IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 <comment><USER2> IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice.

OTOH there's definitely a difference between people, people who aren't mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscientific metric for identifying these people, it might leave some of them unidentified, but they definitely exist. Anyone who's worked with other people, hired other people, had to evaluate other people's capabilities, can be in no doubt about this.

It's hard to separate out Taleb's own axe-grinding from anything concrete he's trying to say about what IQ means as an independent concept. He seems more upset at short-sighted application of thought to first-order problems rather than asking higher-order questions about why the problems are problems in the first place, why the questions are being asked. When I've seen a difference between people in this degree, it's more a matter of personality than intelligence: the more detail-oriented, autistic-spectrum someone is, the more they focus only on the details, and miss out on the bigger picture. It takes a little effort to step back, but I think it can be learned. Whereas IQ (or g) doesn't seem to be improved easily with learning.

<comment><USER3> The original tweetstorm and this post aim to show something very specific, namely that IQ misses the mark as a measure of intelligence the further away from IQ 70 one ventures. In other words, stupid is stupid, but smart seems to come in many flavors.

The title of the article itself points to this fact, as the word "largely" is inserted. Nassim Nicholas Taleb himself can see the value at the lower levels.

If the goal was to find people that can, say, program, I think IQ works as a perfectly fine metric. If one wants to find someone who can make revolutionary break throughs, possibly less so, but even then, if IQ can exclude 50+% of people, you are onto a good thing.

<comment><USER4> The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of 135. Here's one good reference, but you can easily find many others: [https://www.jstor.org/stable/41038598?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...](https://www.jstor.org/stable/41038598?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

Taleb just seems to make the (incorrect) assumption that IQ is less predictive of performance at the high end--without any evidence--and then builds an extended diatribe on top of that falsehood. This thread is evidence of the damage that someone with very little domain knowledge, very high self- assuredness, and a far-reaching voice can do to the factual basis of public discourse.

I just can't get over how misleading it all is. He just made up those figures at the bottom of the article--they aren't based on any actual data at all!

<comment> jf- IQ is one of those topics which is, unfortunately, inescapably political. If important psychometric traits, like intelligence and personality, are highly heritable, then one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning points of view is undermined: that everyone is inherently equal, that anyone can achieve anything given the right education, environment and resources.

Add to this the fact that we know that other heritable traits may be ethnically distributed, and we have a particularly difficult thesis.

The solution to this for some, is that IQ cannot be allowed to be meaningful, as the idea is simply too dangerous. The article above and much of this discussion are the result.

Simply put, this is a battle of ideology masquerading as a debate over a matter of fact. This is not the kind of discourse you would get if people were discussing the precise atomic weight of hydrogen.

<comment><USER5> The leftist position isn't that everyone is inherently equal but that everyone should be valued equally and afforded equal opportunity regardless of their race/gender/ability. The idea of an "IQ" measure is too close to the idea of measuring inherent value, which shouldn't be contingent on things like how much nutrition you had as a child. Furthermore, the idea of "IQ" could be considered dangerous because it often serves to mask the harmful biases that actually inform our impressions of people.

<comment><USER6> The left uses any inequality of outcome, like the unequal representation of minorities and women in the software development industry, as evidence of discrimination without allowing for the possibility these differences are due to different abilities, choices, or desires.

And if anyone challenges the belief that all outcomes should be equal, they retreat behind the very different argument you've just made, which nearly everyone agrees with.

The motte and bailey tactic.

<comment><USER7> Hold on, I'm a lefty - and don't particularly like that brush you're tarring me with. Now before we go on, I do agree with some of your points. The results we observe are driven by many factors and individual choice is one of them. I object to 'positive discrimination' and the like as it's personally unfair. However, I do have that deep troubling feeling that there is bias all over the place. I'll just go with gender, as you mentioned it (and yes, this is all anecdotal). I'm in the UK, working for an Israeli company. The UK office (and US) is a veritable 'sausage-fest' \- however Israel and India have a far higher proportion of women doing these technical roles. My point is that these "personal desires" seem to vary by geography, rather than gender. Now, why would this matter, if everybody gets to do what they want? Well, income. Many western industries seem to have massive gender bias within them - and women always seem to end up in the ones that pay less (which for want of a better metric is our best indicator of 'value' we have). Now within a job role, once you balance in hours worked/flexibility/anything-you-care to include the gender pay gap isn't too bad. It's there, but not enough to annoy me. My quibble is that if you/I had two children, one male, one female, equal in every way - the male child is going to earn more.

<comment><USER8> Believing that all humans are equal and any differences in outcome is the result of discrimination is a caracature of leftist views akin to labelling conservatives "just people out to screw over the poor".

My observation is that the biggest chasm between left and right is the _burden of proof for discrimination_. The left believes discrimination is the basic human condition and one must prove that a decision or process is fair, or else it is biased by default. The right believes discrimination is an abberation, much like crime, and guilt must be proven, not presumed.

<comment><USER9> Interesting view I hadn't heard before.

Notably, under the left's view, believing a system is just would require proving a negative.

Is basically 'guilty until proven innocent'; a recipe for eternal identitarian strife; totally different from how we approach structurally similar questions on other topics.

<comment><USER7> I'd agree with the OP - I'd never thought about it like that before. My addition to the theory would be that left & right look identify the issue from different perspectives. e.g. You can look at the planet as whole today, and see there are massive disparities - then try to drill down and work out how to fix it holistically. Or, you can look at those immediately around you, sort that out, and hope that all people do this and it will ultimately ripple up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> reading the Wikipedia article, it says that scientific consensus among surveyed psychologists and educational researchers is that IQ is a valid and accurate mesaure of the important components of intelligence

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliability_and_validity)

If you're going to challenge that scientific consensus you better have something better to bring to the table than "it's being used by racists" and anecdotal tidbits suggesting a causation correlation fallacy between academic performance and IQ.

<comment><USER11> Wikipedia is not a totally reliable reference when researching non- quantitative information, especially in area with active stakeholders that likely edit wikipedia. And I would not trust "scientific consensus" in this instance given psychology's recent well documented reproducibility crisis.

<comment><USER12> This article doesn't even seem contrary to scientific consensus as far as what factual information is presented. It's just about how it's packaged in order to form his argument. It's sort of a lawyer-y manipulation of terms with some added hyperbole and even appeals to fashion sense that are misrepresenting what IQ is and what the consensus actually is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This post reads like a polemic and not something to be digested as science (note calling it a 'pseudoscientific swindle' and the ad hominem attack on Murray at the start). There seems to be a bi-modal reaction to the IQ measurement problem. It's either a real meaningful and effective measure of intellectual capacity. Or, people try and discredit the whole idea and label anyone that explores it a racist or otherwise posses a shallow understanding of the science. The real problem is that it has _some_ validity so it can be used to argue for and against all sorts of things that are really not justified by the science. However, if we ignore IQ as a valid research subject and line of inquiry we'll be doing ourselves a disservice. We need to follow that thread even if we don't like where it leads.

<comment><USER14> I completely agree with you about the unproductive nature of this article, and the fact that there are two lines of extremists both pro and anti and it has absolutely become part of the identity politics of the right (and reactionary left).

However, there's some real discussion on the effectiveness of IQ as a measure and its shortcomings. Vox is a great example of this, they published some highly critical articles after Sam Harris had Murray on his podcast. They point to good specific points which are problematic with IQ - particular when IQ is used as an argument for particular policies rather than information. Unfortunately even when there are specific points raised and proper meat to the discussion it still devolves into vitriolic shit flinging. Really the lesson to learn from this is how political tribalism can work to totally destroy the ability of society to have an honest discussion on a topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Best parenting advice I ever got was to praise children for hard work, and avoid calling them "smart." Intelligence becomes a stand in for some measure of goodness or social fitness that after a while it's hard to know what we're talking about anymore. Further, it's seen as innate whereas hard work is something anyone can do. Being "smart" implies there's a set of "un-smart" kids that don't have the same fitness or goodness, and since it's innate, they'll always be that way in an ungifted underclass. Cue the icky connections to racism and eugenics...

Usually as a parent, seeing your kid as "smart" corresponds to noticing affinity for a kind of interest or task. You'll help their confidence more to encourage that affinity and notice the hard won accomplishments than just saying they have some magical innate thing called "intelligence".

<comment><USER16> If you've spent any amount of time in education (or you have any faith in the data), then it is patently obvious that there is indeed a set of "un-smart" kids. We can quibble about how big that group is, but they definitely exist. It's not their fault, they just got a bad set of numbers in the polygenetic lottery or were subjected to environmental stresses that caused lasting damage. Pretending that they're smart is a brutal act of cruelty that only serves to perpetuate inequality.

Some people aren't smart. Some people aren't tall. Some people aren't athletic. Some people aren't beautiful. It is incumbent on us to build a society that affords everyone security, respect and opportunity, regardless of whether they're smart or tall or athletic or beautiful.

Still not convinced? Imagine a society where we just pretended that there was no such thing as physical disability. Paraplegics are just as capable of walking as anyone else if only they get the right training. We shouldn't give paraplegics wheelchairs, we should lend them $150,000 to spend three years at walking school. The blind don't need canes and dogs, they just need extra seeing practice. How barbaric, how inhumane, how very familiar.

