LED Inventor and Employer Settle for $8.1M (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/business/worldbusiness/12light.html?_r=1&

<comment><USER2> He did also just pick up a Nobel prize today, so that ain't half bad...

<comment><USER3> And the Millennium Technology Prize in 2006. Its award is 1 million euros.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was peanut money compared to the value of the invention.

<comment><USER5> The Lipitor guy ($135b in sales) didn't get a cent on top of his salary (which many here would scoff at were it offered to them) -- and he has been laid off twice since then. In the sciences this kind of thing is the rule, not the exception.

And before HN starts with the "He deserves exactly what he got because he didn't negotiate for equity," I would like to point out that looking for a job in research science is nothing like looking for a job in software engineering. Scientists are seldom in a position to make demands. The market simply does not value science. It places plenty of value on the products which science is the rate-limiting step in creating, but because basic science is effectively a non-excludable good it seldom gets to capture any appreciable fraction of the value it creates. The patent system was a valiant attempt to fix this, but it hasn't lived up to anybody's hopes.

> "That sucks. I'm glad I'm not a scientist!"

Just hope that in 30 years when you get diagnosed with cancer your cure won't be in the set {things that would have been discovered if medical research had gotten >2% of health care expenditures} \ {things that were discovered anyway}. This is a problem that affects us all.

<comment><USER6> > The market simply does not value science.

Not true. It values science.

It just doesn't value most scientists. If you produce high quality science on a consistent, constant basis ... trust me, you'll get the big $$$.

But if you get lucky because you stumbled on something great, that's not science. That's winning the lottery. And you didn't win the lottery, your employer did. Your employer knows it had nothing to do with you and had everything to do with luck.

If Lipitor guy had a convincing argument that he could have another $135b breakthrough, that he could be consistent, do you really think everybody would tell him to screw off? I bet they would easily lay half that amount at his feet.

<comment><USER5> > But if you get lucky because you stumbled on something great, that's not > science.

No, that's exactly how science works. The consistent delivery of predictable desired results is called engineering, not science.

The rest of your post revolves around this misunderstanding, so I won't insult you by repeating myself.

<comment><USER6> > No, that's exactly how science works.

No, it doesn't. There have been an ample number of scientists that have produced spectacular work on a consistent basis. No luck involved. And they have been highly valued.

What you don't want to admit is that scientists are like basketball players when it comes to how they're valued. You're either a superstar or you're worthless ... and being really good is equivalent to being worthless. You need to be spectacular.

I'm not trying to offend, that's just how the market works. I don't see anybody complaining about the market dynamics of athletes.

<comment><USER5> First of all, these are two distinct claims:

1\. The market undervalues science and scientists

2\. Science is sub-optimally close to the "extremistan" end of the "extremistan-mediocristan" spectrum

I believe both (why do you think I would "not want to admit" #2?), but the claim I have been making is #1. The existence of well-compensated scientists is not evidence against #1 because #1 is an aggregate statement and #2 should guarantee the existence of well-compensated scientists regardless of #1.

Now let's talk about #2.

> There have been an ample number of scientists that have produced spectacular > work on a consistent basis. No luck involved.

Examples?

Before you try to p-hack this one, let me specify the null model: scientist as prospector. Like gold in the ground, ideas cluster. Skill and resources determine your rate of sifting through earth, but at the end of the day initial positioning matters a hell of a lot. The founders of a new field are all but guaranteed decades of consistent productivity, but in order to maximize the amount of gold dug out of the ground it still makes sense to devote considerable resources to surveyors who haven't yet hit paydirt.

What would I see as evidence of the "skill" view? Einstein before 1906. People who are able to consistently make breakthroughs.

What do I see as counterevidence? Einstein after 1906. An overabundance of one-hit-wonders. Hundreds of theoretical papers in the arXiv that make the construction of GR look like a rite of passage rather than a singular achievement -- with the exception that Einstein happened to be right where they happened to be wrong or useless (it's not like either could tell ahead of time how things would turn out). Epistemology: correct useful ideas are very, very sparse in the set of plausible ideas.

> I don't see anybody complaining about the market dynamics of athletes.

Doubling the number of competent-but-not-superstar basketball players would add little marginal value (more games, maybe).

Doubling the number of competent-but-not-superstar scientists would about double the marginal discovery rate of science, assuming the scientist-as- prospector model.

<comment><USER6> > Doubling the number of competent-but-not-superstar scientists would about > double the marginal discovery rate of science, assuming the scientist-as- > prospector model.

Right. I reject that assumption. Because science has nothing to do with luck. You provided zero evidence to suggest that it does.

I would posit that there is substantial skill and talent involved in properly positioning yourself to be one of the "founders of a new field". It has nothing to do with luck.

Since it has nothing to do with luck, doubling or tripling the number of individuals who don't have the capacity to properly position themselves changes nothing. It just wastes resources on useless fields that produce nothing valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> $8.1M will buy you everything you need for the rest of your life. I'm glad that this was the outcome, and I hope that he's now leading a happy life!

<comment><USER3> He seems to be doing quite well.

[http://ssleec.ucsb.edu/nakamura](http://ssleec.ucsb.edu/nakamura)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It may seem small, but for some reason it feels like a big win.</comment>


This blogger.com profile is squatting YC founder's names - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogger.com/profile/08940238965281804762

<comment><USER2> Why would this be an issue?

That is, why is this an issue that's any more important than that Chinese ISP that keeps sending you emails about the .cn version of your domain name? Having yourname.blogspot.com wasn't a priority yesterday, so why is it in any way bad news to find that it's not available today?

There are a million places to register unique names for things. Some (like .com domains) have value, some (like Geocities profiles, square feet of peat at the Lagavulin distillery, and .blogspot.com subdomains) do not.

<comment><USER3> That would be the other Islay single malt, Laphroaig.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Every time I see Blogger.com I'm always shocked that the site still looks exactly like it did years ago -- it's had even has less TLC than Yahoo! has given Flickr. It really speaks volumes about a lack of focus at Google -- in the time Blogger has atrophied we've seen the likes of Movable Type, Wordpress and Tumblr arrive on the scene -- so that's at least three generations of blog that blogger.com is behind at current count. Honestly someone squatting on a blogger namespace seems almost as silly as setting up a myspace page at this point...

<comment><USER5> You imply Flickr's gotten no love from Yahoo!, but that's not true at all. Just last year they completely revemped one of the most important pages on their site: The photo page - [http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/06/23/a-new- photo-experience-...](http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/06/23/a-new-photo- experience-your-photos-happier/)

And they've made lots of improvements all over the site over the years. Flickr is one of the remaining products at Yahoo! that's gotten any serious love lately.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. A _lot_ of hard work went into the photo page redesign/rebuild. It's difficult majorly overhauling a site that serves so many different needs to so many different kinds of users.

<comment><USER7> Too bad for all that work, it just got worse.

The photo view experience on Flickr is slower than any of its competitors. Slow slow sloooooow.

Plus recently, some of my photos have started to break (as in broken images).

It just feels like it's dead.

Incremental improvements (that aren't always improvements) aren't what Flickr needs. They need some vision and balls.

<comment><USER6> Hi, sorry you've had some difficulties with the site. We've made performance a big focus on the photo page but there's other sections of the site we're still trying to make faster. Regarding the broken images, we should be all clear on that (we recently brought up a new image cluster), so if you're still seeing that, let me know. I'm caudill @ yahoo-inc.com.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FFeY7yQ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FFeY7yQFJBAJ:www.blogger.com/profile/08940238965281804762+http://www.blogger.com/profile/08940238965281804762&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=sg&source=www.google.com.sg)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like blogger/google took it down.

<comment><USER10> Selling accounts like he was seems to be in violation of the blogger terms of use, relevant section: "7. No Resale of the Service. Unless expressly authorized in writing by Google, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes (a) any portion of the Service, (b) use of the Service, or (c) access to the Service."

Although I didn't see any way to report the violation.

<comment><USER11> Was he reselling blogger accounts or just domains?

<comment><USER10> Seems it was selling domains (that's what happens when skimming and not paying attention to URLs) but blogger was being used as a placeholder and directory type thing, so that probably falls into the category of "exploit for any commercial purposes"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone contacted him? I've always wondered what user names go for. Anyone thought of making an exchange for these? Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin URLs?

<comment><USER13> I'm thinking about proposing to buy it for an amount covering his cost except a dollar. He will still lose money (which should serve as a valuable lesson), but not as much as if I never buy it - and I really don't need it anyway...

<comment><USER14> Why would he accept?

<comment><USER13> What would you pick: lose a dollar or lose the cost of a domain? (the cost of a domain is still more than dollar)

<comment><USER15> What if the satisfaction of not selling it to you is worth more than a dollar to him/her?

<comment><USER16> Boy I can't believe you were going to pay 500 bucks for a .com domain with your name. The guy who's owning mine is asking for not less than $6K so I just went for the '.me' which is at least as nice looking as '.com' and adds a cool factor to your emails/business cards. Everyone seems not to believe that your email can be email@example.com but I'd say that it looks catchy aint it?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, much better uses for $6k....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> squatting on YC companies seems to be popular.

