Ask HN: Propaganda for creative salary manipulation? - <AUTHOR>

Every once and a while (at least once a week) I stumble upon some essay heralding the euphoria of working in a good team, or on a good project, or of spending your life solving projects. They all seem to have the same underlying tone, that engineers don't care about money, they care about the work they do. Sometimes I wonder if these articles are some creative, subtle, under-handed manipulation to convince young engineers to feel guilty for demanding to get paid a fair wage for the value of their services.<p>Am I the only engineer out here that wants to scream, "fuck you, pay me" whenever somebody rambels on and on about how wonderful it is to drink the kool-aid at flickr, google, twitter, or zynga? (and for the record, all of my friends at these 4 companies feel very under-paid). <comment><USER2> No, you're not - and kudos for articulating that feeling of frustration so exactly. Without criticizing any particular company o industry, this sort of thing is rampant nowadays. It's just as bad, if not worse, in my business (independent film), to the point where I'm now surprised when someone makes me a good offer or accepts my price without significant haggling. As with coding, it's such a cool profession to be in - and intense pressure and challenge can make for such strong team bonds - that it's almost _infra dig_ to say you also need to make a decent living, or that you might want to spend money on something quite unrelated.

For a while I'd argue on the basis that being freelance is more expensive, equipment is expensive (substitute training courses or whatever), taxes and cost of living all force me to set a price X...but I realized that this kind of argument was putting me in an inferior position and giving the power to the buyer. So now I just say that I like really, _really_ high quality hookers and blow, and that such luxuries don't come cheap. Although this is a joke, it serves two purposes: first, it reminds the recruiter/ producer/ publisher that you have concerns of their own, about which they know nothing and which they are not competent to evaluate; and second, it's aggressive enough to make the other person uncomfortable, by demonstrating your lack of shame about your own worth, which is a great negotiating tactic.

It doesn't have to be hookers and blow of course, that's just a funny cliche in my business. It could be solid-gold golf clubs or putting juice in your Ferrari or whatever. The point is that you're a busy person and you are the sole arbiter of how your time should be valued, and that for some kinds of things, the price is what it is. If you can't pay, then you don't get to play.

<comment><USER3> _The point is that you're a busy person and you are the sole arbiter of how your time should be valued, and that for some kinds of things, the price is what it is. If you can't pay, then you don't get to play._

I wish somebody had told me this when I started freelancing.

<comment><USER2> So do I. For that matter, I might need you to remind me at some point in the future :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Am I the only engineer out here that wants to scream, "fuck you, pay me" whenever somebody rambels on and on about how wonderful it is to drink the kool-aid at flickr, google, twitter, or zynga? (and for the record, all of my friends at these 4 companies feel very under-paid)."

I'm one of those engineers that drank the kool-aid. Yeah, I could probably make more elsewhere. However, I'm at the stage of my career where I'm optimizing for experience, not for earnings. I'd rather trade salary for skills now, so that those skills can bring more salary later. That's capitalism.

Besides, I honestly don't see the point of going from $100K to $200K (made-up numbers, but presumably the ballpark we're talking about). I save half my take-home pay anyway; I can't really think of what else I'd like to buy with it. When I choose to optimize for earnings, I'd rather be in the tens of millions, i.e. found a company and grow it - which also happens to be quite satisfying, although lots of hard work. There's a material difference between "never has to work again" and "still a wage slave". There isn't one (to me) between "can afford a Beemer" and "can afford a Honda Civic."

<comment><USER5> Wait? What? Which engineers are getting paid $200K?

If that's the ballpark I must have been playing a different sport for the last 6 years.

Anyhow, I've also had a swig of the kool-aid over those years and is now the basis of my new-found freedom and upstart dreams... time will tell if that investment paid off however.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about the bay area, but there are definitely devs in NYC making over 200k.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No one is choosing between company A offering $60k, B offering $100k, and C offering $350k for the same work, and then choosing A or B. Most people get 1-5 offers all within a relatively small range. The fact that people choose the company with the best environment/project should not be surprising.

<comment><USER8> Last time I did a wide job search I had offers ranging from $25 to $150 / hour.

I still can't figure out how the hell the company offering $25 / hour thought they could get anyone hired.

<comment><USER9> That's $52k per year, which is comfortably middle to upper-middle class in much of America. If that was in the Bay or NYC then it's low, but if it was in Omaha or Des Moines it's a good salary for an entry level dev.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but I agree with Joel on this one:

"They don't care about money, actually, unless you're screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that's usually a sign that people aren't really loving their job.

...

That doesn't mean you can underpay people, because they do care about justice, and they will get infuriated if they find out that different people are getting different salaries for the same work, or that everyone in your shop is making 20% less than an otherwise identical shop down the road, and suddenly money will be a big issue."

An employer could _really_ take advantage of me monetarily if they provided a work environment that was _that cool_. Aside from that, as long as I make enough to make a decent living, I don't care. When I'm considering working for a new company, money really is a secondary issue.

<comment><USER11> Joel is awesome, althought I don't agree with him on everything. He's got it nailed. When you're working a dead-end job, being paid less than everyone at other companies, in an environment where even your chair is falling apart, doing the same thing you did last year and the year before, money becomes a very big issue. It's why they pay people big bucks at banks to do COM/ATL programming. No one wants to do it and everyone recognizes it. I wish companies would take a deeper look at themselves and say "Am I really making a difference to my employess?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The phenomenon isn't limited to engineers. People in all fields are willing to take less money for work they enjoy more. There are some kinds of work people like so much they'll do it for free: e.g. writing open source software.

<comment><USER4> Work that people enjoy more probably pays less _because_ people enjoy it more. It's supply and demand: there's a greater supply of labor for jobs that people want to work at. Most people consider having a nice work environment to be worth $X to them, so their indifference curves get shifted over.

<comment><USER13> Yes, economists these days don't talk about compensation so much but "utility" which is the aggregate of salary, cow-orkers, short commute, nice office, meaningful work, yadda yadda. People will always act to maximize utility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Am I the only engineer out here that wants to scream_

Perhaps a more constructive approach is to say "I'm glad your corporate culture is wonderful. I'm sure we can do business together if you can offer a salary competitive with my best options."

</comment><comment><USER15> Sorry, your friend at google feels under-paid? No offense to your friend or you, but It's hard for me to really understand that because of several reasons. First of all, he/she likely makes at least what..80k? 90k? I understand it's not a million dollars a year but that's not a bad salary. Second of all, there are people that would accept a lot less than that simply to work at google. I used to cook professionally, and was at one point working for FREE at Corton, in NYC, solely so that I can say I worked and learned there. All the cooks who work in fine dining get paid horribly but work there to learn from the best. This should be the same for hackers. Of course your friends from these great companies wouldn't have a hard time finding a wall street job for a lot more pay, but you'd have to agree that they are learning a LOT more than they would there, and that has to be worth something.

<comment><USER13> $80-90k doesn't go very far in Mountain View or Manhattan.

<comment><USER15> Believe me I know, I'm from NYC. But that's the average STARTING salary for hackers at the big companies, and surely it will be a nice stepping stone to bigger, better places.

<comment><USER16> Starting salary for hackers? My ex made starte in that range with just her modest fluency with html. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that number is really low for NYC, in my personal exp.

<comment><USER17> Oh crap - stop posting those salaries :P

I'm in the 3rd world right now making 12000 U$D a year - and taxed like hell for being in the upper range.

I'll most probably emigrate within the next year, but I know it won't be a bed of roses...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the case of startups I think that there are two issues to be aware of. The first is that (in my experience) most early stage startups are severely underfunded. After the dot com bust (back then the startups were severely overfunded) the investors swung back to a different extreme. So don't jump to conclusions and blame the founders - I think most founders are trying to do the best they can with the resources at hand.

The second issue is how the founder presents the situation to potential employees. I was once offered 10,000 options by what's considered to be a very successful startup. When I politely mentioned that this figure is meaningless and that I need to know the percentage of the company it represents in order to properly evaluate the offer, the founder said that "investors don't like giving away this information - I promise you that it's enough that you'll become a millionaire". If you're in a situation like that where the management has no respect for your time, I'd say run. But if they're honest about why the salary is lower than average, well, it's really up to you.

