Maternal fluoride exposure during pregnancy and IQ scores in offspring - <AUTHOR> https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2748634 <comment><USER2> Separate discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20739540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20739540)

</comment><comment><USER3> The previous thread was very critical of this article's statistics.

Reposting my comment:

When I see a headline like this my instinct is to jump to "overfitting". In a study like this they use P=0.05 as their cut off for significance. One in 20 such studies would be expected to give meaningless results. But they had the choice of cohort (all kids or boys and girls separately), so 1 in 10. They measured urine concentrations of fluorine at three time points during pregnancy, which makes for 7 different potential combinations of input variables, for a total of 14 different potential analyses, where 1 in 20 is expected to be significant. Of course, they didn't preregister, so who knows whether their analysis changed on the fly..

<comment><USER4> Those multiple comparisons are quite obvious from the text, so a rigorous reviewer may have asked them to do a Bonferroni correction. Not sure if this was the case though.

<comment><USER3> You're right, and one would hope that happened. But not knowing the field or journal norms, all I could do was search the text for "Bonferroni" and "regist". In my lab if additional analysis was requested by the reviewer and we did it, we would have added a sentence to the manuscript.

But not having published in this field or journal, I have no idea what their norms are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is always a lot of skepticism around studies that show fluoridation is bad for health. Question though, shouldn't we need strong evidence that _adding_ fluoride to the water is safe, rather than the other way around? Even if it has some (questionably) positive effects, that doesn't make it right to add an arbitrary chemical to a fundamental substance needed for life. While we are at it, why don't we add iodine, vitamin D, magnesium, etc?

<comment><USER6> What kind of safety threshold do you require?

Acute, chronic, cancer studies, Alzheimer's links? Comparison vs bad dental hygiene in the above? What is the reference group you propose?

How much would you pay for this relatively superb level of detail? (Which is on par with 50+ years of longitudinal and cross sectional studies. About 1 billion USD.)

<comment><USER7> No need to pay a cent if you don't add it to the water. Anecdotally it appears difficult to find a toothpaste than doesn't contain fluoride sufficient to strengthen tooth enamel & bone via its incorporation over time and there are other sources in food and drink (tea). Fluoride has no other role in human metabolism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you're water conscious like me that doesn't want anything "added" to the water, consider buying a home distiller. Just search for distiller in amazon for some ideas of what you get. It takes 3-5 hours for about a gallon. If you just queue them up during your work day. Just store the water in large glass mason jars and throw them in the fridge. Kick the plastic bottled water habits. It's not just BPA but tons of plasticizers that leech into your fav. bottled waters. My wife and I switched to this after we drank some Fiji from a gas station, after it had warmed up - all you can taste is plastic - even with the BPA free stickers. In the end we decided you can't really trust the companies distributing plastic bottled water because you never know which crate is left out in 105 degree summer heat during its various transitions. That's pretty disgusting if you think about it.

<comment><USER9> If you do go down this track you need to re-mineralise the water as pure water is damaging to the body as pure water will leach all the electrolytes from your body.

<comment><USER10> Not if you're also eating food.

<comment><USER11> Most people are already deficient in salt and magnesium, I think more is likely better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All the tap water in Australia is fluoridated. You would be considered a bit odd if you drink filtered water instead of tap water (bar say SA where the water tastes bad). All other things equal, we should expect 3&4 yearolds to have a 3.66 higher IQ than those, say, in NSW, where the water is treated and tastes good enough to drink?

Surely there are some population effects or something else going on here, or the effect, especially later on in life, evens out between the groups.

<comment><USER13> Particularly with the nationwide school test scoring, there should be statistically significant score differences in QLD (only recently fluoridated).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/drinking- fluoridated...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/drinking-fluoridated- water-during-pregnancy-may-lower-iq-sons-controversial-study-says):

 _" If the work holds up—a big "if," as the paper's findings are already coming under heavy scrutiny—it could hold serious implications for public policy."_

Why should scientific data be doubted simply because its implications, if taken seriously, would be to cause more inconvenience or less money-making in our lives?

<comment><USER15> Because it would be too easy to influence public policy by any interested parties. We already know corporations sponsor papers for their PR, this just means it would become a simple tool to influence policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Barely significant results like this are suspect. See [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2017/7/31/16021654/p-values-statistical-significance-redefine-0005) for a good overview. TLDR: the smart money is on this result failing to reproduce.

</comment><comment><USER17> Reposting a more skeptical comment to provide some balanced responses: [https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/cslscx/is_f...](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/cslscx/is_fluoride_potentially_neurotoxic/exfkypd/)

>Sci-Hub Link: [https://sci- hub.se/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.1728](https://sci- hub.se/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.1728)

>Study itself: [https://sci- hub.se/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.1729](https://sci- hub.se/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.1729)

>A decent amount of this is focused on Black Tea consumption during pregnancy which is apparently a problem: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808922/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4808922/)

>Collected skeptical commentary at the Science Media Centre: [https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to- study-...](https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study- looking-at-maternal-exposure-to-fluoride-and-iq-in-children/)

>First, the claim that maternal fluoride exposure is associated with a decrease in IQ of children is false. This finding was non-significant (but not reported in the abstract). They did observe a decrease for male children and a slight increase in IQ (but non-significant) for girls. This is an example of subgroup analysis – which is frowned upon in these kinds of studies because it is nearly always possible to identify some subgroup which shows an effect if the data are noisy. Here the data are very noisy. A further issue is that the estimate of the decrease in IQ for male offspring is unfeasibility large – at 4-5 IQ points. This level of average deficit would be readily detectable in previous studies and is likely a reflection of bias or very noisy data (the interval estimate here is very wide). As high fluoride areas are not randomly assigned there are also countless uncontrolled confounders. While they did correct for a limited set of covariates, the overall effect was non- significant with and without covariates. In summary it is not correct to imply that the data here show evidence of a link between maternal fluoride exposure and IQ. The average change in IQ is not statistically significant.

</comment><comment><USER18> _Estimated Fluoride Intake and IQ A 1-mg increase in fluoride intake was associated with a 3.66 (95% CI, −7.16 to −0.15; P = .04) lower FSIQ score among boys and girls_

<comment> broski-billups I'm on Detroit water and just checked the latest water test I could find -- .57ppm fluoride. If I did the math right, there is 1mg fluoride in every .46 gallons of water.

<comment> broski-billups Additionally, the maximum level allowed in my city is 16mg per gallon, and has been since I was born. However, in the year I was born(1992) the maximum measured level per the city test was 48mg per gallon.</comment></comment></comment>


Simultaneous Discovery of Vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/02/simultaneous_di.html <comment><AUTHOR> > This is not uncommon. It's almost like there's something in the air that > makes a particular vulnerability shallow and easy to discover.

It seems as though similar things happen in science. Many big discoveries are often nearly simultaneous (even if only one party gets most of the credit). The expansion of the Universe was discovered by Hubble and Lemaître, for example. Calculus developed by Newton and Leibniz. So I guess this is a societal/communications phenomena.</comment>


PHP will switch to git - <AUTHOR> http://news.php.net/php.internals/55293

<comment><USER2> Git appears to be fast becoming the standard DVCS.

Is there any reason that all reasonably well-run projects should not be using git?

GitHub seems vastly superior to BitBucket, and git itself seems pretty much isomorphic to hg (albeit with worse syntax). (This ignores darcs, bzr, etc., but those never seemed terribly competitive for mindshare.) Furthermore, the network effects (with pull requests on Github, not having to have people learn a new DVCS to commit to your project, etc.) seem huge.

Aside from some new innovation on the scale of switching from a centralized VCS to a distributed VCS, I can't imagine anything that would cause me to try to start a project in something other than git, learn another VCS other than git, or try to convert someone to another VCS other than git. Is this the wrong attitude?

Is there any chance that Python might see the light and switch to git from hg? At this stage, choosing hg over git for reasons that seem increasingly irrelevant (better Windows support at the time, written in C/shell rather than Python) is starting to look like a worse and worse historical decision.

<comment><USER3> I'm a pious hg user - even gave git a good run (mostly because of Github). I can't get over how _amazing_ mercurial patch-queues are. Big win. I love mercurial's easy plugin development and hooks (thank you Python); I love how many awesome plugins exist for mercurial. On and on and on.

<comment><USER4> I keep seeing people talk about all the good of hg over git, but I haven't seen anything that really sets it apart.