For example a few weeks ago airnb.com sold for 5 grand on GoDaddy.

<comment><USER19> I just realized—it's probably a great investment to buy common misspellings of your own company's name. They can bring more traffic to your site (and keep you from having to pay name sharks.) If your company decides they don't need them, you can probably flip them for a big profit.

<comment><USER20> When launching Truemors, Guy Kawasaki registered 55 domains to "surround" truemors.com.

This represented 9% of his total budget.

(From Kawasaki's 2008 book Reality Check).

<comment><USER21> was it worth it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> who cares?</comment>


I Killed Heroku -- Here's How - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekatsea.com/heroku-goes-kaboom

<comment><USER2> To be clear, this was mostly my fault. My heroku-rails gem had a terrible flaw.

It's now fixed on version 0.4.0 of heroku-rails gem <https://github.com/railsjedi/heroku-rails/issues/7>

<comment><AUTHOR> Dude, that's not really your flaw. Open Source pretty much means "use at your own risk" and the fact that Heroku just lets your wipe everything clean; that's pretty bad design.

p.s. Mind you, I don't pay Heroku enough to respond to my "omfg everything just died requests", but while MongoHQ responded in less than 1 hour, Heroku sent me an email in the morning, and w/out any steps to resolution :(</comment></comment>


What is the best single board computer for my project? - <AUTHOR> I have been looking for the right iot device to make a wifi router. Ideally it would have Ethernet in, 1 Ethernet out port, use open wrt or another open source software and be as small as possible. Does anyone have suggestions, experience with this type of project? <comment><USER2> banana pi makes a router board. [http://www.banana- pi.com/eacp_view.asp?id=64](http://www.banana-pi.com/eacp_view.asp?id=64) Or, you could get the tp-link travel router and flash open-wrt. [https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=325251#p325251](https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=325251#p325251)</comment>


Instagram grows to 1M active advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/22/instagram-grows-to-1m-active-advertisers-plans-to-add-more-data-and-direct-booking/ <comment><USER2> Instagram has become my favourite platform. Every time I log into Facebook all I see is a wall of poor quality shared posts ranging from random truck videos to fake news.

The relative quiet on Instagram, knowing I'm going to be getting only photos is serene.

<comment><USER3> Same. I use Facebook for nothing but messaging now, and have every other feature blocked with my adblocker.

<comment><USER4> You can use messenger directly at [https://www.messenger.com/](https://www.messenger.com/)

<comment><USER5> Is there a tinfoil to just use Messenger?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what you mean, but it's now possible to deactivate your FB account and continue to use Messenger.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I was asking if there is something similar to Tinfoil for Facebook, [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco.fbwrapper&hl=en) , but just for Messenger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Has anyone noticed a huge influx of ads when using Instagram? Admittedly I'm an infrequent user but as I use Facebook less I find that time being spent on IG.

One technique that has worked for me to reduce the number of ads I see is to report every single one as "I find this offensive". Do that enough times and you won't see an ad for a long time.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if they have some system in place to notice and counter-act this.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps, but in today's world if you tell a company you find something offensive they're likely to listen (for fear of PR fallout). Admittedly, I find all ads offensive (to my time) so it's disingenuous but it works—for now—so I'll keep doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Instagram is awesome. I wish Facebook did not own them and Instagram stayed independent like Snapchat.

<comment><USER10> What would be different if Instagram was independent?

<comment><USER11> Facebook has become a privacy nightmare and has numerous concerns w/r/t ownership and management. Their role is the only reason I have any hesitation using Instagram, though I do fully embrace the platform anyway.

<comment><USER12> Can you articulate what it is about Facebook that is a 'privacy nightmare'?

<comment><USER13> not sure what the poster was talking about but the advertising became creepily targeted

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used to love Instagram, but since I tried to register an account for a new business (which it blocked before I could even sign in, thus consigning the username into oblivion) I haven't been able to log back into my personal account. It keeps sending me through a verify phase because of suspicious activity on my account. This leads to my successfully verifying, and then ending up at a 500 server error page, or a bad request 400 error page.[0] Attempts to search for this on the Instagram help page.. oh my gosh, I get as far as typing two characters into the search box and it locks me out saying I'm too fast. [1] (the search box is search as you type.) I try and report that as an error using an included link on that page, and low and behold that page is also having problems. [2]

It's a bit of a cluster... in my experience.

I really want to get back into my Instagram account!

I'm missing out getting advertised too, and I'm missing out advertising to others, it's pretty much a double whammy!

P.S. I'd love to prove I'm not a dirty spammer and get into the new business account too, but all attempts to fill out that form with the relevant evidence on Facebook/Instagram has been ignored.

[0] [http://imgur.com/UMp6TTV](http://imgur.com/UMp6TTV) [1] [http://imgur.com/bbQtPPL](http://imgur.com/bbQtPPL) [2] [http://imgur.com/BTgNLAY](http://imgur.com/BTgNLAY)

<comment><USER15> Oh, I had something similar happen. I had 3 (legitimate) accounts banned at the same time, for no reason. When I went through the verification process, the upload button wouldn't work, and the contact link would give a 400. Some weeks later it started working, but basically it's a clusterf __*k. It 's a clear example of a dumb system, caused by artificial stupidity (AI in practice) and poor organisation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Instagram has a real ad quality problem. I routinely get ads like "99 percent off Yeezy's!!!!!" This links to clear scam websites.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, ads are targeted based on your social graph. I routinely see ads relevant to my lifestyle or occupation, never those for spammy products or trashy memes.

<comment><USER13> not sure about that. if anything its most likely location because this summer when i was in silicon valley i got ads for jobs. however on my college campus its these trashy ones.

<comment><USER16> I'm getting location based too. Which is always interesting as the ads are in Japanese, so I can't even read them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whenever you create an ad on FB, it is also placed on Instagram by default. I wonder how many out of that 1M were people who didn't disable the default.

</comment><comment><USER18> Has anyone else had the experience of seeing almost zero ads on Instagram since they introduced them? I can count the number I've seen on one hand. I marked the first couple, right after they launched them, as not relevant (they weren't) and since then I think I've seen two, one in the feed and one in their Stories feature.

</comment><comment><USER19> There's actually an interesting comment on the article itself:

> Kind of misleading...when you start advertising on Facebook it automatically > opts you in to advertising on Instagram.

I don't know if this is true or not but that could certainly explain how their advertiser numbers ballooned like that.

<comment><USER20> It is true. Every ad, promotion, or boosted post defaults to placement in news feeds on FB desktop and mobile, and Instagram.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's funny because when you want to buy ads on facebook, you spend something like 80% of budget on facebook and the remaining 20% on instagram by default

<comment><USER22> There is a clear option to define the placement of the ad, and turning off Instagram is the first option you see.

<comment><USER23> There is a real power in the default options though - and when the FB ads first started allowing IG as a placement it wasn't the case.

<comment><USER24> i agree, loads of casual FB advertisers surely just leave on Instagram

the power of the Adwords and FB Ads customer base is sometimes overlooked I find. if Instagram stayed independent and had to build their own ad-customer base, would they have been as successful?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Instagram was cool, now it's going downhill in my opinion due to many spam accounts. Here is my highly opinionated piece on it:

[https://medium.com/@AndyStannard/an-open-letter-to- instagram...](https://medium.com/@AndyStannard/an-open-letter-to- instagram-c59258073563#.bfazod73g)

</comment><comment><USER26> The advertisements on IG are pretty good. I find that I want to buy about 40% of the products they advertise to me. That's as good as I've seen in 20 years of web browsing.

</comment><comment><USER27> Full Disclosure: I'm the developer of statimgram.com

I believe Instagram will continue to keep growing, and I wanted to help advertisers and users to have more tools to engage and reach their followers.

Now with statimgram, you can schedule and post from the browser not only regular posts, but also directly into IG stories.

We are launching next week, and I'm opening the API to developers as well, if you want early access please message me.

<comment><USER9> Does this violate their terms of service? I've heard they do not want desktop uploading or any form of uploading media through the API. I can't seem to find an API reference for uploading on api.instagram.com

<comment><USER27> We provide a full "end to end" posting service requiring no intervention from you after you have scheduled your posts (no push notifications to your phone and you having to open the Instagram app to post it for example. We don't use IG's API.

<comment><USER28> > We don't use IG's API.

This suggests that you're either using people, have found an effective automated method, or have reached agreement with IG.

If the first: how well will that scale with growth? If the second: what happens when the block this current method, or otherwise block your ability to do this because it violates some obscure ToS clause?

If the third: congratulations and best of luck!

<comment><USER27> All I can say is that this is indeed an automated method. All that IG receives is a https call from an Android phone. We can't go on details because this is our secret sauce (but we are opening our API so other developers can do the same).

<comment><USER24> is this the secret sauce? [https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram- API](https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram-API)

the work the Spanish developer puts into this 3rd party API is crazy and all the issues are from Indian spammers demanding he fixes it!

<comment><USER29> This one seems fairly representable, and great: [https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram- API/issues/1097](https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram-API/issues/1097)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/05/21/manipulating-app-store-reviews-with-dark-patterns/

<comment><USER2> I agree with the overall premise of the article, in that these examples are in fact exploiting UI design patterns to funnel users into _not_ being able to painlessly leave negative reviews. But i want to offer a different perspective for consideration other than "this is evil".