I think in general the economics works out because it's easy for investors (and in turn, founders) to prey on young, gullible people who have a romanticized idea of the startup scene and potential returns. If you look at the statistics, the expected value is just bad, and young inexperienced people generally aren't able to properly evaluate it. So investors put in too little money because enough people are willing to work for pizza and beer, and in turn employees are underpaid because enough people are willing to work for less in exchange for the "startup experience". It's a crappy situation, but like with most things in the world, I'd say don't worry about fighting battles that aren't worth fighting. If you're clever enough to realize this, work for Wall Street or Microsoft - in my experience you'll find much smarter people there than in most startups anyway.

Regarding Google underpaying engineers, in my opinion it doesn't jibe with their "don't be evil" mantra. They really should know better.

</comment><comment><USER19> Stockholm syndrome and the entitlement effect also play a role here. The authors (rationally) know they have sacrificed salary, so they try to rationalize by explaining to their readers and to themselves what they have won.

<comment><USER20> It really depends upon what your goals are in life - your "top level motivator".

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> In my personal hiring experience, developers - especially junior developers - rarely negotiate salary. This is too bad, because the people doing the hiring expect you to negotiate, and therefore intentionally offer you something lower than the actual amount they're willing to pay. When you buy the spiel and accept the first offer, so much the better for the company. If later you feel compelled to write a blog post that justifies your decision to yourself, so much the better for the company.

Every person out there should read 'Secrets of Power Negotiating' and 'Secrets of Power Salary Negotiating' by Roger Dawson. Yes, both the titles of the books and the contents inside absolutely scream 'sales toolbox', but I'd ask you to ignore this and power through it - the lessons you'll learn are indispensable.

</comment><comment><USER22> The correct response is not to say _"fuck you, pay me."_ It is _"wow, that's awesome, pay me."_

Working at a good company, on a good team, on a cool project - those are true benefits, that's why people talk about them. But in this context, they're just a negotiation tactic. Therefore, don't feel like you have to take a wage below what you feel is justified. Decide what you think you're worth and ask for it.

On the other hand, if you don't get what you want, then either you're not very good at negotiating or your market value doesn't match your perception.

(On the other other hand, you could just apply to Netflix where they make it a policy[1] to pay you the highest salary in the range for your position. No negotiating needed.)

* [1]<http://www.netflix.com/Jobs?id=5366#reason4> _

</comment><comment><USER23> Don't confuse the dollar amount of your salary with your _total_ compensation. Salary is only one term in the overall equation.

Consider, for example, a company that buys you lunch. Here in NY, lunch costs about $10 if you buy it yourself. If you're in the 25% tax bracket, that's worth $3,300+ in salary.

Do they provide daycare? Transportation costs? Paying for conferences? 401k matching?

Your friends that feel underpaid did a poor job of negotiating their total compensation. Next time they should sit down and do something along the following lines:

\- list out every possible benefit a company might offer

\- group the ones they personally care about (don't have kids? Then the daycare benefit is worthless)

\- for the ones they care about, think about how much each one is worth in $ to them.

\- think about what the minimum they would accept for that benefit, how much would make them happy, and how much would make the ecstatic.

\- for the ones they don't care about, thik about how much it costs the company to pay for each

When it comes time to negotiate your compensation, always think in sets. Always word things in terms of how moving any one piece requires movement on a different piece. Give up the things in the "don't care" set for the equivalent value of something in the "want" set.

If they want to give you less money, you say you could agree to that, if they give you X number of vacation days. Or if they say they have free daycare, you say that you appreciate that, but since you don't have kids you would rather have "work at home Fridays" and a slightly larger 401k match.

Consider the total You are much more likely to get a larger total if you don't focus only on the money.

[edit: bad math]

      (salary equivalent) = (daily cost * 5 days/wk * 50 wks/yr)
                            </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>
                                       ( 1 - tax rate )

      25% tax bracket
      $ 5 lunch = (5 * 5 * 50)/(75%) = $1,667 salary
      $10 lunch = $3,333

So if the company gives you lunch each day, it's worth $333 in salary for every dollar you _would_ have to spend to buy the same lunch. That ignores the fact that your income tax rate changes depending on your salary.

<comment><USER24> How the hell a $10 lunch is worth $10,000? Even if you work every single week (no vacation), 5 days a week, 52 * 5 * $10 = $2600.

Plus, you don't have to spend $10 for lunch. There's a bunch of places in NYC where you can eat a decent lunch for $5-8.

<comment><USER23> Corrected, thanks.

Yes, prices vary wildly from area to area. My point is that you should try and figure out, given each possible benefit, the range of how much it's worth to you. Be aware of what things you want, what each is worth at various levels, and what you're willing to give up to get those things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think as long as money isn't your #1 priority, it's great to push for a fair wage. For me personally, making more money is better than not making more money, but there's plenty of things that come before that; doing something I love, happiniess, time commitment, morals, etc. You should decide how much you want to make at a minimum before you negotiate salary for any job and stick to your guns.

To answer your first questions, I don't think it's propaganda. I think the underlying idea is that money shouldn't be the #1 thing to you.

#Sarcasm I haven't had a lot of success whenever I've decided to yell, "fuck you, gimme a raise". Maybe a more creative approach is in order.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a capitalist. And apparently a bad one, since I choose engineering instead of finance. I'm also an experienced entrepreneur with an understanding of the value of my time and labors. Most startups today are selling advertising. No matter how great their corporate culture is, that means in order to work for them I have to shower twice in the morning, and twice at night to get skim the filth off of me. Therefore, in this startup market, money is my #1 goal, because no amount of happy hippy engineering juju makes up for whoring myself out to the advertising industry. Money helps.. it means I can put more into my daughter's college fund and hope she has the opportunity to do something with her life that's less disgusting than what I'm doing with mine.

<comment><USER26> And what exactly is "filthy" about advertising?

<comment><USER27> I can't speak for the parent, or anyone else for that matter, but it does not appeal to me to burn ingenuity trying solely to figure out how better to get people to buy stuff. It's an arms race, where you expend more effort simply for a better chance at winning a zero-sum game. I'd prefer to work on projects where, rather than fighting to capture scraps of consumer disposable income, I become the spring that sources a mighty river of created value.

<comment><USER28> Is advertisement a zero-sum game? I don't think so, if you figure out how to better match products with customers, you create value for everyone. This is what Google did in a big way.

<comment><USER29> A large amount of advertising is oriented towards getting customers to buy things they don't want and don't need.

This is negative sum.

I won't even get into the cognitive imbalances created by being constantly assaulted with demanding stimuli in media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wouldn't say the only one but there are certainly a lot that aren't like that.

I personally given the option between Job A and Job B where Job B pays less but has more interesting problems/more freedoms I will take Job B every time. I can say that with confidence because I've done it twice already and in one case where Job A was paying almost twice as much.

Why? Well in any case Job B is going to still be paying me a lot compared to most people so its not as if I will be suffering by working for less. Secondly my time doing something I don't enjoy is a LOT more expensive than my time doing something I enjoy and lastly because at Job B I'll often get to improve myself and try new technologies/products/ideas that will better prepare me for the future that I never get to try at Job A. The cost to do those things in my free time would often add up to quite a bit making the difference in salary smaller with the other difference being made up by the lower end moving up with your new found skills.

</comment><comment><USER31> Probably Maslow's hierarchy of needs is part of the explanation. Pay comes in pretty low, so when the base-needs are fullfilled, it becomes more personal as to what you consider important next. This might me more money, quality of life, growth within, etc.

<comment><USER32> Maslow's hierarchy was discredited a long time ago. It survived only because it seems to make so much sense.

<comment><USER33> What do you mean by "discredited"? People don't really need food, shelter, and self-fulfillment? What has replaced it?

<comment><USER32> Well, it does seem to make a lot of sense but I don't think there is much research to actually support it. I don't remember where I read that now it's not considered very useful (I do remember it was in at least a couple of places), but the wikipedia page lists mentions at least one reference against it (Wahba, A; Bridgewell, L (1976). "Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the need hierarchy theory"), and not so many references in its favor.