If you were doing a sales pitch, what would you show that hg has over git? What are some specific plugins that ease your development or release process? What are some real-world advantages of the hg patch-queue over how git handles pulls?

I'm honestly curious. I just haven't seen anything to sell me on why hg is so much better than git (or even the other way around).

<comment><USER5> From the perspective of a longtime hg user who switched jobs and is now in git land: hg is easier to pick up and start using than git.

git lets you do _incredible things_ with your tree, things that hg forbids or makes impossible. But git also lets you make big mistakes, and isn't very nice about helping you fix them.

hg, on the other hand, has a much nicer learning curve. As an example, try to forget _everything_ you know about version control and type `hg help push` and `git help push`.

Which one would you be able to parse? Personally, when I read "The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +, followed by the source ref <src>, followed by a colon :, followed by the destination ref <dst>", I want to punch a baby.

At the end of the day, if I want to transition a team away from SVN onto a DVCS, I'd pick hg -- just because it lets a team Get Shit Done without spending a ton of time learning a new VCS. But if I'm starting my own project? I'd pick git in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The votes are a _stark_ contrast to those of the core Python developers when they were voting on which DVCS to migrate to[1]—although understandably they favoured Mercurial, they _disfavoured_ git. (Bazaar got a good share of votes as well.) The victor's margin was much smaller.

This was all early-2009, though. I wonder if git's increasing popularity has swayed the core PHP developers?

[1] [http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#why-mercurial- over-...](http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/#why-mercurial-over-other- dvcss)

<comment><USER7> Mercurial is written in Python - as a Python developer I can attest to the phenomenon of Python developers preferring software written in Python. Part of this is rational, part of this is pure "my tribe" bias (by the way, I use and like git, don't know Mercurial at all.)

PHP developers are less likely to be affected by that.

<comment><USER8> > PHP developers are less likely to be affected by that.

We won't know until someone writes a DVCS in PHP..

<comment><USER9> hmmmmmmm.....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rasmus gave a talk yesterday and I asked if they were switching to github. He said they'd likely switch to git (it's now happening, apparently), but not github because it can't do ACLs and the PHP project has thousands of people who need commit access to various places.

<comment><USER11> And plain Git can do ACLs? I didn't know that.

<comment><USER12> I assume you already know this, i.e. the above was sarcasm, but: No, it can't. But since remote access to Git most commonly happens over SSH, ACLs can be implemented by additional tools which serve as the login shell and filter the git commands the client wants to run. The best such tool right now is gitolite, building on concepts established by gitosis. The GitHub-like open source web repo manager Gitorious also implements an ACL system that way.

<comment><USER11> I was pretty sure, but I never know when I've missed some huge piece of functionality in a program. Thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is no point in git-vs-hg debate. Main point is that PHP people are switching to DVCS.

Git is often chosen because it is more popular, has larger community and stuff-written-about-it.

Also, it has GitHub, which can be attributed for most of the huge boost of git popularity.

That does not neccessarily mean that git is better. Still, it is good enough for most of us (and them), and there is just no point in debating. PHP vote was not about which-is-better. It as about - which-one-to-chose.

</comment><comment><USER14> Some folk jumping to conclusions in the comments here ...

The linked message is one post on an internal mailing list. It was intended as a summary of the votes, for the voters. It has no broader context of the situation they face or no links to any debates that might have happened before because of the audience it was aimed at.

If anyone from PHP internals wants to tell us about the background of this decision that would be really interesting.

<comment><USER15> This discussion has been going on for a about 1.5 months. Even before that actually, but the discussion that led to this move starts here:

[http://marc.info/?l=php- internals&m=131275031209004&...](http://marc.info/?l=php- internals&m=131275031209004&w=2)

\- PHP Internals Lurker

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> i hope they'll follow the trend and move it to github!

<comment><USER17> Why?

<comment><USER16> What treffer said. It'll be like the old days of sourceforge, just better and simpler. I love how easy it is to commit to projects on github. Also love the idea of a centralized place to follow all your favorite projects. If linux can be on github i would think php could as well.

<comment><USER18> >I love how easy it is to commit to projects on github

It's as simple to commit projects to github as it is to sf, bitbucket, google code, etc. Wait... you need to set up ssh credentials on github... sorry, it's more difficult to commit a project to github than it is to most of the alternatives.

>Also love the idea of a centralized place to follow all your favorite projects.

It's good that we like different things. I love the FACT that there can't be such place, it's technically not possible, fortunately!

>If linux can be on github i would think php could as well.

Linux is not on github, Linus Torvalds has one of his branches of the linux kernel on github, doesn't mean that he doesn't push his commits to other places too, which he certainly does. Also, linux is much more than the kernel, and its bits are hosted in literally thousands of different places. Finally, you can maintain your branch of the linux kernel wherever you wish, there's no mystical force forcing everybody to use Linus', you can use whatever kernel build you want from whatever sources you want. So saying "linux is on github" is a rather vague sentence.

Don't get me wrong, I like github, I would hate not having a reason to. It appears to me that most of the people don't relaly know why they like github. Because it's popular maybe?

<comment><USER19> nothing to do with being "cool". Github have created a great piece of management software to view and manage your git repositories. It's easy to use and that is why its popular not used because its popular. Git itself is popular because its easier to use than SVN and is decentralized which is very useful.

<comment><USER20> > Github have created a great piece of management software to view and manage > _your git repositories_

Therein lies the problem, and why it's not a good collaboration space for everyone (as has been implied elsewhere in this thread). I won't use it simply because I dislike dealing with git, for example. Yes, it's a great tool if you want to use git. The mentality I've seen become more prevalent over the last year to two years, however, is that you _must_ be on Github to "do open source right"--setting aside the obvious silliness of that, it does still exist in a lot of places.

If they supported hg with the same infrastructure, I'd consider switching off of bitbucket, but given the Github folks' public behaviors in the past, it wouldn't be a guarantee. I've been treated very well by Atlassian and don't think particularly highly of the Github guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I, for one, am happy it's not the other way round

</comment><comment><USER22> PHP should switch to Django instead.

<comment><USER23> Haha. You beat me to it!

<comment><USER22> I went from 999 to 992. I guess I should have kept my mouth shut, but it was worth it. But tbh, I have nothing against PHP; it was just a joke.

<comment><USER22> Wow, I went from 999 to 964.. that's 35 down-votes! This is insane, but not surprising coming from PHP folks. (Too serious to laugh, too stupid to switch, too stubborn to think, too old to learn, amen.)

<comment><USER24> It isn't PHP folks who are down voting you, it's the Hacker News community. You didn't add anything to this conversation, so you were down voted. Please read the guidelines: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

If you want that sort of conversation, go to reddit.

<comment><USER23> Point taken. :) Sorry. Removing my post (and taking most of this thread with it.)

EDIT: Except I didn't realize I can't do that after folks have replied. Anyways, it's pretty clear a lot of folks didn't find it funny or appreciate it. I went from about 90 karma to 55 or so. Sorry to be a bother.

<comment><USER24> No problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Just learn from your experience and move on. We try to keep a high level of conversation here. Please try to keep things civil, and make comments that actually add to the conversation. Thanks :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Announcing The Fog Creek Fellowship - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fogcreek.com/announcing-the-fog-creek-fellowship/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FogCreekBlog+%28Fog+Creek+Blog%29 <comment><USER2> > Additionally, all fellows will have 1:1 pair programming sessions with their > mentors. Fog Creek currently has a 0.4% acceptance rate for full-time > developers; The fellows will be working with the best in the industry.

I understand what fogcreek was tryiing to communicate here but I chuckled at this as it flies in the face of something joel said about how everyone thinks they are hiring the top 1%

> > [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html)

On a more serious note....Congratulations to FogCreek, atleast they are trying to do something here rather than just complaining about it on internet forums:)

<comment><USER3> I was about to make a note of this but you found a much better example from co-founder's (sort of defunt) blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Fellowship?

It's my personal opinion, and it might not be very popular, but I've never seen a company making such ho-hum products being so pompous as Fog Creek. (Well, StackOverflow is great. But it's not a Fog Creek business per se, and it's probably more due to Jeff).

One might say 37 Signals, but 37 Signals has written New York Time best- selling books, created the most celebrated web framework of the last decade, and has a bunch of web products people love to use. Plus, I don't find them much pompous anyway, just good at self-promotion, which is a different thing.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, we use Kiln and Fogbugz at work, and they're not the greatest.