As a developer of apps, you provide software that tries to fulfill a specific need of some subset of users (in other words, it's not merely an uber-fart- generator). You genuinely build this app to the best of your ability and push it to the app store. Users trickle in, based on the app description and find that, for example, it lacks polish or it doesn't have feature X yet, which is relevant to the app's domain and to the user, but is not currently implemented. In other words, there is a mismatch between user expectations and the app-provided experience.

Instinctively, these users feel the urge to leave a negative rating. It's a knee-jerk reaction. As a developer, I want the user to engage me, because obviously I have an app that is not quite there yet. I want the user to tell me what they want fixed before leaving a negative review, so that i can satisfy their needs without burying the app. By funneling him into such a feedback loop, I can better my app and in turn help him fulfill his needs best.

Is this unethical, or evil? I say no. Apple outright banning these unethical -- as the author considers them -- design patterns, would also have a detrimental effect on many legitimate use cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it is unethical to make more of an effort to persuade happy users to leave a review. In fact, I find the "send love" option quite brilliant.

What I do find a bit appalling is outright tricking the user to think they are leaving a review to help other users make an educated decision on whether to download/purchase this app using a faux review form that leads nowhere, as in the last example. This is deceptive and in in a way it's almost comparable to phishing. I think that "posing as an official Apple feedback channel with the intention to censor bad reviews" would be a pretty natural addition to Apple's Terms & Conditions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi there. This is ouriel co-founder of appsfire

Thanks for the comments and interesting conversation. Here is a comment i just posted to the author of the post. I hope it brings some light on the situation.

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

i wanted to follow up on your note regarding app booster.

First off App booster is a dialog system between the developer and the user. It includes a among other elements a simple feedback system which is not a review UI. It is a way for users to simply and directly contact the developers. Like thousands of apps we had at the beginning a simple email feedback system, but we realized that all it was creating was poor quality feedback - mostly blank emails. Many developers were in the same situation. So we decided to create our own app specific, mobile feedback system.

The idea behind this feedback system was, unlike the app store, to allow the developer to have a chance to respond before the user posts a bad review. Many times bad reviews are published for the wrong reasons and are wrongly attributed to the developer who has no chance to answer in the app store (eg users complaining of an app performing poorly, when the problem was the wifi connection or poor 3G connection..). We had to create a system that allow the developer to have a chance to answer first. If we were suggesting the user to drop a negative review in the app store, then we would simply kill that possibility.

When a positive feedback is sent, it is mostly likely one that does not need an answer and it felt right to entice the user to visit the app store to publish a review there. Note that unlike other methods you are describing in your post this is not forced to all users by a popup, It is natively integrated in the flow of a user already satisfied in the app. Jumping from there to the app store is not incentivized or rewarded in anyway (your post does not mention those methods used by many apps who will ask for a like on Facebook or pay users to review apps which are clearly manipulative methods). The review comes in context in a full optin way, with no tricks.

When using App booster, Users know they are not submitting a review to the App store and they send "Feedback" to the developer because this is the app messaging system. I am not sure why you would consider it differently and i would suggest an edit to your post. You seem to indicate we may try to confuse user with that approach?

We don't agree with your interpretation this is manipulation. As a matter of fact we believe this is the right thing to do. It just makes things right for the developer and the user. No one is forcing any one and a real dialog can take place. The real problem is that the review system is broken in the app store. It is being gamed, it is being manipulated, but you should look in a different direction: look at services paying or rewarding users creating massive pattern of ratings in a matter of hours.

For the record we created for our quality index (App score) a system that detects abnormal rating patterns. We know a little about that. [http://blog.appsfire.com/introducing-the-appsfire-app- score-...](http://blog.appsfire.com/introducing-the-appsfire-app-score-the- ultimate-quality-score-for-mobile-apps/)

App booster is an user friendly, developer friendly way to re-establish what the app store has never offered: a direct dialog channel with the user and a smart feedback system to treat efficiently bad and good feedback.

Let me know if you have more questions

PS: We actually showed our system to some people at Apple who actually reacted very positively to the initiative.

<comment><USER4> Article author here.

It's true that Apple's App Store design encourages users to vent into reviews because it does not provide a straightforward way to contact the developers or raise a support ticket. This is bad and it really needs fixing.

However, your approach is not neutral. Let's just take a look at the logic (diagram from article):

[http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp- content/uploads/2012...](http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/05/appsfire-export.png)

After a user submits positive feedback, they are invited to leave a review. After a user submits negative feedback, they are not invited to do so - only a highly motivated user would then bother to leave the app, find the entry in the App Store and write a review there. What's more, it's hard to say whether some users will even understand the difference between your internal feedback UI and the Apple App Store review UI. i.e. they might think that your feedback form posts into the App Store reviews area.

For the record, the article does not claim "this is evil" (as kgtm stated earlier). It simply states that the appsfire interface fits the definition of a dark pattern. Whether you think it's ethical or not, you have to agree that the UI is somewhat manipulative.

<comment><USER5> Well, if an app author is going to go the extra mile and write a mechanism to complement apple's deficient review system, you can't really ask them to be neutral while doing so. Think about it for a second, how could they have done it differently? The only viable option is to remove the link to leaving a review after the positive feedback and that's removing functionality(If I found an app useful I want to help the developer by leaving a positive review). I can't really blame anyone for not adding a link to leaving a review after the user has given negative feedback, I definitely wouldn't to it.

Furthermore, I don't use iOS, but if review patterns are similar to those on Android(and I can't really see why they wouldn't be) then I can really see where the app's author is coming from. Most negative reviews I've seen(especially on actually good apps) have been things like "1-star doesn't work!" in a sea of "5-star awesome app!". You can hardly blame a developer for wanting to know how it "doesn't work" instead of just getting a vague review that doesn't explain anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _If the user taps the green thumbs up icon and submits the form, they are invited to leave an App Store review. If they tap the red thumbs down icon, what happens? Nothing. They are given no easy way to post-up their negative review._

I don't think this is unethical. I don't know anyone who encourages unhappy customers to write reviews, on or off the app store.

<comment><USER7> "If you can find a subtle way to segment your users by their sentiment towards your app, you can then ask one of those segments to write reviews and not the other, thus skewing the ratings."

It skews the ratings in your favor, deceiving future users about the actual quality of the app.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's more deceptive than putting favorable reviews on the back of a book, or those any ads where they get actual customers to review a product. The app store is both a promotional channel and a marketplace.

<comment><USER8> Interesting point, however the main difference between a printed book and the app store is that the product on the app store can be constantly changing based on the user feedback. If reviews are inherently prejudiced in one direction, does that leave much incentive for developers to improve their app?

On the other hand, a private engagement directly with developers could prove to be more beneficial since it allows developers know of shortcomings/user- expectations without negatively affecting the overall ratings. This way, they can improve the app without having lingering negative comments affect the perception of their updates.

<comment><USER6> _If reviews are inherently prejudiced in one direction, does that leave much incentive for developers to improve their app?_

Well these aren't fake reviews that appear out of thin air. The reviews may be "biased" but they're still written by real, mostly happy, users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you haven't used Appirater, the article doesn't make it clear that one way to use it is to only nag users for a review after they've hit a "significant event" like completing all the levels or improving their score or whatever.

<comment><USER10> I did exactly this in one of my android app. When the user successfully finishes the games, he will be given an option to either rate the game on Google play or retry the game again. If he fails to complete the game, he will just be allowed to retry/quit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's not unethical. It's not like they're paying reviewers to put positive reviews for their app. I know a lot of people who are doing that... $50 for 100 positive reviews, 5 stars.. Now THAT's unethical.

</comment><comment><USER12> For the lazy: Is there any short summary or one liner about what dark patterns are?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure this method works great, but the funny thing is you don't even have to go nearly this far. We use a custom bit of code that presents a dialog almost exactly like the one in the first picture. (We even localized it along with the app.)

The dialog is only set to show when the customer has used the app past the period of time where most people who aren't going to stick around will have abandoned it[1]. Thus, we simply only show the "please review the app" request to people who have already decided they like the app.

The difference between this method and the one presented in the article is this-- every user of our app, who becomes a "regular" user, gets asked to leave a review. The "dark method" only asked those who decide they want to give feedback of some kind to give a review.

So, of course, those who are still grudgingly using our app past the %80 cutoff will be asked to leave reviews and they leave some medium or negative reviews.

But here's the big secret of the appstore that I've never seen anyone mention-- reviews boost sales, even bad ones. Getting a sufficient quantity of reviews over some period, with a sufficiently high net positive value for those reviews, causes Apple to feature your app more in cross-selling opportunities (like the iTunes receipt or the "customers of this app also bought..." box).

So, I'd stick with our current method where every long term user of the app is asked to leave a review, over only asking those who have decided to leave feedback.

The app whose had this feature the longest is currently at 4.5 stars and is getting regular reviews. Another app that was a MVP that failed (but is still a good highly rated app) doesn't have this feature (cause its an MVP) and gets far fewer reviews as a percentage of its user base.

