Reinvented in His 60s, After 26 Jobless Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/29/booming/reinvented-in-his-60s-after-26-jobless-months.html <comment><USER2> I had a friend who committed suicide in his early sixties after three years of not being able to land a decent position. He was amazingly qualified to do a ton of things. Age discrimination was at play here.

He actually went back to school and kept a positive attitude through all of it. He'd come over to my office and we'd have long chats. I'd get him involved in what I was doing and did my best to keep him motivated. I even paid for a two week Solidworks course hoping to help open new doors for him. I would give him access to my machine shop and shoved him into the world of modern mechanical design and manufacturing.

In the end he could not cope with no longer being "useful" and took his own life before finishing the course. I had no idea and saw no sign of what was going on in his mind.

I still can't believe the loss.

<comment><USER3> Ouch. Sorry to hear that.

<comment><USER2> It sucks because he was my mentor as I grew as an engineer. Everywhere I look I find examples of what he taught me. Some of my thinking was molded by him. I have little engineering sayings and rules of thumb I got from him. Another friend of mine is the same. When we get together we invariably go into examples of how last week or last month we did X and it reminded us of him. I guess in a small way that makes him live on in our minds through what we do professionally every day.

<comment><USER4> you may want to read this: [http://www.prb.org/Articles/2006/ElderlyWhiteMenAfflictedbyH...](http://www.prb.org/Articles/2006/ElderlyWhiteMenAfflictedbyHighSuicideRates.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I recently went to a talk given in Seattle given by a person who was on the 2nd place team in the Netflix Prize competition. The talk was amazing, but I also found the speaker quite interesting.

He had graduated from a top school in the 70s. Worked in chemistry throughout the 80s, 90s and early 00s. Then he decided to go back to school and get a CS degree since his field wasn't as promising as it once was.

He decided that the Netflix prize was a great way to test his education in machine learning, and he jumped right in, and ended up working with a great team.

Since ageism is a concern for a lot of people in tech, I was quite happy to see someone thriving, even after such a late career pivot. I'm not sure we can all be as sharp and energetic as this particular person is late in our careers, but it did give me hope that there will still be a place for us when we're 50+ or 60+. Not that anyone reading this isn't 100% sure they'll be retired by 35. :p

<comment><USER6> Ageism, to me, is the ultimate sign that engineers are still a conquered people. See, age is an issue for smooth-talking sales douches, because every career accomplishment in their world gets harshly age-graded, but shouldn't be in ours. Ours should be about substance, not image. If I need to evaluate a cool new technology, do I give a rat's ass if the author was 17 or 73? Of course not. I just care about how the thing works.

<comment><USER7> A few years back I interviewed a mixed race post-operative transsexual for a developer position in our startup. At that point in my life, I had not been exposed to much diversity at all.

The candidate had been referred by a friend of mine who offered the personal bio ahead of time, probably to filter out any polite but intolerant employers. Before the interview started I forcefully reminded myself to keep an open mind and conduct the interview as I would any other.

Half way through the interview it sort of suddenly dawned on me that I really didn't care, at all, about this person's personal orientation, preferences or lifestyle; as long as they could code, I would be happy to have them on board (as a co-worker and friend, as co-workers tend to become in such close quarters). And I felt intuitively confident that my co-founder would feel the same way. A lot of folks probably repeat this sentiment every day, but I wonder in how many industries they really, truly mean it. I think tech is a very special industry in terms of its ability to focus on substance, as you say, over form or perception.

<comment><USER8> This is why we're always adamant that our first interview is a phone screen focused on a few coding problems and discussion about them. Yes, you can still tell some basic things like gender, accent, and so forth, but removing as much of the "first impression" BS that we can is important to us. We save the "culture fit" of the interview process to a later stage, while trying to provide as much transparency about our culture to our candidate as possible. We've ended up hiring some of our best employees that might have not done as well on an in-person interview this way. Yeah, these things shouldn't matter but they tend to. Well done for ignoring the unimportant and focusing on substance!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The biggest issue here in my eyes is 600 submitted resumes and only 3 interviews (2 by phone). Those numbers are astounding, and I'd have to guess that someone with his qualifications must have had some issues to compound any perceived issues with ageism.

Ageism is real, but I don't think we can attribute ageism and the down economy to a .5% response rate to a resume for a well-qualified individual. More likely some other reasons (I wrote about this issue last year here [http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/08/06/why-you-didnt-get- the-...](http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/08/06/why-you-didnt-get-the- interview/)) contributed to the issue.

I'd be curious to see those 600 applications - the jobs, the resume, and whatever other material he sent. I find it hard to believe that his applications themselves wouldn't account for much of the lack of response.

<comment><USER10> I'm also curious what his social network looks like.

Besides all of the other -isms in play, nepotism is really a huge part of getting your foot in the door in most places in this world. And I'm not even talking about "cushy job for the wastrel nephew" nepotism. While I'd like to think that I've gotten every job I've had because I was a competent, useful person, in almost every case I started the interview through someone I knew who worked there. The same goes for most people I know.

Even if you don't get the job based on who you know, just getting the _interview_ based on who you know is a huge, fat advantage, straight-up nepotism. And the great thing about nepotism is that you tend to know people who are like you in one or more ways: same race, same gender, same socio- economic-background, same political views, or in this case, same age. It's all the other -isms wrapped up into one.

<comment><USER9> The more accurate word here is cronyism, indicating a contact and not necessarily a family member, but your point is valid.

<comment><USER11> Or simply networking--if we can get away from the isms. And, yes, for better or worse, knowing people matters. Every job I've had after my first ones out out of degree programs--I did something of a career shift through a grad degree early on--have been the direct result of calling someone I knew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently did some work with a engineer who is 60+ and spends more time studying and keeping himself current than anyone I know.

It was eye-opening to me. Many if not most people I've met at that age willingly admit to having given up on learning new things years if not decades ago.

I was really inspired by this guy and hope to follow a similar path.

<comment><USER13> That's great. In his last lecture, Dr. Bose said that the average timespan of an engineer doing actual engineering was about 7 years because they get promoted and become managers. I hope to avoid this at all costs and keep practicing my craft until I die.

<comment><USER12> I'm with you, but there are a couple of downsides I've observed with staying out of management:

* It can make moving between jobs harder. Career managers are scared to death of people who are more technical than they are and entirely capable of doing their jobs. Nothing can convince them that we don't actually want their jobs. They will see fit to undermine you at every turn.

* Moving permanently into management in ~10 years seems to be such a common career path that it raises questions when someone hasn't done it. "What's wrong with him/her?"

* Many if not most organizations are stuck in a mindset managers must be paid above those they manage. In some places it's hard and fast rule.

On a related note, one of the worst situations I've ever had to deal with was working for a guy who had stopped being anything remotely technical at least half a decade earlier, but refused to acknowledge it. It made for a fullblown career manager who steadfastly believed that he was still the best and brightest engineer in any room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one getting tired of articles behind the NY Times paywall getting submitted to HN?

<comment><USER15> I agree, and I for one would gladly pay $15/month for a way to get around the paywall automatically without having to use incognito mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shouldn't you be financially independent after a lifetime of working at above average professional wages?

<comment><USER17> Expensive habits are easy to acquire and hard to get rid of.

<comment><USER18> Ever been personally sued? Had medical bills beyond health insurance? Had a 401k or maybe a conservative investment go bankrupt?

There are many ways that one can be subjected to harsh financial realities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At age 58, his life expectancy is around 20 years, and he could live 10 years or more beyond that, probably with rising care costs throughout. Once he leaves the workforce, voluntarily or involuntarily, he will be completely dependent on savings, retirement plans, and Social Security to support himself and any dependents. Staying in the workforce delays drawing down his savings, reducing the risk of running out of money at the far end---when he can't do a d-d thing about it. So, yeah, it makes sense that he wants to keep working, independent of whether he "should" be able to stretch his money.

<comment><USER20> I don't understand why so many are criticizing this guy; if he doesn't want to retire _right now_ like it seems, why shouldn't he work for another few years until he's ready? Obviously increasing his savings in the meantime will do him well when he does decide to leave the workforce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I missing the reinvention in this story? Man works for years in the loans business and as a lecturer in business courses to Americans in Maryland. Gets laid off, takes a couple of years but eventually finds a job first in the loans business and then as a lecturer in business courses, but _gasp_ to Americans living _in Germany_!

<comment><USER22> It looks like he went from the VP of a student loan company to a _lowly_ financial adviser at Merrill Lynch. He now teaches business courses in Germany, which he considers as his dream job.

I guess reinvention to you and I are vastly different than to the writer of this article. I, like you, don't see any retraining or new skills being developed to gain the new job. He just used another subset of resume (Phd) to get another job.

If anything, this article is showing how boomers, once making comfy 6-figure salaries, are now getting bumped down on the payscale (sub-6-figures) as time goes on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ageism is not just a problem in engineering, but in almost all technical fields. The problem is, that 20-something kid, you don't judge them by what they can do, you judge them by their growth potential. There is then a natural bias that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" and so we judge older candidates (say "senior") by what they can do, assuming that they are at or have hit their peak. This all flies out the window in management or executive positions, where leadership and bullsh*ting are more sought after.

