CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47478537 <comment><USER2> I am reminded of Larry Summers, then the head of Harvard, who said something similar:

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsge...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jan/18/educationsgendergap.genderissues)

I think that previously there was a distinct issue with not enough women going through the degree programs. If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar. I think that just because the sample size for women is smaller, it will appear that the variance is smaller as there are less samples to spread it out. Thus it is possible that this will address itself if women equalize with men or exceed them in terms of graduation numbers in the relevant fields.

Given that women have actually come to dominant a lot of previously male dominated fields, fields where prominent men said women would never succeed at, I think that mathematics and physics could fall as well. It may take longer, but it is very possible.

If male variance is higher, there are likely both benefits and downsides to it, and I wouldn't be surprised if while statistically women are different there are unforseen benefits to that.

I feel like he has found one statistical difference between men and women and believe that this defines forever men and women performance in the very complex field of physics. This is over simplifying everything and I'd never bet on such an oversimplified prediction based on cherry picking by an amateur.

I think that when some people discover there are third rail/hot button issues that "can not be talked about in polite company", they take stronger positions on those issues in a reactionary way than are actually warranted by the evidence.

EDIT: What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted?

<comment><USER3> I've been reading recently about a structural/sociocultural/technological phenomenon that's actually holding women back in a field where women tend to dominate in representation at the academic level, but are regularly outcompeted by men at the professional level.

Piano playing.

It all comes down to the shape of the instrument, and hand-span, which is unquestionably (and uncontroversially) larger in men than in women: [http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/...](http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/uploads/3/4/1/6/34165129/right- hand-span-results-with-dots-dec-2016_1_orig.jpg) (from [http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span- data.html](http://www.smallpianokeyboards.org/hand-span-data.html))

The interesting thing is that there is a solution to the problem, the 7/8 piano, which has an octave spacing of 5.5" as opposed to the 6.5" on a typical piano.

The thing is, no one really takes it seriously outside of a few universities and a dedicated group that's trying to advance this cause.

Even women who learned to play long ago grouse that "I can play a regular piano, you just have to use different technique!", but won't admit to themselves or to others that the technique they're required to use is a detriment to playing the instrument with ease.

The other issue is that these pianos are hard to come by, since almost every manufacturer makes pianos of the same keyboard size, and pianists are one of the few musicians expected to play on whatever instrument they're given.

The other interesting thing is that the majority of men would actually play better on these pianos, because they would suddenly have "rachmaninoff hands", but the legacy of having hundreds of thousands of existing pianos just sitting around prevents progress from being made toward this goal.

P.S. if anyone wants to make a startup company for building 7/8 digital pianos (of which there are none currently on the market), hit me up.

<comment><USER4> This could go the other way, like you might be seen as saying that women don't have hand-spans as big as men, meaning that they're not as good as men when it comes to their physical capabilities and as such "providing" them with smaller pianos might be looked at as "demeaning" towards said women (you're thinking about them as not being as good as men are). Gender politics can be fun like that.

<comment><USER5> So producing shoes or coat's in women sizes is also "demeaning" towards women? I can't imagine why producing smaller pianos would be any different.

<comment><USER6> Because someone would say that it shows that a woman cannot play a proper piano like a man can - she has to be provided with a smaller(and therefore obviously inferior) one.

<comment><USER7> But it's important to keep in mind _no one is saying that_. It's dangerous to get wrapped up in what people _might_ say because that relies on your imagination, not reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can't start neutral discussion with weak evidence, strong conclusion and open hostility. Strumia could have just presented his findings neutrally, without already made up his mind and having a clearly visible agenda and hostility.

There is a pattern that is repeating:

1\. Scientist has a political opinion on difficult politically volatile issue that is outside his field.

2\. Scientist finds some supporting evidence.

3\. Scientist comes out with agenda, evidence and overly confident conclusion.

4\. Backlash

5\. Scientist claims that he is discriminated. He thinks that just because he had some hard data, his presentation was just cold neutral science.

6\. Others find easily some evidence that explains his theories away (Women leaving the field in disproportionately higher rates in this case).

<comment><USER9> There are really strong parallels between this and the Ted Hill NYJM fiasco. And, like the physicists in this story, professional mathematicians pointed out that Hill's paper was wildly inappropriate for the venue. Both Hill and Strumia tried to launder their institutional credibility into authority to make political arguments. Arguably, Hill was more successful, even if his stunt was more egregious.

<comment><USER10> In the 19th century William Whewell developed concept of "Consilience of Inductions". Evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. We should feel more confident about our conclusions when we have lots of lines of evidence that stand alone independently, preferably collected by different people, in different parts of the globe or at least different universities. Maybe they don't even like each other.

Many contrarian views grow long time in small small minded groups or even withing one individual. They have high internal consistency and logic. When exposed to outsiders, they usually spot some obvious errors immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >> _He also showed cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science_ and presented the results of an analysis that he claimed showed that work conducted by female physicists was not as good as their male counterparts.

My underlined sentence, is most likely the reason Cern considered that Alessandro Strumia's actions would bring disrepute to the Centre. Holding and publicly discussing controversial views is one thing. Publicly ridiculing your colleagues is quite another.

<comment><USER12> Did you see the slides in question? If not take a look:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view)

I see no great insults here, one cartoon suggests that the gender studies activists that are so concerned about the lack of women in STEM could have better addressed the problem if they themselves pursued careers in STEM rather than gender studies. The other cartoon is even milder. As to ridiculing his colleagues, from what I can see there is one slide in which Strumia states a female colleague that was hired over him has 10x fewer citations. Assuming that is true, how is that ridiculing a colleague?

<comment><USER11> Yes, I've seen the slides. They are offensive and the cartoons in them are offensive in the context of the slides. There is no question that they would harm CERN's repuation and that people at CERN would be livid at Strumio's talk as a result.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the particlesforjustice link:

" _As an example of the inappropriateness of citations as a metric, almost 1 /3 of Strumia's citations come from being one of thousands of authors on the CMS Higgs discovery paper, to which we can safely conclude that his contribution (as a theoretical associate in an experimental collaboration) was modest. Hundreds more citations come from papers about the statistically insignificant 750 GeV fluctuation at CERN, which disappeared with more data._"

Ouchie.

<comment><USER14> And yet even if you throw out half his citations, he would still have over 3x as many as the woman who was hired over him.

He has 21,000 citations.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandro_Strumia](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandro_Strumia)

The woman who was hired has 3000.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna_Ceresole](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Anna_Ceresole)

<comment><USER15> Yes, the slide you refer to, where he publicly names and insults a member of the selection comitte that didn't hire him is the slide that relly got him in trouble.

You are, quite obviously, going to get in trouble by demonstrating such lack of professionalism. Any selection comitte that considers questions such as: "will the candidate respect collegues if they happen to be female" will from his presentation know that the answer is _absolutey not_.

<comment><USER14> > the slide you refer to

I didn't refer to any slides. Are you replying to the wrong person?

> "will the candidate respect collegues if they happen to be female" will from > his presentation know that the answer is absolutey not.

But now I will refer to slides, to counter that statement:

 _Physics does not depend on nation, race, sex ⇒ open to good people from any background._

 _Curie etc. welcomed after showing what they can do, got Nobels..._

He doesn't object to women in physics. He objects to lower standards and "positive discrimination" for women in physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm nearly 50 and decided some years ago that life was just too short to bother accommodating people who are assholes. Perhaps he's brilliant, but there's quite a lot of brilliant people around and if there's a discovery just waiting to be made it's more likely that someone else will do than that the opportunity to make it will be lost forever.

I'm not arguing that everyone has to hold the same views, but if your need to have your views heard is so pressing that you're willing to damage the social cohesion of your peer group or team to the point that they can't get anything done then it better be something super-important like the lab being on fire or the discovery of fraud or catastrophic professional negligence.

<comment><USER17> That's one way to look at things. But keep in mind, in that hypothetical world, we just erased Feynman, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and, well, probably the entire United States. Folks may disagree about whether that's a net win or a net loss.

<comment><USER16> No, 'we' didn't. Einstein does not have a reputation for alienating his scientific colleagues or throwing tantrums at the IAS that I'm aware of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those that would like to see the slides of his talk to judge for themselves they are available here [1]. The slides described as "cartoons deriding women campaigning for equality in science" by the BBC, are 5th and and 2nd from the bottom.

