Matt Blaze Recounts Teenaged Harassment By John Draper - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/mattblaze/status/931675797479444480 <comment><AUTHOR> John Draper is "Captain Crunch".

Context: Kevin Collier's Buzzfeed piece about conferences banning Draper due to his habit of persuading young (teenaged) attendees to participate in private "exercises" that are clearly tantamount to sexual molestation:

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/hacker-hero-is-said- to...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/hacker-hero-is-said-to-have-used- cyber-conferences-to?utm_term=.akj7LAGaw#.iprXq5mk7)

<comment><AUTHOR> PS:

A lot of people from my "generation" of hacker-scene hackers are commenting on Facebook about how they warned people back then what Draper was about. Which, they did. But mostly, Draper's proclivities were a joke to us.

I don't blame us too much. We were 18-19 years old and it was the mid-late 1990s.

But I'd sort of want to remind, um, us? that there are a bunch of other people with comparable reputations. I don't think they're my stories to tell (or, in my case, I guess my rumors to spread). But there are a lot of missing stairs in this field, not just that one.

<comment><USER2> The stories I'm sure some of us could tell. Between Draper, the raves, all of the Cons (pumpcon, summercon, defcon in the early 90s). I'm sure some folks could go to jail and not for wire fraud or computer crime either. But as you noted, they aren't my stories to tell either. I'm sure at some point they will get told in a book. Everything else from that time sure seems to have been spilled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, Draper tried to have me go to his place and give him a backrub once, some time in the mid 80s. I was maybe 22 at the time. I declined, and avoided being in close proximity to him after that. No idea what would have happened, it just felt really creepy.

[edit: just read the full twitter thread. Backrubs, right ...]

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone who ever spent much time with John could probably tell a similar story.

I used to hang out with him a bit in the mid-'70s. I'd read about him in the famous Esquire article, and it was pretty cool when I finally got to meet him. He wanted to learn how to program, and we had both recently discovered FORTH. Most importantly, he had some really good pot (for those days).

So I would drop by and we would stay up late at night hacking and smoking. Then he asked me if I wanted to work out.

I thought that sounded like a good idea. Goodness knows, everyone can use more exercise!

Then I found out what he meant, and it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. So we went back to hacking and kept it at that level. It was really no problem, just a simple misunderstanding, and we continued to have fun hacking together.

I didn't see John for many years, and then ran into him at the 2013 Homebrew reunion. I introduced myself and he didn't quite remember me at first. Then his eyes lit up and he asked me, "Did we work out?"

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/in/dateposte...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/10861963196/in/dateposted- public/lightbox/)

Next time I saw John was at the 2015 CES, and he was in a wheelchair recovering from back surgery.

You know, whatever feelings any of us may have about the guy, at this point he's not in the best of health. My personal feeling is that perhaps we could wish him well and let bygones be bygones?

<comment><USER5> > _we could wish him well and let bygones be bygones?_

Well it can sometimes be hard to reconcile the person you know and like with the bad things they have done, it would appear that he systematically assaulted a very large number of young men over a period of decades.

Criminal charges might be a more appropriate response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm in disbelief and disgusted that conference organizers would assign volunteers to police Draper's behavior but still allow him to attend the conferences. This went on for decades and was well known but nobody outed him until now? Unreal.

<comment><USER7> Snubs was straight up groped by a stranger at a con. She told the organizers immediately and they still invited him back the next year. [https://youtube.com/watch?v=oxLENeCf3OA](https://youtube.com/watch?v=oxLENeCf3OA) Recently Hak5 has decided not to sponsor events that don't have a Code of Conduct anymore, which is potentially losing them a bunch of money but it could also save people a lot of trouble. [https://mobile.twitter.com/snubs/status/916477812646612993](https://mobile.twitter.com/snubs/status/916477812646612993)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> BuzzFeed has a compilation of first-hand accounts involving Draper: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/hacker-hero-is-said- to...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/kevincollier/hacker-hero-is-said-to-have-used- cyber-conferences-to?utm_term=.gq17zJWDnm#.djDoLvX1Nq)

<comment><USER9> No-one seems to be accusing him of an actual crime. It sounds like his victims/partners willingly carried him on their backs or did workouts together or took their shirts off. It sounds very similar to what many pairs opposite sex people do when one invites the other back to their hotel room. If it was a woman and she wasn't sexually interested in him, she would be unlikely to go along so far - certainly not taking off clothes in a hotel room! Does it just seem worse because it's gay? Maybe it's worse because young men in those days didn't think that other men might be gay so they misread his advances?

<comment><USER5> You might find it quite instructive to read up on the legal definitions of sexual assault and sexual harassment.

It's also important to consider what consent actually is. Just because someone doesn't say no doesn't necessarily mean that they want something to happen.

Don't lose sight of the power imbalance, as well as the youth and inexperience of the victims.

<comment><USER10> I have read several stories of people being approached and many have said they felt uncomfortable and didnt do it.

Does that not imply there was no power imbalance as the weak or inexperienced were not coerced ?

Do you have a story of someone coerced ?

OR do you just prefer to make shit up ?

<comment><USER5> Quoting directly from the buzzfeed aerticle:

> _In a series of interviews, six men with direct knowledge of Draper, now 74, > described him as habitually meeting young, often teenage men at conferences > between 1999 and 2007, touting "energy" exercises or stretches. These > included him massaging men in public and urging them to come to his or their > hotel room for private sessions. In multiple cases in which the men agreed, > Draper would leap on their backs in ways the men described as unwanted > sexual contact._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Jobs was asked by Draper, in the '70's, to help Draper exercise by sitting on Draper's back," Wozniak told BuzzFeed News. "Jobs took this as being out of the ordinary and not up his alley and he avoided it. I cannot presume what it was about, although you are always free to guess."

That explains a lot! I read about Wozniak hiring Draper, in secret behind Jobs back, to work on modem for Apple 2(or 2gs?). I was wondering why such conspiracy, now we know.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is not news. Anybody who goes to con, particularly telephreak and friends, has known about Crunch for a long time, now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Who is John draper?</comment>


This Guy Earned $450K Last Year. And He Hasn't Written a Line of Code  - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CharlynKeating/if-you-re-an-app-developer-who-isn-t-making-a-decent-living-from-the-app-stores-there-s-someone-ac5082d8de47 <comment><USER2> I mean a basketball player earns 10 million a year without writing code OR books.

Cool article dumb title ;)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but in a world of about 7.2 billion people, there are only 55 basketball players capable of making 10 million+ a year [1] (I'm assuming there is no foreign league paying a player more than 10M USD per year, someone feel free to check me on this). If you were one of the top 55 "best" programmers or writers in the world, I have a feeling you could figure out how to make 10M/year.

[1] [http://espn.go.com/nba/salaries/_/page/2/seasontype/3](http://espn.go.com/nba/salaries/_/page/2/seasontype/3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Sales is a job for people who can't code."

On the contrary, coding is a job for people who can't sell, which is the more demanding and more valuable skill.

<comment><USER5> Who in the company gets a piece of what they kill? For all the bullshit about 10x developers (who unless very lucky get paid 1.5x at a generous company), 10x salespeople get paid 10x.</comment></comment>


For the love of God, YC companies-to-be stop posting ambiguous job description - <AUTHOR> I am so frustrated because I am one of those potential candidates that you all YC companies that are seeking - the important first hire but this is the one thousand four hundred and seventy-forth time that I see posting that just wasted 20 seconds of my life reading and got no freaking clue what I signing up for.
If you can't say what your company actually does, I'm sure you can say things like you will be working on solving monetization issues for the laundry machines.
I want to give props to some that are doing it right and here's one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877677
Here's one that I'm not really interested in what they have to say.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2878738
I've built cool stuff and awesome systems so I don't need fluff. <comment><USER2> YC S11 Company Seeks Uber Python Dev

We're a young company that's so hot, we melt ice in our sleep. Some of our investors even believe we're responsible for global warming. Out hotness is to be expected: our 5 founders hail from top engineering schools, and one even won $5,000 in a single night playing online poker when he was 13 (for reals).

Our users? Cooler than a polar bear's toe nails. Think Tom from MySpace, but even cooler. They're young, they love technology and they all have fat bank accounts. Oh, they're all beautiful people too.

Our trajectory is clear: extreme penetration of a lucrative niche market in Year 1, and world domination in Year 2. We've already grown 500% in our first 2 weeks after launch. See <http://yfrog.com/kfu2tcj>

We're looking for an awesome Python developer with a big ego and low self- esteem. Someone who knows he's the sheeeeet but doesn't want to prove it at a big company that does lame stuff like QA. Someone who can down a can of Coke and a box of Mentos and then go on to devour a four-course meal of web-scale challenges the likes of which no other startup has ever faced. Seriously.

What do we offer? Put simply, The Life. As an early employee, you'll receive a salary that will enable you to rent a condo in Palo Alto with 3 other startup dude roommates, a huge equity stake that will be massively diluted as we raise new rounds of funding from some of the most respected angels and VCs in the Valley, and the ginormous confidence that comes with knowing you're changing the world one unique visitor at a time.

If you're ready to take your awesomeness to the next level and think you have what it takes to hang, send us an email at email@example.com and tell us why we shouldn't laugh at your Github account.

<comment><USER3> What's funny is it took me a moment to figure out if you were being sarcastic, or just reposting a real job :)

<comment><USER4> I didn't realize at all it was stair until I read your comment.

