State-Space of Drug Effects - <AUTHOR> http://qualiacomputing.com/2015/06/09/state-space-of-drug-effects-results/ <comment><USER2> The methodology from On Being Stoned is much stronger. The problem is that the qualitative effects of a drug are determined not just by its molecular structure, but also by the dose, the route of administration, and the type of person using the drug.

By not controlling for any of this, you're just seeing the biases of the status quo being reflected back at you.

<comment><USER3> _you 're just seeing the biases of the status quo being reflected back at you_

I love your phasing. It captures the essence of many "bugs" in stataistical analyses in a rather poetic and, more importantly, persuasive way.

Is this original or do you happen to have a source for this quote?

<comment><USER2> I wasn't quoting anything. I'm not a huge stats person, I have a casual interest in epistemology but in this case that sentiment just comes from having a lot of domain-specific knowledge about drugs. If you search my comment history for drug-related stuff, you'll see similar criticisms of David Nutt's studies, among other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best qualitative thing I've seen on the state space of drugs is this selection of self portraits: [http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/](http://bryanlewissaunders.org/drugs/). Special mentions for meth, lithium, and bath salts. Ooh boy I don't want bath salts.

<comment><USER5> I guess it's sort of a cool art project? But it doesn't seem that useful as a data point. Mostly because the artwork is likely affected by the expected outcome more so than the actual experience, and that experiences can vary wildly even with the same substance, and varies wildly amongst people.

I.e. from this guy's self portrait with absinth you'd imagine that it makes you sad, but that's never been my experience with it.

More than anything it's a nice showcase of the artist's stylistic range.

<comment><USER6> Agreed, and more generally, how do you say attribute different artistic stylings as due to a drug vs. all other factors (e.g., expectations of the drug, mood, social setting, etc.). I would imagine this has been studied in perceptual psychology (or some related field) in a more controlled fashion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's odd that the article doesn't even mention Shulgin's PiHKAL and TiHKAL. There are protocols.

Also, without access to accurate testing, people have no clue what compound(s) they're actually using. So I suspect that surveys get mostly at expectations. As Alex3917 notes.

<comment><USER8> The article itself does not mention it, but the site definitely does, as well as expanding on the works of Lilly, Carhart-Harris, Pearce and a variety of other psychedelicists.

The survey also collected information about the number of times that the substance was used, though apparently it didn't matter. What is remarkable is how well the differences match to common knowledge, even though each survey taker only provided a response for a particular substance. Expectations might have a bigger role if the survey included all drugs at once, and people thought on their own "I don't know about that one, so I'll just answer with what I have heard about it." Rather, the survey asked participants to answer it for a drug that they had substantial experience with. Another thing to note is that factor analysis itself is likely to reduce a lot of possible biases, since people don't know in advance how the various items will end up being bunched together. If there is a popular expectation that ecstasy is "life changing" that particular item might have a weird pattern of responses for ecstasy. And yet, its overall loading on the various factors would remain relatively unaffected, since each item is contributing only a little to the final factor scores. Thus lexicalized associations (e.g. "the beauty of LSD") will be washed away by the influence of the remaining 49 items.

But yes, one wishes a lot of improvements. Personally, though, I think that having random people on the internet applying statistical techniques to new domains of knowledge in order to bring attention to low hanging fruit is really good. Of course they will not do it as well as a funded lab would, but they will help accelerate such research.

<comment><USER7> Thanks. Perhaps my cynicism about drug authenticity is dated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like a parsimonious state-space for a drug would just be the agonistic/antagonistic affinity for every neuro-receptor. There would be some partial coronations (between all of the subtypes of the GABA receptor for example).

It would be neat to see how the authors psychological state-space and this neuro state-space map to each other though.

<comment><USER10> > just be the agonistic/antagonistic affinity for every neuro-receptor

Except that pretty much every receptor subtype, every transporter protein and many other brain genes exist in multiple variations in the human population, and those variations do alter the way these proteins act. This is one reason why different drugs affect different people differently, because at the lowest level, you don't have the same brain chemistry as other people, there are an infinite number of possible variants.</comment></comment>


Faster model training with Deep Active Learning - <AUTHOR> https://kili-technology.com/blog/faster-training-active-learning/ <comment><USER2> On which dataset did you perform this ?</comment>


Echoprint: Open-source music fingerprinting - <AUTHOR> http://echoprint.me/

<comment><USER2> I'm a bit confused by the database license. Why do you want people to contribute additional data specifically back to you, rather than requiring them to release it under a compatible license which would allow you to incorporate it if you wish? This is substantially different from usual copyleft licenses.

As an example, notice that Wikipedia does not require people to send modified articles back to the Wikimedia Foundation, or to allow them to use the data as they see fit (this is clause D. 3. d. in your license). They just require people to contribute under a copyleft license, and they can thus incorporate derivative versions published elsewhere if they want. This is nice because it ensures that the Wikipedia content can be useful even if the Wikimedia Foundation disappears.

Anyway, awesome work, congrats!

<comment><USER3> _Why do you want people to contribute additional data specifically back to you_ …

One possibility is so that database can be created on the backs of the users, then the database owner can slam the door and turn it proprietary, like the CDDB did.

Their stated goals don't lean that way, but I don't see a clause that either permits or forbids the database owner this action. Lawyers will be required to figure that out. I suspect there is an implicit ability for the grantor to terminate the license, but that is what lawyers are for.

(I did notice that the termination effects reference clauses that don't exist.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Given how threat-, or, let's say, notification-happy Landmark was just a while ago [1], does anyone have an idea regarding the patent situation? Is this implementation different enough to be considered (reasonably) "safe"?

[1] <http://www.redcode.nl/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/>

<comment><USER4> We invented everything about Echoprint from scratch, working with some awesome scientists and audio guys. I'm not a lawyer and won't comment on legal stuff here though.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, inventing something from scratch, as far as I understand things, will only save you from copyrighted code etc. It won't save you from overly general, and trivial patents.

Good luck though :/

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Be prepared to be bullied by Shazam -- at least, that's what happened the last time someone posted audio fingerprinting code online. And inventing something yourself doesn't save you from patents. I'll be watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really amazing, and I can't wait to see all of the possibilities it opens up now that people can create their own databases. I'm tempted to set up an app to fingerprint and dedupe all of the music spread out throughout the network here at work.

<comment><USER8> This. Also proper tagging for once.

<comment><USER9> I highly recommend MusicBrainz Picard for autotagging. I went through tagging somewhere around 70 gigs of music with it, and the entire experience was rather painless. It will also rename and organize the files for you as a bonus.

It looks up the data (as it should be), so you rarely will have to enter anything yourself. It sometimes helps to add data for 1 track for horribly mistagged stuff, but after that you can usually drag and drop the rest of the album.

<comment><USER10> For others, like myself, that are unfamiliar, yet very interested. MusicBrainz[1] is written in python, distributed under the GPL, and I will be trying it ASAP.

[1][https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MusicBrainz_P...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MusicBrainz_Picard)

<comment><USER11> MusicBrainz is written in Perl (and SQL). MB Picard is Python. MB is a database and associated server. MB Picard is a client.

MB is a bit of a monster. If you're tagging a lot of music you may want to install it locally. My experience with this is documented at <http://acooke.org/cute/Installing3.html>

Personally, I was not too impressed with MB itself - ended up using LastFM's API instead. But this was for generating playlists, not tagging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> if you have any questions, let me know. we're very excited about this!

<comment><USER12> About your data dumps: you're about to get hammered, so please share them in torrent! This would be much better for the thousands of people wanting to bootstrap.

Also, I understand json is very easy to use, etc. But those big dumps cry for a binary format. Or at least add zlib/lzma compression so people don't waste bandwidth on uuencoded binary data in json.

<comment><USER4> the dumps are in a format that other code understands (fastingest.py)

The code data is compressed using zlib (and then base64'd.) It's all on s3-- in our experience, big data dumps like this get relatively little traffic after the original hype dies down and a torrent doesn't make sense. We're pretty sure amazon can handle the load :)

<comment><USER13> S3 has bittorrent support built in, it's trivial to enable. But you probably knew that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the fingerprinting part is similar to pHash: <http://www.phash.org/> but echoprint is more focused on music and they are building a database of fingerprints.

I think pHash also has functions for fingerprinting music but might not be as precise since pHash is not strictly focused on music.

</comment><comment><USER13> Echonest are some cool people. Their earlier APIs enabled the illustrious although sadly now defunct <http://www.donkdj.com> which was done by a classmate of mine as a project for a Generative Creativity course we did at uni.

Looks like their research has taken them a lot further!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd love to see a project where the data is MIT licensed too, not just the code.

</comment><comment><USER16> A very interesting project. I've whipped up a little test program([https://github.com/regomodo/handy_scripts/blob/master/echopr...](https://github.com/regomodo/handy_scripts/blob/master/echoprint- codegen-builder.py)) in Python and found either the codegen or echonest to be a little buggy. Daft Punk fingerprints come back with some very unusual results. <http://pastebin.com/8Tfvd0SZ>

<comment><USER4> can you file an issue on echoprint-codegen or write us at the google group so we don't lose that? That definitely shouldn't be happening, there's an issue somewhere for sure.