[1] - [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA9...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c_NyUhOZ8erdqU2AGZJZtNfFeA91Kefj/view)

<comment><USER19> The BBC's characterization I think is unfair, I suggest HN'ers actually read the presentation.

While controversial, I don't think it's poignantly offensive.

I'm wary of researchers getting into flame wars and I guess CERN does have the right to avoid such things, at the same time, he seems to be making some points with a lot of data - the best thing someone concerned with opinions could do is actually debunk them instead of having him silenced ... because the BBC's article trying to shut him down may in fact have the opposite effect.

<comment><USER9> It's a formal presentation at a CERN workshop that invokes "Cultural Marxism". CERN had to apologize for the presentation after the workshop. Of course they're pissed.

<comment><USER19> They had to apologize because some people were going to be offended, surely, it doesn't mean the presentation is intellectually offensive.

'PR' is different than 'Science'.

'Cultural Marxism' is just a popular term for Intersectionalism, and it's a real issue, particularly on campus.

People should be able to talk about issues that are a little bit uncomfortable.

<comment><USER9> He misled CERN to get his talk into the workshop, didn't provide materials a priori, deliberately gave his talk an obscurantist title, and attacked the workshop (and specific individual scientists and organizers) during the presentation. It was a stunt; he played the workshop. Nobody is going to congratulate him for that.

<comment><USER20> While I agree with your other points, I have yet to attend a physics conference where I'm asked to provide my slides a priori.

<comment><USER9> I'm not suggesting he had to, just that he in several ways went out of his way to make sure nobody knew what he was going to say. It's not like the workshop accepted his talk knowing he'd be presenting a contrarian view; had they know, they would not have accepted him.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but adding fictive ways to your "several ways" makes it disingenuous. The things he did different from the normal process (title, abstract etc.) are enough to show that he deceived CERN.

<comment><USER9> Sure! Sorry, I didn't mean to sound like I thought you didn't have a point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I went into this leaning towards "they probably are mistreating the guy", but nope, dude's... wrong, manipulative, a liar to further his own goals?

The guy quotes the Istanbul Convention, article 4, as being

"Discriminations against men 'shall not be considered discrimination'"

[https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/01A6/production/...](https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/01A6/production/_105922400_47478537.jpg)

But what it actually says is

"Special measures that are necessary to prevent and protect women from gender- based violence shall not be considered discrimination under the terms of this Convention."

[https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full- list/-/conventio...](https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full- list/-/conventions/rms/090000168008482e)

So I don't know how much deeper I need to dig in light of this to figure out this guy was probably justly dismissed and will lie to and attempt to manipulate the media in his favor, given his obviously intentional misquoting the above. This doesn't further any cause of men's rights or anything, if anything it harms it.

<comment><USER22> Why would measures meant to protect somebody from violence ever be considered discriminatory in the first place?

<comment><USER23> People complain about government-funded women's refuges not accepting male victims of domestic violence.

I think those people are wrong, especially if there are male refuges available.

<comment><USER24> > I think those people are wrong, especially if there are male refuges > available.

Personally I think they are right, _especially_ if there are no male refuges available. Which according to my cursory glances seems to be the case, at least in London[0].

[0]: [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/there-are-no-male- safe...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/there-are-no-male-safe-houses- for-male-victims-of-domestic-abuse-in-london-and-a-charity-is- asking-a3912091.html)

<comment><USER23> You've failed to show whether there are any government funded domestic violence shelters for women in London.

And reading your link it seems the government funding is clearly for both men and women:

> "Tackling domestic violence is a key priority in the Mayor's Policing and > Crime Plan. He has provided £2 million of funding for the Pan London > Domestic Abuse Service – the biggest of its kind in London – which is open > to men and women.

> "Through Survivors UK, the Mayor also supports male victims of rape and > sexual abuse with funding to help them receive counselling through one-to- > one support and advocacy support should they wish to report to the police > and proceed through the criminal justice route.

Domestic violence shelters in the UK are almost entirely provided by charities.

<comment><USER24> I wasn't aware that we had specified the criteria as being government run, because of course refuges are operating as independent charities...

I thought it was about government _funded_ refuges?

In July of 2018, while under austerity, the government gave 19M GBP to various charities who support domestic abuse survivors.[0]

Curiously, zero of those charities allow men to enter their shelters.[1][2]

[0]: [https://www.gov.uk/government/news/19-million-fund-to- suppor...](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/19-million-fund-to-support- victims-of-domestic-abuse)

[1]: [https://localgiving.org/charity/safenet/project/janes- place/](https://localgiving.org/charity/safenet/project/janes-place/)

[2]: [http://www.cih.org/resources/PDF/presentations/arch2015/1Vic...](http://www.cih.org/resources/PDF/presentations/arch2015/1Vicky%20Atkinson%20-%20domestic%20abuse.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what would have happened if he had done a presentation in favor of the current favored political/pseudo religious orthodoxy with bad/inaccurate poorly done data. We will never know but, I'll bet you not much would have been said about it.

I'm not in the field, but from everything I've read the rest of his work is some of the top in the field. So we un-person this individual and start to dis-credit his work, not based on its merit, but because of the creators "moral character".

If someone dug back into Einstein and many other prominent scientists I'm sure that they could find plenty of issues with their moral character as well. For science to thrive it needs to be based on realism and facts. If someone presents inaccurate facts, they need to be refuted with with accurate ones and a lively debate needs to be possible to get to truth.

The mobs condemning someone does not achieve that goal. This is also probably one of the reasons why scientific innovation is continuing to slow down.

<comment><USER26> Lol

Firstly, the guy isn't qualified to make such a sweeping statement about the opposite sex. So before we even step into the problems with why it's a dumb idea to say such things, lets just make it clear that he's a physicist and not an anthropologist, biologist, or sociologist.

We definitely care about his moral character, but it's also just flat out incredibly naive to discredit women in his field when they've been playing catch-up for years due to cultural boundaries in the sciences.

Any scientist who steps out of their lane to attack another gender or race deserves every bit of what they get. It's cowardly to use your position as a scientist in a completely unrelated field to justify your hatred for some other group of humans.

Moreover, the guys history is terrible. He's got a chip on his shoulder about women and unethically chose to use his platform as a CERN scientist to exercise his anger.

<comment><USER27> Would he be qualified to state that men and women are equally skilled at physics? Surely you would need the same credentials to determine that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >Prof Strumia analysed papers available in a database of particle physics research. He produced a series of graphs which, he claimed, showed that women were hired over men whose research was cited more by other scientists in their publications, which is an indication of higher quality.

>He also presented data that he claimed showed that male and female researchers were equally cited at the start of their careers but men scored progressively better as their careers progressed.

I know being published and cited is a big deal in those fields, but is that really a great measuring stick? Couldn't those choices be filled with any sort of bias, or just picking things that support a common theory or line of thinking... and not indicate quality?

It seems like a potentially poor benchmark.

<comment><USER29> Yes, it is completely circular. Because if discrimination against women exists, then the higher citation rate and slower career progress are equally explained by this.

This isn't evidence in favour of some causal explanation about innate differences between men and women, he's just trying to justify his prior assumptions.

This is very much comparable to the circular nature of IQ measurement. People with racist attitudes often conflate innate ability and IQ, because IQ is very much designed to measure the sort of things that people who like IQ tests are good at.

These people will often present evidence in the same way the physicist does, by pointing out that say, people with higher IQs have higher personal income, but this obviously neglects the facts that if IQ tests / degrees etc.. are licenses for success in the first place, so you're just running in circles.

<comment><USER30> IQ tests are not used as barriers to any institutions in the US (or in most of the developed world). They are almost exclusively used for research purposes.

<comment><USER31> IQ tests have been used as barriers in _some_ circumstances - for example, people who are "too smart" may be at a disadvantage should they want to enter some police forces in the U.S.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Q: Did Prof. Strumia work with subject matter experts on his controversial research before giving his presentation?

My opinion: Being an expert in one area may not translate well into other areas. I'm a pretty good sysadmin, maybe even above average. But I don't present myself as a good/great devops or software engineer because I know I don't know as much as the developers I work with. If I'm trying to figure out some issue that involves a build or code in some way, I do my initial research then present that tentative conclusion to trusted experts for them to review. I don't make a presentation saying definitively "this is now happening" because I'd probably be wrong.