Even though it isn't fair at all, it makes sense when you think about it. Its something to keep in mind when we are young, to climb the ladder as fast as possible so that we are "immune" later. It is much harder for those of us that don't like management and prefer to be engineers for our careers.

</comment><comment><USER24> What is worth mentioning is that in Europe you don't need a six figure salary to be well-off. In the US you have all sorts of expenses that just don't correlate in most European countries. The main ones being healthcare & education: I had a month of tests resulting in keyhole surgery and this wasn't done on the national health service it was private, the bill was a fraction of what it would have been in the US. The term "Social Security" means different things in different countries.

Now he is in Germany I suspect he will be well looked after and if he chooses to retire there, instead of returning to the US, he will be well looked after. Don't be too surprised at him being happy with a five figure salary instead of his old six figures, money isn't everything.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder why the nytimes would focus on a story like this--the guy should have had _at least_ a quarter million saved up not including retirement funds, and with his severance, he could just coast into retirement.

Sure, some people hate to not work, but that still wouldn't make him a tragic figure.

<comment><USER6> Let's assume he had (to use your number) $250,000 in net worth.

How, pray tell, is he going to retire on $438,000? On top of inflation, you're doing quite well if your portfolio gets 4 to 5%. That means one can safely draw about $20,000 annually from that.

The sad truth of a contracting economy is that most people can afford to retire by the age at which society seems to expect it.

<comment><USER16> 1) $250K is only 1,33 times his last gross salary of $188K so that would make him a dramatic undersaver at this age.

2) Assuming he owned his apartment you can go Mr. Money Mustache on $20K dividends a year. If he owned a house he could downgrade as well.

3) There are people sailing around the world on a budget of $2000 per month. Just dividends from his severance and renting out his house (assuming he owned only that) would get him there.

I can totally understand the shock of seeing reality turn out drastically different than his expectations but once you get near the ~500K net worth figure, it becomes possible to cover necessities indefinitely.

<comment><USER26> "There are people sailing around the world on a budget of $2000 per month"

Those people probably don't have reasonable health insurance.

<comment><USER16> Private health insurance with global ex-US coverage is quite affordable.

$2000 per month puts you well into the upper class in the majority of countries. Those people have good health care, why shouldn't an American who goes to those same places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What I saw, over a few decades in programming is that: Right off you start off with a split between people who love it, and people for whom it is a job. The jobs people seldom transition to loving it. On the other hand, each few years, a few loving-it people peel off to stable niches and quiet work. It's attrition. And so while I decry ageism (and that kids might think me less good than I am) ... prejudices can be somewhat odds based. Few people really keep on loving it and trying machine learning late in life. Perhaps each paradigm shift (I can use that, darn it!) leaves a few behind.

</comment><comment><USER28> While the gap has increased during the recession, the proportion has stayed about the same. Since there would be proportionately fewer jobs, it makes sense that the gap wouldn't stay fixed. While I'm sure ageism is at play, you also have to consider that older people who have specialized are going to be looking at a smaller job pool. Even if they haven't specialized they still can't do hard labor jobs that younger people could do. Also they might have more savings, allowing them to look for more specific jobs that they actually want to do, rather than any job.

</comment><comment><USER29> we just hired a guy in his mid 40s to do sysadmin work. apparently he had been out of work for over a year.

turns out he worked with someone we know 3 jobs ago, completely randomly (didn't find out until the interview). we snapped him up right quick as his salary requirements were relaxed because of his work hiatus. even 10k/year makes a huge difference when you're a small firm. that's $1-2k/month when you factor in payroll tax and healthcare.

would we have hired him if he didn't know that guy? i would be lying if i said i knew for sure. but we have other > 35 year olds on the team, so there's a good chance. but it certainly helped.

either way, great hire so far. certainly increases the chance of us hiring more > 40 folks in the future (all the founders are < 30)

lesson to me is always be on good terms with the poeple you work with, you never know when an old colleague will put in a good word for you in the future, and under what circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER30> How ironic that a VP at a student loan company ends up getting in over his with a student loan.

</comment><comment><USER31> "The only way to succeed is to make people hate you." \--Josef von Sternberg

</comment><comment><USER32> I worked at a major semiconductor company in Silicon Valley for many years. I interviewed thousands of candidates, many of who were older than me.

I noticed that older engineers seemed to bifurcate into two groups: the ones who were curious about everything, and the ones who stayed in their box.

The ones who were curious about everything remained great engineers. They tinkered with new technologies, read books about software project management, wrote cool little programs in unusual languages like Haskell or Scheme, etc. These guys were invariably great engineers, and their experience was just icing on the cake.

The ones who stayed in their niche of writing x86 assembly, COBOL applications for mainframes or writing the same class of network drivers for Linux for fifteen years were usually awful.

I don't doubt that there is actual ageism out there. However, when I did interviews I never cared. However, I also noticed that the "lazy engineers" hadn't really done anything in their career to expand their skill set beyond the minimum their employers required them to do, and I could see why they were not employable. The older "curious, passionate" engineers I hired worked out awesome.</comment>


Every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/radar-theme-web-ops.html <comment><USER2> Every unsupported claim you read makes you 1% dumber.

<comment><USER3> Greg Linden used to work at Amazon. From an older blog post of his:

"In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue."

[http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at- web-20....](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html)

<comment><USER4> Have they tried speeding it up 100ms to see if they gain revenue? I can't believe such a minuscule change has such a huge effect, that's astounding

<comment><USER5> Disclosure: I used to work at amazon.

I find it immaterial considering the easier thing to speed up is the number of HTTP requests on the site, and that has clearly gotten worse over the years, not better. I pushed heavily to get HTML cleaned up and valid (showing an easy 10-20% reduction with HTML alone), reduce the amount of javascript, etc. It simply wasn't a priority. To be fair, at the time I was there the priority was to grow as fast as possible and deal with profits later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's kind of ironic then how slow Radar is.

Seriously though, site responsiveness is important. If you haven't seen it YSlow is pretty awesome (<http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/>).

</comment><comment><USER7> The source slide actually says "+100 ms -1% sales". A 1% drop in sales would likely cost even more in profits, given fixed costs.

In either formulation, it's within the range of plausibility.

In my experience, a single change that makes a web server faster causes a slow, steady increase in traffic over the next few days/weeks, as the audience reacts to the new responsiveness.

Note also that Google considers page load latency in scoring ad relevance, and almost certainly natural search result ranking as well. So everything improves with speed.

</comment><comment><USER8> If I've decided to purchase something from Amazon.com, I doubt an eye-blink's worth of waiting will change my mind.

<comment><USER9> You are probably correct, but if you haven't decided then it probably does.

Just to be pedantic an eye blink takes 300 to 400 ms. Amazon's claim is that delays 3 to 4 times less than an eye blink are annoying to people.

Mean reaction time for a human is around 200 ms for a visual stimulus so Amazon is talking about faster than normal reaction time as well.

Frame rate in video games is between 30 and 60 frames per second or one frame every 16 to 33 ms. Cinema is 24 fps or one frame every 40 ms.

So it would appear that Amazon is saying that a delay that a human can perceive is troubling and results in lost sales.

<comment><USER10> I doubt the dropoff curve is linear. It's probably negligible up to a small threshold (500 ms?) with exponential decay in the tail. I'm willing to believe that a 1-second delay is a 10% hit, though I wonder how that would be measured, but this doesn't necessarily entail that 100ms costs 1%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Empirical evidence?

</comment><comment><USER12> "The techniques of web ops are being hoarded by some companies"

Are these techniques patented? Otherwise how does one "hoard" a technique?

<comment><USER13> Perhaps through the use of trade secrets.</comment></comment>


Design and Research - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/desres.html <comment><USER2> Pointed to by "The Hundred-Year Language:" <http://www.paulgraham.com/hundred.html>

and points to "Taste for Makers:" <http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html>

See also <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811518></comment>


Does Google Know Too Much About You? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/168224/ <comment> onreact-com Yes, it does. Either we implement control over this global information monopoly or one day we'll wake up in a nightmare society. The Google China censorship is just the beginning.</comment>


IPhone 3GS Loses to Baby 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/297695_10150867282195013_770940012_20912879_1601234133_n.jpg Sorry gang, don't normally post this stuff, but my iPhone 3GS sacrificed itself after a long life to get this shot, and I've never seen this message come up except when I plug my phone into a newer accessory that the phone can't fully take advantage of. View the photo in full resolution to see what I mean. The mom (wife to one of my best friends) took the shot on her iPhone4 after dinner tonight.<p>I swear, I'm not just creating an excuse to upgrade to the 4GS... <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry gang, might be grossly off-topic, but couldn't help myself. Took this after dinner tonight at a life-long friend's. His wife snapped it on her iPhone4. Unfortunately, my iPhone 3GS doesn't look like it will make it. A worthy sacrifice.

I swear I'm not just looking for an excuse to upgrade to the 4S...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FYI, enlarge and view message.</comment>


Cardnap: The Hipmunk of Gift Cards Wants To Make Card Search A Breeze - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/18/cardnap-the-hipmunk-of-gift-cards-wants-to-make-card-search-a-breeze/ <comment><AUTHOR> So we launched Cardnap a week ago to the day. We've seen a LifeHacker article, and a TheNextWeb article. This post marks our official 'hard' launch.