As for what has replaced it, AFAIK it wasn't one "thing" as simple as the hierarchy was, but simply more research about the issue. There is a lot of literature on the subject, and a lot of it by Maslow himself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I find the type of salaries discussed here downright surreal. I live in Vancouver, BC which has some of the best 'quality of life' according to various random surveys. This translates into an median annual FAMILY income of ~$60k CAD and a median house price approaching 1 million CAD. My wife and I both work in tech, and both make more individually than the average family income, but not a whole lot more.

The salary range in Vancouver seems to top out around $150k, and that is uncommon. New grads can expect something between $50k and $80k. The intangibles definitely make a difference to expectations. I sacrifice both salary, and to some degree interesting work (at least at my day job) to live here.

<comment><USER35> I'm from Victoria and these six figures salaries being thrown around as "not that much" seem crazy to me too. Victoria is a smaller version of Vancouver but take off about $50k for the highest salary range and about $20k from your range for a new grad.

The quality of life is great though. It takes me 10 minutes to bike to work and I'm home by 5.

I've come to realization lately that if I want to earn a lot as a software developer, I will need to move to a large US city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a data point, I'm currently trying for a PhD instead of a "regular" job. That does involve trading immediate and lifetime earnings for more interesting work.

I'm by no means unique.

<comment><USER37> It's one thing to work for "free" for Science.

It's another thing to work for "free" for company owners who already own three yachts and a personal helicopter.

<comment><USER36> Although this may not apply to the institute I'm applying to, the people in charge of the university where I am currently studying certainly do not lack income. I will not speculate on whether or not this is earned, just point out that I've rarely heard anything positive about their policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I don't think it is intentionally propaganda, though it may influence opinion because if you're forced to sell yourself into wage slavery it really does help to work on something fun for a company that has free catered meals.

If money is so important to you, maybe you should start a startup.

</comment><comment><USER13> Absolutely. Remember, _someone's_ getting paid for your work, for the value you create. If not you, then who? What're they creating?

<comment><USER39> Risking capital.

<comment><USER40> So they have a lot less to risk than you do (for most investors, losing the entire investment wouldn't hurt them bad enough to force them into the work force. If you lose your job however...)

<comment><USER39> That is terrible logic. They have less exposure to personal tragedy for a given loss, but that does not in any way impact the market value of their loss. In fact, an investor experiences a real loss of assets (decreased net worth) whereas an unemployed person merely ceases monetary gain. The fact that your financial situation is dependent upon continual injection of capital is immaterial to the comparison of value lost.

If you're trying to make a social justice argument about capitalism as an economic model, that isn't relevant.

<comment><USER40> You say things like "investor experiences a real loss of assets (decreased net worth) whereas an unemployed person merely ceases monetary gain" and say _my_ logic is terrible? The investor, in most cases, lost some number in a computer somewhere. The employee may lose his home. How can you possibly suggest that the investor lost more? In fact, if he's properly diversified it is possible that while this investment failed, he made extra somewhere else.

If you think the investors losses are more damaging to the market as a whole I still disagree. The employee was likely injecting most of their income right back into the economy. An investor is probably just buying stock from other stock holders (much safer way to make money than a business venture). Unless the stock holder is the company, this is just money changing hands between rich people, i.e. _zero_ gain for the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As an engineer I'm not particulartly concerned about money, provided that I get paid some "living wage" which allows me to not have to worry about paying bills, rent, etc. I'd rather spend my time working on interesting projects with some modest but liveable wage than do something boring (or of questionable ethical value) on a high wage.

<comment><USER40> Is the work you will be doing on these "interesting projects" the thing you would pick if you were a multimillionaire and didn't have to work?

If not making as much as you possibly can, with the lowest living standard you can get away with is a better bet imo. I can't imagine any place letting me work on what _I_ want when _I_ want to all the time, and even if there were such a place what happens when I invent something? My name is on a list with a bunch of other mostly unrelated people?

<comment><USER20> If money were no obstacle I'd still be working on similar projects. The "interesting projects" are things which are on the outside of the envelope of what we currently think of as possible. Making progress on interesting projects means expanding the scope of human endeavor.

<comment><USER40> Fair enough. In your case it makes sense then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Am I the only one suprised to hear about 150k-200k salaries as software developer ? Most people I know are in the 50-100k range

These only seem to be possible in Silicon Valley or NYC-Manhattan

</comment><comment><USER42> I would guess that a lot of engineers DO care about money. In fact, i would think that MOST do, because most become engineers in order to make a living, and nothing more.

The problem is, I think that in engineering and other skilled work, the ones that are interested in their area of work regardless of whether they get paid well or not tend to be more skilled and do a better job. The same can be said for airline pilots (to put it simply, don't become an airline pilot if you want a safe job with a good salary, become an airline pilot if you LOVE flying).

So for a company looking to hire people, if a candidate will accept more interesting work for a lower salary, that is a good indicator that they CARE about the work they do. Someone who is only more interested in the salary and less interested in what they do _might_ be the ones that are happy with doing the bare minimums.

The other side of the problem is that most people think they are above average intelligent, and therefore most people will feel underpaid if they are not paid above average.

If you really love your job and you can do it by running your own business, that's often the best option. As an employee you are only making other people rich in exchange for some economic stability.

</comment><comment><USER43> I was like this four years ago (the first few months after graduating). My idea, and my plan, was basically "lock me in a box and make me write cool code, and I'll be happy".

It's not true. I've discovered that I need my input and my work to be economically validated. Someone (preferrably myself; but someone else is better than nobody) needs to make money off my work. I don't think that's a bad evolution :-)

<comment><USER44> I like to talk directly to the client and see the finished product being used. It's great to see a delighted client and know that "I made that!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is money the only goal? I'd rather take an enjoyable job with 20% less salary over the higher salary mediocre job in a crappy location. There's a lot more to life satisfaction than money -- as long as you have enough money for your lifestyle and future plans, why compromise on the rest?

Anyway, salary negotiations are by definition adversarial, and offers are negotiable. The best negotiating tool is a higher offer from someone else.

</comment><comment><USER46> I guess I always imagined there was some sort of equity stake at the kind of companies offering lower salaries. If there isn't, I'm certainly not one to be sold on the propaganda. There are plenty of places that have great teams and better salaries out there. In fact, I don't believe the two are mutually exclusive. A place with a high salary could be a lot of fun to work at and a low salary gig could be at a total sweatshop.

</comment><comment><USER28> Propaganda for salary manipulation, really? I'd hate if HN started to upvote conspiracy theories.

</comment><comment><USER47> You're on the right path. Keep going.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is always (emerging) market(s) with lots of smart people who want to work for much less salary because they enjoying of what they are doing. =)

</comment><comment><USER49> Who cares? Start a company and profit. If it doesn't work, try again. I'd rather be poor and get a shot at the big bucks than have a nice & stable salary.

<comment><USER49> -1 ? You don't have to share my opinion but I'm not sure it deserves a down vote.</comment></comment>


Quora pays thousands for posting questions - <AUTHOR> https://quorapartners.quora.com/The-Quora-Partner-Program-in-2018 <comment><USER2> What happened to Quora anyway? When it started I recall it being super hot with crazy high quality answers.

Then they started with logins being required and it all seemed to go downhill at an amazing speed.

<comment><USER3> >What happened to Quora anyway?

It became marketing. Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the responder's startup.

Same with Medium.

Once the startup bros say a site is good for "native marketing", that's when the begins to die.

<comment><USER4> > Almost every question turns into blatant and unhelpful pitches for the > responder's startup.

They break _all_ of their own rules for the sake of clicks. I was a Top Writer there for two years. I finally got sick of trying to write informative high- quality answers only to see them buried beneath flippant image-heavy crap (rules violation #1) that didn't even get one tenth as many upvotes (rules violation #2). Then they started getting on my case for not having topic bios, even though other people's were blatantly _false_ , for not responding nicely when their favorites were being dicks in comments, etc. So I just quit cold turkey and haven't posted since. I only go back to read sometimes when I'm _super_ bored, and that's about it.

<comment><USER5> Do you know of any good replacement sites? (If you were to answer longform somewhere now, where would it be?)

<comment><USER6> well... [http://stackoverflow.com](http://stackoverflow.com) for programming, and the family of [http://stackexchange.com](http://stackexchange.com) websites for many other fields.

<comment><USER7> Quora's whole model is "like Stack Exchange, but with venture capital for a big IPO".

