The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy - <AUTHOR> https://exolymph.news/2016/06/21/cloning-artificial-intelligence-death/ <comment><USER2> The author's "fallacy" isn't so much a fallacy as much as it is one particular (and rather unsurprising) opinion on how to answer the questions that Aaronson and Hanson have asked.

In this sense, the author fundamentally misses the point of what Aaronson and Hanson have written. Aaronson and Hanson seem to be primarily interested in identifying _questions_ and exploring the _problems_ that arise when trying to give simple answers to those questions.

The fact that the author is able to quickly and cleanly resolve his personal belief about how these questions should be answered doesn't indicate that the questions are easy to answer or even that there is an obviously correct answer. At least any more than a Christian's belief in God cleanly settles the question of whether God exists.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish you'd explain why you disagree with my answer.

<comment><USER3> I think what throwawaysocks is saying is that your refutation doesn't really add value to the discussion. I agree with you, that my clone's consciousness is not my own consciousness, but what are the deeper implications?

Particularly when we start to consider AI, and its not your own human consciousness but rather an artificial one, does our notion of "murder" change? Then they question, is true "cloning" even possible? (Aaronson uses quantum uncertainty to say 'no', but Hanson claims 'yes' given total understanding of the brain.)

Thanks for your article, I'm personally on your side but this whole debate has really made me think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Imagine that I visit a cloning facility that can flawlessly duplicate a human, memories and all. The techs there put me in a medical gown and sedate me, and a while later I wake up in an empty room.

Without any additional information, I have no way to determine if I am the clone or not. I know only that there is another me in the building somewhere, having the exact same thoughts as I am having right now.

In fact, I have no way to know if the cloning was even successful or not. There is no way for me to distinguish from this room if I am the clone, if the other copy was disintegrated, or if no copy was made at all. The room I'm in could be on Mars for all I know.

Does it make sense for me to worry about the fate of the other potential copy if I know absolutely that nothing of my essence has been lost either way?

<comment><USER5> This is all basic stuff. Think deeper.

You go to sleep every night. When you wake up the next day, how do you know you're the same person as yesterday? What does that mean?

Now consider if you didn't have memories of the past. What would make you "you"? The body would be the same but your amnesia would change things, eh?

Now what if you knew next week you would lose your memories for sure, but this week you can go on an amazing vacation. Does it matter where you go? It matters to your current self but to your future self.

Now think about sacrificing pleasure now so you can live a longer life. Or feel good about your life at 80.

Now think about the afterlife. What if you are reincarnated with no memories of the past? We already kind of established that "reincarnated you" wouldn't care about current you. But will current you care about reincarnated you?

Consider this: if a "future you" doesn't remember being "current you" how are they really different than a random person with a similar body who also has amnesia?

In short, long term, is it all about the memories?

What is the self preservation instinct about?

Finally the big one... if there were no conscious observers at all, in what sense would anything exist? That is, if I described to you a universe that you can never detect or deduce must exist from any observations in this one, how would saying "that universe EXISTS be different than saying it DOESN'T EXIST? It seems the word itself requires concious observers. Thus, the concept of consciousness and existence may be two sides of the same amazing conundrum.

<comment><USER6> You know you're the same person as yesterday because without you, there is no _knowing_. A clone is no more _you_ than an identical twin is you. What makes you _you_ is the ability to ask the question in the first place. If you were dead, there would be no question.

<comment><USER7> I don't follow.

You know based on your ability to ask the question that you currently are you and not a clone of yourself, but you don't know that the person yesterday was you and not some other person that you were cloned from.

<comment><USER6> _but you don 't know that the person yesterday was you and not some other person that you were cloned from._

The parent did not say anything about this and neither did I. Of course you cannot know whether you are a clone or not. My point is that if a clone is made of you and you are killed, you will be dead, you won't be the clone.

<comment><USER7> You both did.

> When you wake up the next day, how do you know you're the same person as > yesterday?

> You know you're the same person as yesterday

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another similar thought experiment is what happen if we cut ourselves laterally exactly in half and then fill back in the missing half on both parts. In the case of both halves, we are continuing an existing consciousness.

Would you be OK killing off one of the halves?

<comment><USER9> I've been through this a million times before. If they refuse to act with me as a single entity, they're dead to me.

<comment><USER8> Which one is "me" though? Which ever side I in my current state end up being?

<comment><USER10> We have some data on this from split-brain patients. These are people whose corpus callosum---a bundle of fibers linking their left and right cerebral hemispheres---is cut. Such people start to act as if they are two individuals. Each hemisphere only has access to half of the visual field, and due to a quirk of how language is lateralized (typically left hemisphere only) they can make conflicting verbal and nonverbal reports of ambiguous stimuli: saying one thing yet writing another.

So given this, it's not really fair to say that there is a unitary state to split. Each half would get a different state (perhaps "synchronized" at the time of the split), and only one half would be able to talk about the experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We're chasing our tails here. The definition of the copy function requires both an original and a copy. There is //always// an original and a copy. Thus, exact clones and copies made in teleport machines are always copies, separate from the original. There can be no copy function without an original and a copy. You can think of as many elaborate cloning thought experiments as you like; if they can be reduced to a copy function then the answer is simple.

I know I'm not the first person in this thread to declare the answer simple, but the author appears to be reaching the obvious if somewhat occluded correct conclusion.

<comment><USER12> The particles that make up your will have a probability of being in a certain place according to some rules. When you move, the particles "disappear" from one place and "appear" at another place. Do you know they are the same particles? Does it matter?

Does it matter more that there's no duplicate particles (ie. no changes of a copy being made)?

In that case, you could device a teleport machine that makes sure to read the state "bit by bit" (particle by particle), then destroys the original particle before creating a new particle in another location. How different would that be compared to what's normally happening to your body?

<comment><USER11> > Does it matter more that there's no duplicate particles (ie. no changes of a > copy being made)?

Yes, it does matter. No copy being introduced means it's just a translation of displacement. That's an entirely different operation.

Quantum tunnelling is fun to think about, but at the scale of atoms it starts to lose any relevance, and at the scale of neurons has no meaning at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Consider another version: An exactly similar human being to you is discovered to exist on another planet. They have your memories, your aspirations, your habits, etc. They were not created as a copy of you. This person was born to parents, just like you, and lived the same life that you did. They are reading this post on HN right now.

Surely in this scenario the answer to "is it OK to kill one of you now?" is "no".

So why is this different to some people than a synthetically-created clone?

<comment><USER14> >Surely in this scenario the answer to "is it OK to kill one of you now?" is "no".

I don't know about that.

I'm not sure about this intuition pump. If they are truly identical to me, then the world they live in must also me identical to mine or we would have diverged. So if we discovered Earth-2, then Earth-2 would simultaneously discover us (or Earth-3 etc). No actions can cause divergence, so it's not possible for anyone on any Earth to only kill one of you. It would be like trying to kill your reflection.

If we're talking about some kind of god who is outside the mirror/chain Earth system, and has the ability to break symmetry as they see fit, it's still not clear-cut. In effect, from such a perspective, there is only one Earth (albeit with copies) until changes are made. It's not even clear that deleting one of the several identical copies of the whole Earth is wrong. Moreover, deciding to kill someone on one of several heretofore identical Earth's and seeing how they diverge is _informationally_ the same as spawning a new Earth - an act of _creation_ rather than destruction. Nothing is lost - that person still lives their life on an Earth somewhere - but now new lives will be led, new experiences, new sadness but also somewhere new joy.

I think it's pretty clear though that our morality of "no killing" is based pretty strongly upon the assumption that there's only one of someone, they can only be killed once, and it's forever. Start violating these assumptions and it breaks down quickly.

<comment> norea-armozel Only if you assume the finality of death makes anything less good. If you assume every conscious being has inherent value then the entire argument has to go another way which isn't much better, but it can be characterized as a viable alternative if perfect copies of any one person could be created down to the Planck constants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One's position in space-time is an inextricable component of "the self". Even in theory, a perfectly replicated individual has already fundamentally diverged from the original just by virtue of its existence as a duplicate (since duplication implies a distinct position in space-time). Ultimately, what I'm saying is that the idea of a "perfect duplicate" is something of a contradiction, and any theory of mind that attempts to define one's "homunculus" in terms of a physical brain state is in some ways moot because although our human senses might indicate that we are dealing with two identical individuals we are actually dealing with two fundamentally distinct beings, despite the apparent similarities.