We're now profitable, and have started integrating all of our 'Review our Startup' feedback! Things are going great :-)</comment>


3 Easy Loopholes for Everyday Life - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fetchnotes.com/post/52379039839/3-easy-loopholes-for-everyday-living

<comment><USER2> > I have confirmed reports that Southwest and United have checked names.

First class on Southwest?

</comment><comment><USER3> Did this person just confess to theft of services in a blog article?

<comment><USER4> Would it be considered theft of services?

<comment><USER3> He didn't pay for first-class service and yet obtained it. The times he was found-out, he covered his tracks by lying. Seems pretty clear to me it's theft of services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't the airlines check?</comment>


Why don't women get drag-and-drop? - <AUTHOR> http://sb1.tumblr.com/post/7281321982/women-drag-and-drop <comment><USER2> A week ago, I implemented drag&drop for an iPad app. I explicitly made it _not_ depend on the finger position, but the center of the dragged object, giving a much better experience.

This advantage might be specific to touch interfaces where your fingers obscure whatever you touch.

</comment><comment><USER3> what's the over under on this being cited in a lack-of-women-in-tech article in the next two weeks?</comment>


The MealPal scheme is no free lunch - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/hngry/the-mealpal-scheme-is-no-free-lunch-c0ef41c4ce3d <comment><USER2> Sounds like Classpass but the big difference is with Classpass there's no real variable cost per new person added, you're basically just capitalizing on excess space that would have gone unused. With food, most of the cost is variable, each new $6.99 lunch sold costs the restaurant real money. How is this sustainable?</comment>


Weight Loss and Handstands: The Story of James Golick's Physical Metamorphosis - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@prlambert/weight-loss-and-handstands-70c78cb2d3bf

<comment><USER2> It's always especially sad to hear about someone passing away who's left such a strong impression on the people around them. I was/am a religious person, but whether I think about it from a religious or secular sense, there's just not much comfort other than to acknowledge that the one truth in life is that we've all got to go at some point, and try to live for the best in the face of that fact.

I totally agree that weightloss is more mental than physical. I've struggled with mild to moderate obesity for most of my life. I'm 6'0" and I've weighed up to 250lbs at my heaviest, down to about 170lbs at my lightest. The first half of my twenties were pretty much the only time in my life I've been at a normal BMI.

The times in my life when I've been able to control my weight have taken complete self-control and continuous denial of my urge to indulge. For me there's very little I enjoy as much as a rich meal, even if I feel like crap afterward. By contrast, the constant feeling of wellness that comes with being trim just doesn't seem to measure up.</comment>


The Amish Effect - <AUTHOR> http://lancasteronline.com/business/local_business/the-amish-effect-unique-cultural-strengths-help-plain-sect-businesses/article_ba60c8e4-e6dc-11e5-9cc7-73775e680585.html <comment><USER2> This article is interesting, but it perpetuates a generally positive impression of Amish life.

It's important to know that the Amish community is extremely conservative. In general, it does not have the protections that most Americans have put in place for their children (working conditions, etc.). Women in general are also very poorly treated, and lack many of the rights that we as Americans believe they should enjoy (like being equal to their male counterparts).

The response by the community to anyone who disagrees is expulsion.

[http://fourhourworkweek.com/2008/07/15/escaping-the-amish- pa...](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2008/07/15/escaping-the-amish-part-1/) [http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/3348](http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/3348)

<comment><USER3> I live in the area where this article covers, though not Amish nor related to Amish.

First of all, no one is expelled for disagreeing. And Amish regularly leave with no issues nor problems, making that decision before adult baptism. We know lots of people who do that. They still happily and friendly live next to and interact with Amish.

The problem (shunning) tends to come if Amish leave after baptism but I have yet to hear anyone expelled for disagreeing on issues.

As for children working condition protection, what do you think Amish children / teenagers do? They primarily do lots of household chores, certainly more than regular American kids but they do it with their parents and their siblings. Amish are not focused on making lots of money and they tend to do things at home so it's far unlike factory farms or third world factories one might imagine.

As for woman being poorly treated, it's quite rare for anyone, man or woman, to be poorly treated, attacked, demeaned, etc. among the Lancaster Amish from what I have seen and heard. I think what you are getting at its restriction of typical American freedoms. But the same goes for Amish men. Going out for beers with your buddies, getting a girlfriend on the side, building a corporate career, doing a YC tech startup, hanging out on a boat / yachet, etc. are all no goes for men. It's certainly not for everyone.

I would encourage you to check it out, it's less than 3 hours away from NYC and it's quite an experience. You might be surprised about how happy and fulfilled the Amish in Lancaster are.

Net/net, the article perpetuates a generally positive impression of Amish life because Amish in Lancaster generally have a positive / fulfilling life.

<comment><USER2> I grew up near Lancaster, got my first drivers license there. I am Pennsylvania Dutch, so am related to them. My parents now live in Chautauqua, NY. I often go to the Amish to purchase leather, quilts, and food. I don't think they are evil, and I don't think that people (women) are necessarily unhappy in that community.

Lancaster is practically cosmopolitan compared to the Amish of Ohio and Western NY. So they are less restrictive than Amish of other areas. In general they have always been kind people in all of my interactions.

That being said, I do think that children have a false choice when they are offered to go live in the outside community. They have an 8th grade education. They might be able to get very manual labor jobs, but are most likely incapable of getting a college degree, without a lot of support. And chores are one thing, but when we talk about a lot of the other work on a farm we aren't looking at just cleaning up your room. Focusing on children alone, I think that community is one which does not even give their children an option of existing in the real world, without a ton of struggle.

<comment><USER4> >> but are most likely incapable of getting a college degree, without a lot of support

You could say the same of trailer park kids.

I wouldn't expect Amish adults to know how to live in a non-Amish way, how do you expect them to teach that to their children?

If they had all the things you expect people to have, they wouldn't be called Amish, they'd be your neighbours.

You talk with judgement if Amish life is a _negative_ thing. It's how some people live. Let's not dislodge them from it.

How would you like to be told your way of life is enabled by a government that plunders resources overseas, in a nation that was built on the back of slavery and robbing of natives? Not very nice, is it? It's how you live and you like to live how you like to live. Same with the Amish.

<comment><USER5> >> but are most likely incapable of getting a college degree, without a lot of support

> You could say the same of trailer park kids.

Yes, but you would have a hard time finding an article fetishizing the idyllic, back-to-basics, cultural lifestyle of trailer parks. People generally recognize those conditions are crappy.

> You talk with judgement if Amish life is a negative thing. It's how some > people live. Let's not dislodge them from it.

It is a negative thing. Yes, I'm sure some Amish are happy, and that's fine for them. But those who aren't, don't have a real choice to leave.

> How would you like to be told your way of life is enabled by a government > that plunders resources overseas, in a nation that was built on the back of > slavery and robbing of natives? Not very nice, is it? It's how you live and > you like to live how you like to live.

I am working to change my government, and if I were capable I'd work to change the Amish community. Injustice perpetrated by my government doesn't make injustice perpetrated by the Amish community okay.

<comment><USER4> >> I am working to change my government

That's fine for you. But other people trying to change your way of life, they are called extremists.

Trying to change how other people live will only cause suffering. Look at the millions of displaced in Iraq, Syria, Libya, where the West attempted regime change because of injustice (as they claim).

Injustice perpetrated by the Amish community should be left up to members of Amish community to change.

<comment><USER5> The Amish have a tradition called Rumspringa where teens are given a year of freedom to do anything they want after which they can choose to come back and be Amish or go their own way. Basically, a bunch of kids are sent off into the world with no sex education and told to do whatever they want. Obviously a lot of them come back pregnant or with STDs or drug habits. And with little education and no resources outside the Amish, the choice isn't real; there's no way for them to realistically choose to leave the Amish community. And if somehow they do manage to get enough resources to leave, they can look forward to being ostracized by their friends and family.

Saying that is bad doesn't mean I'm an extremist.

I'm not suggesting we go into Amish communities and overthrow their leaders. I'm just saying I don't think we should fetishize or support their way of life, which is harmful to many who live in it, and we should provide support for people seeking to leave the Amish community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had the opportunity to visit a few Amish farms in central Missouri last fall. We enjoyed being able to buy farm fresh meat (some still twitching!), eggs, and such, and from what I saw and what I've heard from others' experiences, the Amish are honest, hardy, and hardworking. Their buggies shared the road with their neighbors' cars, and I was surprised to see obviously non-Amish homes in the area.

Also, I've seen Amish craftsmanship of barns and lofts and things on occasion, and have been impressed, and clients I've talked to had nothing but good to say about their carpentry work.

<comment><USER7> I grew up near Amish country in central Missouri. My parents still live there. I have always been fascinated with the Amish: their way of life, religious/social/cultural/legal beliefs, their form of community governance, their historical relationship with the US government, and more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After most furniture manufacturing moved overseas, it was impossible to find reasonably priced quality furniture for a while. I found an Amish furniture maker near Bird In Hand who filled that need for us.

