Lessons from Interviewing 400 Engineers Over Three Startups - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/review/my-lessons-from-interviewing-400-engineers-over-three-startups/ <comment><USER2> > One year, I hired 50 engineers. I couldn't have done that in a high quality > way without a system that let me interview about 500 candidates

How is this even physically possible? I don't mind interviewing usually but 2 or more a day, every single day, sounds like pure hell. Not to mention that after not touching any code for a whole year I'd be questioning your ability to be doing technical hires in the first place.

I'm very skeptical also that this ultra-standardised approach is getting anything like what I would call "top 10%" programmers. Top 10% of people who happen to do well in this particular interview setup, morelike. Teams I like to work for have a healthy mix of abilities, passions and experience. This sounds like a recipe for a room full of dull clones, none of whom have any knowledge outside a strictly specified little box. What next, psychometric screening?

I do agree with one point though - 3 people in the room is probably the right number.

<comment><USER3> > What next, psychometric screening?

I did one about 10 years ago, and let me share a funny story. The head of HR was sitting next to me and right after the psychometric test she gave me a blank sheet of paper and told me to draw a human being. I promptly asked (without even considering my question, I was ready to ask the person's gender right next, looking for requirements): with clothes on or naked? She laughed so hard that I thought I had failed and laughed at it too. I got the job, though.

<comment><USER4> That would have been an absolute perfect opportunity to to draw a middle finger and walk out. That sounds like an absolutely idotic application process.

I might have even laughed at the HR person and asked the question "are you fucking serious?"

<comment><USER5> Sounds like you've got a fair bit of experience limiting your own career.

<comment><USER4> Not really, a company that's employing those tactics is probably one not worth working for. An interview is a two way street, they are interviewing me and I am interviewing them. This would be a huge red flag.

<comment><USER5> The best companies I've worked for have been the ones who put a lot of effort into making sure they understand who they're hiring. That usually means a lot of weird questions about topics that aren't related to the technical aspects of the job.

My last round of interviews I got the tech side without any issues, but I was subjected to three rounds of the soft skills side because they were concerned my quiet affect might not fit into the team. I did what I was asked and was rewarded with working on a fantastic team that someone had put significant effort into ensuring the personalities meshed well.

Burning a bridge because you thought someone cared too much about the wrong thing is a great way to never get another callback from everyone involved in the process. Recruiters and HR people move around a lot, and have long memories.

I'd rather someone cared too much, than not enough.

<comment><USER4> I'd happily burn a bridge with someone in HR that expected me to jump through hoops and draw pictures. Those people need to hear the truth, they are bad at their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> FLUX-YOU This article feels like it dances around the point of technical questions and the assessment that comes with it, which is what most of us worry about when interviewing.

Soft skills are often treated as if they're there or they aren't. There's not as clear a distinction between 'junior' and 'senior' soft skills. I don't think I've ever gotten a salary bump in the offer for being a cool guy to work with (according to the interviewers). Usually it means I get the job or I don't. This isn't really that interesting to me.

The group stuff is spot on though.

\- One on one is often dry. You have to have an affinity right off the bat. This is the equivalent to showing up at a bar and having a fun conversation with a stranger.

\- More than two or three interviewers, and it can quickly turn into a company circle-jerk (I've had 15 interviewers once from 4 separate teams in one interview -- that fucking sucked).

<comment><USER6> _One on one is often dry. You have to have an affinity right off the bat._

If I follow you on soft skills, are you implying that a company that subscribes to this logic is selecting for attributes that their current employees lack, even though they're participating in interviews that will be used to judge same?

<comment> FLUX-YOU I mean that it's more boring, not that it's intentionally set up to be that way to find certain people.

<comment><USER6> Well yeah, because the interviewer knows the other people! The candidate, however.

My point was that if they're actually hiring for soft skills, why does it not hold sway in one-on-ones? It would seem to symbolize a weak bullpen, so to speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1 in 10 interviews is a hire? How can his methods be described as sucsessfull.

Speaking of my own experience I'd say it takes 6 months to find out if a programmer is good or really good (bad is easy to spot) and being able to tell that in 4h is just self-deception.

I wonder how hireing managers compares to coin tosses after some 15min telephone offsite initial screening and just filtering of resumés.

<comment><USER8> 1 in 10 fitting the company culture and being a good technical fit sounds pretty good to me. What number would sound good to you and why?

As someone who has done a lot of interviews, I think his methods sound great. Through trial and error, I've ended up with an approach that is pretty similar to what's described in the article, although there are some new ideas from the article I'd like to try out.

> I'd say it takes 6 months to find out if a programmer is good or really good

I'm much more concerned about cultural fit. After that I'm happy with both good and really good programmers. A good programmer can be trained up to be really good. Most companies need a mix a junior, intermediate, and senior programmers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aside from the numbers, this has got to be one of the more enlightened approaches I've heard of for doing interviews.

Compare it to some places that think it is _good_ thing to make candidates uncomfortable so they can "see how they work under pressure".

</comment><comment><USER10> > interviewing is a team priority: engineers on his team who are seasoned > interviewers can conduct 12-16 interviews per month.

That is a _lot_ of interviews. What does that imply about the rejection rate - 90%, 95%?

> Every engineer must be equally skillful with code and colleagues.

I agree with this but feel it might be controversial here.

<comment><USER6> _engineers on his team who are seasoned interviewers can conduct 12-16 interviews per month_

By my back of the conventional-wisdom calculations, each engineer is losing about a day's worth of productivity every week.

<comment><USER11> That's 20% for recruiting and hiring.

What is the cost of a bad hire, though?

<comment><USER12> I'd love to see a company actually quantify this, instead of just assuming it is large and letting the question paralyze them into being excessively conservative and picky.

I've been in a situation where we needed somebody _right now_ to backfill someone who left, and the company agonized over who to hire, taking over a month and blowing through dozens of candidates, ensuring that the product schedule slipped and losing us an untold amount of revenue.

<comment><USER13> And to pile on the anecdotes, I've been in the exact opposite situation where we needed somebody _right now_ to handle a new requirement, and we hired someone "pretty good" after already taking longer than the rest of management was happy with to hire.

They ended up being pretty weak, having trouble shipping, eating large amounts of onboarding and management attention, as well as other engineers patching up their work to make it serviceable. They were just good enough to make it seem worth the slog too, so they sucked a bunch of extra labor out of everyone else for the better part of a year before they left.

In retrospect, I made the right decision with what I knew in the moment — but with 20/20 hindsight I should have waited.

<comment><USER6> So it sounds like they were "fine," and the cost was not really that high.

<comment><USER13> No, it sucked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I saw Marco speak at Railsconf 2017 and he was wonderful at challenging some of the social norms that I had around development as a career.

Highly recommended: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6fBRwi6cqc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6fBRwi6cqc)

<comment><USER14> What social norms in particular? Could you please elaborate?

<comment><AUTHOR> His feelings about being black in tech, how he felt he had to act when he was in that unique position and the feelings he had about being an example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In interviewing, like in many other subjective measurements an important trade off is precision (percentage of hires that worked out) vs recall (good hires that got rejected).

Experienced interviewers, or an innovative process can optimize both values, but I do not believe one can reach perfection. In fact, I don't think most companies are even anywhere close to optimums in either of those values.

Yet what's rarely considered during interviewing is which of the two values the organization should optimize for. An early stage startup, hiring a senior engineer may choose to optimize for precision. A mature organization that needs to hire quickly to start a new initiative may choose to minimize recall.

Another way to put it - hiring is risky. The amount of risk you are willing to take should depend on circumstances and your ability to absorb failures.

</comment><comment><USER8> Having learned this myself over a few decades through both trial and error and also researching best practice, I have to say this guy gets a ton of stuff right. I also read a few new things I now want to try.

Just to reiterate one of the more important points from the article in my own words: resumes (CVs) have almost zero correlation to the quality of candidates. Pre-screening calls can really only screen out people who are completely unqualified due to not actually having the skills listed on their resume. So I will pre-screen with some very basic tech questions. Or more likely, I'll just use a recruiter to pre-screen for me.

I'm going to finish up with a copy paste from a past comment I made to a different article with some tips that have helped me over the years:

1\. Unless you've been trained to interview people, you are probably really bad at it. Think about how bad someone is at coding who never did it before and has no training. Interviewing people is no different: it is a skill that takes time and effort to learn. Get trained up and practice. As much training as you have time for. Educate yourself in your free time on a regular basis with articles about best practice. Adding more words won't make this sink in more, but I will end by saying I can't stress this point enough. You are bad at interviewing. You need to fix that before anything else if you want to hire good devs.

