The Beige Box Fades to Black (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/18/technology/the-beige-box-fades-to-black.html <comment><USER2> There was a cycle in consumer electronics. Beige, black, white, grey, and back to beige again. This didn't happen by accident. It was managed by the Color Association of the United States, which decides which colors are "in" for each season.[1] They've been doing this since 1915.

The Color Association has much less clout than it used to, since the US lost its apparel business. They once really did rule color, because their "forecasts" were used by big fabric mills to decide what to make in quantity.

[1] [http://www.colorassociation.com/pages/6-forecasts](http://www.colorassociation.com/pages/6-forecasts)

<comment><USER3> What happened to silver and brown? Lots of older electronics were made with bakelite and aluminum or had some aluminum accents.

[I'm thinking about old reel-reel tape players, Sanyo, Philips, Zenith, Braun transistor radios --interestingly I recall seeing some old typewriters which had a weird grey-green hue]

<comment><USER2> Military equipment from WWII and the 1950s came in olive drab for field use, and lighter versions of that grey-green showed up in civilian electronics.

<comment><USER3> Huh, that's an interesting observation --never would have come up with that connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From Gibson's 'All Tomorrow's Parties':

Looking past the display, she could see a lot of old hardware side by side on shelves, most of it in that grubby beige plastic. Why had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased everything in that? Anything digital, from that century, it was pretty much guaranteed to be that sad-ass institutional beige, unless they'd wanted it to look more dramatic, more cutting edge, in which case they'd opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was folded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript sort-of-tan. [...] She pointed at the beige hardware. 'How come this old shit is always that same color? His forehead creased. 'There are two theories. One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace. Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms. He smirked at Chevette. 'Yeah? What's two? 'That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible. Literally 'plain vanilla, you follow me?

<comment><USER5> I think that look was supposed to be cutting edge back then:

Google Image: "citroen karin" ( [https://www.google.ca/search?biw=1288&bih=633&tbm=isch&sa=1&...](https://www.google.ca/search?biw=1288&bih=633&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=citroen+karin&oq=citroen+karin&gs_l=psy- ab.3..0l4.72420.75208.0.75322.214.171.124.0.0.0.160.1145.7j4.11.0....0...1.1.64.psy- ab..2.11.1142...0i67k1.0.mbGyIrZvkFQ) ) or "sttng bridge" ( [https://www.google.ca/search?biw=1288&bih=633&tbm=isch&sa=1&...](https://www.google.ca/search?biw=1288&bih=633&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=sttng+bridge&oq=sttng+bridge&gs_l=psy- ab.3...31854.36657.0.36802.14.13.1.0.0.0.131.1278.9j4.13.0....0...1.1.64.psy- ab..0.8.800...0j0i67k1j0i30k1j0i10i24k1j0i24k1.0.5ZETk7Fy0lg) )

<comment><USER6> Ah, I see it now. I guess it sort of looks like a hi-tech golden ceramic material when it's presented right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you get a chance to go by a 'Vintage Computer Festival' (there are three that happen in the US and one in Europe that I know of) and you get a good look at machines pre-1981/1982 (intro of the IBM PC) and post, and then pre (2004/2005)(intro of the ITX form factor) and post. You can see that early PCs were trying to look like minicomputers, some with switches on the front, some just with a reset button, and then the PC era where everything looked pretty much like a PC in either a 'desktop' or a 'tower' case. And then the death of the PC and the start of the 'application' computer that started to look more like high end Hi-fi equipment rather than a computer.

<comment><USER8> A fair amount of the 8 bit home computers looked more like typewriters than anything else to me. The apple II, commodore VIC/64, Atari 400/800, etc.

<comment><USER7> Good point, or like computer "terminals" of the day screen and keyboard as opposed to platen and keyboard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Was the NeXT cube the first black PC? Here's a good look, for those of you who have never seen one: [http://www.johnmiranda.com/next.htm](http://www.johnmiranda.com/next.htm)

<comment><USER8> GRiD made black PC's before the NeXT. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Systems_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Systems_Corporation)

There was also the Amstrad CPC: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_CPC)

And the Sinclair ZX81: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81)

And the Memotech MTX: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX)

PDP-11's were mostly black, but I suppose that doesn't count as a "PC".

<comment><USER10> There was also the black apple ][ by Bell and Howell

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Something I have wondered, are tastes kinda cyclical? New cool things eventually fall out of favour and then have a resurgence decades or more later on (think skinny jeans from the 70s reappearing in last few years, semi-ironic appreciation of Journey and other 80s music and so on).

And if so does this will this style come back into fashion? When all the laptops or PC hardware are sleek black or brushed aluminium will a nicely executed beige finish look bold, different and interesting enough to take over again?

As an example, Sony have a retro-style PS4 which is similar (but grey and not beige) - compared to the normal black one it looks really nice to me

<comment><USER12> It is ultimately technology and legislation driven rather than 'fashion'.

If a new pigment comes out that enables pure white or black or silver or any other colour at a cheaper, better price then that sets the fashion. If that new pigment later turns out to be a fire hazard or toxic on some way then it goes, for some other colours to be used and therefore 'the new fashion'.

If you look at aluminium finishes, the smooth, polished look fell out of favour just around the time that a variant on the shotblasting process became cheaper. So aluminium became less shiny.

There are many other factors but a surprising amount of what dictates fashion is a new industrial process or chemical discovery.

</comment></comment><comment> amiga-workbench Sadly not matte black, piano black plastics on consumer electronics are revolting fingerprint magnets.

</comment><comment><USER13> What about avacado green? That's what color my appliances are in my cottage.

<comment><USER14> Not:

Harvest Gold?

Coppertone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I honestly think a beige computer would garner a cult following if released today. Lots of the younger generation are into surreal 90s throwbacks.

<comment> amiga-workbench Corsair had an april fools a few years back with a beige 900D case, the thing is a lot of people actually wanted it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Warning, big, bitter rant. Given the OP, it's long past time for this rant:

I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise black desktop PC cases. I prefer beige, white, bare metal, or nearly anything else.

I need to assemble a new desktop PC from parts, and if I have to get a black case, then I will paint it white or beige, remove the black paint and paint it beige or white, or some such. For the paint quality, I don't care: I'll put up with blobs of paint, runs, drips, a really bad paint job, maybe some dead insects stuck in the paint, etc., ANYTHING but black. I don't much care what the thing looks like, except I don't want black.

Black is about the worst possible color for a desktop PC case.

Why? Style, fashion, emotion? Nope. Instead, rock solid, crucial functionality, practicality, and utility.

For the needed equipment for my business, in particular, my first server for my startup, any effort to emphasize style, etc. and ignore utility, etc. is really offensive, infuriating, dysfunctional, outrageous.

Makers of black desktop PC cases, shut up, sit down, and listen up: Can I order a case totally unpainted? I'll pay extra for unpainted. Will pay still more for beige or white. For your black case, I HATE your product.

Why do I hate black PC cases? Simple. Dirt simple. Really simple: I have to build the PC and then maintain that PC. To do that I need to be able to SEE the parts. But with a black case, it's just super tough to see the parts. Being able to see the parts is just CRUCIAL. With a black PC, to work on it, commonly I will need 200-400 W of incandescent light, which heats up the work area and gets in the way of the work, just to SEE. Then commonly I bump into one of the lights and break the filament of the bulb. Bummer.

E.g., go to Web sites of companies that sell desktop PC cases and look at their pictures of their cases. Sure, for the black cases, about all you can see are big, black blobs with essentially all details hidden. Especially for the insides, when shopping, building, or maintaining, I need to see clearly.

Is any water torture severe enough punishment for the people painting desktop PC cases black?

Again, offer an option of a case with no paint at all. Or, for the best option, sure, return to a beige case.