The guy had no electricity, but did have a small PDA with a solar charger - many years before that became common and PDAs morphed into phones. He ran his whole business off of that, and what was in his head.

<comment><USER9> My roofer (in Lancaster County, PA) is an Amish man who owns a cell phone. He doesn't keep it with him, mind you, he just listens to his voice mail once an evening and returns the calls made. The next day he and his partners get driven around by a non-Amish to each job site of the day.

To use a stereotype in a positive fashion, he, like most Amish and conservative Mennonites I've dealt with, takes a lot of pride in his work and charges very little relative to other businesses.

<comment><USER10> Years ago I worked for a company that supplied medical supplies (bottles and jars etc) to other companies, the company was owned by a religious group who eschewed the use of technology much like the Amish, they ran the entire company on paper using old style ledgers.

When they needed to send a fax they'd nip over to the (ironically) software company/IT services company next door (a deal that was struck with the judicious application of baked goods).

They where nice people to work for but it seemed very strange to running a warehouse on paper in the late 90's.

<comment><USER11> Was that the Exclusive Brethren?

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

<comment><USER10> Could be, Plymouth rings a bell.

Awesome people, bit of a strange worldview but friendly to a young kid working agency shifts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The comments here have a number of various negative stereotypes of the Amish. These are probably all based on factual events, but I doubt they are as negative as we perceive.

Do a thought exercise and reverse roles. Imagine you live in a highly conservative rural community and you wanted to make a negative documentary about the modern american lifestyle. There would be no shortage of truthful material to make us seem totally depraved.

Often I find my Amish neighbors are more accepting of us and our strange lifestyle and we are of theirs.

<comment><USER13> Whenever we see religious communities providing their own "courts" and "punishment" of child abusers we see those children continuing to be abused and the abusers continuing the abuse, often with different children.

This has happened across religions and across countries.

There have been significant problems with the Catholic church (because they're so large) either ignoring the abuse coming from nuns, or thinking that telling a priest to stop and moving him to a different town would help. That caused _significant_ levels of harm to the survivors, and to the rest of society (in paying the costs associated with completed and attempted suicide, with drug and alcohol addiction, with mental health treatment, with reduced economic activity).

It's not just Christianity though. The Beth Din courts used by some Jewish people and the sharia courts used by some Muslim people have often told abuse survivors not to go to the police to report abuse. That covers child sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, but it also covers domestic abuse and domestic violence.

Here's one UK tv programme about rabbis: [http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/rabbi-urges- alleged-...](http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/rabbi-urges-alleged- child-abuse-victim-not-to-tell-police)

So, while we don't know if abuse is worse in these communities we do know that the reaction to abuse is often totally inadequate.

As a general principle any organisation that has any contact with children needs to have in place robust child safeguarding processes.

It's a bit disturbing to see how weak this concept is in the US (and how it's sometimes really poorly done (eg lengthy interventions for people who allow their children to walk home from school)).

For tech companies: What do you do if a 14 year old discloses on your service that they're being abused at home? What if they say they're 11 and disclose they're being abused at home? What if an adult discloses that they're abusing their child? It might not be your role to report these to the relevant authorities (do you even know who those are) but you might want to have a single simple page on your website that describes your company's processes and requirements for interacting with law enforcement. (Something like "We don't cooperate with law enforcement under any circumstances. You'll need to take us through court" or "if you're the correct law enforcement agency and send us validly formed legal documents to firstname.lastname@example.com we can release this {list} information".) Users of your site who see the disclosures can then include your requirements in their reports to law enforcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I grew up near an Amish community in Chautauqua County, NY. My parents had a barn built by Amish.

I hadn't thought much about the Amish in many years until I spent significant time in Chautauqua this year. I was surprised. Much of the land that had been abandoned as worthless, has been bought by the Amish and made productive again.

<comment><USER15> Does it look like it is portrayed in the media, or they modernized a bit?

<comment><USER14> I don't know how it is portrayed in the media, but I will say it is a pretty simple lifestyle in Chautauqua. It is not uncommon to see horse and buggy on the back roads. Modern amenities are definitely limited. There are exceptions, and I'm not sure how they are made, but overall it truly is a time warp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 11\. For many Americans, the term "Amish" has strong positive associations: > honesty, simplicity, old-fashioned virtue.

I'm surprised by this. I associate "Amish" with inbred luddites who abuse their children. I'm not saying "inbred" as a cheap insult. From the Wikipedia article on the Amish:

> Since almost all Amish descend from about 200 18th-century founders, genetic > disorders that come out due to inbreeding exist in more isolated districts > (an example of the founder effect). Some of these disorders are quite rare, > or unique, and are serious enough to increase the mortality rate among Amish > children. The Amish are aware of the advantages of exogamy, but for > religious reasons only marry within their communities. The majority of Amish > accept these as "Gottes Wille" (God's will); they reject use of preventive > genetic tests prior to marriage and genetic testing of unborn children to > discover genetic disorders.

Also, the very last point:

> 12\. Amish employees in Amish businesses are exempt from mainstream > companies' Social Security, health insurance and pension mandates. Though > that keeps costs down, the impact is often exaggerated, Amish business > owners say.

Talk about burying the lede! I had no idea Amish businesses had such huge tax breaks.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Health](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish#Health)

<comment><USER17> Three claims, let's evaluate:

"inbred" seems to have a factual basis, that's fair.

"luddite" in this context is an unnecessarily loaded term that suggests an ignorance of history. (I.E., the luddites [1] were not simplistically anti- technology, they were anti-"the crown suddenly taking away the common land and giving it to rich capitalists to enrich themselves with industry while displacing us as laborers, and then blaming us for being against progress", ie, "Enclosure.') [2]

"abuse their children" requires proof. Is there evidence the amish abuse their children at a rate higher than the rest of society, and/or other cultural enclaves such as tight-nit immigrant groups?

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future- Industrial/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Rebels-Against-The-Future- Industrial/dp/0201407183) [2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure)

<comment><USER16> "Luddite" is one of those words like "gay": it has a very different primary meaning today than it used to. I'm aware of both meanings and I used "luddite" in the common, modern sense of being anti-technology.

> Is there evidence the amish abuse their children at a rate higher than the > rest of society…

Where to start? The Amish stance on corporal punishment of children is well- known. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" (as Proverbs 13:24 is commonly misquoted) applies. Hitting children is common in Amish households and schools. Sources on this range from atheist neighbors[1], to friends of the Amish[2], to books that praise the Amish[3]. And speaking of Amish schools: They end at the 8th grade. People like to think that Amish teenagers have a choice about leaving the community, but what choice do they have when their prospects in modern life are so limited by their lack of education?

To frame it more concretely: If you had a neighbor who denied their children cold drinks or air conditioning on hot days, who hit them for questioning religion, and who took them out of high school so they could do work, is there any doubt that you would call child protective services? It flabbergasts me that the Amish get a pass here.

> …and/or other cultural enclaves such as tight-nit immigrant groups?

This is moving the goalposts. It doesn't matter whether other groups _also_ abuse their children. "But FLDS groups abuse their kids too!" is not an excuse that our society tolerates. In fact, with the FLDS, we sent in SWAT teams and arrested the church leaders. Sadly, the Amish seem to be grandfathered in.

The child abuse is the issue that gets the biggest rise out of me, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other ways in which the Amish needlessly inflict suffering on each other. Due to their piety, Amish positions on topics such as birth control, homosexuality, and the rights of women shouldn't surprise you.

1\. [http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/09/wha...](http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2012/09/what- amish-life-is-really-like-by-an-eyewitness/)

2\. [http://amishamerica.com/how-do-amish-discipline- children/](http://amishamerica.com/how-do-amish-discipline-children/)

3\. _Amish Roots: A Treasury of History, Wisdom, and Lore_ p. 111, section titled "Disobedient Children"

<comment><USER3> "The Amish stance on corporal punishment of children is well-known"

I live in the Amish community referenced in this article and I have never seen nor heard of any corporal punishment nor child abuse. Indeed, I have never heard any Amish person even yell, scold or argue with anyone. Because of that, I am pretty sure such issues are rare in this area.

"People like to think that Amish teenagers have a choice about leaving the community, but what choice do they have when their prospects in modern life are so limited by their lack of education?"

Most Americans, Amish or not, do not become software developers, bankers, accountants, etc. Lots of Amish leave. For example, two doors down from my house there is an elderly Amish couple. All of their children are non-Amish but still support, visit, help, interact with their parents. Not surprisingly, most ex-Amish do not pursue fields requiring advanced education but tend to do very well in more blue core businesses where their work ethic, integrity and significant youth experience working at home can be turned into a solid career.

<comment><USER18> _I live in the Amish community referenced in this article and I have never seen nor heard of any corporal punishment nor child abuse. Indeed, I have never heard any Amish person even yell, scold or argue with anyone. Because of that, I am pretty sure such issues are rare in this area._

Are you part of the community, or just live in the area? Because if the latter, it's hardly surprising; socially conservative people rarely handle their family matters in public.

<comment><USER3> Our neighbors are Amish and Mennonite. We know and interact with many of them including people who left being Amish. And even the ones who left and have issues with the Amish, I have never heard or seen any incidents of child abuse.

