A revolution in our sense of self - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/01/revolution-in-our-sense-of-self-sunday-essay <comment><USER2> At the risk of making a middlebrow dismissal, it seems like the author is dancing around the Buddhist doctrine of _anattā_ / _anātman_ (oversimplified: "self" doesn't actually exist) [1] without actually confronting it. I guess that's fair inasmuch as concepts like the existence of a soul are nominally not part of the field of psychology (though a bunch of clinical psychology constructs don't really make sense without some kind of soul-like entity, so the issue is there implicitly). But without following through on the implications, I'm not sure what makes this a "revolution".

His description of GOFAI also doesn't ring true to me, but maybe that's a matter of interpretation.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I find it strange that so many of the comments, for & against Chater, are expressed with such certainly. Philosophy and religion (lots of overlap) have been discussing these issues without resolution for millennia, psychology for decades to centuries (depending on your definition), neuroscience is starting to contribute but is still in its infancy. Thousands of minds (of various degrees of brilliance), hundreds of subcultures, dozens of nations have made busy on the topic, without anything having emerged to compel agreement, yet a substantial minority of readers here seem to think they definitively know the answer.

Why is it so hard to admit ignorance? Especially in a culture claiming to vaunt science (especially here, I would have thought), whose very basis is admission of the limits of the egoistic individual to cognise reality?

After a couple of centuries of incredibly promising empirical work in so many fields, it should be really, really easy to say or write "I'm not sure". The following step ("how can we devise a way to ask nature what's true here") may well be a matter for specialists. But one might have hoped the initial questioning open stance would have seeped, just a little, into the culture by now. We have a long way to go.

<comment><USER4> When you live in a culture that deeply believes in the idea of progress* it's blasphemous to give time to ignorance. If you believe in progress you can be humbled by ignorance but not awed by it. In the west we know of other cultures (past and present) that chose to be complacent and live in ignorant comfort but we know that they chose that path at the expense of truth. We know that our striving for truth is the reason we destroyed and dominated those who chose complacency.

There is a lot of cultural superiority wrapped up in why we can't admit ignorance. In the west we believe in cavemen. We think people with spears and grass skirts are "lesser" civilizations. Even if you are the least bigoted person in the west you still feel a sense of cultural pride that you live in a world ruled by the scientific method and not by gods. You pity the natives because they lived and died and created no objective truth, they left no enduring mark on humanity. In terms of human progress they are the before and we are the after. "Cultural relativism" is a phrase many people have no time for in the west. We shouldn't long to live like the "noble savage" but I think we have serious problem in the west appreciating our cultural reality isn't the one true cultural reality.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article begins by observing that we can not learn the motivations of a fictional character because the character died and her motivations were not written in. It then imagines a fan-fiction continuation for the character then concludes that we cannot learn anything more.

This keeps on going, apparently trying to ascribe self to the characters in the author's imagination. They seem to be terrified of the idea that the self is alone within the body and in response invent an elaborate fiction for why 'self' doesn't exist. - A common fear, but I suppose they are brave for exposing it even in part.

<comment><USER6> This notion of self - the idea of an inner homunculus with agency - has always struck me as off, since I ever could think about it. _My_ self is an observer of my thoughts and actions; to the degree that I feel involved it is in being part of an action / reaction loop. I have a thought, observe it and react to it, which is another thought. The feeling of reaction is my self.

<comment><USER7> You've probably heard of the concept of ego. The idea is that the ego reacts to thoughts and observes itself and thinks it is the self, but beneath the ego is the true self-- whatever it may be. So the ego in this case would be a tool.

There's also the idea that thoughts don't come from the ego, or the self, or what-have-you; the idea that the "I" does not have thoughts, that perhaps thoughts are randomly generated and something compels us to follow one thought or another, so that we think an "I" is having a thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your unawareness of your own motivations is hardly news - psychoanalysts have been making hay here for decades - but it's not evidence of lack of motivations.

A behaviourist has the hammer of behaviour, and is trying to treat the mind as his nail. But he missed the mark right from the outset, for me.

I don't think his defence of human creativity is on strong grounds either. Association and generative application of patterns are pretty key to creativity to my mind; what we lack is a high enough tower to properly guide intention in our pattern systems, primarily because of the inefficiency in training I suspect.

<comment><USER8> Its one thing to claim that people are "unaware of their own motivations" and quite another thing to claim, as this author does, that those motivations don't actually exist.

<comment><USER6> There's no difference to a behaviourist...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm sympathetic to all Nick Chater's evidence that our conscious explanations for behavior, as expressed in natural language, have nothing to do with their actual causation. But it doesn't follow that humans don't have "beliefs" and "motivations". The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some utility function: that's where the "hidden motivations" of e.g. Freudianism come into play.

<comment><USER10> > The human brain implements a policy which can be seen as maximizing some > utility function

That needs quite a bit of extra nuance. Certainly, our brains don't actually find optimal solutions. We do not reliably maximize some utility function. Instead, it seems our behavior can be explained much like some recursive approximate optimization algorithm.

In this version, we have some utility function, and we do our best to optimize it. Each step being made with the presumption it will indeed optimize. But at that point, it becomes a lot harder to justify that such a utility function exists. Especially because you need concepts like 'intent' or 'belief'. But those are terms of human behavior, reducing human behavior to human behavior isn't very helpful.

There are arguments that go around this. One can say that 'intent' or 'belief' come from our creator. Or, one can say these are the results of evolution. It should be noted that going from evolution to 'intent' and 'belief' is really non-trivial. As such, one might consider that perhaps, explaining humans as 'optimizing some utility function' isn't the best theory.

Personally, I happen to believe the story of 'intent' arising from evolution, but it isn't clear-cut.

<comment><USER9> Cool ideas. I think we have to place extremely high prior probability mass on the hypothesis that humans enact policies that optimize a utility function determined by evolution, for the simple reason that an organism that does this will do a lot better than one that doesn't.

This thinking is reducing "human behavior to human behavior" in the sense that you'd still be using the language of intents. But if we determine intent through empirical analysis of behavior and inference of the utility function, then the _content_ of that intent may be very very different from what we express verbally.

This doesn't mean humans are irrational, just that there's a mismatch between our true goals and our verbally stated goals.

Now inference of the utility function doesn't have to depend on an assumption of perfect optimization (it could be a softmax policy or something like that). Nor would it have to be trivial: to prevent trivial solutions I think you'd have to make strong assumptions about the space of plausible utility functions, such as simplicity assumptions, or maybe evolutionary assumptions.

Sounds like a cool PhD project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not a psychological theory. And certainly not a "revolutionary" one. This article is a crude, philosophical "argument" for the non-existence of qualia. It follows from his conclusions that sunsets can't really be beautiful, citizen kane can't really be a good movie, and so on.

<comment><USER12> > the non-existence of qualia

Or that they are crude approximations of more fundamental neural activations. Like how clouds follow the laws of physics.

edit: (i seem to be restricted from posting)

i m not claiming clouds are an illusion, that's a strawman, but that studying the shape of clouds is the wrong way to go about physics.

