Kate Middleton's Wedding Gown Demonstrates Wikipedia's Woman Problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/13/kate_middleton_s_wedding_gown_and_wikipedia_s_gender_gap_.html <comment><USER2> Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability requirement. Gender imbalance might be a problem, but it's not a problem to the same extent as notability-based deletionism is. Notability is an extremely vague standard, a perfect recipe for abuse and selective enforcement. A fair and efficient editorial process should strive to replace vague rules with clearer counterparts whenever possible.

Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete _any_ article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity. All of these standards can be applied fairly strictly, and with much less vagueness than notability.

\- It's not like Wikipedia is short of disk space to store a few million extra text articles.

\- The argument that it would be too difficult to maintain lots of extra articles is also weak, because not every article needs to be regularly edited, and more articles on niche topics might actually attract more editors.

\- No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat. That's just alarmism. Besides, if something like that ever becomes a problem, a better response would be a prohibition on self-promotion or some other clear guideline, rather than a vague requirement of notability.

\- If these deletionists are just being OCD and wanting everything to be tidy and clean and under their editorial control, I would say that they need to take a break. In fact, it's possible that people with certain psychological traits self-select for Wikipedia editorship. But the kind of intolerance and self-centered narrow-mindedness that overzealous deletionists exhibit doesn't suit the spirit of a collaborative online project. Keep your OCD to your own home/office and away from public spaces, thank you very much.

Right now, I get the impression that it's too easy to flag something for deletion and too difficult to counter the deletionist argument, especially since the deletionists are so familiar with editorial procedures. This inequality needs to change. _The burden of proof should be on people who want to remove information from the Web, not on those who want to keep it._ Isn't that the same principle that we fought tooth and nail to uphold against the onslaught of SOPA, ACTA, etc?

<comment><USER3> "No, we won't end up with a page for every John Doe and his cat."

And if we did? It think it would be rather cool for everyone, living or dead, to have his own Wikipedia page. In fact these might have special status as non-deletable.

If your family ran a web site about its family, would you deny any member a page, especially if some members already had pages?

Now consider our larger family, all us humans that have ever been and ever will be. Besides the many topics about our "family" covered by Wikipedia, some of us have pages specifically about us. Why shouldn't _all_ of us have our own pages?

Well before Wikipedia came along, I've wished that each person on Earth could have some way of being recorded for posterity. Some peoples' record will of course be more interesting than others'. But we're all family, even the boring and embarrassing ones.

<comment><USER4> If there are good references, Wikipedia has been moving in this direction. But as an encyclopedia, and one that claims no authority for itself based on any kind of expertise of the authors, articles really need to be referenced to good sources in the published literature.

If you _do_ have good sources for something, e.g. there is even a relatively small biographical section on someone in a published book, or a journal article, or something similar, the separate "notability" requirement has been increasingly going away, so that "but I've got sources" trumps it. I wrote a bit on that last year: [http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability...](http://www.kmjn.org/notes/wikipedia_notability_verifiability.html) (I also discuss some of the history around these requirements, some of which were motivated by trying to do something about Usenet physics cranks who found Wikipedia and decided it'd be a great place for articles on all their pet theories.)

I've been systematically going through several references and adding articles on _everything_ in them, and haven't run into people objecting to my articles or trying to delete them for several years, since the end of the more "notability" focused era. Now as long as my articles include some references, they seem fine. One of my projects is marching through the _Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie_ adding articles on random people who were mayors of Prussian towns in 1850, and that kind of thing. There's even a Wikiproject trying to organize efforts to cover everything in that particular reference: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_e...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_articles/ADB)

I do think it's _also_ valuable for there to be other projects, which catalog information that can't be referenced well. For example, Know Your Meme does a pretty decent job of doing original research in history-of-memes. There are several genealogy projects that attempt to catalog people more exhaustively as well. But those are pretty different projects from Wikipedia's goal of _summarizing_ stuff that's published in the existing literature, with references. Wikipedia doesn't have to be the only wiki on the internet, so I don't see why those original-research projects can't develop in parallel.

<comment><USER5> I have not seen Wikipedia "moving in this directon." I had some editors delete a 5 year old page with multiple published sources and 10+ inbound wikipedia links on it. I am getting it reviewed now. There are some bad apple editors on Wikipedia who are high up on their horses.

<comment><USER4> I'm not arguing it never happens, but that it's been "moving in this direction", i.e. that notability plays an increasingly small role relative to verifiability. That's my observation over about 8 years of writing articles now and then, but I would be interested in a more quantitative test of that claim if someone knows of a way to do it. Nobody has given me any grief since around 2008 for new articles, even ones on quite "minor" subjects, whereas the question of "does this belong in an encyclopedia?" used to be a more common discussion in Wikipedia's early days, as everyone was trying to figure out what "a wiki encyclopedia" really meant. (In particular, people coming from a more academic background, like Larry Sanger, were advocating for a much smaller, more traditional encyclopedia, certainly not one with millions of articles.)

I do think there are specific areas that remain more controversial, mainly around recent pop culture and business. If people suspect you're self- promoting, then they may try to get an article deleted (there was a recent rash of hotels hiring PR firms to add articles on them, which wouldn't be so bad in itself if the articles didn't read like ad copy). Same if you write an article on a recent internet meme, or a website.

In the areas I've been working in, which are mainly geography, history, science, mathematics, and literature, "notability" as a separate requirement seems basically completely dead in practice. I used to have to argue against deletion of my articles on minor 19th-century Prussians. But nobody even thinks of deleting those these days, as long as they have solid citations.

edit: Looking elsewhere in the thread, it looks like your views of Wikipedia are generalized from one very self-interested example: an article about your dad. May I suggest that isn't the most unbiased way of forming an opinion on a complex subject?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am frequently surprised to find Wikipedia articles about very narrow, highly-specialized technical concepts. For example, there is a Wikipedia page about iso646.h in the C language standard (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso646.h>). If you're wondering why you never heard of iso646.h before, it's because it is only useful if you are programming in C on a system that does not support cutting-edge characters like "&" or "|". This is esoterica that does not have any measurable impact on the world. And this isn't even an article about ISO 646 per se, it's about a _header file_.

I find such articles extremely useful, so I'm not advocating that they be deleted. But surely the wedding gown worn by a British Monarch who is widely known for her fashion sense is at least as relevant to the world at large.

<comment><USER7> Judging by the number of magazine covers and news segments devoted to this woman, I'd say it's a lot more relevant.

I agree with the current top poster: they shouldn't delete anything that doesn't conform to general rules of objectivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wikipedia is an interesting place. I am not sure what classifies articles for deletion, but it feels like only people who live in the Internet industry take part in actively running and editing the articles. I don't think of it as a male dominant community (even though I am female), but it feels like to me that only for people who are only care about stuff they know. It feels more like a closed minded community than having a woman problem.

My previous company was a chip and Wi-Fi module startup (ZeroG Wireless). I had requested our company name to be created around 2009. At that point, we had been around for 4 years and we had taken $30m in funding. However, we were never granted a section on Wikipedia.

On the other hand, plenty of internet companies who were around than launch much shorter than that and their names are currently on Wikipedia, for example, Pownce. I am sure that many others are granted a Wikipedia entry for being around less, accomplishing less than what we did. The only difference is that these were Internet startups and ZeroG was not.

Some people simply need to wake up and stop living in their own bubble. Let's hope that one day they can realize that others do care about things that the community doesn't care.

<comment><USER9> > My previous company was a chip and Wi-Fi module startup (ZeroG Wireless). I > had requested our company name to be created around 2009. At that point, we > had been around for 4 years and we had taken $30m in funding. However, we > were never granted a section on Wikipedia.

There are a lot of ways to get yourself discredited on Wikipedia, but trying to get an article written about yourself, your company, your band, or anything else you are intimately involved in is the most reliable.

<comment><USER8> I never attempted to write about my company. I submitted a request to have my company created as an entry. You need to have your company name created first before anyone can write about you.

<comment><USER9> I never said you did attempt to write about your company.

> You need to have your company name created first before anyone can write > about you.

No you don't. If you're logged in and you go to a blank page, you can just start writing something there, unless the page has been specifically blocked from page creation because someone keeps putting spam there.

I would say that the combination of not knowing how Wikipedia works, asking other people to do something for you, and on top of that, trying to get an article written about yourself, your company, your band, or anything else you are intimately involved with is a perfect way to get yourself ignored and discredited.

<comment><USER8> All I did was request my company name to be created. I never attempted to write the article myself.

I didn't find a way of writing on a blank page like you did, the situation may have changed. Well if you did, you're definitely more knowledgeable than me about Wikipedia, but please don't tell me what I did and did not do.