<comment><USER13> The neat thing about physicists (and many engineers) is that, because they understand the fundamentals of everything, they are completely qualified to speak on any topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'll just say this. Anyone who discourages anybody from even TRYING to learn or pursue a career in science is a bully and a jerk. That's the way the world is going and being tech savvy only makes the world a better place. That said our schools and workplaces should still be based on MERIT. I don't care where the science comes from so long as it's good science. If it just so happens to be more men are doing science than women, then we should make sure it's not because somebody is being shut out. Everyone get's to try and I even mean slow learners who are men and maybe even white. I say this because we NEED science and technological know-how going forward. If someone is so inclined educate them, give them a job. Yes we need more women in science, because we need more people in science, badly. It would be a pity if someday we achieve some quota that we're satisfied with and leave it at that. The world demands more people competent in science than can every fill the need, especially going forward. I personally DO NOT CARE wha the sex of the scientist who did XYZ happens to be. If fewer women get into the sciences or lean towards studying biology or something else, I accept that on one condition, that the DOOR is OPEN for EVERYONE. The country with the most technologically capable citizens is probably the one that's going to lead the world. Science education should be given out liberally and not rationed for an elite few. I personally do not care how the final stats and quotas look. Did every woman sincerely interested in a science career have the support and means necessary to pursue her goals? The answer to the question should be a resounding YES. The next thing is that I don't like sexist people but why make an example out of this guy and fire him? It doesn't solve anything. He didn't harass or grope someone. Go ahead and trash his ideas, discredit him, etc. whatever but leave his job alone. It's savage to fire people just because they have opinions you do like.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's no doubt Strumia did a dumb, and while he may kind of have a point regarding the variability hypothesis, there's actually more to it.

It comes down to chromosomes. XY individuals have a single X chromosome while XX individuals have two (duh).

The X and Y chromosomes have a small section that pairs one another (the pseudo-homologous region), but most of their chromatin is different.

The Y is mostly made of genes required for the architecture of the testicle, whereas the non-homologous part of the X contains genes that are implicated in many cellular processes. Humans need at least one chromosome to be viable.

In XX individuals, to avoid the over-expression of the dedicated X genes (those that are not part of the pseudo-homologous region), one X chromosome is deactivated. This happens at random, during the early embryonic life.

As a consequence XX individuals have roughly one half of their cells that expresses the alleles of their father's X and the other half expresses those of their mother's. XY individuals only express the alleles of their mother's X.

Depending on what an allele does and how an allele pair interacts, this can have different consequences.

The canonical example is color vision where XY individuals are more often affected by color perception issues than at a much higher frequency than XX individuals. Also, some XX individuals exhibit tetrachromacy, i.e. for them color is a 4d space rather than the RGB 3d space most of us are used to.

For other parameters like body size, having distinct alleles results in a phenotype that is in between. After normalization, XY individuals have a larger variance in body size than XX folks, since the latter can fall into more intermediate buckets.

Sex chromosomes in birds are the other way around. Males have a WW pair while females have a WZ pair. In birds, the variance for body size is larger in females.

This leads us, at long last to IQ, whose variance is larger in the XY group than in the XX one (with an identical mean in both groups). This may lead one to think that it makes it normal to have more XY folks in academia for mathy/brainy topics like physics (since there will be more of them in the upper tail of the distribution), but it ignores several things:

\- IQ is an imperfect measure, and we may be ignoring people whose faculties are, like tetrachromacy, out of reach for XY folks, who designed the tests.

\- XY folks in the upper tail of the distribution for a given parameter (say, IQ) have nevertheless a higher probability to be catastrophic in other dimensions (when compared to XX folks). This is relevant because science is becoming more and more of a collective endavour where social abilities matter as much as raw intelligence. It looks like Strumia sucks at that game.

<comment><USER35> People are unwilling, to the point of delusion, to accept the _possibility_ that this higher variance really does explain differences in representation among sexes across various top talent industries.

Academic society is in a weird place where _this_ kind of bias is acceptable. Which is antithetical to science and I therefore understand Strumia's frustration.

<comment><USER36> Meanwhile people (though broadly, it appears, a different set of them) also appear to be unwilling, to the point of delusion, to accept the fact that it is meaningless to attempt to extrapolate from statistical phenomena to individual, or vice-versa.

So, sure: stipulated. Male _h. sapiens sapiens_ have _statistically_ greater variability, across the population. That in _no way whatsoever_ prevents a woman from being the biggest or smartest, or a man the smallest or weakest, or either the best at one job, or the worst at another. Population trends are _population_ trends. They do not meaningfully constrain individual expression.

<comment><USER17> You are correct that a set of people are unwilling to accept that, but it's actually the same set. Those who bring up male variability pretty frequently take great pains to state, gratuitously, that it applies to populations in a general sense and not individuals. Damore called this out as well, but the mob rewrote his words for him to omit anything like that.

 _Most_ men advancing this argument have no problem whatsoever with the idea that there can be women who are better than they are. For some reason it's impossible to utter words like (downvoted, wtf? See...) GP did without a lot of people putting extra words in your mouth and assuming you're using population generalizations as a thinly veiled charade to attack individuals.

<comment><USER36> That's quite curious to me, since the overwhelming majority of the argument I've seen that cites the Damore memo glosses right over that distinction, or, at best, does an, "I'm not saying the thing, but, you know, _the thing_..." with this very question.

Maybe that's an inference I'm putting there, in at least some of the cases, but in another nontrivial subset of them, it's a serious exercise in creative interpretation to find any other read of the person's own words.

<comment><USER37> Without taking a position on the strength of the arguments in the Damore memo, if most of your news diet comes from the anti-Damore side of the debate, you're more likely to see only the less reasonable people on the pro-Damore side, for the same reason that people on the anti-SJW side mostly encounter the most inflammatory arguments on the pro-SJW side.

<comment><USER17> How the hell did this guy get flagged? Is SJW a trigger word now?

<comment><USER36> No, but it's corrosive to constructive discourse, per my other comment.

I'm legit a little slack-jawed in "did you _really_ go there?" to see this comment adjacent to that, considering.

EDIT: I didn't flag that comment, fwiw.

EDIT 2: "Trigger word" is another great example. That's a dismissive use of the notion, implying the people being "triggered" are irrational, emotional, and, by inference, wrong. It's an _ad hominem_ , and it's destructive discourse.

I don't know when we decided it was cool to conflate people expressing disapproval with people who've been traumatized and are reacting to a stimulus that's evocative of their trauma, but it's not. Speaking as someone who's experienced multiple kinds of the traumas that can legitimately warrant "trigger warnings", it's really, really not.

I truly want to understand how someone thinks they can talk to and about people like that, and then cry foul at blowback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To me, the point in Strumia's case is that it doesn't matter whether his conclusions, or data, are sound or bonkers: the fact is that bad scientific research eventually condemns you to irrelevance, not to political outrage and disciplinary measures. The latter should be reserved to those who _knowingly falsify_ data, plagiarise other people's work, etc.

<comment><USER15> Uh, you do know his actual actions was to misrepresent the contents of his talk, and spend time of it insulting members of a selection comitte that didn't hire him?

The fact is that he thinks open harrasment of people that didn't judged him less suitable for a position is ok, which in itself is reason to keep him away from any position of imprtance.

<comment><USER22> The personal attack (or piece of personal anecdata) in the presentation was certainly condemnable and should have been left out- but let's not pretend the problem wasn't the content of the whole presentation, personal attack or not.

<comment><USER15> While his whole presentation had serious issues, starting with his misrepresentation of its contents to the organisers, the personal attack is clearly the most important infraction.

It is, _on its own_ , enought cause to sanction him as he was.

<comment><USER9> The JusticeForStrumia page (run by supporters of Strumia) showcases an email from CERN that says exactly this: the personal attack was the major professional problem from the talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> At my company, any sort of presentation at trade shows or conferences has to be reviewed by the marketing department first. In fact often the content originated from the marketing department. It seems to me like large scientific organizations like CERN should do something similar. Science has always been political and probably always will be.

</comment><comment><USER39> Perhaps he meant to say that "some women were less able at physics than some men. And vice versa."

</comment><comment><USER40> The skeptic in me asks: if he goes to a friend of his at CERN and asks him to present a talk that reaches the exact opposite conclusion, no matter how shaky the reasoning, will that person be similarly in danger of losing their position?

<comment><USER41> If he takes pot shots at colleagues by way of example during the presentation, then yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> He claims that he could proof his assumptions if he were to be published in a journal but I think it would be very strange if somebody published his "research". He is not a sociologist and this is clearly not his area of expertise.