I also don't understand the arguments for 'inner life'. as far as neuroscience of the brain is concerned that's an interpretation of brain dynamics. It has been given too much undeserved attention in philosophy imho. Inner life is defined as opposed to what? outer life ? as far as the brain is concerned there is no external world, it processes neural signals that are generated entirely inside the organism, sometimes in response to external stimuli like light. Why would it be impossible for it to process the neural activity of itself the same way that it processes the neural activity of the retina.

<comment><USER13> And yet no one has ever seriously claimed that clouds are an illusion.

I don't understand this need that behaviorists have to not just set the inner life aside but to claim that it doesn't even exist. It clearly does. It's the one thing each of us knows with utmost certainty. Just because there might be an explanation for it based on more fundamental principles—principles which, I might add, we are nowhere near understanding—doesn't mean it's not real.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> WARNING: contains spoiler for Anna Karenina. Man, I was just thinking of starting that book.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is trash. The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race.

>One crucial clue that the inner oracle is an illusion comes, on closer analysis, from the fact that our explanations are less than watertight. Indeed, they are systematically and spectacularly leaky. Now it is hardly controversial that our thoughts seem fragmentary and contradictory.

The author may be accurate in stating that his thoughts and "explanations" are fragmentary and contradictory - but that doesn't mean the thoughts of everyone are. Indeed, logical consistency among one's thoughts, positions, and expositions is, to me, the most important standard when it comes to judging "intelligence".

>I can't quite tell you how a fridge works or how electricity flows around the house. I continually fall into confusion and contradiction when struggling to explain rules of English grammar, how quantitative easing works or the difference between a fruit and a vegetable.

Clearly QE and rules of grammar aren't the only thing this author is confused about. Perhaps the author shouldn't pretend (even to himself) to understand things that he doesn't and he won't end up rationalizing and inventing fantasies to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging, whether to yourself or others, that you don't know how something works. Everyone has gaps in their knowledge - the world is a big place, its impossible to know everything. The difference lies in people who come to grips with their limits and abilities, and think rationally about them, and people who float through life without giving anything much "deep thought", and instead simply "wing it", and end up (like the author) constantly generalizing and making rationalizations about whatever is currently in front of their nose.

<comment><USER15> "The author is projecting his vapidity on the whole human race."

Yes. Thank you.

Does the author think nobody knows how a fridge works, and actually there is nothing to know?

I recognized immediately in the metaphor of "selves as fictional characters" that the author would be arguing we are all "spin all the way down" — just stories we tell ourselves.

If you work on stripping away the stories, you will find there is a "you" underneath, after all.

A lot of the things we tell ourselves are not true, but that doesn't mean there is no truth of the matter. You can even ask yourself, when you are telling yourself a story, is that really true? And you may find yourself answering, "Well, no..." You have to at least believe in yourself (so to speak) to make progress in knowing yourself, getting along with yourself, and loving yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Don't despair. This does not mean there isn't something we can define as a > "self".

If Nietzsche were alive today, he would substitute 'god' for 'self' and would declare "Self is dead". Philosophers of mind have spent the latter part of the 20th century arguing about their intuitions despite contradictory evidence and really not much progress has been made apart from getting in arguments with the 'explanationists' like Dennett. But it could spark a whole new set of questions if they shifted focus from the elusive self back to the whole (which, ironically would revive god).

</comment><comment><USER16> Does it really matter that much whether, in our minds, there is a single network ("service"), which handles both decision-making and self- understanding, or these are two disparate networks that work in tandem?

It actually reminds me of adversarial networks (like AlphaGo), you could also ask why there should be two networks that encode good game states, isn't it a waste? Maybe each network knows something that the other doesn't.

Likewise, in our minds, maybe sometimes the decision-making network produces such crap that it needs to be tested first on a fictional model human, our own sense of self, before it can be vetted enough to be sensible to be actualized on the environment and other people.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wait, what if we've just been anthropomorphizing ourselves this whole time??

That's right, treating humans as if they have human traits like beliefs and intentions.

</comment><comment><USER17> Before you breach this subject you should first define the terms you use, otherwise you just end up with gibberish. These articles are often insufferably vague and unspecific in what they're trying to say.

1) What is a "self"?

2) What is a "rich inner world"?

Define these and all your problems will go away. A lot of the time these terms are diffuse metaphors for a collection of things, so it's not surprising you can't find them.

> But did she really want to die?

This question, again, only gains complexity if you do not properly define what you're asking. What does "really want to die" mean? Create a definition, such as "a person really wants to die if they have been contemplating suicide for the past 6 months", and, again, your troubles disappear. If you don't know if Anna had such a desire for 6 months, then you're just lacking information. Nothing magical.

Philosophy, psychology, sociology, etc., are complicated precisely because they are vague enough fields that we still need to look at them through an intuitive lens a lot of the time, rather than the plain logical lens. It just comes with the territory. All it means is that we do not understand the field very well.

> But, as likely as not, Anna will be as unsure as anyone else about her true > motivations.

This is not interesting. All that is happening here is that the entity in question does not have the hardware needed to understand its own hardware. A car doesn't understand itself, either. And humans do not fully understand their brain. Most entities are like this. This doesn't meant the car is magical and non-understandable, it just means there's no need to keep the hardware and its own understanding at the same level of complexity. Don't ask the car how it works, ask someone smarter, the human. Don't ask the human how it works, as someone smarter, the world.

> Why this sofa? Why Bach, not Brahms? Why this choice of career? Why children > or not? Why evolution, not creationism? How does a bicycle work, or a > violin, or a currency? And each justification can be buttressed with further > justifications, caveats and clarifications, and each of these be defended > further, seemingly without end.

I wouldn't mix these things up. Most people don't introspect much, and most people adapt to their environment. You will have a lot of issues socially if you don't have some simple answer to a question like "why this choice of career". You're generally conditioned to pick a tribe, so what you believe in can be important. Basically, these justifications have arisen due to pressure to create them, they're entirely unrelated to the "self". Saying "I don't know why I like this sofa" is not fashionable, even if it's very much the truth. And there's nothing wrong with that: we don't understand our hardware, which is fine.

Understanding of diffuse things like "currency" is, if anything, one of the more impressive functions of the brain that I'm not sure how long it will take for AI to replicate.

<comment><USER11> Maybe I oversimplified it, but it actually seemed pretty straight forward to me.

His point is that the terms for "wanting to die" cannot be defined, and from there concludes that "wanting to die" isn't really a feeling within us.

He can't clarify his terms because, for some reason, he has taken a disliking to interpretation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> tl;dr psychologist that teaches at a business school finds out about gestalt and proceeds to sell truckloads of books by dressing it in inflamatory know it all afirmations, proved by optical ilusions (how else can you prove gestalt?)

ps: same tactics applied to this comment, minus optical illusions

</comment><comment><USER7> I found this article quite annoying. The author seems to be evaluating mind on whether or not it is rational, and taking reason as motivator for depth in the sense that there should always be reasons for our actions and beliefs.

Of course the mind is irrational. And of course our sense of self is an illusion. That does not imply lack of depth. Depth in the mind is precisely NOT based on reason. It is all dynamic; chaotic in the mathematical sense. There is no "theory of mind" and there is no philosophy that could explain the self or the mind because it is in a way an abyss, full of elements of time, emotion, sensory input, and randomly arising thoughts that may or may not originate from the "self".

