Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10% - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/indonesian-borrowers-bring-dollar-bond-deals-to-boost-buffers <comment><USER2> In the 80s, we were borrowing money for mortgages (secured by houses with tenants and 20% downpayments) at rates over 15%.

I don't find yields over 10% given the current economic climate to be unreasonable or evidence of "desperation" on the part of sellers. I would probably find rates of _under_ 10% as evidence of desperation on the part of buyers...

<comment><USER3> In order to draw a conclusion, we should look at the _real_ interest rate vs. the nominal one.

<comment><USER4> Real interest rate depends on inflation which is an invented phenomenon of the 20th century. Inflation wasn't relevant in the preceding century and might not be relevant in 21st century either.

At least not in the current form it is measure as a CPI while ignoring asset price inflation in real estate and stock markets.

Whether that is a bug or feature remains to be seen, but for most people a psychological effect of large inflation has been present at least since the last big ceisia in 2008. Banks keep flooding the economy with new QE money and asset prices and rent payments keep increasing. Many people are not able to afford housing and birth rates plummet for not being able to have stability necessary to raise a family.

Whether somebody adds a patch to the inflation theory such as the concept of Biflation (inflation in asset prices, deflation in cheap goods manufactured by robots and imported from China at the same time) or throws thr concept of inflation out of the window completely is the question for economists for this century.

<comment><USER5> > while ignoring asset price inflation in real estate and stock markets.

Do you have any data to back this up? Some quick math shows annualized S&P 500 Return with dividends reinvested from april 2010 to april 2020 are 9.694% [0] which is entirely in line with historical returns [1]. Housing price per square foot hasn't really changed for most people either [2].

[0]: [https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return- calculator/](https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index#Performance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index#Performance)

[2]: [https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home- prices/](https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Companies were over-leveraged and didn't have cash stockpiles. They're trying to get liquid cash so they don't have to divest of assets in a market that isn't buying or go into chapter 11.

All the same, people are willing to extend loans because they are long on the economy, recovery, and return to normalcy. The engines are starting again.

The biggest issue was that companies were over-leveraged with debt. Maybe we'll learn a lesson from this, although I suspect opportunity cost will prevent many from being more prudent.

<comment><USER7> To play devil's advocate, how are companies over-leveraged during an environment of such low interest rates? Companies will optimize their capital structure for the lowest cost of capital, and if the cost of debt decreases, companies should rationally leverage accordingly.

That's why we see Apple issuing $8B of debt (at ~135bps over 30 year Treasury bonds!) despite having over $200B of cash on hand. If your hurdle rate is 2.5%, surely your profitable business can return more to shareholders than that, so you should binge on this capital source? (Or even, as Apple claims it will do, distribute this directly to shareholders via buybacks & dividends.)

Also, I would qualify your statement that people are not necessarily long the economy in the short-term, which is where credit markets have miraculously thawed; they're long the fact that they will undoubtedly be able to get credit from yet someone else (namely, the lender of last resort).

<comment><USER8> GP said "leveraged _and didn 't have cash stockpiles_". Your example of Apple may fit the first criteria, but not the second.

And this is exactly why you _should_ have a cash stockpile, either as a company or an individual: You can never tell when a random event will completely wipe out your earnings for 6 months.

I'm no corporate financier, but I've certainly heard arguments in favor of borrowing money during times of low interest rates _in order to have_ a cash stockpile. But borrowing to do stock bybacks _when you don 't have a stockpile_ is just skating further out onto thinner and thinner ice.

<comment><USER9> > But borrowing to do stock bybacks when you don't have a stockpile is just > skating further out onto thinner and thinner ice.

this also partly depends on your expectation on the availability to resell the stocks later on if desired

<comment><USER10> If you're creating the cash buffer as a way to stay afloat during hard times, that's a bad strategy, since the market for shares (including yours) will be weak precisely when you need the cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://archive.is/skzZQ](https://archive.is/skzZQ)

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like we're setting ourselves up for a junk bond bubble down the road.

<comment><USER13> Central banks will just buy them onto their balance sheets. Its already begun:

[https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/04/30/1588254981000/How- sho...](https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2020/04/30/1588254981000/How-should-the- Fed-buy-junk-bonds-/)

[https://www.afr.com/markets/debt-markets/why-the-rba-is- lend...](https://www.afr.com/markets/debt-markets/why-the-rba-is-lending- against-corporate-bonds-20200505-p54q2v)

<comment><USER14> This is really worrying. There is no central bank of central bank, so this really is the last lifeline. The system has been pushed to its limit.

<comment><USER15> A central bank is the lender of last resort.

Bank of International Settlements is the central bank of central banks. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_for_International_Settlements)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can anybody who understands better than me explain how this links to central banks' quantitative easing policies and the big macroeconomic picture?

<comment><USER17> It doesn't directly. The central banks have lowered "safe rates" down to zero and sometimes below, but desperate businesses still have to offer high yields over 10% to find willing lenders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this a buy signal for some of these travel or travel related companies I wonder? I can see them having a issue with cashflow now, but its not always going to be like this, people will need rental cars, maybe not as many, but they will need them. Potential consolidation first to reduce capacity and then price rises.

</comment><comment><USER19> Curious how all of these crazy interest movements will affect the housing market. Deflation sounds bad for housing values, but then again, it means interest rates will stay low, propping up values. And then there's the generally-crazy bay area market.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anybody know how usury laws apply to bonds, especially for sole prop/partnerships or personally-secured debt?

</comment><comment><USER21> This is unsustainable debt levels. It's like living on credit cards. These companies and countries should be downsizing.

<comment><USER22> At the moment? Downsizing employers in the emergency will likely wreck the recovery, and you can't "downsize" a country without a body count.

<comment><USER23> For an example of that see: 1929 & Money Supply Reduction.</comment></comment></comment>


Java Dev Environments with Containers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@brunoborges/java-dev-environments-with-containers-66d6797b2753 <comment><USER2> Just installing a JDK and gradle seems perfectly easy IMO. On Linux it's just a package manager command, same for Mac if you are using macports or whatever.

Or if you don't have a package manager, the instructions still a lot shorter than this medium post! [https://adoptopenjdk.net/installation.html?variant=openjdk11...](https://adoptopenjdk.net/installation.html?variant=openjdk11&jvmVariant=hotspot#x64_mac- jdk)

Nothing against docker but especially when running in windows or Mac where it runs in a resource limited VM, I think you'd potentially be hurting your compilation performance a bit by running everything in docker.</comment>


The Power of Collaborative Debugging - <AUTHOR> https://robert.ocallahan.org/2019/11/the-power-of-collaborative-debugging.html <comment><USER2> The more I read about Pernosco the more I want to use it.</comment>


After 20M Downloads On Android, Japan's Bitcellar Brings FxCamera To iOS - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/26/bitcellar-fxcamera/

<comment><USER2> coolest camera app!</comment>


I will make 100 redesigns because I'm sick of startups - <AUTHOR> http://romansnitko.posterous.com/i-will-make-100-redesigns-because-im-sick-of <comment><USER2> _Have you ever wondered why every pornsite banner knows where you live, but no airline website is smart enough to do that?_

I actually implemented automatic IP geolocation on RateMyStudentRental.com, but it confused a lot of people because they weren't expecting it.

You have people trying to search for rental housing near their school while they're back home over break, and people searching for something across town by campus while they're at work, etc. Even the people who were trying to search for something nearby still _expected_ to have to enter in the address, so they were completely thrown off, which is counter to the whole "Don't make me think" mantra. And don't even get me started on the people searching behind a corporate firewall, where the corporate headquarters (and IT dept) were halfway across the US.

In the end, I had to remove the automatic IP geolocation. Perhaps this is specific to my niche. Perhaps this feature is still ahead of the time (as the porn industry often is). Either way, that's what happens when you must hold your website changes accountable to actual metrics and results.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the problem is more that you didn't present them with an option to choose the auto-generated option. I think a graceful method would be to allow them to enter a zip code, but have a radio that has the auto-generated option as a choice. So they are presented with "Enter your location" which they proceed to click the radio box. Presumably you could then save the location they manually entered in via a cookie and present that as an option as well.

<comment><USER2> Actually, I did have that option. The difference is that I had the auto location by default with an option to enter it manually. Perhaps if I had tried it the other way around, it would have worked better. But neither would have really had any effect on the bottom line, so I didn't have the luxury of spending more time to test it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> These redesigns are good, I have to say. I'm glad you focused on making them more functional instead of prettier (that can't be said about most other unsolicited redesigns).

