Why do companies with unbounded resources still have terrible moderation? - <AUTHOR> https://moultano.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/why-do-companies-with-huge-resources-still-have-terrible-moderation/ <comment><USER2> There are two classes of users: normal people who want to use your service and people who actively weaponize it for their own ego. Those latter users have all the time in world and can defeat any attempt to stop them. This is because, online, time is the only resource that matters. You have a limited amount of this resource. Your company has a limited amount of this resource. Your normal users have a limited amount of this resource.

There is a discussion below about Flat Earthers having every right to speak -- and I agree. And in fact, I doubt anyone would truly care about Flat Earthers having their Flat Earth forum or even adding an occasional Flat Earth comment whenever NASA posts a round Earth photo. That's never been the problem. The problem is that some users don't stop there -- they're on a mission to change the world. They going to abuse your platform to the extreme to promote their views. Most big platforms right now have a huge mess of people tossing free bytes at each other.

If a small group of dedicated people wanted to ruin Hacker News for the rest of us, I have no doubt in my mind that they could. No amount of moderation could stop them. I've seen it first hand a few times with other services.

<comment><USER3> They couldn't ruin HN because of the system of voting, flagging, and high karma requirement for downvoting.

And this applies in general, the only working way to moderate is distributing the effort between users who are interested in the final result.

Ideally big sites would not have one single system for moderation, but multiple lists so that if two groups keep flagging each other they get separated and don't see other groups posts, instead of one group having to leave the site.

<comment><USER4> I don't know.

HN has plenty of misinformation posted on it constantly. Countless posts that are objectively wrong, and in many cases it is done intentionally. I have seen lies supporting eugenics, lies about how quantum computing is a fake conspiracy, etc etc. And yet the mods only jump in when you're impolite by referring to OP with "you" and "you're" because it is a "personal attack". They are optimizing on the wrong problem, IMO. I would rather discuss with people who are snide rather than with liars who have an agenda.

HN has its own "fake news" problems. And this is the society we are living in; you can say anything as long as it doesn't offend or hurt someone's feelings. Even if it is objectively fake horse shit.

<comment><USER3> In your example if someone pointed out that quantum computers required some equations to hold with far greater precision than anything measured, so there is small but non-zero probability that it will turn out quantum computers can not work, would it be a lie that moderators should delete?

I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not, if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence.

<comment><USER5> > I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not

codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out.

> if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can > convince people instead of trying to silence

The tools you referred to _are_ tools to silence, so you are "trying to silence" every time you flag or downvote a post. As for refuting the misinformation, I regularly see posts doing this downvoted while the misinformation is upvoted[1]. This is particularly true in discussions on contentious topics. Thus, I'm not nearly as certain as you are that these tools would protect HN from a sufficiently dedicated group.

[1] At least once, because I downvote it and the comment remains black.

<comment><USER4> Exactly this. HN is a cesspool of misinformation. Whether it comes from people pushing an agenda, or just plain ignorance. I take everything said here with a grain of salt, and fact check _everything_. Because I have seen some very creative and convincing misinformation here, that when researched doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

My point is that people casually browsing this place are going to be infected by the misinformation and spread it to others. All while the mods overfit on whether someone's response wasn't polite enough, which in a lot of cases is biased to begin with.

Stack Exchange is a much, MUCH more reliable source of information than the horse shit I see pranced around here on a daily basis. Their moderation system actually works because it empowers knowledgeable users.

<comment><USER6> I don't find this to be the case. Usually, when someone is wrong, they are quickly corrected. So when reading a thread, I rarely come away with an incorrect belief.

Maybe some example would help me understand what you mean. Could you link to some clear misinformation on HN that wasn't convincingly refuted elsewhere in the thread?

<comment><USER4> Plenty examples here, even with people coming out of the woodwork to support eugenics under false pretenses: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20542738)

Look up some accounts (jlawson) and you will find they consistently post right wing BS here.

Or just search HN for eugenics and see all the crazy claims made...

Plenty other examples, but due to ignorance, like someone giving a long convincing explanation of the thermodynamics behind the efficiency of steam engines which sounded entirely convincing. But was complete utter horse shit once researched, and no one refuted it. But it was upvoted plenty.

<comment><USER6> I looked in the places you suggested but none of them seem like cesspools of misinformation.

Political opinions from across the right-left spectrum, if presented in a civil and substantive way and without fake facts, are not against the rules here. Extreme opinions tend to get downvoted pretty quickly, though.

<comment><USER4> I guess you didn't look hard enough. Because the top comment is a lie:

 _If you outlaw this, people like me (who think inflicting stupidly and ill- health on their children by withholding these technologies is morally wrong) will just fly to Singapore. Even if you could enforce this, not every country will. 5+ standard deviation increases in many traits is on the table_

Nope, 5+ std deviations is not on the table.

<comment><USER6> You might disapprove of the sentiment, but that does not appear to be a lie. A lie has to be factually incorrect. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie)

<comment><USER4> Claiming 5+ std deviations is a statement, not a sentiment. The author cites a paper that makes no such claim. That counts as a lie.

<comment><USER6> The citation by Gwern mentions a number of traits which could plausibly be improved 5 SD, like height (which would be +20 inches -- ie, a 7'5" man).

<comment><USER4> Height has nothing to do with intelligence, which is what the discussion thread is about.

<comment><USER6> I think pointing to evidence that _many_ traits are susceptible to +5 SD increases by genetic screening is reasonable in the context a discussion about intelligence, even though +5 SD change in intelligence hasn't been demonstrated.

+5 SD change in intelligence (ie, average IQ of 175) would be amazing, but it's not obviously impossible. So it's "on the table" in the sense that cities on Mars are "on the table". It's not prohibited by any known laws of nature, and some experts are working on it.

There are lots of actual lies in circulation, so I encourage you to reserve the use of the word for things that are demonstrably false, not just ambitious claims that one might be skeptical of.

<comment><USER4> That was never shown, it is you who are stretching what can reasonably be claimed with basically no evidence supporting such nonsense. None of what you said was in the original source.

Stretching the truth like this is lying, whether you like it or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article concludes with:

1\. Effective moderation can only come from others steeped in the particular cultural context they're part of.

2\. Effort should be given to moderate to give communities the ability to moderate themselves at scale.

With that in mind, it may be worth considering Reddit. Each subreddit has it's own moderation team from the community that is charged with enforcing sitewide guidelines like not doxing people, etc.

This lets them penalize and ban at the community/subreddit level instead of trying to interact with individuals.

There are problems, of course, but with 20million people a month interacting with the site you're going to have problems no matter what (as the article explains in detail).

<comment><AUTHOR> I do think Reddit is particularly well suited to having good moderation by virtue of its structure, and Twitter is particularly poorly suited. Twitter is all about decontextualizing what people are saying.

<comment><USER8> I think a useful somewhat-apples-to-apples comparison for moderation is: Quora and StackExchange. Both websites are intended to be Q&A platforms, but their approach is markedly different and results in different moderation issues.

Quora is heavily centralized - all content must be moderated by the company, there is little to no segregation of questions by dedicated community, and all questions are allowed. Individual users must be name-identified and, importantly, are the core ingredient for Quora - people come to read the content of specific people, not for quality of the content in general. Users have stake but no say in the evolution of the system, and are by design incentivised to not care about question or answer quality but instead about the people they engage with. Further, questions are considered to be "owned by everyone" \- so users are free to alter questions indefinitely.

In contrast, StackExchange (not StackOverflow) has similar properties to Reddit - partitioned into smaller communities, reliant on user moderation, equipped with a somewhat reasonable appeals process that relies on a "meta" site where users can contribute to improving the site. Users have both stake and say, and importantly are dedicated to improving the average quality of answers rather than who is answering.

The difference in moderation is stark. Quora's issues with moderation have been legendary - anywhere from an inability to stop sockpuppet voting, pay-to- upvote rings, and reversing helpful edits to outright refusing to take action against documented sexual harassment by users against other users. StackExchange has had no such issues, or rather it has had vanishingly fewer issues compared to Quora.

While we obviously can't compare them on equal footing, given that the sites are so different, this is some circumstantial evidence that community moderation, allowing communities to manage their evolution, and removing the focus on individuals is a better experience between two sites that seek to accomplish the same goal.