I viewed it out of context, through the news:yc iPhone app, from "best comments" page, and there's no link to 'parent' post (at least not that I'm aware of).

I really thought it was a genuine job ad. I think this says a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heh, I agree, that second one is rubbish. It seems like they're trying _real_ hard to paint a picture of how young and energetic and fun they are... but then didn't say the first word about the product they're building. I don't know about the rest of you, but all the "young, hip, energetic, red-bull drinking, prank pulling startup vibe" stuff isn't terribly interesting to me, compared to knowing something about the actual, ya know, work.

As they say _"it's called work for a reason."_

Sure, we all (well, mostly all) want a fun, happy workplace... but if I'm working on something that's mind-numbingly boring, I'm going to zone out and not give a flip about the red-bull and the nerf fights and the after-work LAN parties and all that B.S., in about 2 minutes.

<comment><USER6> Those types of job postings are like kryptonite to parents, aka, more experienced engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My apologies on behalf of YC. I deleted that job post, and asked the companies in this batch not to post this sort of thing anymore.

<comment><USER8> I kinda wanted to see it, though, so I had some context.

<comment><USER9> It was a post titled "YC S11 Company Seeks Rails Architect". It began "We're an exciting young explosive company. Our users are true evangelists—wearing our gear, drinking from our shot glasses, and shouting cheers to our name..." The rest was equally as vague and platitude-filled.

<comment><USER3> I mis-read this as "We're an exciting young exploitative company". The things my mind does some days. Thankfully, that's not at all what it said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is how the second posting came across to me:

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

Wassup broz.

We're an awesome new startup that totally kicks ass and we drink alot of beer and stufzlol.

Anyway, we need a nodejs ninja rockstar bro to chill with us and write some codez.

We aint gunna tell you what we do cuz thats not how we roll but email us at firstname.lastname@example.com </comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>==

</comment><comment><USER11> It would actually be clever if they are both for the same job and that company is just split testing their job descriptions.

<comment><USER12> My company is currently doing this with job titles. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The cheerleaders are beginning to arrive on the scene. Everyone in the company should be outgoing, fun, super-communicative and ready to party. You know: nerds.

</comment><comment><USER14> In this hiring environment I'm not above the occasional shameless plug. Your point about vagueness is well taken, but I'd have to write 3 pages to really give you a detailed understanding and I'd rather just show it all to you over a beer.

My company is hiring:

We do e-commerce where people can set up their own fashion boutique -- we have a massive catalog full of top-tier designer products. We have made incredible partnerships with brands, the fashion industry, etc. People who set up stores facilitate social shopping via their store and make a small commission per sale. If you don't get why this is cool b/c you wear sweatpants or the same pair of jeans, that's OK, I have data to show you.

Our site, www.styleowner.com is solid on the backend but needs a lot of frontend love. If you like backbone.js, web standards, etc., come join us and help make it one of the best sites on the web. Backend developers wanted too however. We use Ruby, Sinatra, DataMapper, Node, Redis and more. Interest in IOS is also a plus.

We're hiring for 2-3 positions. We are looking to make some key hires right now and the goal is a _superb_ team.

If you're in San Fran let me meet with you over coffee or beers and show you our codebase, tell you in incredible detail what we're working on, etc. I'd also like to see some of your code. The goal is to give you an idea if you want to work on our app and what that would entail over at least the next few months.

We're funded by Accel, have great investors, etc. The only challenge has been in tech hiring b/c if you're good you probably already have a job you enjoy. So give it a shot and meet us and see what you think.

Putting together an awesome engineering team is our #1 priority. We're in the stage where we're making key hires and ramping up.

email email@example.com

<comment><USER15> I was hoping this was a joke like the top non-pg comment. It's not, so why do you think it's okay to post a job listing in this thread?

Edit: the OP added the statement about "not being above a shameless plug" after I left this comment. It's still spam if the job market is tough.

<comment><USER14> The posting generally complies with the OP's request for a lack of hyperbole.

The OP indicated that if the hyperbole were removed, he/she would potentially be interested in finding a new job!

<comment><USER15> The OP is interested in a lack of hyperbole in the sponsored YC.news links. This is the comment section of hackernews, not the sponsored link section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The top 3 things I look for when picking a job:

\- The people I'll be working with \- The product I'll be working on \- The job I'll be doing

These posts are way to ambiguous to answer these real questions. The only questions they do answer is that you were good enough to get into YC. If you want someone to apply for the job just cause you are a YC company, tough luck - the applicants are gonna suck big time.

<comment><USER17> You should email us about that first post if we sound at all close to people you might enjoy working with. We'll answer any question you have, up to and including my shoe size.

At this stage, most employees are going to be working on a shared vision more than anything, which comes down to how you feel about the people. The goal with our description was to reflect the people and at least define the problem space a little bit. "Non douchebags doing ads" might have been more direct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That last link has the word "bptumblr" in their Amazon EC3 link. If you Google that term, you get a bunch of porn sites. That might explain their popularity in random bars and early profitability :-)

<comment><USER19> It's hard to imagine YC funding a porn company, but I will say from experience that there are worse jobs than being a programmer at a porn company. Aside from the fun parties and social work atmosphere, it can be very technically challenging (scaling a Rails app up to 1,000,000+ uniques per day is pretty fun if you've never done it before).

<comment><USER20> why? pg is a prude?

my understanding was that they funded the people as much as the idea. i doubt the fact that a bunch of smart people were doing something cool with - shock - boobies would stop him.

<comment><USER19> I have no idea whether or not pg is a prude. What I meant was that it's a hyper-competitive, highly saturated market and most porn companies these days are "innovating" with traffic generation and content, and not with technology or novel business models.

Believe me, I've worked in and with the industry for years and it is ripe for a breakthrough. I actually was working on a project at a porn company that had the potential to disrupt the porn industry but was abandoned due to internal political reasons. If pg wanted me to build it again, I'd be all over it.

<comment><USER18> I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley don't want to touch it, because of the stigma. Having that on your resume reduces your chances of getting a job with high profile companies or government agencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I fully agree. I often wonder why the posts are something similar to the following:

Young company looking for C++ programmers to help create a small fraction of the functionality provided by a Bloomberg terminal for a small fraction of the price of a Bloomberg terminal. Financial knowledge appreciated, but not required.

NOTE: If I had more than a few hours a week to work on such a thing, and I didn't have a large amount of student debt, then this would be a posting I would eventually like to make. For now, the above is only meant to serve as an example of how I think a job posting should read.

</comment><comment><USER22> Allow me to ask what may be a silly question:

If you're looking to hire someone by posting a public job description, why are you unwilling to say who you are?

The older and more experienced I get, the more the notion of "secret companies" (aka stealth mode) seems absurd. The CIA might need to keep secrets. A web technology company does not. Like another poster said, nobody's suggesting that you have to reveal your deepest darkest technology special sauce in your job posting.

But why not at least reveal the name and nature of your business? It's fairly relevant.

</comment><comment><USER23> I just don't understand why all these announcements say stuff like 'we have 150k users' -- but they won't even mention their name? I understand if you are IN 'stealth mode' but if you have so hundreds of thousands of users -- that's not exactly stealth anymore is it

<comment><USER24> Only YC companies can make job postings on HN. The companies haven't announced that they're YC-backed yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And spare me terms like "ninajas" and "rockstars".

<comment><USER17> We're looking for pandas. Email us if you're a CoffeeScript drinking panda.

<comment><USER25> Pandas are cute, but they spend most of their day sleeping. Why don't you look for people, instead?

<comment><USER8> Because people focused on sleeping will find more efficient ways to get their awesomeness done. (Here, by "people", I mean "pandas".)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I can understand the various arguments for a need to be somewhat secretive and that's fine. That being said, there's some no-brainer concepts to include in a job listing if you want it to be worth your time.

#1) Don't just say what the job title is, be clear on what it means to you. I've had job interviews for a "frontend developer" be anything from a PSD- slicer to a 95% backend coder.

#2) If you want a passionate employee (you do), you need to give enough information about your company so they can tell if it interests them. I could care less what cool technology you use if I don't know whether I'm reforming healthcare or inventing new ways to impose banking fees. You can say what you do without providing any sort of specific information.

#3) Sarcasm online can be very easily misinterpreted. I suggest being upfront and professional in any job posting but if you must use some kind of sarcasm, be sure to note it.

Note: This is by no means a complete list, simply some reoccurring issues I've seen during my recent job search. Edit: Formatting.

</comment><comment><USER27> I actually liked some things in the "YC S11 Company Seeks Rails Architect" post. Not the hyperbole and fluff, but the details on growth, trajectory, culture, current team, etc. I'd be more specific, but since the post was deleted, I can't reference it.

The "Summer 2011 YC company seeks CoffeeScript drinking frontend engineer" post seems very generic to me. It's nice that they mention the industry they're working in, but otherwise, I didn't pick up on much differentiation in the job description from other companies looking to fill a similar role (and the post nearly admits that itself, at the end).

</comment><comment><USER28> I know rock stars. Rock stars are friends of mine. Programmers are not rock stars.

Seriously though, whoever started the whole rockstar/ninja thing should be punished. This is programming. Forget sex, drugs, rock-n-roll and throwing stars. I want to work with people who always know where their towel is.