Do you have some evidence of systematic Amish child abuse beyond your stereotype of "socially conservative people rarely handle their family matters in public"?

Child abuse exists in the world, among tech founders, politicians, Amish, atheists, etc. I am simply saying, based on direct interaction and knowledge that it is most certainly uncommon in Lancaster Amish.

<comment><USER18> The person you originally replied to did cite some evidence of Amish child abuse beyond the stereotype.

<comment><USER3> The evidence provided was

\- an anecdote from a "very rural part of Ohio" where the Amish "lived in grinding poverty". I have no experience with Ohio Amish so I cannot comment but what they describe is nothing like Lancaster Amish (the article referenced here and my comments on). \- an entry from Amish America talks about spankings, which is a practice statistics show most American parents do [https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+americans+spank+c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=percentage+americans+spank+child&oq=percentage+americans+spank+child) From what I have seen of the Amish, I think it is significantly less than the average American.

If you think it is child abuse to not let your children go to high school or to deprive them of the 'real' world, that is a different story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Amish population is increasing rapidly: [https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/statistics/amish- popul...](https://groups.etown.edu/amishstudies/statistics/amish-population- profile-2015/)

Kevin Kelly has written about the Amish: [http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish- hackers-a/](http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/)

</comment><comment><USER20> I suppose this is slightly OT, but wrt to the Amish apprenticeship , I have started teaching my 15yo nephew programming and, as of late, I have been thinking about ways to get him to do a couple of months of apprenticeship with me. Right now, I can tell he's struggling even with pretty basic notions. I think it is partially due to him not being proficient enough in english (he speaks and writes norwegian, french and spanish fluently tho so I don't blame him), so googling around and finding answers seems hard for him. I dont live in the same country as him so I don't really know where it stops clicking for him (and he doesn't have a lot of 'screen time' to do research because of his parents, which is a good thing I suppose, but not for teaching him programming). Also he's more of an entrepreneur type than a hacker type so his patience gets in the way for him to deep dive: he just wants to see his project happen, he doesn't really care how (I suppose that's normal for a 15yo though). Therefore, getting him to read a book, or doing some structured course is not going to fly (I think). Also I am pretty strict trying to teach him the "'real'" ''"basics"'': in JavaScripts example functions, scoping, events, the DOM, - not just how to glue together stuff. He's the one that asked me to help him out though, and he also said he wanted to really understand it (which is why I am trying to be strict) so there's innate motivation driving him. He asked me how to do a autocomplete (a list that pops up under an input box), so that's what we're building. (Tips are welcome by the way :)

To get back on the topic: writing this got me thinking that, maybe in a 100 years from now, the Amish will be the turn-to lisp/fortran/c/cobol? consultants :)

EDIT: typos

</comment><comment><USER21> What a weird paradox [http://imgur.com/fYi3aj9](http://imgur.com/fYi3aj9)

</comment><comment><USER22> There is nothing wrong with a high failure rate, especially if you eventually succeed. On the other hand many Amish businesses don't scale, or provide littler inactivation - and certainly not technological innovation. The real Gleason is that they prefer self-employment.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's something else to see your little hometown newspaper on the front of HN.

</comment><comment><USER24> Don't forget about Rumspringa.

> A popular view exists by which the period is institutionalized as a rite of > passage, and the usual behavioral restrictions are relaxed, so that Amish > youth can acquire some experience and knowledge of the non-Amish world.

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

"Devil's Playground" [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293088/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293088/)

<comment><USER25> Which just serves to show them how bad the world is and give them a false sense of decision. Taking a sheltered kid and having them go wild is hardly a way to get a good view of things. And if they do get a good view and decide to enjoy the world, then everyone they know shuns them. It's quite deceptive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting. It's a good thing that the United States are home to communities that seem to others to be out-of-time. Modern culture seems to be so quickly mingling all concepts that it's refreshing to see people who are mostly untouched by that and live just what they think makes them happy without the constant competition to be more "modern" all the time.

Their business seems to be less fragile towards outside influence and fashionable ideas which turn out to be nonsense half a year later. Ironically, they seem to benefit from the growing demand for niche and regional products outside their world.

Having said that, hope that Amish doesn't become the new Hipster lifestyle for the next 1-2 years now :D

</comment><comment><USER27> > offers online ordering on a modern, well-designed website.

Excuse my ignorance, but doesn't this violate the ban on modern technology?

<comment><USER17> No problem, this is a common misconception with the Amish. The Amish are not categorically anti-technology. They didn't randomly put a stake in the ground and say "no new tech after 1743!" or whatever.

Instead, they evaluate every single piece of technology before deciding to use it, to see if it will disrupt their culture and way of life. For instance, many Amish communities decided the utility of telephones was a good thing when they were first invented. Then they found that they encouraged gossip and other things they saw as culturally negative. So many Amish communities instituted a communal phone booth in the center of the village -- if you need the utility of a phone call, you have it, but without the personal temptation that comes with a personal phone.

Also there are many variants of the Amish, especially if you include the broader Anabaptist and Mennonite communities, each with their own rules.

For instance did you know some Amish communities allowed personal automobile ownership? They are not around any more because personal automobiles made it very easy for them to disburse and their communities died.

You could say that the Amish culture that survives to this day in a recognizably Amish form has been shaped by natural selection of a sort -- a test of whether the techs they choose perpetuate their community, or lead to assimilation.

(I don't have the specific citations for all this on me at the moment, but it's from what I've read in many articles and books about the Amish I've read over the years)

<comment><USER28> > disburse

disperse

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure if this commercial is insulting or flattering to the Amish, but it is funny: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2fkXt__lck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2fkXt__lck)

</comment><comment><USER30> I had a nice chat with a friend who provides services for the Amish community in northern Indiana. I didn't know much about the Amish community outside of "they're the ones who don't drive cars" and the Amish turkeys my mom purchased for Thanksgiving (US).

I learned a few things that surprised me enough that I ended up Googling for proof:

\- Some Amish communities allow electricity (limited, off-grid)[1]. What is allowed and isn't allowed can vary quite a bit, but only the teenagers can own cars[2].

\- Amish throw the craziest parties; drugs, booze, you-name-it[2]. See "Devil's Playground (2002)", much of it shot in the community that my friend served.

\- If your view of "eating healthy" rejects conventional pesticides, Amish != Organic. My friend, who previous ran an organic farm, said that the community she worked with was _obsessed_ with yields and used an appalling amount of chemical pesticides and fertilizers[3]. In that community, there were no organic farms (though they exist). Every conventional practice that didn't break community rules was used, including with meat products, resulting in the worst of centuries old farming practices mixed with modern chemistry. GMOs are also allowed if that's something that concerns you.[4]

\- Amish share some practices with Christianity, such as sex before marriage being forbidden, but some Amish communities encourage "Bed Courtship" (Bed Date or "Bundling"), where as part of courtship, two people share a bed ("Bundling" because they're bundled separately so they can become closer by ... _talking_ ). If my conservative parents had caught me sharing a bed with someone I was dating ... I don't even know what they would have done.[5]

My favorite part was the description of Amish kitchen cupboards: Filled to the teeth with Velveeta and gelatin[6] and they use it everywhere.

[1] [http://www.discoverlancaster.com/towns-and-heritage/amish- co...](http://www.discoverlancaster.com/towns-and-heritage/amish- country/amishandtechnology.asp)

[2] And many own really nice ones ... during Rumspringa. My friend's children were not allowed to hang out with Amish teenagers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumspringa)

[3] [http://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use- pesticides/](http://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-pesticides/) [http://modernfarmer.com/2014/11/amish-mennonite-farmers- poll...](http://modernfarmer.com/2014/11/amish-mennonite-farmers-polluting- lancaster-county/)

[4] [http://www.biofortified.org/2013/10/amish- gmos/](http://www.biofortified.org/2013/10/amish-gmos/)

[5] Here's an article explaining "why" it's allowed: [http://www.sacred- texts.com/ame/amish/am07.htm](http://www.sacred-texts.com/ame/amish/am07.htm)

[6] I had heard of the gelatin thing, but not about Velveeta. Hearing descriptions about some of the meals made me ill. The attraction to Velveeta is shelf-stability. [http://www.amishreader.com/2015/03/12/the-truth-about- authen...](http://www.amishreader.com/2015/03/12/the-truth-about-authentic- homemade-macaroni-and-cheese-recipe/)

<comment><USER31> > Amish share some practices with Christianity

Not surprising since they are Christians.</comment></comment>


Getting Reid Hoffman wrong (& right) - <AUTHOR> http://copy-cat.co/blog/getting-reid-hoffman-wrong-and-right/

<comment><USER2> I'm building an app that is jurisdictionaly based and thus my first potential market will only be about 50 people within civil engineering in my region. I'm a little nervous about taking this advice since if I lose a few prospective customers because of an embarrassing release, I very well may lose them for good with no one to replace them.

Any thoughts?

<comment><USER2> Many thanks antidoh, Momoko11 and MrMcDowall.