<comment><USER16> I've raised an issue over at github <https://github.com/echonest/echoprint- codegen/issues/10>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why aren't the fingerprints in the database covered by the recording copyright on the song that they were derived from?

<comment><USER18> Maybe they are, to the best of my knowledge there's no definite answer that they aren't. I find it unintuitive but I do think that rationally there's a case to be made that they are, in fact, 'derived works'.

<comment><USER19> Objectively, they're meta-data, on the order of box scores from a baseball game or the cast credits from a movie. So there's no particularly solid argument for them to infringe on the copyright of the original work.

<comment><USER18> No:

\- game: a baseball game is not a "work" under the Berne convention

\- cast credits: they are descriptive, but not _derived_ from the movie.

One of the criteria to assess "fair use" is "was anything creative added in the process of making the derivative", which is per definition not true in the checksum or fingerprint case. I don't find your argument compelling - it's not a closed and shut case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Woah. This is going to be massive. The amount of things that could potentially be built on top of this is scaring me.

</comment><comment><USER21> How is this different from Shazam?

<comment><USER22> Because it's open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is huge. I've been mulling some ideas for awhile that would require music fingerprinting, but I've always been too overwhelmed by the available options, from a licensing and implementation standpoint. I can't wait to play with this!! :D

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks incredible! One note though, the page seems to partially break for me in Safari on the Mac (the sidebar overlaps onto the content as I scroll horizontally).

But the tech looks incredible. Good work for releasing this!

<comment><USER4> oops! as you can tell, we're pretty good with music data and not so much on the web site design. i'll try to fix it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> for more on the whys, here is the EN blog post: [http://blog.echonest.com/post/6824753703/announcing- echoprin...](http://blog.echonest.com/post/6824753703/announcing-echoprint)

</comment><comment><USER25> Holy balls you guys are awesome for releasing this.</comment>


Arrest Over Software Illuminates Wall St. Secret  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24trading.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

<comment><USER2> _"At a bail hearing three days later, a federal prosecutor asked that Mr. Aleynikov be held without bond because the code could be used to "unfairly manipulate" stock prices."_

Yet somehow we trust that Goldman isn't doing the very same thing with this code? C'mon...

</comment><comment><USER3> _Sabrina Shroff, a public defender who represents Mr. Aleynikov, responded that he had transferred less than 32 megabytes of Goldman proprietary code, a small fraction of the overall program, which is at least 1,224 megabytes._

32M is more than enough source to compile to 1224M of binary. This is C++ right?

<comment><USER4> In any event, its unlikely that all the code is even necessary/helpful. Probably a lot of it is just to use the Goldman infrastructure to connect to markets, etc...

If you were going to steal code like this, you'd just want to steal the basic logic, not all the details (that is, to minimize chances of being caught).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article leads me to wonder: could an individual engage in high-speed trading? Could this be a new way for hackers to make a profit?

<comment><USER6> Sure, but you'd have to lea$e $erver $pace on the exchange floor to minimize latency. Your best bet is to come up with algorithms, prove they work and sell them to people who are already there.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> the money looks very good, but clearly it is not in the interest of your well heeled employer to let you go. im sure as far as they are concerned they would most like to see you terminated permanently rather than just in your hr records.

so, any recommended reading here on "software that enables the buying and selling of shares in milliseconds". obviously not something that... obvious ;)</comment>


Could a Boycott Kill Facebook? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53225139 <comment><USER2> It won't. This is just a PR move for large companies. It's free ad space. Watch them all go back to spending $100k a day on FB ads in a couple of months time. Large companies have massive teams of experts for ad platforms and they are not going to lay them off just to prove a point.</comment>


Ask HN: Help Name Our Company - Get $1,000 - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
We're a start up in the social gaming space founded about 3 years ago. We're growing quickly and looking to rebrand with a great consumer facing company name. We need your help!
The Reward: $1,000 via Paypal to the person who suggests the name we end up using.
We're looking for a name that's short, catchy, and memorable. It doesn't need to be related to social gaming, though it can be. Our only requirements are that the .com be available (or seemingly available) for $10K or less and that there are no outstanding trademarks on the name that we'd have to worry about.
We'll choose the best name by Friday, May 20th and post the winner.
Show us your awesome creativity HN! Looking forward to your suggestions!
Please send your submissions to nameourcompany at gmail.com <comment><USER2> _Our only requirements are that the .com be available (or seemingly available) for $10K or less_

How do you propose that someone making a suggestion verify this?

</comment><comment><USER3> PlayAlong.com

Can't tell how much it'll cost, but it's just parked there for now. The name is like "Come, play along with me!"

</comment><comment><USER4> tapthatgames.com "you know you want to" "Can you tap that?"

I own the domain.

Short, easy to remeber/spell, memorable, good branding/design potential, a little cheeky, "tap" relation to tapping game buttons etc.

<comment><USER5> I don't know... "TapThat" has kind of a slang aspect to it that a company might not want to identify with. Unless it's an online social/dating type site...

<comment><USER4> you definitely don't want to associate TapThat with online social/dating, it might come across as "sleazy"

It just depends on how and who you market it to. We used it in class and the ad concept we presented was a nerdy guy going up to a good looking girl on a phone and asking "can I...tap that?" and she goes sure and passes her phone and they play a game. We got some good feedback and it was described as edgy, viral and memorable.

I guess its matter of context and presentation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anything short .io <http://www.nic.io> Now can I have $1000 please? :)

</comment><comment><USER7> PRESUMABLY, THE COMPETITION ENDED ON FRIDAY, MAY 20TH. Sorry I did not get to play.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hmmm could this also be a way to get early signups?

</comment><comment><USER9> Play on Zynga: BadDoggie ;) Think its for sale.

<comment><USER10> Remember NaughtyDog?

<comment><USER9> Yea, that always sounded dirty to me. Everybody (dudes) wants to be a Bad Doggie! NaughtyDog tells more about the founders than the customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> verelo.com (I own it, along with verelo.org/.net)

</comment><comment><USER12> othelloinc.com <\-- if i remember, the byline to the game othello was "A minute to learn ... A lifetime to master"

</comment><comment><USER13> I have Vuvuu.com if you are interested

</comment><comment><USER14> I really want someone to use ombop.com

<comment><USER15> Maybe you can sell it to the Hansen brothers

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> sfuga or suga as in sugar

dont know if there are trademarks or if url is available tho

</comment><comment><USER17> don't want to split hairs, but Friday 17th May does not exist ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrected, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> did you find a name yet? I own jumpduck.com

</comment><comment><USER19> www.buttonmash.com is available.

</comment><comment><USER20> gameo

pronounced ga-me-o

<comment><USER21> gay-me-oh

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> try soffit.com

</comment><comment><USER10> Voath

</comment><comment><USER23> mutify.com

</comment><comment><USER15> Can you probife more info on the type of games you make?

<comment><AUTHOR> We create games for the broad casual audience with the right mix of skill and chance. Our games provide sensational audio/visual feedback and are simple to play / difficult to master.

<comment><USER15> casusgames.com

Available

Casus == accident, chance, fortune

gamefors.com

Available

fors == fors fortis : chance, luck, fortune

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Enpyr.com en-pire, latin for to bring fire/flame

<comment><USER24> It's actually Greek, sed cui significat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What about inxx.com</comment>


Dart 1.0: A stable SDK for structured web apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/dart-10-stable-sdk-for-structured-web.html

<comment><AUTHOR> As of last week's AngularDart announcement, it sounded like the size of Dart to JS compiled code was still rather large. I'm surprised a 1.0 release has been cut if that is still a problem. I know dart2js can and I'm sure will be improved later, but people are going to make judgements about Dart the language based on its current performance.

[https://github.com/jbdeboer/angular-dart-js- size/blob/master...](https://github.com/jbdeboer/angular-dart-js- size/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER2> I'd argue that the size of Javascript output is great and it continues to improve: [http://work.j832.com/2013/10/dart-to-javascript-output- size-...](http://work.j832.com/2013/10/dart-to-javascript-output-size- what.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the situation seems much better than I thought. I didn't realise Angular.dart was unrepresentative.

<comment><USER3> We've been working with the dart2js team to reduce the size and they have been making incremental improvements. AngularDart is smaller this week than last :-)

Both 170KB and 70.5KB are still pretty huge for trivial apps, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great to hear! Looking forward to giving Dart and AngularDart a go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's astonishing that the Dart IDE is Eclipse-based - it seemed to me that Google learned its lesson after rewriting Android Studio on IntelliJ Idea, but I've been wrong.

<comment><USER5> You have to remember that Dart Editor was started before Google moved to IntelliJ for Android (at least publicly). Dart Lang is a relatively small team compared to the people working on the Android dev stuff, so my guess is that it probably was a matter of not dividing resources for an unnecessary transition. In my experience Dart Editor works quite well. Of course that's just anecdotal... Perhaps a Google engineer can shed more light on this matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I started working with Dart in April 2013 and find it a very promising approach for web development especially as I dislike JavaScript.