<comment><USER29> Ruby coders are rock stars. Perl hackers are sorcerers. PHP coders are ninjas. This must be what they mean in their coded job descriptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Clearly the company in the second example is making gigawidgets.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thank you for saying this more bluntly then I did:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2659445>

I was trying to be a bit more diplomatic but my feeling was the same. It serves no purpose to be so discrete all the time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Agree 100%. Whether a job description, Web page, brochure or any other vehicle, real communications say what they mean and don't use euphemisms. These generic descriptions are probably copied and that's pure laziness.

</comment><comment><USER33> I agree, they want to remain stealthy and keep the prying eyes of journalists and rivals out but need to be able to convince potential employees to actually contact them.

</comment><comment><USER34> Maybe it's just because I'm "old" or have been around the block, but hyperbole in a job description really turns me off. The harder the sell, the less I trust the seller. Actually this is true everywhere.

Further, you can tell us what the business is, and what is compelling about it, without giving up the secret sauce. You can even mention the secret sauce without giving up the secret.

EG, if your startup was google: We're building a revolutionary search engine using the social proof inherent in the web to give people results that are far more relevant than Yahoo and Inktomi. There, did I give away the page rank algorithm? No, but I did reveal the compelling advantage that google had: they figured out how to derive social proof from the web... which at the time was unheard of.

Even if that's too revealing.... at least talk about your technology stack. If you write a 500 word essay and the only mentions of technology is that you use "rails/node.js" -- something at first blush seems like not a choice but a pair of choices-- you're being evasive one something you have no reason to be evasive on. "We're using rails to host the primary web app, and node.js to run a really nice realtime updating system, blah blah blah."

You can talk about that... and you are giving candidates an opportunity to know what you're like based on your technology choices and how you talk about technology.

<comment><USER17> I am also old and have been around the block. There's a chance I hold the record for having the most kids of any founder in a YC batch, which I think is astonishingly cool...

I think it's rare that startups have anything as ground breaking as page rank, and even rarer that it _seems_ ground breaking to anyone else at the time. If we had some specific formula for growing environment saving bacteria from leftover banana peels, we'd tell you for sure.

What we really have is a set of guiding principles, indicators that tell us we're pointed roughly where we should be pointed, and lots of things we want to try to get there.

The tech details weren't meant to be evasive as much as de-emphasized. They're there because we think good candidates might find those specific technologies interesting. We had variants on the description with many more specifics, but none of them seemed entirely important at the time. I do like talking tech, though, so here's an exhaustive look:

* We use CoffeeScript at several levels and happen to think it's pretty awesome. Anything that we could have done in JS has been done in CoffeeScript instead, this includes super tight ad serving javascript, the frontend code for our user facing apps, etc.

* We have two major classes of users, those who use our tools to do better advertising, and those who see ads. The "magic" for the first class is whatever the latest release candidate of Rails 3.1 is (rc5 maybe?), the second is the Node.js version that Heroku's Cedar stack supports (0.4.6 I think).

* Both apps feed copious amounts of information into a backend Mongo replica set, and the Node layer leans on Redis for some things.

* We've done limited data visualization with that d3 toolkit I mentioned. We feel that data viz is often underrated, but an extremely useful thing for us to devote resources to. If we could justify buying the entire New York Times data visualization team we'd do so.

<comment><USER34> I agree that startups won't likely have something as ground breaking as page rank. I only referred to that example because I knew everyone would know the algo. I merely meant to illustrate "show us how you're doing a new take on X" rather than "show us you've got something ground breaking". I also free that something that is groundbreaking may not seem so at the time.

If my rails/node reference was to you, it wasn't meant personally. Just as an example that struck me, and one of many.

The four bullet points are very useful, and more importantly they are genuine. That's really good about them. They give me a good perspective on where your business is at, and where you're thinking right and where I think you've made a wrong choice.

I think I didn't mention that one of the more important piece of information one can get form a job listing is whether the owners of the company have their heads up their asses. Seeing that you made what I consider a "wrong" choice reminds me of that. (And I don't think you have your heads up your asses, but that's the kind of situation that developers really want to avoid... ad asks for "rock stars" and mentioned cutting edge technologies and languages, and then you find out you'r doing ASP programming.) Those four bullet points make the company real in my head.. if that makes any sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Agreed. #2 appears to be very concerned with interesting they see themselves while #1 appears to understand that a) finding talent is hard and b) they need to convince someone to work for them based on the interesting things they're working on (or they're just savvy on what keywords to use).

You also have to consider that many of these YC companies are young, small and inexperienced, regardless of their job descriptions, so take it with a grain of salt before you commit to anyone. These guys could pivot at any given moment, change technology stack on a dime (just happened to me), fire you because you don't fit in, etc.

<comment><USER17> You should definitely apply to that first job if having technology stacks yanked out from under you sounds annoying. It sure sounds annoying to me.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I wrote the first job description.

<comment><USER36> _FULL DISCLOSURE: I wrote the first job description._

You had me at "syncretic.sausage"! Please promise me that you'll make .sausage a custom TLD someday!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not looking for a job, but do occasionally see one here that may fit someone I know, and I pass it on....but _only_ if I don't see (for the 10,000th time) vapid marketing-speak like "join a team of rock stars" or "wanna rock with us?", or "rock our stars" or whatever. I have nothing against actual rock stars (musicians), but if you're basically a bunch of marketing or management suits, you're the farthest thing from a "rock star" imaginable.

</comment><comment><USER38> This comment will probably cost me some karma but the "for the love of god" makes me feel uncomfortable. I assume it is used as an expression and not as proselytism or whatever.

Replace god in this expression by gays, Allah, children, science, music, bits or whatever and you may experience the same feeling I had. And it doesn't provide any useful and constructive information to the main point.

<comment><USER39> Actually, I had trouble figuring out what to say that's non-offending when someone sneezes. I ended up picking "Gazuntite", which means health (pls. don't ask why I need to say anything at all).

Also, there is a hilarious south park episode that delves into this issue. Here's a clip for some yucks: <http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/230805/science-help-us>

<comment><USER40> Why must you say anything at all? This is a centuries-old meme that serves no purpose. It annoys me slightly anytime says it to me, and I don't say anything to anyone else when they sneeze.

<comment><USER41> It's a behavior that we as a society have decided is polite. It hurts no one, aside from maybe a few neckbeards who have entirely too much invested in Being An Atheist (or the equivalent for your hair-splitting worldview of choice).

That you choose to get "annoyed" about such things is your problem, nobody else's.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Comparison of Functional Data Structures on the JVM - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lacuna/bifurcan/blob/master/doc/comparison.md <comment><USER2> For those interested in this type of thing, Li Haoyi created an in depth look at the Scala structures.

[http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/BenchmarkingScalaCollections.htm...](http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/BenchmarkingScalaCollections.html)

It includes some interesting commentary as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that Scala 2.13 (next release) includes a CHAMP hash map implementation, first contributed by the original author and then refined by several Scala contributors, most notably Jason Zaugg (@retronym) and Josh (@joshlemer)

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to include these, but it wasn't immediately obvious how to construct them from outside Scala without CanBuildFrom. If anyone wants to open a PR or even provide a few hints, I'd be happy to update the benchmarks.

<comment><USER4> Scala 2.13 greatly simplifies the external interface of the collections and no longer requires CanBuildFrom [1]. You may find them much easier to work with now.

[1] [https://scala-lang.org/files/archive/api/2.13.0-M5/](https://scala- lang.org/files/archive/api/2.13.0-M5/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> reddit thread from a year ago [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5790ky/benchma...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5790ky/benchmarking_scala_collections/?submit_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lihaoyi.com%2Fpost%2FBenchmarkingScalaCollections.html&already_submitted=true&submit_title=Benchmarking+Scala+Collections)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing! One quick question: in the methodology section, you mention that the results are from a median value out of repeated runs. While I get that you run JITted code, you also mention that it makes the runs isolated from GC side-effects.

Just out of curiosity, what did you do to ensure that GC would not interfere with the execution while the tests are running?

<comment><AUTHOR> By forcing the GC to run in between tests, basically. The README for the benchmarking tool describes it in more detail: [https://github.com/hugoduncan/criterium](https://github.com/hugoduncan/criterium).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pet peeve: I wish people would call them persistent or fork-on-write, but functional at least is better than immutable.

<comment><USER8> Would "purely functional data structures" float your boat?

I suspect the idea is to tie in with the idea of '(purely) functional programming', which is where these will shine.

In any case the term '(purely) functional data structures' seems pretty well entrenched and dates _at least_ to Okasaki's thesis in the late 1990s, possibly earlier (I'm not an expert). In fact, it looks like the link actually mentions Okasaki's work.

<comment><USER7> So an appeal to authority? [0] Or to tradition, I'm not sure.

[0] [https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...](https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/21/Appeal- to-Authority)

<comment><USER8> No, not really. I'm not saying anything about what these things ought to have been called in a perfect world (though I think it actually fits pretty well). I'm observing that they've been called by this name for a while, so even if you can find an unambiguously better one, popularizing it may be hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see you have written interfaces like List & Maps. Probably, we need to use interfaces from Java native, but provide better implementation through bifurcan. This makes it easy for existing applications to switch to bifurcan where they need.

</comment><comment><USER9> Indeed great work! Is Google's guava collections part of this research?

