Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/language-and-bias/

<comment><USER2> I have many years of first-hand experience; I'm an American who has lived in (mostly rural) France since 2006.

This may well be true; but I've found that in actual, real-world interactions, the fact that I'm speaking a non-native language is mostly a disadvantage in decision-making.

I'm normally relatively non-confrontational even when speaking English. But in French, I've found that this is hugely magnified, and I suffer for it. Even when people are being unacceptably rude to me or people around me, I'm stuck being polite and agreeable.

In French, when someone calls me on the phone, trying to sell me something, I'm only now (after 6 years here) getting comfortable interrupting them.

Not long after moving here, I had a clearly intoxicated man invite himself into my house (even though my wife & I had two visitors staying with us), and he eventually even _asked to borrow one of my women_ (because apparently my wife plus the two women visiting were "mine"?!), and I eventually got rid of him, but I never said anything remotely impolite.

I hired a local workman just starting his own construction business to replace the fence around our garden, and he persuaded me to pay in advance even though his incompetence was already becoming clear (and the end result was already falling apart by the time he "finished"). I never said anything confrontational.

These are embarrassing stories to tell; I'd never let things like this happen if I were on my own turf, linguistically. In English I can be subtly cutting, or curt, or strongly rude, or whatever I want with no further thought, when the situation calls for it.

In French, when someone insults me I'm still wondering if I may have misunderstood, or am missing social cues, or if I've accidentally offended _them_ and their behavior is justified. In a confrontation, I immediately feel like I'm in over my head, and taking control of the situation is almost impossible.

It's slowly improving -- my French is already quite good, and I'm relearning how to manage in difficult situations.

But it's been a serious downside I hadn't expected before moving here, and if this is a general effect I imagine it would offset the advantages studied here pretty significantly.

<comment><USER3> I have to disagree with you. I think it is cultural much more so than language. I have lived in a couple of cultures and travelled extensively during the past ten years. At the risk of offending more than a few, there's what some have come to call the "feminization" of American men. Maybe it's a result of the ability to sue anyone for anything, I don't know. But there's a very distinct characteristic to men (an women) from other cultures that will place the uber-polite American men and women at a disadvantage in certain situations.

Here's an example that isn't really about what I am talking about but speaks to the cultural and environmental differences:

Here in Los Angeles it is not too uncommon to see people crossing a street without even looking right or left and without continuously scanning for cars as they cross the street. I've also seen (kids!!!!) crossing the street running. Now, go down to Buenos Aires and try that on for size. Or do it in Rome. Or cross a bike path in Amsterdam without looking. You'll land yourself in a hospital, if you are lucky.

It's the same out in Manhattan, of course.

Non-scientific, non-extensive observation, but I don't think the lack of assertiveness has anything to do with language but rather culture. I can be assertive in a few languages, but I spent most of my young life in a more, shall we say, "fire-y" culture.

<comment><USER4> > _Here in Los Angeles it is not too uncommon to see people crossing a street_

I live in SM and work in West LA. Most of the crosswalks simply don't have lights. Not even the ones in the ground that flash yellow. If you don't go for it, you'll never cross because there's no reason for anyone to stop.

"Feminized" (and I disagree with this characterization because - have you met any females in latin or european countries? Quite assertive.) men would just stand there, waiting for traffic to stop. I see that here a lot from clueless people.

Locals like me just charge into traffic on foot, consequences be damned. I just walk in front of a 50MPH vehicle and stare them down and dare them to run me over. Hasn't happened yet. Try it some time, that's livin' ;)

<comment><USER3> "Feminized" isn't the right way to put it. I just threw it out there. As you correctly point out, women in other cultures are quite assertive. I should point out that I am not the one to coin the phrase:

[http://www.askmen.com/dating/curtsmith_100/142_dating_advice...](http://www.askmen.com/dating/curtsmith_100/142_dating_advice.html)

[http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...](http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=feminized+american+men)

Walking in front of a car doing 50mph might be OK in West LA. Please don't try it in another country unless you want to experience their intensive care facilities.

On the point of crossing the street with fast moving traffic, you don't really need to do what you are doing. It's a dance. If you've ever been to Manhattan you know what I am talking about. Cross a little, wait, one more lane, wait, etc. No big deal if you know what you are doing.

What I am talking about is the total absence of the external appearance of awareness. It's one thing to cross the street and stare a driver in the eyes. It's quite another to cross the street while looking at the ground. I teach my kids that if there's no eye contact with the driver they don't get in front of that car. Plain and simple. They've also had some "training" in Manhattan and parts of Europe. You'll never see them cross a street without looking.

To be clear, being masculine does not mean being a complete asshole. In fact, quite the opposite, in my opinion. It's a balance. It's being a gentleman while remaining assertive and considerate. It is yielding your seat in the train to an older person. While, at the same time, not bending with the wind when it is important. It's about a balance that I can't fully define. All else being equal, I don't think it has anything whatsoever to do with language.

<comment><USER4> I find it somewhat cute you think New York and Europe have aggressive drivers. In my experience, with the exception of Rome, they basically follow the rules and give right of way. Boston is worse than NY. Nobody even stops at red lights.

Try visiting Asia. They actively _try_ to hit pedestrians to teach them a lesson, especially in large cities like Shanghai in China (TW and SG and JP are a bit better).

The opposite end of the spectrum is Denver, CO. People just wander around in the streets. It's a known thing. The cab drivers all hate it.

My point is that the culture of LA allows it, so you should do it. LA isn't any of these places. And yes, I'm bragging about how well traveled I am right now.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't necessarily talking about drivers but rather people in inter-personal contact.

Asia is on my list. I've mainly done Europe and S. America. Almost went to Tokyo to study Aikido for six months but just couldn't pull it together. Maybe next time.

<comment><USER4> Wow, Japan, where they worship white people.

How adventurous and original of you. Did you think of that one all on your own?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When I was religious, I noticed a very strange thing going on in my mind: when religious ideas were expressed in English, they sounded stupid, hilariously stupid, but when the same idea was expressed in Arabic, it sounded very normal.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of how ridiculous TV ads look in foreign countries. It's not like they're any more ridiculous in your own country, but when they're presented in a new way and a new language with new products, they just seem so... inane, and you can't believe anyone would be persuaded by them. But of course, we all are...

<comment><USER7> Interestingly enough, I find ads in my own language (russian) way more ridiculous than similar ads in english (not that I often see either). So it is possible that you are looking at objectively more ridiculous ads.

A similar effect happens with code -- any language with syntax localized to russian looks funny to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article sounds eerily like one I read last night about a study centered around religious belief and critical thinking [1]. It sounds like deliberate use of heavily analytical thinking displaces the "gut check" in the decisions we make.

[1] [http://news.discovery.com/human/religious-belief-critical- th...](http://news.discovery.com/human/religious-belief-critical- thinking-120426.html)

<comment><USER3> Interesting article, thanks for bringing it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Previous discussion of the original paper:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876695>

</comment><comment><USER10> Just as a note: Published in one of the journals (Psychological Science) that was mentioned a few days ago in another article about trying to replicate psychological experiments as part of the Open Science Framework ("Is Psychology About to Come Undone?" [http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is- psychology-about-to...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology- about-to-come-undone/29045)).

</comment><comment><USER11> It's really important to recognize that the causal link is very, very specific here: thinking in a foreign language _reduces the framing effect_. That's the whole of the claim.

Expecting it to make all of your other decision-making events more rational is more than a little silly.

</comment><comment><USER12> Full text of the original paper: [http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh...](http://portal.unitbv.ro/proxy/download.ashx?dec=1&url=uh4QwdELmSQKwh0PmD07tSpMxqiKsSZJmS0LvD4BvD3LtqfOvhALl9aNl8YM0cYN1cYM1noS0PAT09eN0dlOlnwUmCtRvgMKwg4CB6X)

</comment><comment><USER13> Being German, my native tongue has sort of a reputation for being overly analytical and rational. Still, English has long since become at least an equal partner in my own head, and when developing or even just sitting at my computer, it has long surpassed German in usage.

I find English in itself to be very comfortable to think in, but this article made me realize that it may be more about _not having to think in German_ than it is having the privilege to think in English.

<comment><USER14> For me (native Spanish speaker), English is the language of work. That's mainly because I used it for my MSc, PhD and a postdoc. During that time I only used Spanish to speak to my wife. Moreover, all the technology reading I do is in English.

Now that I am back in Mexico, I feel funny discussing work related issues in Spanish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How do you folks _think_ in a language? I don't understand it and it really pisses me off... How is it possible at all? What is the process of such verbal thinking? How it feels like? Is it like words sounding in your head or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Is it like words sounding in your head or something?_

I would say it's close to that, except there isn't the feeling of a sound. It's more as if language were a muscle and you were exercising it silently, producing words. Not that all thoughts come in complete sentences or even with words, but some mental processes definitely involve language. I'd be surprised if you didn't have this as well. Hard to say, of course. But you may catch yourself "thinking in words" someday and then realize you do it all the time.