[1] This is part of the reason app prices are so cheap. People use the app store as a place to impulse buy small items. So they want apps to be cheap because often they aren't going to use them long, or they are just trying them out.</comment>


Small functions to functionally augment ruby. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/thoughtnirvana/functional

<comment><USER2> I wrote a similar thing a few months ago.

[https://github.com/stefanpenner/rebinder/blob/master/lib/reb...](https://github.com/stefanpenner/rebinder/blob/master/lib/rebinder.rb)

My syntax was far more sarcastic and less legitimate, however. eg:

        add = Fixnum.☃.+
        add3 = add.∂(3)
        assert_equal 7, add3.☏(4)

The fun bit is that this implementation doesn't actually use lambdas, but rather (Unbound)Method instances.

</comment><comment><USER3> Naive fibonacci is a much more interesting example for memoize than factorial:

        fib = +lambda {|n| return 1 if n <= 1; fib[n-2] + fib[n-1]}

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I added that to tests and README. Except that I have

        fib = +lambda {|n| return n if n <= 1; fib[n-1] + fib[n-1] }

My fibonacci is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3.. and yours is 1, 1, 2, 3... but doesn't make a difference as far as example goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's with the [] notation? Isn't there a way to "overload" the () in ruby? I.e.

(sqr * inc)(5) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome to Ruby - Ruby has procs, blocks, lambdas, methods which are similar yet different.

Blocks aren't objects - when they are converted to objects, they become procs. Procs are like blocks and lambdas are like methods, but you can't call either of them with () syntax.

And then there are multiple ways to call them:

      f.call()
      f[]
      f.()

Take your pick.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Translating my site to Chinese - Traditional or Simplified? - <AUTHOR>

What's better and more popular in order to target a lot of Chinese: Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese? The site has mobile phone related contents and basic tech vocabular <comment><USER2> Traditional: Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Simplified: Mainland China.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

To get the highest reach => simplified

To get a good reach with better purchasing power => traditional

Best => both

Is this right? And with which would you start, higher reach or better purchasing power?

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't characterize the languages in those terms. It really boils down to who your site needs to reach. If it needs to be read by people in Mainland China, simplified is the way to go. If it needs to be read by people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and pretty much anywhere else, it should be in Traditional Chinese.

Preferred language is tied to regions, not purchasing power. What I mean is that it's not something like "the rich learn Traditional and the poor learn Simplified", it's kind of like whether a person grew up learning the English spelling of a word or the American one. Except the differences aren't as subtle as they are in English.

If you're not sure which geographic group you're trying to reach, you should translate the site into both Traditional and Simplified. However, don't expect the same translated site to reach both groups, especially if you're going to be using tech vocabulary since that varies even more from place to place.

<comment><USER4> Singapore and Malaysia reads Simplified Chinese and not Traditional Chinese.

Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan reads Traditional Chinese. While simplified Chinese is getting much more popular in Hong Kong, some of Hong Kong's traditional Chinese is meant to be read in Cantonese, a dialect. So it's not so straightforward.

I doubt there is a correlation between Traditional/Simplified Chinese and purchasing power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Traditional Chinese is better, because even people from china can read them. but for example Simplified, some Taiwanese and HonKongese can't read.

</comment><comment><USER6> Use Simplified Chinese you can definitely cover more people.

If you use Traditional Chinese you may cover only 1/10 of the people(Taiwan, Guangdong, HK, some oversea Chinese) of Chinese people if not less.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the comments!

It's not about traditional or simplified. It's about which first. We are rolling out to all languages world-wide and wanna start with the most relevant ones for getting high reach fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Go with simplified. Your target audience can more than likely comprehend both and simplified is MUCH more common outside of newspapers and government documents.</comment>


Show HN: Create thousands of videos from a Google sheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.moovly.com/products/video-automator <comment><USER2> Really excited for this as a Real Estate Salesperson. I'm technically aware but not competent enough to figure this out on my own without spending a month or two trending it out - time I don't have. Made an inquiry already and waiting for an email from "Bob"

<comment><USER3> This seems like a bizarre comment for HN; first the job you hold seems unique on this particular news forum, and second, your statement about not understanding.

What do you mean by "trending this out"? What do you mean by "time I don't have"?

As a Real Estate Salesperson, how would this product fit into (I'm assuming) advertising and sales efforts?

<comment><USER2> Not sure how it autocorrected to trending, but I meant to say "learn and figure it out" :-/

And yes the product fit is automated videos for my own listings and promotion of others in the industry (attracts buyers).

<comment><USER3> That makes more sense. Thank you for replying.

I'm pretty blind to video ads at this point; how do you get videos in front of people that want what you have?

<comment><USER4> two big sources you can buy video views from are google and facebook. they allow most of the same targeting as their other types of ad campaigns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google sheets is one simple example of a data source by which videos can be produced en mass using the Moovly API. Via the API videos can be produced in volume (e.g. personalisation) or on demand when data changes (e.g. ECommerce product review score or price changes). Try it, I'd be interested to hear of other applications or uses.

</comment><comment><USER6> It looks neat product. Wonder which technology is used to render videos.

<comment><USER7> I made a proof of concept of a more narrow system with reveal.js and phamtomjs. Everything than you can run on a browser can be easylly automated to a video.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I spent same effort with reveal.js but I found it not very convenient. Assuming you have used phantomjs for capturing frames. I preferred screen capture since my requirement is to use sound and synchronize slide timings to length of sounds. I skipped extra step of capturing frame-by-frame and merging sound and pictures with separate process. Screen capture part made my pipeline semi-automated. I was searching good approach since then but cannot find any solution elegant than Flash. It is dead tech but even today I cannot find real alternative to Flash in terms of asset management, scripting, exporting, IDE and motion graphics. It won't took more than an hour to create an simple application with Flash that consumes data dynamically and create video out of it.</comment></comment></comment>


A novel way to address your envelope - <AUTHOR> http://mapenvelope.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm kind of confused about the placement of the marker and personal note. In most cases, I open envelopes by tearing the topmost fold, which would cut the connection between the place marker and the message.

<comment><USER3> I think this envelope is intended to be placed into another one which is actually mailed, so that the one with the marker does not have to be sealed. I guess that's pretty common for doing various kinds of formal invitations, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Similar project: [http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/03/30/google-envelopes- beta-...](http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/03/30/google-envelopes-beta-of- course/)

And a partial howto from one of Google's Appengine devs, Nick Johnson:

<http://mapvelopes.appspot.com/>

[http://blog.notdot.net/2010/04/Generating-PDFs-on-App- Engine...](http://blog.notdot.net/2010/04/Generating-PDFs-on-App-Engine- Python-and-introducing-Mapvelopes)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wish we could zoom in or out; some addresses are way too far out to be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't seem to work for me, though I am using IE6 so that is probably the issue.

I think this would be fun, but anyone have any experience making their own envelopes? Wonder if they hold up well...

<comment><USER7> IE6? Wow!

<comment><USER8> He should get a prize for still using IE6. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER9> Torture?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like that the submitted site has a "send me an email" link. I didn't see a privacy policy posted (that's usually de rigueur for a website that asks for personal information), so I sent a question asking what the privacy policy was for users who submit their personal address.

Edit for update: I received this answer to my question:

"The policy is that we don't do anything with it whatsoever.

\-- Stephen Hallgren"

That might be a good thing to say explicitly on the site, with the usual "privacy" link text.

<comment><USER11> Is the "privacy policy" a legally binding document? If so, how so? If not, why do you think it's important what a tiny start-up's privacy policy is?

The privacy policy is a promise. Broken promises have repercussions in proportion to how well known it is that you break your promises. For Facebook, that might be important. For weekendproject.com, I can't imagine why you're fixated on it.

<comment><USER10> I don't know how you reach the conclusion I'm "fixated" on anything. I just note for the record that it's an industry-standard recommendation for websites that solicit personal information to declare a privacy policy. I agree that there has to be a certain degree of user trust in any such stated policy, because the stated policy might be a lie. On the other hand, if the stated policy is a lie, then users who are misled by the stated policy would have a legal remedy if they chose to pursue that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The default example when I loaded the page was "Niagara Falls", but the market was on a golf course. Weird.

</comment><comment><USER13> I guess this prints Google Maps on it? How can this be legally fine? Google Maps is not even remotely "free" for such things. OpenStreetMap data however would allow it with attribution.

<comment><USER14> If they're using the API, then "as long as your site is generally accessible to consumers without charge, you may use the Google Maps API" (<http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#tos_commercial>)

<comment><USER13> Oh, I was thinking they would actually print out the envelope. If it is "just" a website then of course it is fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Sorry, we were unable to geocode that address" for every address entered. Different browsers, all the same message.

<comment><USER15> Ok, it's working from home, must be a firewall or shared IP thing at work... odd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wish it wouldn't mangle the formatting of the address, but that's probably the fault of Google.</comment>


QMachine – a supercomputer made out of crowdsourced Web browsers - <AUTHOR> https://www.qmachine.org/ <comment><USER2> Sean is a really great guy--glad to see he got something like this working!