And, one more, for the industrial designers that try to make the cases look like something from _Star Wars_ , with swoops, sweeps, other dramatic nonsense, to heck with it. Instead, the case is a mechanical tool. I no more want the emotional droppings of industrial designers on my desktop PC case -- any such is patronizing -- than I want them on my set of metric socket wrenches, a sledge hammer, a circle saw, etc. Keep the artistic industrial designers far away from the desktop PC case I need for my next computer, a server for my startup. Or just borrow case design themes from, say, Supermicro.

If I want art, then I'll select my own, thank you. For a PC case, I want just a tool, like a socket wrench, and not some wacko effort at style, fashion, or art.

For the bad art, I'll upchuck but put up with it. For black, I won't put up with it, will shop (I have, for hours) for beige and otherwise, if I have to accept black, will remove the paint, repaint it, or paint over it.

This is a rant, but long needed to be said, too long, and especially needed now given the OP.

One more: I don't want my keyboard black either. In year 2000, I ordered three beige keyboards from Gateway. At this point, one of the three still works well, and for that I've had to use epoxy to repair the broken bearing for the wire _stabilizer_ of the space bar. Why keep the old beige keyboards? Sure, easy: I want to be able to see the keys; I do know _touch typing_ but only for keys a-z ; for most of the rest, I have to look so want to be able to see.

/rant

<comment><USER17> Caselabs[1] offers cases in black, gunmetal and a special run of white. I have also seen special runs of unpainted cases available.

The Merlin line is currently available with a two-tone option with black, gunmetal or white exterior and black, gunmetal, white or red internals.

[1]: [http://www.caselabs-store.com/pc-cases/](http://www.caselabs- store.com/pc-cases/)

<comment><USER16> THANKS! I'll look. You did much better shopping than I did.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Image hosting for user uploads - <AUTHOR>

This may be a fairly elementary question, but I was wondering what the best/cheapest way to do storage for user uploaded images is without relying on another platform like flickr or facebook. I'm assuming its S3 but would love to hear if there are other solutions out there. <comment><USER2> I use Rackspace's cloud files: <http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/>

Similar product to S3.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have experience with S3 as well? Any advice on why you might choose one over the other?

<comment><USER2> I moved over from S3 primarily b/c I was movingn from EC3 to Rackspace Cloud Servers. The biggest headache I have now is you can't serve files over SSL on Rackspace Cloud and they don't support CNAME aliasing. But I hear those are both coming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> S3 + CloudFront (CDN). S3 is super easy to deal with programmatically and if you ever need to do batch operations from a GUI, there are "FTP" clients that can connect to S3. CloudFront is a nice bump up in performance for minimal increase in cost (if you're trying to do as low cost as possible reduced redundancy S3 is the cheapest option I've seen).

</comment><comment><USER4> App Engine's blobstore. I'm not sure about cost vis a vis S3, but I'm sure that info is around. It's very easy to use. I recently set up AE for file sharing (upload from app, user gets link to share) and it took me about 30 minutes of coding time.</comment>


Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool.... - <AUTHOR> http://www.freshtechapps.com/firefox-29-beta-arrives-with-easy-sync-tool-customization-mode-and-chrome-like-user-interface-australis/ Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool, customization mode and Chrome-like user interface Australis <comment><USER2> You can always use Aurora which is Firefox two versions ahead of release. So you would have had those features about a month ago.

I was for a long time hesitant thinking that it would be unstable, or cause compatibility issues with my favourite extensions... Nothing like that. At least in my experience. New sync worked completely flawlessly. I now use it on both Ubuntu[1] and Android[2] almost exclusively.

On Android it's faster than Chrome beta, perhaps partly due to AdBlock, and it has a nicer interface, especially closing tabs is much easier. It's not available from Google Play but it updates itself so you only need to download the .apk manually once (make sure you do it over ssl).

On desktop some changes brought by Australis are, let's say, not to my taste. Of course, there's already an addon to fix it[3]. You can keep whatever you like from the new UI, and revert whatever you don't. For example, I like the drawer but didn't like the inability to move back and forward buttons to the right of the url bar. They're back on the right[4]. Same goes for rounded corners of tabs, or any other control issue.

[1] [https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla- daily/+archive/firefox...](https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-mozilla- daily/+archive/firefox-aurora)

[2] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/aurora/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/mobile/aurora/)

[3] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/classicthemer...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/)

[4] [http://i.imgur.com/LE8UZHY.png](http://i.imgur.com/LE8UZHY.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> _In this new version, Mozilla presents a major user interface overhaul Australis that makes it easy to customize your browser._

The amount of doublespeak Mozilla has been putting out recently is astounding. Read the comments here for example (I don't know if they've changed anything since then, but I doubt it): [https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/11/australis- is-landing-in-...](https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/11/australis-is-landing- in-firefox-nightly/)

All they appear to be doing is chasing Chrome's design decisions.

<comment><USER4> I worry that desktop Firefox will go the way of the Android version or the neutered Firefox OS browser, where you cannot install the vital security add- on NoScript due to the incompatible add-on model that the mobile versions use. That used to work on Android, but no longer (and it seems the noscript dev is not a fan of the mobile platform). There are many more add-ons that only work on the desktop version. They should all be cross-platform and not desktop specific :(

<comment><USER5> The problem is that most existing extensions are based on XUL, which is terrible and impractical for good mobile UIs.

There is a more abstract addon API (used by restartless addons) and your favourite ones just need to be updated.

Also, NoScript is not a "vital security add-on".

<comment><USER3> > Also, NoScript is not a "vital security add-on".

The vast majority of exploits depend on JS being available, since (at the very least) it'll be used to unobfuscate/execute some attack code. Remember the Tor browser vulnerability that was exploited? That wouldn't have happened without JS.

(Coincidentally, I find it amusing that not too long after, that Firefox made it even harder to disable JS, by _removing the checkbox for global enable /disable_.)

<comment><USER5> That's almost like saying the vast majority of exploits depend on you using a Turing machine.

Breaking most websites for the sake of slightly reducing the attack surface doesn't seem worth it.

<comment><USER3> The definition of "most websites" varies between people; the majority of the Internet browsing I do (mostly reading content in the form of text or images) does not require JS. If I come across a site in a search that refuses to show content without JS (and Google's cache, text-only, doesn't give me what I want to see either), I'll just move on to the next search result.

It's far better for websites to break, than my machine. The tradeoff will be different for someone who regularly browses a different demographic of sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been patiently waiting for Firefox to fix their ugly UI, I look forward to finally ditching Chrome and returning to a browser made by a company whose primary concern isn't accumulating data on its users.

<comment><USER7> FXChrome solved the problem for me (chrome-like theme for firefox, its perfect). I am glad someone finally told them their last design iteration was horrendous. Honestly, who makes these decisions over there?

<comment><USER8> UX people and graphic designers, based on extensive user testing. Have you run any user tests lately? ;)

<comment><USER3> The majority of the users being tested are not power users. In fact the power users are probably the ones who don't like the idea of their browser phoning home to report their usage habits, and so disable those sorts of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Australis is such an improvement that I'm tempted to come back from Chrome. Everything feels very fluid and fast. I'd be curious to see the latest benchmarks on startup time, Javascript performance and such.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how long you have been a Chrome user, but Firefox has felt snappy and responsive for a few months now. Australis re-design shows that often speed is more a matter of impression than benchmark results.

<comment><USER9> I switched from Firefox to Chrome the week it came out. So maybe 5 years? I've kept Firefox installed for testing web development and such though.

You're absolutely right that perception of speed is largely about experience. The animations are smooth, it doesn't jump around. But I can tell that the boot times are much faster now as well.