Random tangential statement: I predict that Sapir-Whorf will come back into fashion and be thoroughly rehabilitated.

<comment><USER15> > I'd be surprised if you didn't have this as well.

No, I don't. Neither the people I asked. Everyone I asked agrees there are two separate processes: thinking and translating thoughts into words.

> "thinking in words" someday and then realize you do it all the time.

No, I do not. Moreover, I don't even have to. I clearly remember myself at the age when I didn't talk, yet I was able to think and I still can do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> previous discussion and link to the original paper here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876695>

</comment><comment><USER17> I suspect (but have no real insight) that this is similar to the wisdom we gain from Rubber Duckie coding[1]. For those unaware, the process is simply to explain what you're coding to a rubber duck.

The duck, being an inanimate object, obviously has to be talked to like a moron, so you end up explaining it "like it's five".

What I've often found happens though, is that in the process of explaining it, or just in organizing the logic in my head enough that it can be explained -- is that you find logic flaws in the application you may not have been aware of.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging>

<comment><USER18> The study says it reduces the framing effect. The idea of Rubber Duck debugging is to reduce cognitive dissonance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I spend 1/2 time in Japan because my wife is Japanese. Our 8 year old is bilingual, my wife is fluent in english but learned as an adult, and my japanese is rudimentary.

Some of the comments disagreeing with the research, I can sympathize with from my perspective in Japan - certainly I feel at a disadvantage due to my language limitations.

However, I think the presumption in the research is that the subjects understand the language, that this disadvantage is removed. The thesis is that if one is fluent in a second language (or not disadvantaged by non- understanding of linguistic constructs), one is freed of cultural constraints that attend to native speakers of the language.

Going from personal experience observing my wife debate in english, and again, she is fluent, the language is much more of a coldly analytic tool for her - the words all have their nominal meaning. However, over the years, as she has grown more culturally fluent, I've observed this effect declining.

Just anecdotal observations.</comment>


It's inevitable that the founder will retire. So who takes over then? - <AUTHOR> http://freakonomicsradio.com/hour-long-special-the-church-of-scionology.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to audio - [http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/freak...](http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/freakonomics_specials/freakonomics_specials060111.mp3)</comment>


The Good and the Bad Regarding AT&T's New Data Plans - <AUTHOR> http://jarqu.es/tctx

<comment><USER2> Seriously, why are you submitting with your own link shortener? The real link:

[http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/good_and_bad_regarding_att...](http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/good_and_bad_regarding_att_data_plans)</comment>


Entitled startup founders and indulgent VCs = disaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/michelle-quinn/ci_30285683/founders-syndrome-takes-troubling-turn <comment><USER2> This is inevitable as venture capital assumes a larger portion of the economy. However, I have never seen such a focus on reputation as I have in the startup/venture capital world.

A good portion of what you might call 'blue chip' VC's value reputation highly. I may have the details wrong here, but between stints at Twitter Jack Dorsey tried his hand at another startup, failed, and felt so bad about it he repaid his VC's out of personal funds. Ron Conway made an offer on the spot to fund his next venture, whatever it might be.

My perception is that YCombinator is like that as well, and that word will get around quickly if you act like a jerk.

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek talks at some length about avoiding jerks even if they are productive programmers.

Investment has always, always attracted jerks, so there is nothing surprising here. It's unfortunate that the article does not mention the rare rejection of apparatchik-ism and the self-serving and jerks in general that does happen in VC.</comment>


How to be a programmer - <AUTHOR> http://secretgeek.net/howtobeaprogrammer.asp <comment><USER2> Notice the lack of "brains" in that diagram.

Yup, nailed it.</comment>


Ask HN: Any payment gateways for a UK gambling website? - <AUTHOR> I've been commissioned to build a website for a UK gambling website for a while now. We're gearing up for launch in the first quarter of next year but at the minute we're struggling with getting a payment gateway on board. Skrill is supposedly good for gambling companies but they wouldn't except the companies application. We've tried others like Brain Tree and Cash Free (which I believe I saw featured on HN) but also no takers.
Has any body done something similar to this and experienced similar issues? Do any one have suggestions for gateways to try?
Just to note, my involvement in sorting out a payment gateway is to just suggest platforms and answer technical questions. The MD of the company I am working for sorts the rest of the application. <comment><USER2> Did Skrill give any reason?

You could try Strip, Sagepay or Worldpay but I believe Skrill are the most gambling site friendly so their refusal could suggest a deeper problem with your business plan.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I don't really deal with the submission process so I'm not 100% on the story. It could be the business plan, I'm not sure. We have tried Worldpay, but I have always thought Stripe was a instant no when it comes to gambling sites?</comment></comment>


The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right-rail-popular_d00a3648-f912-49b3-9b8a-f82ade2ecbd5_popular4-1 <comment><USER2> From what I read in this article and other sources, performing more tests seems to be a very promising approach to get this pandemic under control.

The number of positive tests and death rates are published every day on all channels. I wish the number of performed tests would be also published daily. What gets measured gets managed.

I wonder what limits the number of tests that can be performed. How much would it cost to ramp up testing capabilities so that every person with symptoms can be tested? How much to increase it to a level that everyone can be tested?

<comment><USER3> It's not a question of cost at this point. It's a question of availability of reagents and consumables, materials to make those, and time it takes to ramp up. The supply chain is like a supertanker.

At first we didn't have enough test, but that ramped up quickly, then we didn't have enough RNA extraction reagent, now we don't have enough swabs, and soon is the collection media that will be missing.

There has been a call for more protective equipement. But as the situation gets worst, beds space, ventilator, and then staff are going to be the bottleneck.

If you google you'll find stories of people helping their local hospital by 3D printing parts for for respirators, and swabs. There's nothing cost effective about that, it's not fast, but it gets the job done. If you were to scale that, you would be competing for the same materials than manufacturers using injection molding or plastic dipping are.

<comment><USER4> We do not have tests.

[https://covidtracking.com/data/](https://covidtracking.com/data/)

We have tested 150K people.

We have 327M people in the US, we have tested 0.00046% of the population.

We do not have tests.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but about HALF of those tests were done in the last TWO days! Capacity is coming online very rapidly now and while we are starting from behind, we will not be so short on tests for long. Roche alone is shipping 400,000 tests per week and Abbot Labs is on track to perform one million tests per week in the next couple of weeks. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/america-is- final...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/america-is-finally- testing-for-coronavirus-in-significant-volumes/)

<comment><USER6> The important number is the ratio of tests:true case count. You need ~1000 - 10,000X tests/case to do true contact tracing because you want to a) blanket the country with tests and test every single suspected case even if 99% of them end up not being COVID 19 and b) proactively quarantine every person that a positive person has come into contact with and then test each of those people every single day for 14 days until they come up negative. If a single of those people come up positive, then you want to proactively quarantine all the people THAT person came into contact with, rinse and repeat.

It's great that tests are finally ramping up but the growth in testing can never exceed the growth in cases if cases are doubling every finite number of days. The choices are a severe lockdown where R < 0.5 until the true case count drops to near 0, a non-severe lockdown where R ~1.2 - 1.8 (Hubei's lockdown had an R of 1.3 in the early days until they figured out centralized quarantine could bring it down to 0.4) and you just continue the lockdown indefinitely, or "herd immunity" where R stays at 2.4 until pretty much everyone in the country gets sick.

Once you get your true case load down below your test load, then you can think about using non-pharmaceutical interventions (universal masking, universal temperature screening, mandatory hand washing when entering into a gathering space etc.) along with rigorous contact tracing to ensure that any future outbreaks remain small and contained.

<comment><USER5> I agree with wanted to blanket the country in tests, but you don't need 1000 tests to do contact tracing for one person, even normally, let alone during social distancing.

You don't need to test people every day for 14 days.

<comment><USER6> You do because as soon as that person is confirmed positive, then you need to contact trace and quarantine that person's contacts. Every day that goes between a confirmed positive and a contact trace, the more that person's contacts are walking around, spreading it asymptomatically and making the cluster even more out of control.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and _looks like_ it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below)

The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skewing it. If we take the last 10 data points, they fall very well onto the curves for all 3 countries, and that curve for the USA is horrific. I'm not an epidemiologist nor statistican so it would be irresponsible to put my predicted figures here, but christ, if I'm right the US is going to be reeling in just a few day.

Edit: @mnl below has pointed out that infection is not an exponential but on the whole a logistics curve (s-shaped curve [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function)). He is correct. However in early stages I believe an exponential MAY be a decent approximation (and I'm reading up on it now). However, the inflection in the 'S' (where new infections would start to slow down) would be expected to be at far higher figures than those I'm looking at - a few tens of thousands of reported infections per country currently - and it's not even close to that (populations of multiple millions in each country).