Everything after the comma explains why Quora is junk.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Quora is (was) open ended and allowed discussions. Most tech questions I have can't be written on stackoverflow. The most stupid one is "what book can I read to learn xxx".

Now they removed descriptions from questions, hide comments by default, so they are heading the same direction.

Stackoverflow is helpful as documentation with examples, but for engineering problems is of no help anymore. I usually have to ask in some dev chats and discuss there

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> $27k for 8000 questions, that's basically admitting they paid for spam. I don't see how this is a good product decision at all and the content quality has declined severely.

Meanwhile being a Top Writer has done nothing for me other than getting the opportunity to buy quora branded swag from their store. Saying that this system is imbalanced and unfair seems to be an understatement.

<comment><USER8> The mind blowing fact is that they're advertising this metric as if it's a stat to be proud of. I think the average person browsing the internet would see this and instantly question the site's credibility. I would _maybe_ understand this statistic being shared internally or in an email to partners-- but published publicly on the internet? They're just looking to invite criticism and a loss of trust.

<comment><USER9> Or they just want more people in the partner program and don't care about their reputation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The top earning partner has earned $26,897 and asked over 8,000 questions, > averaging about _45 questions per day_

> The top 10 earning partners earned an average of $9,189 and asked 11,256 > questions each, _averaging 61 questions per day_

This explains quite a bit about the quality of the content on that site....

<comment><USER11> That's $0.82 per question for the top 10 earning partners, in case somebody is too lazy to do the math :)

And yes, advertising this fact seems misguided to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The top earning partner has earned $26,897 and asked over 8,000 questions, > _averaging about 45 questions per day_

That average metric is more _suspicious_ than an indicator of scale/impact.

</comment><comment><USER13> Im still wondering why Quora is allowed in google results. They're like the new expertsexchange. Plus it completely baffles me that anyone would use it for a topic that has a stack exchange.

<comment><USER14> More than anything I want a search engine I can blacklist domains in.

<comment><USER15> Just putting "-quora.com" (no quotes) on the end of a search seems to do it just fine.. you could have a long list of them you copy/paste in every time, or I imagine you could write a grease monkey script to do it for you automatically every time you click "search"

<comment><USER16> Or -site:quora.com if you are OK with pages with links to quora but you just do not want a result from that domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I quit Quora after they deleted my account by mistake - in the process of merging my two accounts with different emails, they managed to delete both - and then said "sorry, we screwed up, but unfortunately we can't undo it". All my answers were gone. I put many hours into writing those answers and I still don't understand the policy of automatically deleting all content when the account is deleted.

<comment><USER18> That policy is actually good.

If someone goes through the trouble to delete their account it makes sense that they'd want their content gone too (privacy).

<comment><USER17> No it does not. When you decide to delete your account it should be up to you if you also want your content deleted. The company should not make that choice for you one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> With Quora I learned how real filter bubbles are. During the 2016 elections I used to click on a lot of anti-trump questions. The site painted me a picture that trump was a "joke" and that he no one seriously believe he had a "chance". I was genuinely chock he started winning the primaries.. and then the elections. Looking back I still can't believe that I was so out of touch with reality. I haven't use Quora since them. Nowadays I actively try to ignore Quora when it shows up in search result. But when don't the answers are often short and wrong, or blatant self promotion.

<comment><USER20> For what it's worth, despite the very strong liberal bias on Quora, (I worked for Quora 2012-2014), they tried very hard to reduce bias from their feed algorithms and tried to remain very neutral in rankings and distribution.

I think there was a conservative chilling effect that went above and beyond what they could have done to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At some point Quora become so metric driven, so focused at maintaining their growth and retention and hell knows what, that it turned into a very user unfriendly place, akin to Yelp.

No, I don't need to login. No, I don't need 50 more notifications and an email digest, no, I don't need to install the damnt app.

</comment><comment><USER22> Two comments:

1) Why wouldn't the people answering the questions get that money? Aren't they the ones adding value to the site?

2) I've noticed a ton of spam answers recently where the answer is just a link to another site, didn't used to happen like 2 years ago

<comment><USER23> Turns out good questions are sometimes more valuable than good answers

<comment><USER24> But in fact the quality of the new questions go down, while the quality of answers is still better than elsewhere.

For sure good answers are more valuable than good questions.

<comment><USER23> What do you mean

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A few years ago I thought Quora was the biggest threat to Google. There were many questions I would go straight to Quora to find answers. I was wrong.

<comment><USER26> you and many, many other venture capitalists

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd be interested in knowing the thought process/analytics that inspired the idea to pay for questions, and not (highly-upvoted) answers? My main reason for joining Quora was that it seemed to be the social network that Dave Baggett [0] (at the time) was actively using.

[0] [https://www.quora.com/profile/Dave- Baggett](https://www.quora.com/profile/Dave-Baggett)

</comment><comment><USER28> Im so glad I deleted my account on that site

</comment><comment><USER29> Quora is a little addictive. I get an email daily with several questions (and links to the answers.)

Some I like, some I don't. But it is interesting to read.

<comment><USER30> I used to enjoy getting Quora digests. I remember seeing famous people and even some of my professors using Quora.

Jimmy "your premise is flawed" Wales was famous on Quora for his shutdowns. The site slowly started turning into a platform for marketers to pump their self-help/motivational channels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Aside, but I get all my Q&A jollies from [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/) these days. The moderation is unparalleled and the questions as well as the answers are interesting. There will be unanswered questions, which is frustrating, but the quality remains high.

</comment><comment><USER32> When you ask question you get zero answers and it get flagged as "badly worded"?

And when you search a question you get 50 questions asking the same thing and each has 90 answers each but most are complete bs, or spam or like 20 people saying the same thing or copy paste from top Google search results.... You can't scroll long enough.. Also 20 paragraph stories from Indian person.

</comment><comment><USER33> If we look at Quora as a marketplace connecting users in need of information and experts, then paying for questions means oversupply of experts. This is a bad sign: if a lot of people are ready to work for free, there is another incentive behind. I believe it is either marketing or vain. If so, it seems irrational to me to seek any kind of information anything on Quora.

</comment><comment><USER34> Would be curious to know how much revenue for the company the top earner generated

</comment><comment><USER35> I just got invited to the partner program. I opted in but didn't pay much attention.

What is the best way to maximize the revenue / opportunity here?

</comment><comment><USER36> Still No API, right? So no care.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder what motivates Adam D'Angelo to keep on as founder and CEO after 10 years of running Quora. Here is someone who got rich off FB and could do anything. Maybe early on that "anything" was Quora but I really can't believe that what Quora is now is anything close to what he envisioned when he first started the site. At this point it feels like a Zombie co that keeps chugging along because it has no other choice but to do so?

Quora embodies what I fear most about the idea of ever starting a VC-backed co...that once you accept money it is very hard to return it and if your burn rate is low you could just "exist" for years without actually succeeding or accomplishing much at all.

<comment><USER20> Have you thought about this a lot?

Quora is Adam's baby. He owns most of it and has been involved as a primary investor for... I'm not sure how long. Before that he was CTO of Facebook and an early investor in Instagram. He's made immense returns on these investments. I don't have numbers, but I would bet money he could buy back Quora from investors with cash and still be a several-hundred-millionaire. With that said, why would he do anything but his pet project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Having so much success though can also mean that you don't have as much drive to make a great product because you're already set. Not that it must be the case here, but passion is hard to maintain when it doesn't really have much effect on your life.

Also, if the site can be run completely independently (and it looks like operational costs are rather low) then why even take VC in the first place? Surely the effects of hundreds of millions requiring a return could easily be predicted as eventually causing problems?

<comment><USER20> I agree with your first point, but Adam is also one of the sharpest people I've ever known. It's hard for me to resolve the idea that he'd be complacent.

As for funding, he wasn't liquid when Quora started afaik, but also even smart wealthy people take loans and get VC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> content quality aside, at least this makes users customers. why shouldn't folks creating content on sites like this be part of the profit sharing?

<comment><AUTHOR> The only valuable content are the answers, some that have taken hours to write and kept up to date by passionate folks who are willing to share their expertise and knowledge.

They don't pay for answers though, and this is making writers turn into unpaid workers generating money for spammers who just post questions all day. Many writers I know have stopped because there is no upside.