I am OK if Wikipedia deletes my article if it's their policy. My issue is that they did not treat my company the same as the the rest of the world due to own ignorance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Articles like this make me angry. Wikipedia is one of the most important, if not the most important, example of digital commons, created by an enourmous amount of volunteer work. 91% of those doing this work are male, according to the article. Now a group that has contributed only a small fraction of the work for a decade complains about being underrepresented? This is not the military, which had actual barriers of entry for women, this is Wikipedia, which you could edit without an account only a few years ago. At that time it was a true, anonymous meritocracy, as opposed to a mailing list where your name gives away your gender and may subject you to gender discrimination.

<comment><USER11> Except of course that having articles deleted is a barrier to entry.

<comment><USER10> Which would have been a gender-neutral barrier had women contributed a similar share of work and dedication in the early days and thus achieved similar influence.

<comment><USER12> Influence has a way of perpetuating itself, especially when its protected by nerdy little enclaves. So you are saying that because women (or mexicans or furries) did not contribute in the past, they now deserve to be excluded in the future?

<comment><USER10> No, I would hope to see more work from (and proportionately more influence for) women on Wikipedia. But the article presents what seems to be the result of past inaction, back when Wikipedia was a meritocracy, as a Women's Rights issue. Yes, there is a gender bias on Wikipedia now, and even chauvinistic behavior. We should get rid of both, if possible, which may be difficult as such an environment is not inviting to women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some years ago I cleaned up some random biology article vandalized with lots of not-even-subtle profanity. It was immediately reverted by some editor and I had to insist that he _reads_ my modification to get it approved.

It was the last time I tried to edit anything in WP, as I always had this kind of problem.

I read it a lot like anyone else and donate small money every year but each time I read about the behind the scene, I'm appalled.

<comment><USER14> I wrote a small article on an obscure piece of software, I even studied the wiki syntax and added an infobox & image.

It got fast track deleted the next day.

Wikipedia has reached an equilibrium point between articles that cannot be deleted and deletionist desires to delete everything. In many cases the deciding factor, or the demand to the deletionists' supply, is public outrage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship. Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship. Who is to say that people will want to read? Censorship.

There should not be any notion of importance. All knowledge is important. What I find important is as valid as what any one else values as important.

Frankly, and to my shame this is the first time I have given any thought to it, I am disgusted that something which, IMHO, is supposed to be an unbiased information repository actually deletes knowledge. To me, this is the most disturbing case of censorship I have ever thought about. Government censorship is expected, bad news, sure but expected. But this is supposed to be above that. How can they bleat on about SOPA etc, then allow a small number of geeks to tell me I can't see an article about some princesses dress? Wikipedia is NOT Geekpedia. And it should not be censoring knowledge.

Quite sad actually. My Wikipedia love bubble just burst. :(

<comment><USER16> Censorship is when you try to prevent a class of ideas or knowledge from being communicated in any medium. Dictators try to stop criticism, regardless of whether it's by pamphlet or radio broadcast. That is not the issue we're talking about at all.

We're talking about editing a specific body of work (Wikipedia) to exclude things deemed unfit. In fact, the motto of the NY Times is "all the news that's fit to print". That's editorial control, not censorship, because they don't try to prevent Small Town Weekly from printing a story about a lost dog, they just refuse to print it in the NY Times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This brings up a very interesting point - can anyone think of topics that Wikipedia has inadvertently omitted thanks to the narrow section of society that contributes significant amounts of new content to the site?

There's been a lot of talk in recent years about how the "initial work" of adding information to Wikipedia is mostly done, and that from here on out, it's going to be mainly about adding new content as it's created (new events, people, companies, etc.). But it seems possible that myopia on the part of editors could be having inadvertent effects.

<comment><USER18> It used to be even worse -- when I started using Wikipedia (dinosaurs walked the earth) they had substantially more written about several comic book characters than on obscure religious cults like e.g. Catholicism.

That said, long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians (who are _so screamingly not representative of the population_ that it almost pains me to have to mention that) than on any objectively awesome target for Wikipedia. Happily, Wikipedian's consensus target for Wikipedia is, even if far from perfect, pretty close to one of the most useful tools on the Internet.

<comment><USER17> > long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians

The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. As long as the site doesn't make editing/adding articles a more user friendly/advertised feature, things aren't going to change.

Case in point: I went just yesterday to add some new content to an article, along with which I had a citation to add. Imagine my surprise when I found out that citations are still added in MediaWiki syntax! I can say without a doubt that every single acquaintance of mine who doesn't have an interest in computers (and quite a few who do) would have been utterly discouraged at this point from editing the article.

How difficult can it be to add a GUI editor? It would be a small, purely technical, step that could have a significant impact on the userbase, if advertised properly.

<comment><USER19> Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base.

Most GUI text editors around the web are horrible buggy piles of crap (to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe's forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers). The result of any such effort could easily end up making the software more complex and harder to use rather than easier.

<comment><USER20> > Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at > least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would > be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of > resistance from the existing user base.

As one of the most popular websites on the net, it's not like they don't have the resources to do it.

I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism against newbies. This probably does some good, but it also definitely does a lot of bad (keeping out worthy contributors just because they don't feel like learning the markup language).

I'm sure they could achieve their goal some other way without pushing away talented contributors.

<comment><USER19> > _it's not like they don't have the resources to do it._

Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities (not to mention other code priorities). They're doing the best they can, but making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks.

> _I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it > somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism._

Do you have any evidence for that? As conspiracy theories go, this one seems pretty weak to me. I can't think of another organization of comparable size which is as welcoming and open to involvement and contribution from ordinary community members, at all levels of decision making. Almost the entire management and operation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is carried out in public, nearly all of the parties involved are volunteers (with a quite small number of full time staff keeping infrastructure running, handling legal issues, and so on), and many many decisions are made collectively, by consensus.

It's easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.

<comment><USER21> I just downloaded Mediawiki and took a look at the source code. Some of the later added code doesn't seem as bad, but there's an overwhelmingly extreme amount of mingling between the data logic, including the classes and actions, and the html markup. It makes it utterly hard to read understand for someone wanting to contribute. The codebase isn't light either so (correct me if I'm wrong but) I don't think a complete rewrite of the application ever occurred after the first version.

Now if only some of us stopped creating social networks for kitties, and actually contributed our time and hackery into something that actually benefited the world.

<comment><USER4> You might be interested in the Parsoid project, which Wikimedia funded precisely to try to build a more maintainable pipeline for parsing syntax into some kind of AST or document model, disentangled from the other cruft: <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid>

I believe it's currently being maintained separately, so the logic in MediaWiki itself is still the crufty version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Isn't it sexism to say that linux distros are for men and wedding gowns for women?

<comment><USER23> Yes. Isn't it silly to ask a stupid question for the sake of making a rhetorical point?

<comment><USER24> Yes and no. To be honest the article strikes me as a fluff piece attempting to meaning into something what is really a pair of fairly trivial problems - those being deletionism and and the fact that the majority of editors are American males[0].

> ...the site remains a boys' club.

This is a somewhat unfair characterisation since the gender of an editor is usually unknown to other editors or irrelevant to the topic at hand.

> "We have over 100 articles on different Linux distributions, some of them > quite obscure … and [they have] virtually no impact on the broader culture, > but we think that's perfectly fine." [Jimbo Wales]

Claiming that Wikipedia editors are "perfectly fine" with having hundreds of articles on non-notable topics like minor Linux distributions is a bit of a stretch. Sub-par articles on minor technical things like programming languages and F/OSS projects are constantly being flagged for deletion or merging[1] and to be honest I'm not particularly surprised that what was, on 29 April 2011[2] a stub on a wedding dress was nominated for merging. Of course, the article has since grown into a useful and well referenced piece, but I don't think its fair to claim this incident represents Wikipedia's "woman problem" unless one is also willing to discuss Wikipedia's "Lisp problem"[1] or Wikipedia's "Linux problem"[3].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pseudomonas/IP_editors_by...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pseudomonas/IP_editors_by_country) [1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arc_(programming_language...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Arc_\(programming_language\)) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wedding_dress_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wedding_dress_of_Kate_Middleton&oldid=426548936) [3]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:SliTaz>

<comment><USER25> _"to be honest I'm not particularly surprised that what was, on 29 April 2011[2] a stub on a wedding dress was nominated for merging."_

The article was flagged only 16 minutes after it was created, so it didn't have time to evolve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having an article marked for deletion means nothing, it happens all the time, and is one of the ways power flows in Wikipedia's anarchic domain (and I'm not sure this kind of power play is really gendered, it is more of a conservative, restraining, force).

While I highly regard Wikipedia's amazing and quite successful project, and hope there will be more editors that are female (oriented, not necessarily biological), there is still a lot that's not there, perhaps will never be, yet matters for various cultures and localities around the world, Wikipedia English has a built in bias (hint: English), and it's not a gendered one.