But after all the discussion about Dustin's AA or Andrew's Zappos redesigns, I don't know how the fact still didn't catch up, that creating the first mockup isn't that big of a deal, and the real work can't be done not taking into account any requirements or business goals :)

And unfortunately from a user's standpoint, a redesign is one of the worst things that could happen to a site. Because however cramped and difficult a site might be, there are people who use them daily, and changing the structure completely overnight would abandon the most loyal users. That's why it's easy for startups to come up with nice sites in 2010, they haven't had a website since 1995 so they don't have the baggage of previous users.

So as much as a redesign, I'd appreciate not a complete overhaul but sort of a compromise, that would improve usability without forcing old users to relearn everything. A good alternative is having the old and new site co-exist for a while, to get feedback on the new site as well, but not all companies unfortunately have resources for that.

<comment><USER5> No, the most loyal users won't abandon it. They will scream and curse and complain and beg you to make it the way it was for about four weeks. After that time, everyone will have forgotten what the old version looked like and stop complaining.

Rinse, repeat, for every major redesign.

<comment><USER6> This hasn't been the case for the recent thesixtyone redesign. Hundreds of dedicated users (users who actually spent money) and artists have left and are more than likely never going back.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure if this will pan out to be true and anyways they did the opposite of what this guy is doing. They took a usable site and made it unusable :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a great idea in theory, the problem is that corporate designs go through ten different committees each wanting something different, so you end up with an unusable mess.

<comment><USER9> Exactly, the first design mockup is the easiest part of the process.

From my experience, getting feedback from a small team in 20 person startup can drastically change the site from the designers original vision.

At the bigs companies there are many different stakeholders who need to be appeased. Some of the changes may seem illogical to the average consumer, but they might be well justified by management. For example trying to keep a few big corporate clients happy by including a large cheesy marketing message on the homepage.

Edit: But I admit, DHL is in desperate need for a redesign. Their website is awful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree that big companies would dramatically slow down the development process. And that's why I put a disclaimer on each page saying it takes consulting and understanding of the problem domain to produce a final result. Mockup is definitely just a first step, but I figured it's the step that attracts an attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Would it be cool if the AA site searched all airlines (like Kayak does)? Oh, I would use that thing._

That's like saying "Wouldn't it be cool if Amazon displayed the prices of all of its competitors (like PriceGrabber does)?" It's a conflict of interest. Either the information is honest and helps competitors or it is dishonest and of no benefit to consumers.

</comment><comment><USER11> Design is not the problem.

I'd be much more curious to see "100 Business Redesigns" where you'd outline how you'd revolutionize the mission, organizational culture, operations, marketing, etc of a large public company.

You could title it "If I ran this place..."

Here, I'll start with NCR, just like the OP:

* Simplify pricing: For a given market, date, and vehicle class, here's the cost of the rental, regardless of what referral source you came through. Inventory is inventory.

* Publish all this data publicly, not just to those who pay for SABRE contracts

* Include a gas card (ala zipcar). (Pre-negotiate rates with the major gas station operators)

* Don't overbook. Have real-time inventory available at all times at all points of sale. (again see zipcar)

* Don't bombard me with cross-sells from your "partners". The only revenue you ever got from that is from people who forget to untick the box that charges them the extra $50. It just gets in the way of me completing the transaction with you.

<comment><USER11> Organizational Theory question: How do you avoid, once becoming a larger enterprise, this kind of "mission creep" where too many groups hold sway over the public face and mission of a company?

The most common model I've seen thus far is the "single-minded-guy-at-the-top" model: Apple, Zappos (any other good examples come to mind?). A relentless voice to keep reminding people "what is our core business?" and ruthlessly cull everything that isn't core, even if it contributes revenue.

I don't usually hear about JetBlue's CEO holding that kind of sway-- they seem to have that culture organically. If I recall, Southwest _used_ to have that kind of CEO, but he's retired, so the question remains of how to maintain that kind of focus.

<comment><USER12> The problem with managing any large organisation is achieving some degree of harmony between what the people with the vision and overall responsibility want and what the people working five levels below them are actually doing. Once you reach the point where no-one has non-trivial insight into everything that is going on, this becomes very difficult, no matter how carefully you plan your corporate communications and how sincere the management structure.

A common, and reasonable-sounding, approach to fixing problem areas is to create some sort of "focus group" or "core team" (or bring in an external consultancy) who can take the time to do what the rest of the staff can't do without disrupting their regular jobs: go talk to people at all levels through the organisation, gather the key points about what is happening and what the staff feel about it, summarise what is _actually happening_ for management, and possibly advise on how to improve the situation based on what has worked elsewhere.

The difficulty with this approach is that in most organisations, there will be a grass-roots resistance/resentment of any changes that such a working group proposes, because people don't like to be told how to do their jobs, even if they are doing them badly and don't necessarily realise it. You have to have honest, full-on backing right down the management structure to pull this off, and you need to get the "good" people on your side first so that when others challenge the changes the people they know personally and respect will shape their views. This is possible, but IME only if senior management are willing to deal brutally with any middle management interference runners, which they seldom are. (Edit: Also, anyone seconded to the working group needs to have both an open mind themselves and the respect of the management team in whatever part of the organisation they represent. Otherwise, they will just disrupt the group, or they'll talk a lot and come up with good ideas to which no-one will then listen.)

Those who get to run big businesses and have snazzy MBAs and such are supposed to understand these issues and get them right, but it's sad how often they don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great idea and I am sure you'll learn a lot in the process. 37 Signals did something similar back in the day (2001): <http://37signals.com/better>

<comment><USER14> Let's not forget dcurtis's attempt to redesign the American Airlines website - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614703>

And the subsequent fallout from an AA employee opening his mouth - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922913>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice.

Consultants and Job Seekers take note: instead of telling people what you can do for them, just start doing it.

This strategy to get hired is quite applicable to other professions.

<comment><USER16> That doesn't set a very good precedent though. There's a reason designers scorn "spec work".

<comment><USER17> The likelihood that the targeted companies hire you afterwards is VERY low. You basically just shat all over their baby.

On the other hand, other companies (who weren't shat on) will stand up and take notice.

Spec work is only when it's by request, and the request came from people who benefit from it (e.g. "show me how you'd do this before I pay you").

This isn't spec work, it's publicity-seeking. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really like the changes that you made and immediately wanted to see what you would do with my website's design.

Though I stumbled when the "Have a tip which site should I redesign next?" link took me to Twitter. I missed the "Hire Me" link in the top right for some reason. (big screen made it way out in right field.)

Regardless, I bet you'll bring more business this way; maybe even from one of your "targets". It's a really nice guerrilla marketing strategy.

</comment><comment><USER19> You should try to abstract your rules for these redesigns and make them in to a best practices ruleset.

I like all three. Can I add you to my list of 'available' webdesigners ?

The biggest problem with these big corporate websites I think is that they have no real incentive to think about the usability and general aesthetics of their websites.

After all, we're just lousy customers, if the package was sent through DHL we'll have to use their website.

If you want to fly KLM/North-West then you'll have to use their website, etc.

If they were _just_ competing on the web they'd be paying much more attention to these details.

Another big problem is that usually there are 10 or 15 departments involved in getting a big corporate website built, especially if they interface to 'legacy' systems.

Looking at this through the lens of a startup-minded person is not 100% accurate. It is also a very good reason why running a start-up is much more fun than working for one of these big corporations.

Before you would even get internal permission to do these mock-ups you'd be 6 months down the line, and during those 6 months the requirements would change all the time.

<comment><USER20> The real problem is that big companies are structured into hierarchies, and getting a big change (like a site redesign) often requires simultaneously developing support through several branches of the company tree. At each level, management feels an obligation to make their opinions felt, and the result is endless compromise. For some things, this works well, but it is a very risk-averse process, so it is hard to make dramatic improvements. So big companies buy little companies (and often ruin them, but that's another discussion).

The problem isn't necessarily that big companies have incapable web designers, but rather that the influence of even the most capable is quite limited. It seems to be a fundamental problem with large organizations.

<comment><USER5> I once worked for a large company I shall not name, where ultimately the decision on which colour to make the menu on the website ended up being taken by the CEO.

(He picked blue)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One thing I forgot to mention in the post: I chose National Car Rental website for a redesign, because I've been watching The Daily Show online every day with NCR ads. I was so fed up with it, that I felt I had to do something about it to release the pain.

<comment><USER21> The Where and When step it's absolutely awesome. I really like it, the very essential of the task.