<comment><USER39> I wish someone would make a for profit site that is a mashup of hacker news, quora and twitter and paid people for posting content, specifically for upvotes. I would invest in this personally

<comment><AUTHOR> I think paying for content is the problem because it skews everything, unless there is very tight control over submissions.

<comment><USER39> Why ? What's the difference between paying for upvotes in dopamine hits or money ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because people will do anything for even trivial amounts of money while upvotes are controlled by users which is self-correcting when the community and controls are well managed.

<comment><USER39> I'm proposing leaving the upvotes in the hands of users but paying users for high karma

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, but the overall point is that as soon as you introduce money people will spend inordinate amounts of time to game the system. Paying for high scores will mean people doing anything they can to get upvotes unethically that will eventually hurt the community, similar to what's happening on Quora right now.

<comment><USER39> agree that there are complications but I think there are also advantages. All these sites depend on quality content and creating an explicit incentive to provide it is not so bad, is it ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> No one thinks that's unethical?

</comment><comment><USER41> Pathetic. You rarely see an authentic answer in Quora these days. It's all self-promotion, direct and indirect advertising, fake wisdom and "life hacks".

<comment><USER42> I agree with you. Many of the popular writers seem interested in internet points.

Many of the answers have the same storytime format. The writer takes us back in time, introduces a concept that on first inspection seems wrong, and eventually gives us an example of why it is correct by using an example of someone else's misfortune.

It gets old fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Reminds me of the site Mahalo.com which used to pay users for posting answers. Anyone heard of them lately?</comment>


Do you really need a full-time hire for that? - <AUTHOR> http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2012/03/do-you-really-need-a-full-time-hire-for-that.html

<comment><USER2> I have the opposite problem - or more accurately, it's the opposite face of the same problem: same issues, opposite approach. I have a lot of different tasks that I would like to hire someone(s) to do, but nowhere near enough work to make it worth the overhead and inefficiencies of doing so.

As such, I end doing the mail, finance, support calls (omg, the support calls and emails!), etc. for our startup, and can only hope to weather it out until the amount of work becomes enough to make it actually worth hiring someone.

The real problem is that a lot of it is very domain-specific. This isn't generic stuff that can be freelanced - it's ongoing work that'll take up an hour of my (your) day and requires intimate familiarity with the how and what of our day-to-day routine and products. I still outsource/contract stuff like design work and other "parcelable" jobs, but most of the drudgery will remain on my shoulders until the problems outlined in TFA are no longer applicable for me.

<comment><USER3> I had this same problem but lately I've decided to emulate the model of my Uncle.

He has been a fairly successful businessman since the late 70s, with ventures ranging from publishing to travel service to real estate.

One thing he always did though was draw in members of the family to help. You'd be surprised how happily people will help you once asked, and being able to step away from a task for an hour or two is a huge relief.

Also the quality of advise goes up highly once people become more involved with your business---from the outside looking in, everything seems hunky-dory and you're liable to just have family grin and say "its awesome!" if you ask for their help. Once they've worked on it for a little while too, maybe because they feel they've earned the right to have input they'll tell you what they really feel.

This applies to your users/customers too--get buy-in from Day 1 and they'll be the best QA department you ever had. When you have someone right out a 3 page email detailing their thoughts, _then_ you know you're onto something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I consider using outside resources a great strategy. Having an influential agency on your side rather an a full time designer can mean connections that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

It also keep the focus on projects with a beginning and an end. FTE's are great for somebody that represents a core function of the business. In my services company we have 6 of them, end everybody is at 95-100% capacity and bought into what we're doing. Adding even one more person though can be treacherous, especially when building a product.

The article is right, users will let you know endlessly about how to fix the UI, you don't need some UI god to figure that out before you have something built.

</comment><comment><USER5> One problem with this idea is that most quality people aren't going to want to work as contractors part-time. Now if the work you need to do is not particularly hard or you don't need it done particularly well then this might work.

<comment><USER6> _One problem with this idea is that most quality people aren't going to want to work as contractors part-time._

That's a strong assertion for which I see no evidence in the market. Plenty of great programmers and designers neither have to nor want to work for anyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My thoughts exactly. Be smart with your hires.</comment>


Dear OpenAI: Please Open Source Your Language Model - <AUTHOR> https://thegradient.pub/openai-please-open-source-your-language-model/ <comment><USER2> I really strongly disagree with this. I don't have much time to write, but:

1\. Photo manipulation has been extremely destructive in a variety of ways. People "know" that photoshop is a thing, yet fake pictures abound at all levels of publications, and unrealistic standards propagate at full speed nonetheless. The effects are wide spread and insidious.

A way to automate the production of median-literacy shitposts on the internet tuned to whatever you want to propagandize would be a devastating blow. People "knowing" that it was possible would do precious little to stop the onslaught, and it all but destroy online discourse in any open channels. I'm certain there would be other consequences that I can't fathom right now because I don't grok the potential scale or nth order effects.

2\. There is no fire alarm for AGI[1]. Is this thing the key to really dangerous AI? Will the next thing be? No one knows. It's better to be conservative.

[1] [https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire- alarm/](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/)

<comment><USER3> > _2\. There is no fire alarm for AGI[1]. Is this thing the key to really > dangerous AI? Will the next thing be? No one knows. It 's better to be > conservative._

This is certainly a point worth discussing, but it's odd for OpenAI to suddenly stand on principle about this specific result.

OpenAI was founded on the idea that public access to AI tools and research would improve and democratize them. Their website and founders make statements like _" Are we really willing to let our society be infiltrated by autonomous software and hardware agents whose details of operation are known only to a select few? Of course not."_ and _"...empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower."_ Meanwhile, their view on AGI risk seems to be that more access will improve scrutiny and oversight. Since day one, they've taken flak from people like Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander ([https://futureoflife.org/2015/12/17/should-ai-be- open](https://futureoflife.org/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open)) who argued that their stance amounted to publicly sharing untested, hazardous tools.

And now they balked because... they built an essay generator that's not quite good enough to compete with cheap troll farms that governments can already afford? I don't think they're necessarily wrong to not share this, and I know Sam Altman said a while back that they might not release all their source code. But I don't think this should be looked at in isolation.

If the people going to bat for democratized access to AI suddenly decided that the public can't be trusted with access to AI tools, that's worth talking about.

<comment><USER4> I think they did change their mind on this after considering the AGI risk more and getting a better understanding of it.

I'm not sure where I read a discussion about this, but I do think it was something they've talked about before.

<comment><USER5> Is OpenAI anywhere near AGI such that it would warrant such concerns?

<comment><USER4> It's hard to know what near is and what the timeline is.

This article digs into some historical evidence of this: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEtzRE2M5m9YEAQpX/there-s- no...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEtzRE2M5m9YEAQpX/there-s-no-fire- alarm-for-artificial-general-intelligence)

From the post:

"Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is very often the case that key technological developments still seem decades away, five years before they show up.

In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.

In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.

And of course if you're not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then."

Maybe it's hundreds of years out, but maybe it's not. Since it's hard to know probably better to try and work on the safety aspects now.

<comment><USER6> Of course, I'm sure you can find plenty of examples where things that are decades away, are described as decades away.

<comment><USER4> Sure - this isn't to imply that that can't happen or even that that isn't the more common case.

It's only to say that just because something may seem far away it may not be - even if you're the person that will invent it only two years later (and therefore are probably in the best position to know).

Given the high stakes of unsafe AGI and this uncertainty it's probably worth some people working on goal alignment.

This is somewhat unrelated to the recent release though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worth noting that there's a surprising difference between the full model (1542M hyperparameters) and the released smaller model in the repo (117M): the full model can account for narrative structure much better ([https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097652984316481537](https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097652984316481537)), while the smaller model tends to go on trainwrecks, especially if you give it a bespoke grammatical structure ([https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097656934180696064](https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097656934180696064))

The arguments OpenAI have given about people using the model to create fake news are IMO not good; bad actors will still create fake news anyways (or with the paper/repo, they might even create more bespoke models trained on a specific type of dataset for even better fake news). With the open model, we would know how to better fight such attacks.

<comment><USER8> plus they have opened source the code, and the training cost of the full model is evaluated at 45k$, which is not much for a state actor or a serious org of any kind

<comment><USER9> what would they do with it? It is a text decorator, it can't make sense of itself. maybe they can make 1000 fake facebook accounts that post a lot. still, i doubt facebook uses text to detect bots, its easier to use ip/network patterns.