<comment><USER27> There's a bot I think that marks new articles as speedy delete by default. At least I wrote a stub, marked as such, and seconds after completion got a deletion notice.

<comment><USER4> Weird. Did it include any references? I haven't had these problems people are mentioning in the past few years, and I create articles now and then. They're usually not even really long ones: 1-2 paragraphs, 1-2 sources cited. Usually on historical stuff, e.g. ancient Greek archaeological sites, or minor 18th/19th-century government officials, scientists, or inventors.

The most common outcome is that I never hear from anybody. The articles don't get nominated for deletion, and neither do they get improved by anyone else.

<comment><USER28> Add a biography of some female scientists and writers and see what happens. Then watch the pages.

<comment><USER4> That's actually something I do do! One of my on-again, off-again projects, which now that you mentioned it I should return to, is going through the book _American Women Historians, 1700s–1900s: A Biographical Dictionary_ , and adding articles on the ones that're missing (which is a lot of them), especially those where I can find 2-3 additional sources to use for an article (which is still a lot of them). So far nobody's tried to delete my contributions.

There are also some more organized projects. There are a few dozen people at WikiProject Women's History: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women%27s_History), and Wikimedia hired a paid Community Fellow to focus on gender-gap issues: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia)

more discussion at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deletionism> and <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism>

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm a Wikipedian, with a registered Wikipedia user account and moderate Wikipedia editing experience since 2010. The interesting discussion thread groups together two kinds of issues: issues discused in the submitted article from Slate and issues brought up by Hacker News participants. I'll discuss each in turn.

The Slate article by Torie Bosch,

<http://www.slate.com/authors.torie_bosch.html>

a professional journalist who edits a project covering technology and society issues, reports from this year's Wikimania meeting that Wikipedia continues to face criticism from readers who think its group of editors ("Wikipedians") skew too heavily to "geeks" and result in underrepresentation of topics of interest to women. Thus far Wikipedia is still working on plans to encourage more women to become Wikipedians and to edit more regularly.

She finishes up by writing, "I've never been a Wikipedia editor. The community struck me as uninviting, legalistic." I'll be interested in her experiences if she decides to wade in. Unlike most Wikipedians, Torie Bosch has actual professional editing experience, having had to submit manuscripts to editors who chop out her darling words, and having had to chop out words from the manuscripts of other reporters. Most Wikipedians have not had professional editing or research experience of any kind before joining Wikipedia, and what I find most "uninviting" about Wikipedia is not that it is "legalistic" (although it often is legalistic) but that many Wikipedians are completely clueless about what a good source looks like and how bad many of the current articles have been for how long. I'm not sure yet if Wikipedia is pursuing a successful strategy to improve content quality.

[http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strate...](http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic_Plan_Summary/Improve_Quality)

After being very involved in Wikipedia editing just as there was a major Arbitration Committee case on topics that I have researched thoroughly for years,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence)

I have reduced my involvement mostly to "wikignome" editing of random mistakes I encounter as I use Wikipedia as a reader. I still have the SOFIXIT mentality,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFIXIT>

of cleaning up problems in Wikipedia as I find them, but to fix big problems on Wikipedia caused by point-of-view-pushing propagandists is even more work than editing a publication as an occupation (something I have done), and yet unpaid. So I really wonder how much time Torie Bosch will devote to Wikipedia when she could be doing editorial work in an actual collegial environment at Slate with pay and professional recognition.

The Hacker News comments before this comment have mostly referred to the issue of "deletionism." For example,

 _Every time a "problem" like this makes the news, the real problem always seems to be overzealous deletionists with their ridiculously strict notability requirement. . . ._

 _Honestly, I cannot think of a good reason to delete any article at all, unless it's obviously fraudulent, marketing-oriented, illegal, or obscene according to a widely accepted definition of obscenity._

 _I wonder if there is an organized campaign to fix the overzealous deletion problem (by changing the "notability" policy), to boycott as long as it remains and pledge to donate if it is changed to a more objective policy._

 _Why are any articles deleted, unless they are factually wrong? Censorship. Who is to say what will be important in the future? Censorship. Who is to say that people will want to read? Censorship._

 _I have noticed alot of information/articles upon wikipedia get deleted/flagged for deletion at a rather zelous rate and in that I have one question: WHY, if they are not superceeded or and made redundant then personaly I feel they should never be removed._

The one-word reply to comments like these is "Deletionpedia."

<http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page>

I was just browsing random pages of Deletionpedia to see what was posted there before the Deletionpedia project fizzled out (which appears to have been back in 2009). These are by no means the worst examples of material that has been deleted from Wikipedia (I'm not sure if Deletionpedia was ever an exhaustive list of deleted articles, or only a selected sample of those), but the sheer lack of maintenance of Deletionpedia over the last few years calls baloney on the idea that there are lots of readers happy to read stuff that has been deleted from Wikipedia. As bad as Wikipedia often is, EDITING (modifying and deleting) stuff on it so that Wikipedia more closely resembles an encyclopedia makes some Wikipedia pages much better reads than many of the millions of pages would turn up in a keywork search on the same topics.

I don't believe that a lot of readers see value in an online "encyclopedia" with a no-deletion or hardly-any-deletion policy because no one has put up the money to fund one, and I'm not aware of anyone here on Hacker News who is donating programming skill to start one. If you really think articles "should never be removed," build a service to host articles written by anyone about anything and see what happens.

The big problem on Wikipedia is not deletionism. It is insertion of promotional articles (some more subtle than others), propaganda articles (likewise), personal or family vanity articles (very numerous), and fan and hobby articles that are not based on any reliable sources and are written in a manner more suitable for MySpace than for any encyclopedia.

A lot of people who attempt to edit Wikipedia never look up the article about what Wikipedia is not,

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not>

and attempt to publish their own thoughts, promote their own causes or businesses, social network in an online encyclopedia, self-report the news, or otherwise post material that has nothing to do with maintaining a free online encyclopedia built from reliable sources.

<comment><USER31> 'If you really think articles "should never be removed," build a service to host articles written by anyone about anything and see what happens.'

Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki thinks it is worthwhile: <http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/wiki-inventor/>

"no one should have that sort of central control"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wikipedia's stated aim, to make information "freely" available, has no gender bias; it doesn't ask for it before serving its content - in marked contrast to other services (Google? Facebook? certainly the various ad services) which _might_ structure their content according to a user's gender.

However, if Wikipedia has another aim - to make _the scope_ of its content bias-free, then I think it has not thought it thoroughly yet: even structuring information as encyclopedia entries is inherently biased and restrictive (not necessarily bad though). Correlating Wikipedia's contributors' sex to an assumed gender bias in its scope (who gets to decide the articles' 'gender'?), as Wales does, proves how naïve such a project currently is.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think the problem with the Wedding Gown has more to do with the fact that there is no UK wikipedia, rather than a gender issue. The English wikipedia is an interesting amalgam with lots of peculiarities when seen from an outsider's perspective.

</comment><comment><USER33> You can get a iPhone app subscription to Britannica for a few $/mo. I have found Britannica to be excruciatingly better written and more comprehensive on their in-depth articles than Wikipedia. Things that aren't in the nerd enclave are covered, and well. I would never donate to Wikipedia as it is today: I happily send money to Britannica.

There are too many structural problems with Wikipedia - documented over the last few years by various angry bloggers - for me to feel OK with Wikipedia. Some of the content - good. The community & rules - blech. c2 is a better wiki. :-)

</comment><comment><USER34> Because all women love dresses, just like all geeks love linux.

<comment><USER35> Because I wish there were no gender biases, I will pretend that just because not 100% of a gender is completely monolithic, that must mean that any gender bias is disproved.

<comment><USER34> Seriously, honestly, the majority of women could not be stuffed about celebrity wedding dresses. Sure, more women are into it than men, I won't argue about that. But I'll be damned if 'caring about celebrity wedding dresses' is classed as a 'women's issue', because, frankly, it's not. No more than 'caring about racing cars' are a 'men's issue', and most men get through life not thinking about them much, and just as many find them boring as interesting. If I was forbidden to talk about racing at work, I wouldn't go around yawping about how my boss had problems with "men's issues". It's not a women's issue, it's a fashion issue.

Note that I'm talking about real, actual men and women here; not the stereotypes that folks have in their head, but the actual people they want to do editorial work.

A better example: What about guns? The gender balance when it comes to vocal, visible people who like guns is heavily skewed towards males, but people don't call out gun control advocates as causing trouble for 'men's issues', or 'trying to silence men'.

The issue here is less 'geeks hate women, and so women's articles suffer in wikipedia', and more 'geeks care less about subjects outside their bailiwick, like fashion, and so those articles suffer in wikipedia'. The question is really 'how do we loosen the reins of the geeks a little', not 'there's not enough Genital Type V amongst our editors'.