<comment><USER8> > the USA curve is fearsomely steep

This analysis is difficult because it is related to testing capacity. We all know testing capacity was limited early on. It remains limited, but is growing. The faster capacity grows, the steeper the curve will be. Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing.

In another comment, you claim looking at the curves leaves out politics completely, but it doesn't. Any politician can make the situation look worse on the curve, but better serve their people, by increasing testing. They can also make their curve look better, but do worse for their people, by claiming their state is unable to purchase tests. This can be a very political game.

<comment><USER9> Yep. Ventilator usage [if available] and deaths are more reliable indicators, but they're also lagging ones [and even deaths aren't entirely consistently measured since many of the most severely affected patients exhibit comorbities, and many nations don't test the dead]

<comment><USER10> > deaths are more reliable indicators

They are more reliable than the simple number of cases but in the Italian province of Bergamo (and I suppose in neighbouring Brescia, too) lots of people have started dying before the ambulance even arrives at their homes. Those people will not show up on the official statistics of covid victims, at least not now.

A similar thing had started happening in Wuhan once the situation had become really dire, and the closest valid indicator people could find was to look at the number of incinerators and how busy they were (mostly looking at the number, because the incinerators were busy 24/7 anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 165M deaths actually sounds plausible for covid19, if it overwhelms health care in India and developing world countries...

<comment><USER12> And how many deaths would a greater-then-the-great-despresison depression will cause?

<comment><USER13> Yes. No one is asking this question.

<comment><USER14> That, IMHO is the point that was only implicitely made by the original article : massive testing lets you keep the economy at least partially work, because you know who can go to work safely and who can't.

I really hope someone makes a deep study of the decisions that were taken regarding testing facilities in the various european countries, because i have the feeling, at least here in france, that doctors gave up a little too fast on that option (and i still don't understand why)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Is there in any way a brighter side to this?_

Something I talk about a fair amount: It's incredibly hard to measure what didn't happen but should have. Humans are really bad at that, and understandably so.

If we had adopted a lot of the practices being advocated currently and avoided the epidemic, no one would know or believe we had accomplished anything. Having a pandemic and defeating it is the only way humanity can know and understand with confidence that we need to make a lot of changes to make life work with so many billions of people on the planet.

I have a serious medical condition. I've gotten off all drugs. I know what my life is supposed to look like because I know what my condition is supposed to do. Other people have what I have. I know the typical prognosis.

Yet I have no credibility. I've been mocked and attacked and dismissed online for years because other people cannot see that I've done anything and don't believe I have. Other people can't see what I see and it makes me look to them like a loon suffering hallucinations, not a visionary that people ought to listen to.

I once had someone email me and tell me "I give my child the sea salt and coconut oil you've recommended, and he's in the ER less, but he's not on fewer drugs."

She meant he still was on the same amount of maintenance drugs as before. She wasn't really recognizing that fewer ER visits meant fewer rounds of antibiotics, steroids and similar.

The child was taking less medication, but the mother couldn't quite manage to count the drugs that weren't happening. In her mind, it would only count if her child could reduce his maintenance drugs.

There are a lot of things I hope we change. But the reality is that without a pandemic, no one would believe those changes actually provide germ control and actually matter to the functioning of the world. People would just find the restrictions annoying and pointless and would rebel against it.

You are only going to get compliance when enough people have been burned that change seems less onerous than not changing. That's basically how humans always handle things.

It's frustrating. I wish it weren't so.

But people don't change everything at great cost to avoid disaster based on predictions and models. We make those changes because we got burned in actual fact, not in theory, and we don't want to go back.

And then it's no longer hypothetical. Then it's actually real and we aren't running from Boogeymen. We're problem solving and dealing with actual reality.

Then you see real change.

<comment><USER16> I'm sorry, you sound like you've been through a lot, but what does this have to do with the article, or even the sentence you excerpted?

<comment><USER17> I believe she is saying that the humanity will be better prepared to handle threats after the pandemic. That's a brighter side to things.

<comment><USER15> Better prepared and _will know the value of it._

We already have remote work. It may have already reduced our vulnerability and lessened the impact of this pandemic.

I'm not seeing that talked about. We have no means to measure how much worse this pandemic would have been without remote work, without the internet, without credit cards and PayPal and a zillion other things that already exist.

In most cases, we don't even try to measure the disasters that didn't happen. That gets viewed as talking out your ass, basically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Illiterate politicians can still survive if they keep competent people in their surrounding. Our president pushed out the relevant people from national security council, kept his own folks, and did not listen to anyone in January.

Four years of presidency tenure has it's downsides.

</comment><comment><USER19> Francois Balloux Computational biologist, director of Genetics Institute at UCL had interesting twitter post: [https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12388371580074475...](https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1238837158007447558)

> Predictions from any model are only as good as the data that parametrised > it. There are two major unknowns at this stage. (1) We don't know to what > extent covid-19 transmission will be seasonal. (2) We don't know if covid-19 > infection induces long-lasting immunity.

>How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). If this were to be confirmed, it would add to the challenge of managing the pandemic.

>Short-lived immunisation would defeat both 'flattening the curve' and 'herd immunity' approaches. Devising an effective strategy would be even more challenging under low seasonal forcing. It would also considerably complicate effective vaccination campaigns.

<comment><USER20> Why don't we know the extent of seasonal transmission? At the very least, we have data from areas that are in opposite seasons, even if we've yet to collect data on the transition from one season to another. Can't we get some insight from comparing the rate of transmission in Australia, where it's summer, to the UK, where it's winter?

<comment><USER21> This virus has spread just like you would expect it to if airplanes did not exist (probably because most flights are short range). And it started at the North Hemisphere.

The southern countries are all on the initial stages, and I doubt any one has any reliable number for transmission speed, due to both test limits and low numbers overall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Earlier discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22635225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22635225)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, except the discussion on this one are more relevant, to what is at stake. The other started pretty quickly on pooping the media.

<comment><USER23> As opposed to this one, which is starting with armchair statisticians extrapolating curves without considering the nuances of the underlying data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Most people (and most people who advice the public in the US) doesn't take this serious enough.

One of the foremost experts in epidemiology in the US Michael T. Osterholm said on Joe Rogan (AFAIKR) 6-12 months for the virus to go away, up to 5 years for a vaccine and that it would return in China when people start behaving normally again. This isn't something that will go away in a few weeks or months.

In "Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs" he also predicted a Corona virus coming from China.

In a months time the US will take the place of Italy and see the healthsystem crash.

<comment><USER25> If you read the article, Dr Brilliant [sic] says 12-18 months most likely for a vaccine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doctor Who?

</comment><comment><USER12> Corona is killing a negligible % of the population, mostly very old and very sick people (checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary - average age of dead patiences is 79.5 years, all of them with severe background illness, in a part of the country where 29% of the population is at least 60 yeard old. Those are the facts.). If anyting, what we are experiencing is not a corona pandemic but a massive, global hysteria pandemic - much more dangerous.

<comment><USER7> > checkout the official data from the Italian health ministary

Post link plz

<comment><USER27> Here is something from somewhere from yesterday [https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infograf...](https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Infografica_20marzo%20ITA.pdf)</comment></comment></comment>


Most innovative Companies List - 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/full-list

<comment><USER2> I don't get the list. What is their definition of innovative? Only web companies at the top - this seems questionable for me.</comment>


Construction destruction - <AUTHOR> http://ericlippert.com/2013/06/10/construction-destruction/

<comment><USER2> This is why writing terrible code is a bad idea.</comment>


Sergey Brin's Resume as a Student - <AUTHOR> http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/resume.html <comment><USER2> Sergey and Larry didn't code much though. This one's hilarious:

In the book, early Google engineering boss Craig Silverstein says "I didn't trust Larry and Sergey as coders." "I had to deal with their legacy code from the Stanford days and it had a lot of problems. They're research coders: more interested in writing code that works than code that's maintainable." One Google engineer from back then says the most remarkable thing about the co- founders' code was that when it broke, users would see funny error message: "Whoa, horsey!" It turns out the developers most responsible for building the Google that quickly became the Web's most powerful company are two guys you've probably never heard of. The first is Urs Hözle. According to one early Googler quoted by Edwards, Hözle was "the key" to Google's early success. Edwards writes, "Enough engineers sang his praises that this book could have been written entirely as a hagiography of Saint Urs, Keeper of the Blessed Code." The second is Jeff Dean. Edwards writes that "Jeff pumped out elegant code like a champagne fountain at a wedding." "It seemed to pour from him effortlessly in endless streams that flowed together to form sparkling programs that did remarkable things. He once wrote a two-hundred-thousand-line application to help the Centers for Disease Control manage specialized statistics for epidemiologists. It's still in use and garners more peer citations than any of the dozens of patented programs he has produced in a decade at Google. He wrote it as a summer intern in high school."

<comment><USER3> Are there any samples of that elegant code available online?