Both teams have done an excellent job. Seeing this release has encouraged me to finally donate to Mozilla. They do a lot of good for the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "In addition, Firefox Sync is also upgraded so that all current users will need to create new account"

Seriously, NO! How to alienate your existing customers.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure that part of the article is correct. I've been using my old sync account in Nightly builds (now up to version 31) and it's still working fine.

Edit: I just checked with a clean install, and there's a button that says "Using an older version of sync?" It brings you to this page [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-update-to-the- ne...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-update-to-the-new-firefox- sync?redirectlocale=en-US&as=u&redirectslug=how-sync-works-old-version- firefox&utm_source=inproduct) which basically says "unlink all your devices and re-link them." So I guess adding new devices to your old account doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So now I need to give them my email address plus remember yet another password for sync? Do not want. I always thought the old model with the sync keys was pretty sweet. Is the synced data end-to-end encrypted? It better be!

<comment><USER14> You can run your own Firefox sync server, but it's a pain to implement.

[http://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run- sync.html](http://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html)

Once it's up and running, though, it's seamless.

Edit: Hmm. Looks like they're happy to break this:

" Some unknown proportion of the user base uses their own Sync servers ... [Asa] I don't think we should worry too much about this group. If we can identify them and message them that'd be sufficient for my concerns."

[https://services.etherpad.mozilla.org/sync- migration](https://services.etherpad.mozilla.org/sync-migration)

Well, thanks.

Here's a code-dump of the new Firefox Account server. Not sure yet if I can implement this:

[https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server](https://github.com/mozilla/fxa- auth-server)

<comment><USER15> That's not a very reassuring attitude. Hopefully the new Firefox Accounts authentication server will be easy enough to deploy and configure as an alternative to private Sync servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So.. can I disable australis somehow?

<comment><USER10> Have you at least tried it or are you simply change averse?

I have done the move a few weeks back, and I don't regret my decision. The toolbar and my add-ons located there still work very well, also the new menu gives a quick access to useful features.

<comment><USER17> I, for one, have tried it and it makes things I do frequently, more difficult: there's no longer available a bookmark button to open the bookmarks sidebar, there's no longer a menu item to show all bookmaks, when I bookmark something I click the bookmarks star twice in order to enter tags but the second click is only sometimes registered. For me, the previous theme worked much better than australis. I struggle to see the improvements in australis.

<comment><USER10> Opening the bookmarks toolbar takes indeed two clicks now (but you can use the keyboard shortcut CMD + B to open it instantly). Regarding your second point, the double click works great, and the bookmark details overlay appears.

<comment><USER17> I'm on Ubuntu, if that makes a difference about the double click on the bookmark star so perhaps it's a platform issue. But I was referring to the bookmarks sidebar not toolbar. How do you open the sidebar?

<comment><USER9> On Windows Ctrl+B opens the bookmark sidebar, and ctrl+shift+b opens the "library" popup with bookmarks selected.

<comment><USER17> My point is that there used to be a button that you could place in a toolbar and clicking the button would open the bookmarks sidebar. That button is now gone. I'm sure that in time I'll get used to the changes in australis but I think it would have been better if they would have been introduced gradually. As it was introduced, lots of things stopped working at once the way I was used to. For me, this is friction and it's not good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the linked markup, the difference between the bookmark star when the page is bookmarked (vs not bookmarked) is that the star is filled in grey rather than an outline.

I think this is a subtle design problem that doesn't easily show "bookmarked" vs "not bookmarked" state. I think users may have come to expect the typical yellow star when bookmarking a page. Usually if I want to bookmark a page I glance at the star to see if it's already bookmarked, and the outline vs. grey states don't make that clear.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's still some stuff before I can consider switching from Chrome, most are OS X specific-ish:

\- No swipe animation for going back/forward in history.

\- Doesn't have that native feel for "over-scrolling". You know when you try to scroll beyond the page and see that grey linen stuff.

\- No Keychain integration (yes I know there's an addon, but I would rather see this integrated).

\- Even though there's been plenty of improvements, the dev tools in Chrome feels more polished and feature complete.

</comment><comment><USER20> The real strength of Firefox vs Chrome is in FF's real (as in not android-"open-source") open source philosophy which makes forked projects like Palemoon possible (I personally prefer Palemoon at the moment due to more conservative release cycle and UI plus strong security focus)

<comment><USER8> I agree that the freedom to actually maintain viable forks like Palemoon is excellent.

On the other hand, I wish Palemoon didn't exist: It's a compatibility nightmare for anyone trying to build HTML5 apps or games using recent APIs. All his changes tend to cause mysterious memory usage/cpu usage issues or simply break things, and 'use a different browser' is not a great answer to have to give a customer.

I don't know how you could consider Palemoon security focused unless everyone using it is building it from source and they've carefully examined his changelists. At least with trunk Firefox you know the commits are exhaustively reviewed and tested (perhaps too exhaustively; some FF contributors find the extensive review process stifling).

EDIT: Removed complaint about Pale Moon builds not being reproducible; he used to have a big angry rant about how he wouldn't share his build settings with anyone, but he's apparently removed it. Nice move!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been using it for quite a while (as "Aurora"), and it is quite a significant improvement over regular stable Firefox builds.</comment>


Mechanical Skeeball machine built entirely with K'nex - <AUTHOR> http://www.instructables.com/id/Knex-Skeeball-Machine/

<comment><USER2> wow that is such a win. I wish I didn't give away all my k'nex to my cousins who don't even build anything with them.</comment>


Wells Fargo: There were nearly 70 percent more potentially fake accounts opened - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/31/wells-fargo-there-were-nearly-twice-as-many-potentially-fake-accounts-opened-than-originally-thought.html <comment><USER2> For years I watched our corporate owned "Financial Media" gush over Wells Fargo, to the point that I, a layman, wondered wtf was going on there.

Now we all know they were scamming customers but how is it that they kept touting them to the point where $billions were invested in these companies without any one of those "Financial Expert Journalists" having even so much as a clue?

One might guess they were shorting the stock, but of course those that might would be chastised for daring to.</comment>


Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality/ <comment><USER3> The difficulty with these semi-classical interpretations of quantum phenomena is that they tend to work nicely for a few very simple cases and fall to bits when things get more complex. Bohm's quantum potential works almost perfectly for single electron atoms, in which the quantum potential simply holds the electron still, but falls apart for multi-electron atoms, which require a higher dimensional space for the quantum potential to live.

Although Bell did defend pilot wave theory--which is taught in every introductory QM course and covered in every introductory QM text--he himself did not see it as anything more than an inspiration for a more complete interpretation, which would necessarily be non-local in accordance with the theorem that bears his name.

My own belief is that pilot waves cannot account for quantum statistics, and therefore cannot account for the heat capacity of solids: [http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=470](http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=470) There is a claim that pilot wave theory somehow deals with this, but the argument is focused on the decay of radioactive particles rather than thermodynamics, which seems to be odd, because the thermodynamic argument is the fundamental one: the heat capacity of solids is an unequivocal way of counting available states, and if hidden variables (such as the "true" positions and momenta of the piloted particles) exist then they break the symmetry under exchange that gives rise to the statistics we observe, and create additional states that would... hmmm...

OK, having thought about it for a bit I'm no longer _entirely_ convinced it's impossible that pilot waves might preserve the symmetry while also preserving identity. It would require that exchanging the labels on the pilot waves precisely compensate for the labels on the particles. Would that be enough? I'm going to have to think more about this before forming a more firmly held opinion on it.

<comment><USER4> > ...pilot wave theory--which is taught in every introductory QM course and > covered in every introductory QM text...

Having assisted in teaching intro QM courses, I can say this is very incorrect -- unless you replace "every" with "many" and "taught/covered" with "mentioned off hand".

