/group decides to release something really cool on April 1, too bad... I won't be paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER44> You'll find, if you put your head down and keep working, that it's over within 24 hours.

Unlike Halloween and Christmas, which keep pounding nails into my head from about a month or two before they occur to about two weeks after they're over.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiySknl9zs0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiySknl9zs0)

</comment><comment><USER45> At the office, a few people might do gags, and maybe one is really good and sucks you in totally. That's funny. No, it's awesome to get punked to that degree even when you were looking out for it!

On the net it's (become) unbearable, because it's a solid wall. News, thoughtful articles, social media are so full of AFD stuff that the net is almost worthless[1]. I.e., it doesn't scale.

I don't mind being punked. I don't mind it a few times in the same day. When the whole day is a never ending stream of it, it becomes tiresome and irritating.

Footnote:

1\. This is substantially different from, say, the Super Bowl. If I'm not interested in the Super Bowl I just skim past it. But AFD pranks are _meant_ to look plausible. In an alternate universe "Facebook buys Oculus" is an AFD prank instead of real. So you can't skim over them.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if everyone here knows that we had a rather animated thread about this last night, after I asked people to flag April Fools' gags off the front page (and then amended it to say _lame_ April Fools' gags):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506793](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7506793)

These threads are still open for discussion, but I'm going to downweight this one now, since it's been on the front page a long time and nothing new is likely to emerge from it. I applied the exact same penalty to my own post last night.

HN doesn't avoid humor, but it does eschew lame humor as part of eschewing lameness in general. Obviously, people's opinions about what's lame and what's funny differ wildly.

</comment><comment><USER47> But there are unicorns on Stack Overflow.

<comment><USER48> ...they are great and I like what you can buy with them.

However...

They are a 'joke' in the broadest sense of the word, but not a _joke_. I am not 'fooled'.

A true April Fool's Day joke is about pulling the wool over someone's eyes in such a way that they really do not know if it is true or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > "How are we going to attract and recruit the best engineers unless we've got > a reputation for the very best and most foolish April Fools trickery?"

You say that sarcastically, but I see that as a legitimate concern. Why miss out on a great opportunity to make a connection with thousands of users who otherwise wouldn't see any uniqueness or individuality to what you do? And the only risk is that they'd piss off someone with a corny joke.

That said, I sympathize. I enjoy jokes, but I'd like to read real news too.

</comment><comment><USER50> > I have a sense of humor. Really I do.

The problem is that very few of the jokes that any of these companies pull are even a little humorous.

There have been a few funny/clever ones, but they're the 1%.

<comment><USER51> We'll see what comes out this year, but I generally think there is always at least a few smirk/smile inducing pranks every year. Where when you read the headline, there is at least a half-second where your mind believes it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> StackOverflow unicoins are sort of fine with me because I can still use the site. But up until midday php.net was rotating every single documentation page which was hyper-annoying.

</comment><comment><USER53> Today is my most productive day. Cause I just don't have the will to figure out if "news" stories are real or 4/1\. So, I don't read HN or Reddit or anything. (I didn't realize it was april 1st until seeing this.)

Like the redis Hyperloglog? is it a joke, is it real? Fuck if I'm wasting my time to figure out. If it's real it will be still be talked about next week and I'll learn about then.

Until tomorrow, Norm out!

</comment><comment><USER54> Besides spending 15 minutes searching for pokemons and 5 minutes enjoying the htc gluuv joke, this is just a normal day for me.

I really don't see anything to be mad about.

</comment><comment><USER55> It's been downhill since BBC aired the spaghetti tree.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is most likely joke, but there is nothing more uncool that trying be cool very hard. Especially, these american style campaigns. So off-putting.

</comment><comment><USER57> Well, people think they cannot miss out and need to do it - because their competitor does it. You'll see the same with world cup advertisement in a few months. Most of it is crap, rising above the crowd is hard.

On the other hand, there are some clever things that sound like jokes, but are not: [http://stroopwafel.me/](http://stroopwafel.me/)

Well, I for my part have my share of fun.