I know it's just a sketch you did for fun, read the disclaimer in the page, but: The Main navigation menu, the tips (ads ?) in the left, and the successive steps however can be optimized. Eg: Enter personal information (Mr. Stewart ... It's not needed when the user (mr Stewart) is logged in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seeing redesigns is an interesting exercise. But I don't see it being much more than that.

The author asked why companies have not done this. Believe me, 9 times out of 10, if it would increase their income, they would have. The fact that they have not done so means that there are either business reasons to leave it as- is, or simply other projects that will have a greater impact on the business, and therefore a redesign is of low priority.

I've said this before -- just becase we care about web startups, that does not make every company into a web startup. Having a good web design does not always have a material impact on the bottom line of a business.

<comment><USER23> That's a valid point for businesses in general. However, for customer facing businesses like DHL or AA that depend on their websites for a large part of their customer interaction, caring a lot about your website would seem to be pretty important.

I haven't worked in that situation before, but what is likely happening is that the managers in these large orgs are 50+, didn't grow up with the internet, and don't fully appreciate things like the importance of awesome design in your front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Interesting concept if you can sustain it. I would pay special attention to detail though. The DHL redesign has a pretty glaring typo in it. You don't want to appear lazy if you're trying to generate work from the mockups.

</comment><comment><USER25> The National Car Rental redesign is great. Gets to the essence of the service and makes it so easy - you are good!

</comment><comment><USER26> I love the hubris. "there are plenty of reasons, from lack of understanding of the profits that a good website eventually brings". Yes, the multi-billion dollar corporation has less of an idea what a more usable website would do to their bottom line, than some random guy with a posterous account.

<comment><USER27> Any large team ends up as an average of it's members. So all you have to do is be above that average. There is no large company in the world that meets with a web designer and says "Do what you think is right, you're the expert."

Its similar with internal IT. Invariably they have to answer to people that have no tech background/knowledge, and those same people will not allow the IT dept to make decisions independently. Large organizations guarantee suboptimal results in this manner.

You see the hubris is even more prevalent in the big corporations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Keep notified of the latest designs - Public Femtoo Tracker available:

<http://femtoo.com/index.php?action=TrackerLibraryLoad>

(snitko - you can create your own Femtoo Tracker and add a 'Track this page' button to the site to keep people updated...)

</comment><comment><USER29> The colors are better on the originals. Much brighter.

</comment><comment><USER30> Nice job. You should do it on government websites.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER32> The redesigns look great, way to go ;)

If this gains a little traction, you might find your inbox full of requests for your services. (Edit: I missed the dark gray bar at the top of the page and now see that you're aiming for that. Good luck!)</comment>


Launch it like Google - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/01/launch-it-like-google.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fsethsmainblog+%28Seth%27s+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> Uninformed. Paypal did not launch in obscurity - see Max Levchin's account in Founders At Work.

<comment><USER3> You should elaborate, so that we don't have to read a whole book just to disagree with you :D

<comment><USER2> PayPal had a big demo day where they invited the press to demonstrate their cool new technology: PDA-to-PDA money transfer. They made a big case of the fact that their investment was transferred using PayPal's technology.

Then, later, they found out that people found the web-based money transfers a lot more interesting than the PDA stuff. But they had their big launch day - before their product was even really completely conceived.</comment></comment></comment>


Can fake names create bias in interviewing? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.interviewing.io/can-fake-names-create-bias/ <comment><USER2> I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse.

Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate.

Maybe I'm assuming that Bay Area hiring practices are more universal than they really are. Perhaps Bay Area tech companies are under particular pressure to increase the percentage of diverse employees. For instance my company is targeting 33% female tech employees, but most data says women comprise ~20-25% of the tech workforce. Tough to reach those targets without some sort of bias.

For what it's worth I don't think our diversity hiring practices result in any lowered caliber of hires. Most of the affirmative hiring policies only affect resume review and technical phone interviews.

<comment><USER3> I'd hate to work somewhere knowing I was hired because the color of my skin and not my abilities. maybe less of an issue in non-brainy jobs, but in Tech I would feel more insecure not knowing if I got the job to fill a quota. This sounds rather disgusting to me.

<comment><USER4> Subconscious bias means your concern is applicable regardless of your skin color or gender. If you're a white male, you could easily have been hired simply because of your skin color and gender and not your abilities. Effectively, your point is moot. Maybe worry less about the thoughts and feelings of who hired you and focus on doing your best work.

<comment><USER5> >If you're a white male, you could easily have been hired simply because of your skin color and gender and not your abilities.

This may have been the case decade(s) ago, but I think the climate is very different now. With the prevalence of social "justice" hiring policies, I'd be much more confident I was hired because of ability, rather than to fill a quota, as a white male than any other race/sex combination.

Sadly, affirmative action creates "mismatch" that often worsens the problem it is trying to solve. Minorities are highly recruited to fill quotas, even if less capable. This (1) puts them in over their head setting them up to fail and (2) creates a perception that the minorities are inherently less qualified (rather than the truth, that they are being over-selected for).

One of many articles on this topic: [https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the- sad-...](https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-irony-of- affirmative-action)

<comment><USER4> > This may have been the case decade(s) ago, but I think the climate is very > different now.

I don't. I've met many incompetent white males in over their heads.

<comment><USER5> There are tons of people over their heads, everywhere, of all races and sexes.

But as the other person who replied to you noted, people now are openly stating that they want to avoid hiring white males.

>Sadly I've had to bring up my genetic background recently as a pure survival mechanism because people keep telling me to my face that they don't want to hire white men so I need to let them know I'm not white so I don't get instantly filtered out.

In recent times, I have not heard that more frequently about any other race/sex combination. To me it's undeniable that the hiring climate has changed drastically.

<comment><USER4> You were stating that "things have changed" in response to my statement that white males are often hired because of subconscious bias. That there are recent diversity hiring programs does not mean that white males are no longer hired because of subconscious bias.

Clearly, diversity hiring programs are new things that did not exist decades ago.

<comment><USER5> Ah, to be clear: Subconscious biases still exist to some degree. In recent years, in government and large corporations, diversity hiring goals have completely dominated the hiring process compared to subconscious biases.

I don't think you agree with that statement; if you did, would you think that it is a good result? I don't. I don't think the solution to past unfairness is to tilt the see-saw in the other direction, creating more unfairness.

You replied to another poster:

>Good. Then we're in agreement that hiring for diversity is of no detriment. Incompetent white people are hired because of subconscious bias and incompetent people of color are hired because of diversity goals. We've achieved equality.

I disagree strongly, and I somewhat agree with that poster's response to you. To me, equality means equality of process. To reclaim a phrase: equal opportunity -- not equal results. All bias is bad and should be fought against. Anti-bias training, examining disproportionate results to see if bias was an underlying cause, and race/sex-blind hiring, all are possible steps in the right direction.

To correct for subconscious bias for white males with conscious bias against them hardly seems the path towards equality.

<comment><USER4> > Ah, to be clear: Subconscious biases still exist to some degree.

Subconscious bias still exists to a huge degree. Studies have been done, and it is fairly obvious, that show increased diversity has a positive effect towards decreasing subconscious bias. I would propose that we give these hiring diversity goals, say, 100 years. Then we can circle back to see about making some adjustments towards a determination as to whether subconscious bias has effectively been eliminated.

> In recent years, in government and large corporations, diversity hiring > goals have completely dominated the hiring process compared to subconscious > biases. I don't think you agree with that statement; if you did, would you > think that it is a good result?

I do agree that in recent years diversity hiring goals have increased significantly. And I do think it is a good course of action.

> I don't think the solution to past unfairness is to tilt the see-saw in the > other direction, creating more unfairness.

When your vehicles steering is misaligned, do you counter steer in the other direction or do you drive around in circles all day?

> To me, equality means equality of process.

That's a lovely ideal. It doesn't exist. You've already stated that you admit subconscious bias exists "to some degree". So the process is already unequal.

With diversity hiring, more people of color will be hired, both competent and incompetent. Without diversity hiring, more white people will be hired, both competent and incompetent. There is no evidence that shows conscious bias favoring people of color results in more incompetent hires vs. subconscious bias favoring white people. That is the process: incompetent people get hired, race has nothing to do with it. In order to hire more competent people of color, diversity hiring is required (diversity is also required to, over time, progressively decrease the prevalence of subconscious bias). More people of color hired (competent or incompetent) naturally means fewer white people hired (competent and incompetent). I fail to see why that is an issue, unless you are consciously or subconsciously biased to favor white people and/or oblivious of how change is a result of action.