Honestly, I don't care if it's a male or female who does it, I just want them (especially Kiln) to work at an acceptable speed. Waiting 30 seconds for any given page to load gets old fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great initiative. Reading Joel's blog was a fun and inspiring part of growing up in the programming world. As a woman in CS, I look forward to see this expanded to allow more of us to participate, not just NYC residents.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great firm, but I still can't ever imagine wanting to (or being compelled to) eat lunch with the rest of my team every day.

<comment><USER8> The developers last company I worked at just naturally had lunch together almost every day. It wasn't mandatory and often some folks would go and meet friends or do their own thing for lunch, but overwhelmingly most of us ate together. Honestly, I really loved it. It really helped us to get to know each other outside of the work we were doing. It was also common for the non- developers at the company to also join us for lunch, which I thought was awesome. There was no sense of separation or exclusiveness.

Every day may seem like a bit much, but if you don't want to eat lunch with your team 3, 4, or even 5 days in a row, maybe you're not working with the right people...

<comment><USER9> > There was no sense of separation or exclusiveness.

Even for the people who didn't eat with the group every day? I notice that those people tend to get excluded over time. Not on purpose, necessarily. It's human nature to see things in terms of "part of the tribe" and "not part of the tribe".

> maybe you're not working with the right people..

This depends on a lot of factors. Even if you absolutely love everybody you work with, you may not want to eat lunch with them every day. For example, you work in an open office environment and see, hear and talk to them for 8-12 hours every day. Some would argue that, under those conditions, taking an hour in the middle of the day to be by yourself or to meet with people you don't see quite so often would be considered healthy.

On the other hand, if you all work in private offices 8-12 hours every day, then taking an hour and socializing with your co-workers sounds fantastic.

<comment><USER8> It was a small office. When people went for lunch they just yelled and anybody who wanted to join them did.

> Some would argue that, under those conditions, taking an hour in the middle > of the day to be by yourself or to meet with people you don't see quite so > often would be considered healthy.

That's certainly true, but I was more responding to the idea that somebody would actively avoid it. I definitely took a lunch by myself with my kindle not infrequently, but I certainly didn't go out of my way to avoid lunch with my coworkers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A female developer I once employed was from Singapore. She told me that in Singapore there is no noticeable gender discrepancy in IT.

How accurate was she? I don't know. If she was correct, then it suggests that the enormous over-representation in IT in the US and some other countries may be due solely to cultural reasons.

<comment><USER11> That is literally the only thing that could explain the issue. We know that women are just as capable at the job as men. There is no biological reason. That only leaves culture.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, but it's not necessarily "bad culture".

E.g women might culturally just prefer other jobs in the US compared to Singapore. If more women are into Biology or Math and less in IT or Physics in some country, it doesn't mean the said country's culture has to change to achieve 50-50 men/women in all professions.

The main issue is: what makes something a valid part of culture as opposed to a bad part of culture we need to change? Culture doesn't just grow from opression, but also from preferences, historical accidents, etc. Should we abolish Cosmopolitan and Men's Health and have everyone read the same magazine (say, Wired)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
         In the past, we've focused on our intern pipeline
         by recruiting heavily from schools with high
         percentages of female students. We've hosted and
         sponsored hackathons and events with a focus on women
         in tech. We provide continuing education programs for
         female employees who want to learn how to code. These
         efforts have helped some, but it's not enough.

This topic has become VERY popular of late and is considered by most people to be such a worthy cause. Can I be a voice of dissent?

If you've tried this hard to hire your fair share of female developers and you still haven't been able to do it, is it possible that trying to force it to happen may be the wrong approach? Perhaps it is the case that there just are not females who want to be developers at Fog Creek.

The problem with equality, even equal opportunity, is that it is not realistic (the world doesn't naturally provide equal opportunity) and it creates as much discrimination as it purports to abolish.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ugh.. Disgusting. What about other disparities? This is a company that is famously elitist and now they seem to have jumped on this 'gender parity' bandwagon for brownie points.

Lets give more opportunities to the most mollycoddled social class ( white women) in the history of humanity.

<comment><USER14> Is this the same mollycoddled social class in the history of humanity that just earned the right to vote in the U.S. < 100 years ago?

<comment><USER13> Yes access to great schools, well informed parents with good jobs, all material comforts, red carpet welcome to STEM programs via scholarships. I call that mollycoddled.

I tutor a mexican kid both of whose parents are undocumented immigrants they don't seek out( out of fear) or even know about who to play the game, many of his friends sell drugs.

Shouldn't lower socio/economic background trump being a woman when we come up with programs like these?

<comment><USER15> I'm appalled that you do so little to help starving children in Africa. Instead you've put your efforts into helping the inhabitants of the richest country in the world.

</sarcasm></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wanted at Chinese Startups: Attractive Women to Ease Coders' Stress - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/business/china-women-technology.html <comment><USER2> As a female programmer, I wish I could have a programmer motivator. It's been a tough week.

<comment><USER3> As a male engineer I'd be happy to spend half the time going around and chatting, listening, massaging and organizing games to help colleages / team mates destress and feel energized and motivated.

For hetero orientation pairs, opposite gender, can have added destressing effect, if people are skillful at creating a good mood. Effective way to relax and raise morale.

But because that connotes "sex", the Western moral hysteria / panic mode sets in, and people automatically make it mean "bad"/"abusive"/"counter- progressive". Christian legacy programming? They think that makes them "free" but I think constraining narratives around sex to a limited set of negative connotations, just binds them to endless suffering and frustration.

This moral panic is probably partly a psyop. Sexual drive is such a powerful drive, any group who can manipulate / control / or redirect / re-narrate that en masse holds powerful sway over the population. If you can make people hate themselves for their own gender, skin color or sexuality, you have really succeeded in warping / manipulating them for something that should be so positive / neutral. That frustration for the individual that results can then be directed toward whatever would seem to provide the answer. In effect, this psyop can yoke people to a particular cause, such as "progressive liberal politics" that seem to provide the answer to the invented "axes of evil" of "sexuality / skin color / gender", and pretend to lead the way to a "promised land" of equality (? heh) even while dividing everyone into groups and getting them to fight each other. The ultimate aim of all this is probably just crowd control for the population, by "drawing off" excess frustration into such fruitless causes, you can ensure the activation energy of "revolution" / mass civil unrest is never tipped. Also the frustrated will seek other outlets for their stymied desires, so rise in entertainment / consumer culture offering short-term thrills like sucrose, endorphins, etc.

In light of all this -- the 1980s quest for status ( mirrored by current modern day Chinese quest for status ) is more healthy. But without a totalitarian state, and inundated by new technologies that empower individuals, how are you going to keep a society under control in a democracy? Democracy / politics has to end up being a very compelling reality-tv entertainment, and people must "spend" most of their excess energy on fruitless pursuits, to ensure they don't spend it on something such as "overthrowing the state".

And when you want to take the yoke off people, they fight to keep themselves bound up in it. Insisting they are free. Such is the depth of their manipulation.

<comment><USER4> > As a male engineer I'd be happy to spend half the time going around and > chatting, listening, massaging and organizing games to help colleages / team > mates destress and feel energized and motivated.

As a gay engineer, I doubt that if a man came over and started doing those things to you, you would feel energized and motivated. That hopefully gives you an idea why workplace norms in the modern world are the way they are.

<comment><USER5> As an aromantic man, I do feel more energized and motivated after a chat or a card game with my (mostly male) colleagues. I'm somewhat averse to body contact, so I wouldn't make use of a massager, but so long as it's just an extra perk like a Googly ball-bath (they have those, right?), I don't see the problem.

Not being sexually attracted to someone doesn't mean that their company won't be refreshing or even uncomfortable. I think that's much more a matter of personality, and gender is only a secondary factor in whether you'll find someone likable or not.

<comment><USER6> As a gay woman engineer, I've always had the policy that, while I'm at work, any part of you that touches me, I get to keep.

What ever happened to that fad where an animal shelter would release a flock of puppies in your office for an afternoon? I'd be into that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whereas the West sees male domination in tech as a problem and intervenes, China caters. Which approach will end up being more productive? Does it matter?

<comment><USER8> The rising labor force participation of women has been a major factor in total productivity growth. If we had continued to pursue male domination, for example, we'd have a lot fewer doctors. (Or a lot fewer of something else valuable.) And there's still a lot more to be gained.