<comment><USER8> it's not a text decorator, it's a text generator

<comment><USER9> i mean, it is not some sentient AI. it takes some text and decorates it with 100 other sentences. most of the time it doesnt make any sense and it doesnt have intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Req'd reading: "OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues" by CMU Professor Zachary Lipton, [http://approximatelycorrect.com/2019/02/17/openai- trains-lan...](http://approximatelycorrect.com/2019/02/17/openai-trains- language-model-mass-hysteria-ensues/)

A salient quote from the article:

> However, what makes OpenAI's decision puzzling is that it seems to presume > that OpenAI is somehow special—that their technology is somehow different > than what everyone else in the entire NLP community is doing—otherwise, what > is achieved by withholding it? However, from reading the paper, it appears > that this work is straight down the middle of the mainstream NLP research. > To be clear, it is good work and could likely be published, but it is > precisely the sort of science-as-usual step forward that you would expect to > see in a month or two, from any of tens of equally strong NLP labs.

<comment><USER11> Suffice to say, most of what comes out of OpenAI is vanilla type work that I haven't seen go beyond academic research labs. They do spend a lot of time on PR and making stuff look pretty, I guess.

<comment><USER12> To be fair they've also released some useful tools, such as the AI Gym.

<comment><USER13> To be fair, all of their useful tools have been deprecated or in 'maintenance mode'. See [https://github.com/openai/gym](https://github.com/openai/gym)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My conspiracy theory on this: This entire fiasco is actually an experiment to gauge public reaction to this kind of release strategy. Eventually the point will come where the choice of releasing a model may have real ethical considerations, so they are test driving the possibilities with a relatively harmless model.

Given the, in my opinion, huge overreaction to all of this, I fear this may only encourage AI research groups to be more secretive with their work.

<comment><USER15> OpenAI is just trying to make a buck. Just like most other programmers, they don't give a damn about how damaging their code is going to be.

<comment><USER7> OpenAI is literally a non-profit.

<comment><USER16> Not saying I agree with the parent but while OpenAI is non-profit it's owned by billionaires whose companies directly benefit from their research.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps they kept it closed source because they sold it to one of those companies? Non-profits are allowed to sell things, after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like the work OpenAI has done in the past, so please take my complaints as gentle complaints:

\- a very small percentage of generated samples 'read well'

\- I Don't see any evidence of 'understanding', at least in the sense that BERT can identify original nouns that pronouns refer to (anaphora resolution): amazing to get state of the art results

\- the 'we aren't going to share code and results' thing reminds me of the movie The Wizard of Oz: trust them that they developed cool technology

\- in 6 months, high school students might be getting similar results, given how fast our field is moving forward: this makes the danger concern less important in my opinion

This whole thing seems like a throwback to how science was conducted 10 years ago - ancient times in our fast moving tech world.

<comment><USER19> > the 'we aren't going to share code and results' thing reminds me of the > movie The Wizard of Oz: trust them that they developed cool technology

And this is where it stands: They claim to have something.

They won't release it.

If they had _nothing_ but a somewhat creative streak to make up the results, the world would look exactly the same as it would if they had something.

Them lying is the least hypothesis here.

<comment><USER20> Given that experts in the field seem to think this is an incremental step forward, OpenAI has already demonstrated a track record of doing things probably more impressive than this, and the massive loss of credibility that would come with being caught in a lie here, on priors we should expect they're not lying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this blog post response was pretty good:

OpenAI's GPT-2: the model, the hype, and the controversy [https://towardsdatascience.com/openais-gpt-2-the-model- the-h...](https://towardsdatascience.com/openais-gpt-2-the-model-the-hype-and- the-controversy-1109f4bfd5e8)

I think this is a better response than the article submitted here. There are ethical concerns and risk with these releases and it's probably a good idea to start considering them. What they did release seems reasonable in context.

I find the argument that making the technology as open as possible leading to people taking a skeptical look at things not very convincing. Recent election interference, disinformation campaigns, and the general inability for the public to disambiguate fact from fiction seems like decent evidence that just because people know something can be faked doesn't lead to critical thinking - confirmation bias is strong.

<comment><USER9> as an FOSSuser you should know that many parts of opensource software used to be outright illegal (e.g. pgp). opensource democratized all of them

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I strongly disagree with OP's logic when he says - Photoshop hasn't negatively affected the world "precisely because everyone knows about Photoshop." \- the crux of his argument. IMO the main reason Photoshop hasn't affected the world negatively is because it is HARD to make convincing fakes - precisely what OpenAI are ensuring by not releasing the model.

Notice that this reasoning doesn't take into account whether or not GPT-2 can actually negatively impact the world. It says as long as people are aware that the text they are reading could be fake/AI-generated, we'll be fine. I think people are already aware of that. I don't see how releasing the pre-trained model will help with that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Another thing that has not been discussed yet: OpenAI does not want to be responsible for the output of this model. Can you imagine the headlines? "OpenAI released a text generating AI and it is racist as hell". People should have learned their lesson after the Tay fiasco.

I am ambiguous on the issue of release vs. non-release, but the mockery and derision they faced makes me ashamed to contribute to this field. No good faith is assumed, but projection of PR-blitzes and academic penis envy.

Perhaps AI researchers are simply not the best for dealing with ethical and societal issues. Look at how long it took to get decent research into fairness, and its current low focus in industry. If you were in predictive modeling 10 years ago, it is likely you contributed to promoting and institutionalizing bias and racism. Do you want these same people deciding on responsible disclosure standards? Does the head of Facebook AI or those that OK'd project Dragonfly or Maven have any real authority on the responsible ethical use of new technology?

I am not too sure about the impact of a human-level text generating tool. It may throw us back to the old days of email spam (before Bayesian spam filters). It is always easier to troll and derail than it is to employ such techniques for good. Scaling up disinformation campaigns is a real threat to our democracies (or maybe this decade-old technique is already in use at scale by militaries, and this work is merely showing what the AI community's love for military funding looks like).

I am sure that the impact of the NIPS abbreviation is an order of magnitude lower than that of this technology, yet companies like NVIDIA used Neurips in their marketing PR before it was officially introduced (made them look like the good guys for a profit). How is that for malaligning ML research for PR purposes? Would the current vitriol displayed in online discussons be appreciated when there was a name change proposal for the betterment of society?

Disclaimer: this comment in favor of OpenAI was written by a real human. Could you tell for sure now you know the current state of the art? What would these comment sections look like if one person controls 20% of the accounts here?

<comment><USER23> > It is always easier to troll and derail than it is to employ such techniques > for good.

Curious-- what possible good comes with the ability to generate grammatically correct text devoid of actual meaning?

Sure, you could generate an arbitrary essay, but it's less an essay _about_ anything and more just an arrangement of words that happen to statistically relate to each other. Markov chains already do this and while the output looks technically correct, you're not going to learn or interpret anything from it.

Same goes with things like autocomplete. You could generate an entire passage just accepting its suggestions. It would pass a grammar test but doesn't _mean_ anything.

Chatbots are an obvious application, but how is that "good," or any different than the Harlow experiment performed on humans? Fooling people into developing social relationships with an algorithm (however short or trivial) is cruel and unethical beyond belief.

A photoshopped image might be pleasant or stimulating to look at, and does have known problems in terms of normalizing a fictitious reality. But fake text? What non-malicious use can there possibly be?

<comment><USER24> Current application: Better character - and token completion helps make it easier for people with physical disabilities to interact with computers. [http://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/papers/uist2000.pdf](http://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/papers/uist2000.pdf) (pdf)

Research progress: Better compression measures the progress to general intelligence. [http://mattmahoney.net/dc/rationale.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/rationale.html)

Future application: Meaningful completion of questions, leading to personalized learning material for students all over the world. If only there was an OpenQuora.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't understand why the choice of opensourcing seems to be so binary for some. It feels as if it's either:

A-Leave everything open and hope that the global interoperability and cathartic flow of information creates a magic utopia for humanity.

B-Everyone incorporates into the soviet-union/chinese-firewall for protection.