> To correct for subconscious bias for white males with conscious bias against > them hardly seems the path towards equality.

It may hardly seem like a path towards equality, but in fact it is (see steering analogy). That it may feel "unfair", well, in regards to that all I can say is "Sorry. But think of it this way, now you know how it feels for people of color. Lack of privilege kinda sucks." If there were another method of addressing pernicious subconscious bias favoring white people I'd be all for it. Doing nothing is obviously not a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The obsession with biases is a form of bias, you not only have to check what fake name you are submitting, you must make sure the people reading it are the same, that the mood of the people reading its the same and that their way of thinking hasn't changed much; such psychological uncertainties are the same reason psychology experiments are hard to replicate. Not to mention the randomness of things like if your resume was the first one thew saw or the last one, and many other things you have no knowledge or control over.

<comment><USER7> I completely agree that the questions that we choose to ask determine the knowledge that we get. This experiment is clearly situated within the positivist view of research.

However I don't think that invalidates the result, the whole point of randomization of people into the conditions (here the names) is to control for these latent variables like you've talked about (way of reading, mood, etc).

Are you critiquing randomization in general or this specific experiment?

<comment><USER8> Randomization solves for the problem, that's true, but that isn't what people are arguing when they criticize social science research like this.

Theoretically, if you have X number of factors you can't control for, then there should be some threshold Y where the sample size benefits from random selection and accounts for those factors. Right now, social scientists have formulas they use to establish what is and is not an acceptable population when doing experiments like this.

The problem that is being identified (and can't be stated often enough, honestly) is that human emotional preferences and variability of experience means that X is far more variable than anyone can conceive. A human being is an extremely complex biological system and that complexity compounds when you begin comparing people to one another and in groups. So unless you are actively controlling for every possible factor in that system, the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd.

Anyone with half a brain can see this, but social science has to deliver on a product and justify its existence with research funding, so it developed standards - like the aforementioned formulas - that allow it to ignore the problem of identifying X and instead just assuming their synthetic Y will do.

This is the real reason why psychologists have a replication crisis and why they always will. Many of them don't even use the standards they have because honestly, they all realize it's nonsense to begin with.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for this comment, it's well thought out and elucidates what the original poster is probably critiquing.

I want to make sure I'm understanding, are you saying that there is no sample size with which you would be comfortable making a conclusion about this? That's what I'm taking away from this comment "the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd."

<comment><USER8> What I mean is that social science research will only ever be able to speak to the samples they are studying. That's usually okay, though, because typically in an experiment with difficult variability, you can gain certainty through replication. With social science, the variability in human beings is so significant that I don't think replication works the same way. I think you would need to replicate studies about a dozen times across different cultures, timeframes, languages, regions, religions, etc just to even begin approaching something like reliable results.

And given the fact that social science has a replication problem (an understatement if I'm right), the entire area of study is suspect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of an interesting Harvard study I read a few years ago titled 'Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal'.

It can be found here: [https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_an...](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_and_greg_more_employable_than_lakisha_and_jamal.pdf)

<comment><USER10> IIRC this was one of the studies whose name list was criticised for having a lot of class differences as well as claimed race differences: when the authors sat down to invent white- and black-sounding names, they picked high-class and low-class names, thus injecting their own stereotypes into their data.

<comment><USER11> I saw another study where they found phone numbers for mental health professionals, and they called and left a message, asking someone to call them back to set up a first appointment.

The had _other people_ rate the voices as "sounds black" / "sounds white," and "sounds white-collar" / "sounds blue-collar."

That way, they measured the correlation between "sounds black" and "doesn't get call backs."

As you can imagine, "white" sounding people got more call backs. And "white- collar" sounding people got more call backs. I don't know if they reported which was more beneficial, sounding white, or white-collar.

My point being, if you have a large enough collection of names, and you _measure_ how the candidate appears to them, you can then correlate the appearance with the outcome, showing the bias against that appearance.

You don't need to have the researchers generate their own candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Heh. I have a very Hispanic name but I am white/European. This is fairly common where I am originally from and even more in other places. I've definitely gotten weird looks when I go from phone screen -> in person interview. Unfortunately Americans, even progressive ones, have a very narrow view of what "Hispanic" means.

<comment><USER2> Same boat here. I am Cuban, but basically completely white. A lot of people don't realize that Hispanic is a cultural designation that encompasses multiple races. Many are of native or mixed Central and South American descent. Many are black, descendants of Africans. Many are white. Peru has a large Japanese diaspora, so I guess it's possible to have Asian Hispanics as well (though I've never met anyone that identifies as such).

<comment><USER12> Yep. One of our presidents was Japanese-Peruvian, and I went to school in Peru with a few people with Japanese first and last names.

<comment><USER2> Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students into Peruvian society? Did they fluently speak Spanish? Did they consider themselves Hispanic (though I think "Hispanic" is more of a term North Americans apply to South and Central Americas, so apologies if this last question is hard to answer)?

<comment><USER12> > Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students > into Peruvian society?

100% integrated, considered themselves Peruvian, couldn't tell the difference without looking at them. The immigration was decades if not a century before I grew up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given names is one of the most effective way to encode culture. We already know that individuals harbor some biases based on culture, so it's no surprise that there is some bias when people exchange names.

My mother explicitly gave me a "white sounding" name when I was born and in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias.

There are many people in my corporation that are South East Asian but go anglicized names like: John, Kevin and Mary. They usually keep the family name though.

<comment><USER14> > in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that > those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias.

My grandfather changed our family name (which to be fair was spelled very badly when character sets were converted). It's funny because nobody knows what ethnicity "Comjean" is. People get confused and they are thinking about it. Adding to the confusion my parents gave me a first name from the old country.

People in moments of candor ( or from New York) have told me 1. I don't look like my name . And 2 misguessed my country of origin often putting me into their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think there are lots of factors involved with names, but yeah.

Even the spelling of names makes a difference. Interesting example: Dale Carnegie deliberately changed his last name from "Carnagey" to "Carnegie" so people, on some subliminal way, may associate him with the classy steel- building Andrew Carnegie family.

<comment><USER16> Charlie Sheen's birth name is Ramon Estevez. Despite it's "liberal bias", Hollywood is notorious for its preference for "Real American (TM)" names.

<comment><USER17> And his dad, Martin Sheen's birth name was Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess I don't see the point of these names? Why not just Candidate A,B,C or 1,2,3, etc.

<comment><USER19> Yup, this is called "blind hiring" and it's a thing.

[https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr- magazine/0418/pages/ca...](https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr- magazine/0418/pages/can-blind-hiring-improve-workplace-diversity.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always considered something similar with my name. For example if my legal name is Ronnie should I put Ron/Ronald on professional resumes/LinkedIn? Even though that's not my real name. Or Donnie vs. Don/Donald. Tommy vs. Tom/Thomas. It just seems anything ending in "ie,y" appears less professional.

<comment><USER21> I probably would. I think the problem is that so many people associate ie/y with nicknames for kids that it biases them. I'd probably use Ron initially and then when you get to the face-to-face interview stage you can let people know that you generally go by Ronnie if they ask. HR isn't going to care what you go by online or your resume as long as the 'official' paperwork you submit is correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> "infinite avalanche" is a commonplace, boring phrase? Wonder where he's from.

<comment><USER23> Sounds like he's super white.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Some words are prettier than others. All of the words in the first list are quite long and fantastical, whereas the latter are fairly common assonant word pairs. It's natural that the first then are more evocative and have nicer associations.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a hiring manager, if you give me a fake name, it is to your advantage if it's the same fake name you use on LinkedIn, github, stackoverflow, and other sites that are going to come up when I google you...

I don't care about your social media accounts, your country of origin, your gender, or anything else that's irrelevant to your performance, but I do care about your technical history and abilities (and of course, your eligibility to work).

<comment><USER26> TFA is about the company assigning randomized pseudonyms to candidates.

<comment><USER25> I understand. Whether the candidate, a researcher, or my in-house recruiter mangles the name, the end effect is the same.

<comment><USER26> Why? I can get being pissed if someone's misrepresenting their identity (or annoyed if they're representing it inconsistently) as a job seeker.

But AFAICT this is about letting the candidate's performance be mentally/emotionally isolated from all the baggage that comes along with their history. It doesn't even preclude screening people out based on history before this anonymized interview.

You can then put it back together with the other information you have about them once you've formed an opinion of their technical abilities without preconceptions about them.