<comment><USER35> So what would you call a "men's issue" or a "women's issue"? Or do you think that no such issues exist?

<comment><USER34> Sure. Motherhood issues. Reproductive rights. Sexism issues (of which there are tons). Things that are _inherent_ to being a woman. In some places, there's a _luxury_ tax on tampons (!) - that's a woman's issue. Social clubs (or gyms) that admit only men/women. And, clearly, trying to break out of the stereotypes people hold of 'what women are' is also a woman's issue.

Here is an example of what can happen when people think that love of fashion is inherent to being female. It's an ad campaign using fashion imagery to attract girls to science - and you wouldn't see a parallel campaign using guns to attract boys to be a teacher, would you? Or racecars to be a nurse? Examples of what she's talking about start about one minute in: <http://youtu.be/x3eZQHwGQE0>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Along the same lines as the dress issue is this piece from On The Media [http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/09/professor-versus- wikip...](http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/09/professor-versus- wikipedia/transcript/). It goes into depth about the editorial problem at Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER37> Why not simply accept that wikipedia has a particular bias, and set up your own wiki - fashionpedia perhaps - if you want to create articles that wikipedia doesn't accept?

Wikipedia has become a success because of its culture. It should be very careful about changing that based on the demands of the entitled multitudes.

<comment><USER11> Because Wikipedia aspires not to have such biases. If Wikipedia was linuxdistropedia then no-one would think it was odd that it was focused on obscure distros and didn't care for articles about embroidery or the history of Islamic jurisprudence. But it aspires to be a universal encyclopaedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> isn't deletionism irrelevant in a post github world. anyone can just create a gist instead. i hope github forks the wikipedia.

<comment><USER39> Copying Wikipedia has been done, and nobody hears about it because it's the people and publicity that matters, the constant supply of contibutors that matters, not the copied tech or the content. And there's no reason to think that Github would bring a userbase that's either different or bigger than what Wikipedia already has now, much less a better userbase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I have noticed alot of information/articles upon wikipedia get deleted/flagged for deletion at a rather zelous rate and in that I have one question: WHY, if they are not superceeded or and made redundant then personaly I feel they should never be removed. This may be some form of gender bias, though I have not looked up male sports items upon wiki. The dress does have a nice backstory from what I read in the news and was a pretty big historical event as far as wedding go and in that factualy it will not be superceeded in that regard.

So the question is realy for me is wikipedia a source of knowledge/history/facts or is it biased towards flavour of the month(FOTM) and if it is the later then perhaps they need to revaluate there priorities.

As to a solution, maybe they could have all articles that are flagged for deletion, need approval by one male and one female. Though in that I will say that some males have a female mindset and some females have a male mindset and in that they should be able to express and vote based upon there mindset as apposed to some physical gender.

There is no golden solution though I do feel the zelous removal of articles be curtailed and a approach of only removing non-factualy/incorrect articles be the approach taken and in that, there will be less issues and references to items that have been removed.

I hope they resolve a amicle approach or I fear they will only spawn a womenpedia based site for women only and that would be a sad day and a true wakeup call to the insanity and directions being taken. Look at business for examples how issolation impacts - you will see many females who state they promote women in business and yet you never see a man saying I promote males in business. One is accepted and the other is sexist. But sadly they mearly add fuel to the issue and instead of addressing the issue, I personaly feel they exacerbate the issue. Though if you were or felt persecuted - you to would stand up and do something about it, if you were strong person. Not all people are strong in defending there morals and fairness and in that it does highlight women are just as right to feel persecuted. Though I do wish the approach of "Supporting fairness in buisness" was adopted as apposed to "Supporting women in buisness" was the standard they promoted as it is just that - about fairness and that can and does work both ways on many level.

Much respect to Mr Wales for spotting this issue and taking onboard, a true sign of a fair person.

I also have no interests in make-up and wedding dresses and the like, but I fully respect they are facts of the World and in that have as much right as any linux distro to be there, I'm not forced to look up those articles, nor am I forced to read linux distros on the site but having that option is something I compeletly and utterly support and to do otherwise would be unfair and that is something that I feel uncomfortable with and hopefully this clear and documented bias can be eliminated in any form it takes in life, be it race, sex, orientation or origins. We are all humans and in that we strive to be better every generation we spawn. Humanity is wonderful when it works and aporant when it fails. Lets stand up and count everybody.

</comment><comment><USER41> I see arguments for and against allowing Middleton's dress to be covered. For: it meets the criteria of being a widely covered and notable event, documented by numerous major media entities, and associated with a historical event of the ruling royal party of England. Against: yes it's just ephemeral celebrity gossip chit-chat that gives certain people (most likely, mostly women or perhaps some gay men) a feeling of warm fuzzies when thinking about it or fantasizing about it. So yes that feels wrong for Wikipedia because there are plenty of other websites and mediums for that sort of thing.

In other words, the problem is that it both belongs, and doesn't belong. And they need to resolve that paradox, maybe setting a new precedent or revising their official criteria.

I think the "not enough women" thing is just a side issue. And one that has an easy and blatantly obvious solution: if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it. If enough of you do it, then the gender balance will shift notably. If enough of you are not interested, then it won't. There's nothing inherently wrong with either state of affairs, it would be just the way it is. For example, I don't think it's "wrong" that the overwhelming majority (99.8%+) of hair cut folks at Great Clips over the years, in my direct experience, have been women, because that probably just reflects the natural level of interest of men and women in working in that role. I don't feel oppressed or excluded. If I wanted to work there cutting hair, or have a man cut my hair, I'd make it happen, end of story, and if not, or either way, I'd live with it and move on.

<comment><USER42> I'm pretty sure those "feelings of warm fuzzies" move a _lot_ of money in the fashion industry. The influence that even details like that have when we're dealing with celebrities shouldn't be disregarded.

 _if you're a woman and you want to become a Wikipedia contributor or moderator, then go do it._

I think the point is that they did, and their contributions got deleted.</comment></comment>


Detecting machine-readable zones in passport images - <AUTHOR> http://www.pyimagesearch.com/2015/11/30/detecting-machine-readable-zones-in-passport-images/ <comment><USER2> This is very interesting; a human would OCR the page and the pick the region with many less than / greater than signs. I wonder whether that would work here -- you need to OCR after finding the region anyways.</comment>


Brewster Is the Worst App Ever - <AUTHOR> This morning, I saw a message in my inbox that said John Smith, a pseudonym for an old friend, which said (and I quote verbatim):
"[John] asked us to reach out and confirm they have your latest info"
John never asked Brewster to reach out. He simply clicked on a message in his inbox that told him the same lie: "[some old friend] has asked us to reach out and confirm your latest info" and in turn it spammed all of his contacts with the same deceitful message.
It is embarrassing to have an app lie to my contacts, some of whom I don't wish to contact and certainly not have an app lie and suggest that I have interest in reconnecting with them. There are people in my inbox, including a whole bunch of the truly forgotten kind (ex girlfriend's, slimy ex business contacts, etc) whom I'd never want to open any sort of contact with, never mind asking them to confirm their latest info.
Clearly, Brewster is a scam spread by outright deception.
Google is to blame, too. They only state "Manage Your Contacts" not "Send messages to your contacts" in the app permissions.
What are my legal options here? I deleted the app from my Google account but they already have my data and they already contacted a ton of people.
Is this something to report to Google or my state's attorney general? or whom should I contact to try and bring justice here to the tens or hundreds of thousands of users who like me simply clicked to verify their contact info not knowing that this terrible lying app would go and "reach out" to old contacts and tell them that they were asked by the person whom they lied to to confirm their latest info, which is itself a lie. In other words, acquiring users through outright deception.
Thanks for any tips about dealing with this <comment><USER2> Report them to the Google Play store. [https://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/answ...](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android- developer/answer/1085703?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER3> Find out the emails of the founders/engineers of the app, then sign up with their email address to every newsletter and spam list you could think of. Use crunchbase to find the info.

Maybe a taste of their own medicine could slap some reality into them.

</comment><comment><USER4> I never signed up with them, but I just got a similar piece of spam, but supposedly originating from someone I don't know, and not referring to me by my actual name.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had the same problem - it was spamming without my permission. I opened up a dialogue with them and promptly uninstalled/unsubscribed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Same here, but in the receiving end. I was contacted by a bunch of people I don't even remember anymore. I just ignored the request.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't get what the company is thinking here. Do they really think that these tactics work long time?