2\. How are you measuring success as an interviewer? This is a really difficult thing to measure because how can you find out that your interview process is rejecting candidates who would make great employees? I'm not going to try to answer this here, but it's an excellent question to think about. One thing that might help is the next point.

3\. Whatever your first impression is of the candidate, spend a good part of the interview trying to prove yourself wrong. Candidate seems like a perfect fit for the team and a great coder? Instead of relaxing because you're sure you already found the right person, see if you can figure out why they might be a bad fit or if their coding skills aren't as good as first impressions. Same for someone who seems weak at coding. Maybe they are just nervous. Can you make them relaxed enough so their awesome skills can come through? Maybe in both cases your first impressions will be proven correct. But if not you might have just found a diamond in the rough that other companies are skipping over.

<comment><USER16> Regarding your first point - any recommendations on articles to read on best practice?

<comment><USER8> I just went through my bookmarks and quite a few of the links are dead... I've been doing this for decades so that's not a surprise. And not really a big deal. Most of the progress I've seen has been made in the last five or so years. Technical interviews might be horrible now, but they used to be way worse!

A LOT of the articles I've read over the years I have not bookmarked because my idea of a good technical interview is the opposite of what those articles recommended.

I normally read everything interview related I come across in HN or Reddit programming subreddits but I'll also do a search every six months or so and see if anything interesting comes up.

Although I have cherry-picked advice from reading many articles over the years, more importantly I've tried really hard to come up with an interview process I myself would enjoy as a candidate. That factor is very important to me because I think the interviewing process sucks at many companies. It's painful for everyone involved _and_ ineffective. I would tolerate painful and effective. But I think it can be somewhat painless and effective.

I remember getting at least a few valuable ideas from these:

[http://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect- tech...](http://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect-technical- interview-from-a-former-Amazon-VP/)

[https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like- google/](https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/)

[https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-analyzed-thousands-of- cod...](https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-analyzed-thousands-of-coding- interviews-heres-what-we-learned-99384b1fda50)

Also ask someone in HR what soft skills you need to improve related to interviewing. And then take classes based on that.

Most importantly, and as the article suggested, interview candidates with another person who has more experience interviewing. With a variety of people. You'll learn the most by doing interviews alongside people who are better at it than you. Practice really is what makes perfect. Especially if someone can coach you.

One final thought, recruiters aren't going to give away the store and teach you how to be a great interviewer, but you can pick their brain with questions. If your company will pay for a recruiter then always go back to them with doubts about your process after every interview. They want you to hire their candidates so they will help out a little with advice. I've heard some great advice from recruiters themselves.

<comment><USER16> I haven't had a chance to look through all the links yet but thanks for following up! Will definitely review.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lesson one: interview the people who aren't engineers.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd be embarrassed to admit to these metrics. This guy has wasted not only his own time by bringing 5x the candidates needed onsite, but his team's, his employers', and the candidates themselves'. A quality hiring process would know with at least a 50% confidence level that the person is worth hiring before bringing them in for the onsite. A phone call or one-hour Skype, or even 3 supplemental ones, is a lot cheaper than the onsite.

It says a lot about the industry that not only is it common practice to have a "concave" funnel where you don't winnow people out early enough and end up making your engineers spend half their workday conducting pointless interviews instead of doing actual work, but also that management writ large is too clueless to be embarrassed.

If anything your engineers did, anything, had a 20% success rate, would you consider them "only the best"? Even if their appraisal of the top 10% of candidates was accurate and reproducible (it's not even close), I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire.

Sure, the guy can point to his numbers as some sort of merit badge, but if I told you I washed my hands 400 times a day, you wouldn't consider me some kind of expert on handwashing, would you? You'd rightly think I'm some kind of crazy person.

<comment><USER19> > A quality hiring process would know with at least a 50% confidence level > that the person is worth hiring before bringing them in for the onsite.

After having done a decent amount of hiring interviews and managing in my life, I don't think it's possible to have 50% confidence before you meet someone. The way you gain that much confidence is by 1- talking and listening to them, and 2- comparing them to other candidates.

> I'd still expect them to achieve their results with fewer than 3, and > preferably fewer than 2 onsites per hire.

This seems hyper-focused on the minor efficiencies of interviewing, at the expense of employment efficiency; it's feels like an engineering approach that might not have all the requirements at hand.

The employee is (probably) going to be paid a six figure salary, and will have a large impact on the team. Great candidates can improve the efficiency of the people around them for years and years. Bad candidates can slow entire teams down. I've watched some excellent and prolific and opinionated engineers do major productivity damage -- millions of dollars worth, and I've watched some young CS graduates outlearn and outperform some veterans. Resumes & github accounts simply don't have enough information to know whether a candidate can help your company.

In my experience, it has been worth the time to let the hiring process go slow enough to be able to compare people's personalities, and not just their on- paper engineering credentials.

I think far too many engineers here on HN and out in the workforce dramatically underestimate how important attitude and people skills are in the hiring process, and dramatically over-estimate how important specific math & programming skills are.

<comment><USER8> As another person with some experience with hiring, I agree with you fully.

To put one of your points in my own words, your engineers are going to be spending the majority of their waking hours with this new person five days a week. Take the time to make sure it's a good fit.

<comment><USER18> As yet another person with some experience with hiring, let's not get theory and practice confused.

Taking the time to make sure it's a good fit is a worthy goal, but the industry is operating under some kind of delusion that there's a Ballmer Peak ([http://xkcd.com/323/](http://xkcd.com/323/)) to interviewing people somewhere between the 4th and 5th hour of the onsite interview.

Returns start diminishing very quickly after the first five minutes. This is why multiple people earlier in the process are necessary.

<comment><USER8> > Returns start diminishing very quickly after the first five minutes.

That's the opposite of a scientific approach. One of the best things I ever learned from an experienced interviewer is the spend the rest of the interview trying to disprove your first impression. Anything else is an exercise in confirmation bias. I'm not saying that I've never ended an interview early when it's obvious there is a bad fit. My time is important and so is other people's time.

<comment><USER18> A scientific approach is to pose a theory (this candidate would make a good hire) and perform a measurement (whoa, this guy's good) and then perhaps perform the measurement again, without bias, to see if the measurement is consistent and reproducible.

What you're suggesting is to spend the next several hours performing additional measurements in the hopes of finding one contrary to your first measurement. _That_ is precisely the opposite of science. It's also how casinos stay in business.

<comment><USER8> > and then perhaps perform the measurement again

Not perhaps. Definitely measure again.

And that's exactly what I said. Don't trust your initial impression. Measure again. Get as many data points as you can.

> What you're suggesting is to spend the next several hours

I didn't suggest that and I'm not sure where you got that idea from. My interviews are usually less than an hour and then I hand the candidate over to the next interviewer. If they are a strong no from me, I'll even talk to the next interviewer to explain why and see if they even want to continue with the candidate. They usually don't want to continue with a "strong no" candidate, but sometimes the next interviewer might not share my concerns and they do want to continue with the candidate. Could be the person is a good fit for the other interviewer's team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tried to read but the site is hot garbage on mobile.

<comment><USER21> Yep, absolutely horrendous and totally unreadable on iOS safari. First a modal pops up with the "no thanks" beyond the fold (and weird scrolling behavior). Once I finally figure out how to close it, I'm at the bottom of the page. If I scroll up, I see the first few sentences and then an email form. No thanks.

<comment><USER22> Even on Desktop, "No thanks", then "No thanks" again before even getting to article. Hit back without reading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g >So if you come on site with us, you're going to have four sessions. That's our 'right' number, because we don't want to ask too much time from candidates and be grueling, but we also need to have enough data points. The four sessions include three evaluations sessions with the team, each an hour long. Then there's a session with the hiring manager, usually me, so I can answer any questions about how the team works

Did I read this correctly? Four hours? Is this over one day or several?

Most people I know won't even touch a job listing with more than two interviews.

<comment><USER23> When you say most people, who are you referencing? Day long loops are the norm for my social circle. As in, get in at 9am, leave at 1-2pm. That includes lunch for an informal round.

<comment> ainar-g I guess I needed to be clearer there.