That doesn't mean we should dispose of philosophy altogether. Philosophy and psychology are moved by and created in the energy of the era. It is important to continuously reevaluate what we think the mind is because it is representative of how we see the world. And here we have a theory of mind in our author's little article too.

I see nothing in this article other than an exemplary case of being able to explain something in any way you wish.

<comment><USER19> > our sense of self is an illusion

I've heard this, several times, from "new age" as well as "scientific" type-of people. I still don't understand what people mean by this... would it be possible to explain in a bit more detail?

<comment><USER7> It's based on uncertainty of perception. We build a model of ourselves, just as we do with the real world (including scientifically) but this model will never exactly specify the real world. We can come quite close, but we can't be infinitely precise. For example, a wheel is not really a circle but it's circular enough-- and, to build on that, we can't really specify the wheel itself, except through conceptual models.

In the case of the self, we build a model of what we _are_ based off of data we gather from introspection and from people who are close to us. But this model is constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true self (if there _is_ a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always changing).

Nonetheless, we rely heavily on our sense of self. This sense helps us make hard decisions because we want to keep our actions in line with who we think we are-- we need that structure to survive. So, even though it can't be said to be real in any objective sense, we treat it as though it were real and we let it guide us to the point that most of the time we do think it's real. That's the illusory aspect.

You can really bring this over into anything you perceive. An object? Well, no. The object is not really distinct from the air surrounding it, except that we treat mass and visual outline (which is also an illusion created by our visual cortex) as indicators of being "separate", even though in the strictest sense the object is completely entangled in the environment of molecules, atoms, quanta, etc.

<comment><USER20> > we build a model of what we are based off of data we gather from > introspection and from people who are close to us. But this model is > constantly in flux, and can never be said to actually reach the true self > (if there is a true self-- and perhaps there is, but maybe it is always > changing).

There's another argument (which I think your parent is referring to) which says that the thing that's doing the modeling is the very thing that's being modeled, so it's impossible to separate the data from the model. The radical conclusion people have come up with is that therefore there is no difference between the model and the data. What we perceive to be the model is actually the data, that there is nothing outside of the data because there can't be.

I haven't been able to decide if this is profound or incoherent.

<comment><USER15> I disagree with this argument. I think some portion of our brain is devoted to "modeling," and the things being modeled include other parts of our brain; other parts of our body; phenomena that include certain parts of the brain and non-brain body parts (eg emotions); other times and places; other people; our environment; and so on and so forth.

Certain modes of thinking, like abstract thought and reasoning, can only draw on these models, so in that limited scope, the only a available data is the models — which there are more of than we could ever attend to exhaustively. In other states of mind, there is all kinds of other data.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mind Ease – The new (free) web app to effectively reduce your anxiety - <AUTHOR> http://mindease.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Seems cool. I'm not associated with it but wanted to share here in case some people would find it useful.</comment>


Centralization of Bitcoin Wealth: 4% of addresses own 96% of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://howmuch.net/articles/bitcoin-wealth-distribution <comment><USER2> Although the pie chart is a bit skewed because there are many exchanges that hold custody of coins in (multi-sig) cold storage, Bitcoin's distribution is not as dispersed as most would have liked it to be. That's largely because people were able to mine the currency in silence during 2009-10 where adoption and therefore difficulty were miniscule. I think one of the most annoying things people keep coming up with is doing airdrops for their altcoins based on the distribution to registered Bitcoin addresses. Byteball keeps doing this and therefore favors and privileges large Bitcoin holders. That's one of the most unfair ways to distribute a new cryptocurrency, especially for people that haven't had the privilege to have known about Bitcoin early.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is an exercise in ignorance. Wallet providers? Does he not even understand the concept of personal wallets? Anybody that keeps a significant amount of money in a hosted wallet outside of specific circumstances (I. E. trading) is not only doing it wrong, they are being extremely foolish. And it looks like he's counting dust wallets and orphaned wallets.

Maybe he should have learned something about the subject matter before writing an "authoratative" article.

</comment><comment><USER4> Author states that 1 address does not necessarily equals one person, but for some reason does this down in the article instead of an upfront disclaimer.

<comment><USER5> That's common knowledge, both for Bitcoin and elsewhere. How could any digital asset (Bitcoin, email account, social media account) guarantee a 1:1 mapping to humans?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Haha. As if there was any realistic link between addresses and people. They're even designed to be one-time-use..

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't that imply we should see significantly _less_ centralization than this? At the very least 4% holding 96% implies something isn't being used right..

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't explain what set of addresses they actually looked at. All addresses ever in use? All addresses currently holding value?

Also not sure what that's supposed to mean:

> _And that's the issue. There's only a very limited number of bitcoin wallet > providers out there._

Might be confusing exchanges and wallets?

<comment><USER9> You don't have to look at each address, you can just trace which addresses have been used through the block chain.

<comment><USER8> ... yes? It's still relevant and missing info _which_ of the addresses that have been used they looked at.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this a pie chart??

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks pretty bad, but I would like to see how it changes after subtracting Satoshi coins, exchanges, etc. I'm sure it still wouldn't be that great.

</comment><comment><USER12> If this is even remotely representative of how Bitcoin wealth is distributed amongst individuals (not addresses)...

<comment><USER13> It's not. Many addresses are single use

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Jesus, who thought that chart was a good idea?</comment>


AOL buys Huffington Post for $315mm in cash - <AUTHOR> http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110206/youve-got-arianna-aol-buys-huffington-post-for-315-million-in-cash/?mod=tweet

<comment><USER2> I think the key news bit here is that Ariana Huffington will be in charge of all of AOL's blog/news properties.

<comment><USER3> That would make her Arrington's boss, among others, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER4> Correct. Paul Carr's words:

"I have no idea how any of this will affect TechCrunch. So far AOL has kept true to its promise not to interfere with our editorial and there's no reason to suppose that will change under Huffington. That said, it would be idiotic to think that our parents' content strategy – particularly the SEO stuff – won't have annoying trickle-down consequences for all of us in the long term."

[edit- Corrected source of the quote.]

<comment><USER5> For those who haven't read it yet, AOL's "Master Plan" for its blogs and news sites:

<http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way>

      AOL tells its editors to decide what topics to cover based on four considerations:
      traffic potential, revenue potential, edit quality and turn-around time.

      AOL asks its editors to decide whether to produce content based on
      "the profitability consideration."

      The documents reveal that AOL is, when the story calls for it, willing to boost
      traffic by 5 to 10% with search ads and other "paid media."

      AOL site leaders are expected to have eight ideas for packages that could
      generate at least $1 million in revenue on hand at all times.

      In-house AOL staffers are expected to write five to 10 stories per day.

Every time AOL buys another site, I mourn.

<comment><USER6> In other words "content farm". But since it will be done by "leading" blogs it will be considered an ok thing to do. Makes perfect sense, huffpo and TC was never too far from being a content farm. These sites are rarely about quality but quantity. They often rewrite news they find in their rss feed.

<comment><USER7> I said it before and I'll say it again: take TechCrunch as it currently exists, bolt-on a section for high-end electronics reviews, and you'd goose their revenues without any actual human who reads TechCrunch noticing. (The reviews rank based on on-page optimization plus the earned trust of TechCrunch, and the eCPM would be out of this world relative to any article TechCrunch publishes.)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734020>

Traditional publishers are cottoning to this tactic, too.