I'm not sure what this would say about social networks - which are all about emphasis on other people - but it does seem like a great model for online communities that aren't social network focused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is why moderation should stick to the "clear and present danger" standard established by US courts. There has to be a _credible threat of violence_ directed at a _specific individual_. "Hate speech" is too hard to distinguish from political speech. Don't try to do it in advance. Prior restraint is bad.

Banning people from being excessively annoying over a period of time is perhaps an option. That's after the fact, not before.

<comment><USER10> That may not be optimal for the site, though. Many users will leave a site before it reaches the level of violent threats.

The goal of moderators (on most sites) is neither to maximize speech nor to protect people's feelings. The goal is to keep people engaged with the site, and that of necessity means balancing the people who wish to be annoying with those who will leave when their annoyance gets too high. That gets the maximum engagement, which usually goes hand in hand with maximum revenue.

Even on sites whose goal is divorced from revenue, many will find that Gresham's Law of Comments applies: bad speech drives out good. Hate speech tends to drive away people from the topic at hand, because people respond to hate speech as if it were a threat, even if it isn't immediately physical violence. Responding to that dominates the conversation, and then people interested in the original conversation leave.

Good user controls can help, but ultimately a site must keep its eye on the bottom line. You may have a hard time distinguishing hate speech from valid political speech, but users know when they're not enjoying the site, and leave. It's up to the site's designers to pick their target audience and encourage them to stay. And if that target audience is "everybody, including people who want to engage in hate speech", they may find that "nobody, except people who want to engage in hate speech" is what they end up with. Which may well be what they want, but for those who don't, they need to recognize that and take steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Moderation is indeed difficult, but automating moderation is a bar we need not even get to yet, when even policies that are relatively easy to enforce keep getting watered down.

Just today, for example, it was revealed that Facebook is no longer going to prohibit false factual claims in paid political advertisements -- even if those falsehoods are determined by generally-respected fact checkers. See, e.g., [https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in- his](https://popular.info/p/facebook-says-trump-can-lie-in-his) (and associated commentary [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152869)).

<comment><USER12> The problem is, "respected fact checkers" are anything but. The HN discussion you linked to actually mentions some interesting things that these fact checkers omitted.

Factcheck.org claims: "there is no evidence that Hunter Biden was ever under investigation or that his father pressured Ukraine to fire Shokin on his behalf."

However, the fired Ukranian prosecutor testified in court that "the truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors." [1]

Testimony taken under penalty of perjury is _evidence_ , and factcheck.org was wrong to claim that there is no evidence.

[1] [https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/463307-solomon-these- on...](https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/463307-solomon-these-once-secret- memos-cast-doubt-on-joe-bidens-ukraine-story)

<comment><USER11> I agree that there might be evidence, and Factcheck.org may have gotten that wrong. But perfection isn't the bar we're aiming for, nor is it practically attainable - "usually correct" is reasonable.

Moreover, let's not confuse testimonial evidence with fact. They are not identical. In our judicial system, the jury is the finder of fact; they weigh the evidence to make conclusions.

We also can't let a minor technical error in a tangential report invalidate the rest of what otherwise is a lie -- specifically the primary bold claim in the example advertisement that's at the heart of the article.

<comment><USER13> "usually correct" is what the general media is, and they all usually have an agenda. Whenever they get it wrong, the process of commenting itself is a fact-checking exercise that s usually better than the "fact checkers" (case in point this thread). That nullifies the idea of factcheckers imho

I think the biggest issue with social media is: do not make truth a popularity contest

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To me it is fallacy of bigtech to misclassify moderation problem as just a typical ML problem. Hence a false belief that ML models, standard approaches that they use for their other ML problems, and cheap annotators can solve it.

What, I think, can be done:

1\. Don't just hire expensive PhDs and hope that algorithms can correctly classify racism, etc. Hire an expensive product visionary who can build holistic approach to address moderation problem and knows what is solvable with ML and what needs pivoting to human-guided resolution.

2\. Don't hire lots of cheap annotators in "Rural Inida" but hire or train fewer expensive experts and give them powerful tools that can scale their work to handle efficiently all suspicious traffic.

3\. Give power to "normal" users to flag inappropriate content or behavior and loop this in a thought-out workflow with your ML and your experts on the other end.

4\. Partition users and content so that bad actors and bad content get clustered away and are less easily accessible for others.

Why bigtech companies don't do it? Besides fallacy of thinking this is a "typical" ML problem, moderation is hard. It's also hard to make a business case for short-minded bosses and prove revenue increase or expenses cut. Lastly, some bigtech ones benefit a lot from abuse so they can't change immediately to stop it all.

<comment><USER15> I'm reading the new book on the failings of pure ML based AI by Gary Marcus and Ernie Davis (Rebooting AI) that makes a similar point

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> According to [https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18744264/something- awful-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18744264/something-awful- youtube-moderation-rich-kyanka-lgbtq) the best mods are chosen by the community they're moderating. You see this on Reddit. The mods mostly complain about how limited the tools are; they certainly aren't using machine learning written by PhD's. But Reddit ends up being fairly well-moderated; it's the subreddits themselves that end up banned for various reasons.

<comment><USER17> Reddit mods aren't chosen by the community. Reddit isn't even mentioned in the article.

<comment> barry-cotter Do you mean admins? Because mod teams are self-selecting once a subreddit is up and running and if you don't like a subreddit you can always start your own. People don't vote for mods but they participate in subreddits they like.

In Albert Hirschman's typology it's all exit, voice and loyalty are irrelevant.

<comment><USER18> This ignores network effects. Significant community forks are pretty rare in Reddit's history, and launching a new subreddit is not a trivial thing to do - that goes double since you can expect mods to suppress all mention of the new community since they have absolutely no constraints on their conduct.

<comment><USER13> it happens though. example is r/libertarian vs r/goldandblack . The new subreddits are smaller because they are usually populated with users "that care", and that's a good thing. It's not like they remain obscure too

<comment><USER19> Wasn't /r/goldandblack a split from /r/anarchocapitalism, not /r/libertarian?

<comment><USER13> Yes but now an alternative to both

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Moderating a forum of a few hundred recurring posters, who nominally all want to participate in discussions of a few specified topics is usually feasible.

Moderating open venues with no sense of commonality or community where anyone can just show up and say anything is ... much less feasible.

</comment><comment><USER21> There are really two issues here, both of which make it difficult for these sites to moderate their 'communities':

1\. Moderation doesn't scale. It can't be automated with an algorithm (well), it can't be done well by a bunch of low paid contractors with a handbook and it can't be done across a million user platform by about three people.

Sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc tried to get round this by using the above algorithms and contractors, and that's partly why they're so terrible at it.

2\. Moderation is community specific, with each community having different standards for what's acceptable. For instance, a site like 4chan or 8chan may find nearly anything acceptable, whereas the official Disney or Lego site might only want stuff that's appropriate for a young audience.

That's why forums work so well, because the userbase and owners decide what's acceptable there, and those outside of said grouo can join/not join based on their preferences. Same with Reddit to some degree, though that is complicated by people being able to move between subreddits so easily and them being hosted in the same place.

Unfortunately, many of these larges don't have this. They have one free for all open space where hundreds of different communities are forced to interact with each other. They stick millions of people into a newsfeed/search/whatever that despise each other's views, have completely ideas about what's acceptable and hate every ounce of the other side.

That's a recipe for disaster. Putting those who fundamentally hate each other in the same area for hours per day leads to a toxic atmosphere, and creates a situation that's almost impossible to police well. It's why school and prison are so bad; the kids and prisoners just have too many fundamentally different, conflicting worldviews to get along.

The only way to fix this is to:

1\. Accept that ommunities should be moderated by their members, not robots or contractors.

2\. Split the community into smaller ones where people can set their own boundaries for acceptable behaviour.

3\. Try and stop intercommunity trolling as best as possible

</comment><comment><USER22> And yet US companies feel it appropriate to judge the rest of the world's conversations against the backlight of select US sensitivities and blind spots.

</comment><comment><USER23> Moderation shouldn't be hired out. The community should provide the moderation.

</comment><comment><USER24> My "truth" is not your "truth" is not someone else's "truth". None of us is wise enough to tell someone else that their truth is wrong, so expecting someone to write software that is would be asking a bit much.

Filtering out opinions the majority doesn't want to pay to hear is simpler and more lucrative anyway.