<comment><USER16> Do you say the same thing about copies of a program (and their corresponding hardware)?

<comment><USER15> I would, yes, though I'd be careful about drawing comparisons in this regard between computer programs (as we know them today) and the phenomenon that we call consciousness, since the framework of computation deliberately extricates the essence of a program from the physical phenomena that underpins its existence.

<comment><USER16> Okay, but then you're just moving the debate over a few feet rather than addressing the core point: can a _human_ likewise be abstracted away to some substrate-independent program such that we lose nothing by deleting some running copies? Can we build a box that gives us the same answers Bill Gates would, and causes us to deem it "another Bill Gates" without confusion, modulo having a body and physical access to the world?

<comment><USER15> > _can a human likewise be abstracted away to some substrate-independent > program such that we lose nothing by deleting some running copies_

Oh. Well, assuming our current model of computation, I think a "substrate- independent" human program is essentially non-human by definition (that is to say, lacking the particular qualities of 'consciousness' that we commonly ascribe to humans), so I'd conclude that "nothing is lost" insomuch as "nothing existed" in the first place. In theory, it seems plausible that we could create a program that could consistently pass a "Bill Gates" Turing test, but it is easy for a programmer to imagine how such a program could exist without actually being conscious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "This seems really simple and obvious to me. So what am I missing?"

Personal identity is a deep philosophical problem - see Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons'.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just to throw out a few references, since they seem unmentioned so far:

The Ship of Theseus is an ancient recognition of a similar problem.

Greg Egan has written two stories that deal with copy-vs-continuity of consciousness: Diaspora and Permutation City. Both start with the premise "what if we could digitize our mind?" but go in different directions.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's an interesting problem, but I don't feel like this page accomplished much besides calling a position he disagreed with a fallacy and using unexplained appeals to emotion.

>To refute this, let's conduct a thought experiment. Pretend that you can copy a human brain. There are ten copies of me. They are all individually conscious — perfect replicas that only diverge after the point when replication happened. Is it okay to kill five of these copies? No, of course not! Each one is a self-aware, intelligent mind, human in everything but body. The identicalness doesn't change that.

The things that scare me about death are the ideas that my specific goals would be left unpursued, that my responsibilities would be abandoned, my friends would lose my friendship, and that my memories and experiences would lose their significance upon the world.

If an alien came to Earth with a perfect matter-duplicater (that I have reason to fully trust), duplicated me such that I'm not even sure which is the original, then remembers that he's not allowed to use it on humans, and explains he needs to painlessly euthanize and disassemble one of me, I wouldn't be particularly shaken up by it. Sure, I'd feel I was teased with a cool toy and possibility, but the only injury that has happened is in a way equivalent to a few seconds of memory loss. I've done worse to myself by drinking. There were no big life experiences lost or goals left unpursued.

\---

Going a little further... if I were an AI or could somehow copy myself, I imagine I would frequently make short-lived copies to work together with to accomplish my goals. I as my copies would be told that I'm going to be removed in a few days; I think I could handle the idea of knowing the surviving-me is going to be amnesic to my several days of (probably barely)unique experiences in a world much closer to our goals.

In a world where everyone or all AIs could do the above, I imagine the minds who did the above would become much more successful in nearly all endeavors. Choosing not to do so would be choosing to fail, unless the strategy was made illegal. I struggle to fault the strategy morally given that it would be something done by a single consenting individual to themselves, though it does still sound a little weird to my instincts about how survival is supposed to work. If we encountered otherwise similar aliens which already worked that way, would we judge them, or only consider it an abomination when humans did it to themselves?

I'm a bit disappointed that I haven't seen much sci-fi explore concepts like this.

<comment><USER20> If you haven't seen Primer, I recommend it.

MILD SPOILER: If you could make short-lived copies of yourself, you should probably keep a close eye on them. After all, you're clever, they're clever. You're motivated to keep existing, so are they.

<comment><USER19> >You're motivated to keep existing, so are they.

This is kind of the point I'm arguing against. I'm sure many people would have struggles with their copies, but I think someone disciplined and with the right (well, useful) definitions of self and the meanings of survival internalized could avoid the issue entirely, and accept their short-livedness if they know another instance of themselves is going to continue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The no-cloning theorem together with chaos theory suggests that cloning is fundamentally impossible. Mostly people will respond to this by saying "the brain isn't a quantum computer", which is almost certainly true, but what is actually required for mind uploading is "the brain's behavior is not influenced by quantum phenomena at all", which is even more certainly false.

Yet we're still obsessed with mind uploading. Why?

I guess it's because, while we accept that life seems to have some "atman", a sense of identity, and quantum mechanics allows this in a very weak sense, it makes no sense that our perceptions would be at all influenced by quantum mechanics. Using the no-cloning theorem to resolve the problem of mind uploading seems like cheating, and we're all pretty sure that souls don't exist, so we tend to think that anyone who looks for something like a soul in fundamental physics must be pushing an agenda. But this latter reasoning is a fallacy; the well is poisoned when anyone who suggests that quantum mechanics might derail computational neuroscience must believe in some weird magical revisionism of ESP or hypercomputations occurring in the brain or whatever.

But there's an easier culprit hiding in plain sight: the tendency of people to talk more about things they think they can understand, than things where they run a serious risk of being proven flat wrong. I _could_ be flat wrong (but this is not my first rodeo); many posters in this thread as well as the blogger cannot. Loss aversion strikes again.

</comment><comment><USER22> I came to conclusion that torturing Sims is indeed morally wrong. Now it's not that much wrong, because they are not very self-aware, but if they were more self-aware, it would be very wrong. So yeah, killing clones or even virtual replicas willy-nilly is wrong.

On the other hand, I would have no problem with teleportation-via-cloning. I don't have a problem with being unconscious every night, after all (kudos to [http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1](http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1) for pointing that out to me). Also I have no problem, every day when I go to work, to sit for half an hour in a huge metal structure which is propelled by enormous speed through a tunnel. What if it crashed, and I would be smashed to death? It's pretty much the same question the article asks, what if some incident caused the clone not being recreated successfully? I simply trust the people who built it and maintain it, and I know many people use it with no issues, so why not use it?

<comment><USER23> If torturing sims is morally wrong is it also morally wrong to stop the simulation destroying their universe?

<comment><USER22> Yes and no. It's not wrong to just stop the simulation forever. Torturing or repeatedly killing a virtual being for fun is wrong, but turning off ("killing") a virtual being for the purpose of it being turned off is acceptable.

However, it can be wrong to erase their universe, if that potentially destroys something interesting the virtual beings have created.

In other words, the intent matters. Killing a mouse for fun is immoral, killing it to research cancer is not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Imagine waking up in a strange facility. There's a tray in front of you with a pill and a label that says "eat me."

In World A, the drug causes amnesia--after 12 hours, you'll fall asleep, and completely forget the preceding 12 hours.

In World B, the drug is a suicide pill--after 12 hours, you will fall asleep and die painlessly. However, just before you woke up, a "backup" was uploaded. And upon your death, this backup will be restored.

It seems to me that the subjective experience(s) in both cases would be the same. But we consider the latter "death" and the former "too much to drink."

([http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/is-forgotten-party- dea...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/is-forgotten-party-death.html) got me thinking in these terms--it's by Robin Hanson, who is one of the examples from the article.)

</comment><comment><USER16> This doesn't deserve the label "fallacy"; the only thing I got is that the author disagrees about the implications of restarting a mind somewhere else. Well, great, but you need to explain substantively _why_ you think that is, not simply disagree with it.

But even _then_ , you should only label the _flawed premise_ \-- the one you're refuting to make this point -- as the fallacy, not the conclusion.

What's worse, the author's disagreement has to deal with the (almost) established "consciousness branching" that happens all the time. If you accept the universality of the Schrödinger equation, then your body is branching into different parts of the wavefunction, yet (each of) you obviously internally perceive it as the same consciousness.