[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_and_money_cards/index.html)

Think like that, but 100x more aggressive. Will it degrade the NYT brand a little bit? Meh, it is the NYT: they'll still be the world's preeminent newspaper, they'll still make money from advertisements, and they'll still be able to credibly threaten Google with PRmageddon if Big Daddy G gets uppity about it.

<comment><USER8> Two things here!

1) Tech Crunch doesn't really operate in an eCPM world, they operate in a "real" CPM world with advertisers that are largely paying for branding rather than conversions.

2) The CPMs on electronics reviews (high end or otherwise) are significantly lower than the CPMs on "content a CTO would want to read".

SEO for a publisher really only serves the purpose of getting organic traffic to more premium ad campaigns, much like paid traffic (where a publisher buys CPC ads). The catch with this is that inbound search engine traffic needs to roughly match the demographics you've sold ads for or you end up shooting yourself in the foot. You can do short term traffic buys to inflate ad views with otherwise shitty traffic, but only rarely and it's still dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm just amazed AOL still has money

<comment><USER10> TechCrunch, Bebo, and MapQuest are all owned by AOL.

And MapQuest still has the greatest market share somehow...

edit: AOL sold Bebo in June

<comment><USER11> > And MapQuest still has the greatest market share somehow...

No. Google maps has the greatest market share. Mapquest is #2.

Disclaimer: I'm interning at MapQuest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tim Armstrong is getting AOL to do all the deals that Bartz should be doing at Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER10> Immediately an article I saw in December comes to mind:

AOL Investigation: No Proof TSA Scanners Are Safe

[http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/20/aol-investigation-no- proof...](http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/20/aol-investigation-no-proof-tsa- scanners-are-safe/)

Back then my first thought was: _Wait, AOL does investigations?_

I think this is a win for both parties and for readers. With a sort-of 'proper' news site maybe AOL's own journalism can be taken more seriously, and conversely maybe they can make HuffPo more journalistic in the first place!

<comment><USER12> While some of the HuffPost I do find interesting and even occasionally well written, I'd still have to say your argument amounts to: if we take one steaming pile and combine it with another steaming pile it'll come out smelling like roses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Send your comments and feedback to firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER14> Is HuffPo really worth 7-8 times what AOL paid for Weblogs, Inc. and TechCrunch?

<comment><USER15> In terms of unique visitors, HuffPo beats TechCrunch 10:1.

<comment><USER16> And in terms of demographics, I mean, my mom reads Huffington post. Ariana Huffington is well-known enough to have done the talk-show circuit at least once.

Tech crunch is a niche demographic (silicon valley gossip is only interesting to people inside that particular bubble). I'm honestly not sure what weblogs inc is.

<comment><USER17> Not to mention that your mom is far more valuable from an ad revenue perspective. Chances are you've never clicked on ads displayed on TechCrunch.

<comment><USER16> Thinking about it, my mom is actually extremely savvy.

One of the first people on Amazon (the free swag and shipping era), one of the first people using Google (got an email response from Sergei when she complained about an inappropriate search result), doesn't like Facebook, is into blogs, podcasts and web radio. So she probably doesn't click through the ads displayed on HuffPo unless it is something that she wants (in fact, I think she uses Adblock).

That said, she is fiercely loyal to companies that she sees as supporting her ideals. So if she does need something, and a product that has that functionality advertises on one of her media... she will get that product over another (perhaps better known or cheaper) product.

This actually contradicts the implication of my above post; that my mom reads it, therefore it must appeal to the masses. The truth is, my mom likes it, and she is an excellent market indicator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a non native English speaker, the first thing my head thought was AOL paying with banknotes.

</comment><comment><USER19> How long would it take AOL to make $315 million + profit from HuffPost?

<comment> mkr-hn [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-14/huffington-post- nea...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-14/huffington-post-nears-first- annual-profit-expects-sales-to-triple-by-2012.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This after the About.me buy. I'm excited to see how this reinvention pans out.

</comment><comment><USER21> AOL is very different from what a lot of us remember it as. The moves they are making will position it very well as a strong content provider. It's kind of nostalgic in a way in that AOL started out providing premium content in a very organized fashion for the web.

<comment><USER22> How is it that different? It still makes most of its money off dialup subscriptions. Considering how much crap content they pump out, it's amazing they don't make more from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1+1 = 11. Inspired idiocy. Or something.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't know if this a good thing or bad.

First AOL is a giant when it comes to news these days. Along with Fox, CNN and MSNBC. I guess this allows for another competitor to hit the market. But also allows for News to be under control again by a large corporation and that corporations views on how the world should be reported.

I would gladly see Huff Post move to Television and Maybe more investigative like Reuters.

Those area's would gladly and happily be invested in, if I owned a large New Corp.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if AOL will try to buy Gawker too.

<comment><USER26> Buy Gawker would definitely ensure that they are covered in most, if not all, blogging genres.

They also own Engadget, though, and I would love to see how that would comply with owning Gizmodo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How is Ariana going to justify not paying almost all contributors now?

Amazing that she built this on the backs of authors, most of whom got paid _nothing_. Am I alone in finding this exploitative?

<comment><USER28> Was she forcing them to write articles for her? If they agreed to do it for free, then where is the exploitation?

<comment><USER29> I think a lot of authors and journalists voluntarily write for Huff Post to raise their profile... and I think it's great! If I were a journalist, if Huff Post or Talking Points Memo published articles that I authored, I'd be ecstatic, especially considering the economic situation a lot of journalists find themselves in these days.

<comment><USER27> Profile doesn't pay the rent.

<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/4/29/>

<comment><USER30> I think the theory is that high profile is an investment that makes it easier to find rent money down the road.

<comment><USER31> Yes but the practice is there's always someone a year younger than you who thinks that too, and so he's working for free and hoping the same thing. Then a year later, another one...

<comment><USER30> True, but next year you shouldn't be working for free anymore. There are always going to be clients who care most about getting something cheap or free, and there are always going to be clients who care most about getting something good. Do a few deals for the cheaply oriented clients so you have something that will impress the quality oriented clients and then move up quickly, don't lollygag in the cheap valley very long.

<comment><USER31> A year just isn't that much experience in many fields. You'll be competing with people who are 90% as good as you but cost infinitely less (as in, nothing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now Thats a price which certainly deserves attention. This is the second acquisition after about.me from AOL. Lot to come i am sure, but anyways users would be benefited,</comment>


This Is the World's First Cryptocurrency Issued by a Hedge Fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/02/21/this-is-the-worlds-first-cryptocurrency-issued-by-a-hedge-fund/#1c52084538ca <comment><USER2> Haven't had a chance to look into this in-depth but it seems like it pulls some inspiration from decentralized prediction markets i.e. Augur/Truthcoin</comment>


Ask HN: What's Your ROI in Browsing Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> I currently feel like I'm in a place where the cool stuff is something I can't use because it's too technical, not fully dependable, or just a cool concept at the end of the day.
What value have you gained from hacker news submissions or comments that has helped you in your life?
This is not meant to make HN look bad. <comment><USER2> I really like how critical HN can be sometimes. It makes you reflect on what you're writing very carefully.