<comment><USER43> Peer-review will help with that. I strongly support amateurs publishing if they have something real to contribute. Gate-keeping based on degrees is bad.

<comment><USER44> There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith: if peer reviewers were tasked with reviewing every clever idea from someone who notices a correlation in one data set—and, in particular, at conductor their own experiments to replicate the result—there would statistically be no time for correct science.

Scott Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong" on [https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304) is a similar argument. Though there's no hard logic why a non-TeX math paper from an outsider would be wrong, the probability that it's right is extremely low.

<comment><USER45> > There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good > faith

Absolutely. And thus sadly a solid field needs a certain (ideally low) amount of gatekeeping.

But there are also academic fields which are very far from solid, in which the same license to ignore "cranks" is employed, not to save some mathematicians time, but to build a wall around an ideology.

I don't really think there's an easy way to tell the difference "from 10_000ft", the two situations look identical in that there are journals, those who publish can get jobs, and later edit these journals... and without reading any of the work, there's no way to tell if it's basically solid or basically nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lying about the contents of your talk so you can insult members of a selection comitte that didn't pick you is not a good way to get a contract renewed, who would have known?

Strumia must have really let his victory of the 750 GeV iron throne* dictate his sense of entitlement.

*: [http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-...](http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-gev-edition.html)

<comment><USER43> Your comment points to an underlying story. It mentions a selection committee that was not referenced in the article. Can you please link me to a source where I can learn more about it.

<comment><USER15> One of his slides shows a "case study" that compares the citation number of a named female member of the selection comitte (there are of course several more members), the citation number of the named female that got the position, and the citation number of Strumia himself.

Underneath this table he wrote "the opressive ambient started to open"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Haha I totally misread that as "sexiest" scientist

<comment><USER47> That would certainly have made for a much more interesting article!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> On one hand, in this political climate it's really stupid to say something like that. On the other, someone has to be the first person to say it.

(Not that I necessarily agree with what he said)

<comment><USER49> > On the other, someone has to be the first person to say it.

I don't understand this point. Please could you expand on what you mean?

<comment><USER18> The tale of The Emperor's New Clothes [1] would be appropriate.

In society in general we've decided to take as an assumption that everybody is identically capable in everything and thus that any and all differences must then be attributable to some form of discrimination, bias, or prejudice. And this is something that is pleasant to believe in large part because not believing it has led to dystopic outcomes in the past, including but not limited to government driven eugenics. So it's something that we _want_ to believe. And also stating you do not believe it is a great way to have people judge you for some secret _ist_ of some sort or another.

At the same time this view is contradicted by reality. In times past this reality would have been mostly just empirical, but in modern times we also have genetic and other factors strongly contradicting any notion of inherent equality. So what to do? In my opinion the most important thing here is to ensure as much equality of opportunity as reasonably possible. And this is an effort that should never relent. However, at the same time, it also has to be acknowledged that the lack of equality of result does not inherently mean there's a problem. Ultimately it's the typical problem. Trying to create utopia is often a great path to dystopia. Enforced equality of result for all is rather a key point in Brave New World.

Of course this does not mean that discrimination does not exist. But the standard for assumption of such needs to start growing beyond wild induction from dubious toy experiments, or from works that start with absolute equality as an assumption.

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes)

<comment><USER13> " _In society in general we 've decided to take as an assumption that everybody is identically capable in everything and thus that any and all differences must then be attributable to some form of discrimination, bias, or prejudice._"

This is false, as you partially admit later. The default assumption in society is that many groups are intellectually, morally, emotionally, and physically inferior. This assumption has been made in our society for hundreds of years. And it has led to many poor outcomes---not for the ones benefitting from the assumption, though.

The countervailing hypothesis, that everyone is "identically capable" until clearly demonstrated otherwise, is very recent and hardly universally accepted. And the idea that this hypothesis is "contradicted by reality" is also not clearly true, since the data is not unambiguous.

In other words, if you find that the fundamental research on which your scientific field is based was falsified, you don't start to clean up the mess by assuming the falsified results are true.

<comment><USER18> It's paradoxical as I do agree with you that this is a rather new ideology and is not widely accepted. Nonetheless, the view has a disproportionate hold on power. You're unlikely to face any consequence for suggesting outright false things that fit the ideology, but you can face extremely severe consequences for stating things, even well supported, that run against the ideals of the ideology.

However, I do not agree that the science is ambiguous here and I am very open to anything to the contrary. I can offer specific studies, but I'm fairly sure you'd agree that the more we reveal through genetic research, the greater a role it seems to play in practically everything. Yet there is the issue that many critical genetic factors are unevenly distributed and have very high rates of heritability. What gives reason to believe that it might be that people are "identically capable" in spite of this?

One final point I'd add is that in society power was traditionally not driven by assumption of power, but by power itself. Whichever group was able to prove itself smarter, more powerful, etc than another group had a tendency of imposing its will on the 'weaker' group. Power was rarely given, but often taken. This trend only came to a rapid freeze since the birth of nuclear weapons which have rather revolutionized the notion of power. In a world without nuclear weapons we would not have this unsteady "balance" of power between Europe, China, Mideast, US, and each of their respective allies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> oh I remember listening to Janice talk about it in her podcast

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCIke7zLMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCIke7zLMo)

</comment><comment><USER51> This is like saying Americans are empirically bad at soccer.

First, so what? Second, he should be smart enough to realize this is a rash generalization, regardless of past data. Third, he should know that saying something like this just insults those already in the field, encourages ignorance from others, and discourages those coming into the field, and thus serves absolutely no purpose.

For someone who is supposed to be an intelligent and capable leader of a heavily funded public project, this is pure stupidity and justifies any action they took against him, _regardless of gender politics_.

That said, the guy is totally sexist. No idea why BBC bothered to put it in scare quotes, when it's unquestionably true.</comment>


Evaluating easiness, performance for django/RDF, etc - <AUTHOR>

Greetings,
I need to quickly evaluate easiness of building and running an application with semantic vs semi-semantic vs relational DB management tools.
How long would it take - for a django/python, Java, C or Lisp professional - to create
a very simple API - just a twitter-like or google-like box for entry of words with prompts from my DB, to be placed in a separate table that could be queried as a part of the database?
How much would it cost?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Irene <comment><USER2> Using Django with the django-piston project (link below) enables you to create a very easy web REST-based API.

Using the javascript library jQuery and delving into its copious amount of plugins (autocomplete example link below) would enable you to have a responsive AJAX interface for a text-entry box.

You wouldn't need django-piston to get the AJAX aspect of what I mention above to work, but it somewhat simplifies getting results in a JSON format, and allows you to easily add in new API calls at a later date with its familiar format (well, familiar once you get used to it).

Links: django-piston: <http://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home>

jQuery: <http://jquery.com/>

jQuery autocomplete example: <http://www.pengoworks.com/workshop/jquery/autocomplete.htm>

AJAX definition: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming)>

JSON definition: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON>

<comment><AUTHOR> Very helpful. Thanks for the information, It turned out to be easier than I thought.</comment></comment>


Balsamiq and profit sharing. Should be read alongside Balsamiq on salary. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.balsamiq.com/team/2011/09/12/profitsharing/

<comment><USER2> Seems fair except maybe for the part where compensation takes living expenses into consideration.

If an employee decides to live somewhere cheap and it works out well, then they should see the benefits of this decision. If it means the employer must make certain sacrifices to accomodate this (telecommuting issues), then the employee should bear some extra cost to cover that, but it shouldn't be related to his living expenses.

If an employee chooses to live in Manhattan so they feel plugged in or w/e then they're responsible for covering their exorbitant rent.

Only if the employer demands they live somewhere specific should living expenses be taken into consideration.

<comment><USER3> Note that this is just the bonus. The salary is _not_ dependent on local living expenses, but on average income for similar work in the area (plus a little bit).

<comment><USER4> Why should a bonus be treated any differently than salary with respect to living expenses?

<comment><USER5> I see no more insanity in basing a bonus on cost of living than in basing a salary on market rate. They're both outside the direct control of either party and lack any fundamental relationship to the properties of the particular company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Read this alongside the _salary_ article that was posted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986379>

Balsamiq is a fairly unusual business and Peldi has grown something pretty extraordinary. This is a highly profitable business that has made a conscious decision to be great on its own terms, not on the terms that a Silicon Valley venture capital firm might impose on the business.