<comment><AUTHOR> Guava's "immutable" collections are effectively read-only indices, and do not support efficient updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great work!</comment>


WeWork from Home Now - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradthomas/2020/04/15/wework-from-home-now/ <comment><AUTHOR> Maybe a counterpoint to the article conclusion (for the longer term). With the Covid crisis many companies discovered the benefits of remote working (or at least the lack of all the negative aspects they were fearing). My bet is that many more companies will adopt remote and distributed teams, which could be bullish in the long run for co-working facilities.</comment>


Tinder launches Tinder Plus with age-based fees - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/02/tinder-launches-tinder-plus-with-age-based-fees

<comment><USER2> What's the goal with Passport? I'm guessing to match with potential dates before an upcoming trip or vacation? Will your match know that you're using Passport or will it be invisible to them?</comment>


Ballmer sells 20% of his MSFT holdings - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattlepi.com/business/429709_ballmer06.html <comment> bill-nordwall He was most likely waiting on the final results of on Washington State's income tax initiative, which would have cost him millions had it passed:

[http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Washington_Income_...](http://www.ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Washington_Income_Tax,_Initiative_1098_\(2010\))

</comment><comment><USER2> He sold 12% of his MSFT shares, not 20% like stated in the title: 49.3 million shares out of a total of 408 millions that he owned (SEC link: [http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000119309910000081...](http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/789019/000119309910000081/xslF345X03/edgar.xml) ).

He said he might sell more by end-year, but didn't guarantee that he'll do that ("He said he plans to sell as many as 75 million shares by year's end"). That would bring his sale percentage up around 18.3%.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, I see a few posts defending this move because of tax implications, putting the cost at $65,000,000 if he waits around for the 20% tax bite.

Seems like a pretty big bet that the value of MSFT won't increase by... eh... 70 cents?

</comment><comment><USER4> IMHO very good time for sale: few days after record revenue announce.

<comment><USER5> to me it sends the wrong signal to other share holders. Sell now while the share has a temporary peak.

their up and coming smart-phone business and being able to integrate that with their other online products like Bing will decide whether MS will grow or die. They are late in all domains, so they are gonna have to impress by pushing the experience to new heights.. which I doubt they will pull off considering they have a poor product development culture compared to apple and google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I believe the main reason why MSFT is stagnant is that the biggest shareholder (Bill) is selling this stuff constantly. His must have sold tens of billions of MSFT is the last few years. It is just the inverse of a company like IBM that is actively buying shares.

<comment><USER2> According to <http://www.google.com/finance?q=msft> , 1% of Microsoft shares changes hands each day. This means that every 3 months, on average, every Microsoft share changes hands once.

Bill's selling represents less than 100% and occurred over a decade, which is a much larger time interval. Nowadays mutual/hedge funds look at the company performance (earnings) and at the stock price and effectively pour in the capital whenever the P/E ratio drops below their threshold, thereby effectively compensating the effect of those sales.

When 1% of a company's shares changes hands each day you can't really blame Ballmer for stock price fluctuations.

In regard to IBM, when a company buys back its shares it effectively reduces the number of outstanding shares on the market (and thus it increases their rarity and therefore their price), but the money used for the buy-back could have been instead paid in dividends or used for an external acquisition. It is a management decision that partially says "we didn't find anything else better to do with the money than this", but it's too complex to be analysed in a comment's paragraph. The Ballmer transaction is on the market, investor-to- investor; it doesn't change the number of outstanding shares nor does it dilute the price.

<comment><USER6> > 1% of Microsoft shares changes hands each day

yes, but these are transactions that follow the pattern of the market. Usually they even out, with a few days having more sellers and on other days more buyers.

When you have a share repurchase program, you are basically giving a support for the market. It is hard for the stock to go much lower, because the company is always buying.

Bill and Ballmer, on the other hand, are selling shares. This is not good for the stock, even if spread over a long time.

<comment><USER7> _When you have a share repurchase program, you are basically giving a support for the market. It is hard for the stock to go much lower, because the company is always buying._

This statement shows a common misunderstanding of finance.

The market cap of a company represents the market's best estimate of the value of that company. When a company does a share buy-back, the company loses money and destroys stock. The current value of the money used matches the value of the stock destroyed, and so the market cap should be reduced by the amount of stock destroyed. Therefore to first order effects, the result is that the share price should remain constant. (There are second order effects where some value is transferred from stock holders to option owners, which indicates that the share price should go down.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think the DAY matters; as I understand it, sales by such insiders have to be filed weeks in advance.

</comment><comment><USER9> This move is a little strange. It's a big chunk to sell all at once and some will interpret it as a de facto vote of no confidence in MSFT.

The smoother way for executives to sell their substantial holdings in a company is to say they will sell X shares per year for Y years (typically in the name of diversifying one's holdings) and then put some independent third party (with no access to insider information) in charge of the exact timing of the individual transactions.

<comment><USER10> The insider selling to buying ratio has been over 2000 in recent weeks. This is likely less of a dire sign of MSFT's prospects than it is a condemnation of the US economy after Heli Ben's QE2.

I bet he pumps it into commodities, metals and markets like brazil that aren't devaluing their currencies.

<comment><USER11> Why do you think metals, Brazilian markets etc are a better store of value than MS stock? Why would you expect QE to affect MS stock as a store of value? In what circumstances would MS stock intrinsic value decrease but world commodity prices hold up, if not a business failure of MS itself?

<comment><USER10> MSFT is not immune to economic downturn especially a crash called by a currency crisis. The FED is currently walking a currency crisis tightrope.

As for value stores, look at the performance of the Brazilian market over the last few years and gold and silver.

Worse, if we have a currency crisis here the entire equities market is toast. The people who called this depression (Schiff, Denniger, etc) are calling for a currency crisis due to the fed's actions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm no expert, but this just screams doom to me. When someone inside the company sells their shares in this quantity it's _always_ before something big. I won't speculate at what is going on inside, beyond all the negative image lately, but it can't be good.

And if he wanted to diversify his portfolio then he should buy some APPL! (Laughed at my own joke, too.)

<comment><USER13> It doesn't scream "doom" to me; Ballmer's sale looks like it was done mostly for tax purposes.

<comment><USER14> It still sounds bad to me. It says to me that Steve thinks there's more upside in lower cap gains taxes than hanging onto the stock. In other words, MSFT is stagnant now and it's going to be stagnant for years to come.

If Steve had been doing what Bill does—selling off a big chunk of stock every quarter—no one would've even blinked at this.</comment></comment></comment>


Sting Operations to Expose Celebrity Psychics - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/magazine/psychics-skeptics-facebook.html <comment><USER2> While not a celebrity, I recently met a woman whom spent $XX,000 on psychics to try and understand where life comes from. She was raised Christian, started "branching out" to find the answer and spent over a year of time in doing so. I asked if she ever found the answer.. her response was "no" and that she returned to Christianity. I was flabbergasted with how casual she was about explaining psychics as her choice to better understand the Universe.

<comment><USER3> What's frustrating about these boneheads is that they never consider that 'branching out' should involve an actual education. I guess that's too hard.

<comment><USER4> Education is a cult in and of itself — most follow its scriptures in just as similar a fashion as they would a priest. People just don't think that hard about things outside of their specialization (and often enough, not even then), and end up trapped in all sorts of belief systems, including "education" and "science" (have you ever taken a look at "I fucking love science" fb pages? Its called science, and its followers believe in science, but that group has nothing to do with it. Its just a bunch of rituals that eventualy produce an effect, with any arbitrary reason given)

Its not a fix on its own, just accidentally more (likely to be) correct than psychics, from the perspective of the believer.

<comment><USER5> Look at it that way and pretty much anything is a cult, at which point I'm not sure the label means anything anymore.

<comment><USER4> All a cult is in this view is an unwavering, unthinking group following over some belief system; in that sense, any form of education (of which the bible, and schooling, are just one of) can turn into a cult. Its not surprising that students are just as susceptible as some midwestern hick. Its also not that surprising that people take those teachings differently, and some treat that knowledge in cultish fashion, and others don't.

And its not that surprising that people don't realize this occurs, and spreads the word blindly, with unwavering faith in its problem-solving ability

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just like beginner developers who never sanitize their input, there are also people who never validate their inputs. Just like exploitation of programs, there are people who exploit the behavior of other people, giving them input when what they really want to do is to run their code (buy the product / believe in the psychic).

Just like educating beginning developers in the important of security, we should educate children to sanitize their inputs, validate things they are told, think critically, and realize the code that others are trying to run on them.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that people only "sanitize their input" about things of which they care to keep a consistent model in their heads.

Things that are not relevant to the task at hand (for many, the news) are accepted without critical thought. That's why advertising is so successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a funny article. I didn't expect the technique of leaving those name cards behind. I would guess most people would throw away a name card before they'd research the printed name, so maybe a little researcher bias showing through in this method?

I've been studying various models of charismatic behavior recently and I've come to wonder whether, given _any_ particular dominant interaction or communication style, if played up it will activate the "investigator/auditor" reflex/role of another style.

As an example, growing up around charismatic people, they are very much capable of doing something like this NYT article in reverse, for example getting the quiet, researcher-bean-counter-style approach of some government office critiqued on the evening news, organizing "irrational but passionate" protests, etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm looking forward to a sting operation that exposes celebrity economists.

</comment><comment><USER10> As far as I'm concerned, the much larger and more reprehensible scams are perpetrated by religious/spiritual leaders. The only people this might come as a surprise to are the flock. The most flagrant frauds are committed by evangelical preachers, especially the "prosperity gospel" charlatans. The efforts to expose these crooks on a large scale have been weak and ineffective. The fact that these fat cats actually preach morality (their version, anyway) to their credulous throngs with one bible clutching hand held triumphaly toward heaven, while the other is pickpocketing them, is, of course, morally repugnant. These people need to be taken down. I could go on for hours with credible arguments for why this is justifiable, but I just desperately want to move this ball farther downfield where we can finally score one for the good side. Yes, I'm exercised!