There's also a bunch of subject matter experts lurking here. There's nothing better than when you have lay people discussing say, nuclear reactors and an actual nuclear physicist or engineer chimes in.

As far as content, I really read it more for the weird little obscure articles that are terribly interesting, more than I do for keeping up on tech. However, it is interesting to skim the comments of a submission for a particular technology stack: it really helps give insight into where that particular tech is going and how it's actually used in the real world.

There's also a lot of deeply personal, candid stories on here that I enjoy reading. HN is a forum run by a startup accelerator after all, so there's no shortage of people who have tried and failed repeatedly here. It's a wealth of knowledge and experience I'm very thankful to have.

</comment><comment><USER3> Discovering patio11, codinghorror, tptacek, ahoyhere etc has made tremendous impact on my career / ways of thinking. I would have never negotiated higher salary or shipped my own apps / books without reading their HN comments / blog. It allowed me to work lesser hours and earn money from products.

</comment><comment><USER4> A random article on hacker news completely changed how I job search. This has led to several jobs I don't think I would have found otherwise.

The article was not about job search, it was a post reviewing a tech talk about technology that as you say may have been "too technical" for me at the time

This is not to say that I use hacker news for job search

<comment><USER5> Which article was it?

<comment><USER4> It was on a talk about HalVM that was given at Microsoft Research. Had nothing to do with jobs

It changed how I find companies to work with

<comment><USER6> Can you tell us more? How did it change the way you look for companies?

<comment><USER4> I found that the hardest part of cold applications was identifying companies. In any major city you can probably think of 20 companies off the top of your head that exist there. Fewer with your expertise or interests in mind, fewer that are currently hiring. Additionally, identifying companies (without references or a network to pull on) for job search is a labor intensive and often boring process.

Since I would rather be "always learning" it is far more fun to watch technical talks at conferences and track any company that sponsors a speech I enjoy. I am doing this constantly (not just during active job search).

Since it is the norm for technical conferences to post to youtube, this strategy only costs time.

When you have a list of companies large enough, then it is easier to find competitors or get appropriate suggestions from networking platforms like linkedin.

I never track large or obvious companies, because I probably already know their name.

Now I've been in the field long enough to pull on my network, but don't really find it necessary. I have a list of 300+ companies that I can pull on reflecting my interests/expertise at different points in my career.

The only downside to this is it doesn't usually grow proportional to your geographical region, but there are ways to bias your results with other strategies.

I might have come across this without HN, but it definitely would have happened later. People post things that interest them on HN, and I find things interesting that others do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mostly, it keeps me thinking. I see what people are doing, what they have to say about the latest news, what the latest startups are trying to accomplish. Whatever I think of it all, it invokes some critical thought on the bigger picture of this industry. And I thereby avoid getting caught up in the details of my own work and stagnating.

</comment><comment><USER8> My ROI is pretty high considering the changes I've been seeing in myself lately. It's a huge step up from reddit and 4chan - I cut those websites out of my life and started browsing HN exclusively not too long ago. My mood has changed, I'm less cynical/jaded, and when I make a comment, I consider the person on the other side of the computer screen. This site is a bit slower, so I've also been getting more work done.

</comment><comment><USER9> Since you are asking for the 'Return On Invest', I think there are two sides to this medal. I didn't have any large returns, but I like the content that comes up, so I try to limit the resources I invest.

I observed that giving my brain new(s) information in the morning makes it harder to concentrate later the same day. So I try to avoid visiting HN in the morning and wait until the afternoon.

To improve the noise to signal ratio, I also added a little widget to my new- tab-page showing me the current top 3 news of the 'best' list. That way I don't have to constantly monitor the site and don't miss the big stories either ;-)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've directly found two jobs through HN, so already that's a massive benefit for me. Aside from that, I feel it's given me a much better grasp of both the breadth and depth of the tech industry.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's the only place I ever manage to have substantive discussions of medical science. Given my diagnosis, this positively contributes to my failure to be dead yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you continue to fail at dying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Longtime lurker. I owe my entire career to HN. I was always into programming but never understood the business/startup side behind it. Thought you just had to get a job and unless you were super lucky or rich there wasn't any other way. Discovering HN has shattered this notion and allowed me to live my life the way I always wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sometimes rarely I see something that can help me in my job. The recent announcement of v8 Javascript speed improvements was useful to know, and I'd probably not know without HN. I didn't read the full article but I know if our performance tests suddenly get better when that browser version comes up it might be them not us.

</comment><comment><USER14> I stick with a saying I came up with: "Make Knowledge Actionable"

I gain the most value from Ask HN posts. I used hckrnews.com to identify the top ones. I look at the top comments on these posts. If there are any good insights, I note them and favorite the post.

</comment><comment><USER15> Immeasurable. I don't do any social media, or networking. HN lets me know what's hot, and I can filter whether or not I need it myself. HN brought me Golang, and I wouldn't have found it so early otherwise.

<comment><USER16> My first thought was hn has negative roi for me as it is a time sink. But, like you, I first learned about Go here. A couple of folks at work and I introduced it to our org some maybe seven years ago. The org became a Go shop. I vastly prefer coding in Go compared to AnyEvent Perl or Twisted Python. So, hn has had a very big impact on me; immeasurable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Same as with twitter: negative ROI. I just hate-read it and get pissed off at all the nitpicky assholes going "well, actually" at each other to no end. It's sad, but I don't know how to stop.

</comment><comment><USER18> I got a lot of visitors from Show HN</comment>


Should You Hold "Office Hours"? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/taylor/2009/12/should_you_hold_office_hours.html

<comment><USER2> That's what I've done at YC for the last year or two. It's very efficient. I set aside a block of time, and founders book slots within it. I doubt we could fund 26 startups at once the way we used to do things, where each appointment had to be made individually.

<comment> s-phi-nl You mentioned in your essay on this that you wrote a sign-up program for it. Just out of curiosity, did you use Arc? If not, why not? If it was written in Arc, I'd guess that it was much simpler than HN in terms of complexity.

(Blatantly copied from <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=659520>)

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's written in Arc. All YC's code is.</comment></comment></comment>


What Do Cats See? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mydeals.com/blog/what-do-cats-see/post <comment><USER2> I think there is one fundamental flaw with simulating color seen by non humans or dichromat humans. I've seen this in all computer based simulators. They simply change the weight of some colors relatively to others.

But a dichromat with say, missing L cones will not simply mix green and red, he will experience "green" totally differently than a trichromat. What a trichromat call green is the result of the stimulation of both M and L cones. We cannot see the pure spectral green. We cannot subtract the L cones contributions to what we experience, and its is quite important. The dichromat won't have any L cones contribution, the physiological stimuli won't be the same. He sees the actual spectral green. A color we have never seen and that we cannot imagine.

Now there is an experiment to do : put a full page of bright red and stare at it for minutes. It will start to become orange-ish. This is your L cones getting tired. Now swiftly switch to a bright green full page (prepare it so you can switch with a key press). You will experience a purer green that you ever experienced, because this green will have less red component to it as your L cones are tired (the effect will last mere seconds and quickly fade into normal green). If you were able to completely remove your L cones, you would see what the dichromat sees.