There are manageable, more analogue alternatives too, like reducing the risk and probability of a disaster by trusting a human's judgement to limit access to potentially malicious code; which is exactly what they're doing in this case.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm agnostic about the short term effects of OpenAI's decision, but I wonder if and hope that the eventual equilibrium will look more like things did before the internet.

In, say, the 1960's, if someone stood on a street corner with a sign saying "The End Is Nigh," most people would react with a shrug. They'd know that if the world were ending they'd probably hear about it from a trusted source like a newspaper or broadcaster.

I'm not worried about being tricked by fakes because I know that the NYT will be doing infinitely more than I ever could to verify hugely important facts, and won't overreact to random bits of media. If you're not someone I know personally, and you're not a trusted source of public information, you may as well be holding a sign on a street corner, no matter how realistic the image or text on your sign.

I think there may be vast unintended consequences that have to do with scale, but intuitively it doesn't feel like the "who to trust" problem is more than a matter of cultural behaviors around trust adjusting to the internet age.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, if this tech was the WMD that OpenAI says it is, the NYT would know about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't buy the argument that open-sourcing would allow citizens to better fight this. Let's be realistic. If the full model is published, for every one person who studies the model to understand how to fight false propaganda, there will be 5,000 who use it to shitposting for lulz.

Also, as everyone's pointing out, the cat's out of the bag. Whatever OpenAI does, the same ability will be in the hands of state actors, and large corporations, and soon not-too-large corporations and dedicated individuals, probably in a few years. So basically whatever OpenAI does today doesn't really matter.

We might as well think about totally different ways of building online communities when everyone has shitpointing sockpuppet engines powered by AWS/Azure DeepLearningToolKit Trial Version.

<comment><USER6> Or a neural net for detecting fake text.

How insane would it be if the birth of AGI comes from GANs of fake news?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Everything important is open sourced already.

The article cites replication as important and then paradoxically argues for releasing the model in lieu of replicating the training and verifying the result.

This is the AI equivalent of a pharmaceutical company releasing all their research and patents and then taking heat for not providing reagents and doing the organic synthesis for everyone too.

<comment><USER7> The difference is a pharmaceutical company is for-profit, while OpenAI's (a non-profit) mission ([https://openai.com/about/](https://openai.com/about/)) is "to build safe AGI, and ensure AGI's benefits are _as widely and evenly distributed as possible_." (emphasis mine)

<comment><USER29> I don't see how corporate structure changes anything. It's a huge gift of tons of work, which is far and away the hard part. They've enabled literally anyone who wants to to train their own model on whatever source material they want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The argument in the article is unconvincing, and shows a distinct failure to think on a societal level or on time lines beyond a few weeks. The calculus seems simple to me. The potential harms from not open sourcing the model completely - minimal. Potential harms from open sourcing it completely - greater than minimal. Hence their decision.

OpenAI should be lauded for making this decision. If you think about the sort of people who would choose to work at OpenAI, it is clear this was a very tough choice for them.

</comment><comment><USER31> To me it feels like everything about OpenAI's media strategy is calculated and specifically designed to maximize good PR with the public. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER32> It's very weird to me that a team of researchers who are credibly doing good work and are making an effort to clearly explain their research garners such suspicion.

Are you similarly skeptical of Deepmind, Distill, or Two Minute Papers?

Honestly, the norm of providing two versions of your research (arxiv and blog post) makes ML easier to follow and is something I would like more academics to attempt

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's the most thoughtful piece I've been able to find on the controversial topic so far: [https://www.fast.ai/2019/02/15/openai- gp2/](https://www.fast.ai/2019/02/15/openai-gp2/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Fortunately, we have outstanding and trustworthy corporate citizens like Google, Facebook, Uber and others that will continue AI research safely, ethically and responsibly without the risk of such technologies falling into the unsteady hands of the public.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sooner or later we will have tools for e.g. Reddit where one specifies a desired outcome of a discussion and lets bots paired up with some optimization algorithm figure out how to get popularity majority based on comments so far in individual threads and drive discussion towards stated goal. Later the same will be used in elections or other public "theaters" that won't matter any longer as humanity will be "cracked", i.e. modeled sufficiently enough to predict/influence average humans with just tiny remains of feelings that something might be wrong which only complete societal outcasts would pursue.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm honestly pretty conflicted here and the best thing that is coming out of this is some healthy debate.

IMHO the strongest argument against publishing it is because its built from Reddit it includes a lot of toxicity... VinayPrabhu originally made that argument here [https://medium.com/@VinayPrabhu/reddit-a-one-word-reason- why...](https://medium.com/@VinayPrabhu/reddit-a-one-word-reason-why-i- support-openais-gpt-2-decision-56b82912443c)

Can't blame them for not opening up that can of PR worms. It could be like a version of Microsoft Tay that can form coherent paragraphs.

The bigger picture is this could be used for some very effective social media manipulation. A bit of clever infrastructure, maybe another generation of improvement and some understanding of human psychology (overton window etc) and managing 100,000 believable human accounts on something like reddit that subtly move debate becomes very doable.

Then again its going to happen anyway so better focus on the defensive techniques now...

</comment><comment><USER37> They did release the model [0]. A smaller-scale version of it. If you want the big one, all you have to do is scrape 45M web pages, and increase the parameters to scale.

What they didn't release is the training corpus and the trained filters. By not releasing these, and focusing on ethics, they are trying to avert attention from the mistake of training a massive cyclops on unfiltered internet text. They probably read a lot of embarrassing text they didn't share, imagine that.

0\. [https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/)

</comment><comment><USER38> <quote>Precisely because everyone knows about Photoshop.</quote> Everyone?! All the non-digital-aware people on this planet, which I assume is the majority, may have never heard about Photoshop, or know what can be done with it. Out of the remaining _digital-aware_ human beings who may well know about Photoshop, how many think about it when seeing a photo. I bet it's a very tiny percentage.

</comment><comment><USER39> Why is there so much focus on just the language generation aspect of this model? The language generation examples are to show how well the model generalized the language it's trained on, but the whole point of releasing the pretrained model is that this model also:

>achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization — all without task-specific training

Every comment I see here and else where is strictly about automatically generating comments, but the real loss of having this model kept private is that it would allow anyone to create very, very good NLP projects right away.

The big problem in ML/"AI" now and going forward is that there is an extreme asymmetry emerging in tech. The start of the last major tech boom was because of "disruption". Any clever hacker with a laptop and developer skills could create a product that would topple a giant. Likewise anyone could learn to do anything that needed to be done on their own computer in their own time. Now that's changing, to even play with these new tools you need special access and corporate support.

Releasing the pretrained model to the public would allow a range of groups that cannot afford to build a model such as this to experiment on their own and achieve state of the art NLP results, not just in language generation but in classification, translation, summarization etc. Some kid in the middle of know where could download this and start messing with ideas about building a chat bot.

The threat is not that some rogue actor will create evil spam bots, but that some small scrappy startup would leverage the same, currently exclusive tools, of large technology companies.

The reason why democratizing AI is important is not because we can better fight off some vague threat, but so that, at least for the near term, individuals and small groups can still reasonably compete with major players in the ML space. And of course the fact that someone who claims openness and that they exist to "ensure AGI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible." Can arbitrarily choose not to do go the other direction just shows that tech is moving in a direction where "disruption" is going to become increasingly less possible, and the future of the industry is going to be controlled by a handful of major players.

</comment><comment><USER40> What's extremely bad for research is that they didn't even release their train and test sets. It's not hard to grab 40GB of text from the web that comes from links with at least +3 votes on reddit. But even if you do that, you won't get the same train/test set, and the same split. So impossible to know if a model is outperforming their model.

<comment><USER41> They tested against standard language modeling benchmarks like PTB and WikiText, so it's entirely possible to compare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Network architectures and trainers are improving quickly so it won't be long before others can create a similar model.

Their ace is having a huge clean dataset of grammatically correct text. This is not about the fine points of grammar, but that the content of the average web page is practically word salad.

</comment><comment><USER43> The fact that this thread is in the site is scary, seems like there are parties interested in a public outcry to make some potentially very harmful tools be released to the public... the question is, why?