<comment><USER8> LinkedIn is still around, so maybe?</comment></comment>


Brazil rejects G7's $22M offered to fight Amazon fires - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/world/americas/brazil-amazon-aid.html <comment><USER2> >Bolsonaro will consider $40M G-7 Amazon aid package - if Macron apologizes to him

[https://www.foxnews.com/world/brazil-amazon-fires- bolsonaro-...](https://www.foxnews.com/world/brazil-amazon-fires-bolsonaro- macron-g7-summit-aid)

What is this kindergarten? These are the type of people running countries.. this is sad. What a d _ckhead! People are suffering, large parts of country is on fire and someone wants an apology?_ sigh _

<comment><AUTHOR> Your premise that he would like to help but he's letting his ego get in the way is sadly flawed. Like Trump, he was lobbied to and campaigned on reducing environmental protections (allowing turning rainforest into farmland and lumber yards). There is much Brazil could have already done without the $22MM if it were aligned with his government's interests to do so; the kindergarten EQ and the delusions of grandeur are only the icing on the cake.</comment></comment>


All my homies hate C - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kurtisknodel/all-my-homies-hate-c-9690192a0aa3 <comment><USER2> So the point is: C is crap because the tooling for windows is crap?

I think it's worth distinguishing between language traits and its ecosystem in a very particular platform. The latter being crap just means not enough people care for it (at leat openly). It has nothing to do with the language itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> The proximate issue is Windows; MS has some level of culpability. How do you get angry at an object when there are people responsible for your ills?</comment>


The Mathematics Behind xkcd: A Conversation with Randall Munroe (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.maa.org/publications/periodicals/math-horizons/the-mathematics-behind-xkcd-a-conversation-with-randall-munroe

<comment><USER2> As a programmer who majored in mathematics at the graduate / post graduate level, I want to add that the 'purity' thing can be interesting.

I find it a little difficult to work on programs that don't have a mathematically sound (water tight) solution, but it still needs to be fixed (hacked) in a practical way so the product can ship.

I am rarely happy with my programs. But when I am happy, its awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> His response regarding the science purity comic makes me wonder if perhaps it is time to create "computer engineering" courses.</comment>


BioShock Infinite Lighting  - <AUTHOR> http://solid-angle.blogspot.com/2014/03/bioshock-infinite-lighting.html <comment><USER3> > _Programmers don 't generally have reels, but we do have blogs. I've been > explaining the rendering work I did on BioShock Infinite quite a bit due to > recent events, and I thought it made sense to write some of it down here. > For the bulk of development, I was the only on-site graphics programmer. As > Principal Graphics Programmer I did quite a bit of implementation, but also > coordinated and tasked any offsite rendering work._

Kudos to the OP...I wish more graphics programmers did this. I got into programming because I wanted to do game development but never got into it, but I'm still fascinated by the actual work...not so much the gameplay programming (though I love reading about design choices), but just, well, how it differs from web development. I loved programming in OpenGL, but I've wondered how much linear algebra you bounce in your head on a day-to-day basis in the professional world, and what is the equivalent to "Rails", if any, for graphics work, and if there isn't such a thing, what about graphics development makes such a conceptual framework impossible or unrealistic? And is graphics programming as constrained by the artist workflow as web development is constrained by content-makers/writers?

\---

And a little more both on and off topic: reading the OP makes me sad that Bioshock Infinite had such a beautifully-realized world...but focused a disproportionately amount of gameplay on how to best grind generic-policemens' faces with a meathook.

<comment><USER4> > Kudos to the OP...I wish more graphics programmers did this.

In my experience this mostly happens when a game programmers are switching jobs. Compared to the open source community, or indie community, console game developers rarely publicize their work. To be fair, most of them are under NDA and under a time crunch.

> what is the equivalent to "Rails"

Unity... its "Rails" for game development in general. You can do simple things quickly, and you can dig deeper into shaders and (if you have the commercial version) some advanced visual effects. Of course its not a substitute for writing your own, but unlike writing your own engine, you might actually finish a project with Unity :-)

<comment><USER5> > To be fair, most of them are under NDA and under a time crunch.

Notable exception being of course ID / Carmack, who open source their engine after a number of years. <3

<comment><USER6> I have my doubts that idTech5 will ever be GPL'd

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find this stuff fascinating; I used to mess with OpenGL quite a bit in high school/college, but then moved to HCI in grad school and iOS dev/backend web dev later when I moved into the industry.

I'd love to eventually work on that kind of stuff full time- how would one go about making the transition? Do you basically have to learn/work on projects like this during your free time, and hope your "portfolio" gets you a job?

<comment><USER8> > Do you basically have to learn/work on projects like this during your free > time, and hope your "portfolio" gets you a job?

I always thought this and i applied for my first industry job with a game demo and some tech demos built on a moderately over engineered engine, and my second one with a fps demo with most standard last gen (360/PS3) lighting features and support for real world data formats (quake 2/3 bsp, md2, obj, 3ds, lwo, png, tga, jpg etc.) and a tools pipeline involving radiant and the appropriate game bsp compilers to create levels.

sadly most people i have worked with have made no serious demos or games in their spare time and this is much less common than i had imagined.

knowledge about things like rendering, audio, AI, networking is rarer and will help - however a gameplay programmer is a thing - although despite it seeming like a super generic role there is a skill to creating good and flexible gameplay systems for designers, or in picking the right hacky function to make something 'feel' 'fun'.

oh and be prepared for low pay on the way in - you don't have to tolerate it but i've heard salaries ranging from /actually very illegal/ to £20k for new juniors. i took £17k for my first - if i had known better - and esp the pay rates of my compatriots then i would have asked for more from the beginning...

also try agencies if you don't know many games companies.. you will never be able to rid them from your life and they will do stupid things like call you at your current job and speak to your boss when they can't get through to your personal phone - but its their job to find you something or be honest if they think its not possible.

<comment><USER9> Did the portfolio work for getting a job? For some reason the games industry seems quite impenetrable to me, so I'd like to know what worked/didn't for getting a job in it.

<comment><USER8> i had a friend who recommended me and thats always the best way - however the only real good advice i can give is to keep trying. some of the juniors i have encountered doing their first jobs found them through agencies, former university colleages, applying to their favorite games company etc.

however, yes the demos helped considerably... its a very strong proof of knowledge and skill. a working demo of reasonable complexity is worth more than any level of academic background or past experience outside the industry imo. you just need to get it seen.

as a programmer i can't really offer much advice for design, art or production though. i imagine design and production is basically luck or attitude to get into - everyone wants to do it and the skill is difficult to measure. artists tend to have impressive portfolios and/or showreels demonstrating past work and personal projects...

A surprising amount of production staff have a background in the QA department in my experience too... QA is definitely a way in for all the disciplines but I have no experience of how that works well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a big proponent of unrealistic lighting in games, for two reasons:

1) Trying to simulate realistic lighting in realtime is a fool's errand - <USER2> with every trick we know, lighting can never look completely realistic on today's hardware.

2) There is a certain art to unrealistic lighting. We see reality all the time and it is fairly boring, why not take advantage of the simulation to produce something visually interesting? I recently revamped my lighting for an unrealistic, but stylistic look:

      http://i.imgur.com/t1gC4ME.png

<comment><USER11> Side note: there's a recent push towards "physically based rendering" (in games; film folks have made that a few years ago). This means making light behave in a physically plausible way. This is different from "photo realistic rendering".

Probably best example is Pixar's rendering style - it's not "realistic", but it is very much at the forefront of "physically based".

<comment><USER12> This is partially because of difficulty of debugging a completely ad-hoc pipeline.

When you have 50 moving parts and the final image doesn't look right, it's hard to know where the problem is. Instead, you try to make each part adhere to "reality" by making them "physically based", thus enabling objective testing.

<comment><USER11> Yes. It can also be cheaper to make, since the same material can look good under more different lighting conditions. So an artist can make the textures & material once and it will mostly look "correct" when put in anywhere. As opposed to older ad-hoc models where often in a different lighting setup at least some parts had to be redone.

Just wanted to make a distinction between "physically based/plausible" and "photorealistic", since I've seen both being mixed up a lot of times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I want a lighting algorithm that handles static and dynamic geometry uniformly, with respect to lighting and shadows, and still manages to look "good enough", if not necessarily cutting edge. Does such a thing exist?

The last such approach that I remember was Doom 3's stencil shadows, but it handled only direct lighting. Now that people are used to approximate indirect lighting, we get these huge piles of hacks and we have to reinvent them for every new art style...

<comment><USER14> Crassin's "Interactive Indirect Illumination Using Voxel Cone Tracing" [1] might be of interest. A snippet from the second page:

> We handle fully dynamic scenes, thanks to a new real-time mesh voxelization > and octree building and filtering algorithm that efficiently exploits the > GPU rasterization pipeline. This octree representation is built once for the > static part of the scene, and is then updated interactively with moving > objects or dynamic modifications on the environment (like breaking a wall or > opening a door).

It takes a somewhat beefy computer to run, but the results are impressive. I don't have a link handy, but there was a UE4 editor demo showing some of it a few months ago. IIRC it's been axed as a feature because it wouldn't have run well enough across all of the platforms they were targeting.