I just pulled the very popular "introduction to quantum mechanics" by Griffiths off my shelf. It contains nothing about pilot waves except for a single footnote in an appendix used as an example of "a number of hidden variable theories [proposed over the years]".

<comment><USER3> OK, "every GOOD intro QM course" and "every GOOD intro QM text" :-)

I shall now walk away mumbling about the degenerate state of today's youth...

<comment><USER5> Griffiths happens to be the most accessible while-still-rigorous QM book I've read, so I'd be careful with the criticism ;) it is concise though, which is probably the main reason it doesn't really discuss pilot waves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that these oil droplet experiments are incredibly neat, but I'm surprised by the conclusions about the universe that people try to draw from them.

There are fascinating lab experiments related to black holes [1]. Researchers have figured out how to build things in the lab that obey some laws that are mathematically very similar to those that we think that black holes obey. These black hole analogues end up doing similar things to what we expect real black holes to do.

Nonetheless, no one seems to see those experiments and conclude that "Wow! Our universe must contain black holes that emit Hawking radiation!".

These oil droplet experiments do something quite similar. They create an environment that is reasonably well described by the same equations as pilot waves, and, since those equations are known to make the same predictions as quantum mechanics, the oil droplets do the things that we would imagine quantum particles to do.

This may be beautiful, but just as the existence of black hole analogues in the laboratory does not imply that black holes are real, the existence of pilot-wave-following oil droplets does not imply that pilot waves are better than quantum mechanics.

[1] [http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v10/n11/full/nphys3104.h...](http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v10/n11/full/nphys3104.html)

<comment><USER7> Pretty much everyone actually thinks black holes are real.

IANAP.

<comment><USER8> I think he was referring to Hawking radiation - which is far more controversial in physics circles and a major WTF idea for non-physicists - <USER2> other theoretical black-hole behavior, not existence of black holes themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The "smoking gun" quote:

"Yet an experimental test of droplet entanglement remains a distant goal."

And it will remain a distant goal forever. Per Bell's theorem, entanglement is inherently non-local. Bohmian pilot waves are also non-local, so they can reproduce all the results of QM, but no purely classical model can.

</comment><comment><USER10> Somehow, even though Collapse is insane if you think about it hard enough, and even though Pilot-waves are semi-classical and seem to be adding an additional complication that may not be necessary, both of these seem to be more popular among physicists than Many-Worlds. Somehow, even though superposition is observed and observable, even though the scale on which we can observe it is climbing steadily larger, people keep assuming that it either dissipates sometime before our scale, or that it's an illusion produced by some sort of semi-classical, overcomplicated reinterpretation.

The original idea—that the wave function is the whole deal—works just fine if you accept that _we_ can be in superposition too. If you simply accept that the _entire_ classical concept might be an illusion, and work up from the wave function, there's no reason to shoehorn in an idea like Collapse or Pilot- Wave.

Yes, Copenhagen is wrong. Yes, Collapse is patently absurd. Yes, assuming that there is exactly one, stochastic, probabilistic reality makes no sense. But that doesn't mean we need to add something complicated like an underlying superfluid that supports all of spacetime. This smells like Aether.

 _Why does no one talk about Many-Worlds?_

<comment><USER3> I agree with the comment regarding the Born Rule, which is indeed a deep objection.

A further objection is aimed ad the claim that "we can be in a superposition" and it is: "If we can be in a superposition, why aren't we aware of it?"

This is a general question that any interpretation of QM must answer, and none does, which comes down to: "Why is there a classical world at all?"

There is a sense in which every interpretation of QM is an attempt to answer this question, but none do.

Decoherence, for example, simply asserts that we cannot be aware of quantum effects except via interference phenomena. Why not? Why can't we be _directly conscious_ of the various incoherent components of the wavefunction in the same sense of _directly_ that I am _directly conscious_ of my cat sitting beside me? [1] I don't have to do any fancy interferometry or statistical inference to be aware of the cat, so why do I have to mess about with statistics and interferometry to be aware of the wavefunction, given I myself am described by one?

The fact that my multiple incoherent states do not interfere with each other is irrelevant unless you have some reason to believe that it is only via coherent interactions (interferecne patterns) that the wavefunction manifests itself to consciousness, and why would that be?

When I measure a gamma decay why am I aware of an event at a moment in time rather than a continuous probability wave? Likewise, why can't I be conscious of the wholistic universe that Many Worlds implies?

I've focused on consciousness here because there is no doubt we are directly aware of the classical world but are only indirectly aware of the quantum world, but there is very little reason to believe there is anything particularly special about consciousness in this regard. More likely, the brain, body, planet, etc, all "partake in" classical physics, none of which makes any sense from a quantum perspective.

That is: if all you knew about was quantum mechanics, you would never come up with Born's Rule or anything like it because you would never have any reason to talk about the results of classical measurement. You would not be aware than anything like classical measurement could exist.

So if we believe that QM is somehow foundational or fundamental to the classical world (and who doesn't?) then the fact that it gives no indication that the classical world even exists is something of a problem.

[1] To belabour the point: I do not mean "direct" in any Cartesian sense, but simply that there is a perfectly ordinary causal relationship between my cat and my awareness of my cat, which is quite different from my awareness of wavefunctions, which can only be via indirect means. We might have any number of additional senses, but all of them would be direct in this sense: none of them would allow me the immediate, simultaneous perception of a photon travelling through both slits at once. As Feynman said: this is the fundamental mystery.

<comment><USER11> > A further objection is aimed ad the claim that "we can be in a > superposition" and it is: "If we can be in a superposition, why aren't we > aware of it?"

Sounds rather like the fish being unaware of water. What would _not_ being in a superposition feel like?

> Decoherence, for example, simply asserts that we cannot be aware of quantum > effects except via interference phenomena. Why not? Why can't we be directly > conscious of the various incoherent components of the wavefunction in the > same sense of directly that I am directly conscious of my cat sitting beside > me? [1] I don't have to do any fancy interferometry or statistical inference > to be aware of the cat, so why do I have to mess about with statistics and > interferometry to be aware of the wavefunction, given I myself am described > by one?

So "you" is a quantum computer or something behaving like one, right? For you to "be aware of" a wavefunction, you'd have to causally interact with it. And that's very hard because of e.g. the no-cloning theorem; all you can do is entangle a qbit in your head with the qbit you're trying to measure, but what does that actually get you? What does that subjectively feel like? What operation would you expect to be able to perform that you can't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If this leads to an experimentally verifiable prediction different from the current view of quantum mechanics, it's a very big deal. Otherwise, it's not.

</comment><comment><USER13> Pilot wave resonance/nonresonance from the two receivers of a Bell's inequality experiment may affect the behavior at the source leading to a kind of Monty Hall problem observed as QM. Are we certainly capable of firing a singular entangled photon on command at the press of a button regardless of the orientation of the receivers, or does the firing ability of the source emitter seem to falter with orthogonality at the end receivers?

Of course this could be complicated by a mechanism at the source that ensures a single pair to be emitted. Imagine a mechanism that ensures that only one pair is produced, but it is produced eventually, like a for-loop with a break statement. And maybe the only way to conduct the Bell's Inequality experiment meaningfully is with such a throttling mechanism, which would mask the answer to the question above. Though there might be hints in the amount of time required to generate that singular pair, as if the for-loop had to run more iterations before it was produced, detected only with sensitive timing instruments like with side-channel timing attacks in cryptographic black boxes.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would characterize these fluid dynamics experiments as "very cute", but nothing more.

One of the sad things about physics these days is that it has become more like religion in a bad way. I first heard about Bohmenian mechanics, which this article is about, 8 years ago. I never believed in it, and always thought it was silly. I say "believe" because at this point it really is a question of faith.

It was amusing to me to read this article, it makes all the same points I used to argue against but in a very clever and well written way. What the Bohmeanian mechanics people used to say was the only reason they couldn't respond to this or that problem with the theory was "not enough people were working on it".