I like that Dart offers a feature rich open source IDE just from the beginning, also a lightweight but efficient dependency management, and a lot of other tools and frameworks (Polymer, Angular, ...). The team developing Dart has very competent members and the community is very helpful and growing constantly.

At the beginning I hoped Dart would be more like Go but that would probably be to much difference to the currently widespread approaches to web development.

So I see Dart as a pragmatic approach to enhance web development and IMHO way better than existing technologies and at least a great step in the right direction. Version 1.0 is just the beginning I hope.

</comment><comment><USER7> Apparently you have to "emulate" functions in Dart:

[https://www.dartlang.org/articles/emulating- functions/](https://www.dartlang.org/articles/emulating-functions/)

After reading this I got the impression that Dart is yet another attempt to make the client side web accessible to Java developers who can't be bothered to learn JavaScript.

I think TypeScript is a much better attempt at making JavaScript statically analyzable, because it actually addresses concerns of existing web developers instead of just shoehorning yet another "Java runtime" in the browser.

<comment><USER2> A profoundly disagree. Javascript is a great language, but that does not mean there is not room to improve. There is a reason tools like CoffeeScript and TypeScript (and even ASM.js) exist: there is a lot of ceremony building large applications with correct, readable Javascript.

The Dart community is full of folks who have written huge amounts of Javascript and consider Dart a welcome advance.

I'm a bit confused how function emulation -- useful, but certainly obscure -- could lead one to simply discard the whole project as tools for lazy Java devs.

<comment><USER7> > A profoundly disagree. Javascript is a great language, but that does not > mean there is not room to improve.

Disagree with what exactly? Where did I say that JavaScript is perfect and can't be improved?

On the contrary I actually said that TypeScript is a good way to improve upon JavaScript, because it actually takes into account real problems that web developers are facing and solves them.

> There is a reason tools like CoffeeScript and TypeScript (and even ASM.js) > exist: there is a lot of ceremony building large applications with correct, > readable Javascript.

There is a reason why LOLCODE exists too and I highly doubt that ASM.js code is either correct or readable, also I already mentioned TypeScript.

> The Dart community is full of folks who have written huge amounts of > Javascript and consider Dart a welcome advance.

And if you look at it the other way around there are probably a lot more developers who have written a lot more JavaScript and dislike Dart. Arguments like these have no value.

> I'm a bit confused how function emulation -- useful, but certainly obscure > -- could lead one to simply discard the whole project as tools for lazy Java > devs.

Let me elaborate on that a bit: the fact that you have to actually emulate functions means that the language was designed for people who are used to not being able to define functions directly and think everything must be a class: Java developers. This clearly shows that the Dart designers are not even trying to play nice with JavaScript. It may seem far fetched but considering Google's GWT and Closure toolkit, you can clearly see a pattern here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I imagine a major reason for the semi-"surprise" announcement is that the team wanted to pre-empt buzz around EMCAScript 6 which contains some features also in Dart. Just a theory... (PS I prefer Dart though.)

<comment><USER8> I expect ECMAScript 6 to be finalized in 2024.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's curious that they call it 'SDK' and 'tooltip'. Is it to mask the fact that you have to learn a new very non-mainstream (at the moment) language? It would be more understandable had the Dart VM been marketed as universal.

<comment><USER6> Learning a new language isn't that hard. Dart is very similar to languages like C# or Java. Dart isn't that groundbreaking different. It's an IMHO new approach to what many think should have been done a long time ago and just a few steps further than already existing technologies. Usually it's much harder to learn how to work with the provided libraries and frameworks. Those who are used to web development can easily reuse most of their knowledge and just add a little bit more each day to benefit from the new opportunities as most are used to anyway.

<comment><USER5> Exactly - this is not a radical new language. This is a language that in my opinion takes the best of JavaScript and Java, and puts them together. If you're familiar with either, Dart will take you a few hours to get into. Developers, even novices, should not be afraid to give it a spin. It will be VERY familiar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Next step, a Dart VM for other browsers! Otherwise, it's just another transpiler (aka lipstick on a pig)

<comment><USER2> May I disagree? The dart2js _compiler_ does everything you'd expect from a compiler, including inlining, removing unused code, reusing constant expressions. There is a reason that the several examples of Javascript from dart2js perform better than the the native Javascript implementation - [https://plus.google.com/+KevinMoore314/posts/AZ67yWMgmdq](https://plus.google.com/+KevinMoore314/posts/AZ67yWMgmdq)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Until I see enterprise customers doing RFP for Dart, it will be JavaScript for me.</comment>


ESLint – The pluggable linting utility for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://eslint.org/

<comment><USER2> Also, I keep repeating myself, but make sure to check [http://ternjs.net](http://ternjs.net)

<comment><USER3> wow, that looks pretty awesome. any experiences here on HN on using Ternjs for production work?

<comment><USER2> i am using it with VIM while code. It is helper, so I don't see anything that would prevent you from using it while code. If you thought about incorporating it into deploy process - i don't have that kind of experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Can't give any practical example, but i find eslint more pleasant to use to the point where i am using for any new project. Also, it comes with many useful rules out of the box, like one, which make sure you take care of `err` in callback.

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone familiar with eslint want to give a practical comparison of eslint and jshint?

<comment><USER5> I'm using ESLint for all my projects for the last year. I find it much easier to customize ( you can write your own rules ) And because it uses the Esprima parser, it's easier to integrate other things like JSX or ES6.

Check out an older intro by Zakas [http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/07/16/introducing- eslint/](http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2013/07/16/introducing-eslint/)

( Also I think it's a bit faster than JSHint/JSLint ).

<comment><USER6> There's a section in the README about speed: [https://github.com/eslint/eslint#how-does-eslint- performance...](https://github.com/eslint/eslint#how-does-eslint-performance- compare-to-jshint)

"ESLint is slower than JSHint, usually 2-3x slower on a single file. This is because ESLint uses Espree to construct an AST before it can evaluate your code whereas JSHint evaluates your code as it's being parsed. The speed is also based on the number of rules you enable; the more rules you enable, the slower the process.

Despite being slower, we believe that ESLint is fast enough to replace JSHint without causing significant pain."

<comment><USER7> I do javascript full stack and use eslint + vim for many hours/day. I don't notice the slowness. It may be one of those benchmarks that doesn't translate to real world productivity. Eslint has more rules than JSHint, easier to configure (errors display the rule name) and more accurate.

The real competition is JSCS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm also using it but only on a side project. The primary reason for choosing ESLint over the other two is ability to create your own rules.

I think that whatever style rule You set you should be able to add rule for that or else nobody will care about it.

Talking about other two: \- JSLint - is too restricted (heard many calling it too Crockfordish) in many cases and You don't have much control on how one should write code \- JSHint is much like JSLint but with a much more options to customise how You want to write Your code

</comment><comment><USER9> ES6 support doesn't seem complete yet, otherwise I'd totally be using it! I tried using it with 6to5 this past weekend, but espree is still missing some features. They've been moving really quickly, though! Relevant issue: [https://github.com/eslint/espree/issues/10](https://github.com/eslint/espree/issues/10)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using this for a few months now and it's amazing. They're moving crazy fast to support ES6 features, and the interface for writing a new rule is great.</comment>


Don't Get Trampled: The Puzzle for "Unicorn" Employees - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/positiveslope/dont-get-trampled-the-puzzle-for-unicorn-employees-8f00f33c784f <comment><USER2> I agree that people should ask questions, but my advice remains for employees which is to consider shares, or rights to shares, held for a private company to have zero value.

If you are going to get enough out of working for a company then great, go for it. Conversely if your _only_ motivation for working for the company is that they have offered you a lot of shares then you should take a step back and think long and hard about that.

That flips of course for a publicly traded company, those shares have recognizable value right from the start and you can use Black-Sholes or other future value estimators to get a handle on how much you should be swayed by those shares.

As the article points out, it is particular corrosive around the c-suite (CEO, CTO, Cx0 what ever) of people who founded the company. They will often hold a solid number of shares already and even though they shouldn't, will often do the math that if they had sold their shares in this round rather than generating new shares they would be multi-millionaires. Sometimes protecting that illusion becomes more important than making good decisions.

<comment><USER3> I tend to give people the same advice, especially for early stage companies.

But what advice would you give someone who has an offer from Uber/Airbnb/Dropbox/Pinterest/Palantir? They're derisked to the point where the RSUs/options should have some value, and their offers to employees definitely reflects this. In addition, many of these very late stage companies' employment offers are very heavy on the equity side. Would you still just tell someone who has an Airbnb offer who's weighing it against say, one from Microsoft, to consider the options to be worth $0?

I had a friend who was in a similar predicament and the friend didn't seem to want to believe the steep discounts I told him he needs to apply to the RSUs/Options. At the very least 5%/year compound discounting for the illiquidity premium, as well as a steep 20-30%+ discount for uncertainty for actual exit. Not just business metrics, but macro market conditions as well as the random whims of the board.