<comment><USER17> I rather hope you don't teach kids or anyone else, armed as you would likely be with a set of non-evidential assumptions about their mental development including that of drawing a spurious, simplistic and dangerous parallel between physical disability and mental 'disabilities' as you apply it to the non-clinically-referable population.

<comment><USER16> What would you prefer? That I ignore the overwhelming burden of research on cognitive development? That I pretend that everyone has equal potential for cognitive development, regardless of genetics and environment? That I pretend that we know how to compensate fully for those early disadvantages?

No reasonable person would tell a stunted, sickly and uncoordinated teenager that they could make the NFL combine if only they tried hard enough. It would be an act of cruelty to persuade them of that rather than guiding them towards a more realistic ambition.

We have to accept the very simple reality that while everyone is born with equal rights and equal value as a human being, not everyone is born with equal potential and there is only so much that we as a society can do to ameliorate those differences. We must encourage everyone to achieve their full potential, but we must also recognise that not everyone has the same potential. We must build a society that is fair, decent and humane in spite of that fact.

A great number of non-clinically-referable people have to work extremely hard just to achieve elementary-level literacy and numeracy. Some simply don't have the concentration, memory and cognitive ability required to successfully complete a secondary or post-secondary education. The answer is not to bury our heads in the sand, but to create meaningful opportunities and social support for the millions of people who, through no fault of their own, are currently being shafted by the pointy end of meritocracy.

"You can achieve anything you set your mind to" is a hair's breadth away from "if you fail, it's because you didn't try hard enough". That's an unconscionably callous ideology to base an education system or a society upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems like the author is setting up a straw man representing the IQ test as some omnipresent (or at least somewhat prevalent) test administered widely. He then lambastes it for all its faults (some of his accusations are correct).

But the reality is that IQ tests are only very, very rarely used. In fact a career on the periphery of academia, academic testing, and their efficacy in predicting academic success at the University level, I have never, not once, not from any colleague or at any conference encountered mention of an IQ test as something to be considered for practical use. I have a lesser degree of familiarity with grade school/high school testing methods, but (in the US) I am similarly unaware of any common practice here.

<comment><USER19> Aren't most standardized tests - SAT, ACT, GRE, etc - essentially IQ tests? We don't call them that, but they're testing cognitive ability nonetheless.

<comment><USER18> No, these are some of the tests I work with. Pop culture turned them into a proxy for IQ or Inteligence etc. They're not. The SAT for example is highly targeted towards one specific goal: predicting level of success academically in the first year of college, and only the first year.

They make no other primary research claims about the utility of how the test results should be used, and in dealing with them they are very up front about the importance of a good all around picture of a student including HS GPA, rigor of courses taken, etc., along with SAT as one of multiple metrics.

I repeat, it is pop culture that has distorted these tests beyond all reasonable correspondence to their actual intent.

<comment><USER20> The old SAT correlated more with standard iq tests and can be used for admission into MENSA from what I remember.

<comment><USER18> The old SAT has a statistically significant correlation, but if memory serves (it might not, it's been a while) the correlation wasn't great, it has something like an r-squared value of 0.4 to 0.5, so a majority of the variance in outcomes was not explained by differing performance on the tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The title doesn't seem to match up with the article.

The point seems to be that IQ is good at predicting intellectual deficits at the low end but bad at predicting 'success' above that; further it indicates that IQ is mis-used in this range. This doesn't seem to indicate that IQ is 'pseudoscience', just that it's a misused statistic. Not a real shocker there, almost every statistic is misused by some group.

<comment><USER22> Taleb is saying that if IQs above 100 have no predictive power, then what's the point in measuring them? It would be like taking a BuzzFeed quiz that tells me my Hogwarts house: a real measurement yielding a reproducible result, sure, but a pointless one and any use of it beyond "Huh, that's interesting" would be pseudoscience.

<comment><USER23> > Taleb is saying that if IQs above 100 have no predictive power, then what's > the point in measuring them?

The whole point of IQ tests is not to identify or rank people who score above 100. The whole point is to identify those who fall well below 100,because that's actually a disability.

Look at it this way: some amusement parks feature amusement rides that are only safe to ride if riders can be kept safe by the safety equipment. One way to ensure safety requirements are met is to admit only people taller than a predefined height. That means that a specific metric (height) is used to pick who is able from those who are not. However, that does not mean taller people are better at riding that specific ride, let alone any attraction.

The IQ concept serves the same purpose. Those with a low IQ simply struggle to perform some tasks, but above a fuzzy threshold IQ is a meaningless metric to evaluate or predict success.

<comment><USER5> >The whole point of IQ tests...

I think you're ignoring that the point of IQ for most people and throughout its history is to make statements about racial and/or gender superiority. Most of the posts here seem to focus on the hiring process but the vast majority of the time I hear about IQ it's within the context of a bigoted rant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Frankly, I'm incredibly disappointed in Taleb's recent writing. This article is one of many where the actual point being made is buried beneath unnecessary and divisive ad-hominem attacks.

Does the caption _" Mensa members: typically high "IQ" losers in Birkenstocks."_ usefully contribute to a serious, scholarly conversation on IQ? Is it reasonable or fair-minded to immediately tar opponents to your argument as racists, eugenicists and "psychometry peddlers looking for suckers"?

I am uninterested in engaging with the substance of Taleb's arguments here, because the style is so needlessly vicious. I won't be buying Taleb's next book, because I don't want to endorse this kind of debasement of the public dialogue.

<comment><USER24> It's funny. Normally I place a high value on civility and decency in discourse.

But I don't have any problem with this style of communication from Taleb.

I think it's because I've read/heard enough of his material over many years, and I understand the game he's playing.

He's not cruel, and he means no harm to people personally. Indeed he cares a lot about the general wellbeing of society and individuals, about avoidance of violence, poverty, oppression etc.

His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth.

That means being ruthless in breaking down the mechanisms people use to hide bullshit or smuggle it into important discussions - e.g., status/authority signals like titles, honorifics, academic/professional qualifications, academic processes, group memberships like Mensa, corporate/academic jargon, and politeness/courtesy when it's used to subdue people's efforts to seek truth.

His abrasive style is also a test: people who care about truth will not be offended, as they will welcome their ideas being challenged and scrutinised, because they'll win either way; either they'll be proven right, or they'll be shown to be wrong and they'll learn something.

People who have something to hide will respond by getting offended at his tone, rather than simply defending/explaining their ideas on their merits.

Related to that, he's fine with people being rude to him; indeed he prefers it, and he hates it when people try to flatter him or build rapport with him, because he knows that's the first step to being bullshitted.

There have been times when he's been savage about issues I hold dear, and that's been uncomfortable. But it's been a signal that I've needed to keep working to understand those issues more deeply so they'd hold up to any scrutiny.

<comment><USER16> _> His whole approach designed to cut through bullshit and seek the truth._

If that's the case, then why did he expend so many words on matters that were irrelevant to his core thesis? Why not just concisely set out the evidence demonstrating the inadequacy of IQ?

 _> People who have something to hide will respond by getting offended at his tone, rather than simply defending/explaining their ideas on their merits._

There is an overwhelming amount of information and opinion on the internet. Most of it is very bad. Winnowing it down requires some heuristics. The heuristic "do these words look like those of a careful and thoughtful person making a good-faith argument?" has served me well. I do often encounter bad ideas dressed up in faux erudition, but I very rarely encounter good ideas delivered with a string of irrelevant insults and ad-hominem attacks.

More broadly, being polite in your writing is a simple matter of neighbourliness. Causing upset or inflaming anger is occasionally necessary to pierce the veil of indifference, but we should do so only with great caution. There is already more than enough discord in the world without us adding to it. I see abundant evidence for the fact that civilisation is a fragile and precious thing, held together with the glue of civility. We should think twice before discarding the norms of social behaviour that most of us learned in kindergarten.

<comment><USER24> Yep, it's a heuristic I observe too.

But heuristics, by definition, are imprecise and subject to exceptions, and in my experience he's one of the exceptions.

> Causing upset or inflaming anger is occasionally necessary to pierce the > veil of indifference, but we should do so only with great caution.

I think he does. He only attacks people who are powerful enough to be able to handle it.

And the stuff he talks about is important.

The way IQ testing is revered and misused arguably does great harm to many.

And the stuff he's been banging on about for years - the way governments, big corporate execs, academics and media insiders work together to benefit themselves at the expense of the powerless majority is important, and could well lead to another economic crisis in the next few years - is critically important.

That said, you don't have to listen to him, of course.

But it's worth examining if there's some deeper reason why you find his ideas unpalatable, beyond just tone and style.

My own motivation has been to pay attention to what he says, as he turns out to be right when it matters most, and by applying his ideas about things like stoicism and "anti-fragility", my life has vastly improved.

<comment><USER25> "He only attacks people who are powerful enough to be able to handle it." He was attacking people who politely participated in that Twitter exchange including me, an obscure college professor. Yes, knowing Taleb I wouldn't have challenged him unless I was ready to be insulted, but still I very much doubt that he looked me up to see how powerful or emotionally stable I was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have no way to navigate this, I've heard psychologists claim that IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences.