From the article:

"Some researchers said that [Bohmean Mechanics] has trouble dealing with identical particles, and that it becomes unwieldy when describing multiparticle interactions. They also claimed that it combines less elegantly with special relativity. But other specialists in quantum mechanics disagreed or _said the approach is simply under-researched._ "

<comment><USER15> Every time I hear people say that physics has become has become a religion I want to stab myself. Every day, I sit at Peyton Hall at Princeton and discussions at the IAS where people are consistently debated. There is nothing dogmatic. If you are wrong, you will get corrected. See BICEP2.

<comment><USER16> "Bohmian mechanics has never been widely accepted in the mainstream of the physics community. Since it is not part of the standard physics curriculum, many physicists—probably the majority—are simply unfamiliar with the theory and how it works. _Sometimes the theory is rejected without explicit discussion of reasons for rejection. One also finds objections that are based on simple misunderstandings;_ among these are claims that some no-go theorem, such as von Neumann's theorem, the Kochen-Specker theorem, or Bell's theorem, shows that the theory cannot work. Such objections will not be dealt with here, as the reply to them will be obvious to those who understand the theory. In what follows only objections that are not based on elementary misunderstandings will be discussed."

[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm- bohm/#o](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/#o)

It's true that Bohmian mechanics has never been extended to a full QFT. But considering how little time has been spent on it, isn't it possible this is a result of observed bias against it, and not because it's fundamentally intractable?

For comparison, other theories that have ended up in more intractable places (such as string theory) seem to be considered mainstream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any sufficiently complex system that has a sufficiently large number of known/unknown parameters whose interactions are unknown/partially known/not measurable appears random.

For example, while the path of a piece of paper as it drops to the ground can be modeled exactly based on several parameters such as gravity, air currents (and its parameters), etc. the number of parameters are so large and their interactions so complex, that the only useful approach is to model it statistically. The same goes for the weather. Or the economy. Or the stock market.

It appears that the current quantum mechanical view of the world is simply an acknowledgement of this complexity and the associated unknowns. While it presents a statistical "model" that works for our purposes, it must be acknowledged as a model and not confused with reality. The push for figuring out what drives the statistics needs to continue beyond the building of a model.

<comment><USER18> I noticed a few of the quotes in the article from physicists who, while not outright dismissive, couldn't be bothered about pursuing something that could lead to a more fundamental understanding of reality.

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately this was written by a science reporter, and so, it was written with an angle by someone who doesn't know what he is talking about. Their dismissiveness is well justified.

I was a big fan of exploring the alternative ideas in quantum mechanics, and I tried to like Bohmian pilot waves. They are very philosophically appealing. Then I saw some results in quantum optics which pretty much convinced me it was a silly idea. Walther's ideas on Surrealistic Bohm trajectories should have been enough. I'd be curious if these oil droplets exhibit the surrealistic trajectory behavior. It would be neat if they did, but I doubt it.

While the fluid mechanical experiments are pretty damn neat, the modern revival of Bohmian mechanics is a symptom of the disease that afflicts today's physics community: there are many people who call themselves physicists who insist on working on things which have no physical consequences. If you can't do an experiment, you're a philosopher, armed with math. People who claim they might be able to make an experiment in 20-40 years (after they have tenure and have retired) are arguably worse: yes, I am looking at you, entire field of quantum information snake oil salesman: build something or shut up. All this is a sign of decadence and decay, and it is extremely sad to see so many clever people being so stupid.

FWIIW, I was exposed to Bohm mechanics in my junior year QM course; it's not like nobody has heard of it. It is actually quite ubiquitous in certain kinds of gutter popular literature; the kinds of popular QM books people who believe in psychic powers read. I've met strippers in gothic nightclubs who knew who David Bohm is. As in, more than one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Although I read the article, I really don't understand much the theories and technicality of it. What has fascinated me for a while is the slit experiment. What I tie this to is the Law of Attraction. Say that the subconsciousness is the connection from ourselves to the universe (via meditation for example), what if this is the way for us, through our thoughts, to "observe" what is going to happen (in other words, what we want to happen) and therefore the universe "brings" it to us simply because we observed it? Thanks to having some sort of logic I can believe in, I use the law of attraction and it has proven to always bring me what I want in life so far :)

<comment><USER21> It's vastly more plausible that your brain is good at seeing patterns where none exist than that you have psychic powers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here are Yves Couder's 2011 slides with more details, graphs, photos, and references. [1]

I have a general question for those who are expert in physics, or who have a hobbyist interest: have you read Louis de Broglie's "Ondes et mouvement" (1926)? it's only 133 pages in the original French edition. Or his 1924 PhD thesis? [2]

[1] [http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~colloq/Talk2011_Couder/Coude...](http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~colloq/Talk2011_Couder/Couder.pdf)

[2] [https://tel.archives- ouvertes.fr/tel-00006807/document](https://tel.archives- ouvertes.fr/tel-00006807/document)

</comment><comment><USER23> here's there original research: [http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108...](http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.264503)

an article about this gets published about once a year. here's the first one i encountered: [http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/jul/09/bouncin...](http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/jul/09/bouncing- droplets-simulate-zeeman-effect)

</comment><comment><USER24> Title is confusing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Quantum Mechanics _is_ the interpretation of the very small, so the title is essentially 'Have we been interpreting the interpretation wrong this whole time?'

<comment><USER21> Quantum mechanics in this sense refers to the (very well researched and understood) mathematical theory. This theory permits multiple philosophical explanations of what is 'really happening' to give the mathematical results that we confirm to be correct in experiments.

Any debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics refers to to this question of what really happens, not to any details of what QM actually predicts will happen. That is, until/unless experiments are devised to separate these philosophical explanations, but nothing much has happened on this front for decades.

<comment><USER24> Great explanation. Thanks for clearing that up so succinctly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am not a quantum physicist, can anyone explain what implications (if any) a deterministic model of quantum mechanics would have on the potential of quantum computing?

<comment> one-more-minute I think the idea of this interpretation is specifically _not_ to have any implications outside of what we already know. They should be equivalent in the sense that you can derive one from the other.

It's like making Newtonian mechanical predictions based on F=ma vs. energy arguments, or analysing computation using a Turing machine vs. lambda calculus. The theory can't fundamentally change but you can use a different conceptual framework to get the same results (and some may be much easier to work with / more intuitive than others).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think the whole problem of interpreting quantum mechanics and classical physics is that from what we can see it's counter intuitive and anti-narrative i.e. it cannot be expressed philosophically/via language in any meaningful way.

Mathematically it makes sense, experimentally it makes sense, it is as proven as classical physics are proven yet the two contradict each other.

Perhaps it is as the old zen-buddhist saying go. Wisdom lies in paradox.

</comment><comment><USER27> No. Yes.

<comment><USER28> I would say:

P = 1/Sqrt[2] (Yes + No).

<comment><USER9> |YES>|NO></comment></comment></comment>


LegalSifter: Find out if your client sent you a fair contract - <AUTHOR> https://legalsifter.com/

<comment><USER2> Why do I have to provide a contact to start with? I'm not a lawyer, give me a starter contract to work with and help me tweak it from there.</comment>


Google's diversity numbers haven't budged, and it just lost its diversity chief - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3066914/innovation-agents/google-is-struggling-to-hack-techs-diversity-problem <comment><USER2> I understand the tendency to conclude 'that is great, but are they qualified b/c that is what matters' logic. It's something you (especially if you were educated in America, like me) have to consciously unlearn.