<comment><USER25> I guess my perspective is shaped by the fact that I'm likely hiring very senior folks, where I'm going to look through my network to see if I know anyone who knows them. For that purpose, doing the evaluation "semi-blind" and then later putting the real name/profile back on to do network and reference checks is even OK. (Even in that case, the real hiring decision is subject to skew by knowing the full details of the candidate, and often the resume/work history alone is uniquely identifying.)

I agree that it's 100% fair that we should be evaluating software engineers on software engineering abilities not names (and not even colleges to be honest).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think I've seen many people on reddit assume I'm an urban high school kid because of my username.

<comment><USER28> stcredzero? "Urban high school kid" isn't jumping out at me.

...Actually, nothing jumps out at me at all. I'm not sure _what_ to make of it. Why do they read high school kid out of that?

<comment><USER29> "Millennial" here.

stcredzero.

Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to increase their social status.

Zero refers to zero street cred. Username plays a pun, the the user actually has zero cred. Again, only used by people outside the "street" aka in middle and high school. Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, sice we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian.

In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot.

<comment><USER27> _Also 98% chance OP is male. I 'd say 50-60% white, since we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian._

 _In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot._

But site demographics tell you a lot more!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Polar as a Personal Knowledge Repository - <AUTHOR> https://getpolarized.io/2019/03/01/polar-personal-knowledge-repository.html <comment><USER2> AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email files.

Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations. The last thing I want is _yet another_ place I have to look for my files, and I sure don't want to have to keep things in sync with a repo that holds the rest of my files.

I'm also concerned with the ability of this thing to scale. There doesn't appear to be any system for grouping items other than tagging. Maybe tagging works for others, but it's not something I trust (if I have hundreds of items and missed a tag, the item is lost).

Definitely don't want this to be a negative comment. It's more "you're 95% of the way to an outstanding product, but I think the last 5% might be an obstacle to adoption."

<comment><AUTHOR> > AFAICT, this is for PDF files on your computer and websites converted to > PDF. There's no option to add, say, markdown files or locally stored email > files.

Key point of order.

We don't actually convert the websites to PDF. We cache the pages offline so you have the original in your archive.

This is massively cool and I need to do a better job of making it clear that this isn't just conversion to PDF.

> Don't get me wrong, I've tried it out and it's awesome. I'm just not seeing > how it's going to take off as a knowledge repository with its limitations.

You mean specific limitations to Polar?

> I'm also concerned with the ability of this thing to scale. There doesn't > appear to be any system for grouping items other than tagging. Maybe tagging > works for others, but it's not something I trust (if I have hundreds of > items and missed a tag, the item is lost).

Some users want to have more of a hierarchical folder view and we might implement that.

But I don't get your point about a missing tag.

> Definitely don't want this to be a negative comment. It's more "you're 95% > of the way to an outstanding product, but I think the last 5% might be an > obstacle to adoption."

Well one thing is that I think the Hacker News crowd is very very very picky in terms of features and functionality vs the normal user base.

The features I've seen from HN just aren't going to be necessary for all users. I'm fine adding them if they fit into the roadmap but some just won't be implemented.

One issue is the ability to use other cloud providers which has been brought up a number of times (which is why I wrote this post).

That's a massively complex feature and while that would be cool in some sense it would just be far far far too expensive to implement.

I think the remaining 5% is doable but we will see..

One valid criticism is that PDF is the only format. We're working on markdown and ePub too...

<comment><USER3> > But I don't get your point about a missing tag.

At least in my experience, interfaces that use tags (Gmail, Google Docs prior to the Drive upgrade) end up being a massive global heap that make it impossible to find anything. Tags help but only marginally, and only when I'm very selective about applying them. When a tag becomes too big it, it's just the soup problem all over again. In my experience with Gmail/Docs I usually find things via search, or not at all (and unfortunately more often than not the latter).

You could argue the same problem occurs in hierarchical folders. But I think one major takeaway I've had is that defaults matter: hierarchical folders normalize a usage where you categorize _everything_. Therefore, I can find utility bills for an apartment I moved out of some years ago, with about four clicks through my folder tree. As another example, a while back I was asked for my daughter's birth certificate when checking in for a flight. No problem, five clicks and I've got it on my phone. In my experience this is hopeless in a tagging system unless search is very good or the tags are hierarchical and very granular, and at least so far I've never been able to develop the discipline to do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I mean a document with no tags is just like sticking something in /

Plus, with tags you can have multiple categories.

Also, Polar suggest tags for you based on your history. So it gets smarter over time.

We will probably add some sort of hierarchy viewer but I'm torn over whether it should be compiled based on the tags or built manually.

<comment><USER3> I just went to your website and saw this screenshot:

[https://getpolarized.io/assets/screenshots/document- reposito...](https://getpolarized.io/assets/screenshots/document- repository.png)

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Tags may be supported but it's not a tag-first interface, per se.

When I open finder/explorer/nautilus on my computer, what shows up is the top level of my file hierarchy. This would be like an interface where you showed _only_ top-level tags and then you have to click through one of those to get to any actual documents. You can say this increases friction, but the tradeoff is that it promotes a system of organization that becomes faster overall when I have large numbers of documents.

Or again, the issue of uncategorized files: you say it's like saving a document in /, but when I save a file on my local machine it doesn't put it in / first and then as a second step I have to manually put it somewhere else. But that's how most tagging systems work: documents go into the soup of the untagged list by default, I have to manually tag it if that's what I care about. Again, it's normalizing an approach where you dump things in and organize them later except the second step usually doesn't happen.

Like I said before, it's not that I don't think tagging could be used with discipline to maintain organization, it's that systems that rely on tagging tend to design their interfaces in a way where tagging is at most an afterthought and often isn't done at all. Whereas on my desktop I literally can't save a file without putting it _somewhere_ in the file hierarchy, and the UI is designed to put that hierarchy front and center.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah! That screenshot is out of date.

[https://i.imgur.com/hXizVHG.png](https://i.imgur.com/hXizVHG.png)

Tags are now front and center and on by default in the UI.

You can easily filter by tag too:

[https://i.imgur.com/9N5ZMi6.png](https://i.imgur.com/9N5ZMi6.png)

Polar 2.0 will be web based ... there have been thousands of people checking out the website but not many people downloading the app. Had it been web based I don't think that would have been an issue.

I think they would have started using it.

> it doesn't put it in / first and then as a second step I have to manually > put it somewhere else.

no.. but it will pick either the users home or their Documents or their Downloads. That's not much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, wanted to thanks all you guys for reviewing Polar and there's a lot of good feedback here.

In a nutshell:

1\. I'm working on more document formats including Markdown and ePub.

2\. I'm working on some preliminary support for reference management so we can lookup the full reference info via DOI and have reference formatters for you to use for your research. Some of the DOI storage is already done.

3\. I'm working on a webapp and mobile support. Probably a month away.

4\. The captured web content isn't actually converted to PDF - it's actually a cached web archive. Full HTML is kept in your repo.

5\. Polar 2.0 will be more web aware. You can annotate anything without actually having to store the full thing in Polar. We will just store a URL.

6\. Pagemarks will be improved her shortly so you can toggle them on and off and possibly even highlight through them directly.

7\. There are definitely small bugs and fit and finish issue we're working on. If you have an issue please report it: [https://github.com/burtonator/polar- bookshelf/issues](https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf/issues)

8\. Yes. Polar isn't fully self hosted but that defeats the point. My cure hypothesis is that knowledge benefits from being social which is the main thing I'm trying to test. By the time I'm done I think 95% of you would agree that keeping it private is insane as you don't benefit from the community.

9\. If you like Polar please consider donating. [https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf](https://opencollective.com/polar- bookshelf) ... we've received essentially zero Open Source contributions from the community and very little funding.

<comment><USER4> This is cool! I am working on something similar but a slight variation on intelligence augmentation and memory recall. Would love to chat with you, if interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure.. jump on the discord:

[https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6](https://discordapp.com/invite/GT8MhA6)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea of the Personal Knowledge Repository, but I don't like having a 3rd party app for it. 3rd Party Apps are good for creating and editing content, because there's a lot of different ways things can be made. Yet there's no great reason to use one to store content, storing content is basically the same, and OS's do it well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. There's a lot more functionality than just storing files here.

The OS doesn't provide annotations, highlights, flashcards, doesn't have a tag index, doesn't support offline capture, etc.

Install Polar and take the tour...