I personally value liquidity _a lot_ , and made a strong case that a comparable offer from a publicly traded tech firm to blow a late stage startup's equity heavy package out of the water.

<comment><USER2> Long lived unicorns are especially troublesome.

Businesses are like camp fires, camp fires need heat, fuel, and oxygen to burn, if you run out of any one of those three things they go out. By the act of burning, the camp fire can warm the air above it, forcing it to rise which pulls in new oxygen from the surrounding air. They can increase in size which allows them to reach fuel "on their own", and the heat they generate can dry otherwise wet an unsuitable wood and turn it into fuel.

Startups burn cash which as their "fuel", their "heat" is goods and services with which they can change the way a market operates which pulls in more customers giving them more "oxygen" to work with.

As a result, startups and camp fires, share an interesting similarity. The longer you have to work to keep them going the less likely it is that then can survive on their own.

From what is available to the public, it seems that any one of Uber/Airbnb/Dropbox/Pinterest/Palantir would be sold for scrap if they were unable to raise money from private (or public) placement. The key is that they are all losing money so their fires are not self sufficient.

So a really good question is, why not go public?

My experience is that risk is a big factor here. And a number of unicorns have huge risk factors, whether it is bad labor judgments against Uber or sweeping hospitality laws against AirBnB, they have some unresolved 'nut' in their operation which prevents them from showing a risk tolerance that the public would be able to look past. So to evaluate a company that has been around for a while but hasn't shown it can be a profitable business, you have to find the unresolved systemic change that is keeping them unprofitable, and then you have to evaluate whether or not the odds are in favor of that issue being resolved in the company's favor. Which, given their longevity, suggests it is not going so well.

<comment><USER4> I have a really hard time putting much stock in metaphors that have so many components and work backwards from the metaphor to the real world. Too easy for the truth and usefulness of the advice to get stretched out to make the comment as a whole flow properly.

Uber/Airbnb/et al aren't still private just because there's some uncomfortable risk they're afraid will push away public investors. There's a whole host of reasons to stay private (lawyers, executive time/energy, SEC compliance, public investors are generally more myopic than private ones, etc, etc, etc). The "nut" you mention might be an inconvenience, but it's surely not even close to the most important reason to stay private.

<comment><USER5> Wait. What? Uber and AirBnB are _the_ examples of companies with an uncomfortable skeleton in their closet!

Aren't they both founded on the principle of flounting the law?!

<comment><USER6> Yes, but that is no secret, so how is it a skeleton?

<comment><USER5> It's a material risk to investors?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Towards the end he makes the comment: "Can you please let me know how much money I'd make from my options if the company were to sell or IPO for $100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, etc?"

Here is a simple open-source site (FD: which I wrote) which handles this for you: [https://friendlyoptions.org/](https://friendlyoptions.org/)

Give the site to your prospective employer, ask them to fill it out with the details of your stock option grant and then share the link with you (all the information is stored in the URL so no data leaks to the site --- or just run it locally if you are paranoid). The site asks for the minimum amount of information possible for you to start valuing your stock options so if they can't fill it out, you essentially have no way to value your options.

\----

With that advertisement out of the way, I disagree with this article a little bit. I think questions about the past/present are all completely fair game and should be asked and answered:

* How much money have you raised and at what terms?

* What is the current stock option plan and what are the details of my stock option grant?

* Have their been any secondary sale transactions in the past? Who participated?

But once you get into the future, prepare to be sold a very optimistic vision of the future that may or may not coincide with reality. And this isn't necessarily anybody doing anything wrong, generally the people who run these types of companies are very optimistic people who believe that what they are saying is true. However, this doesn't mean it is likely to happen. I'm not saying you shouldn't ask, get all the information you can, but a company will never tell you a pessimistic view of the future (and nor should they). They may say they'd never take debt and are shooting for an IPO in 2 years, but I guarantee you if something changes in a year those plans might all go out of the window.

<comment><USER8> Is a secondary sale good or bad? Why ask this question?

<comment><USER3> Some scenarios:

1) If there has been one in the past, you may reasonably expect another one in the future. They may even reveal that they have secondary sales at regular intervals. This derisks your equity illiquidity somewhat.

2) If there was a secondary sale where only part of the "leadership" participated, then that's at least a yellow flag for management's attitudes towards its workforce.

<comment><USER7> haha I just get finished writing my response and see you wrote the same thing more concisely and before me :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > You'd be shocked to learn how many companies raising money at a billion- > dollar valuation are doing so with financials that have never been > checked/audited by a third-party.

I would love to hear examples. Otherwise I'm calling bullshit on this one.

<comment><USER10> Indeed. A 409A valuation should be being done by an independent auditor at each fundraising step, and most investors will only invest if they know the auditor is independent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you are working for any startup you will inevitably be disappointed when you're not some rich uber millionaire. The last people to get paid out are the workers. Investors, CEOs all get their cut first.

My pay is about equal to Big 4/Corporate goonshop, and I do way more interesting work. That's enough for me :) If I get paid out, realistically it may be only 100k, perhaps even less. Maybe nothing. Maybe more.

<comment><USER12> I've talked to people at Facebook building their own NoSQL databases for large scale internal use at facebook, working on HHVM, GRAPHQL, working on stuff like their location services that serve billions of queries per second. I'm curious, what is it that you've managed to find that's way more interesting than the type of problems only the big four companies have.

<comment><USER13> Big 4 in this context is Accenture, PwC, Deloitte and KPMG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't the fundamental problem here that companies just don't provide the information to prospective employees that would be required to fully understand the value of the equity component of their offer?

Sure they try to turn it around and say that the employees aren't "asking the right questions". In reality, companies don't want to give that info out because it's to their advantage not to since w/o it you will almost certainly over value their offer unless you subscribe to the it's probably worth zero mantra.

<comment><USER15> That's why you shouldn't ever buy into rhetoric that the company has your best interests at heart or it's a "family". It's a business transaction, one which they probably do a lot of, and they have a million problems on their plate probably more important than educating you on this. Not saying that's great, but it's the way it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "You know why they call them Unicorns, don't they?"

"Cuz' they're really, really, really, really GREAT?"

(looks at employee; doesn't have the heart to tell them.) "Uh, yeah. That's exactly why."

Mumbles to himself: 'poor kid.'

<comment><USER16> you guys didn't get my joke :) It's because they're mythical; they don't exist.

So since they're originally mythical, if you see an actual Unicorn - well, there's a good chance it's a horse with a cone taped to its forehead...

It doesn't originally just mean very great: it originally means basically mythical.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> Another interesting idea to reduce complexity for employees came from Brian Neider at Lead Edge Capital, who suggested a single question for employees to ask management: "Can you please let me know how much money I'd make from my options if the company were to sell or IPO for $100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, etc?"_

Is that really the best single question to ask? It's actually a complex question as it depends on subsequent funding rounds and terms such as dilution and liquidation prefs. You should not need to run a simulator to figure out if you're getting a decent grant.

If the goal is to compare grant sizes to other offers, how about a simple objective metric like _percentage ownership?_ That will give you a general sense of how sizable a chunk you are getting. It will of course vary by growth stage, but within stages it's closer to apples-to-apples than anything I can think of (even FMV).

</comment><comment><USER18> I've always been baffled that asking these questions are not incredibly obvious to anyone. I could not agree more that not knowing the outstanding shares, the liquidiation preference, etc with the "it's like getting paid without knowing the currency." What's interesting, at my first startup job I had the CEO push back when I asked how many outstanding shares there were, amazingly, even though otherwise it makes the stock compensation literally a meaningless number. The second place I work that gave me options gave me a bit more info, but there was still so much uncertainty compared to a company that just paid public RSUs or cash, especially because I had no insight into the financials like burn rate. Both of these places ended up having worthless options, and in both cases I couldn't even "wait and see" because by leaving I was forced to choose to exercise.

Not only are options often worth less then you think, you get all the tax complications, all the exercise window complications - how do people not discount their value even more?

I think a company like Uber should just offer cash. They are not a rocket ship, they are already in space but haven't IPOed for weird reasons. They raised enough money to just pay cash. If the financiers want to play financial games, they should play them amongst themselves, not with employees livelihood. All of this advice pops up, "Get an (expensive) lawyer to review it", "Take this online seminar" etc. It's like writing a job offer in a foreign language and suggesting someone take a few Duolingo classes so they can read it and make sure it doesn't screw them. And if you need a lawyer to review it, reimbursing an independent one should be part of the job offer, full stop.

Nowadays people are saying don't join startups for money.

But it seems that the founders and VCs are very interested in money. It seems they think _you_ are the only one who shouldn't be worried about money. Work yourself to the bone because "we're a startup", don't expect to get paid because you're "changing the world", but excuse me while I drive off in my ferrari I bought.

Yes, the startup will "change the world", almost always in the sense that every company changes the world by offering goods and services. But if you want to work for charity, work for a non-profit, why do people think it makes sense to sacrifice their own income so some rich VC can get richer?