<comment><USER25> There _are_ objective truths. It doesn't matter if you think the earth is flat. It's not. And I really wish this was a contrived example

<comment><USER24> The person who believes (or says they do) that the earth is flat, has every right to do so. I agree with you, they're objectively wrong. I find it arrogant to say they have no right to speak because of that, and will not.

<comment><USER26> Ok, but now replace flat earthers with people advocating and organizing meetings for people interested in joining ISIS.

Why do we want a world where platforms protect videos promoting and glorifying beheadings, exactly?

<comment><USER27> > protect videos promoting and glorifying beheadings

To play devil's advocate, "objectively" these beheadings are still happening somewhere in the world. It's an undeniable truth even though you don't want to see the evidence for it. For a lot of people this is their flat earth. No evidence means it's not happening.

Why not allow the content to be seen, let the world be horrified that there are people driven to become like this, and try to understand what led them to do those things?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The title is silly, because no companies have unbounded resources. If they really did have unbounded resources, they probably _would_ have better moderation. I have plenty of ideas that would work if I could only hire infinity software engineers to implement them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Consider the audience as people who primarily experience this moderation, and have no idea what these sort of things actually cost. For them, the resources of a dominant social media company seem arbitrarily large. (Originally I titled it "huge resources", but it looks like HN has some filter that strips qualifiers like that and it looked silly as "companies with resources")

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm becoming increasingly convinced digital information has inflicted on us the curse of not being able to forget. The online accumulation aids an eternalisation of our short-term memory that is overwhelming us individually and collectively.

</comment><comment><USER30> Because it's not a high enough priority for them. As long as it's not significantly affecting their profits, they'll do the bare minimum moderation. Same idea goes for the weak cybersecurity companies seem to have. When it comes to their IP they'll spend the resources to protect it, but when it comes to their customers info leaking, they don't care.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's like the difference between porn and art. You know it when you see it, but writing a rule for it is impossible.

<comment><USER2> You might not even know it if you see it! It might be dog whistles that you don't even understand until it's pointed out to you.

<comment><USER31> Check out old Mae West movies where she adheres to the letter of the Hayes Code yet always finds a saucy way to get her point across. A couple classics:

Reporter: "What do you think of foreign affairs?" West: "I'm all for 'em!"

"Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"

Language is infinitely malleable. Algorithms don't stand a chance.

<comment><USER32> > Language is infinitely malleable

I mentioned this before but my GF worked on an mmo's for tweens. Said one experiment with filters ended with a 12 year old boy writing, I'm going to stick my giraffe up your pink bunny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm not sure that distinguishing white supremacist symbols from the Circle Game[1] is even possible in theory just from a single post.

[1][https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/circle- game/](https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/circle-game/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Reading this made me realize that the internet needs to be decentralized as soon as possible.

</comment><comment><USER35> Because their resources are not unbounded. On the level of moderation, they are poor.

</comment><comment><USER36> Because they insist on making step one adoption of their fanciest model, on the off chance they can reframe the whole project of content moderation as an opportunity to refine marketable, proprietary tech?

</comment><comment><USER37> Simple answer: because moderation doesn't move the business needle.

<comment><USER38> I would argue it absolutely does. When NYC started "moderating" Times Square a lot more people started coming and spending money. People pay money for all kinds of blocking, scanning and auditing of email content, web content, etc. I expect moderation, and when its not done well, I don't come back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> This article is purely theoretical and I don't think they do such brainstorming about how to train the IA. It's proved that they just take a brunch of poor peoples poorly paid to deal with real messages and try to moderate them sometimes with a poor understanding of the context, and use it as an input to teach the IA how to do "proper" moderation.

That's how figure-eight makes its money

[https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/8/166313-software- aims-t...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/8/166313-software-aims-to- ensure-fairness-in-crowdsourcing-projects/abstract)

<comment><USER40> > It's proved that they just take a brunch of poor peoples poorly paid to deal > with real messages and try to moderate them sometimes with a poor > understanding of the context, and use it as an input to teach the IA how to > do "proper" moderation.

That's exactly what the article says: "you'd write up some guidelines (...) and then contract with some external company to have human beings read those guidelines and rate lots of examples that you send them" and then it mentions people from places with low salaries, like rural India and the Philippines.

And then in the possible solutions, it mentions hiring people well steeped into the specific cultural context of those you're trying to moderate.

This is where I think the article undermines itself, because if paying for some different (and probably more expensive) set of people may be a solution, then the question that was supposed to be answered remains: "why do companies with unbounded resources not do that?"

<comment><AUTHOR> While hiring those people might be more expensive, I expect it isn't much. Annotators willing to read a set of guidelines and perform rating tasks long term are generally not cheap. I suspect that for something like twitter, identifying people most suited to moderate a particular piece of content is itself a very difficult technical and social problem. So even assuming you can figure out how to find these people and hire them, there's still a long path from there to improving moderation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> because Free.

If we hadn't invented free, we'd have moderation because being repeatedly abusive and troll live for money, is in the end self defeating.

If you want moderation enough, get rid of free.

<comment> swagasaurus-rex If it is not free, it is a walled garden.

Maybe the optimism people had of the internet being an all inclusive community was ill fated.

Exclusivity is may be the next fad, driven by the trolling of few in an open community.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Because it would require omniscient AI for a task that even humans fail at doing it perfectly?

Does anybody really expect automated moderation to work even remotely decent?

</comment><comment><USER43> I think there are a few ways to better deploy moderation.

With twitter and its shouty kin, splitting the userbase into "normies" and "broadcaster" (the top 10% with the most views/reach)

Broadcasters have a disproportionate effect in terms of reach and tone. Spending time (and people) closely moderating in a very visible and transparent way will set the tone for everyone.

Twitter is hamstrung because it's most famous user (Trump) breaks its guidelines monthly (I mean he literally threatened to bomb iran, if thats not violent and intimidating behaviour I don't know what is)

Also, controversy drives engagement, which drives revenue. So I would say that its a feature of twitter, not a bug.

<comment><USER44> > he literally threatened to bomb iran,

When people talk about keeping violence off social networks, they mean keeping _personal_ violent threats off social networks. Whether to make war or peace is a political question, one that's perfectly fair to discuss in public. You don't get to impose pacifist foreign policy on the president by conflating random threats of personal violence with the legitimate business of statecraft.

<comment><USER43> You are interpreting this as a political statement.

Threatening to bomb a country is threatening violence, this is against the terms of service: [https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter- rules](https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules) to quote:

> you may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people

Like the law, it either applies equally to everyone, or its does not apply.

> You don't get to impose pacifist foreign policy on the president by > conflating random threats of personal violence with the legitimate business > of statecraft.

Again, you are reading way more into this. Either the Terms of service apply to everyone, or they do not apply.

According to those terms of service, there is no different between me threatening to kill a group of people, and trump doing the same.

As I said, transparency and consistency is the only way it can be implemented effectively.

<comment><USER44> Bombing another country is a legitimate act of the state. It's no more an endorsement of "violence" than wishing for the arrest of a notorious serial killer is an act of "kidnapping". Conflating legitimate acts of the state with extralegal personal criminality _is_ a political statement.

If a site's terms of service prohibit endorsing legitimate acts of the state, that TOS is a political statement.

<comment><USER43> > Bombing another country is a legitimate act of the state

yes, it can be.

> It's no more an endorsement of "violence"

War _is_ violence.

> conflating legitimate acts of the state with extralegal personal criminality

Well, you're saying that I equate the president's tweets as his personal threats. That's orthogonal to extralegal. It is also irrelevant, for the reasons I'm about to lay out:

The Terms of Service are the basis of a contract for using the site[1]. Unless there is a specific clause for "legitimate acts of state" then its a binary choice. Choosing not to implement them equally is a political choice.

look, its perfectly possibly to not agree with a person, but insist that legal/procedural process is adhered to. The president is a person like any other, and subject to the same legal/procedural process as the rest of us.

[1] well usually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> What also makes moderation hard is that it can be abused. For example, anyone who is influential and persuasive enough can be labelled a Nazi by political opponents and targeted campaigns can be run to get them deplatformed

<comment><USER46> it is pretty clear from actual postings whether or not someone is anti- immigrant and/or white supremacist

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Because moderation doesn't scale.

Case in point - youtube. They changed their demonitization algo in response to complaints and now they have complaints from other users that the algo is producing false positives. For example, the "Great War" history podcast had 100s of youtube videos demonitized because they talk about storm troopers and Nazis, which of course isn't great if you _are_ a Nazi, but maybe ok if you're a history podcast.