<comment><USER6> What are you going to do with that data you're collecting through hosting? Not forest for trees, more like, hidden monetization strategy with an otherwise more convenient package in the front as "opt-in". It's only missing something if you're thinking several steps ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would be neater as a self hosted system.

I have a haphazard way of managing notes and docs that has too much overhead.

I would like a squirrel program to store and retrieve more easily and will eventually just write one.

I think we need more tools that rely on self-hosting cheap nodes for data where the owner has complete control. Knowledge management systems are really personal and if third parties go away then that is critically bad. I intend to keep this info for 50-100 years so need something that does a good job of just storing to git or whatever and then rely on different front-ends and things that can be run without any third party access to data.

The iOS model is closest to this in terms of data and apps, but is not OSS and I spend so much time in front of a full computer so phone access only is too limited.

<comment><USER8> I'm using gitea to self-host, works well for markdowns and code, but bad for anything that is binary(pdf,media files,etc), because of git, which really does not fit for binaries, and git-lfs is a PITA to use still

<comment><USER9> Have you tried git-annex? I found it to be a simpler, more git-like solution to the large binaries problem than LFS, which seemed like a centralised system that would be painful to set up.

<comment><USER10> Git-annex is amazing. It has changed the way I manage my data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the idea and was using this for months, but finally gave up, document viewer (or however this pdf.js thing is called in english) lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re-reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be other way to manage progress.

<comment><AUTHOR> > the document viewer ... lags every time I scroll and it's too annoying. Also

Even if you scroll down like 5px or if you scrolled multiple pages at once?

How long was the lag?

> overlays for selecting progress are messing with highlighting and re- > reading. It could be showed instead simply as rectangle with borders, > without this blue background, if that's possible and if not there should be > other way to manage progress.

Yes.. I'm planning on evolving this a bit. I didn't realize that people would be so annoyed by this and it isn't part of my normal usage.

I read forward and the pagemarks lag behind my reading and highlights.

I think I can implement a feature to poke through the pagemark to be able to annotate through it.

<comment><USER11> By lag I mean it's not smooth, not sure if lag is a good word, I don't need to wait seconds for refresh, just milliseconds probably, but it's clearly visible when I compare it to built-in Preview app (I'm using Mac) or Chrome internal pdf viewer. The smallest scroll I can make is sometimes ok, sometimes not, but normal scrolling when I'm just reading stuff is always like that, like something is blocking rendering for a moment. It was completely smooth when I started using it (~7 months ago) but I don't remember when it changed to current state. I thought that it might be some problem with Retina screen resolution and changed it to open in low resolution mode, but it didn't help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I started use evernote for this, but it dawned of me after a while that if evernote went down, all my data, diaries, notes etc etc was to be locked in and I have to start over.

Therefore I'm using org-mode, its just a UTF8 encoded file, even if org-mode disappeared over night, I can still read the data.

<comment><USER13> Evernote isn't too bad - all the data is cached locally in xml files with attachments - one directory per document. It is almost xhtml - the top level content wrapped in an en-note tag and the images are en-media tags.

I agree that it's important to be sure you can get your data back out of whatever you're using. And another benefit of something like org mode that uses text files as a backing store is that you can edit/consume them with whatever tools you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Like it and will check it out.

Had similar thoughts and I named it knowledge graph.

The center is you, than you tag books, lectures, wikipages and have a visual representation of all of your knowledge.

I also imagined having your whole education in it and because it's a graph, you could import a path which you can follow. 1+1 needs to be done before you can do 1*1 etc.

I thought about it while learning for a university course and a lot of time was spent on finding good material which explained a topic. And after the exam I started to forget stuff again.

It felt really stupid.

I wanna be in control on what I know, what I want to know and what I no longer need to know.

And all tools out there are not that good. Anki is doing its job but nothing else. Memrise does it more playful but also misses stuff. Duolingo (most of online learning has this problem) feels more like 101 <topic>.

How is it possible that 1000thands of universities record videos of lectures every year and are often paid by all of us (Germany for example) but all those videos have one or all of the following issues: \- bad audio \- bad video \- horrible handwriting \- no slides

Should it not be possible to sit together and create small topics and build one ONE comprehensive learning page?

...

Edit: and such a platform could not only benefit a lot of people it would also be financially a good deal. From 1-6 grade it could support parents and teachers, than teachers and pupils and later profs and students.

Lots of knowledge doesn't change every year.

</comment><comment><USER8> A personal knowledge management app that can:

        1. deal with various file formats(pdf,markdown,code,flashcards,etc)
        2. easy to annotate, tag, highlight
        3. works across web and smartphone
        4. can be self-hosted and portable

will be very valuable, I'm willing to pay for it if it exists, though an OSS version is optimal. No I don't want to store all my personal notes on any cloud storage so self-host is a must.

<comment><AUTHOR> You will absolutely want cloud storage when I'm done with this and have the social functionality implemented.

Read the linked article. I talk about this at the bottom.

IMO 80% of the VALUE of this data is that you're collaboratively building your knowledge with others.

My core hypothesis is that building knowledge is social.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why would I want spaced repetition for knowledge I don't use? And if I do use it, don't I get spaced repetition for free in the course of using it? It seems there are better uses for my time.

<comment><AUTHOR> The issue is exponential backoff off what your trying to learn. Spaced repetition handles the scheduling. You've learned something important yesterday and you might not forget it tomorrow or the day after but you might in six months.

This is what spaced repetition gives you.

<comment><USER16> A natural way to think about forgetting is that our minds simply run out of space. The key idea behind Anderson's new account of human memory is that the problem might be not one of storage, but of organization.

According to his theory, the mind has essentially infinite capacity for memories, but we have only a finite amount of time in which to search for them.

The key to a good human memory then becomes the same as the key to a good computer cache: predicting which items are most likely to be wanted in the future. That it's a perfect tuning of the brain to the world, making available precisely the things most likely to be needed.

In putting the emphasis on time, caching shows us that memory involves unavoidable tradeoffs, and a certain zero-sumness. You can't have every library book at your desk, every product on display at the front of the store, every headline above the fold, every paper at the top of the pile. And in the same way, you can't have every fact or face or name at the front of your mind.

"Many people hold the bias that human memory is anything but optimal," wrote Anderson and Schooler. "They point to the many frustrating failures of memory. However, these criticisms fail to appreciate the task before human memory, which is to try to manage a huge stockpile of memories. In any system responsible for managing a vast data base there must be failures of retrieval. It is just too expensive to maintain access to an unbounded number of items."

From the book: Algorithms to Live By.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> very interesting, however:

"We use cookies to track your usage. We use cookies to track your usage and to determine which features are used to improve the quality of Polar.

Additionally, we track application errors which helps us find bugs and to prioritize which issues to fix.

This data is sent to 3rd parties which provide the infrastructure necessary to provide the analytics services needed to analyze and store the data.

We avoid sending personally identifiable information at all times."

[https://getpolarized.io/cookie-policy.html](https://getpolarized.io/cookie- policy.html)

I am forced to click on "Accept" actually, which I don't like.

Overall it looks like calibre to me, however Calibre does not do highlighting

<comment><AUTHOR> Polar Premium will allow you to disable tracking but you should enable it.

you can audit the code but we only track what features you use and so forth.

I can't build Polar without the analytics data as I don't know what's breaking and have no ability to optimize it and improve usability.

<comment><USER17> Maybe we should have an open source error tracking engine that can be self hosted. Too often I see this being the reason people freak out about using a product (only on hackernews though).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can I easily use this to replace zotero, jabref, mendeley etc for citation management?

<comment><AUTHOR> Still working on that part. I think I'm going to allow association of a DOI then lookup the full metadata and then allow you to copy the metadata in a citation format to the clipboard.

Would that give you 80% of what you want?

I did some analysis and 40-60% of PDFs have the DOIs embedded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My favorite tools for this sort of thing have been TiddlyWiki as well as Scribble (Racket language). An essential feature present in both is that they both are incredibly hackable and customizeable since most products don't support enough organization for me.

However, my main complaint with these tools is that while they are customizeable, it is sometimes nice to have a WYSIWIG since some notes I take will only every be looked at as I am writing them so having instant feedback is nice, even if the resulting document is imperfect.

<comment><USER10> I used TiddlyWiki for awhile, and it will always have a place in my heart. But it just wasn't portable enough for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Are you building on the web annotation standard? Or otherwise connected to the prior work here? [https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation- model/](https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/)

It applies to PDF's also. More context: [https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web- standar...](https://web.hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/)

<comment><AUTHOR> No.. I looked at it and I'm still considering it but I wanted to first get a Polar MVP launched and prove that people will actively use it.