</comment><comment><USER25> The author seems to believe continuous consciousness is necessary for identity. I hope he never falls asleep. If he does that means he is dead, and tomorrow morning an usurper with his memories will wake up in his bed.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm reminded of this cartoon about an inventor who demonstrates a teleportation device. Shows you don't have to go all technical or write an economic treatise about emulated humans for important philisophical questions. It can be fun as well.

"To be" (by John Weldon) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc)

For a more serious answer to these questions (or at least some) you can look up the work " i am you" By Daniel Kolak.

</comment><comment><USER27> One thing that should be clear in these argument is that many people intuitive sense of the nature of consciousness.

It seems absolutely obvious that there's something unique in a human brain- body that can't be encompassed by just information. It's often denoted by "living, breathing, feeling".

There's no more concrete argument here. A person whose awakened from general anesthesia still "feels like they are the same". A person who, hypothetically, had all cells in their body replace themselves through cell division (say some youth-regaining process more complete than the ordinary aging process, which replaces quite a few still) wouldn't face the "am I really me" question is the same way as that exact duplicate on Mars.

I think these "identity issues" have to do with our internal processes of psychological adaptation. Each human is constantly changing and has a multitude of impulses - yet we each have to pursue our interests as a single being who deals with other single beings. So our brains have a reflexive tendency to form a sense of unified consciousness.

One might say that these are "just psychological issues" but I think it's reasonable to say that this reflex towards unified self-conception is very important for the thing humans do, at in the world as a unified whole rather than a collection of, say, feedback loops.

</comment><comment><USER28> This whole discussion sheds a bit of light on the inevitable difficulties one encounters when attempting to remain unflinchingly dedicated to a purely materialistic philosophical worldview.

(IMHO)

<comment><USER29> If you've got a philosophy that doesn't involve biting any counterintuitive bullets, please share.

<comment><USER28> My point is essentially to encourage open-mindedness about that which we don't (and possibly never can) fully understand from a materialist (as opposed to a philosophical) perspective. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think that if you want to copy a conscious being, you'd have to copy the body as well.[1]

There are a lot of 'memories' stored in the body, and the brain and body (and endocrine system) are inseparably intertwined in my opinion.

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

</comment><comment><USER31> Since there isn't a computer that seems conscious at this time, the idea of machine consciousness is supported by thought experiments. Here's one old chestnut: "What if you replaced your neurons one by one with neuron-sized and shaped substitutes made of silicon chips that perfectly mimicked the chemical and electric functions of the originals? If you just replaced one single neuron, surely you'd feel the same. As you proceed, as more and more neurons are replaced, you'd stay conscious. Why wouldn't you still be conscious at the end of the process, when you'd reside in a brain-shaped glob of silicon? And why couldn't the resulting replacement brain have been manufactured by some other means?"

[http://www.jaronlanier.com/aichapter.html](http://www.jaronlanier.com/aichapter.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> The author of the article is asking a bit of a different question than the the authors of the articles he cites. The cited are more about "what is consciousness" in the context of can a computer be. The author is asking "what am I" That's a little harder isn't it?

He's asking if he got copied instantly and sent to Mars which one of the copies would still be _me_? Well, they both would wouldn't they? Each having a continuous experience leading up to the point they were copies and stepped out of the machine.

The fun part is that, barring quantum hooey that the articles bring up, there seems to be no scientific reason to doubt the physical possibility of this eventually occurring. If you can get copied, and both copies are you, what happens to the underpinnings of most world religions? Delightfully subversive thought right there.

<comment><USER33> "And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?"

\-- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We Must Dissent"

<comment><USER32> Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called "moral value" of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements.

\-- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think fork is a more appropriate description than clone. After the point the new consciousness exists, it immediately begins creating its own experiences from that moment on and ceases to be a clone anymore.

I don't think it makes a difference whether a consciousness is destroyed after its been forked or not. Either way, I wouldn't be volunteering for that kind of experiment any time soon.

Quantum Immortality comes to mind though. I _think_ it may have been Tesla who also mentioned that our consciousness is a receiver that tunes in to the closest match. If this were the case, then I might volunteer after all.

I imagine the only way to know for sure would be to invent the technology to clone/fork consciousness, separate them, show them different cards, destroy one, and ask the other to describe both cards.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's less a fallacy than a fantasy. It's a bizarre universalist solipsism: A perception that all people are is what is important for you to consider, carried to the most absurd conclusion of thinking that what you are is only what is important for others to consider.

Therefore, if you duplicate a process, delete the old and copy the new one in its place, it's the same process.

This is totally acceptable to me if there is a proof somewhere that there is no such thing as subjective experience, but then it makes no sense to talk about "consciousnesses" as separable anyway, and the entire discussion is pointless.

edit: If Peapod suddenly goes out of business and Amazon seamlessly picks up my grocery deliveries, is Amazon Peapod?

</comment><comment><USER36> This sort of reminds me of the movie Sync by Corridor Digital: [https://youtu.be/vhjimhX9d5U?t=38s](https://youtu.be/vhjimhX9d5U?t=38s)

</comment><comment><USER37> I wonder, what does quantum physics have to do with human experience and brain operation?

It's a very persistent idea floating around, despite contradicting everything we know about how a brain operates.

More on topic, what he misses is that "consciousness" is a null word. It does not connect to any real phenomenon, and merely a result of a human being unable to imagine it's own non-existence, thus producing the long list of things like anima, spirit soul, consciousness and so on.

</comment><comment><USER38> There is no fallacy. Everyone's here who is intrigued by this question but dissapointed with the rather simple and unresolving reply in this blog post, should watch Moon directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son who recently directed Warcraft.) Questions like these don't have simple answers. I'm rather dissapointed with the hand wave of emotion the post author ascribes to. But it is bringing the topic up, so I am happy for that.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't understand why the author of the article believes that it's impossible to clone consciousness.

If you made an exact copy of yourself, then you would be able to control both bodies simultaneously and you would also receive sensory feedback from both bodies at the same time.

The main caveat is that these sensory experiences will be partitioned across the two bodies - You (your consciousness) will receive sensory information from both bodies simultaneously but you won't be able to synchronize that information across the partition (unless you made both of your bodies talk to each other).

Just imagine that all creatures on earth were born with only half a body split down the middle; one eye, one ear, one nostril, one arm, etc... As (half) a human, you would probably think that two half-bodies sharing a single mind is impossible... Maybe, as (full) humans, when we think about two bodies sharing a single mind, we also fall into the same psychological trap.

It's true that comparing two half-bodies vs two full-bodies isn't a perfect comparison because in real life, the right and left halves of our brains are connected and do exchange some information... But studies show that some people have been able to live with only half a brain (or half of the brain severely damaged) - Both hemispheres do experience a certain level of isolation (partition) from each other; so a lot of the information is not actually shared across both hemispheres and yet you still experience it. So this does lend some credence to the notion that a single consciousness (or at least a part of that single consciousness) CAN exist across a physical partition.

So the two-body scenario is just a slightly more extreme version of the two- halves scenario which we all subjectively experience on a daily basis.

</comment><comment><USER40> Some further insight here: [https://www.inverse.com/article/15728-can- cryonics-save-the-...](https://www.inverse.com/article/15728-can-cryonics- save-the-brain-and-the-self-a-doctor-holds-out-hope)

</comment><comment><USER41> "Reverting to a previous copy is not the same as continuing to live. This seems really simple and obvious to me. So what am I missing"

What the author is missing is that something can be "simple and obvious" and also wrong.

</comment><comment><USER42> The more interesting question to me is if a good enough copy can be made that is functionally same and what that means.

Reminds me of the Ship of Theseus but with the human body/brain.</comment>


Ask HN: wind powered, power generating ships - <AUTHOR>

Would a very small ship with a very large mast dragging a water turbine generator create enough power to be useful? <comment><USER2> I doubt it. Compared to a fixed tower wind turbine you have hull drag losses, water turbine losses, and the problem of where to put the power since you won't have cables to shore.

Some cruising sailors do use systems like this to generate their own power when under way.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. There was a link here at HN sometimes to an article about a ship with wind turbines going to see and returning with stored hydrogen as an Energy source which I thought was a good idea, if the economics eventually make it viable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 'useful' is subjective. That mast would not have to be 'very large' to power one's GPS system, and having that certainly could be useful. At even lower power, a tiny impeller that measures boat speed could be very useful.