If you want some more background, go and watch this video of the talk Peldi gave at Business of Software last year. There is also a transcript you can speed read if you don't have an hour to spare.

[http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/08/do-worry-be- happy...](http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/08/do-worry-be-happy-peldis- brilliant-talk-about-keeping-sane-as-a-software-ceo-video-transcript.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've never worked at a startup that was consistent about giving out it's bonuses. Usually they did some variation of the "making our numbers" policy usually in place at larger corporations. As a startup, you hardly ever make your numbers. So I've come to discount bonuses altogether (along with worthless stock options) when negotiating my salary. Now that I'm at a bigger company, having a consistent bonus every year is quite nice. There are tradeoffs to be made though...

</comment><comment><USER7> The impact of seniority in the profit sharing program is way too big, in my opinion. I don't even exactly understand what seniority has to do with it, and I'm a (very?) senior developer, working professionally for more than 10 years.

Isn't it an incentive for working less as you become a "dinosaur" in the company? I mean, we can't make the time stop - this is actually an automatically increasing prize, regardless of your performance or any other thing whatsoever, and I'm a little uncomfortable with automatic prizes.

Besides, seniority is already reflected in the salary. Additional prizes should be a direct consequence of productivity, which again, have nothing to do with seniority.

In general, I'm very much in agreement with Peldi's ideas and admire the openness he cultivates but I just don't get this one.

<comment><USER8> _I don't even exactly understand what seniority has to do with it, and I'm a (very?) senior developer, working professionally for more than 10 years._

The seniority portion is based on time working for the company, not on time as a developer in general.

 _Isn't it an incentive for working less as you become a "dinosaur" in the company?_

Presumably there are other checks on that, like performance reviews. If my performance gradually degraded year after year, I'd expect to be talked to about that, and fired if I didn't improve.

 _Besides, seniority is already reflected in the salary._

Sorta -- they base salaries on average where you live for a similar job + a little bit. That's a different kind of seniority than the bonus depends on.

I question how "fair" a bonus structure really can be. At my last company bonuses were entirely random, and weren't always fair: I received several bonuses (that I do believe I deserved), but there were many others who should have been recognized as well on different occasions who weren't.

The bonus here is sort of a macro performance level. Everyone gets to share in the profits of the company when the company does well, and they share somewhat proportionally based on how long they've been with the company. Assuming the company is doing a good job of making sure everyone is performing well and not allowing people to slack off, it's a reflection of your loyalty to the company. And for a startup, it's also maybe a reflection of the amount of risk you took on (employee #1 took on loads, employee #75 took on much less) when you joined.

Then again, maybe I'm just jealous; I've never worked for a company with a profit-sharing plan, but would like to. It feels much more equitable than the traditional stock-option route most companies go for. Though the upside is that for stock options, you just need to stick around until they vest, while with profit sharing you need to stick around until the company is profitable, and you only get payouts while you're still there. Pros and cons to everything, I guess.

<comment><USER7> I'm not questioning the profit-sharing, that's a great incentive (the best IMO) and I'm actually working in a company with that incentive. I'm questioning _automatic_ prizes.

Bonuses are incentives, and they only work if they make you work differently that you would if there wasn't any. That's not what happens with seniority.

Maybe the incentive is not to work better but just to retain the seniors in the company. But retention is a completely different problem altogether. Bonuses tied to profits may not be the best way to retain people if you have a bad year (no profits). I think competitive salaries are a much better incentive for keeping people in the company (better pass the message that you want them to work with you, regardless of how well the company's done on that year).

And sure, performance reviews can be unfair but that's not a reason for dismissing them - just keep improving the way you conduct performance reviews. At a certain point, you'll have to have some kind of peer review, better start now. There are many companies where these reviews actually work well.

The problem is that almost everyone who had bad experiences with performance reviews in previous companies (which seems to be the case of peldi) tend to dismiss them instead of improving them.

<comment><USER8> Mmm, very good point. Perhaps (as you suggest) the bonus structure isn't intended as an incentive to work harder/better.

But it does seem like a poor method to retain people... I feel like my bonus growing over time wouldn't be much of a motivator to stay if the work wasn't keeping me super interested, and my base salary wasn't growing enough to remain competitive. Maybe that's just a bias of mine, though, not to consider the bonus as a top criterion? Dunno.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Back-of-the-envelope math:

Suppose Google were to implement the same policy. Their quarterly profits last quarter were $2.5B, and had approximately 30,000 employees. So 10% of $2.5B split among 30k employees means an average quarterly bonus of $8,300, or a yearly bonus of $33k.

This seems like a pretty good bonus, particularly since if Google used salary.com to define their salaries, an incoming software engineer in the Bay Area would make $70k.

<comment><USER10> On day one you would only be getting 2.5% not 10% so 8,250$. However, if you have 4x the average senority then you would get 33k x (.75 x 4 + .25) = 107k which would be much harder to walk away from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have you guys considered opening up the books to the public as well?

Note: This question is partially relevant to the adjoining article "Balsamic: Salary Policy"</comment>


Ask HN: Did you build a succesful slinkset website? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious with slinkset.com being retired in a few weeks [http://help.posterous.com/slinkset-shutting-down], I'm wondering if anyone was able to build a successful community/website on this platform. And by successful I mean (loosely defined) a website with a decent amount of users or traffic interested in the main topic. (Stats would be nice if you have any.)<p>Also if anyone has some insight, why do you think this service is being retired by Posterous? <comment><USER2> I took a look on compete.com and it looks like their traffic was going down. It probably wasn't a winning site for them.

Looks like slinkset is currently not responding :( It would be nice if they kept it open till the May deadline they set.</comment>


Show HN: A really addictive way to read /r/todayilearned - <AUTHOR> https://polyfact.co?hn3 <comment><USER2> I really dislike how TIL is cramped with "stories". For example in your screenshots there is a story about two twins doing the same thing. Like it is interesting, but how is this a "fact" worth learning? It's the reason I unsubscribed from the subreddit. Just venting I guess.

The app looks nice although I haven't tried it. It's nice that you support lower versions of iOS (I'm using iOS 9).

The cards are kinda tall, seems like it would look kinda ugly on larger devices when there is a low amount of text.

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like the concept. One small improvement I would recommend is to allow cards to be swiped in any direction, specifically up or down. Depending on how you are holding your device, it can feel more natural to swipe up to discard, for example.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another great way to consume it (and this is what I do) is the todayilearned bot for telegram ([https://t.me/todayilearned](https://t.me/todayilearned)).

Not sure if it takes from /r/todayilearned though?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is great. TIL notifications are my favorite thing about the Reddit app (right behind /r/explainlikeimfive). So my only suggestion is to add notifications for new, trending ones.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh, I had the same idea for a long time, but haven't ever came around making it real. Although I wanted to make it for android, not iOS.

Good luck with your app, guys.

</comment><comment><USER7> The card swipe interaction isn't feeling good to me. Feels like it needs improvement. More than 50% of swipes don't work...

</comment><comment><USER8> I loved the Reddit AMA app. I don't know why they decided to kill it. I would've liked your app on my Android device!

</comment><comment><USER9> It's pretty fun and I like it.

One issue: if I flick a card away very slowly, it's pretty annoying how long it takes to float away.

I'd suggest a minimum velocity...

<comment><USER9> Also, I've had slow moving cards get stuck...

[https://imgur.com/a/0trny](https://imgur.com/a/0trny)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a web app for that? i don't like the reddit interface.

</comment><comment><USER11> Make a widget and a dark theme</comment>


Fibery – Yet Another Collaboration Tool - <AUTHOR> https://fibery.io <comment><USER2> This is sublime - the website, I mean. You need to click on "I don't get it, explain differently" a few times before the site reveals its punchline. V slick, v funny. :-)</comment>


Introducing Poke for Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.fb.com/News/559/Introducing-Poke-for-Mobile

<comment><USER2> "Each message expires after a specific time you've set, either 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds. When time runs out, the message disappears from the app."

Sure it disappears from the app, but the message probably stays on Facebook's servers for the rest of your life. Then someday in the future Facebook will probably change their privacy settings suddenly (on purpose or accidentally) and all your messages will appear on your timeline for everyone to see.

<comment><USER3> I thought it was proven that previous reports of "private messages" showing up on poeples' Timelines were false and were down to user confusion?

<comment><USER4> While that's true, the fact is that the data stays forever.