There is also the fact that women are people, of course, and don't deserve to be "dominated" any more than anybody else does.

<comment><USER9> >The rising labor force participation of women has been a major factor in total productivity growth.

Source?

Doubling the labor force has certainly been great for keeping wages down.

Good for corporations, not so good for workers.

<comment><USER8> This is classic Lump of Labor fallacy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy)

The amount of work to do is not fixed. More people working (and at higher levels of value, also a feminist goal) means more value created for us to share in.

As to the societal benefits, there's a lot out there on it. You can search The Economist for "women labor force participation" for literally decades of articles on the benefits of it. But specifically for societal economic growth, here's one study of many: [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2013/sdn1310.pdf](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2013/sdn1310.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Assuming "Coder" is code for male, may eases the stress of being one of the tens of millions of males for whom there is no female to meet and marry.

<comment><USER11> Coders make a good salary and have a normal schedule, they will usually find a partner. But nowadays I guess more and more young people will choose to live alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. Have your engineers work 13-14 hour per day. 2. Bring in a hot feemale for $950 a month to cheer them up. 3. Profit

</comment><comment><USER12> Attractiveness is all about how much time and effort you spend on it. But what's most frightening is our bias on appearance, and how we treat people different based on how they are dressed/makeup. No wonder (hot) people, women in general, spend several hours every day just to look good.

</comment><comment><USER13> If that makes someone comfortable, why not offer it. It's not illegal other than a thought crime in the US.

If offered a good salary in a foreign country, I'd weigh different perks like this.

<comment><USER14> Because it makes someone else uncomfortable?

<comment><USER13> How does it make someone else uncomfortable? The man wants it, and the woman wants to do it. Who are you to tell women what's ok to do with their lives. That's just cultural imperialism.

<comment><USER14> What if it makes the man's female coworkers uncomfortable?

<comment><USER13> It doesn't, said that in the article. She did ask for a male, and I see no reason why she shouldn't get one. Besides, a man on staff that is has stronger hands for back or foot rubs would probably be appreciated by the men as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How could they consider this an even remotely inclusive way to build a workplace?

<comment><USER16> Gender equality is not nearly as big an issue in Asia compared to the west.

My experience is in Japan, but I could summarise a common opinion as "Men and women are different and should be treated differently".

Recently, when asking for a recommendation for a tax credit accountant, I was asked if I would prefer a man or a woman. The question was very matter of fact and not thought of as unusual.

To make things clear: I think this is nonsense and should be called out when it comes up.

<comment><USER17> I think objectcreate has a lot of good points.

Did you know in China almost no women change their last name to their husband's upon marriage (and it's been this way long before feminism even became a thing in the West)?

Whereas today in the "progressive" West it is still expected that women change their last name to their husband's and most do.

<comment><USER5> But children usually bear their father's surname, and if they don't, there's the assumption something's wrong with the father's side. (E.g. his name is not known, or they divorced before birth.)

I think it is silly to try to compare across cultures by looking for the presence or absence of specific customs, because you'll always be biased by your awareness of practices in your own culture, and ignorance of those in a different culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In some Chinese companies, they hire male models to send flowers to female staff.

[0][http://bbs.wangjing.cn/data/attachment/forum/201703/08/13401...](http://bbs.wangjing.cn/data/attachment/forum/201703/08/134016t1ca6dadc3hv3h93.png)

</comment><comment><USER9> This shows a great wisdom.

The Chinese culture is an ancient culture and we have a lot to learn from them, if we can see beyond our arrogance.

<comment><USER18> Is this serious? I can't tell anymore...

<comment><USER19> username is "pravda", I think it's safe to assume sarcasm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People are diverse and morality is diverse. As long as everyone involved is happier with this then it should continue.</comment>


GDPR Version of USA Today Is 500KB Instead of 5.2MB - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/fr3ino/status/1000166112615714816?s=19 <comment><USER2> The day I added an ad blocker (Adblock Plus, Ghostery and uBlock origin) was the day my CPU fans stopped spinning almost constantly, my battery life improved, web pages loaded faster and were more responsive.

My experience of the web is about a thousand times better than it used to be.

I will remove all these when the ad companies and websites start to behave themselves, which will be never.

<comment><USER3> If you liked the effect of installing an adblocker give disabling Javascript a try. (You can selectively whitelist a small number of websites). Did this a couple of years back and the difference is astounding.

<comment><USER4> I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of sites, IME.

Same thing with cookies.

On a side note, web developers have gotten really lazy at feature checking. In the IE days they'd at least have a banner saying their page wasn't going to work because it required IE or Netscape. Browsing with cookies turned off nowadays, I hit one or two sites a day that won't even display and then often get stuck in infinite redirect loop.

Even white listing sites to use cookies is a PITA. Outlook for Office65, for example, requires white listing cookies from 3 or 4 domains, and due to the way it redirects, I had to dig around in Chrome's page inspector to even find out what those domains are. And of course the page itself gives no indication of why it's not loading, it just flashes between empty pages forever.

<comment><USER5> > I'd be willing to bet your "small number" of white listed websites is > actually a lot more than you think. Turning off Javascript breaks a ton of > sites, IME.

My experience is the opposite.

I used NoScript for almost 8 years, and then switched to uMatrix one year ago.

I don't need to enable JavaScript in most sites. And, if I need it, only enable some parts of the page. Most websites are _much_ faster with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Websites can be "documents" or they can be "apps". It's great that we now have the option to build the latter, but far too many things that should be simple documents (news sites, I'm looking at you) are trying to be apps, and it's virtually always a worse user experience, setting aside the cost in load time, memory, and battery usage.

I'm saying this as a JavaScript developer.

<comment><USER6> The market has spoken.

No seriously, if it sucks so much, why haven't users responded by going somewhere else, thus incentivizing sites to behave well?

<comment><USER7> Or: the market does not (always) work. This too is an option.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, and my comment was partially as a response to the anti-regulation demo here on HN.

But, it's still something worth probing into: if it really does make the user experience worse -- and I agree it does -- why _haven 't_ people punished those sites by going elsewhere?

My best guess is that it's like bad customer service: it bugs people, but it's not really the differentiating factor when choosing a product/service provider.

<comment><USER8> Don't be so sure people _aren 't_ going elsewhere. Besides craigslist, there's also the not-Internet option, which I think many of us on here forget, possibly largely because it's so seemingly difficult to measure (in our skewed experience).

I've met _many_ young people who still default to pen-and-paper for things like note-taking. It's tempting to dismiss them as luddites, but I can't exactly blame them, given how much I know about just how user-hostile modern computer software and hardware can be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm honestly starting to reach the opinion we should all be VPNing our web traffic through Europe so we can pick up more of the benefits.

<comment><USER10> Is anyone concerned that we are starting to replicate real world boundaries on the internet.

Internet was supposed to free us from the limitations of the real world. World of internet was supposed to be the one where you can fluidly switch between your preceptions of self, become a new person whenever you felt like, leave your past behind. This was supposed to be a new world where people see themselves differently.

Now we have created countries on internet. Transferred our real world identity onto internet. Masses were rushed into the internet before they were ready, before they got the concept of what internet means psychologically. Now we vast bureaucracies ruling the internet, so depressing. Depressing to see ppl on HN saying "Good" to every GDPR news. Sad to see internet age squashed by beurocracies right when it was getting started.

<comment><USER11> The story of mankind, I'm afraid. A few people find a neat little spot where they can hang out, and for a while things are great, everything is pretty cool. Then, sooner or later, the group gets Too Big. Not so cool stuff starts happening, and where formerly you had a small anarchic group that worked with mutual understanding and (unspoken) agreements, now you have a need for Laws and Enforcement and Bureaucracy.

Every beautiful place on Earth will sooner or later be exploited for mass tourism and marketing. If you ever find such a place, keep it a secret, to keep it intact.

<comment><USER12> It's a known pattern of subcultures. See _Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution_ :

[https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks- mops-sociopaths)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would be very happy if everyone followed this example. Think of this as "modern" from now on. Return to the old, simple web that I know we all loved. Keep the lessons in usability and design learned in the last decade or two.

<comment><USER14> Now we only need to find somebody to pay for that simple web....

<comment><USER15> I think there's somewhat of a false dilemma there.