If you are aiming for large amounts of power, I would expect it to be more efficient to replace part of the sailing by a wind turbine, and to get rid of that water turbine.

</comment><comment><USER5> Take a look at this; I submitted it a couple days ago and found it very interesting:

[http://thepowergeneration.blogspot.com/2009/09/hydrogen- chal...](http://thepowergeneration.blogspot.com/2009/09/hydrogen- challenger.html)

If you had other ships carrying away the generated hydrogen, it seems like a brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> My friend Craig, an engineer for an oceanography company, has been working on very similar ideas for a while. Here are two of his proposals:

<http://longshotcity.com/2008/11/17/flymill/>

<http://www.paratow.com/></comment>


Some useful startup advice - <AUTHOR> http://www.exquisitetweets.com/collection/flaneur/1470

<comment><USER2> This is actually very funny. It's just a shame the HN title is likely to attract a lot of people who won't take the joke well.</comment>


Open sourcing our Android and iOS apps - <AUTHOR> https://kickstarter.engineering/open-sourcing-our-android-and-ios-apps-6891be909fcd#.9bls0yl69 <comment><USER4> Kudos to them. Compared to the web it's rather cumbersome to poke into packaged and released mobile apps, so I really appreciate access to the source of a real world app for learning and comparison.

The Android codebase looks very modern and well structured. I think it makes great use of many of the goodies (gradle, rxjava, retrofit, dagger, android support lib, ...) and learnings (bring your own MV*; use Fragments when you need them, stick to Activities if you can) that is state of the art in Android development. I think it's a great thing to skim through if you are interested in developing for Android or to compare it to you own app.

I can only assume that the same is true for I iOS. I'll certainly check it out should I start developing for that platform.

<comment> V-2 Yeah, they sort of rolled out their own MVVM implementation, based on RxJava and RxLifecycle.

On Android MVVM is more difficult than MVP in my opinion (the most popular choice, not counting spaghetti projects), mostly because the platform doesn't provide the "glue" needed to bind viewmodels to the UI layer. At first glance it looks like they did it without overengineering, which is another trap as far as these matters go.

Clearly a work of very good experts

<comment><USER5> That "glue" can be Android's Databinding library. I've used it to bind ViewModel data to views. Works really well.

<comment> V-2 I'm aware of it, but last I checked it didn't seem production-ready and lacked features. I believe they updated it at some point, but other than some talk at Google IO not much came out of it - even the docs didn't reflect it back then. Perhaps it's up to the task now, I admit I'm not looking it up regularly.

<comment><USER5> It is definitely production ready now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a mobile app developer by profession. But I always wanted to start learning and developing real world apps. The problem I always ran into the tutorials and demos, that they are mostly limited(i.e not close to solving real world problems). I think browsing their code, will give me a good start. And I would know how it's done right! Thank You!

<comment><USER7> Having looked through this project I would not recommend using it as a basis for learning how an iOS app is "done right", as they've deviated from standard iOS/Swift paradigms significantly. In particular, the use of ReactiveCocoa and MVVM creates an app that is structured completely differently from a "traditional" iOS app. They've also used (abused?) Swift's ability to define custom operators which results in a lot of code like this:

        self.youLabel
          |> authorBadgeLabelStyle
          |> UILabel.lens.textColor .~ .whiteColor()
          |> UILabel.lens.text %~ { _ in Strings.update_comments_you() }

Which again is very different from regular iOS/Swift code.

That said, I think this project is interesting to look at from the perspective of "this is what it would look like to go all-in with ReactiveCocoa and MVVM". It's kinda like Twisted in Python: Twisted code looks very different from normal Python code, cause once you start using Twisted, it becomes Twisted all the way down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had a chance to see Brandon from Kickstarter talk about their functional approach at the Functional Swift Conference in Budapest. I highly recommend watching it!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VaIKK2ijM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0VaIKK2ijM)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the link. Watching so far, many of the points Brandon makes vaguely resonate with how I approach structuring my code, but knowing the common vocabulary (f.ex. the term 'co-effect') enables me to communicate how and why I do things, and ultimately to improve.

Out of curiosity, how much were the tickets and how early was it sold out? I was in Budapest right at that time to attend our remote team meeting, and I'm cursing myself for not knowing about this conference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Last year when I was working on a startup's mobile app for Android, it was almost impossible to find good quality code that was open sourced.

I am really happy that Kickstarter has released their android app as open source - would definitely be a great learning experience!

<comment><USER5> There are quite a few "sample" open source projects that demonstrate best practices and various Android architectures. However, they are not fully fledged production applications like the Kickstarter app.

<comment><USER10> That's the entire issue, I've seen quite a lot of "sample" apps that do one thing (like nav bar, or fragments, or animations etc.)

But each of htem brings their own libraries, and don't explain what what's necessary and it's left to the user ot decide to how stitch all of this together.

Don't get me wrong...I'm happy for the demo apps (they had made my life a lot easier), but a production grade app is a whole different ballgame.

<comment><USER11> F-Droid is full of "real" apps that are completely open source. You can look at any of them to see how they work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For anyone reading their post, we're so humbled by Kickstarter mentioning the tiny Artsy for having inspired some of this work. If you're interested in the open-source by default conversation and need some ammo to bring this to your team, start at [http://code.dblock.org/2015/02/09/becoming-open-source-by- de...](http://code.dblock.org/2015/02/09/becoming-open-source-by-default.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> They use Swift Playgrounds to do a lot of development:

"Swift Playgrounds for iterative development and styling. Most major screens in the app get a corresponding playground where we can see a wide variety of devices, languages, and data in real time."

[https://github.com/kickstarter/ios- oss/tree/master/Kickstart...](https://github.com/kickstarter/ios- oss/tree/master/Kickstarter-iOS.playground/Pages)

I've recently bought into this development method too. It's not quite what Bret Victor dreamed up, but it's a big step in the right direction.

<comment><USER14> Is this similar to Xamarin Workbooks?

[https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross- platform/workbook...](https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross- platform/workbooks/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is pretty awesome. Just because an app connects to a single website/service doesn't mean there isn't a benefit to being open! It's good to be able to trust (and verify) the software running on our devices.

<comment><USER16> This. There is really no downside to doing this, and lots of potential upside. I honestly think most companies could do this with zero effect to their bottom line.

<comment><USER17> If your code is bad, then there's risk of making security vulnerabilities more visible. Not that that's a good reason to avoid open sourcing, but it's a reason.

<comment><USER16> Which is also a good reason to open your code and let those that know better help you fix it.

<comment><USER18> > Which is also a good reason to open your code and let those that know better > help you fix it.

This is a fantastic mentality, but unfortunately doesn't really play out in reality.

I'm a huge Open Source fanboy, but we need to be "real". How many people are really going to read every line of every open source program? Very-few-to-none is the real answer. Massively popular software gets eyeballs, but few others do.

Most of us just use the software and trust/hope someone else reviewed it for security et al.

The problem with that is, we are all trusting/hoping someone else did a review, but that someone else is trusting/hoping someone else did a review.

<comment><USER16> How many of the people that do review your code would exploit it vs reporting it to you? Combine it with a bounty program, and chances are you will get useful feedback at a fraction of the cost of a full on audit.

<comment><USER18> I agree with the sentiment of your post, however I believe it is based on an ideal world, which we don't live in.

> How many of the people that do review your code would exploit it vs > reporting it to you

By nature, attackers would be reviewing your code as well.

> Combine it with a bounty program

The overwhelming majority of Open Source software was created-by and is curated-by a single person who makes negative profit by working on the software for free in their spare time. Even some of the most popular projects are still total losses for their curators. You're not going to get bug bounty programs here.

For example, take a look at Crosstool-ng[1] (a popular project used to build cross-compilers for various architectures). Companies and individuals are all using this project to build cross-compilers that they trust to build other software with. A bug in Crosstool-ng could propagate into bugs in the compiled software it produces. Bryan Hundven does most of the heavy lifting on this project by himself, and as far as I know, he's paid nothing for it. You're not going to get a bug bounty program here either.

Heck, it's doubtful even a project as large as the Linux Kernel would be able to afford an ongoing bug bounty program. They're trying with the Linux Foundation and the Core Infrastructure program, but how many years before did it have none of that?