If you copy the direct CDN url of a photo on Facebook and then "delete" it, you can keep returning to that URL to see if it is still active. I've one saved from 2009 that still loads, despite having being "deleted" for almost three years now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently this app has been built in 12 days[1].

[1] <https://www.facebook.com/blake/posts/448334501889024>

<comment><USER6> That is not surprising, because it isn't a new feature of facebook, it is just a UI skin which facilitates certain operations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The last time Blake Ross cloned an app for Zuck was when Facebook Answers came out to compete with Quora. I guess Zuck feels like Snapchat is a threat? I wonder if he tried to buy them.

Blake Ross Clones usually scare people, but they never work out. I don't think Snapchat has much to fear.

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh, so message expiry is the new hot trend? Quickly, pivot!

<comment><USER9> There are pop-up restaurants, why not a pop-up status? Although the former makes money.

<comment><USER8> I haven't heard of pop-up restaurants before, but they sound a lot like food trucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The level to which this is a clone of Snapchat is kind of astounding. Did FB ever try to buy them, or are they trying to destroy competition before they have to pay big bucks like they did for Instagram?

It's all business, so I suppose all's fair, but it hardly paints Facebook as a hub of innovation.

<comment><USER11> Before starting a startup, you take into consideration the chance that a tech giant might implement your idea better, faster, and stronger than you. It's a risk that Snapchat took, and clearly it woke someone up.

From Facebook's point of view, why pay money for an app which can be developed 12 days? The only reasons they would acquire Snapchat are for the team and the users.

The users of Snapchat are likely to already have a facebook, so they likely don't care too much about the users. They will paint it as being more convenient for the users, which is true, but it's also true that the nature of capitalism is anticompetitive.

[http://proletariat.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/the-myth-of- capi...](http://proletariat.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/the-myth-of-capitalist- competition/)

In the case of Instagram, Facebook had more reasons to acquire, but I still don't think that one was really worth 1.2 billion.

<comment><USER4> > why pay money for an app which can be developed 12 days

It sort of shows. I installed the app just to play around with the backend of it, and it's fairly easy to get stuck in a loop with no back buttons. There's also bits of the app that don't make sense, like the differentiation between the different types of received "pokes".

<comment><USER11> I'm sure an update will be released in a week. Facebook likes to "move fast and break things".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This post is relevant: <http://dcurt.is/photos-for-communication>

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there _any_ use-case besides sexting that necessitates:

1\. Sending photos that automatically disappear in seconds; 2\. Requires user input to view; 3\. Prevent screenshots, strong efforts to prevent saving photos?

<comment><USER14> Hmm...maybe cheating on exams?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> When is that site which is a collection of Poke mesaage screenshots going to show up? Can't be that long. I can also see this user reaction: "what! I thought there was no way to save a poke message. facebook you lied to me."

Typically these complaints wouldn't matter as much but because of the sensitive nature of communication this app is designed to facilitate, it could matter much more.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this different from FaceBook Messenger? Looks like some duplication of functionality. Are you going to pull Messenger from the market?

<comment><USER17> The main difference here is that you can set messages to expire after a certain time interval - a feature that became massively popular with SnapChat.

<comment><USER18> What is the purpose of that? i can't think of a single use aside from, say, sexting.

<comment><USER19> It's for fun, obviously, not everything has to have a utilitarian purpose... People take compromising photos, make ugly faces, etc., with the knowledge that the photo will only be seen for 3 seconds.

<comment><USER20> Does screenshot not work during those times? I'm confused how this would give the sender any comfort at all...

<comment><USER21> 50% of the population is on the bottom half of that normal distribution.

People are _dumb_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> These are not real facebook pokes <https://www.facebook.com/pokes> they are phony.

<comment><USER23> Phone-y? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just take a picture of the screen with another camera. Nothing can stop this.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder how Snapchat's founder reacted to this news..

</comment><comment><USER26> Revolutionary.</comment>


Link your GitHub projects to cloud: Clone in Koding button - <AUTHOR> http://kbutton.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> It allows you to make your repo one-click-clone in people's VM on Koding.

It creates a Markdown snippet to add your README.md file. And it creates a link button that opens Koding and allows you to clone the repo.

A few usage examples:

[https://github.com/f/omelette](https://github.com/f/omelette) [https://github.com/f/kapi](https://github.com/f/kapi) [https://github.com/f/qvimrc](https://github.com/f/qvimrc) [https://github.com/f/GitHubDashboard.kdapp](https://github.com/f/GitHubDashboard.kdapp)

</comment><comment><USER2> Someone by the same name ('fka') has been posting stuff about Koding today on r/programming as well as a few other nicks. To me it seems like a bunch of shills trying to promote this crap project.

<comment><AUTHOR> crap? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> really cool - i'd like button a bit bigger and explanatory as to its purpose (see paypal paynow buttons)</comment>


The Most Expensive Cities in the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=15659589

<comment><USER2> For what is worth, this is what I could fid about the methodology:

<http://eiu.enumerate.com/asp/wcol_HelpIndexCalc.asp>

Basically, it says it's only useful to companies to decide what to pay their expat executives.

For the rest of us it's pretty much irrelevant. Normal people will change their consumption patterns according to their income and the local living cost. If you move from Rio to NY and then to Tokyo you'll probably settle for a smaller apartment each time.

But the index seems implausible even for its stated purpose. Let's say you're a "regular" person and are happy with x in NY; then you'll be very comfortable with 1.4x in Tokyo, and will live like a king in Rio with .85x. So what kind of stuff are execs consuming that makes those numbers equivalent?

</comment><comment><USER3> Where is the complete list?

And it's very surprising that shanghai would be nearly as expensive as new york, a city that is already considered fairly expensive.

<comment><USER4> Yes, these lists tend to be aimed at corporate expats with spouses and children negotiating with HR about their cost-of-living adjustments for overseas assignments. So you get a basket of goods that reflects that audience --- big flat in an expat-friendly district, private schools, foodstuffs which are available locally in NY but have to be imported in Shanghai, etc.

What Hacker News really needs is a list of cities ranked on minimum cost of living: how little can a foreigner spend on housing, meals, entertainment, etc. in a given city, without being in danger of crime, disease, ceiling collapse, frostbite, or an unstable internet connection? That figure is far lower in Shanghai and even Hong Kong than in New York ...

<comment><USER5> A couple of years ago, Asuncion, Paraguay won in a "cheapest city" survey. I wonder what their Internet connectivity is like.

<comment><USER6> I live in Asunción and the Internet connectivity sucks in general :( This is a link to an ADSL ISP <http://www.click.com.py/planes.php> if you want to see prices

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best mix of price and quality of life I've found is Taipei, Taiwan. You can live very cheaply - cheap rent, the street food and convenience store food is remarkably good, cheap transit, lots of cheap access to technology, nature, art in the city and surroundings.

I was really blown away with the quality/price mix. I figure the government must be artificially keeping the Taiwan dollar down - I literally couldn't figure out any other explanation for why it'd be so cheap. The place is absolutely wonderful and I think has something to offer most people. I like Japan a lot, but Taiwan has 90% of the quality of the life, cleanliness, and conveniences at less than half the price. Worth checking out for anyone in the area, it's a city I could live in.

They're also pretty liberal about giving living/working permits, long term touring visas if you can prove you have funds, or letting you visa run as much as you want. Only downside is that visa waiver is only 30 days, but there's short hops to lots of interesting places nearby if you want another 30 days. Taiwanese people are generally pretty welcoming and it's easy to make friends there, too - highly recommended.

<comment><USER8> is Taipei behind the Great Firewall? What kind of price is normal for middle of the road livable apartment in a central location with a stable net connection and food / incidentals per month in your experience?

For the record, Sydney figure in my experience is about 2.5k AUD per month, Tallinn figure in my experience is about 900 AUD.

<comment><USER9> Taiwan is NOT RULED by China. There is no restriction to access Internet in Taiwan. But the bandwidth to U.S., Europe is limited due to number of undersea optical cables available.

Once in a while the cable between Taiwan and Hong Kong or Japan was cut off by fishing fleet by accident, it usually takes weeks for bandwidth to resume to previous level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mumbai is at the bottom of the list and Shanghai much above it. What a dramatic contrast for the economic hubs of two leading economies of the world.

</comment><comment><USER11> Tokyo is up to number 2? No wonder I'm constantly poor.

Been thinking about this lately though, it looks like Tokyo is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other city. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500#2009_breakdo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500#2009_breakdown_by_city)

So it might be the best place for a B2B start-up.