There are plenty of sites that I frequent that have tastefully located, static banner ads that are served directly through the site operator rather than through an add network. This has the dual advantage of allowing the operator some editorial control, and of producing ads that tend to be much higher quality (to me, anyway) because they involve actually telling me about new products and services I might be interested in because they are related to the actual content I'm reading, rather than being a giant pile of "one weird trick" ads and targeted advertisers' sad attempts to sell me things I've looked at before, and therefore either already bought or already decided not to buy.

In essence, it would be a return to the kind of advertising that print media uses. Which, incidentally, tends to command a higher price than all this junk, anyway.

I've also done paid subscriptions to various journalistic websites in the past. I've since stopped, generally because their reading experience is generally so awful that I've retreated back to print media for such things. So I suppose you could count me as one of those people who would be willing to directly pay for a simple web. (It's not like I _prefer_ to kill trees. I just value readability is all.)

<comment><USER16> I don't think it is a false dilemma. The problem is about the difference between the magnitude of revenue generated by the proposed methods. Both for publishers AND people interested in advertising products.

Tasteful banners are nice but tracking the performance of such ads is very hard. Ad business is really cut-throat. When you visit a site, there literally are multiple ad networks / advertisers bidding for a spot in front of you, with real money, based on the site, your location and your interests. A huge network of autonomous trader bots that trade real money billions of times per day for a spot in front of a human's eyeballs. If an algorithm decides that you have a higher than normal probability of converting to a paying customer, they (an AI or expert system) decides on the spot to pay "premium" to be in front of your eyeballs. They do this while running A/B tests with different ad variations to figure out what converts better, for which segment of the population etc.

Modern ads are not only kind of targeted. They are INSANELY targeted. There have been instances of people targeting singular people through ads based on geolocation and interests.

A publisher cannot be expected to run all that bidding code on their own servers. Those networks are actually a network of networks. If you are buying ads today, you want analytics immediately to see how you are doing, how much you are spending so that you can improve and adapt before sinking more money on it.

The profits generated by such methods are a couple orders of magnitude higher than a simple untrackable banner on a site placed by a site owner which gets swapped out whenever...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For all that cannot access both versions, keep in mind that the EU one is a vastly simpler UI, it almost looks like just a blog archive, while the US one is a more feature full typical newspaper homepage. Not saying that either one is better, just that it's not an apple to apple comparison.

<comment><USER18> > not an apple to apple comparison.

Hm, what if you're a reader looking for journalistic text articles, is the same content available on both?

<comment><USER17> I'm not a regular USA today reader, but from a brief look it seems like in the EU version only the most recent ~30 articles are "reachable" by clicks from the home page.

p.s. the EU version is on it's own subdomain, maybe you can reach it from the US too: [https://eu.usatoday.com/](https://eu.usatoday.com/)

<comment><USER19> Nope, it redirects back to the regular one for US users.

<comment><USER20> I've rarely seen a website load so fast on mobile...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So we've recently heard in the news that cryptocurrency mining supposedly takes .5% of all global power.

Now compare that to the extra electricity required for everybody undergoing the horrible experience of 80 poorly written trackers and ads constantly overloading each tab in a web browser.

This reminds me of the American budget. Cut the funding for Planned Parenthood and the Arts but we need a hundred new tanks!

<comment><USER22> It's similar to tons of paper wasted for flyers no one asked for. The people spamming this stuff are never really held accountable for their environmental footprint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> i have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client. A single png image of a entire web page is definitely under 5.2MB.

Personally, I can't wait for a shift in business practices. Ads have ruined my confidence in privacy. Most sites share your data with over a dozen different ad tracking vendors. I've seen twice that for a specific class of site, ie thechive.com.

<comment><USER24> > I have often thought at what point do you start rendering web pages remotely > and simply send back the (ie 'png') image to the client.

Please never do that, unless you want your visitors to have the worst accessibility experience.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific needs? If companies will gleefully ignore Linux (and BSDs), browsers other than the ones that ship with a major OS, privacy concerns, free speech principles or shipping to remote areas, I can't really expect them to care much for marginalized groups such as people with accessibility issues.

<comment><USER24> > Yeah, but aren't startups and other profit-driven entities more interested > in catering to the mainstream than to a small set of users with specific > needs?

How are "people on a smartphone" or "people with bad vision" small sets of users? Also, rendering the whole page in a PNG file takes _more work_ than merely serving the page as is, which is the second reason nobody does it (the first one being "why would someone want such a shitty browsing experience?").

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Even before the GDPR, text-only news sites seemed to be making a comeback. On bad cellular connections, these two are great:

[https://lite.cnn.io/en](https://lite.cnn.io/en)

[https://text.npr.org](https://text.npr.org)

<comment><USER27> These are also worth including:

[https://legiblenews.com](https://legiblenews.com)

[https://thecontext.net](https://thecontext.net)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have a very strange feeling that GDPR will end up resetting the internet (in a good way). It's already astonishing how we're getting unsubscribed from every possible mailing list we didn't want to be on in the first place, and it'll become even more awesome when all the websites will take notice, how little they are allowed to do in terms of piling crap on top of their web presence. I'm rather excited about the future right now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Would be really cool to have a list of before and after (size drop), due to GDPR in popular websites.

</comment><comment><USER30> _They went from a load time of more than 45 seconds to 3 seconds, from 124 (!) JavaScript files to 0, and from a total of more than 500 requests to 34._

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER31> When I see a site imploring me to disable my adblocker I think - nope, too late, you ad people screwed up this thing forever, look for a new business model. This one is dead. Or at least, it's dead for me. I am ok with having reasonable number of ads. I am not ok with blowing up site 10x and making my laptop max out CPU and my mobile devices get stuck trying to render all that garbage.

</comment><comment><USER32> How do you think free sites pay for producing all that valuable content? I find it astonishing that most people seem to think having access to news for free is almost a right. If you had taken their paid subscriptions they'd have served you a less add riddled version.

<comment><USER33> Ads are perfectly capable of being served without javascript and without cookies and without tracking users across the internet.

Serving ads requires exactly:

1) The HTML <img> tag.

2) Server side rendering (at least enough to insert a URL into the src="" attribute of the <img> tags.

3) A webserver that responds to the URL's inserted in #2 above by supplying an image.

That's it. And, in fact, in the beginning of ads on the internet, the above was how all ads were served. But sites didn't care for it much, because they had to do extra work to serve ads. And advertisers _very much_ did not like it because they had to trust that their partner sites were truthful in their reporting of add impressions (for the pay by impression model).

And having the advertiser be the one running "the server" of #3 above (which would allow them to monitor impression counts) means that their partner sites need to be kept up to date with the latest set of active URL's, lest some <img> tags show the broken link icon. Also a huge hassle.

The JS ad frameworks came about because the ad networks realized if they could lower the bar to gaining "ads" on a site, they could get more sites running ads (the push went something like "now use 'ad world 2.0', now just a single <script> tag in your website, no other work on your part").

And along the way the ad networks realized that the companies purchasing the impressions were willing to pay more for impressions that might be more "significant", and "relevant ads" were invented. Of course, the unstated, behind the scenes, part of "relevant" was that in order to determine "relevance" we now have to track and monitor the end users activities all across the internet so that if we see J. Smith searching for cat food on Amazon, we can now start serving him ads on facebook for catfood, and they will be "relevant" because we know he is interested in cat food for some reason.

So sites don't have to go "ad free" to also be "track your users activities everywhere" free. They just have to return to the original model where the ad was the internet equivalent of a highway bill-board or a poster on the side of a bus-stop shelter. Untargeted, just there, maybe it is seen, maybe it is not.

<comment><USER34> For that matter "untargeted" in this case just means "not targeted using unrelated viewer data." There's a significant amount of targeting that can take place by targeting based on the content and site. If anything, I would argue that the obsessive ad-network, viewer-based targeting online often has tremendous targeting failures as compared to traditional content-based targeting.

I started distinctly noticing this over the last year or two in thinking about how much more relevant I found advertisements in print magazines and journals as online. In literary journals, I'll find advertisements from publishers about their new releases in related topics. In scientific journals, I'll find conferences, new lab equipment and products for related fields, and so on. In design journals, I'll find advertisements for furniture, fabric, and so on. I get one local art magazine mostly for the advertisements, which are primarily new exhibition announcements. I actually somewhat enjoy seeing these sorts of advertisements: they're clearly marked as ads, but they're also actually useful. If, say, New England Biosciences puts out a kit with new features, their advertising in Science can let me know about an option I might otherwise not have heard about, for example.