Essentially, these programs only work for commercially-backed software, which is only a small sliver of open source software.

[1] [https://github.com/crosstool-ng/crosstool- ng](https://github.com/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng)

<comment><USER16> But I am specifically talking about companies with closed source apps and services open sourcing them, not tools that are already open. Examples are Uber, AirBnB, and Groupon, not gpg or OpenSSL.

<comment><USER18> > But I am specifically talking about companies with closed source apps and > services open sourcing them

Ah, I see. I misunderstood. Yes, I think we are in agreement then, although I have my doubts most companies want their "secret sauce" or code-indiscretions flapping in the wild.

<comment><USER16> I think it depends. The exact PageRank algorithm, or the process that Uber uses to route drivers: probably not. The UI to any of that: why not? I think there is very little secret sauce out there and most of the stuff is just bog standard code that would do no harm being in the open.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't agree more.

I think the largest hurdle for getting more stuff open sourced is two-fold.

1) A large amount of software is sub-par, and likely commits many atrocities including having business logic in the UI.

2) Companies are afraid they'll be embarrassed by their code, and would rather not take the risk of being branded as a company that doesn't do things right.

For number 1, there are potential solutions by hiring better engineers etc... but number 2 is always a (perceived) risk, even if their codebase is "perfect".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is very exciting. There simply aren't a lot of open source "full scale" Android apps. Most of what you find are quick sample apps which simply don't show the complexity inherent in most professional apps. The largest other ones I'm aware of are Github, Google I/O, and some of the AOSP apps.

</comment><comment><USER20> The iOS app looks like a treasure trove, I can't wait to download it and dissect it. It'll be interesting to see how they integrated playgrounds into their development cycle.

I just wish they had upgraded to Swift 3.0

</comment><comment><USER21> This is great. I hope they also provided good documentation / commenting. This can be a fantastic learning tool for programmers at all stages.

Kudos to kickstarter.

</comment><comment><USER22> iOS Project does not build - Xcode 8.2... There is a guard statement with no else clause, that's the first error I got. I didn't bother looking further because... a guard without an else could never compile, so what am I looking at?

I'm getting flashbacks from my last workplace where people merged in code that didn't compile and then went 'oh really? let me fix that real quick'...

Code wouldn't compile in master but the codebase... everything had to be clever. We can't just have a model, a network request to fetch/update for it, a view controller and view cells. A few storyboards and of course no bloody tests - it's a phone app.

No, we need protocols everywhere we can fit them, third party libraries - <USER2> that haven't been out a few years (Reactive whatever), a third party library to make a basic GET request (Alamofire looking at you), a CSS styling library, a JSON to Model library, list goes on.

What we don't need is folder structure that lets you know this is the initial VC, the two folders beneath it are the 2 possible places you can go, the sub- folders in there are the places you can go from that VC and on and on.

Let's just dump all VCs in one folder, all cells in another. Nevermind that in 90% of the cases, that one cell is only ever used in that one tableview - <USER3> need to group those together.

I don't know - maybe it's just me - I'd rather I download a zip, open the project, click that triangle and it runs - this thing makes me jump through hoops, and it still doesn't work... And nothing makes sense, unless you go learn reactive cocoa - based on the amount of files/code, a clear waste of time.

<comment><USER23> > Download the Xcode 7.3.1 release.

The app requires a different version.

[https://github.com/kickstarter/ios- oss/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/kickstarter/ios- oss/blob/master/README.md)

I concede. There are issues getting the dev environment configured.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's the purpose of Android's ApplicationGraph interface?

[https://github.com/kickstarter/android- oss/blob/888a37468358...](https://github.com/kickstarter/android- oss/blob/888a3746835835016fc1a1bb32d8e2a90b8bffce/app/src/main/java/com/kickstarter/ApplicationGraph.java)

<comment><USER24> Looks like they're using Dagger2 ([https://google.github.io/dagger/](https://google.github.io/dagger/)) for dependency injection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good! I try to avoid closed applications on my mobile devices if possible.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if they've considered using something like React Native or Xamarin so they can share some of that functional-style code between the two platforms.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a really great example of how to do it right when it comes to Swift, MVVM, Reactive Cocoa, Testing, CI etc. Lovely code and architecture!

</comment><comment><USER28> This is awesome! Open source production apps are always useful.

</comment><comment><USER29> Does this mean we can clone it now or does the license prohibit that?

</comment><comment><USER30> Open sourcing a client is pretty useless when the bulk of the logic happens inside a company's server somewhere.</comment>


The worst acquisition from the first dotcom boom – Blue Mountain Arts - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/26/business/excite-home-to-acquire-bluemountain.html <comment><USER2> Further context:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/10/business/e-commerce- report...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/10/business/e-commerce-report- possible-sale-blue-mountain-arts-could-lead-end-free- online.html?pagewanted=all)

"American Greetings said Thursday that it has acquired Blue Mountain Arts, the struggling online greeting division of Excite@Home, for $35 million in cash"

[http://www.cnet.com/news/american-greetings-buys-excite- unit...](http://www.cnet.com/news/american-greetings-buys-excite-unit/)

<comment><AUTHOR> oh yeah, I forgot how it imploded so soon after the acquisition. I knew it stuck out in my head as the worst acquisition for a reason other than the price paid, especially the cash part - $350M in cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please don't editorialize the titles of stories you submit here. If you want to comment on a story, the way to do so is by posting one to the thread; that way you're on a level playing field with everyone else.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> good point, thanks for the clarification</comment></comment>


7 Lessons from the Zantaz Firesale (Sold for $375m, Founders Got Nothing) - <AUTHOR> http://www.foundread.com/view/7-lessons-from short version: company sells for $375M, founders got zilch.  Check the details in the link. <comment><USER2> Stay away from comVentures and Roland! They screwed FilmLoop and Nishan Systems too! Here's some more info:

[http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/13/filmloops-demise-the- reput...](http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/13/filmloops-demise-the-reputation- of-vcs-and-how-you-can-help/)

<http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=43685>

One commenter in this article on Zantaz offers a list of VCs to avoid:

[http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and- th...](http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-the- unfortunate-back-story/)

"ComVentures/Roland van der Meer, Crescendo/Spreng, Worldview/Orsak and Wei have similar operating approaches as reflected in the cases of Zantaz, Nishan, Force 10 and other Worldview deals."

Fellow entrepreneurs, beware! Wolves are out there. In today's age, it's easy to vett these VCs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, it's better to get none of something big than a big part of nothing, right? Wait a second...

</comment><comment><USER4> In a linked article, it was reported that one of the founders got 650k, which is still nothing compared to the 375M. It really makes you look at the reputations of the VCs.

"The reportedly terminally ill founder, William Bankert, will end up with only $650,000 or so from the sale." [http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and- th...](http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-the- unfortunate-back-story/)

<comment><USER5> I checked who their VCs were, made quite a discovery.

[http://www.generalatlantic.com/usa/news/newsarticle.asp?id=1...](http://www.generalatlantic.com/usa/news/newsarticle.asp?id=1435)

Name familiar to anyone? General Atlantic were Ars Digita's VCs:

<http://www.waxy.org/random/arsdigita/>

<comment><USER6> general atlantic are a bunch of buffoons, for sure. of course what philip never mentions is that he personally did the deal with GA because they were offering the most money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 375 million isn't a firesale; especially when you're dealing with "email archiving" which sure sounds like a wrapper around the "cp" command.

<comment><USER2> Just a "cp" command?! Heh... do you realize that some of the most successful startups in the recent history have been reimplmentation of various UNIX commands? Think about it for a second...

<comment><USER8> napster?

<comment><USER2> Who re-implemented rsync? Who re-implemented finger? What about talk?

When you start looking, you'll realize that blogger, mozy, twitter, GTalk etc. etc. are nothing more than versions of UNIX command line programs :)

They say that a successful startup will implement and modernize one of the UNIX command line programs. I couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER9> You know that wasn't meant to be taken seriously...