I meant experienced programmers in Moscow, Russia. For the most part it's either one Skype call (<= 30m) and one personal interview (1h - 1h30) or two personal interviews. There are exceptions though. I've heard Yandex requiring at least four interviews, but my colleagues all tell me that they wouldn't agree to proceed on such terms.

Apparently, looking for a job is a much more tedious process in the US.

<comment><USER24> I once interviewed at Apple many years back. Personal interviews with 19 people over 2 days! Well a few of them were in pairs (I presumed they were training their engineers to interview also.) I didn't make it through however not for technical reasons but cultural fit (maybe I didn't act fanatical enough about Apple products?)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Analysis of 114 propaganda sources from ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://188.8.131.52/sites/default/files/Inside%20the%20Jihadi%20Mind.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> "Aim: To identify precisely what ideology is shared by the three groups, as revealed in their propaganda, in order to inform effective counter-narratives from mainstream Muslims, governments and civil society."

Done using Nvivo software.

(Reposting with the IP as the DNS name seemed to hurt the memory of at least one reader, don't let it offend you, it remains very informative :)</comment>


Don't Steal Money from Day Traders Before They Lose It - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-06/don-t-steal-money-from-day-traders-before-they-lose-it <comment><USER2> I was a trader at a big bank for many years. The tools and access I had there put me in a different class of trader that very few other firms or individuals can attain. There is such information and technology asymmetry in this business - its not worth trying to day trade as an individual. Buy and hold forever... only way to invest.

<comment><USER3> I find it hard to believe there's any day trader using any kind of information making a consistent profit. Isn't everybody just dabbling around hoping to be in the 50% that outperform by chance?

i've read about ed thorp pioneering statistical arbitrage in the 80s (?) which would fit the bill of "consistent returns", but I doubt that there is any of that left close to 50 years later.

I'm wondering what all these quantitive funds are doing.

<comment><USER4> The only way you can consistently make money is by knowing things others do not (e.g., insider trading) or by taking advantage of structural problems or inefficiencies in the trading platform (e.g., high frequency trading).

I do believe that insider trading is rampant. I've seen many occasions where a large corporate announcement sends a stock up or down, but hours before, you can see the price of the stock slowly slide in the direction. Obviously a certain amount of that may be random/explainable, but I've seen it a lot and my intuition says more is going on. This also seems relatively easy to quantitatively measure, I'd love to see a real analysis of it.

<comment><USER5> I find the market for knowledge which others do not have but which aren't actually illegal to be quite fascinating.

There is a company who will break down a brand new car into its component parts and by knowledge of materials and production processes can tell to a very narrow margin what the cost of producing that car is - and therefore the profit potential of each sale. The information about the number of cars sold is either public or more easily obtained than the actual company accounts (public in many jurisdictions due to car registrations).

There are other companies who will buy a bunch of iPhones for example and by carefully analysing the serial numbers can deduce to within a reasonable margin exactly how many have been sold.

Using information like this I'm sure most large trading firms have very good models of the likely performance of each publicly listed company.

I wonder how far down this rabbit hole things go. Do they have people standing outside factories counting how many cars leave on the back of the truck? Do they have access to systems like Galileo in the travel industry where they could figure out how many seats had been booked on a plane, or how many rooms were booked in a hotel? They can then take a good guess at staffing / fixed costs and arrive very much in the correct ball park.

<comment><USER6> > There are other companies who will buy a bunch of iPhones for example and by > carefully analysing the serial numbers can deduce to within a reasonable > margin exactly how many have been sold.

AKA the German Tank Problem ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem)). Fascinating application of statistics.

<comment><USER7> Except it only works when serial numbers are sequential, I believe the common practice today is to have serial numbers to be random alphanumeric strings.

<comment><USER8> Not usually, and especially not for physical products. An 8 digit alphanumeric serial contains 2.82E13 possible values (which is more than any one company will sell of anything, ever), and it'd be crazy not to use that to store some kind of information like models, series, bins, etc. Two characters allow almost 1300 possibilities, and just three give over 46,000. Our POs have 6 digits, and after over two decades of multiple weekly deliveries, we're still in the 500000s.

To make that random would be a huge waste and also destroy the potential for creating visible patterns helpful within a lot of industries.

Edit: I just thought about redemption codes, which yes, do aim to be randomized have a huge space relative to the issued codes. In those cases, I see what you mean. Serials of digital media are often and intentionally randomized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh, got through the whole article without the author referencing the origin of the term "bucket shop." Nothing new under the sun when it comes to market manipulation. I like the idea of a whole new generation of crypto market manipulators rediscovering techniques that haven't worked in eh real markets in 100 years.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_\(stock_market\))

 _The transaction goes "in the bucket" and is never executed. Because no trading of actual securities occurs, the customer is essentially betting against the bucket shop operator in a game based on abstract security prices._

<comment><USER10> I think a big difference here is that bucketeers knew they weren't actually buying the securities, and just waging against one another. The scheme in the article is like a combination of a bucket shop and a concealed ponzi scheme

<comment><USER11> Is running a bucket shop still illegal even if you are open with everyone that it is a bucket shop and people are just gambling?

<comment><USER12> The modern equivalent is spreadbetting. We have loads in the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is so interesting - one wonders if this is strictly immoral. I propose this thought experiment: What if there was a version of this fraudulent brokerage that conducted this behavior in the open?

Let's say their policy is something like, "You trade for real under favorable commissions and margins. If we decide via internal algorithms that you are liable to lose money, we will instead pocket your trade and credit you 10% of the money you would have lost back. If you win, you win in full as normal."

Would this be immoral? Illegal?

<comment><USER14> That's basically taking a short position on whatever the customer thinks they're buying, right?

Whenever the customer wants to sell their position, you'd have to pay them whatever the value was at that time, whether the position had gone up or down. Big risk, unless you're confident that the customers are going to reliably make terrible trades, on balance.

It might still be fraud maybe if you claimed to be performing a service that you're not performing, but if you actually told your customers that you were doing it (as in the situation you ask about), then I can't see how it could be breaking any laws. And I'm not certain why your customers would even care, and might even prefer it, due to the "get 10% back if you lose everything" clause which you don't get with normal day trading.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are laws against naked shorting, even when you've personally determined that the stock will tank as evidenced by the fact that an idiot is buying it.

There are arguments that naked shorting should be allowed, but it isn't allowed right now.

<comment><USER15> the parent poster means simply betting against their customers. Not explicitly shorting a security without a locate. Just a lingo thing. In any case, this sounds a lotvlike a Contract-for-Difference type of arrangement. The broker functions as the liquidity provider, taking the contra side to all customer bets. Broker collects the bid-ask spread and hopes that it overcomes losses. One big downside is counterparty risk: if the broker goes bankrupt, the winning customers may not get paid!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't day trade, I mostly keep my money in ETFs and other dumb securities. But every now and again, I see the market move in such a completely unreasonable way, most often hammering a stock on some bad, but not awful news. In these cases, I've made small gambles and bought the stock when it's low to see it recover every time. My sample size is small and I'm too conservative to bet the bank, but I haven't been wrong yet.

<comment><USER16> > I'm too conservative to bet the bank, but I haven't been wrong yet.

You are being cocky because you are dabbling with small money, when you play with big money, your emotions will immediate change and that is when you will make mistakes.

<comment><USER4> > when you play with big money, your emotions will immediate change and that > is when you will make mistakes

That's precisely why I don't play with big money, not that I have so much anyway. I wonder though, if I was playing with someone else's "big money", if you could keep those emotions in check.

<comment><USER17> That's the real trick - convince others to give you a lot of money and when you win you get a big cut and when you lose it's not your money and you just do something else.

Seems to be the way all hedge funds operate, maybe can even charge membership fees too.

<comment><USER4> Right... most traders get big bonuses when they win, but if they lose, at worst they get fired. If you can win for a while and then get fired eventually, you'll still end up on top.

<comment><USER18> Trader A makes $10m in year 1 and gets a $1m bonus. She loses $10m in year 2, and gets no bonus so the firm is down her $1m bonus.

Trader B makes $1m in years 1 and 2. That's too low to trigger a bonus, but his firm is up $2m.

The system doesn't reward trader B so he has to choose: do what's right for the firm, or take big risks in the hope of a bonus

(Simplifying dramatically)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To play Devil's Advocate: How is this different from being a market maker? I am presuming that if the customer actually made money, these guys would pay them from their own pocket.