For those that want the science and math behind diverse teams (as I've given this talk numerous times), there are bunch of links on the last slide of my deck: [http://slides.com/fmitchell/how- math#/10](http://slides.com/fmitchell/how-math#/10)

If you want to see the actual talk I gave at O'Reilly, it's here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HS9wjgfQY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HS9wjgfQY)

<comment><USER3> Hi, I tried to read the two scientific articles present in that list of sources (the rest is opinion pieces and discussion related to the articles); unfortunately, the link to the first one (the study) is broken (as well as some of the others).

As for the second article, please correct me if I am wrong, but from skimming it I believe that first of all, it speaks of diversity in knowledge and problem solving approaches, rather than race, gender, age and other identifying features. In fact it remarks the following:

"The claim that perspectives and heuristics may be influenced by race, geography, gender, or age has much to recommend it, as does the claim that perspectives and tools are shaped by experiences, training, and preferences. However, even when applying our result to those cases when identity diversity has been shown to correlate with functional diversity, we need to be acutely aware that identity-diverse groups often have more conflict, more problems with communication, and less mutual respect and trust among members"

The other problem I see is that this model (from what I gathered) translates into software development terms as something like: 10 top C# developers are not necessarily better at writing a C# backend than, say a group of, 5 very good C# developers, 2 top C developers, 1 very good Python developer and 2 top Haskell developers. Rather than mix and matching experienced and junior devs because the juniors are more "diverse" in one aspect; as is encouraged and practiced by diversity evangelists.

This makes me further cement my position about the diversity question, and that is to just let people find their vocation on their own; the Internet has solved information access, we live in mostly free societies and we can learn on our own. Introduce people to CS? Absolutely. Artificially incentivize career choice by changing hiring practices? Bad idea.

<comment><USER2> I didn't realize the links had expired.

Here is a page linked to the research and modeling I ascribe in my talk: [http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/research-2/diversity-r...](http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/research-2/diversity- research/)

Specifically:

[http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/wp- content/uploads/sit...](http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/wp- content/uploads/sites/344/2015/11/jet.pdf)

[http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/wp- content/uploads/sit...](http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/wp- content/uploads/sites/344/2015/11/pnas.pdf)

[http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/wp- content/uploads/sit...](http://sites.lsa.umich.edu/scottepage/wp- content/uploads/sites/344/2015/11/signals.pdf)

> it speaks of diversity in knowledge and problem solving approaches, rather > than race, gender, age and other identifying features

The key piece is how you connect that statement to your next statement of what defines 'top' and 'very good'. Your heuristic is coding output. Code and programming has context. In most cases, it's a business context.

The point is value can be derived from experiences uniquely tied to race and gender, especially given how we're taught race and gender. It often doesn't coincide with reality.

That intrinsic value, of lived experience, shapes thought. It shapes how people approach problems. That value has to be tapped. Those evaluating talent (and its potential) often cannot 'see' why it should be a factor.

This is a limitation of the evaluators' local optima (referenced in the research).

<comment><USER4> "The point is value can be derived from experiences uniquely tied to race and gender, especially given how we're taught race and gender. It often doesn't coincide with reality."

I can barely understand what you are saying (what does "coincide with reality" mean? What use is it for a company if it doesn't coincide with reality?), but perhaps you could clarify it with a couple of examples?

Also, isn't that argument a bit treacherous in that it implies that "diverse" people are different after all, meaning if they don't get ahead in some environments it might actually be because of their different ways of thinking, and not because of bias they face?

Edit: I was asked once in a tech interview to prove the theorem of Pythagoras. Yesterday I was in a museum for kids that also featured that theorem, so I feel inspired to use this classical problem:

Could you provide an example on how a woman, a woman of color, a white man, a black man, a latino, a gay person (or any other "diverse" person you can think of) would prove that theorem in different ways, unique to their race and gender?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe they realized that diversity is not the most important thing in the world. Also all these diversity officers make me cringe.

</comment><comment><USER6> To be clear: Google does not have a 'diversity problem'.

They are very diverse, and minorities are well represented as a block.

What they have is a 'not enough Blacks and Latinos' problem.

And - 'not enough Females in management positions' problem, possibly.

The underlying issue which some fail to address is the fact that if you only have 15% of tech grads female, and 0.1% African American - it's really difficult to have '50% female coders' or '10% African American coders'. Actually, I'd argue it's impossible.

A really interesting survey I read saw that Males in the Valley tend to think that the 'talent pool' is the issue (i.e. as I stated above), but Females tend to think the big issue is a 'lack of role models'.

Maybe I'm biased being a guy, but I do think that it's primarily the talent pool issue, but I do concede that 'lack of role models' is probably a concern.

I think that this is a concern, but a soft one, and that if a company like Google - which is very open minded and progressive struggles with it, well, it's a tough one to crack. As long as they are trying to make inroads there, then that's good.

I don't think that we should hold them to any specific standard or shame them.

</comment><comment><USER7> The employment anti-discrimination laws was originally designed for manual labor and similar jobs. I suggest a compromise limiting the kinds of jobs these laws apply to.

<comment><USER8> > The employment anti-discrimination laws was originally designed for manual > labor and similar jobs.

No, they weren't. They were designed for all jobs, which weren't just manual labor then.

Obviously, lots of the jobs people in groups which had been systematically discriminated against in work, education, and every place else for centuries were working in or trying to get work in were at or near the bottom of the prestige and pay heirarchy, and thus manual labor, so certainly a lot of the early application was there. But nothing about the motivation or design of the laws was limited to that domain.

<comment><USER7> Another example is the kinds of statistics that are often used, which tends to assume large amount of workers being hired for things like manual labor jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are there any papers on what are the effects of diversity to a culture of programmers? I'd love to once see a scientific approach rather than the political one.

<comment><USER10> > I'd love to once see a scientific approach rather than the political one

You're asking a lot from soft science, especially where said effects would be really hard to measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a very qualified blk cod3r that just got turned down for a job at fb. I thought the interview went well, but I guess the interviewer didn't share that sentiment. Either way, I'm not mad...so just wanna preempt any attempt to suggest that we're not being held to the same standards as everybody else...

<comment><USER11> btw, got one lined up at the big G. Wish me luck! :)

<comment><USER12> good luck. i hope you get the job.

<comment><USER12> i've received my fair share of down votes in the past and i've learned a bit about the kinds of statements people disagree strongly with or find inappropriate.

but now it looks like someone down voted my expression of good luck to a job seeker!

interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Diversify Chief" makes me cringe a bit. Makes me think of the modern-day version of the "Political Commissar" \- there to make sure that you're always towing the Party Line.

Not that I'm against diversity or anything, I just don't like how it's enforced as a goal unto itself.

<comment><USER14> You'll be horrified to learn that many businesses also have "compliance officers". Because that sure sounds like an evil plan to enforce newspeak – if you manage to achieve a certain level of ignorance.

It's also terrible (, terrible) how many companies are wasting money on "Quality Assurance", "Accounting", or "groundskeeping" when a business should actually be profit-driven.

If only we could get out from under the yoke of political correctness. We'd give every employee the title of "profit maker".

<comment><USER13> "Quality Assurance" and "Accounting" are directly tied to delivery a quality product or managing money and thus vital to a business. "Compliance officers" make sure you're not violating laws/trade agreements/what-have-you.

"Diversity" is neither. It's nice to have it, sure, but it cannot be a goal unto itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of talk is about hiring practices (like blind assessments), or retention. But that ignores a question that should be easy to answer: are there a significant number of qualified "diverse" applicants that could be hired with the right approach?

I seriously doubt any qualified developer would have troubles landing a job, regardless of race. Therefore I think the talk about hiring practices and cultural exclusion are misguided. Looking at the pipeline might be more promising, but it seems even Google can not turn the lives of millions of people around single-handedly.

<comment><USER14> The laws don't only apply to hiring (although I believe that, yes, there's still discrimination going on at the margins). They also apply to salaries, promotions, workplace policies etc.