Now this guy comes along saying the complete opposite.

Anyone have any advice on how to weight this up and figure out what the truth is?

<comment><USER27> There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing.

Obviously this is an excellent source of ammo for racists and likewise those fighting racism see it as a threat. By extension, anyone who speaks of this science must also be racist and the science itself must be wrong because it is racist. And even if it's not wrong, it must be locked in a box, hidden deep in the archives, and never spoken of again. If you're a social scientist and your results come back supporting this, should you publish them, twist them, or burn them?

So it's three powerful forces (racism, equality, and truth) all converging on one extremely hot button topic. It's seems Taleb here is trying to pull out the rug from underneath this perfect quaternity of shit show.

<comment><USER28> IQ is well supported, but raceXiq is very poorly supported.

Most of the HBD and 'race realism' stuff fails simply at trying to define race. Often it's 'colored people', and not any kind of grouping that even resembles human genetic diversity. This all relies on very straight-forward and well-established genetics, but they generally can't even come close to the mark here. They'll shout and scream about how "you're not allowed to study this!" despite plenty of scholarly work on human genetic diversity. It's not literally titled 'black people are human garbage', so I can see why they might have trouble finding it.

There's also a lot of cherry-picking, agonizing over particular sub- populations that happen to fit their narrative and acting as though that's case closed.

The reality is that most of the population diversity is in Africa and a bunch of isolated islands. Yet even in these extreme outliers we don't see much in by way of large effects (intra > inter, generally). But the race realist narrative, somehow and miraculously, comes to the conclusion that white people are super duper great, the somewhat less white people are somewhat less great, and black people are genetically .. unfortunate. Who knew?! They just got so damn lucky and happened to hate just the right people!

Plenty of detailed refutation for anyone interested:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4vx/gathering_some_old_refutations_of_the_typical/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx7w/welcome_to_ahs/cs2bzsr/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex...](https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex/argument_the_case_against_race_realism/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems a lot are coming to the defense of IQ tests so I thought I'd throw in my perspective having taken these tests 6 times over the years (WAIS and Raven's) for my diagnosis of ADHD (these tests cost thousands of dollars and are usually reviewed by psychologists).

An IQ score itself is an average of subtest scores that measure various abilities related to intelligence. So you could have some really high scores for certain abilities (e.g. executive functioning - ability to plan ahead) and some really low scores (e.g. spatial reasoning - understanding three dimensional space) and come out as average. Or you could have a really low score in a certain ability while having average scores in others and come out as below average.

Additionally, some test scores can change based on whether they're timed or not. So you could have certain abilities that are above average, but when timed, come out as average or below.

Notably, IQ tests DO NOT test for creativity nor emotional intelligence.

The problem with judging others by their IQ score is that you throw away their strengths by looking at a single score. Some of my abilities are above average and that could be useful to society. I certainly think creativity, emotional intelligence and other abilities IQ tests neglect are relevant to society as well.

For me, my IQ has ranged anywhere from 87 to 117 and this may be due to ADHD. The instability of the score doesn't give me much faith in its usefulness, nor has my intelligence seemed to affect my career as a software engineer (I've had plenty of success in my decade long career). It has however reliably demonstrated I have ADHD for schools and health insurance purposes, and that's really its primary usefulness.

</comment><comment><USER30> > it explains at best between 13% and 50% of the performance in some tasks, > minus the data massaging and statistical cherrypicking by psychologists; it > doesn't satisfy the monotonicity and transitivity required to have a > measure. No measure that fails 60–95% of the time should be part of > "science".

Where did he get "fails 60-95% of the time" from? To me it looks like he either doesn't understand statistics or he is pulling numbers out of the air.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have given dozens of ravens-progressive-matrices variant tests to friends of mine of various intellects and the results are basically never surprising.

I guess it's bullshit though.

Third world country girl who struggled trying to learn computer science and gave up and became an accountant? 95

Kind of slow guy that can't do any algebra in his head, bronze 1 at league of legends? 98

Genius guy that is master tier in league of legends and constantly outwits everyone in banter? 143

Asperger sharp awkward guy that is astonishingly good at math - diamond 3 league of legends? 133

Me: I think I'm an idiot sometimes and smart other times. Platinum 1 at league of legends? 122

My older brother (1): Obviously smarter than me but not by that much seemingly, and definitely a lot physically healthier than I am: 130

My oldest brother (2): National bridge champion and obviously very intelligent, masters in math, been an alcoholic for 5 years and got noticeably less sharp overtime: 135

Another guy who was challenger tier at league of legends and also obviously very intelligent in conversation? 138

Smart younger guy that is kind of whacky and out there, diamond 3 at league of legends: 120 (deviates from the norm here but still lends evidence to the correlation)

Extremely competent native american guy that is 2000 ELO in Chess and was diamond 2/3 in league of legends? 120 (while high though, and same caveat as the above example as the other example just above)

hMmmMmmmMmMMMMMM I guess it is just confirmation bias.

I found it interesting how well it correlated with rank in league of legends. There are about 5-6 other samples I just don't recall the specifics anymore.

</comment><comment><USER32> (1) The details of popular IQ tests are considered commercial secrets by testing companies. The reliability data and validity data are kept secret to people other than selected experts connected to those companies. This opaqueness does nothing to enhance the credibility of IQ tests.

(2) The claims that IQ tests are supported by consensus of psychologists ignore that, scientific knowledge does not rely on consensus to justify its credibility, but the explanatory power and predictive power stemmed from such knowledge. Plus, most psychologists don't do research on IQ tests, the so- called consensus can be regarded to an extent as textbook claims in disguise.

(3) There have always been disagreements. Multiple intelligence theory is one that made its way to textbooks. But there are others. For example, the mutualism model by van der Maas, Kan, and Borsboom (2014) claims that IQ tests do not constitute as a reliable measure that can reflect the underlying mental capacity (if there is one, not none or multiple), the value of IQ tests can only be (weakly, in my opinion) justified by pragmatic considerations [0]. The mutualism model is somewhat tangential to the claims made by Taleb, but my point is that IQ tests are not something that should be glorified.

(4) Psychometrics in general, has deep issues. Operationalism plagues the discipline. The practice of many (I shall reserve properly that it's not all) psychometricians does not meet the idea of validity as instigated by current recommended guidelines, and what should be constitutive of validity is still somewhat an open question that remains to be explored. These are not direct evidence for or against the credibility of IQ tests, but nonetheless should make us cautious how we reach our judgments.

[0] [https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/2/1/12](https://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/2/1/12)

EDIT: grammar

</comment><comment><USER33> Also the people with 180+ IQs that make random lists of "smartest people ever" if you look into it, basically have IQ test taking as a hobby and practice for it to improve their IQ (or rather, ability to take IQ tests). Or they took some test like Stanford-Binet that allows child IQs to reach ridiculous levels if the child happens to develop faster than normal (because of the formula of adjusting a child's IQ to an adult level)

<comment><USER5> In other words: "when a measure become a target it ceases to be a measure"

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have been afraid to take an IQ test for the fear of finding out that I am not very smart. In any case, the current hubbub of folks speaking against IQ tests seems to be more of a idealogical reaction to what IQ tests are telling us. OTOH, this guy seems to be legit. Truth is so hard to find these days.

<comment><USER35> Maybe you're looking in the wrong place?

The question on my mind is the following: How is blindly trusting science better than blindly trusting the pope or your local shaman? Wasn't the real issue blind trust, rather than who or what?

There's nothing to be afraid of, and no reason to take a stupid test. I had to as part of drafting and I can't see these tests leading anywhere worth going. Maybe ask why being seen as smart is important?

<comment><USER34> Most of what any of us believe is trust in some other source. Few things that we believe admit to the scientific method, and even those things that do very few of us reproduce on our own. When is comes to social science, the "science" is pretty weak anyway. Most folks just believe what is popular or what they want to believe. I tend to look for consistency and track record -- most useful tests for truth in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> >If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don't need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists.

If you want to measure skill and experience, that's good advice.

When you want to measure the ability to solve problems where the individual or nobody has skill or experience yet, you have to measure something like intelligence.

<comment><USER37> And anecdotely, IQ style testing has been by far the most determinant data point for successful software developer hires in my experience. I'm almost at the point where I might start to believe it is more important than domain knowledge of programming.

This is likely because the type of work I typically hire for has a large amount of problem solving and troubleshooting as opposed higher level system design. Which is essentially what IQ tests test for.

The world "intelligence" is just a very loaded word and means different things to different people. IQ tests show how well a person can solve puzzles and make connections between systems. Which many consider to be a sign of intelligence. But not everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> No one on HN has mentioned my takeaway on the IQ subject that I've held for many years now. Upon learning more information over the years since, it has only solidified my view.

On his analysis, he has a nice argument but he's outright wrong about some of it. They're discovering more everyday about how advanced 'tribal Europe' really was. From the Vikings having more advanced societies than initially thought, back to the Celts when the Romans actually started to fear the Gauls and decided to stop their advances before they became so organized they also had centralized government. The planning ahead required for survival in northern Europe alone greatly increases the chance of evolving a higher minimum IQ vs more congenial conditions where little to no planning is required.