Or alternately, assuming zero or low enough transaction costs, if these guys just took the opposite position of their customers for each trade (also known as hedging) in the market, then wouldn't the net positions be exactly the same?

Basically, the crime here seems "technical" or some sort of "you lied to me", it's not that people actually got different returns than what their trades entailed.

<comment><USER20> If they are doing this without disclosure, they are adding counterparty risk without consent. Just because they didn't blow up does not mean they can't. It doesn't even have to be due to your trade but someone else's. There have been single trades that have blown up international banks. Rare, and probably irrelevant here, but a point for perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Nonko team decided to take advantage of this pattern by secretly providing > some of Nonko's customers with training accounts instead of live ones and > simply pocketing those customers' deposits.

Seems like a really dangerous move it they allowed trading on anything with low volume (options, smaller stocks). All it takes is one trader to notice their order never actually executed on the public market..

</comment><comment><USER22> Just by the title I knew it had to be a Matt Levine story.

<comment><USER23> The man is a national treasure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Trading is essentially an activity of showing numbers on a screen between funds deposits and funds withdrawal.

Traders are playing with numbers. No one actually expects the paper shares to be mailed after stock purchase.

Brokerage guarantees successful withdrawal event - and if not - then it's a present and clear fraud.

So if brokerage does not actually do anything, but properly updates the numbers on the screen according to security prices and commission schedules + guarantees proper handling of deposit/withdrawals - no one essentially cares?

<comment><USER25> In this case brokerage exposes a client to counter-party risk that client has no idea about.

<comment><USER24> Well, if customer prone to lose anyways - "brokerage" is in good shape to collect commissions.

They'd be in trouble if customer suddenly strikes high margin gold and want to withdraw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Day trading is one thing (which IMO is absurd, if it's defined by not keeping positions overnight). However, if you compare two people picking stocks, one a professional trader and one a guy in his underwear at home or in a coffeeshop on his phone, the former has mostly massive advantages. But he's missing one: the guy in his underwear can afford time-wise to wait a longer timeframe. If I buy a stock I think is a value buy and it crashes, I can hold it as long as I need. The big bank trader has quarterly profits to worry about or his bonus is his jeopardy, if not his job. He has a pool of money he needs to grow and he's under tight scrutiny.

I don't recommend anyone do this, but I've achieved 27% returns trading in my retirement account (the past 12 months as of today). I don't trade random stocks, I don't buy and sell often, and I'm a news junkie so I'm constantly reading the news. If I screw up on a buy, then it turns into a 'buy and hold.'

Lastly, I've worked closely with traders in the past, in a tech capacity. I assure you, they're not all the sophisticated quant geniuses with carefully placed bets that the HN crowd seems to imagine.

(edit: grammar)

</comment><comment><USER27> How did the SEC discover this… did someone submit an order and it did not show up on the exchanges?

<comment><USER28> It's in the complaint. They were using a third party vendor for both the live accounts and the training accounts:

In the summer of 2014, the firm that owned and licensed Platform A discovered Nonko's training accounts scheme, after a technical inquiry from a Nonko customer revealed that the customer wrongly believed that his training account was a live one. On August 29, 2014, the owner of Platform A sent out an email blast to all Nonko customers alerting them that accounts starting with "TR" were training accounts; the firm then discontinued its relationship with Nonko, accusing Nonko of deceiving its customers.

<comment><USER27> Ah, thanks for the update. The wheels of justice turn really slowly though. Some of those account holders could've been long dead before they got their money back. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is notable because in the United States the form of leverage common else where, a contract for difference, is banned. Outside America it is much easier to run these kinds of bucket shops. The key is offering leverage, Kelly's formula suggests that stocks should be traded with a rather narrow band of leverage, under two in most cases. Yet these shops always offer leverage ratios more similar to forex. You would be hard pressed to convince me that ten times leverage should ever be used with equities.

Meanwhile forex markets are even worse. Leverages there in the past were over a hundred. Which explains why there is so much money to advertise forex. Shady online ad markets are filled with ads offering high leverage online only forex accounts. One can be fairly sure those shady forex accounts are nothing more than bucket shops.

In general leverage is a mistake for most investors. Yet the appeal of hitting high returns with low investment (retail investors using leverage tend to measure return with no relation to risk), mean far too many retail investors are playing with options than is safe.

<comment><USER30> IG will offer me, here in Australia, 5% margin on shares (20x leverage), 0.5% margin on forex (200x leverage), 0.5% on indices, and form 0.7-4% on commodities [1].

I set up a demo account a while back, and it's pretty impressive the amount of money you can quickly make (and lose) with CFDs. It was possible on a $30,000 capital to make (or lose) over $1000 per day.

I'm a pretty risk averse guy, and also can't be bothered doing enough market research that short term trading is a sensible idea, so I didn't end up investing any real money.

[1] [https://www.ig.com/au/cfd-trading/charges-and- margins](https://www.ig.com/au/cfd-trading/charges-and-margins)

<comment><USER31> > It was possible on a $30,000 capital to make (or lose) over $1000 per day.

Maybe there is a typo in your example? Making or losing 3.3% in one day does not seem that impresive...

<comment><USER30> I was trading while I was still at work doing my real job, so I wasn't putting 100% of my attention to it.

3.3% daily (if you could consistently make a profit) is a very good return, think about how fast that compounds. Most savings accounts aren't even 3.3% per annum.

<comment><USER32> Head over to /r/wallstreetbets if you'd like to get a nice dose of adrenaline / heart attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hey, if they made sure to credit clients with any gains, does it really matter where the losses went?

Edit: It could be in the ToS. "How can we offer such huge margins? Simple. If our algorithms indicate that you're a loser, we just don't place your trades. But whatever happens, your account will always be credited for gains that you would have earned.".

</comment><comment><USER34> If they hadn't used third party providers they wouldn't have been caught. Nonko only got caught due to bad service/infrastructure design. So really the systems in place to defend against this kind of thing aren't working. Or not working well enough. This is just an observation. I have no idea if this is the sort of thing which _can_ be detected.

</comment><comment><USER35> This article is typical of the complete lack of ethics in the banking and finance industry. As he acknowledges, this is straight up fraud / theft and yet he is sympathetic to the perpetrators. It's the kind of amorality and lack of ethics that was so visible in the financial crisis. At least in this case there appears to have been some actual enforcement unlike in the financial crisis where essentially nobody in the industry was held accountable for their actions.

It's not ok to defraud people or steal from them just because you think they're stupid, either legally or ethnically. This is obvious to most people but apparently not to the finance industry.

<comment><USER23> Matt Levine is typically a voice for greater ethics in the industry. He just happens to also have a very ironic sense of humor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'd always wondered if crypto exchanges actually bother to buy the crypto that you ask them to. For most people they wouldn't know the difference as eventually they'll withdraw in fiat money anyway

<comment><USER37> Very few crypto exchanges support fiat withdrawals. Most are crypto-in, crypto-out, only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Isn't this sort of what the investment firms "dark pools" are doing? not executing order in the public market but in their own private market?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the subtitle is much more informative:

> Boiler room guys knew customers were going to lose their money, so they > allegedly spent it themselves.

But it was also illegally long.

<comment><USER39> you just gotta love Matt Levine headlines, though. The title is as much a play on his constant "laws of insider trading" running gags and part of his daily newsletter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How about thermal imaging of oil tanks at Cushing Oklahoma!

</comment><comment><USER41> How can you do your taxes if your trades are not executed?

<comment><USER42> You use the numbers provided by your broker at the end of the year.

<comment><USER41> So the IRS has no way of validating these numbers (they do require brokers to provide the numbers these days)? Overall I'm just not buying that this story is true, in other words.

<comment><USER43> What makes you think the operators are giving correct numbers to the IRS, or that the IRS would necessarily detect something like that on a fairly small scale?

(I have no idea how any of this works, but I would assume that if they're willing to defraud their own customers they're probably not acting entirely above board on the associated tax paperwork either.)

<comment><USER41> I just think this story is not worth talking about. Two people created a fake website. That is the story. This is a span story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Honestly, this sort of seems fine as long as they covered winners.

It doesn't actually matter from a black box standpoint who took their bets as long as they were given the proper outcomes.

It isn't any different from running a casino really, except it has potentially better odds.