To be clear I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom so it's not like I'm naive in this area...

I just find that implementing standards can slow down a proof of concept that may or not be successful.

Plus I need to review the spec to see if it's compatible with our model and I plan on iterating rapidly on our model and it might not match up with the standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I started keeping favorite quotes in Hypercard back in 1987. I didn't pay attention when Hypercard went extinct 15 years later, and failed to do the work to extract the data. Now I keep info in text files and grep is my friend. No spaced repetition, but tags go in as grep-able raw text too. Will Polar, or Evernote, or any other system, be around in 30 years?

<comment><USER22> What do you do about more structured data, such as Excel files?

<comment><USER21> Great question: If it were just columnized data you could keep it in csv format, but Excel supports way more than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am tackling a related challenge with Digraph, an app I'm working on [0]. My project is focused less on providing an infrastructure for learning and retention, and more on simply organizing the vast amount of information that each of us reads every day, month and year into a collection that is coherent and growing and that builds upon itself.

The long-term vision is a crowd-sourced alternative to search engines like Google and Bing. But the short-term focus is on something targeted and immediately useful.

> If the company that runs your PKR goes out of business you're entire > education might be in jeopardy.

I'm dealing with this problem in part by making the Digraph source available under the MIT license.

[0] [https://digraph.app/](https://digraph.app/), [https://digraph.app/about](https://digraph.app/about)

</comment><comment><USER24> Sounds very zettelkasten-esque.

<comment><USER25> Context: [https://zettelkasten.de/](https://zettelkasten.de/)

<comment><USER26> Similar but OSS: [https://fsnot.es/](https://fsnot.es/) Happily using it for a few months now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can already reopen PDFs where you left them in Adobe Reader :

Edit > Accessibility > Setup Assistant > Set all accessibility options > Next > Next > Next > Next > Reopen documents to the last viewed page

or

Edit > Preferences > Documents > Restore last view settings when reopening documents

</comment><comment><USER28> > maintaining all your documents in one place, annotating them with > highlights, comments, managing your documents with tags, and maintaining key > extracted knowledge via spaced repetition

> I believe this is a new class of application

I haven't used SuperMemo (the app that inspired Anki development), but looks like it has all these features plus tons of other stuff ([https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning](https://help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_learning)). It has some flaws (not cross platform, doesn't support PDF directly, complex UI, and of course closed source), but I think it's unfair to claim "a new class of application".

<comment><USER29> Everything new is inspired by something in the past. Literally nothing comes from whole cloth. I think the point I was trying to make is that we're going to see more of these types of apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I failed to find how to create notes (it should be able to create and interlink all kinds of them if it's meant to be a knowledge repository: notes attached do a particular document, attached to a particular place in a document and not attached to anything, all notes should be taggable).

Lack of support for any formats other than PDF (it should at least support EPUB, all other formats if possible: AZW, DJVU, FB2, Markdown, single-file HTML) limits its usage for studying e-books.

And it's annoyingly slow (but I'd consider this tolerable if it was really helpful).

I just hope this is just the beginning and Polar is actually going to improve.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've tried a number of approaches to a personal data repo: plain text files, custom database tools, dropping everything in a file folder...

My current approach - which I really like - is vimwiki saving to markdown instead of the default .wiki. it's on a self-hosted NextCloud instance, giving me access across all my computers as well as my phone.

It's not perfect - I'm extending it with some standardized project templates and other things - but everything's ultimately text; it's self-hosted, so not dependent on a third-party service that might disappear; and I can easily extend it to meet my requirements.

</comment><comment><USER32> I've tried everything and I really like Dynalist (or any other outliner) as a personal knowledge repo / place to store notes and ideas.

I find ideas do tend to be quite hierarchical and you can link between nodes if need be.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is extremely cool, I've been wondering about how I can create subject matter repositories of various media types and then enhance that data with my own findings.

What would be cool here would be the ability to reference between documents and notes, like you would with hypertext.

Imagine you write an essay or blog post, and you want to instantly browse the citations and quotes you use. That document could live inside polar, maybe as a simple MarkDown editor.

Either way I've downloaded and installed. I wonder if I can get some fancy PDF scanning gear so I can get book segments into it.

/ramble

</comment><comment><USER34> It is a problem about "me" but my problem in personal knowledge is not having it (ok: it is, but thats unavoidable) it's my lack of clarity about which of half-a-hundred models of classification to apply at any given time.

I think this is why google free-text search is so powerful: you don't have to have an organizing principle, you just have to know a few key words, or a semantic construct which can be extracted from (meta) data.

OTOH the chaos implicit in my desk (I use volcano filing) probably perpetuates online in this model.

<comment><USER17> Since I couldn't find anything about this. Is the volcano filing model where things simply get stacked up until they erupt?

<comment><USER34> Yes. the model is you stack things, and they form (cinder) cones, and the boring things are either buried, or slip off and fall to the floor, and what is left is relevant or interesting. It's very effective (at forming piles, at least)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I recently started using Evernote again after a couple of years living in other tools (e.g. DEVONthink). Since I last used it, Evernote has gotten better at saving "simplified" formats of articles to my notebooks. The ability to do so on desktop _and_ mobile devices is pretty key for me. Evernote lets me both capture and view on all of my devices.

Any plans for a mobile app for Polarized? Evernote doesn't support annotations usefully, and the incremental reading feature of Polarized also sounds cool.

<comment><USER36> Any darkmode for Evernote yet? It is useless without it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've tried a few document management solutions, but I can't get past the fact that annotating documents by hand is so much more satisfying, I can't angrily scribble or circle text when they're digital!

<comment><USER38> On iPad (and probably Surface) you can!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I liked the idea but couldn't quite get the anki workflow running smoothly. To be fair I tried this because of the anki integration but I don't think that's what it's meant for

<comment><USER40> Indeed, it's painful to get notes into Anki currently. I would prefer if I could get any text selected into a new Anki note with minimum number of keypresses, rather than creating flashcards in Polar and then syncing them, which seems rather inefficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would like to make it more efficient for sure.

Part of the problem is actually Anki.

It's kind of janky and then there is the issue of firewalls that some people are running into which isn't fun.

I'm trying to smooth out the UI a bit more but it's an iterative process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I use Wallabag on a daily basis for months now and never been happier. Polar seems more advanced at the first glance, anyone using it? What are the experiences with it?

<comment><USER42> Downloaded it. Rather large app bundle. The experience I remember is wanting to archive a page, so:

\- Copying its link

\- Switching over to the app

\- Hunting for a way to add a page to the archive

\- A browser like window opening, pasting the link into the address bar, clicking an accept button

\- It rendering out the page, asking whether it looks okay - it did, so accepting

\- Opening the resulting PDF and it being completely fucked up.

I gave up. I like the idea of Wallabag much more, but can't get the FF extension to work.

Edit: Polar does offer a Chrome extension, but research about a FF version (the API is THE SAME) is hindered by me not being able to find any reference to the Chrome extension anywhere outside of the app. Idk, to me it just seemed fishy. I don't hate burtonator, I've just been frustrated. Why would I save my web pages as PDF anyway? That's an even more obscure, hard to process format. I tend to like the WARC format.

Does Wallabag support a full-text search?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Polar does offer a Chrome extension, but research about a FF version (the > API is THE SAME) is hindered by me not being able to find any reference to > the Chrome extension anywhere outside of the app. Idk, to me it just seemed > fishy.

Wait. What seems fishy? I don't follow.

I'm planning on revamping this entirely with more of this functionality done within the chrome/FF extension itself where we just capture what's already rendered without any of the above complexity.

It's waiting for Polar 2.0 which is about 1-2 months away.

> Why would I save my web pages as PDF anyway? That's an even more obscure, > hard to process format. I tend to like the WARC format.

Big misconception. It's not saved as PDF.. It's saved as a captured HTML format. We might do something like WARC in the future though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Okok. The features are neat.

But what we really need is Polar for EVERYTHING! PDF, docx, jpg, MD, ...

All of them, like a new modern Filesystem. But with Metadata and auto OCR...

That would revolutionary!

</comment><comment><USER44> @burtonator: Are in-app flashcards coming anytime soon? Love the idea of a PKR. Tried Anki for that purpose, but it just didn't work well enough.

<comment><AUTHOR> We could possibly have in-app flashcards but I want to wait until Polar 2.0 which will support web+mobile+table so that I can do cross device sync easier.