</comment><comment><USER44>
      A little learning is a dangerous thing;
      drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
      there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
      and drinking largely sobers us again.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is very nice summary of lot of social media discussion that has been happening. Very thoughtful arguments from people who actually work on this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author doesnt mention the FUD that is being spread through tech media. "AI company is so afraid of its creation, it won't release its source code". Good job helping people understand their AI future. This is a PR stunt. Come on, a little extra spam is not shocking news, and whatever can be used to spread "fake news" can also be used to spread "correct news". Whatever the PR stunt they tried to pull, it is creating a bad narrative for AI.

</comment><comment><USER46> Not releasing the model seems to me to be entirely a PR stunt, and has made me lose a lot of respect for OpenAI.

</comment><comment><USER47> @OpenAI - please, research reputations systems and authorship identification, not fake news generators.

</comment><comment><USER48> Are they planning to change their name to ClosedAI?

</comment><comment><USER49> release the code! you cant stop the signal

<comment><USER7> The _code_ is out ([https://github.com/openai/gpt-2](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2)), just not the larger model itself.

<comment><USER50> Saying 'the code is out' is a little misleading. It's some supporting code for working with a trained model, and a model definition of what is already a standard and widely-implemented architecture. It doesn't include the dataset, the code used to construct the dataset, or perhaps most importantly of all, the code to train a model on a fleet of TPUv3s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is the best publicity they could ever have and it didn't cost them a penny.

There's probably 10 year olds in their bedrooms light years ahead of these guys, certainly from we've seen it's definitely nothing to write home about, but it's all about the marketing and hype, convincing the mass media they've invented the next Terminator.

<comment><USER52> > There's probably [amateurs] light years ahead of these guys

This is not an 80s hacker movie and amateur hackers can get into the DoD computers using a public phone or whatever. This is actual research funded with millions of dollars done by people with years of experience in the field. I find this whole meme in the programming world of some random programmer being able to work miracles and be super advanced kind of dumb.

<comment><USER53> Is it a meme in the programming world? I've only encountered it in Hollywood and TV. It's like how every on-screen computer beeps and boops on every interaction: it's a dramatic device. No one does that IRL because it would drive you bananas in like ten seconds.

Cf. Glyph's "The Television Writer's Guide to Cryptography" [https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/01/television-writer- gu...](https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/01/television-writer-guide-to- cryptography.html)

<comment><USER52> Yeah, I've had a few CS friends and internet people say things like that, like there is probably some programmer who solved the NP problem but no one knows it and of course there's the elite hacker who can do anything he wants thing; not really seriously but enough that it seems to be a meme in the CS world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> 1) What really bothered me personally about GPT2 is that they made it look sciency by putting out a paper that looks like other scientific papers -- but then they undermine a key aspect of science: reproducability/verifiability. I struggle to believe 'science' that cannot be verified/replicated.

2) In addition to this, they stand on the shoulder of giants and profit from a long tradition of researchers and even companies making their data and tools available. but "open"AI chose to go down a different path.

3) which makes me wonder what they are trying to add to the discussion? the discussion about the dangers of AI is fully ongoing. by not releasing background info also means that openAI is not contributing to how dangerous AI can be approached. openAI might or might not have a model that is closer to some worrisome threshold. but we don't know for sure. so imv, what openAI primarily brought to the discussion are some vague fears against technological progress -- which doesn't help anyone.

<comment><USER41> Re 1: GPT2 is no different from most stuffs by DeepMind. DeepMind, in general, does not release code, data, or model. DeepMind does not seem to get reproducibility complaints, supposedly "key aspect of science".</comment></comment>


Introducing GraphQL Support for Insomnia - <AUTHOR> https://insomnia.rest/blog/introducing-graphql <comment><USER2> I'm the creator of Insomnia and I'd love to hear your feedback if you try it out! I'm still a novice to GraphQL, so I'd like to make sure that it accommodates all use cases.

~ Gregory

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been using Insomia for a while, and really, really like it (hence why I submitted this post here :D).

The GraphQL support looks good, and will try it out with our backend.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, thanks for posting :)

Be sure to submit any issues you may have via Slack/GitHub/Email

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is fantastic news as I loved your tool, but it fell out of favor as I startee using graphQL more.

Definitely looking forward to ditching graphiQL!

Does it support imports for graph. cool?

<comment><USER4> I'm curious as to why you want to ditch graphiQL. I find graphiQL to be one of the best things about the GraphQL ecosystem.

<comment><USER3> Purely aesthetics. I'm a weirdo, but a pretty UI really enhances my development experience. I'll use a less functional product if it pleases my pupils, like Hyper over iTerm2. (Not saying insomnia is less functional, it's just very pretty :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps I'm missing it, but it appears this only works with POST requests?

<comment><USER6> You are probably correct. The server-side GQL implementations I have worked on expect only POST requests, and expect each requests' body to contain a query or a mutation.

<comment><USER5> Good point, looks like my implementation of GraphQL was't correct. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> GraphQL actually _does_ support GET requests, but most clients (like Apollo) don't support it out of the box.

[http://graphql.org/learn/serving-over- http/](http://graphql.org/learn/serving-over-http/)

<comment><USER5> That's what I had though, was just surprised by the lack of client support.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you call yourself Ninja/Hacker? - <AUTHOR> Do you like a job post "We looking for JavaScript Ninja" or "We are hiring RoR Hacker"? Or some blog title "I am UX Hacker and love to.."?<p>I personally feel annoying. I prefer to use "Talent" or similar term. What do you think? <comment><USER2> Nope, "Ninja"/"Rockstar" on a job posting automatically makes me not want to apply. "Hacker" is alright, though I never refer to myself as a hacker.

On a side note seeing "we want people who get things/sh!t done" on a job posting really bothers me too... but that might just be me.

</comment><comment><USER3> No.

If you have to call yourself a hacker, you probably aren't one.

And if you call yourself a ninja, you're _doing it wrong._

Whenever I see that kind of thing in a job posting it always seems like an effort to be exploitative.

... of course I never qualify for any of those jobs but then I would never call myself a hacker or a ninja or rock star anyway.

</comment><comment><USER4> When I see the term ninja, wizard or hacker in a job title it suggests to me that the people recruiting are looking for above average developer. I imagine, the rationale behind that is to do with looking for someone who will bring increased efficiency and productivity by being very intimate with a given technology and deliver value from the start. I am not saying this is the case at all but it seems like a plausible rationale behind such words. However, there is quite a stigma attached to these terms and most of the time the interpretation depends on the context. Many recruiters or companies feel that these terms resonate with developers and work for them like a bait for fish. I would definitely approach them sceptically and seek clarification of what the role involves. Probably the biggest issue with these terms is how do you actually quantify qualities of ninja or someone who has talent? Everything depends on context and these are quite murky waters. Software developer or Web developer as a job title sends much clearer picture of the company recruiting needs.

</comment><comment><USER5> The term ninja makes me think that the people running the company don't understand software development and have relegated it to a category filled with mysterious doings. I expect the same sort of folks to call it wizardry or magic.

Hacker isn't as clear-cut a term because there are several different trends in the industry using the term in different ways. Are you a 40 year unix veteran who hacks things together or are you a front-end hipster-stack web developer claiming the title? No, most likely the folks using this term on a job posting are trying to seem youthful, but I can't be certain. I just avoid it as much as possible and, like the others commenting, prefer traditional terms that have legitimate and clear use in the industry.

Think about what is implied for a software architect role vs a web developer. There's much more differentiation in the denotation of those terms than ninja/hacker.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the term Software Developer.

I wont apply to any job post with the words Ninja or Rockstar.

Hacker... I would read it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I find it embarrassing, but I chalk it up to a lack of experience. I always assumed that "hacker", as a term of regard and a social signal, could only be granted by others -- it was gauche to use it to refer to oneself.

Me, I write programs.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm transported back to 2008 whenever I hear "Ninja." Same with "Rockstar."

"Hacker" doesn't bother me.

Developer, Programmer, Designer, Engineer. Stick with the fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nope.

Seems that i see more and more ninjas and hackers everywhere.

Funny thing is that some don't want an engineer, as somehow nova-days an engineer is less then a hacker or a ninja in someones eyes.

<comment><USER10> Well if you see more and more of them, they clearly aren't ninjas :|

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> King S(&* of F&^% Mountain

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree with you.

</comment><comment><USER13> i prefer the term "desk jockey".</comment>