<comment><USER45> You know they probably can't cover the winners, though. The SEC doesn't make stuff like bucket shops illegal on principle; they make it illegal because people got scammed.</comment></comment>


Drupal is a Burning Platform? - <AUTHOR> https://drupal.sh/drupal-burning-platform <comment><USER2> I haven't worked with Drupal in a very long time, but I think one thing that may be missed in this article is that many companies that may have installed drupal in the past can now be served by the likes of Wix, SquareSpace, Shopify, etc.

Wordpress has been able to hang-on to the lead position in the CMS space. Being 2nd in this market is a very difficult proposition.</comment>


Artificial Intelligence, Really, Is Pseudo-Intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/11/21/365753466/artificial-intelligence-really-is-pseudo-intelligence

<comment><USER2> To say something is pseudo-intelligence or true intelligence, one has to define intelligence rigorously. That is more philosophical than people think, because how little we scientifically understand about intelligence, or consciousness, or even life.

For most of people, the intuition of intelligence is a bit naive, and nowadays intuition is often at the opposite of the truth. It often is along the line of "looking intelligent and knowing what it is doing". Something like turing test describes the first part intuitively. But we soon found out that we wouldn't call something "intelligent" even it passes turing test since the machine is unlikely to know why it is saying something, hence the latter part. But again, this is about consciousness or "strong AI", which is even further away from our understanding than "intelligence". How do we know that the machines that "look intelligent" don't "know what they are doing"? Consciousness is very hard to define and even harder to inspect, and maybe someday machines begin to have consciousness even before we realize it? In fact, we already did this to most animals, thinking they are not intelligent or self-conscious while they are.

But to me, the psychology behind these definitions is very interesting and maybe quite important. No matter how we try to define intelligence, we wouldn't call machines intelligent until they very much behave like us. Because to most people, intelligence is what defines humans, so they intuitively use their feelings of "does that feel human" to benchmark intelligence. And psychologically, we are exceptionally good at telling something "not human" from "feeling/looking/speaking like human". But this is a very narrow and, if I dare to say, ignorant and self-centric view, because it implicitly relies on the thinking of "we are far more intelligent than any other life form, and human's intelligence is the only way intelligence can be work".

Think about it, if there's a super-intelligent being that observes our world, maybe to it, human's intelligence is as primitive as fish, and trees aren't far behind; and maybe, entities such like countries or the internet are actually of more intelligent "life" forms, just we haven't realized that yet because they don't look like us at all; and maybe, on the scale of intelligence from 0 to that super-intelligent, humans, birds and machines are clustered in a small range, though significantly larger than zero, still not far from it.

Although the research on human brains and a lot of our own stuff inspired the research of AI quite a lot, it is perfectly possible that we create something truly intelligent or conscious without us understanding human intelligence or consciousness fully. We can have a different kind of "intelligence", and our researches are well on their way toward that. It's very hard to see because we don't understand intelligence, and maybe our hardware isn't powerful enough to fully utilize our theories.

<comment><USER3> While I agree with your point that intelligence must be defined rigorously. We don't need to leave it to the philosophers. After categorizing the types of definitions, Shane Legg successfully used "Property of an agent that interacts with its environment so as to successfully achieve goals across a wide range of environments"[1] for his work in AI.

What Alva Noë is hinting at is the flaw with weak or pseudo-intelligence, as Alva calls it. As impressive as deep blue is with chess, or Watson with Jeopardy, they fail the "goals across a wide range of environments" test. This is clear with deep blue, and Watson once you realize it's just a glorified search engine.

I often hear people claim Watson learns because it improves based on the answer in the category. While it does use previous answers to tweak the final ranking algorithm. All of this is lost once the category is finished. To really "teach" Watson, you need to add more data to its index and re-index offline.

We have a workable definition of intelligence. What we're missing is a fundamental primitive unit of strong AI. Until this is found, AI will always remain just a bag of tricks, only capable of solving problems its programmers planner for.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6umr1OP8uo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6umr1OP8uo)

<comment><USER4> There's still a huge dearth of rigor in defining both the width of a range of environments, the degree of success in achieving goals, and the significance of various goals. I'll expound briefly on the first. Who is to say that the range of "environments" a chess supercomputer faces is narrower than the environments a human faces? Obviously, we intuit our range of environments to be wider, but can we explain why rigorously?

<comment><USER3> It's more than intuition. Both chess and jeopardy are subsets of the human environment. Watson couldn't handle tic-tac-toe, never-mind chess. Change one rule of chess, and human could cope but Deep Blue would need to be rewritten.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The authors comparison of intelligence to biological systems is absurd. Biological systems are more complicated than necessary. Let me say that again. Biological systems are overly complicated. This is because Natural selection has no regard for simplicity. Evolution is a blind process of trial and error that sticks to what works. So just because the gene networks of an amoeba are a confusing mess, which they are, does not imply that Intelligent machines have to be just as complicated.

I wrote a post on this awhile ago: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3b...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wlFJtuBgnVkWm1nflKtJAy3bWCuvBAZDH- GlgadCTCc/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER6> This argument would have merit if we were anywhere near biological intelligence in our "AI". We don't even understand how most of the brain works, what it does or how it does it. In fact if it was so simple even to re- create some aspect of the brain, we would have created the super-brain with the amount of resources we have at our disposal and time we have spent in the field of AI. It is like saying calculus is unnecessarily complex because all I can do is simple arithmetic.

<comment><USER7> Why is the brain the benchmark for "intelligence"? We already have machines that can run circles around the brain on very complex reasoning tasks. True, we don't have a talking robot that simulates humans, but in many other tasks we've met or exceeded what humans can do.

I would argue that we already have intelligent machines. What we don't have is a human simulator.

<comment><USER4> Haven't you heard? At the moment a computer exists which can outperform a human mind at a certain task, that task can no longer be considered a criterion for intelligence. Multiplying large numbers doesn't require intelligence. Chess doesn't require intelligence. Facial recognition doesn't require intelligence. Proving mathematical theorems doesn't require intelligence.

<comment><USER8> There's a widely-accepted standard for judging intelligence called the Turing Test. Computers are still a long way from passing that test.

<comment><USER9> They aren't that far from passing it actually.

One kinda sorta passed it earlier this year, by pretending to be a 13 yo boy. It was at the annual Turing Test event though[1].

Even if we ignore that, given the recent interest in using RNNs to generate natural language I'd say we are 18 months from being able to pass it reliably.

[1][http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and- events/releases/PR583836.a...](http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and- events/releases/PR583836.aspx)

<comment><USER10> I strongly doubt this. Here's a good way to defeat any computer in a Turing test: tell a joke, and ask it to explain why it is funny.

<comment><USER9> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_humor#Joke_reco...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_humor#Joke_recognition)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is quibbling semantics. I bet there are software simulations for amoeba behavior indistinguishable from the real thing. It's placing an inordinate degree of importance on physical reality. Is a perfect simulation different from the real thing? That is a fundamental philosophical question that can't simply be assumed to be no.

<comment><USER12> Lets see it this way, does the amoeba simulation ever begin to show signs of evolving? Even if given a millenia? If no, then it's not intelligence, call it video playback if you will.

<comment><USER13> The author is simply ignorant. This kind of evolution of simulated amoeba-like organisms was done over 20 years ago with Tierra: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_\(computer_simulation\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a pretty short and simple article but I think it is interesting and has been striking at the core of controversy of what AI is.

Is something that behaves like a human really intelligent? Google Search answers a lot of questions almost like a smart well educated person. Is it an intelligent entity? A computer plays chess better than humans. Is it intelligent?

In this case I think the author wants the entity to behave like biological organisms to be considered intelligent. This includes autonomy and self- replication. I can see that. This sort of points to robotics as the field that will produce these entities. Or maybe computer viruses...?

This is also a classic debate between behaviorists and those like Chomsky who want to understand the underlying processes of human cognition and intelligence. I can see both sides and maybe I like Chomsky's more idealistic view a bit better...