<comment><USER3> No prob :) And good luck!</comment></comment></comment>


Startups in india to start as a freshers - <AUTHOR>

Hii i am just graduated from the university and placed in TCS . Is it good to do a job with this service based mnc or should i try for any other startups?
 tell me the startups to start my career as i am good in coding and also want to learn something productive. <comment><USER2> TCS is not selling software to customers. TCS is making money by selling "wage slaves" to US/EU clients.</comment>


Nsa.gov is down - <AUTHOR> http://nsa.gov/ <comment><USER2> I don't mean to be inflammatory but what's the purpose of HN postings regarding sites being down?

I've never actually been to nsa.gov and would have never known it was down. I'm sure most of the readers are in the same boat.

Even if I did access the site on a regular basis, I'd realize it was down and come back later when it might be back up.

Sometimes my favorite coffee shop is closed. I don't walk around the neighborhood carrying a poster stating that fact.

I've just never understood the purpose of these postings. "facebook" is down, "netflix" is down, etc. It doesn't actually accomplish anything.

<comment><USER3> Well for the NSA it could be related to the most recent news (maybe its a DDOS by the Germans?!), thus its 'breaking news' about a hot story a lot of HN readers are interested in.

For the other sites, its very rare they go down and its the best and brightest working to keep them up so if they went down the reason why is probably something that would interest the whole community.

<comment><USER2> "maybe its a DDOS by the Germans?!"

That would be newsworthy however no evidence of this was presented. It was simply "this thing is down now".

If a large site goes down, I would like to know what happened. I'd be interested to learn from the mistakes of others.

This isn't the case with this posting or others like it.

Posts of this ilk rarely have any more information than I could have received from a curl command.

<comment><USER3> I get your point but perhaps theres a sys admin monitoring a DNS server somewhere and realizes theres a bunch of unusual traffic then on his break he checks HN and realizes the NSA site is down, he then does a little investigation and wolla he connects the dots and has something he can teach the rest of us. It's collective intelligence if you will :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mandatory relevant XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/932/](http://xkcd.com/932/)

<comment><USER5> I never understood that comic. You would think preventing traffic reaching a website would be harder than tearing down a poster.

edit: Wrong direction.

<comment><USER6> Hacking the NSA website is not hacking the NSA. Hacking a website is relatively easy and not that interesting to people who deal with servers day- to-day.

<comment><USER5> Right, see. When you say "Relatively easy" do you mean: "it is just subtly easier that compromising the NSA itself" or: "I'm surprised it doesn't happen every day"

because I think you meant the former.

<comment><USER7> I suspect the difference between hacking the NSA website and hacking the NSA's central computer system is more than subtle

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh, i just meet you, and this is crazy, but here is [http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&...](http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&time=16003&view=map) so DoS maybe ?

</comment><comment><USER9> It sure is. It's been down for hours.

        http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/nsa.gov.html

Funny thing is, outages for GitHub and its ilk hit HN in minutes. Either way, the transparency in the post-mortem is more valuable and telling than the outage. Organizations need to prove themselves with transparency to build and earn trust.

Yet, one of these things is not like the other.

<comment><USER10> The public nsa.gov site is just another government website. It's not like they're running it out of one of their secret data centers.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I commented on the organization. One expects the NSA to provide a sub- par post-mortem.

a) it is the NSA and

b) it is a "marketing" website

I'm not sure what utility www.nsa.gov provides beyond a mission statement. Never was curious before, now I am. :)

\--

edit: clarity

<comment><USER11> [http://web.archive.org/web/20131012024556/http://www.nsa.gov...](http://web.archive.org/web/20131012024556/http://www.nsa.gov/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's www.NSA.gov NOT NSA.gov.

www.NSA.gov IS up, at least for me.

Edit: I just talked with my American friend and it apparently really is down for them. It works for me up in Canada, though, at 126.96.36.199.

<comment><USER13> and I get this:

Invalid URL The requested URL "/", is invalid.

Reference #9.c0b31bb8.1382761672.701091f

<comment><USER12> Yeah, you have to have 'Host: www.nsa.gov' in your request.

$ telnet 220.127.116.11 80

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.nsa.gov

[press Enter twice]

Or you can add www.nsa.gov with that IP to your hosts file, if you reallllly need access to it.

<comment><USER13> right www.nsa.gov is up, but nsa.gov is not.

How is that even possible? Shouldn't browser fill in www anyway?

<comment><USER14> nsa.gov and www.nsa.gov are two different hosts as far as DNS is concerned. They can and often do point to different places. This is a good example. www.nsa.gov is an alias to Akamai (a large CDN), and nsa.gov points directly to an NSA owned machine (because for technical reasons you can't have an alias or CNAME at the zone apex), people usually configure these machines to redirect to the www hostname.

Browsers should never "fill in" www, because as I pointed out, www might be a completely different host or service.

<comment><USER13> This is nice to know (and to everyone who have answered me so far), thanks!

I always think www.domain.com resolves to one of the ips and domain.com should too. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For some reason more people than normal have been hitting my redirect in the last couple days. [http://stats.itanimulli.com](http://stats.itanimulli.com) I dont think 20k could bring down the nsa, but its still strange.

</comment><comment><USER16> Their apex has been up and down since the stories broke.

<comment><USER17> Yep. I noticed the domain going flaky in August ([http://aspensmonster.com/2013/08/23/nsa-gov-is-down- friday-a...](http://aspensmonster.com/2013/08/23/nsa-gov-is-down-friday- august-23-2013-0330-cst-0930-gmt/)). That time, it looked like the Akamai Edge network ended up serving it for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe it's for temporary maintenance as they ready the public for exciting and scandalous new wiretapping targets.

</comment><comment><USER19> Word on the street is that it's supposed to be back up and working smoothly by late November.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's back up.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hooray?

</comment><comment><USER22> it's a decoy.

or it might be a decoy decoy... =)</comment>


The internet is increasingly a low-trust society - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/internet-made-dupes-cynics-of-us-all/ <comment><USER2> If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly:

Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale well. The exploiter can skate on anonymity if the community is large enough to continually prey on someone new. Spreading news of an exploiter's behavior to others can greatly improve how well this scales, but this behavior also requires trust.

I think the more direct problem is with scale, and that the internet is at the nexus of many trust issues only because it has ramped up the scale and scope of many interactions.

I'm not super optimistic on solving this intrinsic problem of trust in social exchanges, but I do see this framing as a silver lining. It seems at least plausible to iterate offline at significantly smaller scales on mechanisms for building and maintaining trust--and rectifying its breaches--in ways that do actually scale.

<comment><USER3> It's true that "The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40 years a _lot_ of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions (Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western culture - but _not_ of all cultures on earth, particularly not eastern philosophy, and not the animal kingdom at large)

If you have never read any of these counterpoints, but find that the conclusions of Selfish Gene have shaped your world view, please consider reading some of these counterpoints and seeing if they persuade you to consider new perspectives.

A particularly thorough book detailing these counterpoints is Matthieu Ricard's book:

Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World

<comment><USER4> The book you're recommending seems to be about psychological and spiritual relationships between human beings, from what I can gather from a quick skim on Amazon. But not a single one of the reviews actually describes a single argument the book is making (strange), so it's hard to judge.

Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" is a scientific work about evolutionary selection at the gene level -- I don't recall him touching on psychology at all. (He provides evolutionary explanations for certain altruistic behaviors, but I don't recall him even starting on how they might be expressed via a psychological mechanism or at any conscious level.)

I can't quite imagine what either have to do with each other -- they seem to be such different topics. Or what Dawkins' work has to do with "western culture", or culture at all. At heart it's a quite mathematical/statistical argument.

I'm curious, what exactly do you see being refuted?

<comment><USER3> The author is definitely a "spiritual person", he's a Buddhist monk and the french translator for the Dalai Lama. But he is also very scientifically minded. He has a PHD in cellular genetics from the institute pasteur[1].

One of the central themes of the book, and motivators for the author to write, is to address the contrast between other oriented (altruistic) and self oriented (selfish) societies. The author asserts that in the western fields of psychology, theories of evolution, and economics, it's often taken for granted that an individual's deeds, words, and thoughts are motivated by selfishness. To the extent that this assumption has nearly become dogma. The 868 page book, including a massive 160+ pages of notes, and bibliographies systematically lay out the scientific arguments against "the hypothesis of human selfishness".

You can read the sections of the book that specifically address "the selfish gene" with the following google search [2].

[1]: [https://www.pasteur.fr/en/education/programs-and- courses/doc...](https://www.pasteur.fr/en/education/programs-and- courses/doctoral-and-post-doctoral-programs)

[2]: [https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=altruism+matthiew+rickard&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisx7al6ITjAhWBqp4KHfqfDfIQ6wEIKzAA#v=onepage&q=selfish%20gene&f=false)

<comment><USER4> From the links, it seems like his main criticism of Dawkins is actually merely the word "selfish" in the title of his book, and that the CEO of Enron liked it?

Yes, Dawkins is saying that "universal love" does not have an evolutionary component, which seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim.

It seems like your criticism of Dawkins is more a criticism of how other people have misunderstood him, rather than any criticism of the arguments in _The Selfish Gene_ itself?