Sometimes truth is inconvenient. I would defend IQ. It's real, and it does matter. What I would say is that in my years, I've learned that it is definitely not the most important attribute. It may not even be the second most important attribute.

A cooperative nature is more important than IQ. What use is a highly intelligent person who won't cooperate with others or interact? Einstein without the willingness to collaborate with society overall is useless. Maybe even a nightmare if he's beyond uncooperative and a malevolent genius. A very uncooperative stupid person could potentially be a big problem too.

If I'm ever picking people to be on my team for a zombie apocalypse, or even just managing a modern society today, I'll take someone with a cooperative nature and little regard for their IQ.

In sum, I would agree with Taleb that IQ can potentially be a swindle, but wouldn't agree with the basis of his argument. IQ is an objective measurement of intelligence, but you don't really need to reach so hard as he did to disqualify the importance of IQ. It's obvious as to why it's secondary to other factors.

</comment><comment><USER39> The title is actually much less extreme than the article. The author basically claims all of psychology is a pseudoscience.

<comment><USER40> Well he addressed the replication crisis in earlier writings, which others have noted is a problem as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Missing a bit of sociological historicizing here.

IQ and SATs were essentially designed to keep undesirables, notably Jewish, people out of academic circles. Eugenics and these tests marched hand in hand.

> Armed with this so-called objective methodology, 3 American eugenicists > advanced a straw-man rationale for large-scale testing.14 They reasoned that > society needed to identify, segregate, and sterilize the "feeble-minded,"' 5 > initially defined as those with mental disabili- ties' 6 but later extended > to include any "unfit" person of low intelli- gence, character, or > ethnicity.17 In both Germany and the United States, persecution of the > "feebleminded"'18 hastened a broader eu- genic campaign against immigration, > miscegenation, and other pro- fessed threats to Nordic ascendancy.1 9

[https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=h...](https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.ca/&httpsredir=1&article=1270&context=law- review)

[https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history- of-d...](https://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of- discriminating-against-jews-2014-12)

[https://twitter.com/ft_variations/status/1075782671320657920...](https://twitter.com/ft_variations/status/1075782671320657920?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER42> > Mensa members: typically high "IQ" losers in Birkenstocks.

Nice article.

IQ is actually the best measure yet found to see how well people can succeed in life. There used to be some craze about EQ, but _that_ is actually pseudo- scientific stuff invented and monetized by book authors.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940184](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940184)

<comment><USER43> Yeah, I'm hope I'm not missing out, but the beginning of the article was too aggressive for me to bother with the rest.

<comment><USER42> Same, I just skimmed. Quite sad that people still do this kind of thinking and talking and that it gets rated so high here. I thought that's what people cared about last year, that people deserve equal treatment, no matter what the background is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Taleb's output is getting weird.

See "G factor"[1]. There's a strong correlation between various metrics of "types of intelligence".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_\(psychometrics\))

</comment><comment><USER45> Wow lots of people really wrapped up in this whole IQ thing lol. It's literally a joke, only reason it's so prevalent these days are because of the racist white supremacist and pseudosciencentist "philosophers" raking in the Youtube money. Can someone point to actual real research where someone literally went around the world and gave IQ test to groups of people ? Also were these test in the people's native language, how were they chosen etc. I have a hunch (not a biologist or anything like that) that common sense would say if you take any group of people that come from similar environments and administer IQ test the scores would be similar no matter the race, height, sex, etc. (I.e: take middle class college students from different groups and compare. Then take groups of people from poverty stricken backgrounds and compare) Does anyone disagree ? And why?

</comment><comment><USER46> Related: Adam ruins everything had a segment about IQ in 2017, [https://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins- everything/blog/adams...](https://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins- everything/blog/adams-sources/emily-ruins-adam.html)

</comment><comment><USER47> Wow. So much hatred in this. Iq is just one of many ways to measure certain aspects of aptitude. No institutions are shortsighted enough to place strong emphasis solely on IQ test. This is why college admissions take other data points into equation because sat and act scores are highly correlated to Iq.

<comment><USER48> Well, most of his argument is that it measures nothing, at least not more than let's say... astrology. IQ is pseudoscience. And people using it are wrong - whether they place a strong emphasis on it, or only a little one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Two threads about this from last week:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18756946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18756946)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18755193)

</comment><comment><USER50> The thing is, that people who have high IQ can answer the test questions with ease. They don't have to "muster sterile motivation." That's the perspective of someone daunted by the testing, and thus of lower IQ.

"Anything too hard for me requires lifeless academics capable of sterile motivation, and anything easier is for idiots. I'm sitting precisely at the perfect intelligence level myself; neither idiot, nor starchy, impractical academic!"

> _" When someone asks you a question in the real world, you focus first on > "why is he/she asking me that?"_

In this case, why is this blog writer asking me to believe that the IQ has low value? The "no brainer" hypothesis is that he tried and didn't score very well.

</comment><comment><USER51> IQ is largely poorly understood. When measured as a number it is a convergent assignment, which is everybody is measured against a central assessing scheme that doesn't realistically reflect capabilities, competency, or potential.

More valid are divergent tests that measure creativity, response quantity, originality, and problem solving. In other words how unique can the answers get and still be applicable.

</comment><comment><USER52> The 'original tweetstorm' that led to the article: [https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1076845397795065856](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1076845397795065856)

</comment><comment><USER53> anecdote time: Once I was taking IQ tests with a group of other people, one guy in that group I knew was just really an idiot.

This guy really did seem to be stupider than me in every conceivable measure. There was just no possible human endeavor that I did not feel confident in beating him and this is a pretty rare thing to notice in people for me, I can think of 4-5 people in my life I've thought this of (discounting people suffering from obvious disabilities)

Anyway we took the IQ tests, he came back when he got his result, extremely happy and announced 'I got a 100! I had no idea it was that high!'

</comment><comment><USER40> Those birkenstocks look pretty comfortable. Plus maybe they last longer. I suppose they aren't "sexy" , but I suspect the guys have conceded that. I won't knock it until I try it, which is never.

</comment><comment><USER54> Maybe I'm dumb, but why is "performance fat-tailed"? It was kinda left as an exercise to the reader, but maybe someone has insight. The article got a bit edited, but I'm still not getting it.

<comment><USER55> In other words it's pareto distribution. Most of the scientific citations goes to the 1% of scientists. Most of the success in business goes to the 1% of companies/entrepreneurs.

In Taleb's words: we live in extremistan.

<comment><USER54> Got it, this was helpful as was the answerer below. Thank you guys!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Well, I was rather interested in this article at first, as I think IQ is highly questionable and we give it waaaaay too much credit, but this mostly seems to be an article wanting to bash people with focused thinking patterns (perhaps autistic people), or "nerds", or other groups of people that fail to conform. While calling them wage slaves. It's curious how they managed to conflate both Mensa members and the military in attitudes.

Would be nice if we could call these various things into question without stooping to something as low as modern Western (who am I kidding, American) conceptions of "succeeding" in life.

</comment><comment><USER57> If intelligence exists then there can be some measure of it. Maybe current tests are not very good but that doesn't justify all the arguments in the article.

</comment><comment><USER58> Is IQ data available in a nice CSV file for us to analyze? I would like to see a nice Jupiter notebook with plots and should be able to play around with the data.

</comment><comment> lota-putty Yes, IQ is as much overrated as formal education.

Tests, only measure the state of mind during(tests); not the capability in the past or future.

</comment><comment><USER59> What a mess. Tweetstorm was easier to follow.

</comment><comment><USER60> Given the general snarkyness of the author towards 'intellectuals' in his words, i tend to write off his opinions whether there is validity or not. I'm quite sure there are problems with IQ tests. I'm also sure that they have value much beyond what is promoted here.

</comment><comment><USER61> Q. What is an IQ test? A. A test that measures intelligence.

Q. What is intelligence? A. The thing measured by an IQ test.

Throw this at the next person who mentions IQ to see how intelligent their answer is.

<comment><USER27> I present to you three small companies. All three provide the same type of service. One has an average worker IQ of 80, the next 100, and the last 120.

Which one would you feel most confident in using?

<comment><USER61> The one who does best in a 3 month trial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> True story

</comment><comment> black-tea People want IQ to be wrong. People like the idea of someone who did bad at school but is still a successful and productive person. Such people surely exist, but successful people overwhelmingly do well at school and have natural aptitude. You can deny it all you like, though.

</comment><comment><USER63> So, does this mean that when I read some "genius"'s endless tweeting about how he "has one of the best I.Q.'s" while soandso is a "very low I.Q. individual", that doesn't actually _mean_ anything of substance? Color me surprised!

<comment><USER3> Nassim Nicholas Taleb is saying that the second part is likely accurate - e.g. low IQ people are accurately assessed - but the former part is off. This graph: [https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*76fPv686eOXo1b7F....](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*76fPv686eOXo1b7F.jpg) shows how he claims IQ scores correlate with outcomes, i.e. as you move away upwards from < 70 IQ, its predictive power plummets.

Said simply: stupid is stupid, but we're not totally sure what smart is.

<comment><USER64> I'm not sure if you got the reference but in case you didn't:

[https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/33230821132142592...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/332308211321425920)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> ... but g is the only thing of importance.