[1] [https://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive- indirect...](https://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-indirect- illumination-using-voxel-cone-tracing)

<comment><USER15> So, Voxel Cone Tracing doesn't actually treat static and dynamic geometry as the same. It makes two hierarchical voxel trees, one static, and pre-built. and the other dynamic, and generated per frame. This is really the only way it can stay performant.

<comment><USER14> Not quite. They're all the same to the lighting/shadowing calculations, but it doesn't re-voxelize geometry that didn't change between frames.

From section 4.2:

> Both semi-static and fully dynamic objects are stored in the same octree > structure for an easy traversal and a unified filtering. A time-stamp > mechanism is used to differentiate both types, in order to prevent semi- > static parts of the scene to be destructed in each frame. Our structure > construction algorithm performs in two steps: octree building and MIP- > mapping of the values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Good article. Lots of high-level generic detail :)

> Dynamic shadows from toggleable lights would be projected into this buffer > using a MIN blend

Just wanted to quote this because as much as i love id and JC this bugged the crap out of me in Rage. Overlapping shadows from the same light source do not combine irl :P

</comment><comment><USER16> To me the lighting in Infinite was completely overwhelmed by everything looking like you were viewing it through a cloud of flour if the scene was 'bright' at all. I nearly stopped playing several times because of that issue alone.

</comment><comment><USER17> As a web developer this looks very complicated, reading stuff like this makes me feel useless. I wonder whether game developers feel the same reading about the web stack.

<comment><USER11> Yes, very much so.

I'm a graphics programmer at Unity (the game engine), and recently I toyed around with Rails. That made me realize _how much_ of assumed knowledge and jargon is in any particular field.

As a complete noob, all the information in Rails case sounds like "yeah you just rake your gems, bundle the capistrano and don't forget to bootstrap the angular node" \-- stop, WHAT?! And all this while trying to do a _very_ simple "hello, world" CRUD app.

I'd imagine graphics programming sounds exactly like that from outside, just with different words. "Oh yeah, you just swizzle your lanes, dispatch the predication queries and don't forget to Fresnel your BRDFs" _(no, this sentence does not make any sense whatsoever)_.

Of course if I'd spend even a month in the Rails/web field, I could at least navigate without bumping into everything. Spending a year or two would probably make me comfortable. Same with game or graphics programming. The author of original blog post has been doing this for 20 years...

<comment><USER17> Yeah that's exactly how your jargon sounds to me :) I fiddled with Unity everyone was saying it's "simple"/"easy" ... Sure it is :)))

You know, it's funny how people out of our industry perceive us (at least in my experience) - I mean you say you're a programmer and it's immediately presumed that you just know computers and coding, but we have so many branches, languages, platforms at times it's absolutely overwhelming.

Outside of the basics of programming (you know algorithms, runtime analysis, basic code structure) we have almost nothing in common. It now starts to make sense why the big companies interview in these areas.

<comment><USER11> "you you're a dentist? good, that means you know how to do a surgery. both are medical field, right." :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Obox copies Svbtle - <AUTHOR> http://www.obox-design.com/themes_page.cfm/theme/principles/ref/home

<comment><USER2> While it is very similar, and there are glaring thefts such as the style of the buttons, it does have several important changes. Color is used extensively, when it is totally absent in Svbtle - a change I greatly appreciate, as Svbtle has very ambiguous visual hierarchy between the two columns - it's not terribly clear which one is the content, and the fixed chrome around a tiny content column is distracting. The combination of the color and typography changes draws your eye towards the content. The content column is more prominent for several reasons - it is the brightest spot on the page, the headline has the best size and contrast on the page (black on white stands out much better than white on blue), and the contrast between header and body is much more pronounced, due to a larger size headline with all-caps and a thicker font than Svbtle. The larger font size and more generous line height on the body makes it much more readable, and the reversed color scheme in blockquotes, while I'm not entirely sure is an improvement, is certainly a significant improvement. Also, Principles is responsive at any resolution, while Svbtle is broken on the reading screen from 1024px down to 640px, and is unreadable from approx. 850px to 640px. (This would be due to the fact that it uses resolution breakpoints designed around specific common device widths, instead of sensibly placing them to fix the layout when it needs to be, as good responsive designs do).

It also includes some backend stuff that allows for customizations that Svbtle obviously does not.

So, while it is heavily derivative, and in some cases (the buttons) does rip off Svbtle, it's hardly a copy-paste bootleg. If it was, no one would buy it - the free wp-svbtle theme already does that.

Things that actually _are_ problematic about the theme: \- Change the buttons. Seriously. I don't even like the Svbtle buttons, with their absurd pill shape. This applies to the fields in the comment form as well. \- Move the written-by tagline below the headline. It makes it much clearer what the tagline refers to, and allows the post header and site header to line up, which would look much better. I didn't like its placement in Svbtle, and I don't like it here. \- The drop-down menus (another addition that doesn't come from Svbtle) look really odd because of the reversed color scheme, the space between the menu and the buttons, and the inconsistent border-radius between the top-level button and the drop-down menu.

In summary, Svbtle does not and should not have a monopoly on a two-column layout with a fixed left column and the basics of good typography implemented. Being minimalist is a style in and of itself, and this theme has significant differences. If it wasn't Hacker News' darling Svbtle, no one would be complaining - no one complains about the numerous WordPress themes based on Tumblr.

Maybe Dustin should have got a design patent. ;P

</comment><comment><USER3> I read someone arguing that what Obox has done is _much_ better than what WP- SVBTLE (a free Wordpress theme) did, because at least Obox made some minor changes and didn't use the same name. To me, those reasons are what's _wrong_ with what Obox has done, along with adding money into the mix..

</comment><comment><USER4> Copying somebody's design for personal use is one thing, but selling it for profit is quite another.

</comment><comment><USER5> The 'Purchase Principles' CTA at the bottom is ... ironic? I think this counts as irony: a bootlegged design soliciting users with a phrase synonymous with 'Buy Scruples'.

</comment><comment><USER6> To be fair, they changed the font.</comment>


Show HN: The ideal system. Identity proof based on six degrees of separation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/six-degrees-of-separation/the-ideal-state-of-the-system-identity-proof-system-based-on-six-degrees-of-separation-16044e0968ad <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: Hey, Hacker News! I'm developing an identity proof system based on the idea of six degrees of separation. I'm writing a series of posts, which I'll then transform into whitepaper.

This is the third post. Here I try to imagine the ideal system. What the project might look like in the case of it's success? What if all social connections in the world are replicated? Who may benefit from a database like this?

Will be happy to hear your thoughts and critique!

Previous posts on HN: Personal motivation - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988497](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18988497) Proving the six degrees of separation idea - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094362)</comment>


CT-Wasm: Type-Driven Secure Cryptography for the Web Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.01348 <comment><USER2> Hey one of the authors here! Crazy that someone else posted this, I'm happy to answer any questions.

I also just gave a talk about this at POPL2019 in Lisbon. Slides are here: [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yuC_LvNuFbnhO3aASTQ8...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yuC_LvNuFbnhO3aASTQ8ArdKIec9ETdUJKmh82Aaz00)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a terrific addition to the ecosystem. Please keep it up ;)

What sort of applications are you thinking of building using web browser cryptography? Besides the obvious scenarios around secure communications. And even the dream ideal of privacy preservation wherein all user data is encrypted and stored in local storage. And third party web apps don't send any unencrypted data home. I see tremendous potential in the consumer internet side. Particularly around payments, digital goods, live services, etc. Empowering ordinary folks to be able to run a personal "bank" right in their web browser is pretty exciting!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Relevant discussion on why this is needed: [https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/205](https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/205)</comment>


Open-plan offices drive down face-to-face interactions and increase use of email - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/07/05/open-plan-offices-drive-down-face-to-face-interactions-and-increase-use-of-email/#more-34170 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the point of conducting the study was. I don't think any companys with open offices really thought they helped improve employee interaction. That was just a line used to help justify them putting lower rent before employee well being. No one planning to implement open offices is going to change plans because of a study such as this.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The impact of the 'open' workspace on human collaboration: [http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/373/17...](http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/royptb/373/1753/20170239.full.pdf)</comment>


Ongoing malware attack targeting Apache hijacks 20,000 sites - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/exclusive-ongoing-malware-attack-targeting-apache-hijacks-20000-sites/

<comment><USER2> There is more detailed information available under a few of the links in the article.

Information about what an infection looks like, the attack method, etc: [http://malwaremustdie.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-evil-came- bac...](http://malwaremustdie.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-evil-came-back- darkleechs-apache.html)

From skimming the article, it sounds like it attacks control panels (mostly Plesk?) and possibly WordPress for remote shell, then does some sort of local privilege escalation. It then adds a module to Apache or Nginx which injects malware into served web pages under certain conditions.