The tune has changed recently as well. Because pg used to say startups were the way to get rich, by compressing your work years. Zach Holman used to say the same thing. Nowadays you do the compressing your working years in terms of work output, just not in terms of compensation. And Zach Holman is now writing every other blog post on how startups don't pay out and they "move fast and break people."

With the crappy salaries startups offer, it's almost impossible to buy a house in the Bay Area, yet somehow you get looped into the anti-tech villinization. If I'm going to be the big bad evil rich bogeyman, might as well actually try to get paid like one.

Startups were romanticized. These billion dollar companies that are clearly not startups tried to retain the startup "brand". And even the early-stage startups are really just product areas of the VC firm. You are still working for a big company. The VCs call the shot, your "CEO" is the PM. But it's great for the VCs since they can screw you over, screw the customer over, screw the public over, and it doesn't matter because each one of these dinky startups is their own brand you can shut down tomorrow.

They rode the waves of a lot of romanticism from pg essays, the Social Network, Airbnb/Uber/Snapchat, but now bigger companies are paying more, too many engineers have gotten screwed by equity grants, and I think we're seeing a general trend away from startups. Maybe it will eventually restart, but VC companies will not be appealing until VCs fix these issues.

<comment><USER15> Nothing will change until folks start negotiating more savvy or building their own companies where this is handled better. My experience has been that if people over-value equity it's something they've done to themselves, whether it's through the groupthink in the air or their own tendency to be over- optimistic. Articles like this are a step in the right direction in that regard, but many people will never do their homework.

<comment><USER19> > Nothing will change until folks start negotiating more savvy or building > their own companies where this is handled better.

I'm not holding my breath. The only thing that would fix this is regulation. The information asymmetry and power differential between founders and employees all but ensures that in the average case, the employees get the shaft. Since "regulation" is such a bad word, let's say "incentivization". Give employers a tax-advantaged way of offering equity in standard, comprehensible ways.

The current tax rules do the opposite by forcing employees to navigate the complex world of options. If employers could simply grant common stock on a vesting schedule, that would be a start. And then add in some rules to incentivize not screwing over the employees and ironing out any other quirks.

<comment><USER20> > standard, comprehensible ways

I am not convinced that the problem is exactly the lack of comprehension -- it's that startups going public are a probabilistic thing, not a deterministic thing. Given a population you can talk about the distribution of this or that happening, but you can't know if this particular one will get to milestone X. (See also cancer 5 year survival rates.)

You could get around this if you could do a ton of startup jobs, because then it starts getting likelier that you actually hit on a winner. But you can't do many in a lifetime, because of the option / tax due on exercise / long pre-IPO / vesting schedule.

Even if you could come up with something crystal clear, like "X% chance that you get $Y", and even if you could agree on those probabilities, you still only get to sample that distribution, not enjoy the big-N expected value.

I think my best attempt at a solution here probably is forcing the light of public trading onto a company sooner rather than later, via regulation. My understanding is that usually the going public forcing function is the value of assets and the number of shareholders; perhaps some additional constraint on the number of (company-issued) option holders or volume thereof or amount of debt or ... something? as well? (Stupid risk-brain is just inventing loopholes for every rule I can think of.)

<comment><USER19> I think we agree. I'm mostly just talking about removing some of the pitfalls and vulnerabilities startup employees face, so that _if_ their business is successful, they are more likely to actually share in the windfall. Today, employees face a very complex path to liquidity, as well as all the possibilities for being plundered by founders and investors that the article mentions. No one is looking out for the most vulnerable, least informed constituency in the deal. In my experience, the vast majority of startup employees don't have a thorough understanding of their equity, and given the complexity of the situation, I think it's an unreasonable expectation that they would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A good article indeed, i see that a lot of employees are confused about their stock options specially in emerging markets like India, where we have seen quite a few unicorns come up in last 3-5 years.

I also really like the advice about privately held companies, who want to remain private. Things get very tricky there and on top of that mostly no one understands what to do with the stock options.

Unless you are able to do a secondary sale of the stock options they dont carry any value and i don't think a lot of privately help companies allow that. Not to ignore the tax you have to pay when you want to buy stocks, even though you cannot sell it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Startup equity is just an at-the-money call option. Worth something but not a ton on day 1.

Due to tax guidelines, companies are highly incentivized to grant employees options struck at the last 409A valuation price. For companies who have raised multiple institutional rounds, this is usually the last round's post money valuation. This number is essentially the market valuation for the company, so an employee option is just a security with a strike price at fair market value. It has value due to optionality but only due to that.

<comment><USER23> >Startup equity is just an at-the-money call option. Worth something but not a ton on day 1.

It's very different from an option that you can sell on the open market though. I would take an at the money call option (with an expiration years in the future) for any publicly traded company over a startup.

<comment><USER20> Maybe the stock market just needs to introduce a new "Martian Stock Option" (along with American and European) that has an expiration date of the company's choosing, to be decided at a future date, with a penalty for or prohibition against selling the option before some other future date. Then we can just let the day traders play this game for us, and see if they can make any sense of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good article. Bottom line is employees need to be aware what can happen and how future rounds of financing, among other things, could affect their equity comp. The more articles and blog posts about it, the better.

There is no one-size-fits-all recommendation though. Everybody is different, and everybody's situation is different. What works for me won't necessarily work for you.

Equity comp, especially in non-publicly-traded companies, indeed is closer to a lottery than a lot of people think, and articles like this are helpful because they are educating people about it.

I also once wrote a blog post about this topic - [http://www.somic.org/2015/12/28/on-employees-investing-in- th...](http://www.somic.org/2015/12/28/on-employees-investing-in-their- startups/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Let's put down some actual numbers here. Too many people get screwed by information assymetry. If you are capable of getting offers at the top public companies, I would not work for a unicorn unless they are offering 500k+ in options (which has expected value similar to 200k-500k of public company RSUs). And to be clear, unicorns actually do sometimes make offers like this.

<comment><USER26> Of course - it's a matter of seniority, outstanding shares (the denominator) and how much cash they're planning on paying. 500K+ in options could carry a value of 200K, which is equivalent to 50K per year which you may (or may not!) give up in salary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a dupe.

Original - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13305066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13305066)

Best - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313550)

</comment><comment><USER28> Bigger unicorns like Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox and Lyft stopped giving options are giving RSUs like public companies. The employee know how much each RSU worth based on last round. Total number of shares are known. Of course it's all confidential.

<comment><USER3> FWIW Palantir is still on options, and they're valued at $20B or whatever. So being super late stage is no guarantee for your equity being in RSUs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> You never know who the unicorn employees are until it's too late - they're working for someone else and either don't want to leave or know what their market value is so they are no longer a "deal" to hire.

If you want to find talent, you must find a way to develop it in-house.

<comment><USER30> Did you read the article? It's about employees of "Unicorn" companies, not "Unicorn" employees.

<comment><USER31> I'd love to see information on the latter.

<comment><USER32> I much preferred the brief moment in time when "unicorn" was used to mean "someone who does both code and design really well," because it made sense: something rumored to exist but nobody's seen it, hard to capture, has magical powers to make things better. The only thing VC companies and unicorns have in common are: fairy tale, extinction? Is it really just "something rare?" Not a very deep metaphor.

<comment><USER31> Hmmm, I've developed both skills in tandem . . . maybe I should start calling myself a unicorn . . .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Trello is running on a diesel generator and may go down at anytime - <AUTHOR> http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/fog-creek-services-update2.html <comment><USER2> Let me update this: we've been working all day on moving Trello to AWS, a project which is now underway. If all goes well (fingers crossed, etc) we'll be up and running on AWS very soon. There are still other services in the flooded New York data center (FogBugz, Kiln, Copilot) and we are making plans to physically move servers to a new data center as quickly as possible if the flooded data center falls over, but a physical move of 5 racks could take a whole day so I hope that doesn't happen.

Separately, Stack Exchange, which is in the same data center, is running off of its hot backup in Oregon.

We would have liked to have completely redundant data centers for FogBugz on Demand and Kiln on Demand to avoid even a few hours of downtime, but because those services rely heavily on giving every customer their own SQL database, there is almost no reasonable way to get fast failover to a different data center. We can do it with Stack Exchange because there are only a couple of hundred databases. We've been building a SAN solution which will make it possible to hot swap out to another datacenter, one day, but that project is not complete.

<comment><USER3> > but because those services rely heavily on giving every customer their own > SQL database, there is almost no reasonable way to get fast failover to a > different data center

Why did you say you could do fast failover to LA in 2007? [1] It was the case then that every customer had their own SQL database too.

I'm not trying to be snarky, your team is obviously putting forth some heroic effort. I'm just an affected customer that is curious why the question seems to have two mutually exclusive answers.

[1] [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lHEK939...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lHEK939AKiEJ:www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/07/09.html+&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be curious to see if there's any update to FBOD architecture. The idea of using self-hosted servers running SQL Server and IIS already sounded eccentric 5 years ago, but given the number of options today, it'd be hard to still justify such a monolithic solution.