</comment><comment><USER12> Frankfurt?

Why is Frankfurt ranked so high? It's not a capital city, and in general Germany is relatively cheap for Europe.

<comment><USER13> Frankfurt is a financial center and has a huge airport hub. Since these rankings are based around 'executive-level' compensation, these things make a major difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anecdotally this seems true to me—when moving to London 4 years ago I was taken aback by the cost, but recent visits to my hometown of Sydney has also surprised me at how much it's "caught up" with London.

Bit surprised Moscow is lower than London—it cost the earth when I was there a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER13> In the article, Moscow's drop in price is attributed to the drop in the Rouble against the Dollar...this feels right to me also since Russia has been less openly aggressive recently, which would lead to a cheaper cost of living I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> While low expenses are a good thing, I've learned the hard way I'd much rather pay higher rent to live somewhere I am happy, than to halve my expenses and live somewhere not as nice.

On the other hand, I think I'd appreciate almost any of the cities on this list.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what caused the move from 8th to 17th by London, and likewise 17th to 12th in Sydney?

<comment><USER3> Property Values? I've heard that austrilia hasn't had a real estate bubble 'pop' yet.

<comment><USER17> though some media reports may say otherwise, australia hasn't had a significant decrease in property values in the last 5 years.

there are some isolated cases of properties/suburbs falling significantly in price, but absolutely nothing like what has happened in the united states.

in particular, inner city areas have continued to experience growth year on year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The fluctuation of the dollar has no impact if your entire income and expenditures are all in a different currency. But as others here mention, this kind of chart is mostly for "expats" living in a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me, but every city at and below the 100 mark are world renowned for their criminal histories, and all the cities above it are not.

<comment><USER20> Ever heard of the Paris suburbs? They are not a nice place.

<comment><USER21> Yes, but it's not about the suburbs in this survey. Paris suburbs are a lot more cheaper, and many of my friends flew Paris to get there. Paris is appealing to the wealthy and old people,and because of them the costs of real estate are sky rocketting, a lot of young people cannot afford an appartment in Paris. And 10 euros a beer when the average income is 1500 euros/months is ridiculous. I want cheap beer !

<comment><USER13> I seem to remember that beer everywhere in France is comparatively expensive to Germany or the UK, for example. I also seem to remember that really good wine is surprisingly affordable - certainly in France I would always drink wine and not beer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yet another reason to not start a startup in Paris.

</comment><comment><USER23> Chicago is as expensive as New York? Really?

<comment><USER24> yeah, no way. we have outrageous sales tax, but rent is fairly reasonable.

<comment><USER25> The good news is that we have no stores, so there is never an opportunity to collect that sales tax.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Anyone good with business plans? I could use some help. - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently a semi-finalist in a University sponsored business plan competition. The deadline is Monday March 15, but I could still use a few more eyes to look over my plan for a start-up in the recording music industry,<p>If you're interested, shoot me a line: abrandt <at> mail <dot> bradley <dot> edu. I'd love to get some of the collective HN wisdom behind me. <comment><USER2> line dropped</comment>


Why PHP Scales - A Cranky, Snarky Answer - <AUTHOR> http://web.archive.org/web/20050406082632/http://www.schlossnagle.org/~george/blog/archives/269_Why_PHP_Scales__A_Cranky_Snarky_Answer.html

<comment><USER2> Any claim that any language that has basic control structures and access to OS facilities can't be made to scale is absurd on its face. When you say that a system scales well, you're talking about its asymptotic behavior. Using an inefficient language implementation will penalize you by at worst a constant multiple.

</comment><comment><USER3> Argh, font size. I must just be getting old, I thought I would complain about fonts being too tiny!

<comment><USER4> Fonts can be made to scale by pressing the ctrl key and then rotating the scroll wheel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have never understood peoples thoughts about which languages scale better than others, because all web languages do the same thing - process data and return it to the user.

The only thing you need to worry about is caching and sessions, but that's not a language specific task.

To scale any web language, you just need to add more servers to the cluster. Its the database which is the real scaling problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> PHP's scalability isn't the big question. It's not the thing that gives people pause when they hear there's a PHP project looking for a developer. As far as dynamic languages go, PHP scales better than most and performs pretty damn well out of the box. But it's whether or not you can be productive in PHP that's the real question.</comment>


Actions That Made Me Happier - <AUTHOR> http://www.garyharan.com/2010/04/04/5-actions-that-made-me-happier.html

<comment><USER2> In the "removing small frustrations" category: getting a second power cord for my laptop. It makes me happy twice a day when I don't have to fish my cord out to bring it to work/home.

<comment><USER3> More generally speaking: set up the right infrastructure and own the right tools for common tasks. If you can save yourself a few minutes and a bit of frustration every day for a ten dollar investment or for a bit of effort once, it's worth it!

Some examples: \- owning extra power cords, batteries, memory cards, etc. for electronic devices \- setting up a power strip and various charging or connecting cables where they're easy to reach (consider the recently- circulated pic of the cables clipped to the edge of the desk.) \- own the right cooking utensils, pots, pans, maybe a slow cooker or rice steamer, and so on. There's no sense in frustrating yourself day after day because it's harder than it needs to be to make dinner. \- have appropriately-sized and located garbage cans, recycling bins, clothes hampers, toy boxes, file cabinets, and other types of containers. \- repair or replace broken stuff that regularly causes annoyance, like sticky file cabinet drawers.

<comment><USER4> As dazmax said, not only is it removing frustration, it actually can make you more happy every time you realize you don't have to pack up your cord. This probably mostly applies to people who are used to having to pack up cords a couple times a day to move around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the phrasing of the title, i.e. keeping track of what actually works.

One tip that's helped me: when something makes you feel good, add it to feelgood.txt. Over time, you'll start to see patterns (vs. the random, fallible memories/ideas we have about what makes us happy).

Every few days or so I'll have a random entry [7/23/09: felt good to chill with Andreas. played games, chatted, had bfast, etc. hospitality. nice to catch up. 7/15/09: Felt good to 1) post to BE and 2) exercise today].

Looking back, I can see what actually worked in making me happy.

<comment><USER6> I like that. A lot.

I'm going to create a feelgood.txt on my work computer right now. I'm also thinking about creating a feelbad.txt - so I know what to avoid in my life.

<comment><USER7> The flip side of this is it can be very hard to make changes in your life when you realize that people to whom you may be very close .. are no longer good for you.

<comment><USER8> I came back here to this comment. How has anyone dealt with this situation?

<comment><USER7> Can you email me with your phone number? I'll give you a call. (firstname.lastname@example.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A great and somewhat related article by David Brooks: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/opinion/30brooks.html>

From the article:

"... economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important."

<comment><USER10> Yeah, good article. Thanks for the link. I liked this statement from article:

"Most governments release a ton of data on economic trends but not enough on trust and other social conditions. In short, modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm proud to say I've done all of these. I think the "drink with co-workers" is a super-good point and I wish more people were more honest about it!

<comment><USER12> I understand the logic about the strategic importance of drinking with coworkers but I have always felt it imposed some kind of obligation that I was somewhat uncomfortable about while I was single but much more so since I got married. The burden of the obligation for me is such that it outweighs any benefits I feel it could have in relation to my happiness. Those times when I have gone out with coworkers it has produced rigid conversations bound by convention and politics - not much different from what happens in the office. So I would say that piece of advice should be examined on a case-by-case basis.

<comment><USER13> Maybe that's indicative of a larger culture problem at your company. I can't really see people at a bar talking about politics - are you sure you drank enough?

<comment><USER12> Not _talking_ about politics but _bound_ by politics (office politics).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had the pleasure of spending a week with a group of techies in Montreal (referenced in the post). Definitely a nice and interesting crowd to hang out with (and have a drink with (which did NOT == get blitzed)). Once I read Montreal, that part clicked a bit more. The value and pleasure in such does depend on the crowd and attitudes. Back here and at the corporate job, having drinks has usually been about awkwardly commenting on the attractive women (even in mixed company), an in depth analysis of some fellow's paintball games and season, movies movies movies (but only Hollywood blockbusters and comedies), and wondering when the next bit of shit would hit the fan at the office. Straying from these points often seems risky; people are not too open -- as/in a group -- to alternatives and everyone is at least partially watching their back.

I very much like the point about 'removing small frustrations'. So often, the temptation is to pass the opportunity by, perhaps because it is small compared to everything else we are worrying about. But add it up, over a year or two, or take them all as a set, and the cumulative effect is quite significant. The satisfaction of addressing even one is a real, immediate boost and sense of accomplishment.