<comment><USER59> The problem with g is that it's a number. Who has higher g, Magnus Carlsen or Terence Tao?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Interesting... for some reason I thought Taleb was a darling of the alt-right and the biological determinists (but not necessarily that the feeling was mutual).

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm not sure I believe in varying levels of innate intelligence at all. And if it does exist, it is probably so removed from our standard measures of intelligence so as to make it inconsequential.

What I do believe is that what we perceive to be different levels of intelligence among people is actually learned ways of thinking and approaching problems. Some people are lucky enough to be exposed to habits and ways of thinking early on in their life that provide a compounding return for the rest of it.</comment>


Accessibility section proposal on Stackexchange - <AUTHOR> https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/116219/accessibility <comment><AUTHOR> If you think this section could be useful, please, follow, upvote questions and suggest other questions on the subject of Accessibility that you might be interested in.</comment>


Torus Earth (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html <comment><USER2> What a fascinating premise. Kudos to the author for doing such a thoughtful analysis. His technique for arriving at the cross-sectional shape is especially interesting. I would have never considered that the optimal cross- sectional shape to have been anything other than a circle.

I wonder if it would be possible to orbit the ring in the axial plane, around a single arm of the torus? Or even in a lemniscate, intersecting the inner Lagrange point?

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182822](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7182822)

</comment><comment><USER4> It would be great to see a simulation how it would look like from the surface. It has a great game-world potential.

<comment><USER5> Exactly my thoughts. Combine that with VR and you'd have an interesting way of visualising this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"There is a central unstable Lagrange point at the middle of the hole"_

So, why would Ringworld (an enormous toroidal planet with a relatively small sun (a sun similar to our sun, which weighs 6E24 kg, Ringworld would weigh 300 times that, at 2E27 kg) at its center) be stable?

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld#Errors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld#Errors)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how many millennia it will be before we can trivially terraform one of these from another planet for fun. Just deploy a hoard of self-replicating autonomous robots and sit back for ten years. Might need some carefully- orchestrated nuclear detonations to increase the average gravitational potential, though.

</comment><comment><USER9> So bizarre, I was just fantasizing about this possibility the other day. Then here is this detailed analysis that just pops right up!

</comment><comment><USER10> The ring system of Saturn (and others) aren't a bad start.

</comment><comment><USER11> In other word: is a 2D role playing game map feasible or not.

<comment><USER12> But there you usually have a "flat torus" which cannot exist in euclidean space. I.e. the distances between points in a PacMan style world are such that the loops around the world are always the same size. That's not the case for a toroidal planet as in this article: the inner equator is much smaller than the outer one. Moreover, the flat torus has zero curvature and no surface (of finite extent) that lies inside our space can have zero curvature everywhere. The argument for that is remarkably elegant: suppose you have a surface in space. Pick any point as an "origin". Then since our surface is assumed to be finitely large, there must be a point on it furthest from the origin. But then the surface at this point is tangent to a sphere centered at the origin and in fact must lie entirely on the inside of the sphere. But then it curves at least as much as the sphere and hence has positive curvature at that point.

So you'll never stumble across a PacMan world in all your travels across all the galaxies. (Interestingly, PacMan's world can be embedded into a hypersphere sitting in 4-dimensional space.)

<comment><USER13> I thought it does have curvature (like a non-flat torus), but that curvature is in effect compressed into 'singularities' at the corners.

<comment><USER12> It's possible to hide curvature in singularities like that, but that's not the classical "grid with wrap-around on the top and bottom" you see in video games. In particular, there's nothing "special" about the corners - you can still go up/down/left/right at them. In essence, you could recenter the grid around any point without changing anything so the corners only _look_ special but aren't.

The torus actually needs total curvature 0 (the beautiful Gauss-Bonnet theorem says this and is true even for a torus that _cannot_ fit in 3 dimensional space), which means you'd need some "singularities" with negative curvature and some with positive curvature to cancel out. But clearly all the corners in the torus are the same! So there's no way to hide the right curvature in them.

<comment><USER13> Aha yes I see. I needed to think more carefully about total curvature. I have been doing a bit more reading on this, really a fascinating area. Thanks for the pointers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> and those who live on there would have a head start on knowing the shape of their planet, well those on the inside at least would.

</comment><comment><USER15> Fascinating, and great to imagine that given the sheer number of start in the known universe, there is a chance that somewhere out there such a thing exists right now.</comment>


Raspberry Pi makers release own-brand OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-38403423 <comment><USER2> The title is a bit misleading. The Raspberry Pi foundation is just releasing their own, custom desktop environment (called 'PIXEL') for PC and Mac.

They're also providing a Debian-based x86 distro (i.e. Raspbian) with the PIXEL DE preinstalled.

[https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc- mac/](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/)</comment>


C# in 2012, here's a summary - <AUTHOR> http://fekberg.com/2013/01/08/2012-was-an-amazing-year-heres-a-summary/

<comment><USER2> Not really C# in 2012. Just this fellow's blog in 2012.

</comment><comment><USER3> I looked inside, I saw the words "most valuable", I immediately flagged.

This is a walled-garden developer screaming over the wall, demanding we pay more attention to him and his favorite technologies.

<comment><USER4> I do not think walled-garden means what you think it means.</comment></comment>


An Ode to Hollywood's Obsession With Hacking the Mainframe - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5992318/an-ode-to-hollywoods-obsession-with-hacking-the-mainframe

<comment><USER2> "'hacking the mainframe' is still a convenient but lazy plot device that lets characters discover vital expository backstory"

Kind of like how most of the articles on Gizmodo are non-Gizmo related stories with baited titles and lazy journalism to sucker the maximal amount of people.

Nevertheless, video made me laugh and cringe.</comment>


Hacked Together 118 GB Floppy Disk - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a19616/modified-floppy-disk-and-drive-uses-sd-cards/ <comment><USER2> If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would actually be _more_ functional that current tech.

It bugs me that unmounting SD cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions. It's a regression in usability after floppies and CD-ROMs.

<comment><USER3> > If he could get the drive eject button to unmount the SD card, this would > actually be more functional that current tech. It bugs me that unmounting SD > cards / USB drives and physically removing it are two seperate actions.

To be fair, this was always a problem, also with old computers and OSes. There was no link between pressing eject and magical things happening in the machine to commit data. The data was simply already committed so there was no need to have any additional layers of security.

The difference between then and now is that new computers have enormous amounts of memory and use it to provide write-back caching. This means the OS can tell applications that data is committed when it's not. This is an OS level decision which is done for performance and has nothing to do with the physical eject-buttons on your devices.

You may call this a small nit, but I think it's an important one. The eject- button on old machines would suffer the exact same problems if it used an OS which offered write-back cache.

You could say old _Macs_ didn't have this problem, which is true. But it didn't have an eject-button. It relied on the OS doing that. And then instead you had the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it (or that users didn't realize they had to drag the disk-icon to _trash_ ).

<comment><USER4> > the problem of people not being able to get their disks out of their > machines if the OS for some reason refused to release it

My first time on a Mac, about 1990, I felt pretty confident having plenty of early PC experience. A graphic designer I shared a house with had left me alone with (and permission to use) her Mac.

I quickly discerned there was no software of interest actually installed, but found a floppy that looked something like a game. It wasn't, and I went to hit the ... wait, there's no eject button?

After a fruitless few minutes during which I failed to notice the eject key on the keyboard (of all places!) I eventually opted for tweezers, and gently teased the floppy out of the drive.

Imagine my surprise when I restarted the Mac to find it was unable to start, having apparently completely forgotten about it's own HD! The thing had to go back for servicing before it would even boot properly, iirc.

My reputation as the house's resident computer expert was severely impacted, needless to say.

<comment><USER5> One of the things that drove me nuts using the earlier Macs at my college was the lack of an eject button. Sure, I understand the reasoning now, but when some crappy Hypercard project I was bungling made the computer freeze, I had no way to remove the floppy short of rebooting the whole computer and waiting or hunting around for a paperclip to push into the little manual eject hole.

Still, seeing how many people in my office will just pull USB flash drives without ejecting them I almost see the appeal now.

<comment><USER6> That latter bit is actually so common that Windows was changed to accommodate it, as Raymond Chen wrote at [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031216-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031216-00/?p=41483)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Although this is a fun idea, it's just putting an SD card into a 3.5" floppy disk case and then wiring up the read/write head with contacts to make it appear like an insertion of a normal mass storage SD card.

A more accurate title would be "putting an SD card in a floppy disk case"

<comment><USER8> Makes me ponder a 3.5" SD reader with a eject button though.

<comment><USER9> Or maybe a 3.5" SD _card_ filled with SD technology ... I wonder how much storage that would be.

<comment><USER8> On that note, while idly looking into SD readers for the 3.5" bay, i came across one that could dock a 2.5" SATA drive.

[http://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail...](http://www.akasa.co.uk/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&no=181&type=Card%20Reader/Hub&type_sub=Card%20Reader&model=AK- ICR-10)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Drat, I was hoping it was like a cassette tape adapter and would work in unmodified disk drives. Do floppy disks advertise their own size, or do systems assume that they can only hold 1.44mb? You might need special driver support I guess, which takes some fun away.