<comment><USER4> The best source of the early Google codebase is a talk given by Jeff Dean himself. The talk describes Google1997, Google1999, Google2001, Google2004, Google2007 in some considerable details, from architectural diagrams to low- level bit packing tricks.

[http://research.google.com/people/jeff/WSDM09-keynote.pdf](http://research.google.com/people/jeff/WSDM09-keynote.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's an overview of highly-optimized solutions to difficult problems, I am more interested in elegant code (beautiful + maintainable) - this is why I asked. Something makes me skeptical there could be any at such stage, when shipping is most important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like 'view source' reveals the true motivation, commented out ;-)

<comment><USER6> I wonder if he actually intended anyone to find that, except maybe his college buddies. I know that I would certainly think twice about leaving snarky comments in my resume HTML, but I imagine that "view source" was not as easy as to do in the browsers of the time (I could be wrong, too lazy to research it). Or that, even if it were easy, it would not be a routine check that a hiring manager or interviewer might conduct.

Especially when "frontend development" was not really a skill yet: in 1996, we are talking a world of HTML 3, JavaScript 1, and not even CSS 1 until later that year. HTML likely would not have been the focus of many jobs; it was literally just a way to implement hyperTEXT, so the implementation didn't matter as long as it rendered correctly. It'd be like looking at a candidate's PDF resume in a hex editor.

<comment><USER7> View Source was there in even early versions of browers. Mosaic had it. And lynx had the ability to dump the raw HTML. Most people on the web at that point also knew you could just telnet to port 80.

I would go so far to say that viewing source was the way a lot of people learned. If you saw something on the web you couldn't figure out how to do, you'd view source to learn a new trick.

I also don't think it would be a big deal to have a joke like that in your web resume. Few outside of hardcore geeks were on the web. There was no LinkedIn. Recruiters didn't use the web. Executives didn't. It was unlikely your hiring manager did & if he did, he'd likely appreciate the humor. It's like hiding a joke in kernel module you wrote. If they're the kind of people looking there, they'll have an appreciation for it.

<comment><USER8> This is the time when you came in and could quickly scan the whats new on the internet menu on mosaic :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "His website is not Web 2.0 - doesn't fit our company"

"Doesn't say machine learning on his site - behind the times"

"Doesn't know Map-Reduce and Hadoop"

Yeah, I think we should pass on this candidate

<comment><USER10> Three internships at well-known companies(Wolfram and GE), CS degree from Stanford, knows Python - with that resume you can get 10 offers in two weeks if you schedule interviews right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Ph.D.: expected June 1997."

Ah, someone else who didn't finish their doctorate and ended up working for Google instead. We're like kindred spirits, Sergey and I...

<comment><USER12> From MSc to PhD in 2 year's time... in Spain this is the time you are expected to figure out what to research about. No doubt why Spain needs a bailout. So much to learn.

<comment><USER13> I don't think 2 years is typical for a PhD (even after already earning a M.Sc)

This may be just a sign of the quality of research Sergey was doing which has, as we know now, fairly useful applications :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Years later and I still haven't seen decent and working LaTeX to HTML converter.

<comment><USER15> "It is unique in that it is in written mostly TeX and hence is a somewhat more elegant design than other converters. A small portion of it is written in Perl."

I have no conception of how any software written mostly in TeX with a little bit of Perl could have "elegant design" as a selling point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know the resume is just solid for today's standards, but do keep in mind that his research/work on data/ML is from 1990s -- and at that day and age this was cutting edge research, and people who leveraged this gained significant competitive advantages once they figured out how to properly execute.

I started doing ML work in 2007-8 and even 5-6 years ago it wasn't the hot domain yet that it is now.

</comment><comment><USER17> Recruiters take note. Content >> style. He worked on some interesting projects but the writeup would be deemed "unprofessional" and his resume would be tossed to the bin by a huge chunk of HR departments/firms I've had relations with.

Would have been interesting to use a slightly altered version of this for a blind "which person would you hire" test.

<comment><USER18> Nonesense, this is HTML from 1996. You will need to resize your browser window, at the least.

<comment><USER19> I don't think the above commenter is talking about the look of it when he/she says "style," rather he/she is referring to the way it is written.

<comment><USER20> _sigh_ so funny you had to actually clarify that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the most interesting bit is that Sergey Brin was such an early adopter of python in its infancy. I'm guessing this resume is from 1993-4. Python was released 1991.

edit: nevermind, from the Masters date it sounds like its 95-97

<comment> saiya-jin well you have probably exact date in the title of document ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> His home page from his Stanford days is pretty sweet, got to love his use of gifs. [http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/)

<comment><USER6> "Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page."

This is beyond trippy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know what the class with him and Larry Page ([http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/349/)) was like?

<comment><USER24> That would be a great AMA

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think its interesting that he was able to gain admission into Stanford without having any conference papers in his undergrad years - I guess his grades and other research made up for it.

</comment><comment><USER26> And his CV as an adult:

[http://www.thelocal.dk/20150120/job-denmark-cv- photo](http://www.thelocal.dk/20150120/job-denmark-cv-photo)

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a pretty solid resume, but I've seen a dozen better ones that don't belong to billionaires... Unless...

Sorry, gotta update my LinkedIn.

<comment><USER28> Because the road to success is to copy successful people. Right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Heh, the Movie Rating project is cute (who hasn't done that?).

</comment><comment><USER30> if sergey and larry didn't code much, why do they care about making engineering-centric culture, instead of focusing on the business around engineering?</comment>


My Project: Hypatia: 2D Action Adventure Engine for Nonprogrammers (and - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lillian-lemmer/hypatia

<comment><USER2> Discussion from two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763870](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9763870)</comment>


How mobile apps are helping people eat healthier - <AUTHOR> http://betakit.com/2012/06/02/how-mobile-apps-are-helping-people-eat-healthier

<comment><USER2> This isn't exactly what the article is about, but it's on the topic of iPhone and healthy food:

For people with food specific allergies, there's another fairly specific way that people are able to eat healthier due to smart phones. It's actually quite life changing. Last year through blood tests and biopsy I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease. That basically means my immune system attacks my intestines if I eat anything with gluten in it. Even a microscopic amount of gluten is too much, so kitchen contamination is a big problem and if people don't understand it, I will probably get contaminated food.

There are 2 iPhone apps that I don't know how I could live without:

1\. "Find Me Gluten Free" - Shows me restaurants that are gluten aware. This allows me to eat out without the fear of hidden gluten in my food. I'm sure there are similar apps for every common allergy, such as peanuts.

2\. "Gluten Free Ingredients" - Has a catalog of ingredients and lists if they can contain gluten or not. When someone hands me a packaged food that I'm unfamiliar with, I can quickly verify that there is no gluten in the product.

For people like me, I just can't imagine living without my iPhone. If it were 10 years ago I would mostly be relegated to eating at home or bringing my own food with me when I went out. Now I can even travel without concern.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a great way to use technology. I think that there is a great opportunity for using game dynamics to get kids excited about nutrition in a way that abstracts out the concepts and just makes it fun.

I think if someone can distill that formula, it could be a life changer - esp. if you can appeal to kids now in their formative years.

In the same vein, here is an iPhone app that extrapolates on the concept (ie: making nutrition fun):

<http://www.lalalunchbox.com/>

*full disclosure: I know the developer but it's an amazing product nevertheless

</comment><comment><USER4> BJ Fogg is doing interesting work on that mobile-persuasion subject at Stanford. I remember reading one of his papers that had a quite helpful evaluation of what kind of health regarded persuasion aspects are supported by mobile technology - as a simple example mobile tech having a disadvantage in starting a new behavior, but strong advantage of training an existing one over (ir)regular intervals. It is quite a fascinating subject ( <http://www.mobilepersuasion.org/> ).</comment>


Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5 - <AUTHOR> https://aphyr.com/posts/329-jepsen-rethinkdb-2-1-5 <comment><USER2> This is awesome! I've been waiting for Aphyr to publish his analysis of RethinkDB as this is a project I carried out in a recent distributed systems class that I took. Although our analysis[0] is not as comprehensive (or correct?) as Aphyr's we still managed to learn quite a lot.

If you are looking at using Jepsen to do your own analysis, I have a few takeaways that might be worth sharing -

\- Have a passable knowledge of Clojure

\- Get a beefy workstation. We used a 160 gig EC2 instance[1] and still couldn't get Knossos (the linearizability checker) to complete for longer runs.

\- Use the Docker-in-Docker setup[2] to minimize the frustration

\- Pick an existing system closest to the system you want to analyze and see Aphyr's version of the tests for guidance and overall flow. The code is well commented and you should be able to follow through.

All in all, our major takeaway was that Jepsen is a wonderful (albeit complex) piece of software that takes time to get up and running. Once you are past that though, it stands as a very complete testing tool in itself.

Sincere thanks to Aphyr for open-sourcing it and helping us with our project!