The issue is that each video generates on an individual level so little money for youtube that it just doesn't pay to have an individual go through each and every video on their platform and make a value judgement on worth. I mean anyone can upload a video for free and each watch of a video is maybe at maximum a few cents from an advertiser in profit to youtube.

Facebook and all other content aggregation web forums face the same conundrum. And the problem doesn't get better if we invent new algos or people more efficiently (somehow). On the one hand you now have an algo that determines what can be said or not said en masse and is making the decisions in an increasingly black box (as the heuristics will be by necessity rather complicated), on the other you have the very poor filtering videos or at the very least fallible human judgement still at the wheel on what gets to be said and not said.

Who watches the watchers? At the moment we have a handful of powerful media conglomerates that effectively control through monopsony almost all the social media on the internet. What, we've got Alibaba, Facebook, youtube, reddit, and instagram - that covers at a rough guess like 60-70% of social media traffic? But these are companies that are only successful at scale - you go on a social media platform because all your friends are on it (a la the myspace model) and you are given a "free" user experience because aggregating millions of people allows for a few cents in ad revenue per user to subsidize the servers at scale.

This problem is probably baked into the cake of this particular pattern and isn't fixable. Boy is it going to be wild when we finally crack how to make deep fake videos!

</comment><comment><USER48> You don't need to moderate your social media to death. Intensive moderation is used to control what your users are talking about. Just let the users talk and say whatever they want. I'm tired of these nerds getting people banned when they say something mean online.

</comment><comment><USER49> The title of this article literally reads "Why do those with unlimited power not take steps to limit their power?".

Also, name ONE company with INFINITE resources.

<comment><USER50> Are you being sarcastic or do you think the authors and publishers were actually saying that omnipotent beings exist?</comment></comment>


New Trump Rule Could Create 'Bomb Trains,' Environmentalists Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bomb-trains-1046481/ <comment><USER2> If only we had a recent practical demonstration of what too much explosive stuff in one place can do...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be okay with the order if the trains were specifically routed away from densely populated areas - similar to how nuclear waste products are transported AFAIK.

<comment><USER4> > _Under the new rule, trains would be allowed to transport up to 30,000 > gallons of liquified natural gas (LNG) per tank, significantly more than has > ever been allowed in the U.S., and there will be no restrictions on the > number of LNG tanker cars in a particular train, nor on the routes these > trains may travel, so they will be free to pass through dense population > centers._

Well that's good to know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am sure that the old policy no longer served a purpose, and that there is a sound reasoning behind the new one</comment>


Are there mac pro mouse which don't need receiver? - <AUTHOR> I don't need magic mouse.<p>Are there logitech alternatives without dongel. I don't want usb c or USB. <comment><USER2> Any Bluetooth mouse will work. You don't need to use the dongle on Mac, they have bluetooth built-in (unless you are on a really old Mac Pro tower, in which case you can add bluetooth to it).

</comment><comment><USER3> Any wireless mouse needs a receiver; just use a Bluetooth mouse. Not too tricky.</comment>


The global object in JS: platforms, unreadable code and not breaking the web - <AUTHOR> https://www.contentful.com/blog/2017/01/17/the-global-object-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> Unbelievable that there is no way to access the global object cross-platform yet...</comment>


New Research Finds that Caravaggio Died of Sepsis, Not Syphilis - <AUTHOR> https://hyperallergic.com/461573/new-research-finds-that-caravaggio-died-of-sepsis-not-syphilis/ <comment><USER2> "published in a journal of infectious diseases, called The Lancet"

I realize not everybody knows the Lancet but as medical professional I chuckled at this...

<comment><USER3> If you follow the link, that's not quite where the error lies.

The article was actually published in "The Lancet Infectious Diseases", which is a sub-specialty journal affiliated w/ The Lancet.

Just in case that's not clear...

* The blog-post/article suggests that the research article was published in "The Lancet."

* The Lancet is a prestigious British medical journal that publishes research on a broad range of medical topics.

* The research article was actually published in "The Lancet Infectious Diseases" which is a specialty journal affiliated with its more prestigious "mother journal" called The Lancet.

* The author of the blog-post seems to have not realized what The Lancet is, and incorrectly used its name.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the insightful comment!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's conceivable he got sepsis through a syphilitic ulcer of course ;)

More realistically if it was sepsis you can get that from any infection the reaches the blood stream - an infected cut, and animal bite, etc.

I'm also curious if they did test for lead content - I vaguely recall it accumulating in bones, but that knowledge comes from an episode of macguyver :)

<comment><USER5> Here is the paper from the medical journal: [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099\(18\)30571-1/fulltext)

Of note they did measure lead levels and they were very high, but they have good evidence for staph.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I didn't think it was lead poisoning (I'll leave that to actual scientists :) ), it was more curiosity as to long term use of lead paint, etc.

Thanks for the actual article link.

<comment><USER4> minor update -- apparently there's a deadline on editing? -- why upvotes for my comment rather than for herodutus?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Simon Schama's Power of Art series starts with an episode on Caravaggio. The series is well worth watching and explains a lot about the artists lives.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Schama%27s_Power_of_Ar...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Schama%27s_Power_of_Art)

</comment><comment><USER7> "New reasearch finds that Xyz died of cerebral hypoxia, not heart attack!"</comment>


Erlang R15B Released - <AUTHOR> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-December/063155.html

<comment><USER2> This is great news: _Line number and filename information are now included in exception backtraces_

<comment><USER3> Why didn't they add this before? Lack of time to develop it, or no requests from developers wanting it? I find the latter hard to believe, and the former to be a more likely cause.

<comment><USER4> Because it isn't that useful in Erlang, so the want to have it has not been that big. Most (proper) Erlang programs happen to be a lot of small functions and you know what function caused the error and the error type to boot in addition.

This information is often enough to quickly figure out what is wrong. The trouble arises when you have a large function you did not break up yet because then finding the culprit is much harder.

While I like the change, there is a risk associated with it. Namely that people will be less inclined to break up their code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Notable: The old (deprecated) 'regexp' module has been removed. So if any of your code relies on 'regexp', make sure you replace it with the newer 're' module and update your regular expressions accordingly.

It's nice to have that gone just to avoid confusion with the whole "why there are two regular expression modules?".

</comment><comment><USER5> Off topic, but is there a recommended post detailing various online Erlang learning resources? I'm reading an O'Reilly book and playing around in the shell but I feel like I need more 3rd party resources to really grok what I'm reading.

<comment><USER6> <http://learnyousomeerlang.com/>

Inspired by Learn You a Haskell.

Haven't read all the way through it, but what I've seen looks good.

There's also <http://www.tryerlang.org/> , which seems to be down right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone have any performance stats about the memory allocation improvements in erts? Couldn't find anything with naive Google queries..

<comment><USER8> Alleged drop in performance for some(+) R15A testers.

[http://groups.google.com/group/erlang- programming/browse_thr...](http://groups.google.com/group/erlang- programming/browse_thread/thread/11252f370d2f34fb?pli=1)

Devs claim that it improved performance in their particular benchmarks. I guess the best is to try it for yourself.

(+) presumably those that tested and got a performance gain never bothered to write a ticket or a word of praise. so keep that fact in mind.

<comment><USER4> In addition, they did retry the tests later and found no performance drop.

But do carry out tests if you are hitting the performance ceiling. A particular use of a particular construct may be hampered when people rewrite a piece of code. So while the overall performance might improve, _your_ case may not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm looking forward to running the Windows 64-bit version on my new 4-processor 8GB Dell E6420 :)

Mik</comment>


Gevent 1.0a1 is available (libev/c-ares instead of libevent) - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/gevent/browse_thread/thread/e42d259984e5d846

<comment><USER2> Any word on when Gevent will be compatible with Python 3?

</comment><comment><USER3> Messing around with things like Erlang and node recently, I kinda lost trac about the Python event libraries. Anyone here care to give a short update about the current state of gevent vs. eventlet?