More information about distribution: [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/05/rogue-apache- modu...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/05/rogue-apache-modules- iframe-blackhole-exploit-kit/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It is interesting that the malware hijacks ssh as well. This make me think that RHEL's approach to confining services using SELinux is a good idea, although it is possible that this malware also exploits some weakness there.

<comment><USER4> If SElinux actually made sense to mortals it might be more widely used. It's dizzyingly complicated to configure correctly.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but I think Red Hat has done a good job of simplifying things -- the SELinux booleans are pretty straightforward (e.g. "httpd_execmem" is probably something you want to keep off), the included users/roles are fairly useful, and the labels more or less make sense. For desktops, the sandbox tool is pretty handy.

If you need something more complicated, I can see it being difficult (having sweated through the process myself).

<comment><USER4> If you say something like "httpd_execmem" you've already lost me. That is not straight-forward, that's Byzantine.

RedHat has tried to make this thing more usable, but it's still a greasy pig to wrestle. Applications just mysteriously "don't work" without explanation, and there's no obvious resolution to the problem.

Although iptables is an example of an ornery configuration format, at least it's self-contained. SELinux seems to allow applications to define their own quirky rulesets which complicates things severely.

<comment><USER5> There will always be an explanation. Anything that 'pings' selinux is logged to audit.log. It might be difficult to decipher some of the rules being hit, but it's easy enough to work around them without disabling selinux wholesale. Look into audit2allow. It makes things MUCH simpler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting how malware is evolving just like real parasitic organisms. Those that drain host resources too quickly or noticably don't survive. Killing the host kills you too. Here is parasitic software that largely doesn't bother the host, and thus is able to survive and spread more effectively.

</comment><comment><USER7> Just have a look at your server's /var/log/auth.log file. I see hundreds of intrusion attempts every day. (not running Apache)

</comment><comment><USER8> One of my servers has Webmin on it, which I rarely use. I'm not sure if deleting it would break anything on the backend so if I were to block the port it uses with SELinux, would that pretty much alleviate the problem until I was sure that removing it would not break anything?

I've already checked the server for any rogue Apache modules and nothing appears out of place.

Never mind. There is a stop script.

<comment><USER9> Removing Webmin will not effect anything on your server, other than removing Webmin. Webmin operates directly on config files (i.e. it doesn't regenerate configs out of a database or anything wonky, like most control panels do), and doesn't tie into anything in any way that would cause other services to stop working. (Virtualmin, on the other hand, does provide a few bits that could be important...if you've used Virtualmin to configure mail, it will rely on scripts that are part of the Virtualmin install to check for spam and viruses, as well as perform autoreply functions.)

But, Webmin hasn't had a major remote exploit in years (that we know of). In terms of security risks, I consider Webmin pretty low on the list, because of its good security history (see <http://webmin.com/security.html> for the security history going back several years). It does provide root access, though, which makes it a very valuable target for exploits. As far as we know, Webmin is not implicated as a vector in this particular attack. Plesk has been mentioned as correlated with this attack, but I don't think that's been confirmed, and Plesk has no relation to Webmin, so it seems an odd choice.

Source and disclaimer: I am a developer on the Webmin and Virtualmin projects, and co-founder of Virtualmin, Inc.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the info. :) The page I was reading said it was mostly Plesk, but their pastebin file lists Plesk only. I am just covering my bases until everything is known about this. Although it is pretty unfair that I made it seem as if Webmin was specifically identified as having a vulnerability.

As a beginner, I'd rather disable Webmin for now. Just in case! But you are correct; Webmin is probably not affected by this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone have any hard facts about this? eg. Versions of Apache that are vulnerable, which extensions, CVE numbers?

<comment><USER11> Given that it's supposedly also installing a trojaned version of SSH(d?), it's probably not an Apache exploit at all. It's some other sort of method which gives it root access - either an exploit or just guessing root passwords. :)

<comment><USER12> If I had to guess, it might be related to this: <http://www.cloudlinux.com/blog/clnews/sshd-exploit.php>

The details on that page are weak and there are all sorts of problems with the content in general (namely asking users to run a script blindly), but it seems to mimic what is described.

<comment><USER13> It's very disappointing that they didn't bother to update that news article. The actual source of that "exploit" was compromised admin machines. Everyone that kept having their servers hacked was found to have a rootkit on their local machine. I would not be surprised if this new "exploit" was the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There is an additional good information posted in the Cisco Blog today, the comments part explains good info's: [http://blogs.cisco.com/security/apache- darkleech-compromises...](http://blogs.cisco.com/security/apache-darkleech- compromises/)</comment>


2019 Pulitzer Prize Winners - <AUTHOR> https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2019 <comment><USER2> Great to see the South Florida Sun-Sentinel win its second Public Service [0] award (considered the most prestigious of the journalism Pulitzers). Its first Public Service award -- a 2013 investigation of speeding cops [1] -- is still one of my favorite examples of database-driven journalism; a combination of clever public records requests for metadata, and math, to prove something that technically didn't exist (i.e. cops are usually the deciders of who is speeding).

Its 2019 series about failures by school and police in the Parkland school shooting is also excellent. It also features among its public records work an milestone fuckup by officials in terms of PDF non-redaction [2].

[0] [https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by- category/204](https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/204)

[1] [https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sun- sentinel](https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/sun-sentinel)

[2] [https://www.cjr.org/local_news/redaction-sun- sentinel.php](https://www.cjr.org/local_news/redaction-sun-sentinel.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> "A special citation to honor the journalists, staff and editorial board of the Capital Gazette, Annapolis, Maryland, for their courageous response to the largest killing of journalists in U.S. history in their newsroom on June 28, 2018, and for demonstrating unflagging commitment to covering the news and serving their community at a time of unspeakable grief. The citation comes with a $100,000 bequest by the Pulitzer Board to be used to further the newspaper's journalistic mission."

This is great

</comment><comment><USER4> As an aside, I always recommend Pulitzer Prize winning "Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder to technical audiences. It's a great read with some cool history too.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a little surprised that Miami Herald isn't on the list for their Epstein reporting, maybe they're not eligible until next year.

<comment><USER6> I came across this open letter from Alan Dershowitz, lobbying against their Pulitzer consideration[1]. I haven't seen a public response from either the reporter or the Miami Herald, so I'm curious about their views of the points he brings up.

To be clear, I'm not saying he is accurate. I just don't know enough either way. He's obviously an interested party to the whole story.

[1] [https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14003/pulitzer-prize- fake...](https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14003/pulitzer-prize-fake-news)

<comment><USER7> Do you think we should trust his narrative? I remember watching the disingenuous way he debated Chomsky on Israel/Palestine and thinking that he was totally sleazy

[1] [https://youtu.be/3ux4JU_sbB0](https://youtu.be/3ux4JU_sbB0)

<comment><USER6> I am not sure. Like you, I have seen him engage in disingenuous methods of debating. However, it does seem he offered 'hard' proof to corroborate his story, which is why I'm curious to see how the Herald would respond. It seems we'll find out more about the Epstein affair as there are renewed pushes to investigate what happened in the plea deal.

<comment><USER8> Dersh argues many things confidently and aggressively that seem perhaps facially convincing. Or perhaps you simply don't have time or the presence of mind to present a counterargument in the moment. That's his "strength" as a lawyer. Don't believe any claim until you see the underlying exculpatory evidence, which only he claims exists and only he claims is exculpatory. In this case, he presents none of the evidence. Not one single piece of it. He only presents what the response of others was upon seeing it. He can pull this gag on the general public, but in a court one requires discovery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of last year's winner:

> Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post

> _For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest > that dramatically furthered the nation's understanding of Russian > interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the > Trump campaign, the President-elect's transition team and his eventual > administration._

<comment><USER10> This perfectly demonstrates the state of US media (and western media in general). After over 2 years of misinformation, unfounded allegations, and downright fabrications, the media are now congratulating themselves on a job well done.

It's clear that they have no intention of abandoning their Russiagate narrative, despite Mueller's report.

<comment><USER11> So you've read the report? To my knowledge, the only portion of the 300+ page report that has so far been published is a a sentence fragment quoted by Trump appointee Attorney General William Barr in his 4 page summary. Seems a little premature to conclude we have the whole story.

Also, multiple people close to Trump have been convicted of various crimes as a result of the past two years of investigation. Even if once the dust settles Trump stands clean and pure as the driven snow, investigators already have plenty to show for their work.

<comment><USER12> If the report is so damning otherwise, why is Barr even releasing it?

<comment><USER13> Because Democrats control the House and have subpoena power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How long do they debate for?

Latest piece is from june 2018(or I missed soemthing fresher?)!

<comment><USER15> The Board met last week and chose the winners on Friday. Winners and finalists are notified over the weekend. Everyone else is kept in the dark until the announcement Monday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a native Detroiter it was great to see Aretha Franklin receive recognition. Just sad she couldn't have been awarded it when she could have been alive to enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some amazing reporting listed here, including the runners-up.