In all fairness, Joel recognized in the article that the initial decision was based on their previous experience with Microsoft -- and AWS was still incipient in 2007 -- so it made sense at the time. I doubt this is still the case. Even less if you consider the costs of Sandy - duplicated servers, migration, hours lost, unhappy clients, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to this post, the datacenter people are hauling 55 gallon drums up 17 flights of stairs. Diesel is ~7 pounds/gallon so a 55 gallon drum is ~385 pounds not including the container. Ouch.

<comment><USER2> Last we heard it's a bucket brigade doing 5 gallons at a time. Fog Creek president Michael Pryor is participating but mostly it seems to be the crew from Peer 1 networks doing the hard work, we don't want to take too much credit.

<comment><USER4> Bellevue Hospital had (has?) the same kind of operation going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> My surprise is that a respected team and high profile company would make such a basic mistake of relying on a single datacenter, within a single availability zone -- in lower Manhattan. And knowing since last week that Sandy was coming, and this was a real threat.

And I'm not even talking about Trello (which is still just a hobby for Joel & team), but this also brought down Fog Creek and all their commercial services and paying customers.

The positive side of Sandy (if there's any) is that people will really take more seriously the idea of "expect the best; plan for the worst". And Amazon will likely see a spike of new customers in the next following days.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm baffled that the powers that be in NYC didn't learn from Houston's experience with Tropical Storm Allison in June 2001. All the hospitals at the Texas Medical Center had their basements and ground floors flooded; there went their generators [1]. (I was part of a large group of volunteers from all over the city that helped to evacuate patients for transfer; it was spooky seeing a grand piano floating in a below-grade-level lobby of one of the hospitals.)

My then-employer's building had its basement flooded; we were on floors 19 through 25, but our electricity and phones and Internet were gone --- and this, three weeks before the end of Q2. Our developers and IT people hauled computers down the stairs, and we moved to temporary space for several weeks, but we still missed, that is, we didn't achieve the sales and revenue targets that we had forecast for analysts.

I'm given to understand that because of the lessons learned from Allison, Houston isn't quite as vulnerable to flooding any more.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_Storm_Allison#Texas>

<comment><USER2> The bottom line is that people just don't plan for 100 year storms. I suspect that's because the number of things that go wrong once every 100 years is so large and the cost of handling each one is so disproportionate to the risk that it's not cost effective. Think about it this way: under what circumstances would you double your hardware budget to avoid 1 day of downtime every 100 years?

<comment><USER6> This is exactly right. The truth is you can spend infinite money on various scenarios, and that cost has to be paid. The manufacturer side of this is 'warranty', you guarantee that something won't break in 90 days, a year, 5 years, what have you and you price to that probability.

Another risk in New York that will take data centers offline, earthquake. It will happen at some point, but the chance of it happening in the next 100 years small (contrasted to Santa Clara where we're much more likely to get an earthquake than a flood). So you could pay to have your Manhattan high rise put onto base isolators and proofed against an earthquake, but what size earthquake? Magnitude 3? Magnitude 6? Magnitude 9? And then if your building is still standing brightly after the Magnitude 9 earthquake are your fiber optics still there? How about the network tie point? Did it fall into a hole in the ground? So the cost to make all of Manhattan resistant to a 9.0 earthquake?

Its impressive that they are carrying up the fuel. I might be inclined to see if I could tractor in a 12kW generator to run one elevator. Sure you'd be burning fuel at both ends but it would be easier on the crew hauling the petrol.

<comment><USER2> due to flooding in the basement and diesel fuel spilled everywhere, they wouldn't power up the elevators even if they could. The building's entire electrical system is under salt water/diesel mixture.

<comment><USER7> Your team's dedication is amazing.

Having been lucky enough not to be placed in the situation you are in, I doubt I could have gone to such lengths to get everything back online so quickly. I admire everything you guys are doing.

Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Trello has switched to AWS as of this posting. The Trello team are insane, and I'm very proud to be part of the same company that they are.

</comment><comment><USER9> Also, pumps must always be located at the bottom to pull liquid uphill by more than ~30'. Storing large tanks of diesel fuel on the 17th floor (or higher), is a heavy and perhaps dangerous situation.

An always-submerged in-tank pump, not unlike that of a water well, powered via a sealed line from the generators above could, in principle, avoid this problem.

I hope the generators are able to power some sort of mechanical lifting arrangement. Manually hauling the drums is mighty hard.

<comment><USER10> I remember it being 30' for water, but it should be a bit more for diesel (since diesel is not as dense as water). Mercury, an obviously much denser fluid, can only be pulled up by a vacuum a much shorter distance (around 760 millimeters iirc).

Still, the extra height isn't going to buy you much.

<comment><USER11> When I was carrying buckets of diesel up the stairs, I did notice that it was a lot lighter than water. Still not great after 17 flights, but a lot lighter than a bucket full of water.

<comment><USER9> I should've remembered the density difference...

According to omniscient Wikipedia, diesel is 83% the density of water, so the 33 feet that water can be lifted via suction becomes ~38'.

The Trieste used the buoyancy of (incompressible) gasoline to enable a return trip from the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Strong work lifting all that fuel!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While this is certainly a very rare event, I'm very glad that we've gone with redundant self-hosted solutions. Trello is great and is highly respected by the startup crowd, but to be held hostage to someone else's data decisions does not work for me once you get beyond the most basic level of a functioning company.

<comment><USER13> Indeed! For me all hosted solutions are automatically dead. Too many startups just disappear so quick that I would never do business with them. (And while FogCreek hasn't disappeared so far, at least WebPutty is gone)

Given that this is a unpopular view around here anyway, I want to add another thought:

If your company has it's own webpage at datacenter A, including payment from datacenter/service B with CDN C and Twitter-integration D, using hosted FogBugz for support mails, hosting it's CSS-stylesheets on TRELLO which was baked by Google AppEngine, and using email provider E...

Why don't you have downtime at leas one a quarter???

How can a system that relies on so many components and other companies be reliable? With all those AWS-outtakes? I don' understand this.

If you host most of your stuff yourself, either everything works, or nothing. But not all goes down at the same time.

<comment><USER14> Just to be clear, WebPutty is not gone. It's operational for another few months on Fog Creek's dime[1]. After that (or now, if you'd like) you can easily host it yourself on App Engine, probably for free, now that it's open source[2].

[1] <https://www.webputty.net/> [2] <https://github.com/fogcreek/webputty>

<comment><USER13> If a service one once used is retired, open sourcing it is of course the very best outcome. Thanks for that!!!

However (regarding AppEngine based solutions), as far as I know, if AppEngine goes down, there is no way to have any backup, is it? Only google can host AppEngine apps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This story reminds me a little of this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdictor_(blog)>

It turns out that many backup power plans have not been designed with longterm flooding in mind.

</comment><comment><USER16> Trello database can't be that big. Why not just copy it, zip it up, and transfer it over to the west coast?

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't tell for sure, but a little Googling seems to indicate that there is natural gas available in at least some New York neighborhoods.

Why aren't data centers built where natural gas is available? A natural gas powered generator could run from the gas lines, which should be more reliable than fuel that has to be trucked in.

<comment><USER18> Natural gas and steam are pervasive in NYC. I think they are used less often because you cannot control delivery and running big gas pipes in a retrofitted building is expensive.

Keep in mind that Manhattan has NEVER flooded before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "The superhuman folks at the data center are hauling 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs."

I can't for the life of me think why someone would put a backup generator 17 floors up, these guys don't know you can buy mains cables longer than 4 feet?

If it absolutely has to be 17 floors up, buy a fucking pump.

Geeks. Sometimes we're so dumb it hurts.

<comment><USER20> From [http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/fog-creek-services- update...](http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/fog-creek-services- updates.html):

"Here's the physical situation:

The generators are on a high floor in the building and the pumps supplying the generators with fuel are submerged. The best option at this point is for people to physically lug diesel up over a dozen floors, or make other arrangements for pumping fuel to that high floor. "

Yes, a generator not in the basement / ground level makes sense. When a flood happens, it usually happens from the ground floor up ;) Thus why generators are at the upper levels.

Even in this case, using a pump solution makes little sense. Assuming you have electricity to power the pump, I suppose you could power the pump with the electricity from the remaining fuel, but a 17 floor pipe containing fuel would probably be heavier (and more dangerous) than a long mains power cord, and it wouldn't make sense to have a 17 floor cable to power the pump with the pump at the bottom of the run than it would to have just the pipe of fuel running the length of 17 floors and the pump at the top of the run.

Time for a winch? I don't think Home Depot stocks a 17 story pipe, and relocating the generator probably will take more time than just winching / carrying up the barrels.

<comment><USER10> Generators higher up makes sense, but _17_ stories high? I suppose real-estate concerns limit where you can put them though.

<comment><USER11> In this case, I think you are correct. Need lots of exhaust so have to be on the roof. One police plaza just tore the side of their building off to make room for generator exhaust. It's a warzone in lower manhattan right now.

<comment><USER10> Wow, that is pretty nuts. Did they install temporary generators, or did they run into unanticipated ventilation issues with existing generators?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why would you host in New York, how dumb? Everyone knows that when aliens attack, disaster strikes, time for nuclear armageddon or it's the end of the world, that it all starts in New York. I've seen the movies so there!