</comment><comment><USER4> So it drops the half-baked built-in http lib from libevent in process of switching to libev. That's cool with me. What was the motivation for the switch?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have written about the reasons here: <http://blog.gevent.org/2011/04/28/libev-and-libevent/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This also supports threading. w00t.</comment>


Ask HN: Apply your developper skills in completely different jobs - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have been a developer for 5+ years and I am considering changing completly my career and stopping any IT related activities. I feel like being able to script stuff and develop small apps would be really useful in most of the other jobs but do you have examples based on your experience which show how you re used your developer skill in something completely different.
I know that my switch cannot be based only on this but your examples might help me choosing my next path. Thank you ! <comment><USER2> I am an architect and I am developing something. Product design or cooking but different way</comment>


Reverse engineering the latest Facebook worm - <AUTHOR> http://gdeglin.blogspot.com/2010/09/reverse-engineering-latest-facebook.html

<comment><USER2> Very interesting stuff. I really like articles like this that dive into to the technical side of things. We need more of this on HN. Keep up the good work

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! If anyone sees another FB, twitter, or Google worm spreading send it over to me and I'll be happy to see how that one works too.</comment></comment>


Negative Base - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_base <comment><USER2> When I was part of an organization in college, part of the onboarding process was that each applicant had to have a conversation and (possibly) do a "quest" for each member. My standing quest was that I would write the first 12 or so numbers in negabinary on my whiteboard, and have them determine the next few numbers and explain what they meant. I had people sitting outside my room for hours trying to figure it out. A few did do it, and normally had some expletives for me afterward.

<comment><USER3> Looking at the table is bad enough, but I imagine most people looking would think "Aaah binary" and convert to decimal: 1, 6, 7, 4, 5, 26, 27, 24, 25, 30, 31, 28... That's cruel :)

<comment><USER2> I probably got a little too much sadistic pleasure out of it, yes...

However, I was always willing to answer nontrivial questions, and even convert numbers to/from negabinary to help them. (The program used the Schroeppel2 implementation, to prevent them from getting too much of a clue if they somehow managed to find its source code)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember when negative zero was labelled a hoax. (-:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=-0&diff=25603603&...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=-0&diff=25603603&oldid=25529350)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/-0)

<comment><USER5> Best way to represent nil, in my opinion ;)

Although it smells like a design flaw (which negabinary conveniently doesn't have)

<comment><USER6> Are there common languages where -0 != +0? Or are you implying that this would be a good decision when creating a new language?

<comment><USER7> basically every language with IEEE-754[1] compliance..!

[1] - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754)

<comment><USER8> But only when imposing a total ordering.

<comment><USER7> that's not the case, in IEE754 floating point, zero is signed - i.e negative and positive zero are distinct values

<comment><USER8> But the standard comparison operators don't distinguish them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that's the first time I've ever seen someone use INTERCAL code to try and explain a concept.

<comment> ainar-g For those wondering, please do read the Wiki article[1]. It's amazing.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> See also balanced ternary [1].

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

<comment><USER11> Which you can use to solve the puzzle:

"You have 12 coins that all look exactly the same. One is counterfeit and is either heavier or lighter than the other 11. With a balance beam scale, isolate the counterfeit coin in three moves."

Any uses for Negative-base systems?

<comment><USER12> Hoo, that's one of my favorite puzzles - there was a version of it on Brooklyn Nine-Nine with no solution given, which ruined my sleep that night. I have a theory that it's actually a little harder for programmers than for other technically inclined people because the instinct to treat it as a kind of binary search problem is really hard to shake.

<comment><USER13> Is it not a binary search problem?

<comment><USER11> Not really - you can reduce it to one but you don't quite have enough information.

So I think it goes like this:

\- you have 12 coins, and each one has an equal chance of being heavier or lighter than the others - so that's 24 possiblities

\- you have 3 moves, and the result of each move could be one side of the beam goes down, one side goes up, or it balances. That means you can create a system that identifies 3^3 = 27 outcomes. So far so good.

\- you need each of your outcomes to provide real information. if it was a binary problem that means you're not really getting any information if the beam balances

(bit sketchy on that last point, maybe someone can help with that)

<comment><USER14> "that means you're not really getting any information if the beam balances"

Wrong. If it was true, that would imply that the probability of it balancing is 1, since the information you get is -log2(probability). Obviously the probability of it balancing is lower than 1, so you do get information.

<comment><USER12> You don't get any information if the probability of the beam balancing is either 1 or 0. If you put everyone on the scale, the probability that it will be balanced is 0 - you don't learn anything. So the trick is to exclude some of the sample group in every measurement. You can use a binary search strategy where you divide the coins into "on the scale" and "not on the scale" groups, until you have a set of two that definitely contains the one you're searching for (and then one more measurement will tell you which one of those two it is) - but that strategy requires too many measurements, so you need to use more information at each stage, and you can't throw out coins you've determined to be non-counterfeit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Can anyone provide some examples of practical applications of this?

<comment><USER16> I can't imagine there ever would be.

<comment><USER17> I don't think anyone ever imagined a use for imaginary numbers either, but those turned out to be quite useful for reducing dimensionality. Towards the bottom of the article it states that Donald Knuth proposed imaginary base numerical systems.

So this may eventually find a use, likely with higher-dimensional math.

<comment> ainar-g It will be really funny if there is some bit of new, undiscovered physics, that went undiscovered for so long just because it's best described using some esoteric maths like complex base numbers.

Highly unlikely, but fun to think about.

<comment><USER18> Are there any examples where the representation of a number matters in physics?

<comment><USER19> I recall some effort in moving from imperial measurement to metric. Reality itself does not care, but the math sure gets easier if you carefully select units.

Actually, another neat example is analog vs digital computation. your models can get very different answers. I recall some Mandelbrot guy talking about that.

<comment><USER20> See Gaussian (cgs) units for an example, compare Coulomb's law in cgs and SI: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units#Unit_of_charge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units#Unit_of_charge)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Taken one step further, could you have irrational bases?

i^1 = i

i^2 = -1

i^3 = -i

i^4 = 1

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex- base_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex-base_system)

<comment><USER21> thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How do you divide by numbers other than -2?</comment>


Ask HN: Do You Go Forward After Finding Very Similar Competition? - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone. I'm really hoping to get some feedback from this community.
I have a vision in mind for a web app that is very similar to another one that looks to be very popular.
I just wrote a brain dump of my thoughts on this if you have a few minutes.
Would love to hear from you who might of had a similar situation.
http://preeminentproductions.com/my-sception-dilemma/
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You should do whatever brings satisfaction to your life. If that's working on what you are passionate about and happens to be similar to another offering, so be it.

That said, being an entrepreneur brings with it a certain disadvantage in that you can become overly fond of an idea, so much so in fact that you will ignore all signs you shouldn't be working on it.

Everything in moderation!

<comment><USER3> _You should do whatever brings satisfaction to your life._

Are there data to back this up?

<comment><USER2> Only data from myself, which was what the original question was polling: 'do _you_ go forward'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback over on the site so far!

</comment><comment><USER4> Google wasn't the first search engine...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, definitely. There's definitely a market for it. I just need to work out exactly the value this tool can offer, and then strive to explicitly explain that on my sales pages. It's easy to get carried away just listing features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can look at it a couple of different ways, but my mindset is more from the "competition validates the market" and "if you don't have any competition, that's a warning sign" school of thought.

Anyway, competition is a fact of life for pretty much every company. If you don't have it today, and your idea is good, you'll have it tomorrow, or next week, or whatever. More than likely, if your idea is really good, you have half a dozen competitors working away in their garages (or wherever) right now, that you've never even heard of.

My take? Keep moving forward. Keep a close eye on what your competitors do, and _not_ just in terms of product features and technical stuff. Read _Positioning - The Battle For Your Mind_ by Al Ries & Jack Trout, and _All Marketers are Liars_ by Seth Godin, and think about what "lie" your competition are telling, (or what position they're trying to grab) and figure out if you can A. grab that position / lie before them, or B. establish a related but slightly different position, where you can still be the leader and still make a nice profit.

Trout and Ries talk a lot about "Cherchez le Creneau", a French expression that means "search for the hole". It's a great expression in marketing, in terms of "search for the hole in the market" and fill it.

Like you say... if LayerVault is more feature rich and pricier, then maybe you can grab a different chunk of the market. Do be wary of getting caught up competing on price though. That can lead to a "race to the bottom" scenario. See Thull's book _Mastering The Complex Sale_ for a good discussion of that issue. If you go "down market" try to make it more than just "we're cheaper"... more like "Our product is simpler and easier to use" and if it also happens to be a bit cheaper, then so much the better. Better yet, make a simpler and easier to use product and then charge _more_ than the competition! If you can convince people of the value you can provide, they'll pay for it. Again, see Thull for a lot on how to develop and communicate value.