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised they didn't see it coming.

</comment><comment><USER12> David Chase provided us evidence through the Sopranos character Paulie Walnuts:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PqgoXVB20W4](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PqgoXVB20W4)

It's not entirely unlikely that this scene was based on real mob stories. In the fictional depiction, the psychic would have had to have been in cahoots with Christopher Moltisanti for this to have been a deception, since it's unlikely a psychic would have otherwise guessed about the poison ivy that Paulie got when whacking Mikey Palmice with Christopher.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is sad that such an operation is needed to debunk these leeches.

Good on these people to have the time to debunk common myths and frauds. This might help prevent some from succumbing to their scams.

</comment><comment><USER14> This being hacker news I was trying to envision how celebrities have different physics than regular people. I mean are they talking about Hollywood special effects or something? :facepalm:

James Randi spent his life debunking these charlatans. See Youtube for many examples if you really want to go down the rabbit hole.

</comment><comment><USER15> Read the Wikipedia article on Bob Nygaard. It is a great collection of this detective's most notable psychic-fraud cases (including one where a client lost over $700,000). It will give you an idea of the scope of harm that belief in paranormal has on society.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the first time I've seen the NY Times hiding articles if you're browsing in private/incognito mode.

[https://imgur.com/a/Tlv6Kn3](https://imgur.com/a/Tlv6Kn3)

<comment><USER17> Works for me (Chrome on Linux). Either they do A/B testing or they can only detect it on some browsers. Concerning nonetheless, t.b.h..

<comment><USER18> [https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect- incog...](https://9to5google.com/2019/02/15/google-chrome-detect-incognito/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> John Oliver had a section on it in Sundays "Last Week Tonight". Had me triggered because I have a case in my own family who is drawn into the Astrology/Psychics bullshit. It went so far that she lost a lot of money at a time she was most vulnerable and she would meddle in other peoples lives by predicting horrible stuff (which sometimes happened because of projection) ... So I did an Ask HN here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254698)

-> I don't want to hi-jack this thread but did want to point out the John Oliver story and my general bewilderment wit YT not demonetizing these channels - no need to block or censor but just give them no money for their traffic.

</comment><comment><USER20> The timing of this article is interesting given that John Oliver just did his show about this topic on Sunday. I wonder if that forced them to publish this?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhMGcp9xIhY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhMGcp9xIhY)

<comment><USER21> Was about to say this. Opened the article to expect some reference to the John Oliver show, but still haven't found any.

<comment><USER22> Probably a coincidence, this article likely wasn't written in a day, and I doubt NYTimes and Last Week Tonight are talking to each other.

<comment><USER20> No I'm sure this article was many months in the making. What I'm wondering is if it was always planned to come out today, or if they had to rush to an early finish because of Oliver "scooping" them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/808/](https://xkcd.com/808/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Repeat after me: there's no such thing as a psychic. All psychics are simple con men, who prey on vulnerable individuals in order to receive easy cash. That is all.

<comment><USER25> While I agree that it's all baloney, I'd argue that many of them aren't "con men", since they honestly believe they have psychic powers. They're just _wrong_ , and are confused by confirmation bias.

<comment><USER26> Now.. I have no qualms in calling out fraud where I see it. But care in throwing it all out.

We, earlier this week, read about someone who attended a meditation retreat left in handcuffs because meditation did crazy things to the mind. I mean, he was just eating and sitting and sleeping silently. We have holes in understanding of consciousness, and can't even tell if something is sentient or thinking.

And then, we have people feeling emotions in areas. These emotions can be shared. many people can feel being stared at.

The hole seems to be the intersection of: consciousness, mind, and emotion.

Can we point at emotion? Can we throw it against a wall? Can we describe anger without emotions? How do we measure it? Why can some people feel the anger in an area? Same for mind and consciousness - show me an example. Quantify it.

What's confusing is that your declaration of "They're just wrong, and are confused by confirmation bias." is that the very statement is confirmation bias of sciencism. Either there is proof (positive or negative), or there is not. Do not confuse lack of proof as proof of lack.

<comment><USER27> The fact that we can't yet show a mechanism for <whatever> does not make it reasonable to assume some sort of supernatural explanation. Your logic opens the door for believing any wacky idea a person has should be taken seriously. They shouldn't. Show a mechanism or proof of the effect. Otherwise it's nonsense.

<comment><USER26> What part of my logic is in error?

Lack of proof does not mean proof of nonexistence. And if we look at things like the aether, was made a distinct proof that it didn't exist as conjectured (although its rearing its head as a quantum Foam).

But I await for proof, be it positive or negative, of emotion and consciousness. Because all you did was throw insults.

> Show a mechanism or proof of the effect. Otherwise it's nonsense.

One can highlight open questions with no apparent answers. And it absolutely doesn't make those questions "nonsense". But this view is called Scientism, and is not science. "Proof or its fake" is absolutely not science.

"Proof or its unproven" is science.

<comment><USER25> > Lack of proof does not mean proof of nonexistence.

It is certainly _evidence_ of nonexistence. Do you believe every single claim you've ever heard because you can't conclusively disprove it 100% of the time always? Of course not, you use your reason and assume that more positive claims are false until proven otherwise.

<comment><USER26> Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull's most famous attributed utterance is that "everything that can be invented has been invented."

We laugh at it today, because some patent commissioner couldn't see past his own limited view, and made that claim.

Yet, when I postulate questions about things we have very little science with, I'm dismissed. I ask for science to be used with emotions; yet Im the dumb one. I want scientific method to determine consciousness; yet I'm the non- scientific one.

Again, you're the standard fare when it comes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism)

<comment><USER28> The problem with Scientism is that the very utterance of the word sets up a Straw Man.

But I do get where you're coming from, having followed some of the same articles you've been referencing in your posts.

I think Deepak Chopra had some useful things to say. He is normally derided as trafficking in woo, especially in his remarks about James Randi.

But if you read what he has to say, his position makes sense. A lot of otherwise intelligent people fall into materialism as a sort of intellectual default and it's not wrong to challenge this.

[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/skepticism- and-...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/skepticism-and-a- million-_b_5522690.html)

And this in turn goes back to what Alan Watts had to say, the idea that materialism should be resisted in spite of its surface plausibility.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mryZ7e2TUhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mryZ7e2TUhs)

(The meat of it is around 10 minutes in)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> (EDIT: When I was going through YC and my startup phase I would have automatically down-voted this post, too. Love you all.)

Skeptics: Of course there are many charlatans out there, but I'd love to understand how you justify dismissal of all non-local consciousness phenomena given that the CIA has been using Remote Viewing for decades and that anyone can learn to do it. Go prove it to yourself that it works and you'll taste the potential of consciousness and non-duality.

CIA's FOIA docs on Remote Viewing:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acia.gov+"remote+viewi...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acia.gov+"remote+viewing")

Learn Remote Viewing:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+remote+viewing](https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+remote+viewing)

<comment><USER30> Every other advancement in understanding relatively quickly becomes highly reproducible - someone struggles to figure out how to make a lightbulb work, then woosh, anyone can test that lightbulbs work.

A lot of the psychic stuff - telportation, telekensis, remote viewing etc doesn't follow this. Even worse, in many cases it violates well understood laws of physics etc. Even worse, in contract to someone like bill gates who did some cool software stuff, we don't have example of even one psychic using their powers to fortell the future flaunting and demonstrating their powers and become rich and wealthy.

Out of 5 billion people - not one.

<comment><USER29> "someone struggles to figure out how to make a lightbulb work, then woosh, anyone can test that lightbulbs work."

That's exactly what you can do with remote viewing: test that it works for yourself.

It seems like you're assuming that it is possible to use such powers for base and counter-life purposes like amassing wealth or that anyone that has reached such a subtle level of consciousness would even care about being wealthy.

<comment><USER31> What can you do (remote viewing-wise)?

<comment><USER29> Me, personally, or as a discipline? As a discipline, remote viewing allows the practitioner to gather details about a remote subject (anything in the universe of which you can become aware) which is unavailable to the five senses due to distance, time, or obfuscation. For example, the CIA would use it to gather details about remote bases that they observe on satellite images and such.

Personally, I've been able to identify basic blind targets (from a target pool such as [https://intuitivespecialists.com/target- pool/](https://intuitivespecialists.com/target-pool/)) and started training in earnest, but soon abandoned it as an egoic pursuit in order to focus my attention on raising my consciousness through traditional spiritual practices (meditation, psychadelics, self-inquiry, lucid dreaming, etc).

There is a lot of fun that can happen when you've silenced your mind, sit still, and close your eyes for a few hours. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First Streaming Video iPad App to allow in-app Purchasing of Subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://www.bigstar.tv/blog/2012/06/08/update-bigstar-now-offering-in-app-billing-on-ipad/

<comment><USER2> Pay attention to the red squiggly underline next time.

<comment><AUTHOR> whoops!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it legal to send iPods with music internationally? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a weird idea of exchanging music by sending iPods to strangers via postal mail. My lawyer is currently looking into all the regulations, but I would like to know your opinion: is it legal to do that in your country? <comment><USER2> Interesting question. If you were sending a single pre-filled iPod to a mate in another country then you would not care one way or another.