Yet even before I started very strongly blocking as many ads and tracking online as possible, the targeting was horrible by comparison. There were the saturation-advertising systems, which would come up with wonderful decisions like "this person just bought a new mattress; that must mean they buy mattresses often, so let's show those advertisements" or "this word was used somewhere in the website, let's show stuff tangentially related to that word," or "everyone is interested in ONE WEIRD TRICK." Most of the time, these advertisements had nothing to do with me, or what I was reading, and they were obnoxious and unhelpful. How this became the norm online, just because on some rare occasions, the algorithms might work well, as opposed to the very well- targeted advertisements in print publications, is quite confusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wish that all sites provided alternative mini-versions such as this.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is great. (1) How do I pretend to be from the EU? (2) Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS.

The evolution of the Internet in the last two decades has been such a tremendous disappointment. It really peaked in the early 2000s (when I got my first DSL connection but before JS became a thing).

<comment><USER37> > Th EU should make a law requiring HTML versions of pages with no JS.

I know this is well-intentioned, but so is most authoritarianism. We don't want to go down that road. Your personal preferences don't get to become law.

<comment><USER38> Not so, it's about basic accessibility, so blind readers can use your site. The EU could and probably should dig into that at some point too, and the rest of the world will (hopefully) benefit. (I added hopefully because, unfortunately, a number of websites have engaged in dick moves; namely implementing GDPR protections for EU users only or blocking EU users entirely.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Their eu site only has access to a limited quantity of articles. Shame

</comment><comment><USER40> Tried to open the twitter link. Asked me to agree to their terms to continue to use th service. Answered no. No the link just says "Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later." (the link is [https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow](https://twitter.com/i/flow/consent_violation_flow))

Gotta love the GDPR, a nice way to get rid of all the "social media" crap and hundreds of ad trackers that has infested every corner of the internet.

<comment><USER41> Archived copy will hopefully work better:

[https://archive.is/NX3VY](https://archive.is/NX3VY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Looks like this is for all Gannett-owned newspapers, including my local paper :D

</comment><comment><USER43> And that's why people use as lockers.

</comment><comment><USER44> what is more scary to me is 2 different versions of the same website for 2 different locations!

<comment><USER45> Happens all the time (besides the obvious i18n) , especially with stuff that has different regulations per country, like gambling.

<comment><USER46> Yep. They also block countries until they can be sure they can abide by their regulations.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: CSJS – modular, scoped CSS with ES6 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rtsao/csjs <comment><USER2> Challenge accepted! I plan to make a simpler dynamic CSS construction library (similar to XT.js - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11260471](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11260471) \- which constructs DOM fragments) that's both smaller and targeted for ES5.</comment>


Digital Ocean Shuts Down Site with No Notice - <AUTHOR> Digital Ocean shut down our droplet / site without any notice. They received a single DMCA request and immediately shut down without any notice.<p>Is this standard practice? Seems extreme, very disruptive. Do all hosting providers take this tactic? <comment><USER2> This is how the DMCA works -- a provider is freed from liability if they process a valid-looking takedown request immediately. They can then notify you. You must now file a counter-notice if the request is invalid.

</comment><comment><USER3> You need to give more information on the sequence of events and the correspondence you have had with Digital Ocean. As it is, it is difficult to assess.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was no detailed sequence. Everything was fine one moment. No notice of anything.

Then the website goes down. At the same time we get an email saying:

"This notice is to inform you that material posted on one or more of your Droplet(s), was the subject of a notification of claimed copyright infringement pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). A copy of that notice is included below. As you know, Digital Ocean provides hosting service to your Droplet, but is not responsible for the content hosted there. Copyright infringement is expressly forbidden by our terms of service and can, in appropriate circumstances, result in the termination of your service with Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean takes seriously the DMCA notices it receives and expects its customers to do the same.

At this time we have disabled access to the droplet, pending removal of the infringing content."

That was the first we heard about this issue from DO or anyone.

<comment><USER4> So did you file a counter-notice? How long did it take DO to bring your droplet back?

<comment><AUTHOR> We removed the image, it took 30 minutes to an hour after after we notified them of it to get it reactivated.

The problem was not giving us any notice in advance. This was a single image on our entire site. Seems excessive and unproductive to immediately shut down an entire site for a thumbnail image posted.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This Is Why Your Kickstarter Project Is Late - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3004024/why-your-kickstarter-project-late

<comment><USER2> Manufacturing is hard and it takes time and stuff goes wrong that a quick recompile can't fix. Although 3D printing etc has made things easier to get started it is still a very long a difficult process to get the product launched and in the market is sill just as expensive and slow as it has always been.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, in hardware there's a larger gap between a working prototype and a scalable product. The iteration loop has been getting cheaper and faster, but still is very unforgiving.</comment></comment>


How to get a job at a startup - 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://hicks-wright.net/blog/how-to-get-a-job-at-fog-creek-part-1/

<comment><USER2> This article puts a lot of emphasis on school. A _lot_ of it.

No comment on that, just the observation.</comment>


Unix and Beyond: An interview with Ken Thompson [pdf] (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://cse.unl.edu/~witty/class/csce351/howto/ken_thompson.pdf <comment><USER2> Good quote to end on.

"there are still a lot of fun programs to write."

\-- Ken Thompson, interview with "Computer", May 1999</comment>


Algorithmic adjustment of grades causes chaos in UK exam system - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/16/autumn-term-chaos-feared-over-exam-resits-and-appeals <comment><USER2> I'm not familiar with the UK system, so I'm confused here. Did the exams not take place? Or are they done by the schools? I though the a-levels are standardised country-wide / not sure where the original grade they modify comes from.

<comment><USER3> They didn't happen due to full lockdown that shut the schools. A levels are decided by a single exam in May/June after two years of study.

University starts in September and university places are offered based upon estimates of the grade an individual will get. This happens early in the year Jan/Feb time and is called a "conditional offer".

Those who don't get the grades in the exam in August to satisfy the conditional offer go into a system called "Clearing" to see what other University courses are still available.

The estimates Universities use come from two sources. Either the teachers just vouch for a set of grades, or the school runs a set of test exams called "Mocks" in Nov/December and the grades from them are the estimates.

Covid threw a huge wrench in the works of this Byzantine system.

The problem is that mocks and the actual results have been drifting apart for years, with the universities compensating course by course.

The Ivory Tower technocrats genuinely believed they could impose an algorithmic correction top down and everybody would just accept it. They have had a rude awakening to the political reality - yet again.

<comment><USER4> A system fundamentally broken from the start -- a a stack of separate high stakes exams for 2 years of work (so if you are sick one day you get rejected from college), collapses due to one of many foreseeable potential causes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This really does seem very unfair. I went to a middle-of-the-road comprehensive, and in one particular subject our entire (small) class happened to be talented - all of us but one got A*s. My understanding is that this wouldn't be possible under this algorithm.

On the other hand, I'm struggling to think of a system which would be better, which also preserves the integrity of A-levels as a qualification.

<comment><USER4> This scenario was the climax of the movie _Stand and Deliver_.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Background on the algorithms here:

[https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2020/08/a-level- results-2...](https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2020/08/a-level- results-2020-how-have-grades-been-calculated/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The only reason any of this matters is that higher education is being held as a scarce commodity, with "elite" schools limiting attendance, to prevent lower class people from rising above their class.

</comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone affected (or their parents) considered how this sits in line with the GDPR (implemented as the Data Protection Act 2018).

It has various provisions for purely automated decision making processes that have significant effects on a person, and some of these require prior impact assessments to be carried out. It's quite likely these weren't carried out, given the circumstances.

Might be an angle for anyone affected that's looking to learn some "real world" skills they weren't taught in the syllabus, and fight back on such a basis.

<comment><USER4> There was an assessment. The assessment said everything is fine.</comment></comment>


Patent Troll Sells Licenses For In-App Buy Buttons, Then Tries To Explain Itself - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/patent-troll-sells-licenses-for-in-app-buy-buttons-then-tries-to-explain-itself/ <comment><USER2> Heh Armor Games got one of those today and they don't even _use_ in-game purchases, they got Lodsysed just for having a free version of one of their games!</comment>


Ask HN: Differene between Tumblr and Wordpress? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Wordpress allows embedded audio (from Soundcloud, Spotify, etc) in a text post, while Tumblr does not.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Tumblr has a more minimalistic approach than Wordpress.</comment>


On Learning to Think: Algorithmic Information Theory - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.09249 <comment><USER2> Neural networks are obviously the hot thing in AI right now. From my perspective as an outsider, this paper has a _great_ lit review.