FWIW, we find new competitors all the time... heck, one popped up in our backyard (almost literally) earlier this week, that we had somehow overlooked until a friend of mine interviewed with them. Yikes. But still, we keep moving forward.

I'm reminded too of what Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) said once... paraphrasing slightly, it was basically "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else".

Edit: Oh yeah, one last thing... call this a nitpick if you will, but I'm not really a fan of the name "Sception". "Why not?" you might ask. Well, because it sounds like a made up word, and it reminds me of famous "made up word" names like Inprise which sounded hideous and failed miserably. And it doesn't really fit the pattern of "short, easy to pronounce and easy to spell". Is it pronounced such that the first syllable is the same as the first syllable of "skeptic", or does it sound kinda like "inception"? And if somebody is telling somebody about it over the phone, or you run a radio ad, will it be obvious to somebody hearing the word, how it's spelled? Is it "skeption" or "sception" or something else?

More to the point, it isn't really evocative of anything meaningful (not to me anyway). A point that Trout & Ries emphasize in _Positioning_ is how your names (company and product) should fit with your desired positioning and support the overall theme. Does "Sception" support a useful position ("lie" in Godin terms) that you want to establish?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you very much for this. I am certainly going to look into these book recommendations.

Yeah, I honestly am still unsure of the name. I was going for something that had to do with "views" or "viewpoints". Thank you for your feedback on it.

I hear you loud and clear on the pricing issue.

Hell, I hear you loud and clear on all of it. This is very informative. Thanks again!

<comment><USER5> Sure, anytime. I'm not an expert on any of this, but I've been forced to learn a lot of stuff over the past few years of my own entrepreneurial adventure, and I enjoy sharing knowledge and helping other people. I hope some of this stuff proves to be useful to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yes, you go forward.

 _Looking back at it, thinking that I had come up with a tool that hadn't really been built yet, in this day and age is kind of crazy, I guess?!_

It helps to realize it's not being the only person working on an idea that makes the idea promising. Any idea that's promising will have several teams working in. So if what was deterring you is competition, don't let it deter you. And if there was no competition you should be alarmed.

 _what If I am supposed to put time, energy, and money into the other ideas?_

Constrain yourself to not working on any specific idea until at least two weeks have passed. Not only is it OK for new ideas to surface in the meantime, but it's also something that you want. You don't want to stay stuck working for 6 months on a less valuable idea. And it's not a contradiction to have other ideas, but a healthy path forward. Plus, if you are not having enough stupid-sounding ideas you are probably being too conservative.

If I were to give you only one piece of advice, it would be: describe the whole idea in a short sentence, preferably under 5 words. If you can't do that, you don't know well what your idea is. And that's a much bigger source of concern than competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Love the "describe the whole idea in under 5 words" advice.</comment></comment>


"What IQ is good for" (not for avoiding most biases, it turns out) - <AUTHOR> http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/02/papers-i-need-to-read.html

<comment><USER2> Keith Stanovich (mentioned in the submitted post) has a new book _What Intelligence Tests Miss_ out

[http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss- Psycholog...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss- Psychology/dp/030012385X/)

that I am reading right now. The book is an excellent discussion of the distinction between intelligence and rationality. One can score quite high on IQ tests without being particularly rational.</comment>


Half Your Brain Stands Guard When Sleeping in a New Place - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/21/474691141/half-your-brain-stands-guard-when-sleeping-in-a-new-place <comment><USER2> This is a familiar feeling to me as a sailor; when cruising, every place is new, and at anchor I'm never fully asleep the way I am on land. Any little sound, or the cessation of any regular sound I've gotten used to, and I'm up like a shot with the flashlight trying to identify it. Even the relatively slow rotation of the boat around the anchor as the wind shifts is enough to bring me awake thinking "what changed?"

<comment><USER3> It sounds like the brain will only sleep as deeply as it's safe to. That lines up more with the results in the article than the notion that it's directly about how many times you've been in that location before. When you're in charge of a boat, you have to be alert for any danger. When you're a fireman on duty, you have to be ready to hop into your pants. When you're in a strange sleep lab and covered in biosensors, you're going to be creeped out and on- edge.

<comment><USER4> My grandfather often took the engine room night shift on 'mud barges'. He'd just sleep and any change in sound that might indicate an issue would wake him up instantly. He likes to joke that he got rich sleeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If anyone has a baby, I feel this is what its like having a new born at your home for the first year. I slept HARD before I have ever had kids, but for some reason, that first year, I slept very lightly and would wake up to a cry.

<comment><USER6> I don't have a child, but this happened after buying a house, and living alone. I went from dead to the world sleep, to hearing everything happening in the house. Even ten years later, I still sleep significantly lighter.

<comment><USER7> I struggled with sleeping when I moved to a new state years ago. I still am a little anxious when I sleep and I have my sleep regiment down to the minute in order to get a solid night's rest.

I think sleep has some innocence until you lose it and afterward it changes permanently. It has in my life so far.

<comment><USER8> > _I think sleep has some innocence until you lose it and afterward it changes > permanently._

Yeah, it's called 'getting older'.

<comment><USER9> I'm older than many here, I suspect. And I use modafinil and coffee. But if I'm tired enough, and I know that I have enough slack, I have no problem sleeping. Indeed, if it's quiet enough, I can still sleep for 12 hours or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Like many others in this thread, I sleep very well in hotels. Usually better than at home.

My best sleep comes when I'm camping though. This is definitely not a comfortable or familiar environment, but I still sleep very well and feel refreshed in the morning.

That being said, I usually sleep terribly in friends' houses or AirBnBs.

<comment><USER11> Maybe because hotels are usually "standard" and therefore fall in the bucket of "sleep as usual" ?

<comment><USER12> My theory is that hotels often have thick doors and very solid locks and deadbolts. Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure.

<comment><USER13> >> Plus the added "security" of the front desk... Makes it feel more secure.

For me, there's also the fact that you are one unit out of very many within the hotel. Even if someone is going to be bold enough to break into a hotel room in the more "public environment", the odds are fairly low you'd be the victim from a pool of hundreds of rooms. Your stay is also brief, so you don't have a routine schedule a would-be criminal has time to study. Plus there's typically not going to be much worth stealing out of a hotel room anyway (wide screen TV, computers, etc).

I've always felt fairly safe in large apartment/condo buildings. I've never lived on the ground floor, so it feels like the odds of someone entering the building (or climbing the outside), coming to my floor, and choosing my specific unit to break into are quite low. You're very unlikely to be targeted by outside strangers; and there is a much smaller pool of people who live in the building capable of targeting you.

Three years ago I moved into an apartment with a street-level door. Basically a neighbourhood of townhouse-like buildings. It's been almost two years since I was burglarized while at work. I still don't sleep well anymore, with the ever-present feeling of dread that a nighttime home invasion is coming any day now. I can't leave the apartment for longer than 30 minutes at a time without expecting to come home to another completed burglary. I can't afford to move yet, but I can't wait for the day I go back to doubling my current rent to live in a higher class, 100+ dwelling building.

I will probably never buy a house. As I get older and save for a down payment, I'm sure it will be for a condo. I don't care for condo associations with their politics and fees, and the fact you only own or semi-own a section of an entire building. But I would never feel safe in a house where I have only a single door sitting between myself and my things, and an entire city full of parasitic people.

<comment><USER14> Shouldn't an entire suburb full of houses identical to your own yield the same peace of mind? Do you think being separated by walls instead of air makes a difference mentally?

<comment><USER15> When you're on the ground floor you are more likely to be targeted than when you're on the 40th floor.

<comment><USER10> Oh no! You might get "targeted." How scary!

This thread has been really illuminating for me. I didn't realize so many people were so afraid of "criminals" that they can't even get good sleep.

<comment><USER13> Have you ever been burglarized by someone unknown and uncaught? The violation is extremely personal. These people watch you for days or weeks to ensure they know your routine. They know when you leave for work, and when you come home. They know you don't work Fridays.

It could be a neighbour you've said hello to dozens of times, watching from their window. It could be a stranger who finds it worthwhile to sit in their car watching your home. You'll never know.

Either way, they've invested time in observing you, and have specifically chosen you as their target. Yes, it makes you "targeted". When you come home to your back door broken open, and find $5000 worth of shit missing, and every drawer in your home opened and sifted through? When you can't possibly even know exactly what's missing. A month after the incident, you're still finding new things that were taken from you.