<comment><USER11> They advertise their size. Back in the day, there were programs that let you reformat disks with tweaked parameters -- sectors per track, interleaving, etc -- so you could get a greater capacity. Windows 95 was shipped on a disk formatted for 1680k, for example [1]. Off the shelf disks were hit or miss as far as how big you could reformat them to, with some able to handle close to two megs, and others not able to handle much more than 1.44mb.

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

<comment><USER12> Exactly, it reminds me of the time when I formatted a HD 3.5" floppy to 2M with the aforementioned excellent 2M3.0 tool by Ciriaco García de Celis (Facultad de Ciencias de Valladolid: Grupo Universitario de Informatica). It provided 500 Kb of more available data beyond the 1.44M (more then fdformat). From a 2M dos bootdisk I launched a stripped version of win3.1, extracted the WIN3.UC2 archive to a ramdrive of 6M or so and launched it. In this way I could edit my assignments with wysywig WRITE.EXE instead of the dos based WP51 on the library computers. People were wondering how I could have windows running as it wasn't installed. So nowaydays we have 100000M instead of 2M in a smaller package.

<comment><USER13> > HD 3.5" floppy

It's slightly amusing to me that floppy disks were once called "HD", even though the abbreviation stood for high density rather than high definition.

<comment><USER14> Before those, you had double density "DD" disks -- and extended density "ED" disks after that. With the sleeve encased floppies you could even throw in single-sided and double-sided variants. Growing up, we had a lot of 1200KB 5-1/4 disks. IIRC, they were enough cheaper than 1440KB 3-1/2 disks for close to the same storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I would like to see the 3.5" floppy do a comeback, for instance as a 1TB+ flash drive. It is large enough that you can comfortably handle it physically and label it, maybe it could be a small throwback to the age of floppies and zip drives.

<comment><USER16> And nowadays the write back buffer could be on the device itself, and as you hit the 'eject' button it could use the power from a small capacitor to commit it to the disk. Thus no separate 'eject' in the operating system - pop it out and go.

They could replace Blu Ray with this new format, so all those sci-movies in the 80ies where there are films on floppys - those will turn out to be right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sprite TM did the same thing several years ago:

[http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=3](http://spritesmods.com/?art=macsearm&page=3)

[https://youtu.be/9pJHqaF23B8](https://youtu.be/9pJHqaF23B8)

</comment><comment><USER18> Ah, disappointing. I was expecting some giant array of them all running in unison and making beautiful "music". Sorta like the radiohead hardware hobbyist video [https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ](https://youtu.be/pmfHHLfbjNQ)

<comment><USER19> That would be about 80E3 floppys. Assuming a transfer rate of 500kbyte/second the peak data rate for the array would be 40E9 byte/second!

<comment><USER18> Yes, that is what I wanting to see. Something impressive :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was struck by a talk by Kirk Knoernschild in 2013 where he pointed out that there is now a generation of users who don't know what a floppy disk is... Yet it is still the "save" icon in nearly every application.

<comment><USER21> "What's a pay phone?" is a phrase you'll hear from time to time too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Damn.

It would have never occurred to me, to hack something like this together. I really love it when someone comes up with creative ideas to reuse old stuff and mixing in some new things as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> Would love to see a whole lot more of repurposed, upgraded old tech. VHS, audio tapes, you name it. My latest thrill is the pico8 project. Low res, 8bit games but with the extra compute power of today, it yields funny results.

</comment><comment><USER24> Cute. Does anyone remember the superfloppies of the late 90s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superflop...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk_variants#Superfloppy) ?

<comment><USER25> I used to have a LS120 SuperDisk drive in my computer. I really liked the idea but it was useless because no one else had them. I think I still have the drive and several disks stashed away somewhere.

<comment><USER26> Hey, I'm the other guy who had one, pleased to meet you after all those years! _cackles_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Although this is not a useful "innovation", I had fun while watching it.

</comment><comment><USER28> where/when can I buy this

<comment><USER29> [http://www.ebay.com/itm/FLASHPATH-ADAPTER-FLOPPY-DISK- ADAPTE...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/FLASHPATH-ADAPTER-FLOPPY-DISK-ADAPTER-FOR- SMARTMEDIA-NOS-NIB-/201380015519?hash=item2ee32f2d9f:g:apsAAOSw-vlVkfax)</comment></comment>


Today's Conversation: What were you doing on the Internet in '98 - <AUTHOR> http://thefastertimes.com/thedailychat/2010/04/13/what-were-you-doing-on-the-internet-in-1998/

<comment><USER2> August 11, 1998 - I just took delivery of my Gateway computer with a Pentium II 450, 256MB RAM, and 10GB hard drive. This was the computer I would take with me to college 6 weeks later. The first data to pass through my 56k modem was an MP3 of Eagle-Eye Cherry - Save Tonight, found in an AOL chatroom.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was using KPPP on KDE to dial up an internet connection, communicating with a graduate student in Norway for some work on Project GNU.</comment>


They Shoot Kangaroos - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsideonline.com/2037071/overrood-behind-scenes-australias-surprising-kangaroo-conflict <comment><USER2> Surprised the headline is truncated; it's a reference to

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shoot_Horses,_Don't_They%3F_(novel)

It's a pity kangaroos have to be culled but it's a fact of life.

Aside - our family had a magnificent kangaroo rug made from animals that Dad had hunted. Still had a few bullet holes.

</comment><comment><USER3> More appropriate title: Idiots get in the way of government environmental sustainability engineers. Those engineers are removing a pest. Let them do their job.

<comment><USER4> Here here.

To non Australians, they seem like cute puppies that bounce, but in reality they're a huge pest and terrifying when they appear out of nowhere on the highway.

<comment><USER3> When driving from Kalgoorlie (a remote mining town in the middle of the desert) to Perth (the capital city in that state) one must complete the 6 hour drive across featureless plains during the daylight hours only.

Trying to drive at night will result in kangaroos approaching your headlights, then your passenger vehicle is hitting a 200lb (90kg) mammal whilst driving at 70mph (110kmh) which is never going to end well.

<comment><USER4> Yowch! Even with bull bars, that's never going to be fun

<comment><USER5> Aren't they called roo bars in Oz?

<comment><USER6> Both, depends on your pedigree I think. I hear either as much as the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some animals you can kill, some you cant, the hypocrisy of people. If this article offends you, think about where you live and how many animals used to live there, or the amount of deforestation caused to make your food, be it vegan or not.

</comment><comment><USER8> Kangaroo hides don't have sweat glands and the proteins have more width-wise linkages compared to cows.

This makes their leather very strong, even when thin, which makes it a prized material in protective wear like motorcycle gloves where it provides far more feel.

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

>Although most species of macropod are protected from hunting by law, a small number of the large-sized species which exist in high numbers can be hunted by commercial hunters

</comment><comment><USER9> "Fletcher goes full kangaroo, drooping his head, hunching his shoulders, dangling his hands from his chest and zigzagging slowly forward."

This is my new dance, the 'full kanga.'

<comment><USER8> You never go full kanga.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stopped reading at the word "radicalized"

</comment><comment><USER11> "pest tag", the most useful thing since the sliced bread. Justifying all our destroying ecosystems dreams since the dodo, moa and tasmanian tiger.

Buy now the "pest tag" argument and take to your home also the "but, there is still lots and lots of tuna" and "nobody thinks in the billions of cattle killed by wolves each saturday" tags for free.

<comment><USER12> They are very different to your examples of dodo, moa, and tasmanian tigers. Before European settlement, the population was largely limited by water access. With farming, there are numerous small dams across the landscape and irrigation. The population has exploded in the last 200 years.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I'm not consider myself a total jerk, but let me show you now some interesting examples of what we could call the gray 'pest business' area:

In the North of Spain the iberian subspecies of gray wolves are strictly protected but still can be legally culled in special cases. The wolf was extinct in the basque country about 1950 and after the law any recently extinct native species must to be reintroduced ASAP. For some strange reason this is translated as an active minory supported by the government killing actively any wolf daring to enter in the autonomous community, splitting effectively the normal distribution area of an endangered species in two northern subpopulations since them. The press often show photos of the local hero smiling with the killed animal because, as they remember us constantly, "wolves are vermin".

[http://www.eldiario.es/norte/euskadi/inadmisible-sector- mino...](http://www.eldiario.es/norte/euskadi/inadmisible-sector-minoritario- determine-Euskadi_0_252325104.html)

Now wild boar damages are so high and _kill so many people_ in crash cars, that the same basque government is _buying wolf urine_ with the hope to keep the boars out of the roads. Doing the less possible with the maximum money of the taxpayers.

Out of the basque country, wolf cubs and adults are also being culled systematically inside national parks. Yes, is a National Park and cattle have _all_ priority over pests. Inside our particular northern yellowstone you can see domestic goats, sheeps, thousands and thousands of cows, and even roaming free pigs and chicken. We have also some old trees, zero saplings of three years, and I can guarantee that you will have a hard time finding an exposed grass of more than 6 mm high.

No one of the spanish National Parks is thinking seriously about to reintroducing the locally extinct wolves. No matter how high the prevalence of bovine tuberculosis in wild boar and wild roe deer.