<comment><USER58> I would like to see an ad that is just plain text "We donated the $250k production budget for this ad to Haiti" and a logo. That is far more likely to make me give a company my business than any stupid pointless video clip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> How about a "holiday filter" app? Such an app could enable users to flag "insipid holiday content" which would cause it to be hidden. This could be implemented as a browser extension. In fact, you could even aggregate the information and sell it to companies, and people would even be _happy_ to know that companies are paying to be told they're being annoying.

</comment><comment><USER60> Wow, you sound incredibly bitter... it's one day out of the entire year... How about you unbunch your panties, close your computer and go outside for a day if it _really_ bothers you so much.

And, I realize HN is all adding to the conversation - that's me adding to the conversation with actual, non-sarcastic advice. Pretty blown away at why this deserves an entire thread.

</comment><comment><USER61> I actually just brought this up with my coworkers yesterday. I don't like april fools anymore because all the pranks people pull are completely uninspired and the entire day I have to ask myself "is this an april fool's gag?"

And if you fall prey to a "prank" it's like, "wow you really got me great job" and that's it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I agree 100%. I have long considered April Fools Day as National Do-Not-Use- The-Internet Day, and I generally treat it as such.

<comment><USER63> Not doing very well at that I see. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> So I heard on NPR this morning that San Mateo County was experiencing snow, sleet, and hail at the higher elevations on California 35 and that snow plows were dispatched. Can't tell if that is true or not due to April fools day + the fact that weather is unseasonably cold and rainy last few days. Very lame if its AFD joke.

</comment><comment><USER65> Build an April Fools' API that allows crowdsourced contributions and a browser plugin to flag fake URLs and links.

</comment><comment><USER66> my thoughts exactly... you can't make a good prank anymore when it has become a "PR must" to publish one

</comment><comment><USER67> Simple, don't read the news today. Really, it's just one day. You don't have a huge problem to solve.

<comment><USER68> I agree with this. Seriously, it's just one day: Have some fun or let the others enjoy their fun..

I guess this is a first world problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Can you give some examples? The only april fools things I saw was reddit's webcam thing which I thought was great, and an icon on the corner of youtube which went to a great parody video mocking memes. I later found out about Kaggle's Random Number Challenge which I thought was funny.

</comment><comment><USER70> Very few come up with something that is both audacious enough to be interesting, and realistic enough to pull people in. Usually it's either too pedestrian to be funny, or not realistic enough to catch the spirit of fooling people.

But that 1 in 100 is enough to keep the tradition going.

</comment><comment><USER71> Lame jokes make it easier for the non-creative to participate in the April Fools process.

Not everyone can make a good joke. And those who are bad at making pranks are given the opportunity to stretch out beyond their comfort zone.

</comment><comment><USER72> If you're looking for a non big name joke today, here's a pretty hilarious(and not to mention incredibly controversial) one:

[http://megansmatch.com/](http://megansmatch.com/)

</comment><comment><USER73> I think April Fool's day internet pranks may be one of the easiest way for companies to maintain corporate whimsy and allow their employee's to create something momentarily off their grinding path.

</comment><comment><USER74> This whole thread amounts to: "I like a thing" vs "I don't like a thing". How can people really believe they have meaningful opinions about something so innocuous.

</comment><comment><USER75> This guy just got more than double his total karma over a 1000 day period for whining about April Fool's day. If that's not funny, I don't know what is.

</comment><comment><USER76> Ugh, get over yourself.

</comment><comment><USER77> Are you being treated for that depression? Do you kick puppies and holler at children too? Does it really cost you anything, anything at all to ignore a lame joke?

</comment><comment><USER78> The only thing that is much worse are spam emails claiming "Our prices are so low that they look like an April Fools joke, but we're serious!"

</comment><comment><USER79> I remember plenty of april fool's jokes on the radio and on TV.

I think your problem is just that on the internet you are just exposed to a lot more of them.

</comment><comment><USER80> Little do we know, this entire post is an April Fools joke. Better not agree with the guy, or you're in for a world of trouble tomorrow!

</comment><comment><USER81> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu7vySQbgXI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu7vySQbgXI)

</comment><comment><USER82> Is it so difficult for you to spend one day in a year away from the Internet to avoid the "lameness" that irritates you?

</comment><comment><USER83> April Fools jokes are only truly funny when they are unexpected, exceptionally clever, and well implemented.