[0] - [https://github.com/prakhar1989/ADS](https://github.com/prakhar1989/ADS)

[1] - [https://twitter.com/prakharsriv9/status/675049396636110848](https://twitter.com/prakharsriv9/status/675049396636110848)

[2] - [https://hub.docker.com/r/tjake/jepsen/](https://hub.docker.com/r/tjake/jepsen/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Great to finally see a write up by Aphyr on RethinkDB. Ever since reading these blogs and seeing RethinkDB lost standing Github issue [1] I was keen to hear how RethinkDB would hold up to the tests once RAFT was implemented.

Given the thoroughness of the Jepsen test suite it is something people want to see these days before being able to choose a database with any confidence. Hopefully this sets out expectations with high transparency.

Kudos to the team at RethinkDB for funding and assisting Apyhr in his work.

[1]: [https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493](https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/1493)

<comment><USER4> > Given the thoroughness of the Jepsen test suite it is something people want > to see these days before being able to choose a database with any > confidence.

Definitely agreed on the "something people want to see" part, but this is this is the thing... Jepsen isn't actually __that __thorough[1]. I rather think that this is an indictment on the state of "practical" distributed computing as it currently stands that a "simple" test for linearizability (nowadays) or even simple CAS (which I believe Jepsen started out testing) in a partitioned system would turn up such a huge amount of badly implemented distributed systems and... frankly dishonest documentation around those systems.

It's not that I could necessarily do any better -- except maybe the "honesty" part, or at least adding lots of qualifiers -- I just find it a bit... sad in a way that we haven't come farther. Still, it _is_ a young field, so there may be grounds for optimism for the future. (Thinking of e.g. dependent type systems coming together with model checking coming together with verified model->machine translation, chips with verified semantic models, etc. etc.)

[1] As Aphyr explicitly states, it's actually very limited in the state space that it can explore simply because it's constrained to be "external" to the system being tested. Model checkers can do much more -- but then you usually don't get a fully automatic _and_ verified translation to machine code... and who knows if you've modeled the CPU/IOMMU/etc. correctly anyway?

EDIT: Btw, Aphyr deserves a _HUGE_ amount of praise. AFAIK he's the only person so far who has stepped up to the plate and "dared" to actually test this stuff. It's kind of amazing in a way, but I think I'll blame corporate culture for this sort of thing... "Oh, the documentation says $X therefore we'll believe $X. At least they can't fire us for that." Not surprisingly I was known to be hugely skeptical of any claims made of distributed systems, but I was too much of a coward to embark on "Aphyr's Quest" :). I'm hoping to coin a phrase with that last bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Consistent with the documentation, I have never found a linearization > failure with these settings. If you use hard durability, majority writes, > and majority reads, single-document ops in RethinkDB appear safe.

That's the juicy bit you all should care about.

<comment><USER6> Afaik this is the only thing he's tested that has actually achieved that, despite nearly every system claiming that.

<comment><USER7> I believe that Zookeeper + Curator were entirely consistent with their documentation as well as linearizable: [https://aphyr.com/posts/291-jepsen- zookeeper](https://aphyr.com/posts/291-jepsen-zookeeper) . Now, of course, Zookeeper is built as a state management / coordination service more than a full-fledged database system, so it's not quite apples to apples, but it did offer a similarly strong showing.

I also believe Riak was entirely consistent with its documentation when using CRDTs: [https://aphyr.com/posts/285-jepsen- riak](https://aphyr.com/posts/285-jepsen-riak) .

I think ElasticSearch is also now consistent with its documentation... although the documentation basically says "here be dragons."

As an aside, re-reading these makes miss the old Aphyr work before he worked on contract. The goofy image memes and 100% irreverent tone made for good times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My last two projects have been developed with RethinkDB as the backend, and personally I love it. I tried playing with Mongo for a bunch of projects, and I just didn't enjoy it's shortcomings. Coming from years of MySQL, and other relational databases, RethinkDB gives me the best of both worlds. A relational query language, with the flexibility of schema less tables. Change feeds make real time applications super easy, and the admin GUI is awesome. It's essentially the next evolution of databases, developed by people who know what they are doing. You'll also definitely want to grab Thinky.io ORM when working in Node.js

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm consistently impressed with the results that Aphyr publishes. Always very thorough and as balanced as I've ever seen regarding database testing.

In addition, I really appreciate the approaches that RethinkDB team have taken. Their approach to features and growing the product have been impressive and well calculated. I've followed several issues, and know that they work well on changes that take multiple steps and iterations to achieve (automatic failover, for example). I'm hoping to have more opportunity to use their product in the future (out of my hands at my current position).

<comment><USER10> especially considering he's sponsored by Rethink in this article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think in 3-5 years consultants will be making a killing converting projects from one of 100(s) NoSQL flavors to RDBMS or few surviving NoSQL flavors.

<comment><USER12> I'm already carving out a niche on the east coast with Merb and Rails 2 systems. Every time I think the gold rush is over, another gift falls into my lap. Keep on keepin' on, novelty kings!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> RethinkDB is great. It's the first NoSQL database I've used so far which I actually liked. The query language is sane and the developers definitely know what they're doing. The realtime features are amazing and work very well with Python + asyncio.

<comment><USER14> How would you compare it to Cassandra?

<comment><USER15> Biggest difference is RethinkDB is a JSON document store, and Cassandra is column-oriented. Cassandra is eventually-consistent, and RethinkDB is immediately consistent with all writes going through a primary node for each table.

RethinkDB also has a query language that's integrated very deeply with the driver language itself, vs CQL which is a SQL-like text string.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Last month, there was a software engineering radio episode about rethinkdb, [http://www.se-radio.net/2015/12/se-radio- episode-243-rethink...](http://www.se-radio.net/2015/12/se-radio- episode-243-rethinkdb-with-slava-akhmechet/)

<comment><USER17> And the month before that they did an episode with aphyr :) [http://www.se- radio.net/2015/11/se-radio-episode-241-kyle-ki...](http://www.se- radio.net/2015/11/se-radio-episode-241-kyle-kingsbury-on-consensus-in- distributed-systems/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great article as usual, but I found it hard to read due to the use of en- dashes without spaces.

E.g this sentence:

 _However, only operations on a single document are atomic–queries which access multiple keys may read and write inconsistent data._

which I spent a minute trying to parse as:

 _However, only operations on a single document are "atomic-queries", which access multiple keys may read and write inconsistent data._

<comment><USER19> Indeed; every style guide I've read recommends either unspaced em-dashes or spaced en-dashes.

<comment><USER20> I'd bet this is due to a "smart typography" processor that converts runs of hyphens to em- or en-dashes.

The standard typing convention for decades has been to use "\--" to indicate an em-dash, and that's certainly what I've learned. Many smart converters (including SmartyPants, the one John Gruber created as a companion to Markdown) make that conversion. However, there's also the TeX convention of converting "\--" to an _en-dash_ and requiring "\---" for an em-dash; some processors will use that standard by default, like Pandoc and MultiMarkdown. If you're typing "\--" for em-dash but you're unknowingly using a processor that turns that into en-dashes, well, you get this.

(At some point, Tumblr converted their internal Markdown processor from _" \--" for em-dash_ to _" \--" for en-dash,_ and hundreds of my tech blog posts now look stupid because all the em-dashes have become em-dashes. Thanks, Tumblr.)

<comment><USER21> nice one! i've seen the same problem but didn't know why (always reluctant to eliminate myself as the root cause). Agreed that re-wiring 20+ year old print- to-digital-symbol conversions on one side then doing it again on the other side--all under the hood is a questionable design decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great write-up and delightful to see RethinkDB performing well. I think it is a truly fantastic database to use. Easy installation, the built-in HTTP admin, and query language make ad-hoc data querying fun and smooth.

</comment><comment><USER23> I really wanted to try rethink db in one of my side projects, which is gonna be a SaaS product. What are the best practices/ support for multi tenancy, with rethink? The front end will mostly be Rails (I currently use apartment gem with postgres).

</comment><comment><USER24> Still waiting for first class Heroku support.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was most surprised by the linked research ethics - [http://jepsen.io/ethics.html](http://jepsen.io/ethics.html)

I think this is a resonable approach to getting funding but also being open/transparent about it.

<comment><USER26> That was a great read. It's a thorough discussion of Kyle's approach and thought process regarding conflicts of interest. It's humble and honorable.</comment></comment>


Socialism versus the Family - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7qrKi6hlPo <comment><USER2> Thank you for posting this. Few people realize how much of this comes straight from Marx's playbook.

Socialism is incompatible with the family because it requires that everyone and everything be subjugate to the state. If people are allowed to care more about their families than they do about the state, they might take actions to protect their families over protecting the state, and that was anathema to Marx.

Socialism and communism (two words for the same thing) are a scourge upon the earth. They've been responsible for more death and destruction than any other ideas in history. It's alarming to see that, despite these facts, how many people today cling to them as a "solution" to what ails the world.