Scotland: No trees growing naturally. 100% sappling mortality unless barricated. European Lynx reintroduction is out of discussion; not even in isolated islands or as a single experiment. Blocked forever by the powerful "pest card" by farmers and hunters. If we could ask the scottish plants its definition of pest, they will probably say "sheeps, sheeps roaming free everywhere".

Cougars in Argentina: Kill it with fire. Yes, they are protected. Salmons and minkes in argentina: not pest; dollars. Free pass to all lakes and streams, even if some native species, err... sorry, native pests, will be extinct in the process.

(to be continued...)

<comment><USER11> Second part: Show me the money

" _In 2000 Asturian sheep farmers put in compensation claims for more sheep killed by wolves than actually existed in the Principality_ ".

The two last spanish ministers of _environment_ had repeatly tried to convince Brussels that all was plenty of wolves so they should be hunted _also in the south_. Each year between 140 and 300 wolves are tendered to hunters

[http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/03/27/inenglish/1332871020_305...](http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/03/27/inenglish/1332871020_305012.html)

And here is this bright jewel of internet sarcasm that you surely will enjoy: Lets save the relict population of tasmanian wolves in Andalusia:

[https://scontent-mad1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xlt1/v/t1.0-9/s...](https://scontent-mad1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- xlt1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/12308629_10207824033867164_4933404281340245142_n.jpg?oh=43e8fc2ffb4a8a93af5b7cf53cbb9adb&oe=56F20938)

 _Although there is no proof, in the last decades, of thylacine presence in Andalusia, it is estimated that 8 reproductor groups can be still survive in Sierra Morena._

 _The project perspectives are good, is easy to harmonize the interests of hunters and livestock keepers with a species that do not exists._

 _We want to improve the social perception of tasmanian tigers among citizens. No reintroductions, or real measures against the causes of their extinction are planned._

The context of this is about the new 12 millions of euro granted to "improve the social perception" of wolves in the South of Spain. Since 2012 not a single iberian wolf was caught in the trap cameras deployed to census the also hightly endangered lynx, but Spain said this year in Brussels that there are 50 iberian wolves in two subpopulations instead, the same number as in the last 30 years. A growing number of people think instead that they are locally extinct by now

[http://infoandalucia.com/ii-plan-de-recuperacion-del-lobo- ib...](http://infoandalucia.com/ii-plan-de-recuperacion-del-lobo-iberico-en- andalucia)

Even if one or two wolves miraculously remain they will be highly hybridiseed with feral dogs currently. But as long as Brussels do not ask inconvenient questions about why Spain is not just taking some of the 300 auctioned wolves that will be hunted in the North and traslocate this animals to the National Parks in the South for a small fraction of this money, all will be OK.

As I said I'm not a total jerk. I do not mind if some kangaroos need to be culled as long as is done correctly. Is the common rethoric what is a problem to me, because often it just covers an abuse or a scam (I'm not saying that this is the case here).

If Australia need to keep off kangaroos out of children play areas, I'm fine with the idea. Maybe some strategically situed realistic statues of dingos or thylacines could do a much better job for less money. Who knows?. Children at least will enjoy it. Just lets try it and see what happens.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Russian State Hackers Use Britney Spears Instagram Posts to Control Malware - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/russian-state-hackers-use-britney-spears-instagram-posts-to-control-malware/ <comment><USER2> Genius!</comment>


We all nearly missed the largest underwater volcano eruption ever recorded - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencealert.com/almost-nobody-noticed-largest-underwater-volcano-eruption-ever-recorded-havre-seamount <comment><USER2> For the details, maps, and photos:

[https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=242005](https://volcano.si.edu/volcano.cfm?vn=242005)</comment>


NYSE/NYSE MKT has temporarily suspended trading in all symbols - <AUTHOR> https://www.nyse.com/market-status/history <comment><USER3> This isn't much of an issue for traders That's a nice benefit of having 40+ trading venues in the US. They had problems at the open as well with connectivity on one of their gateways.

Issues like this crop up all the time and most of the time they are resolved before the open. The good news is that they aren't reporting any lost trades or trade busts yet so this isn't as bad as the BATS open at BATS:)

Having said that, they've announced that they will cancel all open orders, that is a huge deal, I can't remember the last time they did that.

To put that into perspective, cancelling all open orders would be the Silicon Valley equivalent of Ebay loosing all bids on their current auctions.

NYSE has always been considered second rate in their IT compared to the NASDAQ and BATS and this won't do much for their reputation.

 __EDIT __meant BATS not FB, thanks!

One other point to keep in mind when throwing around hacking conspiracies. The exchanges aren't running on public networks. You can't DDOS them or hack directly into the matching engines. Though I'm sure you can break in via some other NYSE owned network and make your way to the matching engine somehow.

To hook into the exchange you either go through a blessed intermediary like GS or you plug directly in via colocation. You just can't keep pinging the NYSE on port 80 to bring it down.

<comment><USER4> Are there serious trading shops that don't route orders dynamically to multiple venues?

<comment><USER3> Yes in the sense that about 90% of hedge funds just use a SOR(Smart Order Router) from their executing broker. So from the funds perspective they are just sending an order to GS that should execute on the "US Market" and they expect GS to send it to the appropriate venue.

Most funds just trade through an intermediary like GS and all intermediaries have SOR's that route to each venue in the US as per RegNMS

The remaining 10% are your market makers and HFT's and for them this is a bit of a headache but it happens and they are well equipped to deal with this. No fund that I know of is a market maker for just the NYSE, but if there is then I guess they just go home early?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This doesn't mean _all_ trading is suspended, it just means you can't trade specifically on NYSE or NYSE MKT (formerly Amex). You can still trade NYSE listed stocks at all the other exchanges (BATS, NASDAQ, NYSE Arca, etc). Obviously a black eye for NYSE but it's not as big a deal as the media are making out.

<comment><USER6> It's still pretty bad. Imagine being the IT dept at the NYSE right now. The trading is likely being rerouted to other exchanges. The Wall Street Journal website is also down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty bad timing, markets are already rattled because of China:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/u-s- index-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/u-s-index- futures-tumble-with-asian-equities-as-miners-decline)

Regardless of the technical cause have a feeling this will make things worse and people more nervous.

<comment><USER8> The technical glitch is probably related to China news somehow, but it is rather meaningless for trading in general. NYSE has pretty antiquated technology compared to other exchanges.

<comment><USER9> > The technical glitch is probably related to China news somehow

If that were true, you'd expect to see volume spikes on multiple exchanges, which so far I haven't seen any evidence of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe their network administrator is stuck on the ground in a UAL plane.

<comment><USER11> Well, at least he/she can read the Wall Street Jo...oops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> UAL went down. WSJ down. NYSE halted. coincident?

edit: based on everything that i've heard/read, the incidents are most likely not related. sorry for asking the question.

<comment><USER13> The TV is stating that US government sources do not see a connection.

Edit: Now the Secretary of Homeland Security is saying that there is no evidence of United or the NYSE being due to malice.

Edit (about an hour later): Now the White House Press Secretary is reiterating the point about no indication of malicious actors.

<comment><USER14> As the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

In the case of United Airlines, be prepared to adjust your threshold of expected incompetence dramatically upward; since their merger with Continental multiple _years_ ago, system-wide outages have been an every-couple-of-months thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks like Anonymous tweeted something about this _yesterday_...

[https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/618626955433349120](https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews/status/618626955433349120)

<comment><USER16> We all knew today would be "bad for wall street". The Chinese stock market is crumbling (due to economic, not technical reasons) and Greece is in the fiscal equivalent of the crazy guy barricaded in his house with this gun collection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> From the NY Times:

 _" A trader on the floor of the exchange in lower Manhattan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that after the suspension began, traders were told that the problem was related to updated software that was rolled out before markets opened on Wednesday.

According to the trader, the exchange said that the new software caused problems soon after trading began on Wednesday and the exchange decided to shut down trading all together to fix the problem.

A representative for the exchange did not respond to a request for comment on the trader's account."_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/new- york...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/new-york-stock- exchange-suspends-trading.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first- column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news)

<comment><USER12> three cheers for SDLC!!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like they were having issues earlier today, since before market open. Looks like a network issue based on the previous reports. Those were marked as resolved; unsure if the current issue is related to the previous but it seems likely.

Other exchanges and trading venues appear to operating normally.

</comment><comment><USER19> Well, one thing this has done is bring the paranoid out of the woodwork. I've rarely seen such a display of tinfoil hattery on HN as I have done in the last few days.

<comment><USER12> this is nothing compared to the comment thread on zerohedge. they're connecting jade helm, china, greece, and this into something pretty extraordinary.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but that is Zero Hedge's audience though: the upper echelon, rarified air, pure-bred market conspiracy theorist. What surprised me is seeing it start to creep in HN in such a volume.

<comment><USER12> funny description. i wasn't familiar with them until today but it's fascinating.

<comment><USER20> I've read ZH for six years, it used to be much better until the tinfoil hat, buy gold now brigade took over.

<comment><USER19> And occasionally it still can be - the odd nugget of outside analysis and opinion from anyone but "Tyler," mainly. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Zero Hedge these days too, but mainly for entertainment value than anything actually insightful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's just another advertising campaign for Mr. Robot.