<comment><USER3> Oh, wow, thas was an incredible experience, thanks!

In trying to explain it some way... the green was SO GREEN that it actually looked like it was flashing blue.

By the way, is there any other similar experiment I could try?

<comment><USER4> You might be interested in what is called opponent process theory of color vision.

<comment><USER5> I know I can google it, but is there a particular link you recommend to read up on it?

<comment><USER4> As it happens I was just researching it myself (it was briefly mentioned in a lecture on scientific visualization). I found this (have not read yet), what seems like a thorough and serious treatment of the subject.

[http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color2.html#heringtheory](http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color2.html#heringtheory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The trouble with "simulations" like these is they ignore cognitive post- processing - much like visualizations of what it's like to look through a compound eye portraying it as like looking at a wall of TV sets.

The human images and the cat images are not comparable because the human images represent a subjective impression, rather than a prediction from visual capabilities like the cat images. For example, the human images are crisp right out to near the edges. This is simply inaccurate - you can only read text within a FOV of about 6 degrees.

<comment><USER7> I think these simulations _are_ after post-processing. That us exactly why the human vision picture is sharp past 6 degrees from center - the picture portrays what we see _after_ our brains stitch together a visual field.

<comment><USER6> The human image is after post-processing. But we do not (cannot?) know what post-processing cats apply! Their impression of their own visual field could be just as sharp as ours (and probably is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scientists at Berkeley have actually recorded what cats see by scanning a vision pathway in their brain: [http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/10-15-1...](http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/10-15-1999.html)

Here's a link to the video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piyY- UtyDZw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piyY-UtyDZw)

<comment><USER9> What the hell did they do to that cat! :-(

<comment><USER10> It's a cat scan.

<comment><USER11> Badum tish.

<comment><USER12> This is HN, we handle our anti-reddit-style-comments policy like the Stasi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems to answer a question I asked myself just yesterday:

A neighbour's cat and my cat had a argument, no actual fighting - just lots of staring, yowling and that strange growling sound cats make. Nothing too questionable there, but then my cat did something rather strange - she started moving away by walking extremely slowly and I mean _extremely_ slowly. I wondered what on earth she was up to but after reading this article I think it must have something to do with the fact that cats cannot seem to detect very slow motion. It appears that cats can move and position themselves in such a way that it may be undetectable (or nearly so) to another cat.

Of course there may be a completely different explanation, but I like this one.

<comment><USER14> I suspect not. To do so would imply that cats are self-aware, which no one has been able to demonstrate.

<comment><USER14> The idea was that moving slowly implies that they recognized the other cat has the same limitations as itself.

I am beginning to find Hacker News very tedious when people down-vote posts that they disagree with which were made in good faith.

<comment><USER13> Have you ever seen a pride of lions hunting? The teamwork and understanding involved there is way beyond that required to recognize that another animal might not notice if one moves slowly.

One very simple step is they recognize the concept of upwind and downwind, not to mention the concept of beaters, ambushers and the ability to dynamically change their strategy when circumstances change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article was substandard for HN. No real mention or explanation was made of the reflective layer behind the retina, this is the special feature that gives cats what amounts to night vision, however it is at a cost of resolution. But hey, VGA night vision is better than a 4K pitch black image.

I have noticed that the cats I know are selectively short sighted. A rival cat from a neighbouring area or a fox can be spotted at considerable distance, however, a 'loved human' has to be relatively close to be acknowledged. This could have been rendered in the images, having it so that 'humans see humans' and 'cats see cats' in otherwise identical scenes.

Cat view - as in a few inches from the ground would not have been that hard to do - how difficult is it to take a photo these days rather than just download something random from the internets?

Furthermore, a cat's eyesight is augmented by an array of whiskers. These can be moved forward and back and are there to work out what something in close quarters is doing or shaped like. The cat has this area covered by the whiskers and has no need to be able to focus there even though we expect them to when we wave something in front of their noses.

<comment><USER16> I understand that cats have face blindness. To a human, another human looks very distinctive and unique as we have been crafted by evolution to notice the tiniest difference between faces. To a cat, we all look pretty much the same, it takes them a bit more effort to work out who is who.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cats and other animals can see different spectrum, which is useful to their hunting. Noting that raptors can see infrared so actually 'see' the thermals they are flying in makes a whole lot of sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Apropos of nothing, I find this a fascinating way of enhancing the link authority of a coupon site. Given algorithm changes at Google which punish sites for little original content, adding a blog like this to your coupon site ups content that allows you to organically rank higher.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wouldn't the bokeh (~defocus kernel) shape be changed by the fact that cats have a differently shaped pupil?

Interesting nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think this misses one of the keys aspects of cat vision, movement perception. You'd need video for that. I imagine they see something like a glowing trail around moving stuff. Depeding on light conditions my cat might ignore food/toy until it moves.

<comment><USER20> The photos miss that, but it is mentioned in the text:

 _The increase in rods also enhances their "refresh rate", so that they can pick up movements much faster (very helpful when dealing with small animals that change direction very quickly during a chase)_

Also: _Interestingly, this also means that humans have the ability to see very slowly moving objects at speeds 10 times slower than cats (that is to say that we can see very slow things move that would not appear to be moving to a cat)_

Which made me wonder why sneaking up on a cat chameleon-style doesn't work better.

<comment><USER21> You're not moving slowly enough, and cats can hear really well.

<comment><USER22> And they can probably smell you unless you're down wind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If someone would do the same for eagles instead of cats, that would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER24> Try this instead:

[http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/cats-eye- view/](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/cats-eye-view/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm routinely impressed that my cat uses a litter box with no problem that is almost completely dark at night. Not sure how she can see what she's doing, but it's cool!

<comment><USER26> I don't think she needs to see anything (although she probably does, at least dimly). Even humans should have no problem navigating around a familiar environment without relying on vision -- especially those humans accustomed to it, such as blind people. And cats get plenty of help from their other senses that are considerably keener than their human equivalents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Don't forget about the scientists who apparently took direct video output from a cat's brain - it looks like they have a facial pattern recognition similar to that of ours - what I mean is they look for the eyes/nose/mouth/etc and most likely see cat-like faces on other animals and humans (like we do when we think a dog is smiling). Interesting...

</comment><comment><USER28> that's a blog just to get seo for a "deals" website. to flag or not to flag?

<comment><USER29> Prefer the Mail? [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2462559/Nicko...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2462559/Nickolay- Lamm-pictures-Fascinating-photographs-world-eyes-cat--bit-blur.html)

<comment><USER22> Both the DailyMail and PopSci websites reference this "deals" website as the source. So while the site doesn't look like official news, from what I can tell it seems to be the proper source.

<comment><USER30> This SEO-looking site does credit Nikolai Lamm, who's also posted the content on his personal site, with no further attribution for the photos:

[http://nickolaylamm.com/art-for-clients/what-do-cats- see/](http://nickolaylamm.com/art-for-clients/what-do-cats-see/)

I was surprised to find that the "Art for Clients" tag on his site contains a lot of content that's gone heavily viral recently (especially "The Average Man" photos, which were on HN a few days ago):

[http://nickolaylamm.com/category/art-for- clients/](http://nickolaylamm.com/category/art-for-clients/)

And all these professional news agencies, presumably with legal teams to back it up, attribute Nickolay Lamm as the source for all of those I checked.