Here are a few easy to read articles that talk about this:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-c...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam- chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/)

[http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and- the-f...](http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight- for-the-future-of-ai)

Another interesting one (a bit longer) in the same vein by David Deutsch (yes that Deutsch, the "multiple Universes physics guy")

[http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch- artificial-...](http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial- intelligence/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The whole article is based on a false premise - behaviour of unicellular organisms is now understood very well by biologists and it is clear they are nothing more than automatons, basically. A simple explanation of amoebas behaviour can be found here[1], for example:

 _When an amoeba encounters a chemical that attracts it, the chemoattractant binds to receptors on the amoeba 's surface. The receptor then activates a protein called a G-protein, which activates a protein called PLC. The PLC modifies other molecules to create short-lived messengers that will activate other pathways necessary for movement by the cell._

The story is pretty similar for any other behaviour they exhibit, its just a simple chain of chemical reactions triggered by an impulse from an environment. In contrast to many more complicated organisms where we hypothetically know the same to be the case (like humans?), in unicellular organisms we actually traced many of such pathways.

People very emotionally cling to their beliefs about intelligence, and this blinds them to simple logic. This is the same thing at operation that caused the backslash against evolution theory. In the end I don't see why such determinism would sadden anyone, our everyday experience is what it is and its nature is not changed by learning that we react, in the end, somewhat automatically.

[1] [http://www.ehow.com/info_8517923_ways-amoeba-sees- responds.h...](http://www.ehow.com/info_8517923_ways-amoeba-sees- responds.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> What an astonishingly vapid and frustrating article. We need to get past these semantic arguments about what constitutes "intelligence." The "do submarines swim" analogy is cliched, but perfectly appropriate. It doesn't matter how you define "swim." Submarines are better at certain tasks than human bodies on their own. Likewise, computer systems that we label "AI" systems are better at certain tasks than human bodies (brains) on their own.

The author seems to use "intelligence" and "autonomy" interchangeably, which is troubling, mostly because he makes no attempt at actually defining either. His claim that amoebas and plants "exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers" is ludicrous under any remotely plausible definitions of the terms. If humans genetically engineer an amoeba or a plant to change its behavior, is the magical "autonomy" suddenly gone?

Also, his argument is ridiculous even as semantic arguments go, since "artificial" isn't _supposed_ to mean "synthetic." The standard dictionary definitions are "made by humans" and "false or pretending."

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't think the author has enough knowledge about what is actually going on in the field of AI to provide reasonable arguments, all she/he spoke about was Watson and Clocks, i think she/he must understand there is more to AI than what comes on the news.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm happy to see an article like this on HN. It is much closer to my thoughts on AI then the general optimistic inevitability of AI one usually sees in the tech community.

</comment><comment><USER9> Ha! Artificial intelligence us always whatever we can't work out what to do.

As a general principle, if someone claims X is not AI, then they need to define a test they will accept as a true test of AI.

"The agency and awareness of an amoeba" is achievable now[1].

[1] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms- mind...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/weve-put-worms-mind-lego- robot-body-180953399/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the author should be using the term "agency" instead of "intelligence", and then I might agree. The amoeba or the most basic animal doesn't have much intelligence, but it has drive and desire to survive and reproduce. That's not true in artificially intelligent beings. And while you could hard-code such drive (see the Belief-Desire-Intention frameworks in the multi-agent systems literature), ultimately it will still always be "pseudo" by definition. The notion of survival in a machine will only ever be a trick designed by a human to get a machine to do something for us, not something innate.

Maybe one day we'll implement some Adam and Eve robots with an initial hard- coded survival DNA, that the robots will abide by and transmit to their children robots. Then those children robots will evolve and one day think of building thinking machines (maybe out of some organic material) to work for them and will think of faking some survival code (maybe using some sort of protein?) in them to create pseudo-agency... ;)

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised whenever I see what seems to be belief in dualism in ostensibly serious scientific discussion about _humans_. This author goes so far as to attribute dualism to _amoebas_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's okay, natural intelligence is really only pseudo-intelligence, too.

</comment><comment><USER20> This article makes a number of very bold claims about poorly defined concepts, and provides zero evidence to back anything it says up.

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree that Watson is nothing like a true artificial intelligence. But I do not believe that this means we are unable to create such a thing.

I think true AI will be a highly-parallel learning machine, possibly modeled off of something like the human brain. But I do not think that we need to fully understand the human brain to create an AI smarter than us.

I think one of the big challenges may be in providing the proper sensors / inputs to this learning device.

I think once we have a true AI, we won't really understand how it works, just as we can train a neural network but can't look at the network itself and make much sense from its parts.

I think it's possible that the road to the singularity may be gradual, and we might not even realize when it happens.

Edit: Today's xkcd is somewhat relevant: [http://xkcd.com/1450/](http://xkcd.com/1450/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Man that comment thread takes me right back to Freshman philosophy class. I particularly appreciated the notion of an Amoeba having 'agency'. Caveat the mechanical reconstruction and processing of the organics of DNA, systems have been built and discussed in Artificial Life conferences that not only have the 'agency' of an Amoeba but emergent behaviors in flocking, social adaptation, and mutual defense. And what does that say about intelligence? Pretty much nothing, just like all mass being attracted to all other mass clearly demonstrates the concept of gravity but says nothing at all about what gravity is.

But it is a lot of fun to speculate about.

</comment><comment><USER23> "But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value."

As someone who does work in this field, we're not _that_ far away from a fully atomistic simulation of a single cell (with a couple assumptions about reactive force fields, quantum cut-off, numerical stability, time scales, yada yada...)

</comment><comment><USER24> My problem with the article is, it never explains the difference between "processing" information and "having" information. And I think that the entire argument hangs on this distinction. The author essentially claims, that a amoeba has some essence of live which a computer can not posess, but fails to show that the distinction is important beyond semantics. ( To clarify, I think that this is an entirely defendable position, it is just one of the questions where details of definitions really matter.)

</comment><comment><USER25> The brain is clearly marvelous, but it's not magic. It's a physical object with rules which govern it just like anything else. To think that we won't be able to crack the AI nut just smacks of insecurity on the part of the OP. We are, whether anyone wants to accept it or not, just meat robots.

<comment><USER26> I think a wide-spread problem in this discussion is that people misinterpret the word 'just'. It clearly means "just meat, no magic". But what people mistakenly understand is "just meat, _inferior_ to magic".

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm starting to believe (hard) AI should get the same status as politics and religion on HN. Those comment threads debating the true nature of AI are getting repetitive.</comment>


Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2 degrees: U.N - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-climatechange/governments-not-on-track-to-cap-temperatures-at-below-2-degrees-u-n-idUSKCN1LI03S <comment><USER2> This is a classical example of a market failure. The issue is that today, when you you are buying any good, you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process. In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations. This is called a negative externality.

The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.

Note that market failure does not mean that the "market" mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.

<comment><USER3> Nuclear plants are a good example of this mentality, cheap power until you have to decommission the plant and suddenly costs goes through the roof.

But I would not say this is market failure, to me this is market working exactly as intended and expected: maximizing profit without caring for the rest.

On the other hand, it is not a question of subsidy/handout paid by future generation anymore, we're now at the point where it is a matter of going over the threshold effect where the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.

<comment><USER4> > ... the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of > decades.

That is _very_ unlikely. People could have survived just fine during the Eocene Optimum, ~50 Myr ago. When the entire planet was tropical. Assuming that they knew what to eat, anyway.

<comment><USER5> That is mere pedantry however. Clearly the main point was that the effects will be undesirable because they will come at the cost of a lot of human life. Whether humanity as a species will survive is, arguably, of lesser importance.

<comment><USER6> Mmm...if the effects are merely "undesirable" and not existential than I dare say that the status quo is unlikely to change. I'd go as far as saying that whatever efforts are being done now might simply be lip-service or at best token gestures. Perhaps it is the case that there is a considerable asymmetry in the impact of the effects...

<comment><USER7> "Undesirable" and "come at the cost of a lot of human life" is technically correct, but is also a pretty sterile description, that doesn't communicate the full picture.

The worst-case scenario is a collapse of civilization, which - with or without wars - means mass starvation (if you live in a large city, you'll die in the first week). Your grandchildren - or more likely, someone else's grandchildren - will be living in Mad Max hellscape, desperately trying to stave off reverting to pre-industrial levels of life and technology.

(And with all the easily accessible energy sources already mined out and gone, I suspect the next industrial revolution won't be possible for many, many millennia.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.

<comment><USER9> Personally, I worry about a lot. Global warming, not so much. It will have an impact on coasta cities but that aside, it really isn't that big a deal. We have much bigger risks to worry about (both environmental and otherwise).