</comment><comment><USER84> Actually, HN today is filled with almost no April fools stories. I tried looking, there's maybe 1.. 2?

</comment><comment><USER85> Here's how to "solve" this problem - grow up and ignore things you don't like.

</comment><comment><USER86> Today is a good day for a walk.

</comment><comment><USER87> You know when people say "don't be that guy"?

You're being _that guy_.

</comment><comment><USER88> I don't wate my time reading the news on April 1. It's pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER89> This is a joke, right?

</comment><comment><USER90> A chance for every NonCreativeEntity to feel special.

</comment><comment><USER91> You don't like cold and cynical companies trying to appear funny and relatable? That's an American tradition as old as Mickey Mouse. The anti- Semitic union busting one.

</comment><comment><USER92> You are visiting the wrong websites, then.

</comment><comment><USER93> It's just marketing and advertising.

</comment><comment><USER94> I am viewing this thread Emojified.

</comment><comment><USER95> I enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER96> I just don't read news on April 1. Sometimes is really hard to decide what is joke and what is true.

</comment><comment><USER97> Wait a day. It gets better.

</comment><comment><USER98> -1

</comment><comment><USER99> Yea, I hate fun!</comment>


Forever Young - <AUTHOR> https://kirstenhacker.wordpress.com/2019/11/05/forever-young/ <comment><USER2> The nice thing about science is that there is little space for speculation in old-grown domains such as electromagnetism.

In this very moment, when you sit next to many WiFi devices, probably in an urban region with many mobile phone cells and a that, you can forget about the effect of the magnetic field of the earth onto your body. It is just negligible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't looked into WiFi, since this was about static magnetic fields rather than fluctuating magnetic fields, although I have read about the increased incidence of gliomas (a type of brain tumor) caused by cell phone usage. Of course, that only happens when you hold a wifi source up to your head constantly. For this reason, I don't think that wireless headphones are a good idea.

One odd thing I've come across lately are accounts of the effect of MRI magnetic fields on depression. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do- mris-treat-dep...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-mris-treat- dep..).

Since ECT and other forms of brain damage have been shown to offer temporary relief from depression when endorphins are released in response to the damage, I wonder if MRIs have a similar effect.

<comment><USER2> Something you shouldn't forget is that the electromagnetic field decreases rapidly with spatial seperation from the sender (broadcaster). The relationship is actually 1/r^2, with r the distance. That is: Doubling the distance means only 1/4 of the electromagnetic field strength.

That's the reason why the cell phone in your pocket has a higher impact on your reproduction organs then on your brain. And why the cell phone tower (on average) has less impact on your body then probably any device in your room.

The wireless headphones are recieving most of the time, that's why they should put little harm on your brain. Better care about keeping your phone in a bag instead of your trouser pocket.</comment></comment></comment>


Hermes refusal to change - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/15/t-magazine/hermes.html <comment><USER2> Interesting marketing editorial. It would be entertaining to read similarly quaint articles romanticizing the lives and existances of engineers and managers at SV big and little corps!

The article states there isn't new blood coming in to fill the void left as the current generation of artisans retires. Sooner or later Hermes will be forced to change by drawing from a new talent pool or going bust.</comment>


Jeff Bezos commits $10B to fight climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/p/B8rWKFnnQ5c/?igshid=k4y4ee710mxm <comment><USER2> Simple first steps: Every worker that just uses a computer and a phone is converted to a remote worker. Close down the huge energy wasting office towers and eliminate commuting emissions. The famous 'build a HQ2 with 50,000 new jobs is totally wrong. Build 50 offices across the country with 1000 employees. Build affordable housing next to new office buildings. Get rid of all of the private jets moving people.

<comment><USER3> On a per capita basis those office towers are almost certainly more efficient next to your smaller office buildings. In addition it's only in large dense cities that public transportation (subways, busses, etc) has any hope of competing against people commuting in their cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking forward to reading about how his money will manage to get carbon producers on the hook for the cost of their emissions, because that's the only thing that is going to make any difference.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why does Instagram touch my browser history and prevent me from using the back button in my browser? Aren't they a big enough website to avoid resorting to such anti-consumer tactics?

<comment><USER4> back button works for me on Firefox

could be ublock origin, I dunno</comment></comment>