From his "About Me":

> I blog for MyDeals.com, MyVoucherCodes.co.uk and StorageFront.com. Each blog > post I make takes around 4 weeks to create.

[http://nickolaylamm.com/about-me-2/](http://nickolaylamm.com/about-me-2/)

I smelled something fishy from the "mydeals.com" source from OP, and initially thought that the Daily Mail's attribution to that site was just sloppy and awful... but it all checks out. Huh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> if I understand correctly they are short sighted so a good picture to add would be a macrophotography with a background to see where is their best vision in terms of depth of field no ?

</comment><comment><USER32> [http://twentytwowords.com/2013/10/18/japan-has-two- islands-t...](http://twentytwowords.com/2013/10/18/japan-has-two-islands-that- are-overrun-by-domestic-cats-12-pictures/)

</comment><comment><USER33> I am not sure if I agree with the blurriness of cat-seen images. Human eyes are known to be pretty bad in terms of hardware. It is our brain that applies the wonderful image reconstruction that gives us the perception of crystal clear images. By scanning the neural pathways that transmit image data to a cat's brain, researchers have only establish the kind of signals that a cat's eye sends to its brain, not what a cat actually sees. It is entirely possible (and very likely) that the brain of cats sees something very different than what these images would have us believe.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have seen my cat find a mouse in a camouflaged garden even when the mouse was not moving. Either this study is wrong or my cat is special.

<comment><USER35> I think you're missing a few possible scenarios.

First and foremost, cats have exceptional olfactory senses.

Second of all, the mouse was likely moving around before it noticed your cat approaching, at which point it froze. (By that time, it was of course too late.) Mice don't typically just sit in a garden, never moving.

<comment><USER36> Cats hear up to 60kHz. Those are super senses for us. Imagine what they can hear by small animals -- the movements of the very small things in and on mice, their breath...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I thought enhanced color vision developed for distinguishing plants. Primates eat lots of plants nad have been trichromatic. Cats and dogs are mostly meat eaters.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's an interesting trend to run a blog that drives attention to your startup. The posts are becoming less and less relevant to the company too.

</comment><comment><USER39> When a cat looks at a human he sees a servant.

</comment><comment><USER40> Ran the link through Lynx and the results seemed more accurate:

[BED] [BED] [SCRATCHING POST] [BED] [POTTY] [BED] [BED] [BED]

</comment><comment><USER41> Forget about cats,how can we be sure that all humans see the same colors?

</comment><comment><USER42> How come all those cats are nearly 6ft tall?</comment>


Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Worker's Pay [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://s1.epi.org/files/2015/understanding-productivity-pay-divergence-final.pdf <comment><USER2> The "historic" and "unexpected" drop in oil prices since last September taught me a huge lesson in supply and demand elasticity. The media and analysts want a smoking gun explanation, blaming it on the Saudis attacking frackers, Russian geopolitics, the strong dollar, etc. But a drop to nearly 1/3 the price cannot be explained so simply as the supply and demand difference is a small percentage on consumption.

The way I see it is that both supply and demand are inelastic in this case, as the world only needs so much oil at a certain time and cannot ramp up easily. Supply is inelastic in this case because much of the production boom was generated by highly indebted frackers. That means they have to pump and sell no matter how low oil goes. These two factors completely kill price rebalancing.

What does this mean for worker's pay? Simple: the effect of offshoring a few jobs has similarly an outsized effect on the negotiation power of employees. If there is always someone out there willing to take a job at breakeven (paycheck to paycheck living), worker pay will never go up.

Anyone who claims it's only a few jobs or that they pay market rates for H-1B's is either ignorant or a crook.

<comment><USER3> > If there is always someone out there willing to take a job at breakeven > (paycheck to paycheck living), worker pay will never go up.

Which is why you don't compete on price, but on service. If you can do for the business what other people cannot, your pay will keep going up and to the right for as long as you want.

Mind you, this could be as easy as rephrasing "I know Ruby" to "I use Ruby to increase revenue".

For instance, I am right now hiring a copy editor. I've spoken to plenty of people with a variety of hourly rates. Some said "I am really good at grammar and I am diligent and very detail oriented". Some people said "I can make your writing clearer".

Who do you think I liked more?

<comment><USER4> It's not that big a deal which candidate you like, since any of them will accept a figure within 1 or 2 standard deviations of average pay for the role. Which is kinda the point...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is written by an advocacy group, as disclosed on the first page of the pdf.

Anyway, consider the following scenario. Bob makes $10 an hour, and produces $100 of value. Obviously, this is a great bargain for Bob's employer. So much so, that another employer should be perfectly willing to offer Bob $11 to lure him away. Another sweetens it to $12 and Bob moves again. Rinse, repeat until Bob is making $100 minus the opportunity cost.

What that suggests is that a large gap between compensation and productivity is unstable, as large forces will be at work to shrink that gap. So why is inequality happening?

I suspect that productivity simply isn't increasing for a lot of jobs. Such as janitorial services - there's no automation there, the janitor with a mop and a bucket is doing the same thing he's done for decades.

The rise of computers and the internet, on the other hand, have caused the productivity of other jobs to soar enormously. For example, slightly improving the speed of the operation of a server farm can produce millions of dollars in value. I would expect that workers who can do that will be highly compensated for such value produced.

In other words, there's a growing inequality in the productivity of different kinds of jobs.

<comment><USER6> Bob's upward spiral of salary only works so long as there aren't a bunch of equally qualified Abel, Charlie, Dave, Ed, Frank, and George. If employer 2 needs someone to create that value and can pick amongst 10 employees, the salary of the job will not tend towards $100/hr.

<comment><USER5> A huge moneymaking opportunity in making 10x on investment in employees suggests that new employers will emerge to exploit it. Investment flows to where the money to be made is.

Unless, of course, they manage to keep Bob's productivity a secret, which is possible in the small but highly unlikely over an entire economy.

<comment><USER7> You said yourself in another post that you cannot assume that the productivity gains seen are evenly distributed. So I would propose that there is definitely an informational advantage for the company that currently employs Bob, because they know how much value Bob produces over his cost. How is another company supposed to gain this information, short of hiring Bob and finding out themselves? In which case, they rationally can really only be willing to pay Bob at some sort of _expected average_ productivity.

The only information leak is how much Bob is currently paid. So in some ways it's actually to a company's advantage to basically average out the wages across a level based on the level's entire productivity, because it hides the truly productive from other companies. And this is exactly what we see with modern pay grades and scales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is an employee worth, as an economic unit? In the absence of a labor shortage or non-economic forces, it's just maintenance and education cost. A dorm in Shentzen, some food, and training programs. The maintenance cost on humans hasn't increased much in recent years. Why should wages ever go up?

Rising wages means that people are being paid more than they're worth as an economic unit. Unless you're willing to take the position that people should be paid more than they're worth, you can't expect wages to rise.

Unions once explicitly took that position. A century ago, when Samuel Gompers was asked what he wanted for his union members, he answered "More". That's really what unions are for. In the 1950s and 1960s, not only did unions take that position, many manufacturing companies had come around to agree with it. It was a basic bargaining position in UAW negotiations of that era that wages must rise with productivity. The auto companies went along with this. That drove wages up across the US.