</comment><comment><USER3> Example application? (excepted scientific computing)

<comment><USER4> Fun, probably. It's hard to imagine a workload in which this would be the truly best solution. Real supercomputers nowadays use immense intra-node bandwidth, and if you care about performance (and why are you using a supercomputer if you don't?), languages and environments that run around an order of magnitude faster than Javascript (on Javascript's best day) even before we talk about them running on a supercomputer environment, with the aforementioned bandwidth.

(Tack on another order of magnitude or two if we're talking about something like GPU computation, which I would not yet trust in WebGL, even ignoring the problem of bandwidth for the problem specification. If you work the math, it becomes difficult to overcome orders of magnitude in performance differences by throwing lots of slow resources at a problem, because you get to the point where it becomes impossible to make up the difference due to additional communication overheads.)

This basically limits this "supercomputer" to embarrassingly parallel problems that have very small specifications, for which performance is no particular concern, including the fact that one does not even know how much resources you will have for the problem on a second-by-second basis. This is not a large niche, but it can be fun.

<comment><USER5> > languages and environments that run around an order of magnitude faster than > Javascript (on Javascript's best day)

I'd love to see the programming language that's an order faster than Google V8. See [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php) and play with it a little bit ;-)

<comment><USER4> Javascript's speed can be overstated, especially on benchmarks, where everything can be _just so_ , and maximize the amount of time you spend in the C portion of the runtime. In practice, you do not get a "mere" 3x performance loss in Javascript code, especially for things like what supercomputers do. At least, I haven't seen anyone seriously report that result for anything like real code.

asm.js may overcome that to some extent, but as I mentioned elsewhere, the real problem is bandwidth. Frankly you could run things effectively _instantaneously_ on the client side, and still end up with wildly worse performance on this sort of cluster than a real supercomputer.

<comment><USER5> Google V8's regular expressions can outrun C for real bioinformatics workflows, and it's actually not even close. I routinely write JS that outruns C and C++, and you haven't seen it in reports because my papers haven't been accepted yet. I doubt that I'm the only person capable of writing "amazing" code. Do you write JS?

As for bandwidth, there is no reason to believe that bandwidth is an issue for _all_ parallel architectures. Stream processing works very well under the given constraints, for example.

<comment><USER4> "Do you write JS?"

Yes, along with a ton of other languages. It is well known that if you use a slow language to set up problems for code written in fast implementations, the result can still be quite fast, but it's the fast bit, not the slow bit that's responsible. See also NumPy. It's not Javascript being fast, it's the regex engine. If what you're doing is regexes, it's almost certainly more efficient to just _do_ the regexes than to try to ship the relevant strings down over commodity internet connections... which is, indeed, exactly _why_ you don't take this approach in your code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A similar service: [http://crowdprocess.com/](http://crowdprocess.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> where are my QCoins?

<comment><USER5> Coming soon, if you'd like to help, actually :-)</comment></comment>


How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/13/how-consulting-companies-like-mckinsey-optimized-american-inequality/%3foutputType=amp <comment><AUTHOR> Please note, if the title's link doesn't work, this should: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/13/how- consu...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/12/13/how-consulting- companies-like-mckinsey-optimized-american-inequality/)</comment>


HP sued by Chubby Checker over webOS  size app - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/02/hp-sued-by-chubby-checker-over-webos-penis-size-app/

<comment><USER2> Did HN eat the word "penis"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.</comment></comment>


Does the LFENCE instruction make any sense in x86 processors? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20316124/does-it-make-any-sense-instruction-lfence-in-processors-x86-x86-64 <comment><USER2> The question is ill-posed: MFENCE does _not_ equal LFENCE + SFENCE. LFENCE orders _only_ loads with respect to other loads; SFENCE orders _only_ stores with respect to other stores; but MFENCE orders not only loads w/r/t loads and stores w/r/t stores, _but also_ loads w/r/t stores (and vice versa).</comment>


An Unintended Side Effect of Transparency - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/an-unintended-side-effect-of-transparency <comment><USER2> Underlying data set: [https://projects.propublica.org/checkup/](https://projects.propublica.org/checkup/)</comment>


Apple Says Battery Performance of New iPhone's A9 Chips Vary Only 2-3% - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/08/apple-says-battery-performance-of-new-iphones-a9-chips-vary-only-2-3/ <comment><USER2> FYI, the (free) "Lirum device info lite" app will tell you what CPU you have installed in your iPhone 6s/6s+. N66AP and B71AP are Samsung CPUs, N66MAP and N71MAP are TSMCs.</comment>


Mastercard: Merchants Now Allowed to Add Surcharge for Credit Card Purchases - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.mastercard.com/2012/07/13/mastercard-speaks-out-on-u-s-merchant-settlement/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how long the fee would last if people did a chargeback/return every time they noticed the fee.</comment>


The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/06/25/the-world-should-think-better-about-catastrophic-and-existential-risks <comment><USER3> Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? It was not, it was utterly predictable, if not the specific virus, then at least the course of its spread. The black swan is our collective ineptitude in handling the crisis, not the virus itself.

We've had pandemics repeatedly throughout recorded history and before. It's not as though the world went "a virus what is this we've never seen anything like it".

The black plague, the flu of 1918, and numerous other examples of epidemic diseases have struck down multitudes over thousands of years. Even Sars was just a score of years ago.

We were simply inept when it came to Covid-19. We dropped the ball. The thing about Covid isn't how unexpected it was, it's how utterly predictable it has been at every single turn.

<comment> grey-area You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk.

The spread of coronavirus outside China was in no way inevitable. Several potential pandemics were handled internally, this one escaped due to denial and incompetence, at which point it was harder to control. If it is utterly predictable we should be able to predict its course and fatalities - we can't.

If we had a large asteroid strike, famine, a robot rebellion, a collapse in world supply chains or super-volcano eruption it'd be 'inevitable' according to somebody somewhere, but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence, they didn't help, but fundamentally this spread because most people don't get that sick. Since people mostly feel ok, they're not getting medical treatment and aren't on the radar of any kind of intervention. Also, it's not true to say that if you can say with certainty that something will happen, you know exactly how it's going to go down. I know with 100% certainty that there will be another stock market bubble in the next 20 years, it's completely predictable, but I can't tell you when or how, because that is a different kind of knowledge, it's situational rather than systemic.

<comment><USER5> > I don't agree that this spread due to denial and incompetence

Indeed.There are countries that reacted better than others, but that didn't make the problem go away: it was still a major disruption to the economy and a major health problem causing some people to die. The magnitude of those problems is affected by competence (and luck), but it's not one of those things where if you play by the book you're just going to be fine.

<comment><USER6> Yeah you are gonna be fine, not toally unaffected by largely just fine.

Look at Czech Republic, Vietnam, Korea, Japan. There, hardly anyone died at all.

<comment><USER7> I'm in no way disagreeing that countries like Vietnam have done a good job in keeping on top of the problem, but talking about any country's response in the past tense seems premature.

Pretty much any assessment needs to have a "so far" appended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let people be.

There's way too much "we need to start..." bullshit these days, and mostly spearheaded by the same group of ~500 businesses and media corps[1]; as if any of these fucking mega corporations give a shit about any of us.

When everything you believe in starts aligning perfectly with the corporations that have been screwing you for decades (tax havens, monopolizing the industries your parents worked in, sending all our jobs over seas to underaged slaves, dumping toxins into our rivers, etc.), it's time to rethink your thinking.

1\. took me all of three seconds to find an example for the publisher in question, in what looks like The Economist running pseudo-critic defense for Nike's sweatshops, etc.: [https://www.economist.com/business/1999/02/25/sweatshop- wars](https://www.economist.com/business/1999/02/25/sweatshop-wars)

<comment><USER9> >There's way too much "we need to start..."

Not really. A world as complex as ours needs to be starting new initiatives all the time. Basically every convenience you take for granted (electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores) was because society said "we need to start". In places where they were slow to do that, it's generally less available and lower quality or they have to rely on technology from the places and people that took initiative.

We need to be starting much much more, not less.

<comment><USER10> "we need..." is a persuasion technique. It tries to sell an idea by (a) trying to incorporate you into it the argument before you even agreed (the "we" part) and (b) pushing on through a sense of false urgency (the "need" part).

"We need" is never ever an argument on itself. And it can be easily countered with: Who is this "we" you're talking about because I surely haven't agreed yet if I go along in your story. And the "need" isn't a shared need unless I'm willing to agree that it is a shared need between you and me.

"We need" forces the other to think past the problem and move directly towards "solutions". As if the problem exists outside of our own experience and should be considered as a problem. "We need" never explains why a set of facts is considered a problem in the first place. It just puts the focus on solutions, maybe even solutions that detract from what truly ought to be done.

The same is true when posing "society" as this homogeneous group that declares in unisono "we need to start". This couldn't be farther from the truth. "Society" is just a complex network of individuals, tribes, factions, parties,... with ever evolving shared and conflicting interests. Anything a society seemingly "agreed" upon is more emergent behaviour then deliberate action.

"society" sure didn't consciously decide "we need to start using technology or believing experience x, y or z." On the contrary. There are plenty of examples of beliefs being disparaged, vilified, questioned,... to the point where their proponents were burned on the stake. Or technologies and their inventors being ridiculed or banned because nobody was interested, or it was unclear which problem they truly solved.