<comment><USER3> I don't really think a lot of people think of socialism as a "solution", but rather as a alternative to try again vs hyper capitalism that evolves into "gig economy" aka "freelancers shoulder all the entrepreneurial risk, get paid below minimum wage, have to provide the capital to buy cars + gas themselves, are then stiffed on tips, get no health insurance and will be thrown out if they ever so much as look at the CEO wrong". People appear not to like the US/Silicon Valley style (including "too big to fail" socialized losses for corrupt companies), and since they don't get offered a "capitalism with rules" as an alternative, they're willing to consider other things.

In the end: communism might suck, but being one hospital visit away from bankruptcy, being spied on 24/7 by a corporate-state-hybrid, and working for $10 an hour while a small apartment costs $3k sucks too. And who knows, maybe "this time" it'll work. You know, now that we have block chain or whatever some lunatic thinks will change human biology.

Offer them a chance and they won't grasp at socialist straws. But offering them a chance would cut into profits, so that's not an option, obviously.

<comment><USER4> The "gig economy" you speak of is only part of the economy and centred in certain industries. It's a high risk, high reward which leads people to put in the effort for low pay now, because if they are successful, they'll be afforded greater financial freedom in future. It is not necessary for anyone to actually take up these roles, as there are businesses which will hire and pay employees well, for stable jobs, but with little options for making a fortune unless they accumulate shares over many years, and the company does well long-term. The fact that people take up the high risk jobs is part of the human condition - everyone wants to get rich as quick as possible.

> People appear not to like the US/Silicon Valley style (including "too big to > fail" socialized losses for corrupt companies), and since they don't get > offered a "capitalism with rules" as an alternative, they're willing to > consider other things.

This is blaming socialist intervention for the perceived problems of capitalism. Under capitalism, companies don't get bailed out but they go bankrupt and get replaced by better competition. The reality is we live in "capitalism with _too many_ rules" and too much state meddling. The abundance of rules is beneficial to the big players who can afford big legal teams, and harms the individual who cannot open a simple family business without battling with so much red tape, meaning the big players don't have to worry about small competitors. The big players also make use of IP laws to gain advantage over smaller players. IP laws are a socialst idea too.

Working $10/hr and having reduced purchasing power is also a result of socialist policies. The idea of a "minimum wage" is perhaps the most horrendous of policies. All it does is create a ceiling for what was intended to be a floor for unskilled workers. Meanwhile, it forces the cost of all goods and services upwards to compensate for the additional wages employers must pay, and it means that people who are not productive enough to make "minimum wage" can't earn _anything at all_ , and must rely on welfare (another socialist programme).

Socialists have played the devil's greatest trick, in pretending that many of the problems we have are a result of capitalism, but they are in fact, a result of hidden socialism. And the solution to those problems: more socialism. This has been the "progression" since post WW1.

It is also a mistake to look at profit making as a sin, and here lies the root of socialism: jealousy. Although capitalism benefits society as a whole by increasing the standard of living for everybody through innovation, some people make far more money than others and it breeds resentment among the ones whose lives only improve by a little in comparison. Instead of being grateful that their standard of living is improving as a result of capitalism, they are become ungrateful and bitter. A welfare state adds to this by making them _dependant_ , instead of _responsible_.

<comment><USER3> > It's a high risk, high reward

No, it's really not. There's no high reward when you've worked delivering food work a month. It's lost time.

> It is also a mistake to look at profit making as a sin

Which nobody does. They view the hardcore exploitation as a sin. The "entrap them in debt". The "buy the lawmakers and write the rules". The price fixing, data hoarding & selling, the "let's just do illegal stuff and pay a ridiculously small fine"-shit. It's really not about "nobody is allowed to make a profit".

Sorry, I'll never understand the hardcore libertarians - it's indistinguishable from sociopathy to me.

<comment><USER4> > I'll never understand the hardcore libertarians - it's indistinguishable > from sociopathy to me.

Yet every example we know of where trade has had the fewest obstacles (Britain during Victorian reign, Hong Kong under UK rule, Japan during the Meiji, Singapore post independence, Taiwan since split with China), we see a rapid improvement of the quality of life in just a couple of generations.

Every socialist system we know of (USSR, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Venzeula, etc) has turned to shit in just a couple of generations.

I wonder which one _is_ more sociopathic and not just _seems_ to be the case.

> They view the hardcore exploitation as a sin. The "entrap them in debt". The > "buy the lawmakers and write the rules". The price fixing, data hoarding & > selling, the "let's just do illegal stuff and pay a ridiculously small > fine"-shit. It's really not about "nobody is allowed to make a profit".

The bigger the government, the more corruption in it. These are arguments for small government, because the smaller it is, the less corrupt it can be.

Entrapping into debt is the consequence of a high time preference economy where people are encouraged to spend rather than save. Money is not worth keeping because it is deliberately inflated. Austrian economists promote low time preference, because it's the accumulation of capital which enables things to get done without taking from the pocket of taxpayers.

Data hoarding can be avoided by simply boycotting the companies involved. If enough people cared about it, the companies would have to change their stance. I'm not sure government interference is really going to help here if people aren't willing to help themselves. I also see it as a consequence of people being like overgrown children and not bearing any personal responsibility.

There are countless examples from as far back as the 1800s of wealthy people putting their money towards public good, and doing a far better job of it than modern governments do now.

Part of today's problem is also down to _culture_. It is seen as hip to be rich and blow your money on cars, houses and prostitutes. Communities are no longer a thing because big government has taken over nearly every role where people would've previously come together to solve problems. Real altruism is still practised by some of the super wealthy, but there's a significant amount of virtue signalling because it's a lot easier than performing.

<comment><USER3> > Yet every example we know of where trade has had the fewest obstacles > (Britain during Victorian reign, Hong Kong under UK rule, Japan during the > Meiji, Singapore post independence, Taiwan since split with China), we see a > rapid improvement of the quality of life in just a couple of generations.

If there was a causal connection, you'd expect the US to have a much better quality of life than, say, Sweden. I leave it to you to judge that.

And don't mistake me for somebody who's arguing for socialism. I'm just not a fan of "let them starve, as long as I got mine" libertarianism, and apparently a lot of people aren't either. I'd wager that most libertarians wouldn't be either, if they weren't among those that do well in the current system, but that's beside the point.

> There are countless examples from as far back as the 1800s of wealthy people > putting their money towards public good, and doing a far better job of it > than modern governments do now.

Totally. And it seems to me that there are fewer and fewer today doing it in a similar fashion. I'm not a fan of government, but I'm certain that without it, Uber would use whips to motivate its delivery staff, and those on the receiving end of that motivation would have no way to quit working for Uber.

<comment><USER4> > If there was a causal connection, you'd expect the US to have a much better > quality of life than, say, Sweden. I leave it to you to judge that.

I don't think you've been to Sweden to make that claim, and perhaps you've been listening to socialist propaganda suggesting that Sweden is socialist. It isn't! Sweden is capitalist, and was in fact, one of the pioneers of free market capitalism. I strongly suggest taking an hour out of your time and watch this documentary for an image of Sweden which is a bit more grounded in reality: [http://www.freetochoose.tv/program.php?id=sweden](http://www.freetochoose.tv/program.php?id=sweden)

There are certainly some benefits from living in Sweden, but there are many other benefits from living in the US which you would not have in Sweden.

> I'm just not a fan of "let them starve, as long as I got mine" > libertarianism, and apparently a lot of people aren't either. I'd wager that > most libertarians wouldn't be either

You would be correct, libertarians do not hold this view. They hold the view that people are better at spending their own money than the government is, and this includes charitable donations. Government is an inefficient machine of waste, where a big slice of taxpayer money gets pocketed by every individual who has the opportunity. Direct charity from wealthy people is direct, and comes from understanding of the real problems, because it is usually local and focused. What do some bureaucrats in Washington know of the troubles of people on the street of downtown SF? Why would people on downtown SF want to give away more of their liberties to those people

<comment><USER3> > I don't think you've been to Sweden to make that claim, and perhaps you've > been listening to socialist propaganda suggesting that Sweden is socialist.

I have, multiple times actually, and live quite close. They are a high tax, strong central state country with a strong safety net, and more regulations than the US. The same goes for Denmark, btw. You'd expect them dropping far below the US as well with all the ways the government injects itself into the market. Yet, they don't. Granted, they might have fewer TV channels, a lower incarceration and not have a significant part on antidepressants and opiods, so it's open to debate who actually has a higher quality of life ;)

> You would be correct, libertarians do not hold this view.

I suppose that's similar to half of the feminists saying they are actually egalitarians. Virtually all libertarians I've encountered very much do hold that view. "But we might be charitable". Sure. Might. Everything might happen.

> What do some bureaucrats in Washington know of the troubles of people on the > street of downtown SF?