So - I suspect your question is rather broader than that.

Care to share?

<comment><AUTHOR> The question is: even if sending music (purchased by you) to a mate is legal, doing the same thing, but for a stranger, could be illegal. Like in Germany, where you are allowed to share copyright-protected content with only 7 close people.

Also, if any musical content appears to be pirated (you can expect everything), what implicates from it?</comment></comment>


At best we can each have 3 IPv4 address. - <AUTHOR> http://pjakma.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/why-dont-we-just-reclaim-unused-ipv4-addresses/

<comment><USER2> I think it says a lot about the technological community that the solution to IPv4 has been around and viable for over a decade, but it's only as we reach the terminal stages that uptake really kicks in.

Same thing basically happened with the Y2k bug - the foresight exists, but the general community doesn't follow best practices and just hobbles along until something _has_ to happen.

The same thing will happen with internet control. Egypt (and Canada's capping) has shown that unless you have the ISPs in your pocket, the internet is highly vulnerable to government control. And government doesn't entirely like the direction the internet is going (eg wikileaks, loss of traditional business models (and thus revenue for the govt's biggest suporters)). The potential to build a viable internet without central hubs is out there, but it will never see uptake until it's too late.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My house of 4 Irish college students contains 17 devices requiring an IP.

A more interesting breakdown is that ~50% of those devices have no (or limited) wired networking capabilities, depending mainly on cellular data and/or WiFi.</comment>


Earthquake Scientists Reddit AMA on 'The Really Big One' Coming to the Northwest - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3da1mh/we_are_earthquake_experts_ask_us_anything_about/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the HN submission for the New Yorker article about the imminent earthquake: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878160)</comment>


MacOS XI: It's time to take the next step (concept) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.prototypr.io/macos-it-s-time-to-take-the-next-step-ee7871ccd3c7?utm_source=designernews <comment><USER2> I don't get why people want osx to die and ios to run on mac. They are already pretty much the same OS. Open up the OSX UIKit port should be enough to solve that "problem".

Also, removing the file system tree would be a huge step backwards. Organizing hundreds or thousands of files between dozens to hundreds of projects is just not suited for a "everything in one searchable bag" for a few reasons: To find something with search, you have to already know what you're looking for - something that browsing a folder solves instantly (how can you know you see all relevant files with a search? Maybe there's an important file that didn't match your query?!) - and the common "solution" with tagging/labels are just single-level folders in disguise....

I'm glad Apple decided to not port OSX to the iPad, or replace OSX with an iPad-esque iOS. Most people I've talked to that experienced windows 8 would agree that when Microsoft did just that, it was a misstep.

<comment><USER3> An article I read way back in the early days of the internet said people were in one of two categories: Searchers and Navigators -- that is, people who were more comfortable getting what they want by searching, and people who were more comfortable getting what they want by navigating a hierarchy.

That really struck me, because I'm of the latter type, and it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to have a search paradigm thrust upon me.

<comment><USER4> I don't mind searching to find what I want, but I find myself uncomfortable if I can't then see where it "really" is. In a universe with just tags/labels, it doesn't feel like it's anywhere.

<comment><USER5> In case you hadn't considered the alternative position, I get nervous deciding where something should "Really" be when that's based on a number of things, e.g. there's a multitude of hierarchies I could pick when organizing a music collection, and none is inherently correct over the others. Some things defy a hierarchical structure entirely. (I hate having a "Various Artists" folder, and those albums not being visible under each artist. I have considered symlinks, but too often software treats these as multiple copies.)

I can avoid that by having my files in a content-based-addressing pool with metainformation.

<comment><USER6> How many files do you have? And how many projects?

I'm not organized by nature, but I _need_ some kind of hierarchy for my computer files. There's too much.

<comment><USER5> Trees and hashes both scale to any size, it's about their performance based on how you access and modify them that matters.

Some collections of my files are accessed entirely hierarchically, others are not, I don't think I should have to pick a single paradigm for all my files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These concepts look nice, but never take into account the difficulty of working on complex projects with multiple people that hierarchical filesystem _actually work well on_.

There's absolutely no way you could build an app in a big "bucket 'o' files". Sure, you can put together a flyer for a softball game or (maybe) type up a simplistic report for school, but eventually these "loops" are going to become big, unusable buckets of content that isn't easily searchable (do we have good search on music contents yet? better hope the filename is good before it goes into the bucket!).

Perhaps the answer here is a "subloop". That's starting to look like we've come around to nested document folders again, isn't it?

Somewhat amusing: the screenshot of Sublime Text in the mockup is _using folders_.

<comment><USER8> What I find most funny about it is that HFS actually provides the closest model framework for a heirarchial distributed FS, where pretty much no other does (btrfs does have some benefits as well.)

Like the author, I worked on a distributed cloud FS, but hierarchy was a core goal. The abstracted reference system of HFS that split meta-data from the data resources is a huge boon to handling various common issues, from rights management to doing "fast" full-tree cloning over a distributed store and several other neat tricks like persistence. The biggest issue with distributed heirarchial file-systems is probably how to handle the full-tree cloning, in a way that isn't crippling, slow, or causes an enforced depth and file limits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find these sorts of concept look great, and look they would work well, when you have 10 emails in your mailbox, or 3 tabs open in your browser, or 6 files in Sublime Text, etc etc.

I get hundreds of emails a day, work in an editor that is indexing ~11000 files, regularly have 50 tabs open in Chrome, etc. I find many apps that follow the sorts of aesthetics and principles shown in these mockups just do not scale to what I would consider normal professional use.

<comment><USER10> I think your impression of normal professional use is bonkers. For example, we use Slack and I auto-filter auto-emails so I only get about 30/day in my inbox. While you probably don't need 50 tabs open, I'm not sure this direction would preclude handling that in a decent manner. The editing would work the same whether or not Finder presented the files hierarchically or not...no change there.

<comment><USER11> The described behaviour isn't that unusual. Several of the people I've worked with have said they do things in almost exactly the same way. (and they're not idiots ;>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not impressed:

Tablets and smartphones have a touch screen, computers most often don't. Software that doesn't take this into account will be a second-class citizen on the respective platform.

And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it comes to organizing my source code, for example.

<comment><USER13> > "And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has > its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it > comes to organizing my source code, for example."

The article touches on a concept called 'loops' for cases such as this.

I think there's room for innovation with filesystems. Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku.

<comment><USER14> > Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku

How do you see that working well?

Microsoft tried to incorporate all the stuff like MP3 metadata into explorer way back when (XP? Vista? Can't recall)

OS X has supported "saved searches" which act like a live database-backed file manager ever since Spotlight was added. More recently they added quick tagging of files.

What are you imagining that would be more usable than these?

<comment><USER13> I'm not familiar with those other approaches, but customisable metadata is only half what makes the database filesystem beneficial. Can you specify folders using a query language (via a GUI or otherwise)?

<comment><USER15> Yes. OS X has Smart Folders, whose contents are the results of a Spotlight query.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't see anything new here. Some apps were redesigned to behave a bit like Photos.app, but pretending that adding a menu bar and multiple window support will be an easy port shows an amazing lack of experience. edit: just realized that there are no multiple window apps. So, the distinction of a computer vs a mobile device is gone right there

Organizing files into projects is waved away by "just search through an amorphous blob of data". "Kind: PDF". Who finds files like that?

The user activity thread is nice, but it's clear Apple was already working in this direction with the links timeline in Safari, but all the social service TOS's forbid this kind of presentation and they're super-protective of their presentation to the point even Apple can't negotiate past it at this point.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like the concepts presented here but I cannot shake off the feeling that OS X is pretty much never going to get the love it deserves from Apple.

Apple will just keep improving iOS to be more powerful, more flexible and so on. The iPad Pro with iOS 9 is just a rough draft, it will be iOS 10 or 11 that'll show the hardware off, at least I hope. iOS 9 was probably the biggest jump in productivity for the iPads and hopefully, Apple keeps it going from now on, not neglecting it like it did prior to iOS 9.

<comment><USER17> Well the Mac has had a lot of love poured into it over all these years to get it to where it is today. I enjoy using the Mac in its present incarnation immensely.

<comment><USER18> Could we have with OSX a... gasp... stable platform that is just really good at doing desktop type work?

IOS would have to evolve a lot and in many ways to take over desktop. Maybe it will. Android N seems to be moving there so maybe that's the future.

<comment><USER12> You mean a second Snow Leopard that just fixes bugs and adds overall polish? Yes please!

<comment><USER19> Isn't that pretty much all of the recent OS X releases? What major features did El Capitan add? Yosemite? Mavericks?

I can't think of a single _major_ thing.

At one point they finally got multi monitor support working properly, but I forget when.

<comment><USER12> Mavericks finally brought support for OpenGL 4.1. But granted, that's not something most users will notice.

Also it removed some skeuomorphism, which depending on whether you like it or not counts as a major feature ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would rather have a modern file system optimized for SSDs instead of one with 16bit alignments for the Motorola 68k. It seems like OSX versions are more about tabs in Finder nowadays while Linux (and Windows) actually innovate.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is like looking at Porsche try to make a flatbed truck. It's stupid because it belays all the use cases that the product ctaegory needs.

Designer: design isn't just about looking sleek, it's primarily about meeting the use case as simply and robustly as possible. All these use cases are better on other devices.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not a Mac user; this kind-of looks like Windows 10.