Humanity survived just fine without electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores, digital technology and so on for hundreds of thousands of years. Ask any elderly person if they felt unhappy 60 or 70 years ago because they weren't able to consult Wikipedia via digital devices. They will simply answer "Well, we just went to the library. And that worked out perfectly for us. There simply wasn't an alternative and we didn't lament the lack of an alternative."

Stating that society agreed to "we need to start" would putting the horse before the cart.

<comment><USER9> I typed out a much longer response but this will do:

I think you are not following my argument or the OP. Neither supposes that "we need" is a standalone argument. OP provides specific examples for why "we need" to do these things.

"We" doesn't mean literally every human. Do you think people are actually being misled by this? It just means something like "society at large".

"We" need plumbing. This doesn't mean you can't individually live alone in the woods without plumbing.

"Need" doesn't mean you "must" have something. You don't "need" water if you're suicidal.

"Need" is just shorthand for "sustains our current way of life". If you want to see the downfall of civilization, you don't "need" agriculture. If you don't care about people on dialysis or the millions/billions of others that would die without power, then you don't "need" electricity or internal combustion engines.

You're allowed to have these opposing views.

The "we need" arguments assume that most people want to maintain or improve standards of living.

If you want to decrease standards of living, that's a fine opinion to have (although weird). More importantly, if you don't care about society, why bother arguing this at all? Why post on HN? No one is stopping you from living a pre-plumbing, pre-agricultural life if that's what you want.

"Society" of course tries to sustain itself. If society wants to keep existing in its current form, it does need to do many things (indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, or as the OP talks about, preparing for certain dangerous situations).

<comment><USER10> "We need" is both a social construct and a rhetorical device. No more, no less. I'm all fine when "we need" is used as a conclusion to a careful and thoughtful debate in which we both, equally, established a common need and a common wish to address that need knowing we're both deeply invested. I'm wary of hearing "we need to..." at the opening of every argument over and over again without showing how invested the person making the argument is in solving the issue.

If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.

We need to invest in an equitable society, economies of scale, reduce greenhouse gasses, invest in green technology, prepare for the next pandemic, vote for sensible politics (whatever those may be), invest in education, in the military, in getting to the Moon and establishing viable economies there, getting someone on Mars, invest in global network of satellites across the world, invest in developing nations, overhaul global supply lines and create less dependencies, find a better cure for cancer, invest in cybersecurity, invest in solutions to safeguard rights such as free speech and privacy, reduce fossil fuel dependency, invest in new industries and markets, and so on and so on and so on.

Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?

There are 7.8 billion different answers to that question reflecting different and often very conflicting beliefs, wants, needs, dreams, desires and hopes.

"We need" at the start of every argument dismisses the reality that humanity or society is made up of individual humans, each of which is a unique universe of thoughts and feelings in their own right.

"We need" is a wonky substitute for a far more honest "I - personally - <USER2> strongly about this issue, this is how invested I am in the issue, and I'm curious as to how you're feeling about this."

Worst case, "we need" is simply you projecting a personal fleeting desire to the entirety of humanity. "We need to go to Mars". I'm sure some people feel strongly about that. Maybe you do in this very instance, but will you still actively be thinking about how humanity could get there in an hour or two? Or have you moved on by then, forgetting that you even posted a fleeting thought on social media in the first place? Moreover, you just placed this massive issue - the urgency to get boots on Mars, or the preparation for the next pandemic - at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?

"we need preparing for a pandemic" or "we need to invest in dialysis for people who need it for their survival". Sure, but that's your personal sentiment. But it's not an argument. How are you, as an individual acting on that sentiment? Who are you voting on? Are you making donations? Are you a researcher? Are you running for office yourself? Or are you endorsing politicians who will be making decisions? Or have you invested millions in factories that might one day supply vaccines, hopefully? What are you doing to show the way forward beyond a moot online demonstration of a due sense of self awareness?

"We should have had a (non-false) sense of urgency about this last year?" Who is this we? Why are you involving me into this? I read the news and social media like the next person and I'm an individual with limited time and resources. I'm not an elected decision maker. I'm certainly not privy to intelligence reports. And when I voted for decision makers that ran for office, a pandemic sure wasn't on everyone's mind.

It's an argument that could easily be met with could have, would have, should have, but "we" \- whoever that is - didn't. Hindsight 20/20.

Instead, a better argument is "I feel it's important to vote for politicians that are aware of the importance of public health and who are willing to endorse increased public spending on public health and social security. I feel it's important to hold politicians who don't do this publicly accountable. That's why I openly voice my concern because I care about the impact of their policies on my own community and other communities. I also call representatives, I vote, I support news organizations through donations, I attend rallies to show support and so on."

Showing how you're caring is far more important then just telling you're caring.

<comment><USER9> Preparing for expected catastrophes is not a fleeting desire. It's basically the opposite. There are entire industries built up around this (FEMA, insurance, flood control systems, the CDC, banking reserve ratios, backup servers, many safety rules and systems). Saying we need to adjust these efforts to reflect the real world cost-benefit trade offs is common sense. You can disagree with the particular calculus they're doing (e.g. by thinking a pandemic is so unlikely that we shouldn't prepare very much), but I don't see a sound argument to say "we don't need to prepare at all for these costly events".

>If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.

I don't think people are turning everything into a priority. But if some ill- defined group is trying to do this, it wouldn't change the fact that certain things are a priority if we want to maintain our way of life. Disaster management is one of them.

I'm sure a bunch of people think irrelevant things happening on Instagram are a priority. But that doesn't change the fact that preserving infrastructure _is_ a priority for maintaining our way of life.

As I said, if you don't care about maintaining our way of life, then of course you won't care about what we need to do to preserve that way of life.

>Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?

I think I see the disconnect. No one is saying that the fry cook at McDonalds needs to align global resources better to deal with potential catastrophe. You are reading "we" too literally. (Rather, you are just misunderstanding the word "we". "We" doesn't mean an has never meant every human. We really just means a group of which the speaker is part. It need not include you.)

"We need to better prepare for certain catastrophes" means that politicians and other key actors (say businesses, insurers, bureaucrats, researchers, engineers that have relevant assets, skills, experiences, etc.) need to think better about these and non-key actors (say voters, consumers) need to shift attention, money, votes, etc. to supporting those key actors in this goal. If you are okay with disruptions like pandemics, then you can disagree with this. I think most people would prefer to avoid these disruptions though, given the comparatively low cost for doing so.

>at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?

Support politicians that endorse science and logic, for example. Wear a mask as another example.

I don't think anyone is asking you to do anything that "includes the entirety of humanity or society". We are saying make the choices you can make and support the politicians and businesses that deal with these problems proactively.

>But it's not an argument.

No one is saying "we need to prepare for a pandemic" as a standalone argument. But the argument is not complicated. A pandemic could disrupt our way of life greatly by "harm X" (lets say decrease in quality adjusted life years or GDP). It has a chance of occur of "probability Y". Y here is close to 100% as we know. The cost of preparing systems to mitigate the risks to "harm level Z" is "cost Q". As long as harm X times probability Y is really big (which as we see, it is) and cost Q is less than harm level Z, then it is rational to invest Q resources into mitigation.

You can disagree with whatever numbers we might pick for X Y Z Q, but to say we shouldn't perform the calculus is just to say you don't think society is worth preserving. Again, you can have that viewpoint if you want.

The conversation that I think people are trying to have is "How should we preserve, improve and maintain society" and you're basically saying "don't bother". It's fine to say that, but the people having the discussion obviously aren't going to listen to you.

If we're discussing whether Liverpool should trade Coutinho then no one will be interested in your view that "football is stupid".

>How are you, as an individual acting on that sentiment? Who are you voting on? Are you making donations? Are you a researcher? Are you running for office yourself? Or are you endorsing politicians who will be making decisions? Or have you invested millions in factories that might one day supply vaccines, hopefully? What are you doing to show the way forward beyond a moot online demonstration of a due sense of self awareness?

I am doing things to my ability but this is irrelevant to our argument. I can make a powerful and logically airtight argument supporting thing X while selling a product that kills thing X. I can even make that same argument while personally killing thing X at that very moment.

I'm not holding this discussion to trumpet (or even to discuss) my own virtues or actions. I'm having this argument to disagree with a poorly reasoned argument made by the person I first responded to. I could be a computer simulation and it wouldn't take anything at all away from the logic of the points I make.

>"We should have had a (non-false) sense of urgency about this last year?" Who is this we? Why are you involving me into this?

I'm not involving you. You misunderstand the definition of the word "we"

[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/we](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/we)

"People in general" does not mean every single person and certainly doesn't have to mean you.

>I read the news and social media like the next person and I'm an individual with limited time and resources. I'm not an elected decision maker. I'm certainly not privy to intelligence reports. And when I voted for decision makers that ran for office, a pandemic sure wasn't on everyone's mind.

You shouldn't elect someone that campaigns on a single pet risk, so much as you should elect someone that takes a rational, cost-benefit approach to risks in general.

>It's an argument that could easily be met with could have, would have, should have, but "we" \- whoever that is - didn't. Hindsight 20/20.