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that the music prize once again only cites "art music" after Kendrick Lamar won last year.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting to see 4 winners with investigations about Trump.

<comment><USER20> Well, he is the president.

<comment><USER21> I honestly don't follow pulitzer prizes, but sampling a few recent years (in the past 20), I can't find any where there was ANY award for investigation against a president (there was one for investigation against Dick Cheney in 2008). Has this ever happened before?

<comment><USER22> Keep in mind that 8 of the last 20 years were the historically scandal-free Obama presidency. See eg. [https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/atd-I...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/01/atd-INDICTMENTS-0125.png)

The Obama presidency wasn't completely scandal-free, but there wasn't much opportunity for Pulitzer level investigative reporting against him specifically.

<comment><USER23> It's not so much that there weren't scandals.

It's more about a press corps that let Obama get away with things they would have never given somebody like Trump a pass for.

For example, look at the press reaction to Obama refusing to prosecute CIA torture vs. Trump nominating one of the career officials Obama previously gave a pass to to head up the CIA.

Likewise, I doubt we would give Trump a pass for attempting to move due process free prisons like Gitmo onto American soil.

<comment><USER2> Gina Haspel, the current CIA chief, joined the CIA in 1985 and was not proposed for a permanent leadership position during Obama's time. Obama made a compromise in 2009 to not rock the boat when he entered the office. You expect people to treat this kind of "pardon" as no different than appointing someone to CIA chief? As Dexter Filkins put it: [0]

> _When Obama took office, in 2009, he declared that he would not prosecute > anyone involved in the C.I.A.'s interrogation programs, not even senior > officers, among whom Haspel was one. At the time, Obama said he wanted to > look forward and not back. But the past, as Obama well knows, never goes > away. With the prospect of American torture looming again, I wonder if Obama > regrets his decision. After all, people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could > have gone to prison._

[0] [https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-c-i-a- deput...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-new-c-i-a-deputy- chiefs-black-site-past)

<comment><USER23> If Obama had been willing to live up to America's treaty obligations to prosecute torture, there is very little doubt that Haspel would have been one of the people who landed in prison.

>Haspel oversaw a secret "black site" in Thailand, at which prisoners were waterboarded and subjected to other severe forms of abuse. Haspel later participated in the destruction of the CIA's videotapes of some of its torture sessions.

[https://theintercept.com/2018/03/15/washington-breaks-out- th...](https://theintercept.com/2018/03/15/washington-breaks-out-the-just- following-orders-nazi-defense-for-cia-director-designate-gina-haspel/)

However, more to the point, the press reaction to Obama refusing to prosecute those who ordered or carried out torture mostly came down to expressions of disappointment.

If Trump had refused to prosecute Bush officials for their crimes, he would not have gotten a pass.

<comment><USER24> > If Trump had refused to prosecute Bush officials for their crimes, he would > not have gotten a pass.

That's not the right analogy though. The question is how the press would have reacted to his decision not to prosecute _Obama_ officials. And given their reaction to his threats to do so ("lock her up" &c), my guess is that they would take it as a sign of maturity if he said, "Look, we're not in the business of trying to throw our political opponents in jail for minor crimes, because this would look like tyranny."

Which is not to say that Haspel's crimes were minor. But I do want to make it clear that it's very different to refuse to prosecute people from "the other team" vs. to give your own team a pass.

<comment><USER23> It honestly had very little to do with which team we are discussing, as Obama also refused to do so much as fire the CIA officials under his own administration who were caught red handed spying on Congress while Congress was writing their torture report, much less prosecute them for doing it.

James Clapper lied under oath while testifying before Congress about NSA spying, and he suffered no consequences.

We have previously seen baseball players prosecuted for for the relatively trivial offense of lying to Congress about their personal steroid use.

Obama gave our intelligence agencies a free reign to break the law however they liked, without consequence, and I sincerely doubt the press would give somebody like Trump a free pass if his officials were caught pulling the same crap.

<comment><USER25> It's too late. Obama has been canonized into sainthood long ago. Comparisons are always inadequate, his role in scandals (which apparently don't exist) is always far removed. Louis Lerner is as far up the chain as anyone wanted to dig into the IRS scandal that didn't exist and that didn't lead to a stolen election. The double standard is transparently obvious. The faithful just don't acknowledge it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is like going to a film festival to watch spiderman 2. I was hoping to pick up something for next read but I really don't want to read another trump stuff. All the trump/immigrant/women/muslim/minority news have cast a pall of anxiety and dread over my life.

was hoping to get some awarness about a new cause/topic but this just whats in news cycle everyday.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is problematic.

Pulitzer is rewarding high-brow emotional appeal journalism. All disaster and irrelevant scandal. The journalism we need today is shining light on the ever- increasing complexities of the world and the effects, not the latest shock, awe, and smear.</comment>


Inside the Secret Society of Wall Street's Top In-House Lawyers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-14/what-top-bank-lawyers-were-doing-at-secret-versailles-summit <comment><USER2> > The gatherings, which were described by several people familiar with them > who asked not to be identified, tend to feature discussions of nuts-and- > bolts issues such as managing relationships with the board and whether > compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.

That's some Illuminati-level secret society stuff right there. Clickbait much?

<comment><USER3> Conspiracy to fix wages? Trafficking in insider information? And, the anonymous source doesn't give further details?

I don't know what Illuminati have to do with this post, but I'm sure compliance personnel, at least, would like to know what is said at remote, private discussions between high-level representatives of competing firms.

<comment><USER4> > _I 'm sure compliance personnel, at least, would like to know what is said > in the discussions about them_

It's not common practice to record office conversations. Neither is it common to forbid offsite meetings.

<comment><USER5> Why should an attorney for a competing firm be party to any discussion as to your future compensation?

<comment><USER6> There's a higher-level discussion wherein the compliance guys are supposed to be the watchmen, but if you give them stock or options, then they are suddenly incentivized to do whatever is most profitable for the firm. That's the discussion mentioned.

The counterpoint is that, if you have strong regulators, then they will sniff out the funny business anyway. The resultant fines would hurt the bank's stock, which would still be negative for the compliance personnel.

There, we just had a discussion as to compliance workers' future compensation. And we're not even in the business!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In summary: A group of people who work in the same field get together periodically to talk shop. Just in nicer digs than your average Meetup.

<comment><USER8> This is a very old story:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

<comment><USER9> Damn, my nights drinking with other programmers have clearly been very much wasted!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >whether compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.

I don't this is about underpaying them but rather about legal complexities of inherent conflict of interest between compliance and stock based compensation. E.g. You don't want a compliance officer to look in the other direction to ensure her stock appreciates. This seems like a reasonable question/topic for a meeting of lawyers.

<comment><USER3> They are conflicted themselves; secretly (sources won't even reveal their identities) managing board relationships and deciding on compensation matters. The question is reasonable, the secrecy isn't. The question should be addressed openly.

<comment><USER4> > _the secrecy isn 't_

They won't reveal their identities _to Bloomberg_. This is like saying "Apple won't release attendance and transcripts of its executive meetings to the New York _Times_ ; therefore, they are up to no good".

<comment><USER3> Seems more similar to, "Jobs and Schmidt are emailing and we think it's about wages".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> the author seems desperate to imply some "elite" conspiracy dan brown style mysterious global cabal.

in reality, every person in every social/business position wants to hang out with people in similar positions.

devs go to dev conferences, cio's go to cio events, archivist librarians go to archive/library conferences, gas station owners go to oil company events in Hawaii.

</comment><comment><USER12> How is this different to software engineers meeting up?

Software engineers getting together to talk about which programming language is best, what software to use, etc..

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't that level of coordination against competition laws?</comment>


Ask HN: What would you do with 1.3M laws? - <AUTHOR> I'm the CTO of a law search engine that has 1.3 million laws from 47 countries. We're now wondering what else to do with our giant database of laws. What kind of text analysis could you run? ML algorithms? Clustering? What would be interesting for you to see as an experiment? <comment><USER2> Depends how complete the corpus is, it would be interesting to compare language across laws in different countries to see if how similar they are and possibly detect the influence of lobbyists working on an international level.

<comment><AUTHOR> We translate them into English using Microsoft/Google Translate (which is what you need to do in order to compare between languages) so the meanings may not be quite so easy to compare (because it relies on the current state of the art of machine translation of language - still not at professional legal translator level).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> These laws often make reference to other laws, right? I'd like to see the things referenced seamlessly merged in.

Also, it would be awesome if they could be presented in such a way that laymen could understand what laws actually mean. Legal meanings of words are often very different than the common meanings.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've actually done some work about extracting definitions from laws. But the meaning is still providing using legal language so they may not help too much for the lay person.</comment></comment>