</comment><comment><USER23> Things I would do to make OSX great again:

1\. Fix Finder. 2\. Integrate the iDevice simulator into the OSX: all iOS apps can run on OSX. So let them. 3\. Continue making kick-ass laptop/personal computers, with keyboards and screens and touchscreen, and make the difference between iOS and OSX go away, at the hardware layer.

Plan B:

1\. Put Xcode on iOS. 2\. Make an iOS Touchscreen Laptop (8-core ARM with 16gigs RAM, etc.) 3\. Abandon OSX completely.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can somebody please tell Apple to get color saturation of the GUI back to how it was in the Snow Leopard times? These Lego brick colors are HORRIBLE.

</comment><comment><USER25> This fails to provide any motivation for such a merging/converging iOS/MacOS experience.

Why do I want Netflix and CNN apps that have been so easily (but nonetheless with effort) adapted to support the platform from their iOS counterparts? I expect I'll choose the website in Chrome every time.

<comment><USER26> Personally I'd love to have native apps for media-intensive and "app like" websites. Why? Well, for those sorts of sites a native app will easily perform better and their existence would allow me to dedicate my browser to more lightweight/traditional sites focused on delivering text and images.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd love for the name to switch back to plain _system_ like the old days. So much cooler. I know I have a Mac, it's staring at me every day.

Completely superfluous, of course, and they are probably going with macOS, but one can dream of a more sensible casing future.

<comment><USER28> It hasn't been called "Mac OS X" in several years. It's just "OS X", which is much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is clickbait. There is nothing in here that comes (anywhere) close to XI -- at best, it's OS X 10.12. OS XI will be a paradigm shift -- the way that OS 9 to OS X was -- not just a slightly different UI, desktop picture, and icons.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is way better for e.g. my mother's use case. It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced some kind of "power user shell". I kind of do this already (on Win, Mac, and Linux) by almost exclusively using a terminal window and browser.

edit: "macOS" is absolutely brilliant though. They should go for the throwback hipster vibe.

<comment><USER31> > It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced > some kind of "power user shell"

That sounds like it could work in theory, but I dunno if I'd actually want that as a power user. Mostly because there's more "normal" users out there, I feel like any alternative UI would be neglected. Seems like you'd be consigning yourself to being a second class citizen.

Maybe this works on Linux where there's less of a profit incentive because development on niche WM's and such is largely done by hobbyists, but I'm having a hard time imagining Apple spending a lot of resources on developing something large for a minority of users. Maybe if they opened it up a bit and had some sort of open plugin based build-your-own experience that could shift some of the effort off of them? I could see that working but it doesn't seem in line with Apple's philosophy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> OSX and iOS need to converge into something new and unified. Touch and pen(cils) is becoming standard for new computers in the near future, and tablets with keyboards also need to support touchpad and mouse. It may not have been necessary earlier, but with Surface and iPad Pro it's becoming obvious that these are not completely separate platforms any longer.

<comment><USER6> Can you name an example of desktop software convergence by Apple that went well?

It wrecked Pages, which was one of my favourite software tools prior. I use very little Apple software now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How would you expect 3D Touch to work on a screen that moves if you press on it? You'd need to maintain the laptop screen in one hand while 3D Touch-ing with the other; that's cumbersome.

<comment><USER34> 3D Touch/Force Touch actually currently works on OS X on the 2015 MacBook Pro and the new MacBook. The touchpad doesn't move, it's just pressure sensitive and provides haptic feedback so you feel like you can depress it even more after clicking. OS X provides a dictionary/lookup popover when using it in Safari and some other apps.

<comment><USER33> Oh right; I forgot about the touchpad ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think I'm the sole person on earth who hates touch. I'd switch OS's before I bought a computer with a touch screen.</comment>


JQuery Plugin for Pie Menu (like Path) - <AUTHOR> http://nikesh.github.com/Pie-Menu/

<comment><USER2> Neat, but:

1) What's up with everyone trying to implement this PARTICULAR effect? I'm not saying that fixed-positioned, above-the content menu shall stay unique to Path. But there's no point in copying the same animation, arc of icons, rotation, etc. "Good artists copy, great..." and all this jazz: please steal, and by stealing, make it your own. Now you just copy.

2) The effect has a common CSS bug, where page flashes after animation. I'll send a fix as pull request, but just in case you didn't know how to fix this, the trick is setting 3d-transform(0, 0, 0) on parent object. This activates GPU for that element, and it no longer flashes.

</comment><comment><USER3> The menu is nice, but I'm wondering why no one has implemented the scrolling clock indicator in javascript/CSS. That is actually genuinely useful in some cases. The same goes for an alphabet indicator.

The closest I've seen is sausage.js. <http://christophercliff.github.com/sausage/></comment>


Neurobiologists Reveal The Wisdom Of The Confident - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528941/forget-the-wisdom-of-crowds-neurobiologists-reveal-the-wisdom-of-the-confident/ <comment><USER2> This is the main idea behind prediction markets.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market)

Prediction markets aren't effective because they average over a big crowd; prediction markets are effective because they provide a financial incentive for people who know nothing to bow out of the discussion, leaving only the confident people to form a market consensus.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure it's the same here -- the write-up doesn't mention providing a reward based on correctness. It just says they're weighted based on how little their opinion moves when learning the group's beliefs.

EDIT: I stand corrected. As klochner points out, there was a monetary incentive to get it right, so this is like prediction markets. Not sure why the article doesn't mention this critical part. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032493)

<comment><USER4> I believe the parent is actually saying that the financial incentive is used to select people who know what they are talking about.

It's not necessarily a 1:1 match, but basically that selects for people who believe that they know what they are talking about (and thus are less likely to be swayed by the group opinion). To the extent that the current price of a proposition in prediction markets represents the group opinion, you only expect to win the bet if you think you know better than the group opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Caveat: In this context, "confident" means "updates their belief less after learning the group opinion" \-- i.e. continues to believe what they did before even after knowing the group disagrees.

EDIT: per klochner's correction, the following is wrong, and they did get a monetary incentive, though it's not mentioned in the linked article (only the paper), which is a pretty significant difference!

Note that they did _not_ provide a material incentive for accurate guesses, so I'm honestly surprised that this kind of confidence correlates with correctness. It requires that this feeling of confidence is more likely to happen in people who really do know better compared to those two don't know better. (Per the writeup, if you weight each guess in the average by confidence per this metric, then you get even more accurate answers than the simple mean).

<comment><USER5> _Subjects received monetary payments for each good estimate. Possible rewards were 4, 2, or 1 points if their estimates fell into the 10%, 20%, or 40% intervals around the truth; otherwise, they received no points. The rewards applied to all rounds to make sure that individuals took all of their decisions seriously. The correct answer and the rewards for all five estimates were only disclosed to the subjects after the fifth estimate. This reward structure in- troduced incentives only to find the truth and avoided incentives to conform with others. Furthermore, there were no incentives for strategic considerations. For example, there was no benefit of being better than others or of misleading others, because this did not affect individuals ' payments. There was also no possibility to help others by deviating from the strategy to find the best estimate. Therefore, our experimental design put subjects into a situation in which they would try to get as close to the truth as possible by using their own knowledge and the estimates of others._

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full.pdf)

<comment><USER6> basically this is saying the entire story is pretty much bunk. Its more than a significant omission, it invalidates the entire analysis presented.

<comment><USER7> Seems to me you're proving the point of the article. Rather than contributing independent critical thinking, you're more motivated to pile onto the comments of others, to the point of not even bothering to understand the comment you're piling onto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish the headline made it clear that the 'confidence' it refers to is not the personality trait associated with risk-taking and leadership but the more specific 'confidence' and stubbornness in one's own opinion that one has on a topic when one believes that their opinion is founded on valid information related to that topic that few others are aware of while they were forming their opinions.

<comment><USER9> You took 3 lines to explain the difference between the two meanings. How do you expect the writer to make it clear on a headline?

<comment><USER3> FWIW, I did it in one line [1]. But even better, I think the term "stubborn believers" is a better term and would have decreased the confusion, but note that it requires stubbornness _plus_ disincentive for being wrong to correlate with correctness.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032288](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032288)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Did I interpet something wrong, but isn't "confidence" here something like " _inverse_ herd mentality"? As in, while herd mentality[1] is " _Herd mentality, or mob mentality, describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and /or purchase items._", here "confidence" is exact opposite of that, right?

This is very interesting though, because for example in some subreddits score of a comment (or submission) isn't shown right away, but after a defined delay. This is to combat herd mentality, so that people do not vote something just because others have voted it so-and-so. Instead, it sort of forces individuals to make up their own opinion and vote based on it, thus it sort of forces individuals to be "confident". It doesn't let them delegate the opinion forming to the herd.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> This is research? I'd summarize the results as: "People who actually know answer to an objective question are less likely to change their mind when presented with an alternative than those who don't. Thus one should value their opinions over those of people guessing."

<comment><USER6> Its more than that. This study does not isolate based on knowledge or know how as in 'people who actually know answer to an objective question'. This study isolates based on influence of 'social' stimulus.

<comment><USER11> But the thing is, they specifically don't isolate 'social stimulus'. They offer new information, and those who knew they were guessing revised their estimates. Those who had a good idea of the value did not. There is nothing 'social' here at all.