Finally, to return to the drinking. I find, especially as I get older, that I enjoy a cup or two of coffee in a cafe as much or more than a drink in a bar. The caffeine elevates dopamine and thereby seems to open up conversation, but the results tend to be more interesting and don't culminate in a hang-over.

<comment><USER15> Yes, since alcohol is a depressant, if you want someone to indirectly associate you with being stimulated, coffee.

<comment><USER7> Dude that's genius. I never thought of it in that way before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can only agree with these points. I experienced all of them myself.

</comment><comment><USER17> Makes me want to go to one of the SV/SF Hackers and Founders meetups.

On drinking with co-workers: point taken, but if you are actually having mood problems, watch the alcohol intake. It's a depressant.

<comment><USER18> You're thinking of the wrong definition of "depressant". Alcohol is a physical depressant.

<comment><USER17> It's a psychological depressant as well.

<comment><USER18> Citation needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Holly non-cleartype fonts, my eyes are bleeding!

Why, oh why are people so cruel, so uncaring, so unkind?

<comment><USER20> <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

<comment><USER21> No matter how many times this is posted, I can't upvote it enough.

<comment><USER22> <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

<comment><USER21> Honestly, that helps.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Weird Twitter account posting pictures of phone numbers - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/PhonyBook <comment><AUTHOR> What could be the purpose of this? Some kind of canary?

<comment><USER2> A numbers station? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station)

<comment><AUTHOR> But why pictures, not just the message? Looks like it's been going on for a few years.

<comment><USER2> Excellent question.

Are there any spies here who can answer that?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results - <AUTHOR> http://searchengineland.com/080411-140000.php

<comment><USER2> I noticed this happening in my blog's logs months ago, for my blog's search form. I thought it was fascinating. The keywords it chose to search were generally meaningful words that occurred frequently on the site. I'm not sure if they were correlated with the Google search terms that hit my blog.

The corresponding SEO tip is to make sure that your site's search feature works, delivers good results for the keywords and delivers the results to which you want Google to pay attention.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is kind of a big deal. Crawling the deep web seemed like the one real feature Google's vaporware competitors could tout.

<comment><USER4> The deep web isn't limited to GET requests and forms that don't require passwords.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but this is a start... give it a couple years.

And this is still more than the vaporware competitors that are still vaporware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I propose a new sport - Google Crawler hunting. Kind of like Snipe hunting, only you lay traps. Object is to see how long you can keep the Google bot there by generating new pages programmatically, and how many unique things you can get the bot to do.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's Matt Cutts explaining it a little more: [http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/solved-another-common-site- rev...](http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/solved-another-common-site-review- problem/)

</comment><comment><USER6> So its ok for them to do this? but if you do the same against google (scraping results) - presumably Bad Things happen?

<comment><USER7> Is their search url listed in their robots.txt?

<comment><USER8> Seems strange that you wouldn't have just looked when asking that question (less characters to type at least). Lots of things disallowed.

<http://google.com/robots.txt>

<comment><USER9> I think it was a rhetorical question.

<comment><USER6> Yes it was. But I should have been clearer for the type of literal argument starters that would tend to hang around here ;)

I wonder if google always honour robots.txt

<comment><USER9> I hope so because otherwise they could get stuck in one of those:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What an interesting problem... so, if you were to build a searchbot, what would it type into those form fields it found?

It has to be very difficult, especially since you can't do too many submits. Could you somehow infer what to put in there based on searches in your own database already?

</comment><comment><USER11> What happens when google starts editing wiki pages and filing new bug reports/tickets?

<comment><USER12> It only submits GET forms, you shouldn't use those for those things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> text Google Now Fills Out 1 minute ago link

</comment><comment><USER14> scaling Ron Paul Graham</comment>


Google TPU Performance Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11749/hot-chips-google-tpu-performance-analysis-live-blog-3pm-pt-10pm-utc <comment><USER2> So many details that people gloss over. I have used tensorflow (TF) and it is true that GPUs suck at interference at it. But it's not always the GPUs fault

\- TF can't do anything quantized on GPUs. It just switches back to to the CPU/TPU. \- TF gets relatively poor utilization of the GPU and tends to not be careful with memory use. \- I was able to do certain types of classification hundreds of times faster by seeing what TF was doing it and hand writing it in OCL. Using [https://docs.rs/ocl/0.14.1/ocl/](https://docs.rs/ocl/0.14.1/ocl/). It's a super cool library for rust. Also users should checkout tensorRT [https://github.com/NVIDIA/gpu-rest- engine/tree/master/tensor...](https://github.com/NVIDIA/gpu-rest- engine/tree/master/tensorrt). It's not super well supported and may go away, but it is fast

<comment><USER3> Question about TensorRT: It takes in Caffe trained models. Is this BVLC Caffe or NV-Caffe? In my experience the models aren't compatible between the two.

<comment><USER2> Either but I've never tried

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems very much "back to the future." Systolic array processors were used to accelerate neural networks in the 1980's. Great for matrix math too. (ref: [http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2939&c...](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2939&context=compsci)). These aren't quite the systolic array processor of old, but too close to be considered new arch/micro-arch. The formula is simple, have low precision MM to accelerate, drop in a matrix multiply unit that can be blocked for and high bandwidth memory to feed it and let it go. I'm waiting for more new takes on old arch....as fabbing chips becomes more economical, I hope to see more retro chips. Especially things that didn't quite make the jump from research to production b/c of scaling (or other reason), might now make sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> Back in early-noughties, I remember that there were a company that was developing an accelerator chip for seismic data analysis for oil exploration companies. I can't remember the name now. Can anybody remember?

They were proposing a chip that did nothing but a limited set of linear algebra operations at gigabit rates. They were former Transmeta people

<comment><USER6> Clearspeed? The HPC history books are littered with the bankrupt corpses of special purpose hardware.

<comment> semi-extrinsic I remember an ASIC that was supposed to accelerate multigrid preconditioners, out of some big German university. They were never able to get stuff to market fast enough to beat Intel and Moore's law.

Perhaps the biggest recent success story in this field is Anton.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_\(computer\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks to be all about TPU1? Which is inference-only. Afaik TPU2 allows for training as well, Im much more interested in that. Last line: "There was a TPU2 talk earlier that I missed that I need to look through the slides of and write up later"

<comment><USER8> The Hot Chips talks will eventually make their way onto YouTube...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really don't get how they came up with those numbers comparing CPUs to GPUs.

They claim to have 3.5x as much on-chip memory as a GPU, but the R9 Fury X has 16.7 MiB of _register_ memory compared to their 28MiB. And then of course there's caches on top of that (which funnily add up to less than the register memory, I believe).

I also don't get how they come up with those MAC numbers. An RX Vega 64 can do 27 TFlop/s of half-precision arithmetic, which is _way_ more than 1/25x the 92 TOp/s they claim for the TPU. In fact, it makes the GPU look pretty damn good, considering the TPU only does 8-bit ops.

Of course I'd expect the TPU to beat a GPU in terms of perf/watt, but that's not what they're comparing on that particular slide.

There's the whole question of how you manage latency in inference, but then I'd expect them to talk about the utilization of the GPU resources relative to the theoretical peak.

<comment><USER10> They compared TPU v1 with server hardware available at the time (2015, i.e. K80 and Haswell).

Are the cards you mention from 2015? Are they for gaming or servers? Do they use ECC? If not, that rules them out right away.

You can find the paper with the methodology, theoretical peaks and latency management at [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04760](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.04760)

<comment><USER11> I would argue ECC is completely pointless during neural network inference, the amount of change a single bit flip, even a sign change, is likely to generate is minimal.

<comment><USER12> An exponent bit flip, especially at later layers, would completely break inference.

<comment><USER10> I'd be concerned about code, too. It's not unheard of for a single bit flip to make petabytes go away (true story).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article just seems odd. They're still quoting numbers from how they compared 2 years ago to Kepler GPUs. Unless they have a new TPU out, these are worse than the V100 GPU out today, so it's strange that in a field moving so fast they're constantly quoting old data. It doesn't matter anymore that you had the fastest chip in 2015. If you haven't iterated since then, you are probably losing.

<comment><USER14> The link is about TPUv1, but Google is already using TPUv2 (or maybe TPUv3, they don't talk too much about this things).</comment></comment>