<comment><USER10> I would have just pointed out that Napster was released in 1999. In the technology world that's ancient times.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Sales Take a Hit in States With Online Tax  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-22/amazon-sales-take-a-hit-in-states-with-online-tax.html

<comment><USER2> I'll gladly pay an additional 6-10% to keep avoiding Wal-mart or Target or even Home Depot. There are people like me who just really hate having to suit up and go shopping. I don't like the traffic, I don't like getting ripped off, and I don't find in-store shopping a fun or magical experience like some do.

I can pull up Amazon and read ratings/reviews, see what kind of problems people ran into with products, and make a reasonably informed decision with my money.

In a big box store, I feel like I'm taking more of a chance unless I stop, scan the barcode, read through reviews. Meanwhile, I look like a silly guy who can't make up his mind.

Yes, I enjoy obsessively comparing reviews/ratings for potential purchases. Even the really cheap/insignificant ones...

<comment><USER3> If you walk into Bestbuy and show them the item you intend to purchase from Amazon, they'll match the price. With taxes, and assuming you don't have to drive out of your way, this can be more convenient than Amazon. If you need something overnight, it's actually cheaper than Amazon.

<comment><USER4> Depending on your work or living situation, that might not be more convenient. I'm in SF with no car, and I wouldn't even consider going to Best Buy.

<comment><USER5> I've often had the problem of not being home during the day, and post offices closing early, so hitting a store would be easier for me in some cases.

Of course if the price is right...

<comment><USER6> In the London - no idea about elsewhere - Amazon offers drop-off at a large number of local convenience stores. Usually I have stuff dropped off at the office, but if it's something big I get it delivered to a convenience store 2-3 minutes walk from my house which is also open late.

<comment><USER7> I believe that's available in the US now as "Amazon Lockers"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read the book "The Everything Store". There are large chunk of chapter devoted to how Bezos fought against paying tax. Originally, the argument was that online retailers don't use facilities provided by states so they are not obliged to pay any taxes to states. If I remember correctly, this follows almost directly from constitution. But then states like New York found a loophole which basically says if you have any affiliates in the state then you are physically in that state and so you are obliged to pay taxes. This thing is very messy because some regions not only have state tax but even district and city taxes. So calculating them is very complex task.

When I thought about the whole situation, it became apparent constitution has a bug here. The sales tax is not supposed to be levied because the state is providing some service to the business. It is levied because that's how states want to distribute the burden of taxes on two components: What you earn and what you spend. This way you can target most of the money flow that happens in the state even for edge cases where a person don't have regular income but spends a lot out of his or her inheritance.

So summary here is that online retailers got lucky from this bug in constitution. It was extremely unfair to brick-and-mortar guys who not only have to spend lot of capital but also pay full taxes losing their competitive edge even faster.

Note: Above are just observations and logical arguments. Personally I don't have lot of respect for current tax system.

<comment><USER9> It's bullshit anyway. If the state had no infrastructure essential to Amazon, that person couldn't get online, the package couldn't be delivered to them by truck, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The push to tax Amazon is so online and brick-and-mortars are treated equally in a tax sense. Yet the states that have enacted taxes on Amazon, do not collect taxes unanimously from all businesses selling online within their borders. It seems to me that states need to find a new method to treat all online sales equally as well, and not separate Amazon into its own tax bracket. Is each company that faces a legislature going to have to fight for its tax rate separately and work their won deals? This is ambiguous to buyers and hurts smaller businesses that don't have the legal funds or ability to negotiate.

<comment><USER11> The problem is taxes are incredibly complicated. There are companies that do "tax as a service"[1].

Governments should pass tax laws in some sort of industry standard tax rules specification[2]. This way, companies and the open source world can write rules engines to process taxes and online stores can pick among the competitors, not having to worry about the complexities themselves. Costs are reduced, competition increased, and consumers win.

[1] [http://www.avalara.com/](http://www.avalara.com/)

[2] this might also make taxes simpler. If legislators can't encode (compile) it, they can't legislate it!

<comment><USER12> That's basically the Marketplace Fairness Act, which is the most likely "internet sales tax" bill to pass in the near future.

[http://www.marketplacefairness.org/](http://www.marketplacefairness.org/)

It requires each state that wants to collect from foreign sellers to provide a uniform state-wide sales tax policy, a single organization in each state to handle registrations/filings/audits, and free tax compliance software. It also builds a mechanism to certify companies (like Avalara) to take care of internet sales tax for you, and relieves businesses of liability for mistakes if they use one of these companies to compute/file their taxes.

<comment><USER13> For true fairness there needs to be a single organization nationally that can collect and process the tax. 50 different filings is an unduly onerous and inefficient hurdle for setting up shop.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunetly the distrubuted nature of the political system acts aainst this its the same with emplyment having 53 diferent sets of employment laws is very ineficient.

From an outsiders perspective what the USA needs is a proper reform of the constitution and remove a lot of thinkgs from the perview of the individual states.

A maximum age for senators, congessmen and judges would also be a good thing.

<comment><USER15> Short term limits and a required popular vote to adjust congressional pay would be a better idea that an upper age limit.

<comment><USER16> Most higher-level politicians are independently wealthy. Lowering congressional pay would just serve to further weed out non-super-affluent candidates. I guess it depends on how you like your politics, so I won't pass judgement either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, Amazon has a lot to offer even beyond "No Tax". And I say this as a Canadian who has had to pay taxes and duties on amazon orders since day 1.

People may gripe about it for a bit... but amazon is still the best way to shop, and also has the best selection and prices.

<comment><USER18> I agree that Amazon is often the most convenient option. But their prices simply aren't the best any more (at least for things other than books). Try a price comparison next time and see if you agree! (Another change is that Google Shopping has improved a lot over the last few years, so price comparison is less painful as well.)

One thing Amazon still does best: their deliveries arrive on time, and seem a lot less likely to get stuck in UPS limbo.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, even in Japan, they are not the cheapest option anymore, there are usually smaller retailers for specific items that get you better deals, but think about the following cost: \- cost to register on a different website \- cost to "trust" a minor player you have never used before \- cost of time lost because of delay in delivery \- cost of how they handle returns

Most of the time, I think a few seconds about the difference in price between amazon and that minor retailer, and unless the difference is huge (which is usually not the case), I'll go for Amazon. Even when I had issues with what I got from Amazon they sent me the replacement item BEFORE I even send back the defectuous item. Who else does that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> _The biggest sales uptick -- 61 percent for big-ticket items -- went to merchants that use Amazon Marketplace...That means Amazon still indirectly benefits, since it collects a fee from merchants on its marketplace._

Not sure why they buried this at the end of the article. Amazon can still attract price-conscious shoppers by funneling them to marketplace sellers that don't collect sales tax, and can now invest in more fulfillment centers and other initiatives that require nexus (Amazon Fresh, etc.)

<comment><USER18> This does seem the most important conclusion. What's likely happening is Amazon is no longer showing themselves as the top seller in some cases. Consumers are still buying on Amazon, but from a different seller, who does not charge sales tax.

What would be impressive is if Amazon made an (algorithmic) judgment call, and showed price-sensitive shoppers that would otherwise go elsewhere the cheaper seller, and shoppers that would tolerate the tax the (presumably higher profit) Amazon offering.

<comment><USER21> They already do that with fulfillment by amazon. There is a certain price difference for which Amazon will show you that fulfilled product vs a cheaper marketplace offer with slower fulfillment/ shipping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the report:

 _Our data consist of daily transactions for 2,807,476 households from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013, and include both banking (i.e., checking, savings, and debit card) and credit card transactions. We observe the date, amount, and description of each transaction._

I'm a little disturbed that they had access to complete transaction information for roughly 2% of American households. Is it common practice for banks to share this data? Surely date + amount + description is personally identifiable in many situations.

<comment><USER22> Not to defend the banks, but in what situation could date/amount/description become personally identifiable? I guess it sort of depends on how descriptive the description field is, but if it just lists the product(s) then I don't really know how you'd ever be able to verifiably match it with a name.

<comment><USER23> An '08 paper from Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov at the University of Texas at Austin showed that, in a large dataset, the combination of a large number of transactions could be used to de-anonymize individuals.

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Amazon supports federal legislation that would explicitly let states require > tax collections by all online retailers above a certain size.

This would give Amazon a huge competitive advantage (given their existing infrastructure). Of course they support this.