<comment><USER10> Once the permafrost starts to melt, it will cause a positive feedback loop causing all trapped methane to rapidly be released, doubling the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's literally a ticking bomb. I worry about it.

<comment><USER11> But then again, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere.

<comment><USER3> then again, this is not a process that can be stopped once started and there more than enough methane to have dramatic consequences.

then again this is one reinforcing feedback loop among several others.

Are you familiar with the concept of planet albedo, and how it is changing on earth due to melting polar cap? Ever heard of ocean's anoxic events and their consequences ?

And the list goes on.

<comment><USER11> Yes yes

The reason I'm citing this is not because I think we shouldn't worry, but because if the methane is released (and this depends on the release speed as well) we might have a period with an atmosphere with high concentrations of methane, then a sudden reduction.

Runaway greenhouse gas concentrations and higher temperature might trigger (the reason being we know some things, but we don't know everything) a runaway CO2 capture process. It sounds SciFi, and it probably is, and it seems Nitrogen is a limiting factor. But I wouldn't say it is impossible. Or it could be possible with human help.

Then at the end of this period we could end up with less CO2 in the atmosphere, with oil running out and the clathrates emptied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large- scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to?

It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything.

Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact.

So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not _happen to_ advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives.

So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.

<comment><USER13> I don't think we've hit a limitation of our brains. We used to be able to build cathedrals that took dozens of years to complete. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and didn't complete its initial mission until 1989. We planted trees that we knew would take a hundred years to reach full maturity.

We don't have a cognitive failure. We have an institutional failure. The corporate system that drives most of human society today is often unable to deliver long-term projects that benefit society. The tragedy of the commons is a viable business model — the way to compete is to exploit as much of the environment as you can before the other guy does.

<comment><USER14> Implied in your answer is that the root cause of climate change is failed economic systems. Isn't that what we should address?

<comment><USER13> I believe so, yes.

Capitalism is a very powerful tool, but we've taken it to the point of religious dogma and its short-comings are very real at the scale of a global economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is not just governments, its people too.

How many couples will have more than one child? How many people eat meat or fish every day? How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away? How many people buy huge SUVs and trucks as a status symbol when a smaller car is all they need?

Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck.

I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint to the minimum and guess what? It won't matter because by the time I have saved a few kilos of Co2 there's a douchebag with a hummer driving down the street sucking gasoline like there is no tomorrow!

And to top it off everybody thinks that the world's economy can continue to grow without any limits. I believe that as a species we are simply delusional.

<comment><USER16> Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes you need a car is the issue. Also travelling in general is a big taboo, because environnementalists usually love to travel.

Relying on individual's changes will lead to what we've been doing for 30 years. It leads to the current situation of "penny wise and pound foolish", saving water when brushing teeth but taking planes.

<comment><USER17> > Driving to the corner store isn't the issue. Having a lifestyle that makes > you need a car is the issue.

This. I pissed off my ex's sister once when she said that since she was moving 40 kilometers outside of the city, she and her husband needs two cars. I asked her why she was moving then, you already have a house with a room for all your kids close enough to work that you can bike. She answered that she loves nature, and just going for a run there whenever she wants. So I said "wouldn't you then say that to go for a run in the woods whenever you want, you'll get two cars"?

It sort of killed the mood. I'm a monster.

<comment><USER18> I've had these kinds of conversations often with family, and I think it comes down to them believing in the "right" to live anywhere. They have a right to living in a house close to nature. This attitude comes up when some parties in our country want to raise the price of gas or some other way make it more expensive to drive (to save our planet). The reaction is always the same: "how am I supposed to bike or walk to work, it would take 10 hours!". Well yeah, but it's your choice to live so far away from everything, should we destroy our planet because you want to have a yard and live next to a forest?

<comment><USER19> >Well yeah, but it's your choice to live so far away from everything, should we destroy our planet because you want to have a yard and live next to a forest?

In most cities it's simply unaffordable to live in biking/walking distance to the city centre. And the jobs are there.

<comment><USER20> That depends where you are in the world. Some cities are denser than others. Some places, people are willing to live in smaller appartments, etc. Adjustments to zoning laws and regulations as well as adjustments to personal expectations can go quite far.

Also, there are trains, subways, etc, that has a very small environmental footprint. Bicycles can also take you a fair distance, especially the electric ones.

If there is a will, there is a way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Funny that this would be news in 2018 when a year after the paris COP21, at the 2016 COP22 in Morocco the matter was that we were already past the 1.5° goal and we were on course for going over 2° faster than expected which meant a possible increase of 2.5-3°

These estimation were not even taking into account the full picture and things like positive feedback loops.

</comment><comment><USER20> That global warming is man made and likely to produce catastrophic results, seems well documented now. (possibly 10s or 100s of millions of deaths over the next 200 years, along with a number of species going extinct).

But any claims of cataclysmic outcomes (collapse of most civilizations or even extinction) seems unlikely, as far as I can tell. There are other possible events that are much more likely to produce that kind of results.

Here is my list of fears: 1\. Runaway AI (>40% over the next 200 years) 2\. Nuclear War (>20% over the next 200 years) 3\. Runaway nanotech 4\. Runaway biotech 5\. Runaway, cataclysmic global warming effects (full ecosystem collapse, ice age triggered, >5 degree warming, etc)

<comment><USER10> You should read the article The Uninhabitable Earth[1] by David Wallace-Wells on NyMag. It's a good primer on the current information and predictions.

[1]: [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate- change-...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth- too-hot-for-humans.html)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the link. I've seen most of these points before, I think. My impression is that this view is a fringe view within the academic community. Do you have any references to indicate that this is actually becoming an academic consensus?

To be clear: I'm all for taking the possible actions in order to slow down the global warming. Unfortunately, the best replacement we've had to coal up until now (nuclear) has been unjustly demonized by many of the same people that claim to be most concerned about global warming.

Even the worst case outcome for nuclear is better than the best case outcome for coal...

<comment><USER3> > Unfortunately, the best replacement we've had to coal up until now (nuclear) > has been unjustly demonized by many of the same people that claim to be most > concerned about global warming.

You cannot fix the issue with a change of paradigm, switching from fossil fuels to nuclear will not fix climate change simply because if we switched all plant to nuclear overnight we would run out of fuel in a matter of decades.

The only solution is obvious and it is a decrease of energy use to sustainable levels. Do not consume more than what we can sustainably produce is the only possible way.

This means a drastic reduction of population which has only been possible due to a prolonged lifestyle of overconsumption and it will happen whether we want it or not.

<comment><USER20> If we can postpone the problem by decades, I would consider that a huge win. Maybe we could control fusion by then. Also, nuclear plays fairly well with renewable energy sources, many of which are also getting cheaper (especially solar).

If we take global warming serously, I see absolutely no reason that we should continue to burn coal, except that it is a bit cheaper than nuclear given the current safety regulations for nuclear.

Let's agree to ban coal, and then we can discuss to what extent we should add nuclear energy capacity to replace at least some of it.

As for reducing the population, I'm curious about how exactly you think we could achieve that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > A promise by rich nations to provide developing nations with $100 billion a > year to tackle climate change is only one part of the huge transformation > needed, she added.

This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .

<comment><USER22> Unless you're happy to have your sons and daughters kill people fleeing their uninhabitable countries, military solutions won't help.

<comment><USER23> There is a case of Israeli-Egyptian border.

Israeli don't have to actively kill Egyptians because they, for almost all purposes, can't enter.

Nothing much wrong in having my daughter participate in some wall building.

<comment><USER22> In all current cases there aren't very many people trying to cross the border at once. If Egypt became uninhabitable there'd be 100 million people trying to leave. If it was even just 5% of that trying to get in to Israel then a wall or an army isn't going to stop them unless that army is willing to _actively_ murder innocent people. I don't think any army on Earth would be willing to do that. Consequently a military solution isn't ever going to work.

<comment><USER23> You're talking about Egypt suddently becoming uninhabitable. That's not the case here. The case is that first it will be capable of hosting 100 mln people, then shrink to 90, then to 80, etc... Each transition will probably take five years. Of course there's a possibility of disasters there a wave of "sea people" may hit your wall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And even the agreed upon measures were criticized as hardly enough to affect the change we really need.

Scientists criticized the governments for making a show out of the agreements despite them being insufficient, and here they're not even meeting those goals.

</comment><comment><USER25> Imagine the force required to make governments do their share to prevent >2 degree shift.