That ended in the 1970s. It was the result of explicit policy decisions.[1] Ronald Reagan is called the "Great Communicator" because he was able to sell some of those policies.

[1] [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35277](http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35277)

<comment><USER5> > What is an employee worth, as an economic unit?

The value that he can add to the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone explain what happened in 1973 that would cause such a divergent trend?

<comment><USER5> See my other post here. In a word, automation.

<comment><USER10> Automation is a minor factor _so far_ compared with outsourcing.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can I get some feedback on ideas for my domains? - <AUTHOR> so been putting off a bunch of projects but now I have a golden opportunity to work on them. Here are some ideas:

   import.sh - terminal based scraping tool/api

   export.sh - make REST API using BAML (Browser Automation
   Minimal Language)

   js.fo - a subset of ideas specifically for use as
   javascript libraries. ex) browser.js.fo

   scrape.it, scrape.ly - ???

   pwa.ai - ???
 <comment><USER2> I don't have particular ideas for the given domains, sorry. But I think one should first come up with an idea, and then a name and domain; not the other way around.

If you're looking for ideas, take a look at [https://app.saasible.com/ideas](https://app.saasible.com/ideas) .</comment>


Study: Men looking to live longer should hit the sauna - <AUTHOR> http://m.theweek.com/speedreads/540790/study-men-looking-live-longer-should-hit-sauna <comment><USER2> Actually the article link should go here: [http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sauna- he...](http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sauna- health-20150223-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like I'm lucky to live in Finland, the country with more saunas than men!

More precisely, there are 5.4 million people in Finland and an estimated 3.2 million saunas. (Most new apartments and houses include one, for example.)

That means 1.18 saunas for each male inhabitant.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> source: [http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=21307...](http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2130724)</comment>


Fuck you, Debian - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/broken-window/fuck-you-debian-ebe8cede37ed <comment><USER2> I would encourage the author to file an ITP for soundpackage and then package it for Debian. Once that's in the Debian archive, this package using it is free to enter Debian as well.

<comment><USER3> This is a good point. However, if a Python application depends on a lot of packages which are not on Debian, and I guess this is often the case, then this can seem like an Herculean task.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the preferred platform for dev blog? - <AUTHOR> Hi!
I would like to start a developer blog and I'm looking for advice. The platforms that grabbed my attentions are Medium, Jekyll based-blog (hosted on github pages) or self-hosted WP blog. Is there anything else worth checking? <comment><USER2> I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

\- [0] [https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

\- [1] [http://themes.gohugo.io/](http://themes.gohugo.io/)

\- [2] [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/)

\- [3] [https://www.digitalocean.com/](https://www.digitalocean.com/)

\- [4] [http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five- days/](http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say you want whatever can get you to start writing NOW.

If your goal is content, then you should worry about being consistent with content.

The platform will only matter later in the future.

I'd go with WordPress.com and that's it. From 0 to 60 in a second.

Most people will spend time playing with platforms and tech and forget the most important part which is writing.

<comment><USER4> THIS. Cannot agree enough. People do not care what platform you write on. They don't come to critique the technicalites of your site. You do.

People that take the time to come to your site, they want to read your content. Period.

You could write it in plaintext, with nothing more than raw HTML/CSS. If it's _GOOD CONTENT_ people will come back.

Content is KING.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You could roll your own blog; that's what I'm doing. I wasn't really satisfied with Medium or WordPress, so I just decided to write my own simple blogging software. Writing the blogging software is probably going to be easier than writing the actual blog posts for the blog.

</comment><comment><USER6> I recommend using a static site generator and hosting on S3. It's the cheapest way to do it and will survive a hacker news storm. It's also easily managed in version control and zero maintenance. For extra points you could add a CDN in front of it but it's probably not worth it.

I'm a big golang user so I recommend Hugo for the site generator.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point! What third party tools I can use to handle the comments? Is Disqus worth it?

<comment><USER7> I would also recommend Hugo as well. I just switched over to it from Jekyll and it's really quite nice. It takes a little bit to get used to the theme structure, but once you have it down, it's pretty easy to keep track of.

Disqus is also a great way to have comments on a static blog. I use Disqus and haven't really had any issues at all with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recommend medium.com, it has content discovery feature to help your posts reach out to others.

</comment><comment><USER9> testing out pelican; it has plugins for latex and jupyter</comment>


AI Test Pinpoints More Cancers Targeted by AZN, GSK Drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-15/ai-test-pinpoints-more-cancers-targeted-by-astra-glaxo-drugs <comment><USER2> Using AI to repurpose existing drugs is a more credible story than most in drug discovery.</comment>


How to Tweet Your Way to Good Customer Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.consultengh.com/blog/post/61/How_to_Use_the_Twitter_fail_Hashtag_Part_II/

<comment><USER2> This is exactly what our startup does - facilitate the customer service process.

It's amazing how many people have started to use Twitter as their primary source of communication with the companies they do business with. Twitter enforces complaints to be succinct and to the point and since it's asynchronous, you can get on with your day, rather than being on hold with elevator music playing.

And like the author states, it's such an easy win for the company, even if the reply back is "Give me a call at XXX-XXX-XXXX and I'll help out" or "Send me an email at email@example.com".

</comment><comment><USER3> Customer service over Twitter is an obvious plus. Though I don't think it's possible to achieve anything (At least, anything that involves private/account information, without following/DM-ing), it certainly looks good on the company. When complaining about a problem, even if the response is just "Hi, please send an email to [address]", it shows they are prepared to communicate with their customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also think that the most important part in all of this is the timeliness of their responses. 15 minute responses shows that businesses are investing money into social media by hiring people to watch Twitter feeds or personal handles at all hours of the day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also - the author, @lindseyengh, doesn't even have a lot of Twitter followers (153), so it's not like she has the biggest stretch, either. At least on social media, it seems as though companies care about the little guys, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of using hashtags to amplify one's grievances with a company on twitter. Is there a good way to research appropriate ones, I wonder?

</comment><comment><USER5> Here at Klout, we're seeing a lot of companies respond to mentioners based on their Klout score.

<comment><USER6> Do you tweet out their Klout score when it increases? Seems like a smart strategy to get a response.

<comment><USER5> No, users can send tweets about their score but a lot of businesses use our api to track and organize their incoming requests from social media.</comment></comment></comment>


The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming - <AUTHOR> http://gala4th.blogspot.com/2009/11/ten-commandments-of-egoless-programming.html <comment><USER2> Some good points, but this idea of egoless programming always made me wonder why nobody talks about egoless management, particularly #7 or #1.

I do like this book, however, and particulary practice #8.</comment>


Survey: Most Workplace Internet Use Remains Rudimentary - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/survey_using_social_media_at_w.php <comment><USER2> I think this is interesting. I didn't notice any data in there about search engines, but I suspect that reading individual blog posts is wildly underrepresented, because many inexperienced people wouldn't be able to identify one in search results, but they'd happily consume the data therein when given in response to said search.

Depending on how the question was asked, I'd very definitely not answer yes to reading blogs -- I track zero RSS feeds regarding my trade, and don't visit any blogs at all in a direct fashion.</comment>