<comment><USER24> They get hit with flack coming or going. If they're against online taxes, then they're accused of not doing their fair share to support government coffers, or they're accused of getting an unfair competitive advantage (per offline retailers).

It's similar to Walmart's minimum wage support. If Walmart were against minimum wage increases, their opponents would lambast them for it. If they're in favor of it, they get accused of only being in favor of it because they know they can more easily afford it compared to smaller retailers.

<comment><USER11> You're right, I said this accusingly and that's unproductive. I think legislation like this should exist. I don't think it's right to ignore the advantage (assuming we accept they have one here) and the legislation should take it into account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if the difference is really about the competitive advantage per se. The 10% difference is about the same as the difference in price with tax. It sounds like people are actually spending about the same amount, but now part of that budget is going to tax rather than actually being spent on goods.

</comment><comment><USER26> They started collecting tax in NC in Feb and I'll be honest, I've bought less since then. Last year when I needed something I went to amazon first and if it was there ordered it. Now I shop around.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a good thing. It creates an enormous enforcement efficiency as now states can go after amazon (which they won't have to) and not individual tax dodgers. Not having to charge sales tax also creates an unfair business advantage against local stores.

</comment><comment><USER28> A straightforward solution would be for the US to have a uniform online sales tax, distributed to the state of the shipping address.

Is this intractable?

<comment><USER29> All it would take is an Act of Congress, but it's political. Birmingham, Alabama has a sales tax of 10%. New Hampshire has no sales tax. How do you set the rate nationally without making enemies?

<comment><USER18> I suspect if you tried to do it federally it would be a violation of States' rights and thus unconstitutional.

<comment><USER25> There's always a way around that. Most likely you'd just do it like many other federal carrots — "This tax is levied on all online purchases and will be distributed to the state of the recipient provided that state does not impose any additional taxes on the purchase." You're not depriving the states of their right to tax the purchases, but it will be onerous to their residents if they don't go along with the federal plan.

<comment><USER30> Clever but why should this sales tax go to the state I live in instead of say the community where the item was shipped from? It's really more of a duty or use tax in such a case, like in the old days where I would order something from a catalog not in the state I live in, I was supposed to pay a use tax to this state of the difference between the sales tax here and what I might have paid in taxes when ordering when I did my state income taxes. They really should not call it a sales tax, it potentially gets collected by a state that has nothing to do with the sale at all and the cities and states that had to do with it did not collect any of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm curious, in states that have this, how does it work? Is it all online sellers that did not previously collect sales tax or just a few big ones like amazon? Does it show-up on your shopping cart directly or do you have to do forms quarterly say?

<comment><USER31> Amazon currently collects taxes if they (or the seller) has a physical presence in your state. Apple does the same thing. In my state, I'm required to pay taxes on every online purchase for which taxes have not already been charged to me.

I keep all my receipts for the year and split them between tax paid and not. I pay taxes on all of the online purchases I make during the year. Most people I know, even in states that require collection of taxes for online purchases, don't claim any at the end of the year. Given that out of state companies are under no compulsion to report purchases to state governments, there simply isn't a whole lot of way for states to know whether the information is accurate except through state tax agency audits.

<comment><USER30> Thanks for the nice explanation. The state I live in requires to pay a use tax either quarterly or as part of income taxes but for a couple of years at least has allowed you to use a table graduated based on income instead of keeping records.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Amazon is awesome.</comment>


Ask HN: Best way for a self-taught programmer to have code reviewed? - <AUTHOR> I've been self teaching for about eight months now and can hack together working projects, but I'm sure my code is an absolute mess. Does anyone know of good resources (free or paid) for a more experienced developer to give feedback on one's code? <comment><USER2> [http://codereview.stackexchange.com/](http://codereview.stackexchange.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea. You can post it online and surely you can get tons of criticism ;)</comment>


Show HN: Pinch.js – Desktop like zooming in mobile browser - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fugyk/pinchjs/

<comment><USER2> Do you have an actual example page anywhere that uses this? I'm curious to see what it's like beyond the gifs you have.

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://jsbin.com/cudeguyibu](http://jsbin.com/cudeguyibu)</comment></comment>


Lisp on TV (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/paip-tv.html

<comment><USER2> I heard about this before. I think it's cool that Peter Norvig puts it in his CV: "1998 Television writer: Code written by me for my first textbook was shown on the TV show The Net on 10 Oct. 1998. I was uncredited for this work" (<http://www.norvig.com/resume.html>)</comment>


BlackBerry accuses Snapchat of infringing its messaging patents - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/4/17196840/blackberry-snapchat-patent-infringement-messaging-app <comment><USER2> Is this Blackberry's new strategy? Become the next massive patent troll?</comment>


A superconducting shield for astronauts - <AUTHOR> http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/08/superconducting-shield-astronauts <comment><USER2> _" Captain, magnetic shields at 50%! We've got to pull back."_ \-- some future space traveler.

I remember some interesting discussions about magnetic shields in the NASA technical journal, but there were issues with things like electronics inside the shield and conductive cabling going through it to sensors outside of it. Even in the more detailed site ([http://www.sr2s.eu/2013-08-01-15-34-14](http://www.sr2s.eu/2013-08-01-15-34-14)) I didn't see a lot of info on those sorts of "known" issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> This appears to be merely a mag-sail, but used as a radiation shield.

It seems to be in every way inferior to the m2p2 concept, which uses a mini- magnetosphere (instead of just a magnetic field) for the same purpose [1]. The advantage being that we could build and field such systems using existing technology at reasonable cost.

1: [http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/M2P2/rad.shielding....](http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/space/M2P2/rad.shielding.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just out of curiosity, I wonder if it would be possible to embed the superconducting magnets in a spaceship's liquid hydrogen tank. This would eliminate the need for "exotic" high temperature superconductors.

<comment><USER5> A long-range spacecraft would probably not have LH2 on board. It evaporates quite quickly unless you want to install cryo cooling systems and the power to run them.

<comment><USER4> Boil-off is a bigger problem with LH2 than with liquid oxygen or liquid methane. However, I'm under the impression that it's a tractable problem out to months or maybe even years. Apparently the Spitzer Space Telescope maintained a supply of liquid helium for about five years [1][2].

A lot of Mars manned-mission proposals (starting with Zubrin's Mars Direct plan) depend on the use of a Sabatier reaction which would convert hydrogen brought from Earth into Methane and Oxygen. So the experts must think they can at least minimize boil-off over at least 8 or 9 months. [3]

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

[2] [http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/436-ssc2009-12-NASA-s- Sp...](http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/436-ssc2009-12-NASA-s-Spitzer- Begins-Warm-Mission)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In- situ_resource_utilization#M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In- situ_resource_utilization#Mars)

<comment><USER5> Mars Direct uses suspiciously low boil-off rates for LH2. Certainly well past current state of the art. Best achievable (not flown, but could be) is 0.1%/day, and Mars Direct wants 0.1%/month. You don't lose a lot at 0.1%/day, but it adds up.

<comment><USER4> At 0.1% per day, I get 30% boil-off in 1 year (0.999 ^ 365 ==> 0.694), which is expensive but probably still a net win. I don't think boil-off is a problem once you're on Mars because you can probably just use the hydrogen gas as feedstock into the Sabatier process.

Which is not to say that Mars Direct isn't overly optimistic, possibly about many other things as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now, if you would please strip your spacestation of all metalls and arrange for propulsion to counter the small drag of earths magnetosphere upon the system...

Or are the magnetic fields generated and the corresponding heat from induced eddys not so strong? The sceptic in me wants to know more before feeling optimistic..

Supraconducting magnets allready exist in Magnetic Resonance Tomography and the idea of a cookoff in space after a micro asteroid impact...

</comment><comment><USER7> Is power consumption a problem here? It seems like power production on a space craft would be quite limited (solar, plutonium?) and this thing would consume a lot of it. Is the idea that this would always be on or only on in an emergency? Also, is interference w/ electronics on the craft a problem?

<comment><USER5> It's easier to supply power than mass in space, and mass shielding is the alternative.

Solar is problematic on Earth but is actually quite good in space. Lots of reliable energy right there, especially if you're not in Earth orbit (where the shadow occasionally gets you).

<comment><USER8> If you're in deep space then you're not near any particular star. That's going to reduce the available starlight by several orders of magnitude, right?