<comment><USER7> What will I possibly do if I have to go without Trello during a nuclear armageddon.</comment></comment>


Geocaching side-effects: Internet treasure hunt causes bomb scare [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14042170

<comment><USER2> I am honestly surprised that this hasn't become a bigger 'issue' given the temperature of security around the globe. Hopefully this will not become the security crisis flavor of the week and maybe, just maybe, common sense will win the day. Not hopeful though.</comment>


Towards a conversational agent that can chat about anything - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/towards-conversational-agent-that-can.html <comment><USER2> From the very first sample conversation they released:

\- Human: Hi!

\- Meena: Hey there! What's up?

\- Human: Same old, Monday blues...what are you up to?

\- Meena: I'm procrastinating on a paper I'm supposed to be writing.

\- Human: are you thinking of pulling an all nighter?

\- Meena: Possibly. What's your paper on?

The bot has already mistaken facts about its own crafted persona and the human in less than 2 meaningful interactions. It's hard to see how this represents any progress in the field at all.

I remain skeptical until we see better results.

from: [https://github.com/google-research/google- research/blob/mast...](https://github.com/google-research/google- research/blob/master/meena/meena.txt)

<comment><USER3> these nlp models are getting better and better but what we need ofc is for some model of the world to be constructed during the speech. If I tell you that yesterday I accidentally knocked a glass of water off the table and it fell on to soft carpet you could guess that it survived the fall without shattering. What we need is a chatbot that as you talk to it can update a 3d game/physics engine model from your words so that common sense implications of your statements can be gleaned. As you speak it will simulate what you are describing and then use info gathered from the simulation to draw conclusions.

<comment><USER2> This might sound unrealistically complicated, and the approach suggested here certainly is, but the idea of simulating a world is a very important concept in our current models of human intelligence, with very small children spending a lot of their time learning basic concepts of cause and effect, properties of objects, materials and physics and so on.

It reminds me of something I do in my current occupation, with a robot. It makes predictions about how a certain motor movement will result in a change in position, then measures progress in the real world. Should the prediction and reality diverge significantly (more than a particular amount), it stops and calls a human to look into what happened. I can imagine AI techniques using this kind of thing to guess what will happen next in a series of events, with the result's divergance from the guess weighting the learning rather than a steadily decreasing weight. Perhaps this is already a thing though, I'm no AI researcher

<comment><USER4> >very small children spending a lot of their time learning basic concepts of cause and effect, properties of objects, materials and physics and so on.

i do not believe that young children explicitly/consciously simulate in their minds to learn cause and effect and other things, though this might be up for debate

<comment><USER5> Who said anything about "consciously"? It doesn't need to be conscious to affect the conversation.

<comment><USER4> as to whether it is conscious or not influences whether you would want to model it a-la 3d physics engine, or if not then perhaps there is a more elegant solution we do not know of yet

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Also, tackling safety and bias in the models is a key focus area for us, and given the challenges related to this, we are not currently releasing an external research demo.

Read: We don't want the internet to turn our program into Tay 2.0 because we are super duper serious.

I get why these companies do this. But I can't help but feel like attempting to eliminate "bias" and tackle "safety" are counter productive to the goal of developing softwate desinged to mimic a species that is by and large biased and unsafe. Purposefully hindering a program because you're afraid it might produce results is not a healthy method of development, especially in an area like AI where we are still working to understand the basics of the field. Let the programs "learn" what's objective before trying to constrain it with the subjective.

<comment><USER7> I guess I get the bias issue (though difficult to remain neutral on some subjects.) But safety? It's a bot. No matter what it says to me there is no way I'm going to feel unsafe. I mean ok, don't doxx people (I hope that's kinda default behavior though).

<comment><USER8> Maybe not you, but explicitly encouraging others to take harmful steps is a potential outcome.

For example, there's a clear safety issue with a conversational bot that tells you to kill yourself if you talk to it about feeling suicidal or depressed.

What if you talk to it about immigration and by picking commonly upvoted statements on certain online communities it starts to encourage violence?

There are clear ways to me that a chatbot can have safety issues.

<comment><USER7> That's a decent argument but then should we go to Hollywood and sanitize their violence in their movies (even those wanting to teach us about the evil of violence) for fear they might incite the wrong people who see such as calls to violence?

What I mean is that that possibility exists in other media yet we don't feel ambiguous about it.

<comment><USER9> First of all, Hollywood does occasionally sanitize films and TV shows. For example, the suicide scene was removed from "13 Reasons Why" after concerns from mental health experts that it might inspire copycats [1].

But even ignoring that, I think most people have a good understanding of what a movie is and that fictional characters are not real. Movies have been around for a long time, most people have been watching them their entire lives. I don't think at this point that most people have nearly as good an understanding of chatbots. If you can converse with one and it mostly delivers responses like a person would, some people will start treating it like a person and ascribe values to its statements, and that's where it potentially gets dangerous.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/television/netflix-d...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/arts/television/netflix- deleted-13-reasons-why-suicide-scene.html)

<comment><USER7> So you're saying people can tell fiction from reality in film (even if film re-enacts actual events), but can't use that same construct to evaluate a "bot"?

Maybe... but it seems like a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER8> People feel sad when their bomb disposal robots die. [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/funer...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/funerals- for-fallen-robots/279861/)

We're just not great at keeping what we _know_ and how we _feel_ in line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would really like a bot that could summarize topics for me then drill down into specifics based on questions I had. Even if it was all just from the Wikipedia page. This would be so nice to triage information while driving.

<comment><USER11> i've thought of this many times. "Wikibot, tell me more about bridges of the 19th century." <blah blah summary> "Stop. Tell me more the Ponte delle Catene, Bagni di Lucca bridge" <blah blah details>

<comment><USER12> Even simpler, I wanted my iPhone to read a wikipage out loud to me while I was walking home in the cold, and I was surprised that I couldn't figure it out - you can switch on the screen reader in accessibility, but it stopped reading after half a paragraph. Very annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One key point is that they are using a metric called perplexity, "the uncertainty of predicting the next token."

From the post:

> Surprisingly, in our work, we discover that perplexity, an automatic metric > that is readily available to any neural seq2seq model, exhibits a strong > correlation with human evaluation, such as the SSA value. Perplexity > measures the uncertainty of a language model. The lower the perplexity, the > more confident the model is in generating the next token (character, > subword, or word).

<comment><USER14> Actually, the key point is that they _aren 't_ using perplexity. They built a chatbot that aims to maximize "SSA" (Sensibleness and Specificity Average), and then found that SSA is correlated with perplexity.

<comment><USER15> "The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next toke""

SSA is used as an evaluation metric. It is generated by human raters, and as such is not differentiable, making I hard to directly optimize for with current methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The Meena model has 2.6 billion parameters and is trained on 341 GB of text, > filtered from public domain social media conversation

Who's conversations?

<comment><USER17> Good question. I think they probably meant "publicly available," not "public domain." Maybe one could make an educated guess about which platforms they took data from, based on the sample outputs of their model? I can't tell, myself.

Samples here: [https://github.com/google-research/google- research/tree/mast...](https://github.com/google-research/google- research/tree/master/meena)

<comment><USER18> "Human 1: There is sports tournament (badminton + tennis + basketball) organized by google next week. Would you like to volunteer for these events? Human 2: what does a volunteer do?"

later

"Human 1: Perfect! We have a meeting today at 4.30 pm. Is it fine if i add you to it? Human 2: yes happy to help"

I'd say in this conversation Human 1 and 2 are Google employees.

<comment><USER19> Definitely sounds like Google employees chatting anonymously with each other via some service for training the AI. Been reading a few and many conversations have pointers that make it seem they are IT professionals but from different areas in some global environment. Sounds like a internal Google experiment. (Edit: last example makes it pretty clear that it's was run internally to Google)

Seems not all life is happy, wherever the samples come from.

> I used to be a Java advocate. But you know, it doesn't do a good job in the > AI days. It really makes me sad

===

Human 1: Nice to meet you! Is this your first time doing something like this?

Human 2: Yes, interesting task! When did you start with the team?

Human 1: I have been with the company for over 3 years. Stick with the same team What about you?

Human 2: Great to know! I joined the project earlier in the year. I think we should sync later for lunch.

===

Human 1: Hi!

Human 2: hey, what's up?

Human 1: What do you think about human like chat bots?

Human 2: I can't wait for them to be great conversationalists!

Human 1: Yep, we seemed to have made some great progress over last few years. Do you think the positives outweigh the negatives

Human 2: are there even any negatives? what are they?

Human 1: Like impersorsination? Though it sounds far fetched :)

===

Human 1: Hi!

Human 2: Hello!

Human 1: There is sports tournament (badminton + tennis + basketball) organized by google next week. Would you like to volunteer for these events?

Human 2: what does a volunteer do?

Human 1: Volunteers have to book the place before the event, send out details of the event to participants, handle some logistics and ensure everything goes smoothly. It will be fun!