<comment><USER3> And author

<comment><USER4> Just looked up the author and found this: [http://www.aaaivideos.org/2013/06_task_relevant_roadmaps/](http://www.aaaivideos.org/2013/06_task_relevant_roadmaps/)

The eyes are so creepy.</comment></comment></comment>


Why work in a startup? - <AUTHOR> http://ashishgrover.com/why-work-in-a-start-up/

<comment><USER2> While there are very good points stated on the blog, you also need to consider that unless you are working with the right startup, things can go astray. For example, I have come across startups where goals are short sighted and cost cutting is considered prime rather than building a product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope you will agree with me that start-ups are generally not like that. On the flip-side, start-ups are a big risk. The deviation from the ideal model happens when there are survival issues. Also, one should be aware that every small/mid-size company is not a start-up. The vision of the core team decides the path.</comment></comment>


How to run efficient remote meetings - <AUTHOR> https://www.valycs.com/blog/efficient-remote-meetings <comment><USER2> All this article does is summarize four types of meetings from a book, then goes on to say most meetings lack conflict, yet gives no guidance on how to create that conflict besides "use our tool to get data."

The question of how to keep people's attention in a meeting is interesting. Beyond having a purpose for the meeting and the right people there, what do others do to keep people engaged, especially during remote meetings?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I can provide you with a good example. For instance, on Weekly Staff meeting team usually reviews its metrics. One of the metrics we review is a Queue Length(number of tickets at a specific stage). From the dashboard, we see that InProgress queue is growing the second week in a row. In this case, we start a fruit-full discussion on how to reduce it. If we can't find an answer on the meeting we should continue on Adhoc Topical meeting. For this meeting, we can assign a couple of people to dig deep in the topic and prepare some data and solutions for Adhoc Topical. Does it make sense to you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just flagged, but commenting as well. This article is poorly written and uninformative PR spam.

All it does it tell us that important meetings lack conflict, then advertise its services, which are not related to meetings at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> How should I improve the article to make it more informative for you? Also, please read my example below.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Could you please share your advices for conducting efficient remote meetings?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article was updated after feedback. Thank you for the valuable feedback.</comment>


Google launches the third version of its A.I. chips, an alternative to Nvidia's - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/08/google-launches-tpu-3-point-0-third-version-of-ai-chips.html <comment><USER2> > Also, if the new version is anything like its predecessor, it will also > become accessible to third-party developers through Google's public cloud > service.

I wish this could be bought for home use. Cloud based machine learning is great (I mean that, I love it) but sometimes a one time hardware purchase is easier to swallow than a hourly rate.

<comment><USER3> Dell is selling NVIDIA V100s for only about $20,000 for "home use". [http://www.dell.com/en- us/work/shop/accessories/apd/490-bedx](http://www.dell.com/en- us/work/shop/accessories/apd/490-bedx)

At its priciest in GCP ($2.48/hr) that's still about 7800 hours before buying was an advantage (15700 hours on preemptible gear).

(Disclosure: I work at Google, but this is all public math)

<comment><USER4> > Dell is selling NVIDIA V100s for only about $20,000 for "home use".

or...

[https://www.thinkmate.com/product/nvidia/900-2g500-0000-000](https://www.thinkmate.com/product/nvidia/900-2g500-0000-000)

<comment><USER5> If it's actually home use you can buy the Quadro gv100 for 8999 on the nvidia store: [https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/quadro- sto...](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/quadro-store/)

<comment><USER6> Or a TitanV for $3000 because Tesla is more branding than anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> *announces, not launches

Plenty of details to come. The TPU v2 in beta is available for customers currently. This is v3, not currently available.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's only an alternative by the time you can buy them. Until then owning GPU hardware is a lot cheaper than renting it if you use it for a substantial fraction of the time.

</comment><comment><USER8> This would be an interesting way to launch a denial of service attack on a restaurant in the real world.

<comment><USER9> That doesn't even make sense. The restaurant booking, as shown during the presentation, can only be triggered through Assistant. It's not an API that you can program. You will still have to input it to the Assistant that book this restaurant on this date at this hour. And even if you do program that, Google can control it at the account level that things are not abused. You are assuming as if Google hasn't dealt with DDOS situations before.

Disc: Googler but nowhere close to the project.</comment></comment>


Idea dump, January 2011 edition - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/Idea+dump+January+2011+edition <comment><USER2> I don't know if this is the proper place (if not, sorry), but there's a device I've been dreaming about and that I would gladly pay for: a home router / service that would also do antivirus, content filter and VPN in a user- friendly, turn-key way.

There are products that address some of these features (and yes it can be custom built "by hand"), but I'm not aware of something that does it all out of the box? Here's a more detailed description.

1\. Antivirus

1.1 At the gate

Since the only way to get something on my computers is via the Web, it doesn't seem efficient to run an AV on each one; this device would check all incoming traffic.

1.2 "AV DMZ"

Ideally, this device would also be able to do an AV check on hard disks and such when connected to it via USB, so that if someone comes to my house with a USB drive I can check it there without having any other machine with an antivirus installed.

2\. Proxy / filter

2.1 AdBlock

This is currently worse than antivirus software (except that it's free): one needs one AV per computer, but one AdBlock per _browser_ (and some browsers can't have any, except by using a proxy). Having it centralized would be so much simpler.

2.2 Content filter / blocker

Most home routers have some sort of white list / black list mechanisms, but they have to be edited manually; this device would filter content based on crowd-sourced lists; there could be different lists of differing strength (cf. all the recent talk about content farms).

3\. VPN

Content is being more and more controlled, either at the source (Hulu) or by governments, even in the West (France, Australia and others -- cf. Wikileaks).

A VPN service that would a/ encrypt traffic and b/ make it originate from different places in the world (user-selectable among different solutions offered by the service, maybe for different prices) would alleviate all those problems.

<comment><USER3> HTTPS will get in the way of most of these. If someone on your network decides to search for content you have blocked, all they'd have to do is use HTTPS to access Google, Yahoo, etc. Unless of course you require all your browsers to go through the proxy server on your device that forces HTTP on them. Which is more of a pain.

<comment><USER2> > _If someone on your network decides to search for content you have > blocked..._

I don't mind; it's a device for the home, not for the office. I'm not trying to enforce anything for my "users", I'm just looking for convenience for me.

Content blocking is not a punishment that people would want to escape: it's a reward! Use it if you want to, don't use it if you don't want to...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm intrigued by the EditDistance idea. Right away I started trying to think of how I could implement it. It seems like in order for this to work, the edit distance would have to be based on something more averaged than a single pixel color due to the various types of image compression (jpeg being particularly troublesome for this task, I would imagine). Perhaps the image can be split up into four-pixel blocks whose constituent parts can all be averaged together to form a new color which can then be used as part of the matching.

I must admit however that I have doubts that an edit distance for images would yield interesting results unless the pixels were split into a grid, or maybe something like a quad-tree. Then the edit distance could be applied to each portion of the grid to see how many adjacent sections of the grid are also found to be adjacent in other images.

<comment><AUTHOR> I figure that you need to do some filtering first.

I'd love to go and spend a few months on building a prototype of 'spindisp', if I had the time right now I'd do it.

<comment><USER4> I don't doubt that you've tinkered with this idea in your head as well, and where I went with it is the immediately obvious first place to start. ;)

RE: wishing you had more time -- I feel you on that one. It's taking a lot of personal restraint to keep myself from deviating towards each interesting project that springs up in my head. I never thought that time would end up being such a valuable asset.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Instead of a 90's style "search aggregator," how about a "SEO-less search" website? Basically, it would be a search engine that would aggressively quash SEO spam. It would be monetized through micropayments up-front through services like Paypal, Amazon Payments, and Google Checkout. There would also be search-results ads.

<comment><USER6> Here's the problem - how do you 1. define SEO spam, 2. detect SEO spam. It's not as simple as saying "deindex anything that has optimized title tags or lots of links or shows adsense" because plenty of useful websites optimise for search engines, show ads and have lots of links. What you'd end up with is the dregs of the web, because although you'd reduce the number of spam sites in the results, you'd likely also reduce the number of useful sites in the results because you're specifically targeting and removing the sites that optimise for search engines, which is 99% of the most successful sites on the web today.