<comment><USER5> When people designing real spaceships say "deep space" they mean "beyond Earth orbit", but usually not past Mars.

In sci-fi deep space, yes, you'd have next to no solar power. (In fact, it's minimally useful in the solar system past Jupiter.) But if you can get there at all, you're probably not worried about that.

<comment><USER8> Makes sense, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it possible to make a magnetic configuration that will repel all charged particles?

Won't particles moving in the right direction be attracted and you'll irradiate everyone inside when they slam into the shield, with some extra energy from it?

<comment><USER10> The nice thing about magnetic fields is that _all_ charged particles are deflected: the positive ones bend one way, and the negative ones bend the other.

In a lot of situations, the particles will actually spin along helical paths whose net motion is _along_ the magnetic field lines. In the case of Earth, that means that the charged particles eventually make their way to one or the other pole... and as the field lines descend into the atmosphere, those particles create auroras. Neat stuff!

<comment><USER11> That's why the comment you've replied to says "particles with the right direction", not "particles with the right charge".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how much cooling superconductors need in space.

Basically, how warm is the interior of a satellite with a high albedo (gold foil?) in the inner solar system?

<comment><USER13> Thermal management in space is a big issue. The ISS has big radiators on the long truss, and lots of plumbing for cooling.

For a superconducting magnetic shield, it depends how much power is used to maintain it. MgB2 supports high currents compared to cuprates, so I guess once it's turned on it doesn't need much?</comment></comment>


Laboratory mice completely cured of HIV through Tre-Recombinase - <AUTHOR> http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1003587

<comment><USER2> The original article title here is "Highly Significant Antiviral Activity of HIV-1 LTR-Specific Tre-Recombinase in Humanized Mice," which is admittedly too long for the Hacker News title limit of eighty characters. I might suggest a more accurate submission title for the article could be made out of the summary sentence in the abstract, "The presented data suggest that Tre- recombinase might become a valuable component of a future therapy that aims at virus eradication." So perhaps a submission title of "Tre-recombinase might become a valuable future therapy for HIV" sums up the suggestion made by this preliminary research finding. As usual, I recommend reading LISP hacker and Google director of research Peter Norvig's online essay "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation"

[http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html](http://norvig.com/experiment- design.html)

whenever we discuss preliminary research findings here on Hacker News. This result may not be replicated--many, many preliminary research findings are not. And this result in a mouse model may not translate into a safe and effective treatment in human medicine. But as usual I am glad that scientists all around the world are engaged in fundamental research in the hope of better understanding nature.

</comment><comment><USER3> The HIV problem in humanized mice is such a difficult problem. Even if we overcome the technical challenges of mass-producing tiny condoms, and the logistical challenges of distributing them, mice simply do not use them. The cultural and educational challenges are too great.

<comment><USER4> Maybe if humanized mice practised abstinence until mice marriage they wouldn't get HIV in the first place? Then we wouldn't be spending billions of dollars trying to find them a cure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Read the entire thing, where does it say in any word or in medical terms that they were "completely cured".

All I can see is hints to great progress in the field.

Exceprts:

"Clearly, it is not expected that HIV-1 can be eradicated by Tre activity alone."

"Tre-recombinase technology can be a valuable component of such a multi-tiered strategy to treat HIV-infected patients."

</comment><comment><USER6> That is certainly an interesting approach to the problem. If I read this correctly "However, expressing an engineered HIV-1 long terminal repeat (LTR) site-specific recombinase (Tre), shown to excise integrated proviral DNA in vitro," they have expressed an RNA which targets _and replaces_ the viral DNA in the cells with a non-HIV transcription. That reads a lot like some of the more current gene therapy papers read, with permanent modification of cells rather than simply killing target cells.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a step forward, but treatment is still a long way off:

"Independently of the selected gene therapy strategy, and prior to its potential use in HIV-infected patients, vector technology has to be developed that allows safe and efficient gene transfer followed by reliable transgene expression in target cells"

Gene therapy isn't possible yet because we still can't control where the transgenes get inserted into the human genome. There's the risk of disrupting oncogenes/oncosuppressors, and the probability of getting cancer would be high.

</comment><comment><USER8> Might this mean that we can resume the sexual revolution?</comment>


In defence of not invented here syndrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-invented-here-syndrome/ <comment><USER2> This needs a date (2001). I was confused for a while why I wasn't seeing this show up in my RSS reader until I checked the date</comment>


The Debut of the Hacker League - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/10/03/the-winners-from-hacknys-biggest-hackathon-ever-and-the-debut-of-the-hacker-league/

<comment><USER2> That LoCreep app sounds horrible. Often the "creeps" are just socially awkward guys, and the last thing they need or deserve is public humiliation. Didn't we just go over this with the MTG champion?

Otherwise, this sounds like a great event.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've used <http://hackatopia.com/> before when I've been up to Chicago for hackathons. I like that Hacker League is more centered on each developer and the projects they've built.

I'd be interested to see if this can get any traction beyond the hackNY events.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Hacker League guys are awesome. They pushed beta fixes to the system live as the hackathon was ongoing. The idea of saving/capturing these weekend hacks is a good one. The hackathon itself was a ton of fun. Here is a pic of me when I fell asleep coding at 4am. <http://bit.ly/oVbyuf></comment>


Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-microsoft-wanted-linkedin <comment><USER2> tl;dr - For rich and detailed user and companies data, and user base.</comment>


Pipe Viewer - <AUTHOR> http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198572>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2567186>

</comment><comment><USER3> It's also great that pv supports rate limiting, so you can choose if you want to saturate your network when you use it with netcat.

<comment><USER4> Somewhat related, trickle is a good user-space bandwidth shaper if you aren't sending data over a pipe: <http://monkey.org/~marius/pages/?page=trickle>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's amazingly useful to have realtime throughput rates

tail -f query.log | pv -tri 1 > /dev/null

</comment><comment><USER6> Note, a plain dd will report progress on stderr if sent a SIGUSR1. That can sometimes be enough to avoid the overhead of pv(1) and sending huge amounts of data through another pipe.

<comment><USER7> About the pv overhead, I sent a note to the pv author saying that on Linux at least the transfer function could take advantage of the splice system call. Splice "copies" data from one file descriptor to another file descriptor, avoiding having to copy the data from the kernel to userspace and back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does it know the progress / ETA?

I was under the assumption that pipes do not know how much total data is on its way?

<comment><USER9> If you give it a file, or specify the amount on the commandline it knows, otherwise it doesn't

<comment><USER10> Right. I usually use pv in place of 'cat' at the start of a long set of piped commands. Anywhere you could use 'cat' you can use pv. If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also use multiple 'pv' commands at a time too.

<comment><USER11> > If I'm not mistaken, I think you can also use multiple 'pv' commands at a > time too.

I use multiple pv instances to track compression/decompression rates, and overall progress, for tarballs. Using the "-c" code for console codes keeps the instances from stomping over each other's output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I'm dealing with [compressed] files on disk or across a network, what's the practical overhead of pv? A few extra percent CPU, or some material decrease in through put?

<comment><USER13> very very little, it's just doing read(), counting the bytes, then write(), with some screen output every few seconds.

(hell it could even use splice() and never even see the bytes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> love pv, mostly use it for percentage bar on db restores:

pv -f *.sql.gz | zcat | mysql db_instance_name

</comment><comment><USER15> Nifty command. Been using this for a month or so. One use case is measuring if a downstream process can consume data as fast the previous process is producing it (by alternating second process with /dev/null or some such).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Filed under "How did I not know this?!", with credit to @hmason on Twitter.

<comment><USER16> It's been here before:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3626020>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198572>

I'm sure there were older stories too. IIRC I saw it on HN longer than 6 months ago, but I couldn't find that submission in a cursory search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nice - that'll spice up my rather boring svnadmin dump sessions - thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER18> yes | pv > /dev/null

<comment><USER19>
      pv /dev/zero > /dev/null

<comment><USER18> awesome, i was actually wondering if there was a "yes-esque" (yesque?) /dev/ file.

my throughput from yes is 49MB/s whereas from /dev/zero it's 12GB/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Found out about pv ~year ago when working with large log files. Very useful. I also like it for testing how quickly a script can consume data.</comment>