If you haven't, I highly suggest you read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". While it's at a popular level, it does a fairly good job at presenting a plausible framework for how moral behavior (like altruism) can emerge from evolutionary principles. [1] Haidt is probably one of the most influential moral psychologists today.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics- Relig...](https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics- Religion/dp/0307455777/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=the+righteous+mind&qid=1561476127&s=gateway&sr=8-2)

<comment><USER3> Thank you, I'm familiar with the book you are recommending - the righteous mind. It is discussed in Altruism and cited in its bibliography. [1]

I get the impression you've decided to take a stance on the book Altruism without reading it. The summary you provide for Rightous mind could work just as well as a summary for Altruism too. At this point, we aren't even disagreeing, we're just citing different sources, and I'm content to just drop it.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=altruism&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjerY-Z-4TjAhXGup4KHT- gAP0Q6wEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%22The%20Righteous%20Mind%22&f=false)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could.

If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself.

Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudonymously is now the norm for many people. This changed how people interact online, but it also changed their expectations.

A full name however doesn't make a person or their opinions any more real than a pseudonym will. People will lie to you with a fake name just as shamelessly as they would hiding behind a pseudonym.

<comment><USER6> This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly. This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the Internet".

Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment that goes on the Internet. Doxxing and things like it are terrible and should never happen.

Rather, I'm arguing that people need to acquire a sort of "street smarts" when navigating the Internet. Much like when you travel to a foreign country, you may expect a different culture with different norms, so it is the same with the Internet. What's rude in one culture is simply social convention in another. What is casual conversation in one is taboo in another. I spent a lot of time on the Internet growing up and I feel like I have been inoculated against the worst parts of the Internet, but at times it feels like many people haven't.

A good example of this is how a lot of people and media take 4chan posts at face value, without realizing that a lot of it is completely self-aware and that the worst posts are almost always a game of who can post the most needlessly offensive thing possible. A lot of 4chan is an exercise is communication with no names and no filter. And yet some of my most informative conversations have been on 4chan precisely because there is no politeness filter, and posters can be as devastating critical as they want. But a reader also needs to learn how to tune in and out, correspondingly discount and read between the lines to get the most out of 4chan conversation, otherwise you simply come away with the idea that the community hates everything and everyone.

For a more tame example, I follow a couple of Twitch streamers. For example, for streamer A, most communication with their chat is saccharine and supportive. But for streamer B, the chat makes fun off and insults him the whole way especially he makes a mistake, and the streamer, and the streamer gives as good as he gets and makes fun of the chat the whole time too. And this is normal and fun engagement for all parties. From afar, streamer B's community looks extremely toxic, but that's the furthest thing from the truth. (What is abhorrent is when you take streamer B's chat behavior into streamer A's chat, and that is frowned upon by _all_ parties.)

I believe that Internet activity _should_ be diverse. There should be places where communication is an extension of real life (Facebook, emails), places of semi-anonymous and professional communication (Hacker News, certain subreddits/slack communitiees/GitHub), and then places where you should be able to go hogwild with whatever you want to say (fun subreddits, discord).

Twitter is unfortunately one of those places that has had all of these mixed together, which is why I decided to have multiple Twitter accounts targeting professional/personal hobby communication. From what I hear, kids are already tuning to this idea, with things like public/private instagram accounts.

The Internet is not all the same, and that's great. The Internet is not just real life, and that's great.

<comment><USER7> A serious problem with the "let the people live in their own worlds" attitude is that many communities do not stay in their realms. You allude to this a little but, in my opinion, it's not a minor problem to be glossed over, it's the core of the trust issue: any online community that doesn't keep itself small and insular (and enforce this with sufficient opsec) is at risk of being invaded and exploited (for lulz, for cash, or for political manipulation).

<comment><USER6> I absolutely agree. Invasions are bad, crossing "community" boundaries is. I think that's also part of the "Internet Etiquette" to be learnt: what happens in one domain of the Internet should stay in that domain of the Internet. You don't bring your mischievous trolling behavior from Discord to Facebook, but you also don't bring your "comfortable-space" standards from a support group forum to a video game forum.

I acknowledge your argument that "diverse worlds" system may not be sustainable over time because it is unstable, particularly to new entrants who do have to learn the local lingo. I personally disagree, and would argue instead that that's something Internet users should learn to deal with. We've long had the solution for this: good moderation. You can have hyper-extensive moderation like r/askhistorians or Facebook support groups, you can have moderate moderation for spam and the like for things like generic hobby groups, and then you can have light moderation for spaces deliberately made for that. From heavy to light moderation, the burden shifts from the moderator to the user. Different Internet spaces should have different arrangements like this. While this solution may not be perfect, I argue that this _is what works_. I put this in contrast to another prevailing idea that all spaces should be like IRL (because that has maximal accountability and requires no context switching), and I argue that that's what will diminish the diversity and dynamism of the Internet.

I would further add a key ingredient to making this world is the tools provided by the platform to perform this moderation. That's one reason why Twitter, for all the good content it has, is also a mess, because there's no limit of cross-pollination of communities. Contrast this to, say, Reddit, which gives subreddit moderators significant powers to curate and protect their communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy.

If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans themselves are relatively cheap to buy.

<comment><USER9> Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So I wrote a one star review talking about how I don't want to be bribed and they can't make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn't allow my review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.

<comment><USER10> I mean, how could they trust you weren't a fraudster from a competing product?

<comment><USER11> Because they actually purchased the product?

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's a great deterrent. Especially for a low cost item, I'm pretty sure it happens a lot that competitors would buy a few products of yours and then leave negative reviews as "Verified Purchase".

<comment><USER12> Amazon is not a neutral referee though. They have an incentive to block (both fraudulent and legitimate) one star reviews but keep (even fraudulent) five star reviews: better reviews lead to more sales.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the most intelligent take on internet trust issues that I've seen. The conclusion is overly glib though: it took centuries for high-trust societies to develop the mechanisms that allow them to function as such, and even small changes can upset that balance (as we've been seeing in the real world over the last couple of years). We shouldn't assume it will be trivial to bootstrap those kinds of institutions on the internet.

<comment><USER14> People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the new normal.

This is exactly how the liberal societies of the west evolved. But don't remember that any more, though.

<comment><USER15> This isn't how the Unites States evolved. Arguably, the success of the experiment still hasn't been fully established, but the major institutions that govern the US system were more or less present right from the beginning.

<comment><USER16> There was never any coercion in the US. All those black people simply _begged_ to be chained and beaten for centuries. The tribes? They just really wanted to travel to Oklahoma. Women were naturally granted the right to vote in 1776 without any strife or suffering.

Whitewashing history to make it more palatable is dangerous.

<comment><USER17> We're talking about whether or not coercion is necessary to bootstrap a high- trust society. Are you arguing that those types of coercion were fundamentally necessary to establish the United States? Or are you forgetting this context in order to have something to be upset about?

<comment><USER16> Yes, I am arguing that. There is no way the US is the world power it was through the late 1800s and beyond, without centuries of coercion [0].

[0] [https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern- eco...](https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy)

<comment><USER18> One of the key arguments against slavery was that it help the South back from being able to have a modern, industrial economy. If slavery was the key ingredient to being a world power, the slave states would not have had their asses thoroughly handed to them by the free states in the Civil War.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust, or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2]

[https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the- us...](https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the- us_v2_850x600.svg)

[https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey- cage/files/2014/...](https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey- cage/files/2014/03/pew-millennial-trust.png)

First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were always predominantly american-culture oriented) are now global and thus reflect low trust cultures as well. Second, Goodhart's law, the internet metrics exist mainly to be gamed, thats why they should change. Reviews worked for a while, when the internet had a very different audience , they no longer work, that's normal wear and tear. Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews. Crowdsourcing no longer works. (Which explains why wikipedia should maintain a very conservatiove editing policy from now on)

<comment><USER12> _Third, it 's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews_

Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?

<comment><USER19> Sure that's a great recipe to lose your customers. Shops have an interest in having honest reviews, and if they are gaming them, someone else will provide more honest ones.

<comment><USER12> Classically, you're right, but Amazon seems to operate by a different set of rules. Prices, availability, and recommendations change constantly according to some internal algorithm. In effect, no two users are shopping in the same store. This disrupts the ability for users to communicate about what's going on at Amazon. The whole thing is a big mystery and most people just see what they think is a good deal and snap it up before it's gone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society.

Back in the day, when you placed a long distance call, an operator would come on to ask you what your number was so the call could be billed to you. A single call might be a dollar or a few dollars, which would be ten to several tens of dollars in today's money.

No one would imagine that such a system would work today.

<comment><USER21> _It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society._

And that's probably rooted in people being fundamentally devalued and taken advantage of.

We are seeing worse income inequality than in The Gilded Age and people act like it's a natural and unavoidable side effect of the existence of tech, the internet, whatever. That's BS. People created these things. If these things exploit people, it's because people designed them to exploit people.

If people want people to be treated better, then people need to stop blaming machines for our social values. Tech merely magnifies those values. It doesn't cause them to exist.

Bill Gates said that automating an efficient system amplifies the efficiency and automating an inefficient system amplifies the inefficiency. I propose that you can similarly amplify whatever underlying social values you have, whether that's something good -- pro education! -- or something bad -- racism and misogyny!