Well, that's not exactly right is it? "We" certainly did meet the risk where I am. Americans (or more specifically, some Americans in some places) are having issues understanding science. There's not much hindsight involved. Were there epidemiologists that said we didn't need to worry about or prepare for the risk of a pandemic? Pandemics have happened in the past and will continue to happen in the future.

More importantly, everyone saw what happened in China. America saw this and part of it decided not to take steps to mitigate the risks. I can tell you steps to take to mitigate your risk _starting tomorrow_ and many Americans will still ignore it. This is not hindsight bias.

You could argue China's failures shouldn't be criticized by hindsight bias. But why are many Americans continuing not to fix the problem happening today and tomorrow? Hindsight is not the issue. I can give you steps _right now_ to fix this. But many Americans don't want to listen. As a result they are going to fail. When I point this failure out in the future, it won't be hindsight bias.

>Instead, a better argument is "I feel it's important to vote for politicians that are aware of the importance of public health and who are willing to endorse increased public spending on public health and social security. I feel it's important to hold politicians who don't do this publicly accountable. That's why I openly voice my concern because I care about the impact of their policies on my own community and other communities. I also call representatives, I vote, I support news organizations through donations, I attend rallies to show support and so on."

Ok, that's what this article is doing. I'm not sure who you're arguing against here.

>Showing how you're caring is far more important then just telling you're caring.

I don't care about showing or telling about _my_ caring. I'm just trying to correct the person I originally responded to. What I do or don't do is irrelevant to correcting OP's point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> i have a mini-theory in which any group that allocates resources to existential risks will operate at a disadvantage (in the short term) to groups that do not, thus it's likely that anybody who does this will lose to competitors (businesses, countries) that do not.

FOr example, cloud providers who do not plan for meteor-based regional outages (which occur rarely) believe they can home all their data in a single region. This is much cheaper and will allow the provider a better profit margin, and realistically, not a lot of customers care about their data surviving a meteor taking out US-EAST1.

<comment><USER12> This is a significant issue, any company that set aside resources to protect against a pandemic after the Spanish Flu would have been operating with increased costs for a full 100 years. Yet when the virus hit and companies struggled, I saw plenty of comments saying these companies deserved to fail. I'm all for capitalism and the benefits of market forces, but that's ludicrous. I'm not saying they should all be bailed out either, companies come and go to be honest, but what we do need to do is ensure our vital interests and the infrastructure we depend on is secure and that's going to take a pragmatic approach.

The global cost of the virus is astronomical, but protecting ourselves effectively against a new virus doesn't have to be crippling. The same is true of many other credible risks the article covers. Such preparations could even offer additional useful benefits. It's just going to take vision and pragmatism I'm not sure our political leaders have in them these days.

<comment><USER13> Setting aside money as "pandemic" is a problem. Setting aside money for "emergency" helps reduce impact.

1970 gas shortages 2000 dotcom bubble burst 2008 housing crisis

<comment><USER14> > 1970 gas shortages 2000 dotcom bubble burst 2008 housing crisis

All missed opportunities to change broken institutional structures and to do things differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The world should _act_ better about catastrophic and existential risks.

We think fine. We think when things get serious we'll act. Then things get serious -- like billions of people locked down, plastic in our bloodstreams, would-be leaders exacerbating problems, etc -- and we don't act how we thought we would.

The problem is our behavior. Thinking is relevant, but behavior is the issue.

<comment><USER16> Funny, I think it's exactly the other way around -- people wring their hands about things that don't matter ("plastic in our bloodstreams") but tend to act appropriately. Don't panic. Carry on.

Treating a threat as existential is often enormously costly, and we reliably overestimate threats. Ignoring them is a good first response, if not always a good second one. Being a week or a month late to the current pandemic is less costly than locking down for SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, ...

Not to mention the times when we _did_ overreact. The latest TSA budget is $8.24 billion dollars, or 824 lives per year (at a cost of $10 million per life), or 2.17 One World Trade Centers per year, or (verging into polemic) one 9/11 every four years.

Isn't the lesson that we tend to overreact? Sure, _maybe_ it'll be a pandemic, and let's not completely discount the idea, but why not just lock the plane's cabin doors and see if it gets worse?

<comment><USER17> Enforcing lockdown a week earlier could have halved death toll in the UK

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/uk- coronavirus...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/uk-coronavirus- lockdown-20000-lives-boris-johnson-neil-ferguson)

<comment><USER18> That's entirely presumptive. You can't conclude that a model works because the predictions the model makes don't come true.

<comment><USER17> Models are the best we have. And if we compare the UK with countries that reacted faster then it seems likely that a lot of deaths could have been prevented.

<comment><USER18> If you compare the UK to places that didn't lock down and have had very few deaths you can conclude the opposite. That's why you shouldn't cherry pick your data points.

Many people created models of the spread of Covid. Some of these models worked very well and others were terribly inaccurate. We should use the models that work and not those that have lost all credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you're interested in existential risks check out effective altruism. It's a philanthropic movement whose idea is to maximize the amount of good we can do with our resources. Much of the research is focused on x-risks. I've come to the conclusion that non-profit is the only sector that can tackle x-risks because it's not profitable and there's no political will, which pretty much leaves ea researchers as the only people looking at the area.

<comment><USER20> Note that some popular effective altruists have a little bit of tunnel vision when it comes to X-risks, which leads them to overfund X-risk-due-to-AI over something like, say, X-risk-due-to-asteroids. (X-risk-due-to-nanotech is being suitably supported by not funding nanotech.)

Plus, some people working on the AI X-risk problem are doing it for nothing, which means the state of funding is a bit weird.

<comment><USER21> > tunnel vision when it comes to X-risks, which leads them to overfund X-risk- > due-to-AI over something like, say, X-risk-due-to-asteroids.

Risks from natural events like asteroids are actually quite well understood and we have tight bounds that they aren't that risky per century. The natural risks cause area probably deserves more funding on a global level, but EAs are definitely thinking about it. It's literally the first section in 80k's intro article about X-risks: [https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction- risk/](https://80000hours.org/articles/extinction-risk/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks"

"Plans and early-warning systems are always a good idea"

Yes, we know, but how do achieve anything when people are deep in denial and reading conspiracy theories on Facebook is considered "news"?

You have to consider that the current pandemic is relatively tractable compared to the climate crisis, and we're failing miserably even at that.

</comment><comment><USER23> It is a bit syrreal to read about low probability/high impact risks while we have a very high probability/catastrophic impact event already started.

<comment><USER24> What catastrophic impact event are you referring to? Covid-19? Climate change?

Neither of those are existential risks: they're incredibly unlikely to wipe us out. The kind of high impact risks the article is about are much worse.

<comment><USER25> Uhhh, climate change will absolutely kill us all if we don't do something.

<comment><USER26> How would it kill us all?

I suppose it could lead to a Venus like atmosphere if things got really crazy. Realistically the worst case scenario would _just_ lead to coastal areas being uninhabitable and widespread famine and unrest while the worlds farming and population gets redistributed to more habitable latitudes. I don't think it would ever wipe out EVERYONE even if it's a sizable percentage.

<comment><USER27> There is no "redistribution to more habitable latitudes" (a breathtakingly vast understatement of human suffering) without all out war. There is no all out war without nuclear destruction at our own hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's not a new idea, right? People are bad at valuing far-off very-bad risks compared to inconsequential but tangible near-term risks. And bad at valuing broadly distributed hardships versus concentrated individual pain.

It's exactly why we can't solve climate change, right?

<comment><USER29> It's one reason we've had trouble solving climate change (I wouldn't go so far as to say we can't).

Two more reasons:

1\. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, where many actors, at the individual, corporate, and national level, have incentives to worsen the problem even if nearly everyone would benefit if they all behaved differently.

2\. The climate is a complex system, so it's hard to educate the public about how it works, and easy for bad faith actors or pseudoscientific cranks to obfuscate the discussion.

<comment><USER30> 3\. It is also easy for bad faith actors to exploit the response for their own benefit, undermining the nascent response directly, and undermining it indirectly by undermining those who argue for change with integrity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > There is little planning anywhere for what to do in response to a volcanic > eruption large enough to cool and dry the climate around the world, as the > eruption of Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, did in 1815.

Here I am, thinking about how to provoke a massive volcanic eruption in order to save what's left of our ecosystem.

In case you have been living under a rock: At the end of 2019 we had massive fires in Australia, due to unusually high temperatures. And now the Russian Arctic is experiencing the same - [https://news.yahoo.com/russian-arctic-sets- fantastical-heat-...](https://news.yahoo.com/russian-arctic-sets-fantastical- heat-records-weather-chief-132627542.html)

<comment><USER32> Much cheaper to just spray sulfur dioxide from a plane: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Covid and climate change aren't one country problems. Just like a building on fire doesn't affect just one office. The problem is we need top-down coordination for worldwide threats. We need the UN, or a UN-like organization (United Earth?).

<comment><USER34> The problem is that very large institutions become corrupt with very high certainty. It poses a huge near-term risk itself, so we somehow need to solve coordination problems while staying decentralized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There was nothing unpredictable about this. In 2013 I got handed a copy of a book called 'Spillover, Animal infections and the next pandemic' by David Quammen.