<comment><USER4> I didn't mention any laws. That said, I think the general assumption that racism must be the reason for unequal outcomes might not be based on reality in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Apple seems to have pretty decent numbers compared to the rest of the field. Any insight into how they accomplished that?

<comment><USER6> Apple also has a massive retail staff and retail organization, and especially the former group makes it considerably easier to show 'numbers' that are more 'diverse'.

As far as their high-tech and HQ staff, I don't see any reason to believe that they are materially different from Google or Facebook.

<comment><USER14> The sector-by-sector statistics are at [https://www.apple.com/diversity/](https://www.apple.com/diversity/) – scroll down or search for "Data from the last three years"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be nice to see the diversity reports[1] actually count enrolled tribal members in the US. California has the second highest count by state in the US.

1) article mentions [https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San- Fran...](https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Francisco- Bay-Area-CA)

[edit: downvoted in a diversity thread for asking for more diversity]

</comment><comment><USER17> You may look at the percentages of each ethnic groups studying cs or even STEM before pointing fingers to enterprises. There is no discrimination on choosing majors. And college kids don't go to classes anyway, no matter how racist your professors can be.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think there is a lot of goodwill and good intentions behind this issue, but I suspect that our understanding of it is missing something (I don't know what). And it's pretty obvious that whatever we're trying to do as an industry isn't working. I expect this state of affairs (industry wanting to do better but not improving much) to continue until something about this changes materially.

</comment><comment><USER12> Most of the tech giants are right in the middle of California. California has almost a 50% Latino population, but tech giants have less than a 15% Latino employee base.

I'm always amazed that California's progressive political leadership isn't constantly hammering these companies to make their workforce look more like the California population.

I wonder what would happen if Jerry Brown and Kevin De Leon pulled a Trump on Google, Apple, Facebook and Uber.

"Hire California Latino workers or we will tax your ass out of existence!!!"

Instead, they turn a blind eye.

<comment><USER8> > I wonder what would happen if Jerry Brown and Kevin De Leon pulled a Trump > on Google, Apple, Facebook and Uber.

Then the California Republican party would be competitive statewide again overnight, and/or a lot of tech companies would move out of California, employing even fewer California Latinos than they do now. Possibly both.

<comment><USER12> Just to follow up, if I may:

1\. How would your first possible scenario play out in the voter's mind? What considerations would cause a large number of formerly Democratic voters, and/or current non-voters, to say, "I'd rather vote for a Republican now."

e.g. Do a lot of voters feel so strongly that Google, Apple, Facebook and Uber should remain unencumbered by such goals that it would overcome all their other deeply held objections to Republicans?

Would it just be a deep revulsion to such a Trumpian _method_ applied to large California companies?

I mean what do you see as the thing large numbers of voters would really dislike about such a political move?

2\. Alternatively, if a lot of tech companies voluntarily began moving out of California for this reason, how would they spin it? Surely they would _not_ say, "We're leaving California because we don't want to hire Latinos".

How would they explain such a decision to investors, customers, the general public?

Thank you, kindly.</comment></comment></comment>


Just how fast is too fast when it comes to web requests? - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/11/12/post/ <comment><USER2> There _is_ such a thing as too fast. Flight ticket comparison websites like skyscanner.com insert fake progress delays ("scanning airline website") to make it seem like they're spending a lot of effort to do important work for you. Research has shown that, without that delay, users trust such websites less, or value them less, because the instantaneous response time is equated to less valuable work.

<comment><USER3> I hear this every time TurboTax gets brought up. I think it's a lot healthier to foster good relationships between users and tech so that they don't have to distrust instantaneous actions.

As an aside, I'm also suspicious of research that shows ~100ms as the threshold for "instantaneous" action, because in video games like FPS shooters most players seem to dislike playing on ping that high.

<comment><USER4> I have the same view. 100ms is fine for actions that _require_ round trip to the server, in particular when you hide the latency the way multiplayer games do. But for things that are just local UI operations, if you're taking longer than 16.7 ms, you're doing something wrong. A typical videogame can update the whole screen _and_ all game logic in less than that.

<comment><USER5> Please pass this memo on to people who feel the need to animate UI elements to hide laggyness, and then animate into and out of a loading screen (eg. Loading an app on Android).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hacker News itself is a good example of a related topic: voting here _feels_ fast because the vote button disappears as soon as you click it, but it's actually very slow.

If you open your browser's Network panel in dev tools and vote on something, you'll see that it sends a request, gets back a 302 redirect, and then does another request to load a whole new copy of the page you were voting from in the background (and then just discards it). At least from my location, it consistently takes about 1.2 seconds for each vote to finish, even though it feels instant while using the site.

One consequence of this is that if you vote on multiple comments quickly, some of your votes are probably being lost with no indication. If you try to vote on something else before the first vote has fully finished, the second one gets a 503 error, but there's no indication of this at all.

It happens to me often - I read a good reply comment, vote it up, and then immediately vote up its parent (which I've already read) as well, since it resulted in that good comment. If I come back to the page later I'll notice that my vote on the parent didn't go through, and if you open the Network panel and try this, you'll see it - the second vote 503s if your second click was before the first one finished, but the site acts the same whether it failed or not.

<comment><USER4> That's a good observation. I've noticed it happening too, since I have a similar upvoting pattern: I tend to read a whole subtree, and then go back up, rapidly upvoting comments in it I considered insightful. I've noticed that the votes sometimes don't register, which is why I periodically reload the comment thread and reupvote comments.

'dang, is there any chance this gets improved?

<comment><USER6> I tried emailing him about it a couple months ago, after I made this comment about a different downside of it (bandwidth usage / response size): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20854662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20854662)

He didn't consider it an issue worth fixing, and didn't reply to my long follow-up email trying to explain how wasteful and inefficient the current voting process is and how simple it would be to improve. It seems unlikely to change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is how I felt about Algolia's search when I first enabled it for our Vuepress site at [https://developers.kloudless.com/guides/enterprise/](https://developers.kloudless.com/guides/enterprise/) (the search bar at the very top). I assumed it had loaded some kind of index in memory via JavaScript since the XHR requests take < 30 ms (!) from my location in San Francisco, which is pretty much instant. That's faster than the delay between my keystrokes.

<comment><USER8> Returns in the same speed from Scotland (Glasgow) too. One request was as low as 16ms. Impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a comment system for articles once that was super-duper fast.

The result was that it turned into a chat, so we had to add a "fake delay" for people to treat is as a serious comment system.

<comment><USER10> That's hilarious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's a classic from NNG on 'UX time scales': [https://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-of-10-time-scales- in...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/powers-of-10-time-scales-in-ux/)

You can infer from there that anything around/under 100ms will feel like direct manipulatio, interpreted by the person in the post as 'no request was sent to the server'. The same interpretation might not result from a non- technical person, it will just feel 'different' or they won't notice what happened and submit it multiple times, if there is no success message.

You can also trace it back to one of their 10 heuristics: visibility of system status. If users cannot perceive a change because it happened too fast, the UI has failed and users don't know what happened. One of the reasons some websites add artificial delays, as mentioned in other comments, is not only to signify 'work' being done, but that flashing a spinner for a split second is also a bad experience. You're better off normalizing every action to take at- least-one-second, and ensuring the state of the system is always clear.

</comment><comment><USER12> The server hosting this website doesn't support TLS 1.3 - if it did then you'd have 0 round trip time (0-RTT) session resumption and it would be nearly identical to the http latency.

<comment><USER13> Do servers automatically support 0-RTT? I thought generally you have to explicitly enable 0-RTT because it's vulnerable to replay attacks. Generally you would only enable it for idempotent requests, and feedback is not idempotent (unless the database explicitly rejects duplicate feedback).