What do the super rich in SF do when faced with mass homelessness and people living in open slums otherwise seen in the third world? "Look somewhere else" appears to be the answer. Granted, there are probably a few who don't, but by and large, they don't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't confuse capitalism with corporativism. Capitalism is only free market and private property respect. The today corporations are much more state than market. Socialism is the denial of human being, it's decivilisatory. The collectivism does not works because there is always individuals in charge of the decisions.</comment>


Simon Willison's talk about OpenID at Google - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2288395847791059857 <comment><USER2> Each Second Life character should have an OpenID that allows them to interact with businesses in game. This would let the user do things like logging into the American Apparel website to find all the clothes that they tried on in game.

It would do much to spread adoption of the standard, and it would also be quite useful.

/Not a Second Life player, so possibly a terrible idea

<comment><USER2> Very good video by the way. It touches on things like implementing buddy lists and filters that are portable across multiple websites.</comment></comment>


Mob mentality cycle - lucinda-carlyle https://firstname.lastname@example.com/mob-mentality-cycle-4b2c66ed1846 <comment><AUTHOR> Was anyone in this LambdaConf "debacle" killed, jailed or beaten? Did they have their civil rights violated? No? Then the description of what happened as "an utterly terrifying mob mentality that has unchecked capability to destroy any person, at any time" is just histrionics.

Additionally, the implication that liberals are modern-day replacements for slave owners is delusional and shrill.</comment>


Few asteroids are worth mining, suggests Harvard study - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25716103

<comment><USER2> The value to asteroids, is that they're already in space. No need to lift the materials out of a gravity well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Barring a complete revolution in technology, it will always be cheaper (by several orders of magnitude) to either recycle, find and exploit an Earth- based site, use an ersatz, or simply wage a war over a resource that is deemed needed.

A similar thought on space colonization: humans would rather displace/destroy another tribe and claim their land/resources before going on a dangerous venture to go and live in a less-hospitable environment.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do langs with alleged "automatic memory management manage tiny part - <AUTHOR> Java boasts it has automatic memory management. But you have to close files after using them. That's manual memory management! <comment><USER2> Closing files manually is manual resource management, not memory management. C++ uses its memory management for resource management, but Java doesn't. Java improved resource management with "try with resources", but generally resource management really isn't an issue for most Java developers. In modern frameworks like Spring you rarely have to manage resources yourself. You let the framework manage them for you, and the framework will provide them to you via injection.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want a language where the garbage collector not only frees inaccessible dynamically allocated blocks, but also frees all resources when they're inaccessible. Is it possible to design such a generalized GC?

<comment><USER3> In c# you can implement IDisposable. The garbage collector will call a dispose method allowing you piggyback on the garbage collector for just about anything.

But it's rarely a good idea to piggyback. Most resources are much more limited or time sensitive than memory. So you should free them immediately.

Even when your resource - _is_ \- memory it sometimes is a very very very bad idea to free via garbage collection.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is even the point of garbage collection? By the time you manage all the resources of a 100k line application you're going to have to do as much work as if you wrote it in C.

<comment><USER3> Well the point of gc is to allow the algorithm to focus on the problem domain. and not worry about mechanical implementation details of a computer. Everything has a trade off. An obvious win still must pay a cost elsewhere. In the case of GC it's simply not a good trade off for many resources. Sometimes it cannot be used even if you were willing to accept a trade.

<comment><AUTHOR> Managing resources by hand __is __managing the mechanical implementation details of a computer. So in order to have garbage collection that manages more than just a sliver of memory so small that it counts as a rounding error by the same you get to the size of real world projects, you need a custom operating system and possibly even custom hardware too.

<comment><USER4> Your statement is false for _many_ real world projects. (For some, you are correct. Those projects should not be written in a garbage-collected language, or should be written to run on a custom OS and custom hardware.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "file" abstraction covers many different types of storage: spinning and solid state disks, in-memory structures, whatever your cloud actually uses, optical medial like DVD's, and even magnetic tape. Typically, these are managed by the underlying operating system's IO interface not Java itself.

Historically, operating systems use buffers for IO and closing the file includes flushing the buffers of in-flight data (in addition to things like deallocating pointers to files at the OS level). Without explicit instructions the operating system doesn't know when a file is no longer in use.

A programming language/environment could open and close files on every read and every write automatically. But it would entail overhead for operating system calls to allocate/deallocate nodes in the file table. For some types of programs this might be ok. For others it might be problematic, particularly those with moderate or strong dependence on IO.

<comment><AUTHOR> So in order to have complete automatic resource management you need to build a custom OS and possibly even custom hardware.

<comment><USER6> How would your new OS/hardware know when the "use" of the resource is complete ? Maybe the dev wanted to read just 10 bytes from a 1 GB file, maybe 100 bytes... maybe its a telnet connection which is never supposed to be closed and just kept in a pool ?

For a very small benefit of "automatic closing of resources" this looks like a huge trade-off.

<comment><AUTHOR> Disagree that it is a small benefit. Resource management becomes so unwieldly that there's little difference between a 100k line application in Java and a 100k line application in C with regards to memory/resource management. Are you saying that moving beyond C is a "small benefit"?

And it's easy to determine when the use of the resource is complete: when there are no active pointers to the resource (the circular reference problem I don't think can happen with external resources like files).

<comment><USER7> Some languages (Python, Ruby, probably dozens of others) have constructs along these lines

      with f = open("data.txt")
        print f.readline()

The file is automatically closed at the end of the block. Those languages also have explicit open/close/seek calls to let the developer implement more complex cases.

Btw, the os closes any open file when the program ends.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you're correct that os's have some kind of rudimentary reference counting for files, but it's very inchoate and not designed as the __primary __method of handling file references.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's what the concept of "Finalizers" is for. They indicate that something should be done to an object just before the runtime garbage collects it.

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

Files specifically are a bit thorny because the OS generally places a limit on how many simultaneous open files a process can have, and you don't want to risk bumping in to that limit due to unpredictable garbage collection timing.</comment>


Scientists Learn How Genes Can Jump Between Species - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-discover-how-genes-jump-between-species-1442512800 <comment><USER3> Here's the actual study - [http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005470) \- it's in PLOS Genetics so it's open access for all.

The basic gist is that some parasitic wasps also transfer a virus to their caterpillar hosts. That virus has now been shown to insert and transfer some wasps genes to some non-host caterpillars.

The introduction mentions wolbachia - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia) \- which is an awesome bacterial parasite; it has also transferred genes to hosts. Researchers thought the bacteriophage in Wolbachia helped take part in horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which this study backs up nicely.

<comment><USER4> My grandfather found a parthenogenetic spider and wanted to investigate the possibility that Wolbachia was somehow responsible. Don't think he made much progress though, it was near the end of his life. Here's the article about the spider: [http://www.americanarachnology.org/joa_free/joa_v31_n2/arac-...](http://www.americanarachnology.org/joa_free/joa_v31_n2/arac-031-02-0274.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And between members of a species - virii when reproducing using host cells can end up with transcription errors just as normal dna transcription does - <USER2> the host's genes end up part of the virus, which then infects others - this is how virii mutate and jump species.

Within 20 years gaian thinking probably won't seem so silly - we are part of a macro organism.

<comment><USER6> Do you have any reading/watching recommendations for understanding this hypothesis more?

<comment><USER7> Perhaps a more scientific take on it would be to look up the term "co- evolution".

Which is also my counter-criticism of the idea that this idea destroys the objection to GMO... the natural mechanisms still co-evolved with us ("us" being the whole biosphere here). It is mathematically reasonable to be concerned that fully artificial genetic manipulation is of a different kind, and not merely of a different quantity. (Even ignoring that in the latter case, sufficient quantity takes on a quality of its own.)

Generally I've been pretty positive on GMO food but I have to admit that the mathematical argument against it has a certain potency, when you understand the mathematics of evolution. There is a significant qualitative difference between coevolved mechanisms and artificial mechanisms that ignore that history. I'm still not convinced that our current skills are really great enough to produce some sort of disaster, but that's a debate point with an expiration date on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Smells like teh astroturf to "shape" attitudes towards GMOs.

<comment><USER9> I had that same feeling rather early on when I reached this:

> Opponents have frequently maintained that an interspecies gene transfer done > in a laboratory—the insertion of a bacterial gene into corn to make it > insect-resistant, for example—would never occur naturally and is therefore > unethical and potentially unsafe.

> The new study, published Thursday in the journal PLOS Genetics, undermines > that argument.

> "You realize that nature is creating genetically modified organisms all the > time," said Salvador Herrero, a geneticist at the University of Valencia, > Spain, and co-author of the study. "It's not so weird to transfer genes from > one organism to another.

I don't see how these results undermine the argument in any way, _whatsoever_, Mr. Naik.

The only way it can undermine an anti-GMO agenda is to "equate" human genetic modifications to nature's genetic modifications. The gene vectors we create are different.

Herrero's point laid out here also appears _taken out of the scope of the results of the original study_. Or, more accurately, Herrero's point was taken out of context by the authors of the WSJ piece.