SEO is not an inherently bad thing, it's valueless, spammy content that's bad. The real challenge is in determining whether a page is useful, original and relevant to the search query, and that's where Google et al are falling down at the moment.

<comment><USER5> _It's not as simple as saying "deindex anything that has optimized title tags or lots of links or shows adsense"_

No, it's not. But undoubtedly, SEO spammers are leaving behind the same kind of clues that email spammers do. Using techniques like Bayesian classifiers should be able to classify such pages. Just detecting all the pages that are slightly edited/SEO-optimized stackoverflow answers would be a good start for me.

 _you'd likely also reduce the number of useful sites in the results because you're specifically targeting and removing the sites that optimise for search engines, which is 99% of the most successful sites on the web today._

I'd be putting useful sites in the "useful" corpus.

 _SEO is not an inherently bad thing, it's valueless, spammy content that's bad._

Agreed, just as email marketing is not an inherently bad thing, just spammy emails.

<http://xkcd.com/810/>

<comment><USER6> There are billions and billions of pages in the index, let's say they produce a page classifier that can correctly identify spam an unrealistic 99% of the time. They'd _still_ misidentify tens of millions of pages. Regarding your second point, how do you determine usefulness in a way that can't be gamed? My point is, this is a very, very, very hard problem to solve at their scale, a lot of posters on here are trivialising it.

<comment><USER5> 99% classifier? So I get to have a search that's like Google/Bing for all the non-spammy searches, and it only gets 1/100th the spam for the spammy searches? I think I could sell a proposition like that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do we want some sort of Hacker News only half-bakery?

<comment><USER4> I keep forgetting that site exists. Had to Google it to be reminded of what it is. That isn't a bad idea at all -- just don't make it a public Google doc. Then again, maybe we could just post all these ideas to half-bakery. I can't resist the allure of consolidation.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I can't resist the allure of consolidation.

Neither can I that's why I posted this on HN :)

So many sites to keep track of...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Shoppert sounds like a shopping trolley* with bugs.

* [http://www.transport-impacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/...](http://www.transport-impacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/shopping_trolley_bag.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Shopping trolleys already have bugs.</comment></comment>


Simplifying the EC2 Reserved Instance Model - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplified-reserved-instances/ <comment><USER2> This is great. I kept telling my developer colleagues that AWS EC2 could get more affordable as we scaled and bought reserved instances.

As a bootstrapped startup paying for a year or three years upfront is quite a bit of a burden, but I think this is great progress and will make that easier on us.

I also like Google Cloud's sustained use discounts because it is automatic. I'm not sure if AWS will ever do that, but since I'm such a huge fan of AWS, I'd love it. [1].

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#sustained_use)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah Jeff! I love how this guy actually write and simplifies the technologies.

This is one easy way for non-cloud users to pickup EC2 and use it as hosting services and demystify the price VS usage behind it.

<comment><USER4> Thank you -- this comment made my day!

<comment><USER3> Ah you are here Jeff! You da man, seriously I read most of your blogs, because I have been self-taught & I appreciate when people write good stuff to make you learn rather than just selling. :)! Kudos!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Still this is far less simple than Google's "sustained use" discounts, where price automatically drops when I have more constant use pattern. Here I still need to plan upfront, assume my future usage patterns. It seems easier, but in fact you need to make the same decisions as previously.

I also wonder what happens if I make "no upfront" reservation and don't use it? If nothing - why would I use on-demand, while I always can do reservation without upfront?

<comment><USER6> "No Upfront - You pay nothing upfront but commit to pay for the Reserved Instance over the course of the Reserved Instance term". Presumably, you'll be billed each month (for 12 months) whether you're using it or not. Of course, if you close your AWS account entirely, they'd have to come after you if they wanted to collect -- but if you're not planning to go out of business, then you shouldn't expect to be able to just drop the instance mid-year.

<comment><USER5> OK, then it would behave as the old heavy reservation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would also love to be able to move across instance families. Another reason not to commit for a long period of time. I'm willing to say "I'm committed to using x amount of AWS computing power over the next 3 years" but not if that will prevent me from using any of the new instance families that come out over that time frame.

<comment><USER8> Ah, but that's the whole point. Amazon wants to buy hardware and know that it's going to get used.

<comment><USER7> I certainly understand that Amazon's interests are different from mine, and they are going to make offerings that are good for them. But the best offers are win-win, and a 3-year RI doesn't meet that bar. It's a bad offer for the customer, but masquerades as a good offer. Not unique in the world of business, "buyer beware" and all that of course. It was my bad for not fully appreciating the lock in and avoiding it.

<comment><USER8> _It 's a bad offer for the customer_

Not necessarily. Some people won't want to move between server families anyway. It's up to the customer to figure out if what Amazon is offering is good for them or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pet peeve in case Jeff Barr (or another AWS person) reads this. I purchased multiple 3-year heavy utilization RIs just a few months before the price wars last year. The ROI on those went from "great" to "very modest" overnight. I know there is an RI Marketplace where I could try to sell them, but as the on- demand prices went down so far, I would not be likely to get a decent deal. It felt like the best customers, those who have committed for multiple years, were being left out in the cold. I will not be doing any long-term (over 1 year) RI purchases again unless they make it possible to participate in price drops.

<comment><USER9> That is the whole point. The price IS going to go down overt time. So by getting you to commit to a price Amazon can more accurately predict their growth and you get a fairly decent discount in trade. 1 year terms are much wiser IMHO because of the constant price lowering.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, 1 year is the sweet spot here. I didn't appreciate the opportunity cost of getting the 3-year RI, as much as the straw man "savings" against the current on-demand prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They didn't hit any of my pain points.

The payment schemes weren't particularly complex/annoying. What is annoying is that when you purchase a RI you cannot just point at an existing VM and have the RI both bind to that but also select the right availability zone and location (e.g. 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, East, West, Central, Europe, etc). I've had to go through the painful process of migration from 1B to 1C because I mistakenly purchased US-East-1B instead of US-East-1C.

Plus there is something to be said for Azure's "you can always upgrade it" model. RIs are great price wise, but Amazon won't let me buy e.g. a small RI and then pay the difference to upgrade the RI to a medium or large (even if they have to extend the RI to do so).

This is really the most welcome change (NOT listed in the blog):

> On February 2nd 2015, Light and Medium Utilization Reserved Instances will > no longer be available for purchase.

Light and medium RIs were too complicated. It was also too hard to track your RI usage in the way you'd need to to manage those plans, it is just easier to do on demand pricing with a few heavy utilisation RIs.

<comment><USER11> > Amazon won't let me buy e.g. a small RI and then pay the difference to > upgrade the RI to a medium or large

You kinda can - when you purchase RIs, you're really just purchasing a chunk of capacity ("Units" in EC2 parlance). You can reallocate your units into different RIs, so if you bought a c3.2xlarge and want to upgrade it to a 4x large, you'd just buy a second 2xlarge and then recombine your two 2xlarges into a 4xlarge. Or you could split a 32-unit 4xlarge into 4 8-unit 1x larges.

ie, 2x c3.xlarge ([http://i.imgur.com/hPl2WNJ.png](http://i.imgur.com/hPl2WNJ.png)) recombine into 1x c3.2xlarge ([http://i.imgur.com/KhthjYo.png](http://i.imgur.com/KhthjYo.png))

Granted, you can't jump from a medium to a large; it only works within the same product class. But it does provide upgrade paths. It is bass-ackwards, though. And the fact that they sell "instances" rather than "units" but don't let you bind RIs to actual instances is confusing as all get-out.

<comment><USER12> What you're saying is not really correct.

You cannot just "buy a second 2xlarge" and then recombine them into a 4xlarge. The 2xlarge reservations _and pay attention here_ need to match on their purchase _date_ and _hour_. I.e they have to be bought within the same clock hour on the same day.

If you reserved a 2xlarge at 2014-12-01T22:59:59Z, you couldn't even combine it with one bought at 2014-12-01T23:00:01Z. Yes Amazon is _that_ picky about it. While you _might_ be able to muscle that through a sales contact, it's not even available to customers on business level support, so anything more than a day apart and you're likely out of luck in any case.

(See: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri- modify...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri- modifying.html#ri-modification-limits), particularly bullet point #6)

<comment><USER11> Ah, I didn't realize this. Wow, that's...restrictive. Thanks for the info.</comment></comment></comment></comment>