<comment><USER14> 0-RTT is dangerous for POST requests (or any requests that modify data) unless an idempotency token is present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been on the implementation side of this kind of thing more times than I'm proud of.

Hardcoded delays are especially prevalent in systems which attempt to emulate a human operator, such as virtual assistants which are starting to replace human live chat agents. The excuse is always UX related. Progressive disclosure is cited a /lot/. Apparently users get a better experience when systems pretend to be human and respond slowly, so we would hardcode delays which were a function of the length of the response message.

</comment><comment><USER16> No such thing as too fast. If a user is confused about the interaction because of how fast it is, then that's a UX problem to fix.

Speed is one of the most important properties of exceptional user experiences.

I'm building a developer tool and I'm ruthlessly optimizing for speed. Waiting 20ms for a CLI command versus 100-300 is a huge difference.

<comment><USER17> > If a user is confused about the interaction because of how fast it is, then > that's a UX problem to fix

In some cases the confusion comes from a "did this do any work at all" question. like git branching compared to svn for big projects. As other have brought up, instantaneous reply in airline comparison sites can cause concern of how deep the search was.

A similar paradox is with psychiatrist hourly rates or the placebo effect. The high price (delay) is part of the therapy (interface).

<comment><USER4> Having your program sit in the chair and twiddle its thumbs to make it seem like it's working is just one possible solution. It's tragedy-of-the-commons- esque, because it perpetuates the myth that a given category of work has to be slow.

Alternatives would include: results speaking for themselves, or saying something like "Searched all 124,568,902 connections", or otherwise reaffirming users the work has been done without making _them_ pay for it with time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You need to tell the user that the message has been sent. If nothing happens when you press the button (just an ajax call, no refresh) the user will think there is something wrong.

The reverse can be used in an UI to tell the user that something went wrong, for example in a window pull-down menu, don't hide the menu right away, do what the user request, then hide the menu, so if it the request didn't complete, the menu will still be visible.

<comment><USER19> Hi, the web page in question has always had something to say what's going on. It's not beautiful but it does tell you that things are happening.

Right before it kicks off the call to the server, it lights up something to say "Submitting feedback", and as soon as it finishes, it flips that to "Feedback saved" (which now has a time attached).

Odds are, most people have never actually noticed the first message, since it is quickly replaced with the second.

The messages appear just to the left of the button which was just clicked (and right under the text field). So, in theory, it's right by where your eyes are looking anyway.

But, here we are.

<comment><USER18> Aha. You are on to something then. Your setup is old school. Maybe the advance in network and computer speed has made it too fast :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In a hobby desktop app, I show a splash screen before the UI is fully loaded. After optimizing startup time, it's now at a point where a hot start is very fast, less than 300 ms, to the point that you can't really read anything on the splash screen. Cold start still takes a second or so.

Is there a best practice here? At which point do you stop showing a splash screen? I've seen applications where the splash screen lingers even after the UI is loaded, which seems weird to me and gets in the way of getting things done.

<comment><USER21> Probably a skeleton screen would be better. Show an empty version of the usual ui but with blocky placeholders as stuff loads in.

[https://uxdesign.cc/what-you-should-know-about-skeleton- scre...](https://uxdesign.cc/what-you-should-know-about-skeleton- screens-a820c45a571a)

<comment><USER20> Thank you very much for introducing me to this concept! This gives me some ideas on how to organize the loading. There is definitely stuff I do in the background of the splash screen that could be done later, after a simplified version of the main window is loaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I remember attending a talk about speeding up web UIs once and it got to Q&A time.

I'd read some article about how if you respond too quickly, users can begin to doubt that any work is really being performed, and I've experienced that feeling a handful of times over the years myself.

Anyway, I asked the speaker that and everyone just kind of laughed, which it does seem a little absurd on the face of it.

I guess it's also pretty far from most peoples minds given the web is caked in unnecessary bloat a lot of the time :)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's not that people are used to slow stuff, even if they are. It's that there is a psychological "magic number" whereby something is short enough to seem instant.

There's different values and tons of articles about this so I'll just link a random one. I don't know if there are formal studies on it but I fully believe in the idea that there is a magic "instantaneous" feeling threshold, just from personal experience, especially with tweaking animation delays.

[https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response- times-3-important-...](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/response- times-3-important-limits/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I've run into this before too. Sometimes I've actually added a delay timer to buttons that show loading spinners so that the spinner appears long enough for the user to see more than a flash. Is there a better option?

<comment><USER25> Another common option is a "toast notification" (see android) or other separate confirmation message to acknowledge your action.

"Sent X" or "Finished Y!" is sufficient to distinguish a failed ajax call from a successful button press

<comment><USER26> Yes but be very careful with those. You don't want to spam the user.

I remember some years ago when Ubuntu file sync would pop a notification every time a file was synced. That's a good example of what not to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I feel like it's an issue we will never have on the project I'm currently working on, all requests have a noticeable delay. I guess there's too many layers on the back-end. And maybe some requests are totally not optimised (like doing 20 select 1 elt instead of select 20 elts). And maybe there's no enough caching. Or maybe the thing we're caching are not those that matter… But first we still have to migrate off Internet Explorer (or at least support another browser).

</comment><comment><USER28> > It's a link in the SF Bay Area, and the server is in Texas, so it has to get > out there and back. That's at least 50 milliseconds right there when > measured by a boring old ping.

Am I the only one surprised by this 50ms ping? I can reach cloud servers in the SF Bay Area from Paris in 50ms - and I'm on wifi. Surely SFO-TX should take much less time..?

<comment><USER13> According to this it takes 42ms to get from Paris to SF at the speed of light in a fiber in the great circle path across Earth's surface. Ping is rtt, so that would be 84ms.

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=paris+to+san+francisco...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=paris+to+san+francisco+speed+of+light)

On the topic of websites taking a long time to compute something, Wolfram Alpha is slow. I wonder if any of that slowness is artificial like flight price websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's like if I go to the restaurant and order a steak and you bring it out right away. I'm going to be suspicious.

<comment><USER30> Good point.

"Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than on any place on the face of the earth?"

It's simply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely in 2019: a webpage is fast, or a webpage has a JavaScript bug?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nice pointer about NTP steps and time-smearing, can anyone recommend a good website for dealing with these issues?

I may not be working on real-time systems at the moment, but I've had enough exposure to them in the past that I'd like to scratch that itch.

<comment><USER11> While it's a good idea to use performance.now() for it's better precision* and monotonic guarantee, it's not really a huge concern for this kind of application (measuring time between A and B on the client). You're extremely unlikely to experience clock skew during those brief windows, and the entire web relied on Date.now for performance monitoring for decades.

For dealing with timestamps reliably on the client, we'll just instantiate all dates based on server time instead.

* at least in FF it has been rolled back to 1ms resolution due to privacy/fingerprinting concerns

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> To the last comment within the article: yes, we're accustomed to laggy websites. Most sites have tons of chatter/bloat/trackers. Refreshing to encounter those that don't. Thankfully HN is fairly low-bloat itself.

</comment><comment><USER33> Apache, CGI and a C++ handler is refreshingly old fashioned.

</comment><comment><USER34> Whoever wrote that feedback is probably an engineer at reddit.

"I didn't get any 503 codes forcing me to click send a few times, this comment obviously didn't get through"</comment>


Ask HN: podcast recommendations about startups, tech, science, etc. - <AUTHOR>

I love podcasts but good ones are hard to find. Given that this is a pretty brainy community I'm curious about what podcasts you folks listen to. Topocs of interest include startups, tech, science, space, etc. <comment><USER2> The thread from 2 years ago is still relevant [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565140). I find that the podcast landscape has not changed since then.

I also like the a16z podcast. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z/id842818711?mt=2](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z/id842818711?mt=2)</comment>