A better control would be to ask them how sure they were of their answers, and use that to adjust the bias.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Two other interesting recent articles on crowd behavior:

1) Why can't we be better at predicting successes? (movies, music, etc.)

Turns out when the crowd has social information thrown at them (previous number of downloads shown in listing) the ability to predict a success based on quality gets very unpredictable. [http://www.filosofitis.com.ar/archivos/experimentalmarket.pd...](http://www.filosofitis.com.ar/archivos/experimentalmarket.pdf) Social data is a strong force.

2) Rice vs. wheat.

Wheat farming might be a reason why the industrial revolution started in Britain vs. China. Even though China was highly educated, people working in rice farming depend on large groups working collectively. A culture of collectivism then forms. Collectivism has been shown to breed less innovation than cultures where people are more individualistic (wheat farmers). [http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp- content/uploads/20...](http://internationalpsychoanalysis.net/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/RicePsychologyandInnovationScience-2014-Henrich-593-4.pdf)

Thought a discussion of Wisdom of Crowds might enjoy those if you haven't seen them.

<comment><USER13> The industrial revolution starting in Britain as opposed to China is almost certainly completely unrelated to farming methods, and much more related to politics. China during the industrial revolution was in the grip of a very weak, corrupt, and financially mismanaged dynasty. This set the stage for the Opium Wars and continued decline for the next 200 years, a period which has only recently ended. Prior to that, China was one of the most advanced civilisations in the world for most of its history.

Also note that the staple food of most of Northern China (including Xian, Beijing, and huge amounts of the population) is and has historically been, wheat based.

<comment><USER6> Its always key to take these kind of 'indirect' causation in anthropological fields with a huge grain of salt. It might be true but it is not really 'science' if the hypothesis can't be tested quantitatively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think there is an important difference between situations where the truth is objective (and can and will be measured accurately and fairly when the payoff is determined) and situations where the truth is "made", for lack of a better word.

The best example, of course, is financial markets vs weight of an ox. In financial markets, we are often dealing with a "Keynesian beauty contest" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest)). I would doubt that those whose beliefs are insensitive to data concerning the crowd would do well, at least in the short to medium term.

Whereas in weighing an ox at a fair, that truth is absolutely orthogonal to what the crowd thinks (granted, the odds of a bet structure may vary, but the study didn't get into such things AFAIK). There would be no benefit for an informed observer to dilute his prior with the crowd's ideas, so having a concentrated prior may signal experience, inside knowledge, etc. much more clearly than in the above situation.

<comment><USER15> This was famously in the news as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality- based_community](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community)

(where anti-Bush folks mocked Team Bush's supposed irrationality, ignoring the aspect that truth in human sociopolitical issues is not independent of actors' choices)

<comment><USER16> The power of framing is fascinating stuff.

Running through a chain of articles and excerpts from Lakoff and Luntz one week seemed to work wonders for making sense of difficult sociopolitical conversations with certain friends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The famous ox weight example demonstrates the wisdom of crowds, but doesn't seem applicable to this article. I doubt that fairgoers who entered into the contest were conferring each other on the guesses enough to influence each other, as opposed to say debates on public policy.

<comment><USER18> that's why the wisdom of the crowd works better for guessing a slaughtered ox's weight at the fair than it does on HN or Reddit. There is obviously a very large group of very smart individuals who regular HN, to disagree comes with the fear of looking stupid and being downvoted

<comment><USER19> Wait... are you actually, genuinely afraid of being downvoted? It's okay to be wrong sometimes, dude! Sometimes being very wrong is the only way to learn and help you further down the road. You win some, you lose some. If you're afraid of being wrong on the internet anonymously I can only imagine what it's like in the real world...

Maybe this speaks to the timidity/introversion of many HN posters but remember we are also entrepreneurial -- gotta take some risks!

<comment><USER18> haha check out my post history, I am far from afraid of being downvoted, I actually feel like I usually know when I will be downvoted and I still post. I would guess most others would not and that affects the overall quality in a negative way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For those who want more information, the following article provides a good overview of the research on the Wisdom of the Crowd, as well as what are its limits: [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457222](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2457222)

</comment><comment><USER21> I would like to see the outliers from the experiment, see if there was a large group of individuals who were overconfident and made their estimates way off compared to the crowds.</comment>


'Green' energy relies on copper-nickel mining - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/green-energy-relies-on-copper-nickel-mining/566105561/ <comment><USER2> In short: Did you know one must destroy eggs to make an omelette?

Yes, it takes energy and resources to build things, including "green" things. Pointing out that it is non-zero is hardly an insight. The question is (a) whether the result, in net, is better than the current situation and (b) whether the same investment in other techniques will yield even better results.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Cobalt, lots of it. Most of it comes from the Congo, mined by 40,000 child laborers, which compassionate Minnesotans refer to as child slave labor."

The author forgot to mention, that cobalt plays a vital role in catalysing the removal of sulphur from oil, so not only 'green' energy relies on cobalt mining.

<comment><USER4> That's because in their article all they've done is parrot oil and gas industry talking points.

Even when the electricity is generated by fossil sources, the lifetime impact of an electric vehicle is smaller than a conventional vehicle: [https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric- vehicles-...](https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles- help-to-tackle-climate-change)

Cobalt use in lithium-ion batteries is falling: [https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-batteries-cobalt- vol...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-batteries-cobalt-volkswagen/)

Ironically however what I feel the case is being made for is not his 'all of the above' energy policy- that doesn't follow from the facts. It supports investment in nuclear energy and decreased consumption.</comment></comment>


Chrome 55 chooses HTML5 over Flash by default, drastically reduces RAM usage - <AUTHOR> http://www.techspot.com/news/67268-chrome-55-now-available-loads-html5-over-flash.html <comment><USER2> This article is inaccurate. There is no Top 10 list.

According to the Google HBD plan, the browser uses the Site Engagement metric.

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/106_KLNJfwb9L-1hVVa4i...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/106_KLNJfwb9L-1hVVa4i29aw1YXUy9qFX- Ye4kvJj-4/edit#slide=id.p)

<comment><USER3> Yes, the last page of that presentation says:

There is no longer _any_ notion of a Whitelist for this feature The original proposal called for seeding the feature with a list of sites who had Flash usage above 1% (i.e. a "Top 10" list), to limit over-prompting. Instead we have updated our design to use Site Engagement to better tailor our enablement, of the feature, based on the browsing habits of the end user (i.e. it's a reflection of the sites that they visit).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems to be disabled by default. I can enable the new behavior by going to chrome://flags/#prefer-html-over-flash, but when I set that flag to "default" Flash works the same as before.

Has Google confirmed this actually made it into Chrome 55? Their blog post[1] about the release doesn't mention it. One of the article's sources is from earlier this year, and the developer thread they link to has been quiet for about a month. I wonder if plans changed and they're leaving it behind a flag for now, or if they're A/B testing it somehow.

[1] [https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2016/12/stable- cha...](https://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2016/12/stable-channel- update-for-desktop.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> > An exception to this rule only applies to the top 10 websites that use Flash > (and only for a year). Those sites are: YouTube.com, Facebook.com, > Yahoo.com, VK.com, Live.com, Yandex.ru, OK.ru, Twitch.tv, Amazon.com and > Mail.ru.

I think net neutrality is good for PR, but whenever they have to make a decision...

<comment><USER6> Why is twitch on there? They switched to entirely HTML5 a few months ago

Edit: And youtube? And Facebook? I have flash disabled (chrome://plugins) and haven't seen any issues on any of those sites.

<comment><USER7> You can turn the Twitch HTML5 player off. I had to do this on my laptop (chrome on macos) a few months ago because the HTML5 player was too unstable. Like, I didn't even know they had made the change, I was just losing my mind because I couldn't reliably watch stuff, and noticed it in the settings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Who and why are still using Flash?

<comment><USER9> Many BBC videos, if you don't use an iPad useragent.

<comment><USER10> They seem to have at least made iPlayer available without Flash now. That was a nice surprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> v56 also cut memory consumption, it was so dramatic compared to v53 that it registered as an accounting change to my brain.

</comment><comment><USER12> For a second I thought someone implemented a HTML5 renderer in Flash, thank god that's not the case...

<comment><USER13> Yes, I thought something similar.

"Chooses HTML5 over Flash" or "prefers HTML5 to Flash" might be better phrasing than "loads HTML5 over Flash"

<comment><USER14> Ok, s/load/choose/ it is.</comment></comment></comment>


Any ideas on this? - <AUTHOR>

I am a web developer who will be in west africa for the next 6 months, and i have an idea for a web/mobile application that allows urgent news and information to be pushed to the web and down to subscribers mobile phones via text messages. The problem i have now is getting a way of sending text messages free to subscribers, since i want to service free of charge (for obvious reasons) and i also want the service to be self sustaining without burning a hole in my pocket. Thanks guys for your ideas on this. <comment><USER2> can you figure out a way to use twitter for this? they underwrite your text messaging costs.</comment>


How a Hacker Convinced Motorola to Send Him Source Code - <AUTHOR> https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/greatest-moments-hacking-history-how-hacker-kevin-mitnick-convinced-motorola-to-send-him-source-cod/5be34b30be407717f146888a <comment><USER2> Christ, what an asshole. (The security manager, I mean. Dude: you had one job.)</comment>


College students push back against full tuition after classes move online - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/04/16/college-students-are-rebelling-against-full-tuition-after-classes-move-online/ <comment><USER2> Partition the savings equitably</comment>