<comment><USER10> I don't think there's much to undermine in the first place, as the opponent argument isn't much of an argument – just an appeal to nature (if I understand their position correctly).

Whether the modifications are done by nature or by an agent is irrelevant in itself, as nothing is exclusively inherent to either approach.

Any legitimate skepticism would be backed by critique of theory or argument, and/or contributing alternative explanations.

<comment><USER11> The argument I have heard is that this is part of the basis for the significant difference. Random mutations - [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559911/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1559911/)

<comment><USER10> Consider this hierarchy: Natural/Artificial(whatever these terms mean) -> Genetic Modification(General field) -> Plant Transformation(Specific method) -> Using Agrobacterium tumefaciens(Specific technique) -> The application in practice.

Even if one proves that something applies to a step/layer, one cannot generalize downwards (towards the general); only upwards (towards the specific).

That's why I find the anti-GMO craze weird: Genetic modification in itself isn't harmful, and also happens in nature all the time (as if this makes a difference). It's specific outcomes of certain modifications, or side-effects of specific applied techniques (as noted in the article you linked to).

So, whether a genetic modification is performed by "chance" (as in by nature), or deliberately (as in by humans) is irrelevant in and of itself.

Weakness or risk is inherent not in the performing agent (or lack thereof), but in the the technique or its application – which is clear from the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Minor nitpick:

"Genes typically persist if they provide some benefit."

Or genes persist if they don't provide some detriment. Evolution is a value maximising process, so it minimises costs of reproduction.

<comment><USER10> This is actually important to note.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Article doesn't match the headline at all. The study seems to say "Hey, when your body produces and injects viruses into a host, you can transfer genes", which is obviously a small subset of biological interactions.

It also casually lumps horizontal transfer between bacteria into the same category as multicellular life. We _know_ how bacteria do it, and it's not how most eukaryotic cells are built.

</comment><comment><USER14> So...in other words gmo foods can potentially change human genes or at least add new genes. How in the world would this ever be an argument for gmo foods. ::mind boggled::

<comment><AUTHOR> Nowhere in the article it says that eating foods is responsible for gene transfers from GMOs into you. The point of research is that gene jump between species. Naturally, through vectors such as viruses. So, when scientists introduce say a rapid-growth potato gene into salmon, it's not necessarily such a far fetched gene manipulation. These types of genetic jumps happen naturally all the time.

Opponents of GMOs are very vocal about introduction of "foreign" genes into species. ("How can we have a rapid-growth salmon, if they escape into the environment?" is a typical argument.) But that argument looks pretty feeble if you consider the above mentioned research.

<comment><USER11> I don't think you need to even consider gene transfer to be concerned about species with new traits impact on the environment.

We already have plenty of lessons of introducing existing species outside of their natural environment which resulted in disaster for the local ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is truly amazing how similar this is to the descolada in Orson Scott Card's _Speaker for the Dead_

Quite a visionary that man.</comment>


To The People Who Copied Our Game: Good Luck - <AUTHOR> http://q42.nl/blog/post/88954895323/to-the-people-who-copied-our-game-good-luck <comment><USER2> No. No no no. Sue them. Sue them dead. Where product and brand robbery thrives, developers wither. What's the point in working hard in developing a game (or anything) if all your hard decisions are just going to be copied in a matter of weeks? Why bother? There is certainly an evil side to copyright, trademark, and patent, but these weapons have a place on the side of justice too. Unprotected developers—at least those for whom the money or glory has significance—will give up eventually. When imagination doesn't pay off, the only ones left will be the unimaginative, the copy cats, the cloners. Sue them, for our sake if not yourselves.

<comment><USER3> My grandfather said that he went broke twice in his life: once when he was sued, and once when he sued someone else. Lawsuits are expensive, and if this game isn't making enough money to warrant that money-sink, they might end up putting themselves in an even worse position.

<comment><USER4> This is why there needs to be some kind of indie developers' (/ artists'?) union which can afford to fight the big companies abusing their position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should steal one thing back: the Quento lite icon looks _way_ better than the Quento one.

Or is that the new flat convention for iOS?

</comment><comment><USER6> > Well, we've had our own share of Cease & Desist situations and we decided we > didn't want to be on either side of such a conversation.

This is exactly how it should be done. Take a stand against harmful practices and refrain from using them in your advantage when you have the chance.

<comment><USER7> It's absolutely, completely reasonable to take legal action against someone when they violate copyright you hold on things you created. Arguing that this is intrinsically a "harmful practice" is asinine.

<comment><USER8> Was copyright violated in this case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems to me, this could actually drive sales for Quento. People will play the Quento lite, and not like the ads. They will go to buy the full version, and find Quento.

<comment><USER10> Or, Quento lite is so poorly done that people assume they are from the same company and simply avoid Quento altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Giving a game to the world is a wonderful thing, and if it's a good game, it'll last longer than you. Better for the world that we compete on the quality of our implementations rather than the right to implement, or the right to identify what you're implementing.

To be clear: IMO you'd be entirely moral to defend your trademark here, but you're being exceptionally generous to let it go.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looking at those two games side by side in the store the lite version looks more professional. Can I suggest having a nice appealing icon like Quento Lite? Might do wonders.Just from the icon you can tell that it is some kind of math puzzle, but you have no idea what you are getting with a plus in a yellow square.

</comment><comment><USER13> so are you mad or are you not mad? Hard to tell if you're being edgy and sarcastic or ironic or what. Can't wait for the lite version of your other puzzle.

</comment><comment><USER14> I must admit that "AkaSoft" is a stunning name.

</comment><comment><USER15> Way to roll over and play dead in face of such blatant theft. The phrase "we've had our own share of Cease & Desist situations" also gives a fleeting reader the impression that the company's being complacent because they've been guilty of the same crime in the past: I didn't bother delving in to read that back story and I suspect many other readers may not.

If the above is not the case, then at a minimum, you should:

* Assess your rights vs economic implications: A C&D letter with legal help might be enough to get the offender to stop; nothing wrong in stating your rights and pointing out violations. Does it cost too much to do this? Contact the app stores; they might respond favorably and yank the apps.

* Assess branding/marketing implications: how is this playing out in your customers minds and actions?

\- What can we learn? - What faults does this highlight in our product or operations? Note a few people have mentioned that the ripoff version seems more visually appealing. The only thing worse than being ripped off is if the ripoff is better than your product in any way. So maybe a visual edit should be placed higher on your task list.

\- How do we respond tactically? Referring not to legal but customer facing options. Ie What is the minimum action we can take that will at least show users that the ripoff is not from us?

...Etcetera

<comment><USER15> Why the downvote? What's wrong with expressing why the company in question should not be complacent in face of such aggressive plagiarism/violation by another company?

<comment><USER16> I didn't downvote you, but I'm gonna guess it's due to the tone of your post :

> Way to roll over

> I didn't bother delving

> you should [do this]

etc.

<comment><USER15> Ah. But "The way to roll over..." was not meant as an insult, rather to express frustration at the fact that the person/company in the right was going to left the offender get away with it. Mentioning that many readers would read only the current story was to show how they could get the wrong impression about this company and I tried to keep it constructive by offering suggestion on minimal actions the company could take that could produce positive results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Considering this situation where the developers don't want to take a stand against Quento Lite, what if, Quento developers add a couple of features to the original game release it as "Quento 2"? How would the reaction be like? More downloads, because of the new version? Would people ditch Quento Lite then?

<comment><USER18> I think you're right. It's really about adding value. Emphasis on the "ing".

So, they addED value once by creating the game. Then someone else diminished that value. Now it's up to them to keep adding value.

The people who deserve to win are not the ones who make an idea first. The people who deserve to win are the ones who put together a team and add value in all dimensions - marketing, delivery, support, innovation, accounting, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a good way to deal with this? Even the curated Apple Store is full of clones. In this case claiming copyright or Trademarking the name would force at least a small change in the clone, but they could adjust the spelling.

<comment><USER20> Writing a blog post about it that is likely to introduce your apps to tens of thousands of new people isn't the worst idea for a response :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone tried both of these? I can't help but notice in the screens that Quento Lite has five stars while Quento only has four.

<comment><USER22> Quento has 3353 gradings, Quento Lite has 6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Couldn't tell which screenshot was which.

</comment><comment><USER24> is it only me or does one of the characters from the other game they mentioned look a lot like eggman from sonic

</comment><comment><USER25> You should copyright the name before you release a game on the app store, then you can have some leverage when asking for removal.

<comment><USER26> Product names are not subject to copyright. Trademark is probably what you are thinking of.

<comment><USER4> copyright isn't something that you 'do', either, it just 'is'.

<comment><USER12> I'm pretty sure you can get a more formal copyright paper if you file it. However, it doesn't matter and you could even do it after the fact if someone infringes your copyright.

[http://www.copyright.gov/eco/](http://www.copyright.gov/eco/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>