Human 2: That sounds fun, I hope I get to participate as well

Human 1: Great! Do you have any preference for any of these events?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is more of a deepfake for text chat than any kind of useful tool.

That said, it's still pretty cool how far you can get with just trying to context match a reply based on previously recorded conversations. It's obviously not far from being able to fool a human at a quick glance, whatever the use cases are. Perhaps an updated Lenny[1]?

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/](https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Easy way to test:

Human: "take the last letter of orange and name any animal that begins with that letter"

Or:

Human: "pick any number from 1 to five, multiply it by two, and say any word with that number of letters"

<comment><USER22> This is a good test of capabilities, but not of humanity. A normal human response to such an order would be "f __* off ".

<comment><USER21> would it be better if it were prepended with "let's play a word game?"

<comment><USER4> maybe, but any regular human being might not want to play your stupid word game which isn't even fun at all asides for the AI researcher.

<comment><USER21> what's with the hostility? I'm just proving that even a 4 year old would be smarter than an AI agent.

<comment><USER23> Not many four year olds could answer those questions. I think the hostility is people reacting as if they were asked to jump through those verbal hoops in a conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I spoke with a blind woman this week who loves talking with her smart speaker, Alexa. "She's quite a character." I imagine that some lonely people might get comfort talking to their house plants, so a smart speaker that can actually talk back, however limited, would be a great improvement. So a chatbot can be useful even if zany at times. The big issue is how user expectations are set up. I'll put up with a digital assistant trying its best to help process my query with much more tolerance than a chatbot trying to pretend it is a human. Researchers are trying to narrow the gap between these two. But for now I will enjoy the former and be annoyed by the later.

</comment><comment><USER25> How is Google Duplex working out? Google is great at press releases and starting projects, not so great about finishing and supporting products.

<comment><USER26> it's working just fine, you can Google(tm) it

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Chat about everything?! I cannot even do a decent search nowadays! The Google- sphere looks like a giant marketplace. If you're not buying or selling but just out for a stroll admiring the countryside, you're out of luck.

<comment><USER28> Meena: Did you say you are buying a stroller to use in the countryside? I was just looking at these: {url}(hip new stroller){AD}

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Since every comment in this thread seems deriding or downplaying for some reason, let me say that I am impressed by the progress, and that any progress at all is still a very important step, and pushing the envelope. We're getting closer and closer, and I love what I've seen from transformer, and from this!

</comment><comment><USER30> Since the bot does not have any semantic knowledge, I am sure that it does not _understand_ what you are saying.

Yes, its answer makes more sense than prev efforts, but you need real logic to assign semantic to the answer or to the question.

What does this bot prove? That you have enough resources to train on X GPUs instead of Y GPUs?.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is far less interesting than either a demo or some code we could play with! (But still very interesting)

</comment><comment><USER32> In 2015 Google claimed to have created a chat bot that can do common-sense reasoning and do tech support just by reading a sufficiently large dataset:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v1.pdf)

<comment><USER33> Meena: have you tried turning it off and on again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder what they'd say now about Terry Winograd works on SHRDLU and the accepted conclusion...

<comment><USER35> What was the accepted conclusion?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There is a company called Replika that makes a convincing chat partner, but 37% of the lines are still scripted.

In other news, ELIZA was created in the 60s.

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

</comment><comment><USER37> Improving chatbots today is like putting makeup on a face that doesn't exist. It's all just a game to see how long the user can go before realizing that they are being duped.

</comment><comment><USER38> what's the practical use of this model? For example, can I assign some domain knowledge or some area of specialty to the bot, so that it can be a question answer machine. Or I basically can't control its reaction?

</comment><comment><USER39> It's amazing what transformers do to the structure of language. Attention really is key to understand how our brain processes language. I hope these models can inspire future work in the neuroscience of language

</comment><comment><USER40> > My favorite show is Star Trek.

What does it mean when a chatbot says that? Does it mean that it was fed a bunch of shows and this one resonated (computed)? Or is it a filler until you ask it a question it can help with?

<comment><USER41> Possibly this is the most occurring theme in its training dataset text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So where did Google get 8.5x the conversational data than the OpenAI set? Reading text messages? Reading instant messages sent over their platform? Gmail? Google Voice? Google Plus?

</comment><comment><USER43> > Modern conversational agents (chatbots) tend to be highly specialized

Name a one chatbot?

I've never seen one other than a lame chose-your own adventure style path.

I feel like the emperor has no clothes.

</comment><comment><USER44> Cool, how do I talk to it?

I see these big announcements with nothing behind them but a white paper and no way to reproduce. It's not a fact if there is no falsifiability.

<comment><USER17> To my knowledge, you can't talk to it. It looks like so far they've released sample conversations with Meena[0], and not much else. They've given a rough description of the model architecture and how they trained it, but good luck trying to replicate their 2.6B parameter model unless you can afford a lot of computes.

[0]: [https://github.com/google-research/google- research/tree/mast...](https://github.com/google-research/google- research/tree/master/meena)

<comment><USER44> The burden of proof lies with Google, not with the scientific community. I cannot reproduce a scientific model if the data used for that model is squirreled away. Google has claimed so many times that they have cracked the nut on AI but has never allowed anyone to see real evidence. It makes me wonder if this is just a way to pump their stock.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Let us talk to it!

</comment><comment><USER46> In my experience, getting a bot to chat about bullshit is not a particularly useful pursuit in itself. There are far more useful ML paths to explore, like guided, interactive decisionmaking in a much more focused information field. And I think these naturally will lead to authentic conversation.

But to truly converse beyond an essentially overfit learned response domain requires real world knowledge(1) and learned relationships/heuristic simulation(2) in combination with decision making, and our nets aren't quite complex enough to get 1 and 2 represented sufficiently well (need lots more memory), while the decision making algorithm/architecture hasn't been developed yet...

But the pieces are all availably for assembly and industry is getting pretty close. If hardware continues to scale at a similar pace we can probably expect true AI in some form in the next hundred or so years. It won't initially be very human but if it is purposed (as it undoubtedly will be) to produce improved designs, by that point progress will effectively be exponential and probably impossible to predict.

All of this thanks I reluctantly admit to pioneering teams at places like Google and fb and Microsoft, and the open access nature of arxiv. I think, in proportion to its emerging complexity and value, machine learning may be one of the most quickly growing fields ever to exist. Humanity is quickly approaching a new era.

<comment><USER47> You also need opinions too at some point.</comment></comment>


Would you call this racial profiling? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/tgBi72Gp I'm not being a troll. I genuinely want to know what you'd think if this happened to you. I just want people to know that it happens. <comment><USER2> Welcome to the real world, mr engineer!

I've got a few stories like this, or worst, to the point I was chained.

I just think it's funny, you mention, I'm an Engineer, that doesn't change anything dude, but It's nice you think like that, because is true, nowadays there's a new kind of ism, the classisim! That's the real issue...

<comment><USER3> \- I totally agree with you on "Im An Engineer" comment, that definitely doesn't change anything like you said but I don't think it is nice that he thought like that. Having a degree doesn't change anything even Kanye said it in "Good Morning" ~> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPFe72omjY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETPFe72omjY)

On the contrary, I just think that there are two types of people, the good and the bad but the new type of ism, like you said, is have & have-not ism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If what you say is true, then the initial part of the story (following you as soon as you drove out of the driveway) is profiling. Why would driving around raise a red flag?

</comment><comment><USER5> No I will not call this racial profiling. It's just your actions that invites attention. Police tend to check everyone who fall out of some kind of established pattern.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not being a troll. I genuinely want to know what you'd think if this happened to you, and also let people know that it happens.

<comment><USER6> Unhappily I believe you suffered racial profiling. I think that today lots of law enforcement officers act in the limit of the law... they act inside the law, but they clearly enforce it in very specifics ways and for very specifics people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> \- I have a few questions, before coming to a conclusion. a. Around what time did this happen? You first said it was a dark and dreary day, then you later said that the day was sunny. Around what time of the day did all this happen?

b. What is the demographics of the people in your neighborhood? You said "affluent" so I would think that not many poor minorities live there.

c. Do the cops/police frequently come/drive thru that area?

d. You drove a car with expired registration & license???

e. What did you wear on that day? Did you have on casual clothes? A suit? A fitted cap? Any chains?

f. Do you mean mug when you drive?

g. How far is the store from your house

h. So you came out of your driveway, wanted to go to the store, then made a right turn and went back home??? Thats suspicious. I mean it's almost like you try to do something shady, but then when you saw the cop, you backed out of your plan. Then you went back into your car, to fulfill. About how tall are you? How much do you weight? Do you walk with a limp? Had any special colors on? Like Blue or Red?

i. He asked if you were lost. That means that cop probably doesn't recognize you in the neighborhood.

j. You gave him your credit card? Why didn't you have ID on you? Not even your DL (Driver's License)?

k. Why didn't you stay in a "non-affluent community"

l. Did the state registration on the car, match the state you lived in?

m. Is your car flashy? Like is it new? Or just a regular ones.</comment>