There is a cost to compliance. There is a point where the damage is so incalcuable that you are compelled to force compliance on all other governments.

<comment><USER26> Nuclear winter is a very effective way to reduce global temperature, despite the initial CO2 spike. Also, the damage is quite calculable.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty sure a nuclear winter does not reduce global temperature other than the short term (~10 years). IIRC the hopi prophecies have one such outcome where all humans die crawling in the dark with no food due to no agriculture possible without photosynthesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The National Geographic film Before the Flood [0] did a reasonably good job of covering this topic. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a watch.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_\(film\))

<comment><USER28> I just can't watch it, too depressing. Especially with the USA actively steering the opposite direction, I have little hope.

<comment><USER3> If the only way out is to kill everyone in the USA, this is something that may be attempted at some point. Putin and his new set of weapons could probably razes every major US cities and put an end to the US nonsense.

One way or the other, most humans are gonna die before the end of the century and a dramatic reduction of population will happen. The US way of living will also come to an end, it is simply a matter of doing it voluntarily and aim to avoid the worst or having it forced on them by powers over which they have no say and feel the burn.

<comment><USER27> The US has a high footprint per capita, but its population is relatively small.

Frankly I think the more concerning nations would be China and India. India still has something like 30% of its population, which roughly equates the entirety of the US, living without electricity. India's top priority is development and bringing their people out of poverty, and they have abundant coal to do it cheaply.

You can beat up the US all you want, but the multiplier is important and a place like India can easily move the global needle via the slightest improvements to their average quality of life.

I'm hopeful that China uses its position of control over how everything is being made and resulting prosperity to pivot from fossil fuels.

Russia's future in the warmer planet is especially interesting. Imagine what impact Siberia becoming arable land would have on their place in the world.

<comment><USER4> > Imagine what impact Siberia becoming arable land would have on their place > in the world.

And after the US Midwest is a desert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Its most likely we are heading for 4 degree warming, I have very little faith that this type of collective action problem will be solved in time.

Best way to protect yourself is to invest in real estate up north and in inland parts of the world.

[

The time horizon is too long though, I wish 4 degree warming happened much quicker so that I can reap the rewards of my investment earlier. /s.

]

<comment><USER30> You joke, but I would guess Russia will ultimately be the winner here.

<comment><USER31> In the 1960s, the idea of deliberately warming Canada's arctic -- in order to make more farmland available for cultivation(!) -- was a serious policy proposal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The comments here are so far extremely biased towards panic. It's worth considering that perhaps the world's governments aren't panicking because it's not warranted.

Climate change, while generally "accepted," has a pretty amorphous definition and most current research agrees that there has been a pause since 1995 or so. Given that we are in a 20 year "pause," it's not entirely unreasonable - though clearly heretical - to posit that the alarm is largely unwarranted.

Year after year we see climate predictions fail to come to pass. Good science is based on hypotheses leading to testable predictions, and global warming predictions have a really poor track record of accuracy.

It might be time for the more scientifically minded among us to start increasing our criticism of climate alarmism.</comment>


Ask YC: I could use your comments on my project and plans to monetize it - <AUTHOR>

My project is officezilla.com which I started in 2001 and released the first version in 2002.  It is a
simple groupware collaboration system it handles a lot of things calendars, projects, forums, and such.
I worked on it for two years but then ran into funding problems. I was able to do a big rewrite in
2003 and I have been doing small imrprovements since.  About a year ago I started working on it
more actively again.  I am a single founder..
Stats: OfficeZilla accounts 12,018 OfficeZilla total users 27,740 Signups in the last 30 days 497 (which is average)
After thinking about different plans to make this into a revenue generating system I decided that people will not pay for the basic features but they do want customization
to fit there needs exactly.  I have enough users to take a segment and develop to there needs so I decided upon realty agents.
So I started putting together RealtyGoLive.com (it looks terrible right now forgive me) which would have:
1. The collaboration system customized to an realty agents office
2. A website system with websites for each agent, and an office website (the aggregated listing).  I already have the start on this, totally integrated and managed from the collaboration system.  So management is all done in one place.
3. A PBX system where agents would have a mailbox for each house, could leave details and recieve
messages to email, faxing out and so on.  Lots of good stuff, I like the pbx idea.
4. And other features too many to list but I think I could get them done in around 3 months or so if I was
working on them full time
I am currently hosting the system on an older server with 2 gigabytes of ram and 2 x 800mhz processors.
I have a dedicated sql server, again it is an older server dual 1ghz processors and 2 gigabytes of ram.  I also have two 1 terabyte nas systems for file storage and backup.  People get really mad when I loose there files which has happened thus I got the two nas systems which cost me more money then I could afford.
I sometimes feel a bit behind the times, I am not really into lots of javascript and I am not doing any ajax type things at all.  On another project I did, I do plan to implement some changes in this regard to make the system look a little better and save the data differently, as they move from field to field for example.  The
scripting language for the system is now out-of-favor but I have like 100,000 lines of code and I don't feel a great
need to go and do a re-write, I can't do it, it would take a long time and everything works fine now. I even have rss feeds for (nearly) every feature.
I applied to YC with the RealtyGoLive idea, but I am not sure if that was the best angle to give YC so I am expecting to not make the hurdle there but I feel like I can compete with the likes of http://www.alamode.com/products/Broker/BrokerXsites/default.... and turn RealtyGoLive.com into a million dollar business (at least) and maybe take it world wide because realty is sold everywhere and the
system is already internationalized.
I spent a couple of the years not really working on the system much and that hurt, I am now working on tieing all of the modules together better they already have a group permissions that run accross everything (which is the whole basis of the system) but I also want tie the different data together.  For example if you open contacts you could also see any other related information in other modules. There is a lot to do to catch the system up.  It is not bad, people who use it, use it a lot.
I know everyone here is real big on languages running on Linux/BSD (which when I first started creating websites in 1996 that all I did was apache/linux/perl) but I discovered the power of databases and ASP was the big thing, PHP was around but didn't seem as good in 1999 when I got ASP heavily and I am still doing things like it is 1999.
That is so out of character for this board I thought I would bring it up and see what you think of my system and
see think about my unusual development system in todays environment.
 <comment><USER2> Well, I would recommend moving off Windows simply to save money if you need to scale to multiple servers. Server grade Windows costs quite a bit and the licensing is too complicated for me. Because of this I have made an effort to code in cross platform languages. However I would not start a rewrite of 100,000 lines of ASP (on the other hand 100,000 line is a LOT of code, perhaps it would be a lot less if written in something more powerful).

I don't want to start another language war so I won't recommend any specific language, I just wanted to comment on the fact that you are limiting yourself to one OS and that might hurt.

I like the idea, if executed and marketed well it could really help. Combine this with great real estate listing and search functionality and you might have a winning software.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the licensing. I have been using with Windows 2000 and Sql Server 2000 because I don't want to pay MS more money but if I go to 64 bit servers then I would need at least Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005. That is one reason I am looking for money now while I wasn't before,

And I have been officially rejected from Y Combinator... time for plan b... too bad :(</comment></comment>


Tcl for Web Nerds - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/tcl/index.adp <comment><USER2> I have been really fascinated with TCL lately, and I've been working it into projects as a replacement for shell scripts for writing config files or automating server setup. I still feel like I should be using python though, and that I only use TCL as a "novelty". But how can you not like a language that can be described in 12 rules? [http://wiki.tcl.tk/10259](http://wiki.tcl.tk/10259)

<comment><USER3> I don't know anyone who chooses freely to work with Tcl. It's a curiosity like brainfuck. Fun to look at and marvel at its simplicity but an absolute horror to work in.

<comment><USER4> Tcl forces an event driven approach that seems to be relatively unfamiliar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recalls an old blog post by antirez: [http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html](http://antirez.com/articoli/tclmisunderstood.html)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for this, I always have time articulating what I like about TCL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> wow I haven't heard of TCL for years (excluding TCL/TK of course), I used to run a large patient management system across a hospital system that was built on TCL and ran on top of Solaris (5 from memory). While the software itself was antiquated for the time (2011~) it was pretty solid and fast despite running on relatively low spec hardware for the number of clients. I remember the 'upgrade' path was a Windows app that other than providing a more user friendly interface what was essentially providing the same functionality with the addition of a mouse curser required a hardware of a factor of something like at least 40 times the performance to run at a similar scale.</comment>