For me having flashcards means having them on my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I would pay decent money for the version of this thing that automatically found all the PDFs in my Pinboard account and loaded them in.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on a better sync framework to easily drop in systems like this to discovery notes, documents, URLs, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Today I first discovered that Pocket, which is the integrated service associated with that odd icon in FireFox that I had never clicked on before. It's like Instapaper, which is also something I have never used. Both of those seem to be online services, like Polar, with APIs to support browser extensions, Android integration, and other stuff like that.

I was pretty disappointed that FireFox integrated a service that was proprietary and not even one that was GDPR-compliant.

I have been looking for a hackable alternative to Google Keep. In the past, Pinboard.io had served me well, but now I am looking for something more. I want not just to store bookmarks, not just to archive web pages, but really to have all these at my fingertips for _analysis_. I want to shift the balance I have between consuming new information and munging on the information that's already come my way.

Polar seems to be a great alternative because it's a computer application that's 100% self-hosted. I would like something that could be run in a federated way, like Mastodon, but this is still _very_ nice. Since I own the data, I'm not worried about any limitations. I especially like that various forms of cloud sync are supported (looking at you, Syncthing).

I see Electron bashed on HN from time to time. I have no opinion about it personally. Even if there were some noticeable overhead, the capabilities this offers are probably worth it.

Super exciting. I'll give it a go.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's slow on my mac. I suspect it's the pdf.js rendering engine.

<comment><AUTHOR> would you mind taking a video? Some people are saying it's slow and I wonder if it's slow because of another issue that I haven't seen yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I use standardnotes.org self hosted</comment>


Shareable Jupyter Notebooks That Run on Free Cloud GPUs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.paperspace.com/paperspace-launches-gradient-community-notebooks/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, really thrilled to see this launch. I was a Research Fellow at the Paperspace Advanced Technologies Group this summer and saw this project develop. Gradient Notebooks were an indispensable tool in the work I was doing, and had several advantages for my work over other notebook services. As a researcher, it's great to see an emphasis being placed on starting projects with no fuss or issues around setting up infrastructure and sharing/forking models.

Giving anyone access to free GPUs and powerful tooling seems like an incredible opportunity. I'd love to hear what you all think!

<comment><USER2> Sharing free GPUs is amazing! GPU costs are such a huge blocker for people learning deep learning.

But as a cloud provider, I would be worried about abuse by cryptojackers. I hope that's not a problem and this is sustainable.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand this obsession with cloud-based deep learning for beginners. It creates this hyper-focus on cost: always remember to shut down your instances! With the occasional slippage which causes psychological (and / or financial) pain... The mood is all wrong for somebody entering a new (work-)field.

Google Colab is decent and free.

But you can do computing on cheaper hardware too. The CPU is good enough for learning and a GPU is not outside the budget of many people that presumably already own laptops and such.

I know a local group that shares an i9 / dual GTX "server" and are learning on this shared hardware. I think it's great!

I had a small budget for this learning curiosity and bought a Ryzen and a GTX with only 4GB of RAM. Got a job offer after a while which I had to turn down as it seemed to actually kill my interest in the field. Doing some small personal project now without much fuss to rekindle the fire. And using the CPU for it since it's so small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey HN, just wanted to post here to say that if you need more than 6 hours training (free tier limit) we offer a 4x GPU machine that is only $1.5/hour. Just wanted to let everybody know what kind of competition is out there while you're doing your price comparisons:

[https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud](https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu- cloud)

<comment><USER5> I'd be interested in whatever you could offer that's lowest specs in every respect except GPU ram. So 1 GPU, moderate to low everything else, but 24GB of RAM. Right now there's no great way to run those cheaply, even if I want to do something that might only take a few hours.

<comment><USER6> Does a card like that exist? Last time I shopped for them (a few years ago) it didn't.

<comment><USER7> It does and we offer it. It's called the P6000 and it includes 24GB GPU RAM. It's one of the most popular chips we offer for any kind of CV task as you can fit a ton of images, video frames etc. in GPU memory. In any case, here's a link to the full lineup we offer: [https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances](https://gradient.paperspace.com/instances)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried browsing the documentation for several minutes, but it does not answer this question: which Jupyter kernels are supported? Is it only Python like Google colab?

<comment><USER9> Because everything is running in a docker container behind the scenes we support any kernel you would like. We have a handful of pre-built containers and you can also add a custom container very easily or build one off of a base template such as the Jupyter R stack. Here is a list of some of the container we provide by default [https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/notebook- cont...](https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/notebook-containers)

<comment><USER10> I've gone ahead and added this response to the docs here: [https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/about#contain...](https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/about#containers) :)

<comment><USER8> Awesome, thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google Collaboratory works pretty well as an alternative to this. In fact it works so well, like there's so little time spent in IT, my total usage of it is quite low, because so much of what I've been communicating or seen communicated with notebooks is low quality in the first place.

<comment><USER12> > so much of what I've been communicating or seen communicated with notebooks > is low quality in the first place.

Do you think there's a format which is better suited to sharing data stories?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Question: Why use this over Google colab?

</comment><comment><USER2> Can someone clarify how this works in terms of data? I see "5GB of persistent data", but that's nowhere near enough for my training data. Is there also a larger amount of non-persistent storage that I can download data to?

<comment><USER9> The 5GB of persistent data is available for by default for all free accounts running on the free instances. You can easily upgrade your storage up to 1TB by upgrading you subscription within the console. We can also provide up to 4TB by opening a ticket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sorry, I'm very new to this, how do notebooks/shared notebooks play with version control?

<comment><USER15> Badly - under the hood jupyter notebooks are json which stores not only the code but all of the metadata as well. I know that there are tools that help with integrating jupyter and git but I just end up going back and forth between .py files in VSCode and notebooks in jupyter lab depending on what I'm working on.

<comment><USER16> Aye, notebooks truly represent a wrong turn in scientific computing. The absence of version control alone is a showstopper, but it's insane generally to launch long-running estimations interactively via browser-based notebook interfaces, with outputs that are not readily greppable. But corporate philistines continue to ooh and ah over jupyter's visuals, and companies like Gradient are more than happy to cater to their FOMO.

<comment><USER17> > Aye, notebooks truly represent a wrong turn in scientific computing.

I agree with that problem, yet somehow like the idea of notebooks. Maybe the real tragedy here is that jupyter notebooks are saved as json and not as a valid program with comments, that can be run "as is" from the command line.

<comment><USER16> > I agree with that problem, yet somehow like the idea of notebooks.

You like the tight feedback loop of REPLs, as do I. You don't need the clunky machinery of jupyter to effect REPLs with emacs and ipython.

> real tragedy here is that jupyter notebooks are not [saved] as a > valid > program with comments

Here's a simple way of doing that: write your code as valid programs with comments.

<comment><USER17> > write your code as valid programs with comments.

That's what I do! Then I have a script that converts my python program to shitty json that my colleague--who can only conceive to work inside a notebook --can run it. Finally, another script translates back the json to a readable code; and more importantly, to something that can meaningfully be put into git.

I would love if the jupyter interface allowed to save the notebook directly into a program with comments. Then all this silly sorcery would not be necessary.

<comment><USER16> It does, nbconvert.

But that's besides the point. The jupyter ecosystem, like other widespread and unwieldy formats such as Microsoft Word and PDF, poses a brutal obstruction to Unix workflows.

<comment><USER17> > It does, nbconvert

Yes, my script simply calls the nbconvert library, with some trickery to ensure that the result is idempotent. But I would like not to need this script, that instead the jupyter interface worked with valid python files directly (maybe after enabling some option).

> poses a brutal obstruction to Unix workflows.

It's not as much the notebook itself, but the file format chosen by default by the notebook. If it was a human-editable textfile there would be no problem, and there is no practical obstruction for that (other that young programmers today cannot conceive a different "serialization" format than json).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone now if this system supports Google Docs-like live editing? I'm struggling to find such a service.

<comment><USER19> Google Colab?

Disclaimer: I use Colab regularly as part of my job in Google.

<comment><USER20> I don't believe Colab is real-time live in the way that Google Docs is. I'm using it to teach a class and would love that kind of functionality, but unless I'm missing some option, when I make changes to the notebook, students who have it open don't see the changes immediately, only when they reload.

<comment><USER19> I haven't tried coding live, but comment threads do seem real-time. Probably wrong assumption on my part, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> fyi: your chatbot makes a "popping" noise when scrolling down and puts "(2) New Messages" in the tab title. Both distract from your content.</comment>