It's not just about the stolen property. It's your entire personal space ripped apart. It's a form of psychological rape. Hope you get to experience that some day.

<comment><USER9> I've been there, and it sucks. I ended up sleeping with a loaded 12-gauge shotgun under my bed. Neighbor of mine nailed a burglar with a 38, kept under her pillow.

<comment><USER13> I still sleep with a knife under my matress. Canadian, so no gun. If I had one, it'd be within reach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And the paper: [http://www.cell.com/current- biology/abstract/S0960-9822(16)3...](http://www.cell.com/current- biology/abstract/S0960-9822\(16\)30174-9)

</comment><comment><USER16> Related personal story: I have severe obstructive sleep apena (OSA), and I went for several years before it was diagnosed.

During this time, it was not unusual for me to get very little sleep many days in a row. As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the other eye.

I wouldn't consider it sleeping just on one side of the brain, but there was definitely something different going on. I found that 2-4 hours of that would help my overall wakefulness.

Fortunately I had my condition addressed, but it would have been interesting to see if over time I would have developed into a full sleep-wake state of consciousness.

<comment><USER17> > As a coping mechanism, I learned somewhat to "half-sleep", where I would > close one eye and relax that side while continuing to do things using the > other eye.

That is intriguing. Can you share some techniques on doing this? If I try to close one eye only, my brain would be full engage just to keep the one eye closed.

<comment><USER18> I'm pretty sure I have sleep apnea as well, and I've done something similar. I will often let my right eye stay closed while I'm getting ready for work, or going places that aren't work, and that seems to satisfy part of my brain that demands sleep otherwise.

It actually takes some effort to keep my left eye closed, but for some reason its super easy to keep my right eye closed and takes pretty much no effort at all. So it might be a biological thing. I also struggled to keep my left eye open enough to put contacts in it back when I bothered using contacts.

<comment><USER14> This is amazing. My initial response to this was, "That's weird, I haven't experienced that." But, thinking back to being a teenager and getting little sleep because I was up on the internet all night, I remember taking a shower and getting ready in a state of half-consciousness.. and I remember closing one eye.

<comment><USER19> ... me too! And since I read about it in this thread, I also have sleep apnea and ADHD. Very interesting :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> @hotelpeople A hotel is a safe environment and probably is usually associated with positive experiences. No wonder you sleep better there ;) I am the same

<comment><USER21> Is this a cultural difference ?

An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people (the hotel staff + anyone caring to social engineer) has full access to the door key and I rely on an unfamiliar security system to warn me when things go awry (fire, blackout, water leak etc)

The only places I would feel less safe would be a night train or a taxi in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER22> >An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people [...] has full access to the door key //

Do you normally sleep in an especially secure room? There seems as much likelihood that a hotel staff member would "break" in to my hotel room as someone would break in to my home. It's marginally easier for staff but then they stand to lose their livelihood, are much more likely to be caught, _et cetera_.

Do you leave a door propped against the door handle, or a handle alarm, or anything, to mitigate your feelings of exposure?

<comment><USER21> I feel it might be different depending on where you live, but in Japan/France I always have a inside lock that prevents someone to unlock the door from the outside.

In Japan it was a door chain, in France you leave the key in the door and it blocks external keying. Also you'll have to pass the building gates before reaching an appartment.

It's not infailable, but it's significantly more protected than any standard hotel room.

More than anything I remember unintentionally screwing hotel keys by having them with other devices, and the hotel front would reprint them pretty easily without asking anything more than the room number and the registered name.

<comment><USER10> Serious question: are you really so afraid of the tiny possibility of someone breaking into your room while you're sleeping that you can't sleep well in hotels?

If that's true, I seriously wonder how you ever get in a car.

<comment><USER21> I sleep decently in most conditions (I can sleep in parks for instance), it's more that hotels feel inherently 'public'. It's a place owned by someone else, maintained and cleaned by employees, ruled about under a company's rules. If I had to put it in a bucket, it would go with shopping mall bathrooms, train compartiments or compamy shower rooms.

As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table while you're out, as you would in your house.

<comment><USER10> > As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table > while you're out, as you would in your house.

Speak for yourself.

I routinely leave my most valuable possession (my laptop) in hotel rooms. I'm not paranoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unfamiliar seems the wrong word

I tell people you need a place you can trust

Both wholly from a safety perspective to quelch this brain patrol

But also to trust your environments' behaviour

For instance, does your brain trust your phone on the night stand to leave your sleep uninterrupted? Or will it always be monitoring for familiar signals

similarly, can you trust your hotel to have consistent environment, or did you request a wake up call that your brain will be looking out for?

</comment><comment><USER24> I'd like to know who funded the research.

The Economist also reported it, and explicitly made the point that a hotel chain can use this in their marketing. Where we normally think of unique as being a good thing, this promotes consistency, so it's better to always stay in the same hotel chain instead of using Airbnb or whoever is cheapest on hotels.com.

<comment><USER25> Thankfully you can usually find this info:

> This work was supported by grants to T.W. and Y.S. (NIH R01MH091801, > R01EY019466, and NSF BCS 1539717). This work also involved the use of > instrumentation supported by the NCRR Shared Instrumentation Grant Program > and High-End Instrumentation Grant Program (specifically, grant numbers > S10RR014978, S10RR021110, and S10RR023401). This research was carried out in > part at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the > Massachusetts General Hospital, using resources provided by the Center for > Functional Neuroimaging Technologies, NCRR P41RR14075. Part of this research > was also conducted using computational resources and services at the Center > for Computation and Visualization, Brown University. [0]

[0]: [http://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)3...](http://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(16\)30174-9)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every time I sleep in a new place I've always wondered why I can't sleep more than 5 hours.

However, when I'm sleeping in Inn, Hotels, etc. I can sleep comfortably.

I wonder what the reasoning might be for those situations

<comment><USER27> I suspect that your mind doesn't register a new hotel room as a brand new experience, but rather as a familiar one. I bet the very first time someone sleeps in a hotel, their sleep quality is inferior to the 100th time, say. Even though not all hotel rooms are identical, the ones I generally stay in are similar enough that I doubt I subconsciously experience them as a strange new place.

<comment><USER26> Interesting, that's a good thought

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can not sleep if there isn't a door that I can lock / control. Stranger around, ever worse. Probably same reason I can't fall asleep in a public place, like on the train etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> Once I decided to turn around on my bed by sleeping by putting my head where I usually put my feet... That was one of the most awkward weake up and dreaming experience I've ever had

</comment><comment><USER30> Given that this behavior was studied decades ago, why has it taken so long to record the brain's activity when sleeping in a new place? Is neuroscience that new of a field such that relatively obvious findings are publishable in top journals? Or am I oversimplifying the results acquired in this study?

</comment><comment><USER31> What about long term travelers? Do people who travel the world get "used" to this and adjust?

<comment><USER32> Either we adjust or we are self selected in the first place. Maybe both.

Taking many short flights for work practically forced me to learn to sleep sitting up even during the day if I was not fully rested. Many of my colleagues and frequently flying friends can do it too. But some people seem unable to do it. I found that once I understood I could do it, there was no further practice needed. Like riding a bicycle that half your friends always fall off.

In the past year I have slept in approximately 200 different beds. About once a month I do wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something is very wrong. Sometimes I don't understand why there is no wall next to the bed, or why there is a window there. This feeling is acutely unpleasant, even alarming. But it goes away and I go back to sleep. It doesn't seem to drag my sleep quality down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> _Sasaki says that brain response is involuntary and there 's nothing people can do to prevent it, even if they've just flown in for a big presentation the next morning._

Really hope she was misquoted there and especially since it's not a quote. There's is no evidence or tests in this study to support this claim.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think there may be some subtleties here. Like many others, I've experienced great sleep in hotel rooms, or as a guest in homes that set me up very comfortably. That said, I definitely have noticed I remember my dreams much more frequently if I'm not in my own bed. Whatever my subjective evaluation of the quality of the sleep, it seems like something different is going on in my brain when I'm in unfamiliar surroundings. Maybe the effect shown in this study explains that.

</comment><comment><USER34> For me it is true, at least for the first 2 days. I was thinking it is because I was excited

</comment><comment><USER35> As a nomad who has been living in over 30 Airbnb flats for 2 years, I had this feeling in the past but I don't feel this anymore. Any place I go to feels "normal" to me the minute I step inside.