And classism. We are using technology to amplify extractive economic practices, then blaming the robots as if Judgement Day had already arrived and Skynet is now in charge of our lives. (A la the _Terminator_ movies.)

<comment><USER22> I'd almost rather society just admit it's classist so it can be handled appropriately. Instead we're just in denial and no policies (for better or worse) will ever go towards what we need. I might sound conservative but I'm definitely democrat/liberal in most of my values. I just don't want to live near someone that is thuggish and may steal from my house.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm a bit surprised this article has zero reference to any interdisciplinary work on trust metrics, and stuff like trust propagation algorithms. I'm even more surprised, with the blockchain having becoming such a buzzword these days, that Bitcoin's proof-of-work approach was not even mentioned, let alone evaluated for effectiveness. And where's the love for Bruce Schneier [0]?

I think the article's approach of referencing historic stragies from government and social infrastructure is a bit useless in this context because how much the problem changes when scarce information becomes abundant light- speed communication. I understand that they are trying to make the point that corporate overlords are bad, but maybe it would serve the purposes of the article better to just focus on the variables that matter, now that there's new capacities for transparency and accountability metrics based on some combination of historic behavior, web of trust node size, and other situational variables based on the medium -- like users that spend a lot of money, or consistently downvote known bad actors. Forcing users to have skin in the game with strict enforcement of transgressions is of course a reasonably effective, if coercive, strategy as well, and you can take the edge off this authoritarian approach if you pair it with some variant of restorative justice.

My approach is perhaps not rigorously useful, but for my personal conceptions of trust in a world of bad actors, I like looking at strategies from Axelrod's iterated prisoner's dilemma[1]. Tit for Tat is famously a good strategy, and there's also a good strategy where you forgive on multiple cooperations but gradually increase the punishment of defectors to n times for their nth defection [2]. Though I should mention that tribalist collusion with other bad actors is unfortunately a very viable approach as well.

[0]: [https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/](https://www.schneier.com/books/liars_and_outliers/)

[1]: [https://axelrod.readthedocs.io](https://axelrod.readthedocs.io)

[2]: [http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html](http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/20/4/12.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> There's no mention of what I think is by far the biggest negative influence on trust: the media. Trust in media is at an all time low:

[https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington- secrets/trust...](https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington- secrets/trust-in-media-hits-bottom-60-percent-say-sources-pay-for-stories)

It's a totally self inflicted wound too. Clickbait, outrage bait, blatant political spin, stealthy retractions, journalists on social media starting mobs...

Bots do not even register in most people's minds compared to that.

<comment><USER25> What you see is the clickbait. What you don't see are the structural changes to the media landscape over the past 20 years that led to this.

Newspapers per 100 million people fell from 1200 (in 1945) to 400 (in 2014). This is from a Brookings study cited in a Wikipedia article on the topic [0]. In 2013, the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its photographers and tasked journalists to take photos as well as provide the research and writing [1]. How would the quality of your work be affected if you had to do the job of 2 people?

The classifieds ads business is dead, and subscriptions have been declining for years because "news on the Internet is free". The only "media" that makes serious money is talk radio, which isn't journalism so much as diatribes of political invective.

As it turns out, that's what people are willing to pay for, or at least sit through ads for. If anything, "the media" is giving the people what they want.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers#Performance_in_the_market_\(2000%E2%80%93present\))

[1][https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago- su...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-sun-times- lays-off-all-its-full-time-photographers.html)

<comment><USER26> > The only "media" that makes serious money is

...

> Google Made $4.7 Billion From the News Industry in 2018, Study Says

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google- new...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/09/business/media/google-news- industry-antitrust.html)

Hmm

<comment><USER27> Obviously rchaud is referring to people that create media, or in this case, the journalists. I don't see what relevance Google's revenue is to this conversation. They found a way to make money by directing people to other people's work.

<comment><USER28> While those "other people" were doing unpaid internships, freelancing, and filing for unemployment insurance. Something seems very profoundly wrong with this picture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > In low-trust societies, you never know. You expect to be cheated, often > without recourse. You expect things not to be what they seem and for > promises to be broken, and you don't expect a reasonable and transparent > process for recourse. It's harder for markets to function and economies to > develop in low-trust societies. It's harder to find or extend credit, and > it's risky to pay in advance.

'Bout sums it up.

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I missed something, but when was the internet ever high-trust?

I feel like since it's inception savvy users always applied a healthy amount of skepticism and made thier own choice whether or not they believed something "on the internet". This included both facts on websites and conversing with other humans on chat.

<comment><USER19> > but when was the internet ever high-trust?

Exactly. It started when big corp tried to lure in more users by giving them free cheese, making them believe that the internet is a safe place to post your name, address, work life and sex habits. Everyone at the time thought it was crazy that people did that, and yeah they were right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe the problem is that ever since google the only metric anyone has bothered to devise is "popularity", which was never a particularly good indicator of truth to begin with.

<comment><USER32> Google was built heavily on authority, not just popularity.

Otherwise you could easily buy your way above Wikipedia, a non-profit organization (Wikimedia) - which ranks at or near the top for every query.

Quora, or some other VC backed knowledge service with a couple hundred million to vaporize, would overtake Wikipedia through the direct purchasing of popularity. Then others would quickly follow, entirely wiping Wikipedia from the first pages. That can't be done. If it could, private equity via Answers.com and other such very low quality sites would have already done it, seeking billions of dollars in return on such positioning.

<comment><USER19> Yeah google isn't built on popularity, but everything else is. And it's partly our fault for using aggregators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As it should be, I think. You don't inherently trust stranger on a street, you shouldn't do that on the internet as well.

<comment><USER34> Not quite.

While I wouldn't trust a random stranger on the street with e.g. my money or private data. However, I have no problem trusting them to honestly and truthfully answer questions like "how do I get to X from here?" or "here, can you please mark my bus ticket in that marking machine over there and hand it back to me? I can't quite reach it in this crowded bus".

On the internet, however, I don't trust a random stranger (e.g. a youtube commenter, or a reddit user) with answering "2+2" correctly, let alone with something that involves my possessions, no matter how low-value they might be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Things are increasingly getting worse

General purpose headline for attracting views, tying into the seductiveness of a general perception of doom and gloom.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why- the...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the-world-is- getting-better-why-hardly-anyone-knows-it/)

</comment><comment><USER36> At probably a naive glance it seems related to anonymity. Would tying identity to online posts increase this trust? What if you had to insert your National ID Card to comment in some feedback forums?

I remember YouTube tried this and failed due to pushback.

What's the driver of this clickbait/instant gratification/hot take culture that's developing? Is it just ads?

<comment><USER37> Some of the worst clickbait is published in national newspapers under a byline and photograph of the author.

The Boris Johnson fiasco has got journalists openly saying "who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and screaming next door? We need to find and expose them".

Requiring ID means the culture war side with the best harassment capability can take over the space and decide who becomes the story and who gets made unsafe.

<comment><USER38> > Boris Johnson fiasco

Could you provide some context?

> who are the people who called the police when they heard shouting and > screaming next door? We need to find and expose them".

Could you provide some links?

(sorry, not doubt, truly uninformed)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> That is not really surprising, is it? 20 years ago the Internet was populated with different people, because the subscriptions were expensive. And besides that, there was no mobile Internet, the user demographic was completely different. Now that literally everybody on this planet has access to the Internet, and, well, there are some rather unpleasant people out there, I think we've reached a new historical period with these "low-trust societies".

<comment><USER19> Things were worse 20 years ago for the general internet , with few "trustable" brand names anyway. Piracy, viruses and scams were all over the place. If anything it's cleaner today, thanks to investments in security/antispam, but the mode of operation for scammers has changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> >Better rules and technologies that authenticate online transactions; a different ad-tech infrastructure that resists fraud and preserves privacy;

I don't disagree with the premise, but this solution seems vague at best. Authentication and privacy? Great things to be sure, but where is the connection? As it said, even "verified" purchases could be (and sometimes are) done by paid shills.

I guess the proposal is to create laws that prohibit lying on the internet? This person has clearly fallen on the wrong side of the authoritarian argument if that's the solution they came up with to prevent power consolidation in big business.

</comment><comment><USER41> In Trust We Trust

</comment><comment><USER42> The less trust there is, the more hardship there is.

We are due for tough times ahead.

</comment><comment><USER43> scale is indeed the problem. scale has perverted our capitalist society as well, long before the internet. Adam Smith wrote about capitalism but he never envisioned Amazon. Changing a system from a one-to-one interaction to a one- to-many interaction should not allow us to apply the same rules. In math for example, commutativity works for single numbers, but not matrices.

</comment><comment><USER44> Funny title change

</comment><comment><USER45> Welcome to digital socialism. It always ends with long lines for a few blocks of cheese.</comment>


Making your Web Pages Ridiculously Fast (Without Breaking Them) - <AUTHOR> http://joshsymonds.com/blog/2012/12/18/making-your-web-pages-ridiculously-fast-without-breaking-them/ <comment><USER2> Great post, would be interesting to see what you have done on the server side to tune performance...</comment>