<comment><USER22> Good one! BTW, I like that show. Technology wise, sort of believable, and entertaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apparently its an staypuft attack [https://twitter.com/staypuft/status/618808119695544321](https://twitter.com/staypuft/status/618808119695544321)

<comment><USER24> More info on them/this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> BTW, is NYSE still run by a Tandem?

Edit: I hope so! Great platform.

<comment><USER26> It is now owned by Intercontinental Exchange[0]

[0][http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/new- york...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/business/dealbook/new-york-stock- exchange-suspends-trading.html?ref=business&_r=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very interesting, obviously matters very little to retail traders as most retail brokerages either sell order-flow to marketmakers (e.g., Ameritrade) or have their own smart-router that looks at the liquidity of all exchanges/ECN and decides how to route their customers' orders (Interactive Brokers).

Quick question for trading peeps out there, is there a reason why one would want to direct orders directly to NYSE? Is it because it's still the place to trade bulk orders? (vs. say BATS or ARCA).

</comment><comment><USER28> Systems have bugs all the time. Unfortunately, it was bad timing that all of these systems were affected by different issues.

You're better off using a jump to conclusions board rather than speculating on the correlation of these events.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a 'networking issue' not yet attributed to an adversarial compromise.

There is also an outage at United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal - <USER2> so far attributed to an attack.

</comment><comment><USER30> Time to make the market makers fully electronic. No point in having to physically go to them. Why is NYSE so backwards compared with NASDAQ?

</comment><comment><USER31> Possibly related: wsj.com is also down.

<comment><USER32> Only the front page is generating an error for some reason. Deeper links like [http://www.wsj.com/news/economy](http://www.wsj.com/news/economy) still work fine.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket probably it was a huge volume of trades at the open due to chinese market halt

</comment><comment><USER33> Good thing I still have all the MREs I bought for Y2K

</comment><comment><USER34> Combining this with the United airlines "glitch" \-- it is definitely suspicious. What are the odds of two high profile failures happening at the same time?

<comment><USER35> Sounds like a similar problem to the birthday paradox - only instead of looking at the likelihood of any two people in room having the same birthday, we are asking what is the likelihood of two major companies having the same major, visible failure day. There is a nice explanation and calculator here:

[http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the- birthd...](http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-the-birthday- paradox/)

The parameters that you provide would be the number of companies that would be newsworthy and the number of possible "dates". You could probably back out the latter from an expectation on reliability (five nines, as an example) or think of it as the time between major, visible failures (e.g. enter 3650 if you think of it as a once in ten years kind of failure).

<comment><USER36> If there's smoke there's fire. In my view, Occam's razor might indicate that coincidence is unlikely, and that the two major incidents in US on the same day China's market crash suggest it's a state sponsored cyber attack.

<comment><USER37> _> In my view, Occam's razor might indicate that coincidence is unlikely, and that the two major incidents in US on the same day China's market crash suggest it's a state sponsored cyber attack._

Occam's razor calls for an explanation that does _not_ require the unneeded introduction of a new variable. If you need a _state sponsored cyber attack_ as the alternative explanation, the _coincidence_ theory should be preferred.

<comment><USER38> [http://map.norsecorp.com/](http://map.norsecorp.com/)

Cyberattacks originating from China is not a new variable

<comment><USER37> _> Cyberattacks originating from China is not a new variable_

Sure, but its mere existence in other contexts does not automatically make it the cause of the NYSE etc. glitches. The assumption of causal relationship without any proof is what violates Occam's razor.

(And that map, while pretty, does not proof _state sponsored_ cyber attacks. If I rented myself a $5 VPN account to Russia and then nmap whitehouse.gov, I would appear in that map as an attacker from Russia.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> And combined with the United Airlines ground stop happening now.. Something is certainly happening.

<comment><USER39> That's a pretty big leap to make. You can't take disparate events, equate them and purport "something" is happening. That just doesn't make any sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> wsj goes down, nyse goes down due to technical glitch. seems like a crazy coincidence or some very large state who have a track record of infiltrating and disrupting America electronically at a time when the leaders of that state is feeling the heat and need to stop speculators.

<comment><USER12> so you're saying that china has initiated some sort of half-cocked single- exchange attack? all other exchanges are operating, and trading is maintaining volume, and asset prices are stable. not sure i'm seeing the reasoning for such an attack.

<comment><USER41> Its a distraction. We are here talking about the NYSE not the colossal Chinese market collapse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is what happens when you pay ENGINEERS less than 100k in NYC! This is what happens when you hire a bunch of H1Bs! This is what happens when you don't invest in tech infrastructure!

Why aren't Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt being acquihired? Why isn't David Byttow making 1 million plus as a full stack engineer for the NYSE? It's because companies, even those heavily dependent on their systems, see tech workers as a cost instead of THE business.

This will more than likely never change. Underpaid engineers vastly outperform their salaries. But when things like this happen I can't help but feel a little glee.

<comment><USER43> What are you trying to say? That somehow American born engineers are better than those from the rest of the world?

The attitude of a small subset of people in this country is a constant reminder of why I don't feel at home here.</comment></comment>


This Startup Built Internal Tools to Fuel Major Growth - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/This-Startup-Built-Internal-Tools-to-Fuel-Major-Growth-Heres-Their-Approach

<comment><USER2> As someone who has been a product engineer and internal tool engineer I really appreciated that they made the distinction. Some other points to think about.

1.In the first version of the tool don't have the tool make a decision, just have it generate information, not make decisions. So if it is telling you which sales lead to pursue, first have it generate metrics on why you should pursue a lead

2\. Once you have a tool that makes decisions always have a way to let a human override the tool's decision

3\. Start with a process then add a tool. It's almost always either to work out bugs with people then software

<comment><USER3> Noah here from Percolate. I agree and what's interesting is I also think these are pretty classic values for enterprise (or b2b) software in general. Without the centralized data it's really hard to build any of the workflows or other tools.

<comment><USER2> Agreed. That's why I like to start with a process and then build a tool. If people find the process valuable enough to follow it then you know the tool will be providing real business value

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One downside to this approach is that it can tend to create status or power rifts between the product people and the tools people. In traditional shops, the "skills that pay the bills" product people often get better treatment, higher status, greater advancement opportunity and stronger job security than tooling people, who are often seen as being on the cost side of the business.

Startups that go down this route should be on the lookout for this potential for divisiveness and culture fragmentation.

<comment><USER5> The approach they seemed to take to deal with this was bringing in an outside developer. I'm not a fan of this approach for a number of reasons - but mainly because then you've got a dependency on a single outside person or firm to maintain that application going forward.

<comment><USER3> To answer both: On the division side, we have found a number of people who are simply more passionate about building products for their peers than building products for customers. I interviewed one last night, so I can confirm this is the case. Because the job includes a bit of product management and a bit of design, it ends up being something fundamentally different than what we ask engineers to do.

As for the outside devs, I agree that is a challenge and one of the things that ultimately led to us hiring internally to help support and continue to grow those internal products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be working for them but I would typically advise against too much energy spent on automation and internal tools too early. Tools can really slow you down in the early going when things are changing rapidly. And you can typically throw inexpensive bodies at many of the tasks that are otherwise candidates for automation.

The one thing I do like is that building tools gives more employees experience in building product.

<comment><USER3> I would generally agree with that and we had many instances where we chose to have people perfect workflows prior to fully automating them (and there are lots of situations where that remains the case now). With that said, and I don't know that it was perfectly expressed in the piece, I do think there's a concept that engineers take for granted around the attitude that goes into creating products and automation that needs to be pushed hard throughout the whole organization.

<comment><USER7> Have you looked into W. Edwards Deming at all? His ideas on quality and systems are echoed almost perfectly in this article and in what you're saying here, especially in bringing systems thinking to the entire organization, not just engineering (where abolishing repetitive tasks using scripting comes as second nature). Really astute stuff.

I think he'd reply on the point above, that it's far better to build the system and have it be less than perfect than to rely on a brittle process.

"A bad system will beat a good person every time." \- Deming

So, it will probably not be a waste of time. Has your experience proven this out in general?

<comment><USER3> Haven't read any Deming, but will check it out. Any particularly good place to start?

I'd say in general it has proven out, though there have certainly been some cases where we tried to build products prior to fully defining the challenge/process and they were basically DOA. Again, here internal tools are just like external products: Without a tightly defined challenge/opportunity it's really hard to deliver a useful product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> would love to see examples of other companies being built like this. This could be built as an incubator.

<comment><USER9> It really depends very much upon how the company's built and how its people work culturally, but I think this is absolutely more important for larger companies than smaller ones just because communication overhead far exceeds pretty much every other barrier (regulatory and compliance included).

I'd hesitate to go this route if the product is aimed mostly at an audience used to structured communications such as engineers (github issues, IRC channels, and even wikis are far more structured than the usual e-mail chain like in a mailing list). This is part of why companies with usable CRM like Salesforce have done so well in providing value to their customers.

So, I'd totally do this if I was going to start something that's aimed mostly at enterprise users or with potential to have a need for lots of cross- functional communication like a start-up operating in a highly regulated space.</comment></comment>