</comment><comment><USER36> This seems to have potentially important implications for people who fly across the country the night before a big presentation. Maybe they should be leaving 24 hours earlier.

</comment><comment><USER37> True for me, also if sleeping w a new person.

I sprung up from bed, said smth i couldnt remember, and just like that passed out again when a friend got in the room in my sleep. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER38> Can confirm anecdotally that this is true for me - although this seems to be specific to cases where it's somebody's home and not a hotel room.

</comment><comment><USER39> I tend to sleepwalk when sleeping in a new place for the first time. I wonder if this could be related to it.

</comment><comment><USER40> Great! Now I can tell my wife why I don't like to sleep at her parent's :)

</comment><comment><USER41> But the human brain was shaped during a time when nights were dark and full of terrors, Rattenborg says.

Lol, Game of thrones quote.

</comment><comment><USER42> How about taking sleep aid?

</comment><comment><USER43> Would anyone with deep statistical knowledge be able to comment on the validity of results based on an experiment involving 11 people?

[http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc...](http://www.cell.com/cms/attachment/2054006051/2060445893/mmc1.pdf)

<comment><USER44> The number of subjects doesn't really matter all that much. You can get a statistically significant result with a single subject under the right circumstances. This doesn't happen much in biology and the social sciences, but it happens all the time in physics. The best example is how the precession of Mercury (one "test subject") confirmed general relativity.

What matters is how likely it was that the result you got simply arose by chance. This can only be measured relative to some a priori probabilistic model. If the odds of the result having arisen by chance (the "null hypothesis") is low, then you can confidently "reject the null hypothesis" and conclude that something else must have happened. Of course, the statistics can't tell you what that "something else" was. That requires an explanatory theory.

The problem is that the probabilistic model is also kind of arbitrary. For example, suppose you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads every time. That odds of that happening by chance are, naively, one in 2^10. But that is only true if you only do the experiment once. If you have, say, 2^8 people flipping coins, then the odds of _someone_ seeing 10 heads in a row is one in four. Parapsychology experiments and stock-trading schemes often fall into this trap.

This is a general problem with "big data". The more data you have, the more likely you are to see things happen by pure chance that are intuitively unlikely.

<comment><USER43> None of that is relevant to this experiment or my comment.

And I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter. It matters enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.

<comment><USER45> > And I disagree that the number of subjects doesn't matter. It matters > enormously, precisely because this is a biology experiment.

It's ironic that you say this so definitively when you were the one asking for help interpreting the statistics originally.

Lisper is completely correct. Given a large enough effect size, detecting significant differences in a small population is very possible.

The statistics are sound. The assumption we should be questioning is where the subjects came from and if they are actually representative of the population that we are extrapolating this result to.

<comment><USER46> What Lisper said may be correct, however he really doesn't mention the application of the null-hypothesis in this experiment. To a skeptic it would seem the null hypothesis might be susceptible to the confusion of correlation and causation.

Edit:

The correct interpretation is that the model, the foundation of the null hypothesis, didn't fail yet.

Part of this model is backed by more experiments: _" The reason that we focused on SWA is that it is the only sleep characteristic that reflects the depth of sleep"_ [1].

The model doesn't consist of a single variable. 11 people choosing the same 7 numbers out of 49 by chance is rather unlikely. The null hypothesis would include that there are only 11 people picking, that they don't cheat, and that random chance is indeed a thing. If now 11 people would indeed all choose the same, then the experiment could be repeated, e.g. to show that they are cheating or to increase the significance.

[1] [http://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816...](http://www.cell.com/current- biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2816%2930174-9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Not my experience at all. In hotels I tend to sleep like a baby, often better than I do at home.

<comment><USER48> Perhaps, then, this isn't measuring sleep in any different place (a hotel room, a friend's house), just sleep in a weird, inhospitable place like a lab with weird stuff strapped to your cranium to measure your brain activity.

<comment><USER49> I've taken part in a number of sleep studies and I can say from experience that sleeping with electrodes strapped to your head does make it very difficult to get any sleep.

The worst part was the feedback loop of feeling that I have to sleep, or else this study will be useless; then those feelings contributing to more sleeplessness.

<comment><USER50> I've done some sleep studies too, and had the opposite experience. I was suffering from sleep apnea, which makes it impossible to sleep well. The electrodes during the sleep study were weird, but for much of the night (especially after the first night of study) they were running a CPAP at various levels to determine what I needed to keep my airways open. I slept better than I had in months.

I've been using the CPAP ever since, and now I sleep very well most of the time. I fall asleep in just a few minutes (used to lie awake for hours) I sleep all night through, and I often wake up a few minutes before my alarm goes off.

<comment><USER12> Offtopic, but have a look into myofunctional therapy. Get better at nasal breathing and you'll be amazed at the results. Life changing.

<comment><USER51> Thanks for the recommendation - I've recently realized that I have a lot of trouble breathing through my nose, I'm going to look into this.

<comment><USER12> An ENT may be able to help if it's a physical problem. Tongue placement at the roof of your mouth is paramount though. It will help open the nasal sinus. If you can't put your tongue up there, you may be tongue tied, and can look into a frenectomy to untie it. A myofunctional therapist will then help you learn how to properly strengthen and hold your tongue in the right place, as well as swallow properly.

It might sound crazy, but mouth breathing is linked to ADHD and all kinds of issues, likely due to lower nitric oxide levels and less stimulation of the pituitary gland. Expect the field to grow in the next decade. Lots of us are now having problems because of the reduction of breast feeding, amongst other things.

<comment><USER51> Thanks for the info - seeing an ENT is also on my todo list. I never realized this was an issue until recently, but looking back I've always been a mouth breather.

One night a few weeks ago I tried the method of taping my mouth shut before going to sleep. I woke up the next day feeling super sick and lightheaded, presumably due to lack of oxygen. There definitely seems to be an issue with my nose breathing.

<comment><USER12> Yes, taping is a great strategy but if you have bad tongue placement or just a physical nasal airway restriction, you might not be ready. ENT is your first stop, in my experience. Schedule it up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Looks like we are not that far from the dolphins.

</comment><comment><USER53> Oh, really? What if I am trekking in Nepal for 20 days, each time sleeping in a new place, at different altitude?

<comment><USER54> I would imagine that someone trekking through Nepal has experience with backpacking and finding themselves in a new place in the outdoors. A few people in this thread that have mentioned camping say they sleep better while camping. No idea if thats because they go to the same place to camp every time though.

<comment><USER55> I sleep worse the first night. Then I sleep like a baby the rest of the trip. Because I'm worn out by the end of the day, and a bomb going off wouldn't wake me up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> but what if you have only half a brain to begin with?

</comment><comment><USER57> Other interesting brain tricks, illusions and biases: [https://www.propublica.org/article/how-information- graphics-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-information-graphics- reveal-your-brains-blind-spots)

<comment><USER58> Completely off-topic!

Should be submitted as it's own article.</comment></comment>


Ecuadorean opposition activist email and Facebook hacked by the President - <AUTHOR> http://www.hastingstribune.com/apnewsbreak-email-leak-suggests-ecuador-spied-on-opposition/article_51b2966f-2891-5a62-a975-74773d10eb81.html <comment><AUTHOR> "Ecuadorean opposition activist Dr. Carlos Figueroa was being pursued by the state when his email and Facebook accounts were hacked. Several dozen of his colleagues have similarly had their digital lives violated. All blamed President Rafael Correa's government..."</comment>


Misreading Scoble on Microsoft cry - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2008/02/15/misreading-scoble-on-microsoft-cry/

<comment><USER2> Why does Scoble get time on news.yc? All I ever see him do is shill for large publicly listed companies.

Now they're making him cry?

Scoble is ESR 2.0.

<comment><USER3> ESR? Equivalent Series Resistance? EE here :)</comment></comment>


iPhone is swimming in the Indian Ocean waiting to be rescued - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/f2mo2r/my_brothers_iphone_is_swimming_the_indian_ocean/ <comment><USER2> It's been found by a fisherman (fisherperson?) apparently: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/f2mo2r/my_brothers_iph...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/f2mo2r/my_brothers_iphone_is_swimming_the_indian_ocean/fhew1rw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)</comment>


241543903 is the magic number (amusing Google Search 'hack') - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/images?q=241543903&biw=1082&bih=1077

<comment><USER2> Experiencing a MEME in the making: images of people putting their head in the freezer. 241543903.com</comment>