It was pretty much a storyboard for how COVD-19 (and other) diseases come into play and spread around the world. Totally predictable, in excruciating detail.

[https://books.google.nl/books/about/Spillover_Animal_Infecti...](https://books.google.nl/books/about/Spillover_Animal_Infections_and_the_Next.html?id=RMmxxYUBQhgC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false)

<comment><USER36> Same. I am still surprised when someone says this was totally unpredictable. That book gave me a great overview of what could happen. For example I had a discussion with some friends about facemasks, they claimed that they were not useful, like governments were saying. In the book I remember that almost every researcher regrets not buying more, they are useful.

At least it gave me the ability to take more informed decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The recent conversation between Tom Bilyeu and Daniel Schmachtenberger is a great primer on this topic. Tom inquires about existential risk from a pragmatic, entrepreneurial point of view.

This Economist article only scratches the surface of the risk of accelerating technology development. Schmachtenberger provides a framework for thought and much deeper insights in this direction.

[https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/conversations-with-tom- danie...](https://impacttheory.libsyn.com/conversations-with-tom-daniel- schmachtenberger-on-what-we-must-do-now-to-stop-the-destruction-of- civilization)

<comment><USER38> I wish there were more interviews with Daniel Schmachtenberger. His interview on Eric Weinstein's podcast [0] was also great.

[0] [https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8](https://youtu.be/_b4qKv1Ctv8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Governments should focus more on long-termism than short-termism in general.

<comment><USER40> Sounds like a good way to get voted out in favor of the other guy who promises short term benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Just read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" if you want more thinking about this topic..

<comment><USER42> And even better his concept of building anti-fragile systems. We can model things, predict things, etc - but in the end everything is more complex than we can know so as to appear random. We can't predict what will happen but we can build systems that are anti-fragile, or robust at the minimum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Prior discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659120)

</comment><comment><USER44> We'll also do well by taking a leaf from the Stoics, who wrote only 2000+ years ago ... on the importance of _" prerehearsal of future ills"_.

The meaning of it is explained in a note (24.2) from Seneca's _Letters on Ethics_ (the full collection of 124 letters; excellently translated by Graver and Long):

 _" The advice to reflect on all possible misfortunes is not meant to license groundless worry but rather to afford an accurate assessment of what a human life is likely to include, thus mitigating the psychological impact of inevitable misfortune. [...]"_

\---

And here's a _rousing_ passage by Seneca from letter 91 ("A terrible fire at Lyon"):

 _" When one is unprepared for a disaster, it has a greater effect: shock intensifies the blow. No mortal can fail to grieve more deeply when amazement is added to the loss [...]_

 _" Absolutely anything can be overthrown in its finest hour by the caprice of fortune. Th brighter it shines, the more it is liable to be attacked and shaken: for fortune, nothing is arduous, nothing difficult. Not always does it come by a single road, not always by paths that are well worn. Sometimes it turns our hands against each other; at other times, relying on its own resources, it finds dangers for us that need no agent. No moment is exempt. In the midst of pleasure, things arise that cause us pain. In a time of peace, war breaks out, and all that one had relied on for security becomes an object of fear: friends turn into foes, allies into enemies. The calm of a summer day is suddenly transformed into storms greater than those of winter. Even without an enemy at hand, we suffer war's effects. If there are no other reasons for calamity, excessive prosperity finds its own reasons. The most careful people are attacked by illness; the sturdiest by physical decline; punishments affect those who are completely guiltless; riots those who live in total seclusion. People who have almost forgotten the power of chance find themselves picked out to experience some novel misfortune. The achievements of a lifetime, put together with great effort and many answered prayers, are cast to ruin in a single day. But to speak of a day is to make our hastening calamities slower than they really are. An hour, a mere moment is enough to overturn an empire. It would be some relief to our frailty and our concerns if everything came to an end as slowly as it comes into existence. The reality is that it takes time for things to grow but little or no time for them to be lost."_

</comment><comment><USER45> A sobering thought is that there's little to stop Covids 20.1 through 20.4 emerging as endemic human diseases next week.

It's not like an earthquake where the disaster also relieves stress, albeit in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER46> There's an insurance product for that.

Pandemic insurance is available for businesses - it is a cost that will, by definition, not likely pay back. But if an event occurs it will pay out as expected.

Human behavior is such that only about 12% of Californians in at-risk areas purchase earthquake insurance - even though many significant earthquakes have occurred in living memory.

<comment><USER47> Unfortunately, pandemic insurance is unlikely to work in the real world. A pandemic by definition affects the entire globe, meaning that if pandemic insurance needs to pay out, it will have to pay out for all policy holders, all at once. Given that the business model of insurance companies is to spread risk across all policy holders, it is impossible for insurance companies to payout all policies all at once.

<comment><USER48> Not to mention the fact that pricing pandemic insurance is going to be very hard. Insurance companies generally don't like to take risks... they like things that are highly predictable and can be modeled. The percentage of people aged 40 who will die in a given year is predictable. So are the chances of car accidents by 17 year old female drivers. When the next pandemic will come is anyone's guess though. And lacking a decent way to model a risk like this, the insurance company will inevitably need to charge a high premium to make this a worthwhile product. Meanwhile, consumers will balk at the high premium and not buy the coverage.

<comment><USER46> Yet the models exist and are routinely used to evaluate and price that risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> There are unfortunately many existential risks:

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

* [https://www.existential-risk.org/](https://www.existential-risk.org/)

<comment><USER50> And yet, one of the largest risks is that our modern society simply assumes that none of those will ever happen.

When I grew up in the 80's, society was built around the expectation that WW3 was pretty imminent, and while I'm quite happy that the cold war is over, modern society would most likely be better of if we stopped taking everything for granted and start preparing for things that we know will happen at some point. Like pandemics.

Some kind of shit will happen at some point. That's about the only thing that is certain. We should use the time we have until then for building a non- fragile society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Cant read the article but +1 for title.

<comment><USER52> [http://archive.is/SH3EU](http://archive.is/SH3EU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Perhaps a bit naive standpoint:

If enough power companies buy insurance against a solar storm, the insurers will have to stockpile those huge transformers that take 6-12 months to build.

If they don't buy such an isurance they are negligent and can be sued.

</comment><comment><USER54> Let's see how it plays out with climate change... This stub is the worst.

</comment><comment><USER55> Nah, it will be fine. /s

</comment><comment><USER56> Are we trying to build a responsible society from irresponsible individuals?

Because if we're talking about individuals being responsible, we probably should start from abolishing unemployment benefits (everyone must build an emergency fund), retirement benefits (you didn't put anything into your 401k? You'll die of hunger) and all other sorts of social stuff.

Otherwise it sounds like "we, as a society, must be responsible, while I personally refuse to".</comment>


Chinese city's ban on 'Beijing bikinis' leaves men hot under collar - ga-vu https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/06/chinese-citys-ban-on-beijing-bikinis-leaves-men-hot-under-collar <comment><AUTHOR> Made me laugh. I mean, if most Chinese got 6 packs, then probably nobody in the right mind would even think to mention that ban.

However, I don't like the "banned behaviours" mindset. It's unpleasant too see of course, but banning it is over do, or "矫妄过正"[0].

How about to teach people good manners instead?

[0] [https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin- dictionary....](https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin- dictionary.php?define=%E7%9F%AB%E6%9E%89%E8%BF%87%E6%AD%A3)

</comment><comment><USER2> An article was published earlier by Sixth Tone on the same subject: [http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004231/Itsy- Bitsy](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1004231/Itsy-Bitsy)</comment>


Ask HN: is this ethical? - 4-2011

A program director of a funding agency joins a start-up formed to commercialize the research he has funded until very recently.<p>I am certain this is unethical. The real questions is, how common is this? <comment><AUTHOR> It depends on what government money he controls. In California, I don't think this would be very common as it may violate some conflict of interest regulations depending on when he left the agency, when he joined/formed the start-up, and some other facts. I suspect similar regulations apply to federal agencies.

</comment><comment><USER2> It is only unethical if there is a conflict of interest. Not enough details to in your write-up to identify one.

<comment> 4-2011 The person controls government money and now reaps the benefits, conflict? Judging by your answer, this isn't considered unethical, so it must be common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sorry, could you provide a little bit more detail?

<comment> 4-2011 I don't want to identify the company or the agency...</comment></comment>


Where Is Americans' Outrage Over Huawei Arrest? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-12-07/arrest-of-huawei-s-meng-wanzhou-should-outrage-americans <comment><USER2> While the facts (or even specific charges, other than a characterization that hey may relate to US sanctions on Iran) aren't all out by any stretch, it seems quite plausible that Huawei did in fact violate US sanctions on Iran and that as part of that corporate officers like the CFO would have committed US criminal offenses within the scope of the US-Canada extradition agreement.

If there becomes a reason to think that the government acted without a good faith, evidence-grounded belief in thebfacts alleged in the actual charges sufficient to justify criminal charges, then perhaps outrage will be justified.

</comment><comment><USER3> We don't even know what the charges are yet. I'll withhold my opinion till the facts are there. If there are no facts, (as common in this administration) then this criticism is valid.</comment>