Privatizing Poverty - <AUTHOR> https://thebaffler.com/salvos/privatizing-poverty-phillips-fein <comment><USER2> It should be like in Finland where fines are tied to your income. Poor people get small fines, rich people get big fines.

That is the most logical as a fine is supoosed to be a deterrent and it does not deter if you are super rich. It is also supposed to be a fairly mild punishment so if it is always so high that you can't pay but have to go to prison then you are suddenly handing out very severe punishment for minor infractions.

<comment><USER3> There is actually a constitutional right to be free of "cruel and unusual punishment" in the U.S. Judges just have to start ruling that $250 is cruel when someone is in poverty.

There is also a right to a "fair and speedy trial". Judges just have to start ruling that sitting in county jail for six months waiting for trial is unconstitutional.

<comment><USER4> SCOTUS has already ruled that the death penalty is not cruel and unusual punishment - more specifically, that since it is not unusual, it is not a Constitutional violation despite where you feel it falls on the cruelty spectrum. A common pleas or even circuit court judge can't simply say "lol whatever I'm going to ignore that." Only SCOTUS can reverse its position on the Constitutionality of the death penalty.

<comment><USER5> SCOTUS has ruled that the death penalty _is_ cruel and unusual punishment in many circumstances.

For example, in 1980 they ruled that it could only be applied only if it involves a precise and aggravating factor[0].

Louisiana had a law that made the rape of a child punishable by death and SCOTUS overturned that law in 2008[1].

SCOTUS has consistent narrowed the crimes punishable by death in the past 50 years using the Eighth Amendment as a justification.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States#Supreme_Court_narrows_capital_offenses)

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

<comment><USER6> Just look at the number of executions of people with mental handicaps and tell me the current justice system is capable of acting in a just fashion. [https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/list-defendants-mental- retardat...](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/list-defendants-mental-retardation- executed-united-states)

<comment><USER7> The parent has not made such a claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awareness of this issue, the criminalization of poverty, is growing in America. For example, Equal Justice Under Law ([https://equaljusticeunderlaw.org](https://equaljusticeunderlaw.org)) is focused solely on this problem, and has won _all_ of the 18 cases it has tried so far on behalf of victims of wealth-based discrimination.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone who went through the US visa process, even for the basic visitor visa B1/2, got a taste of this. One needs to set up the appointment, appointment system is handled by the subcontractor, the contractor charges you for setting up the appointment. If someone told me I have to pay for queueing in front of the embassy on the day of the appointment I wouldn't be able to say whether it's some fraudsters, or a policy of US embassy. Yeah yeah, I know - no one is entitled to visit the glorious US of A. I don't pity Americans having hardships over here in EU, because no pity is given in reciprocal situation.

<comment><USER10> If the costs are unreasonable, it's one thing, but I don't see a problem with paying administrative costs to get a visa.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > In one case, a homeless man in Sacramento, California, living under a bridge > received 190 citations from police (almost all related to sleeping outside > and camping) and wound up being assessed $104,000 in unpayable fines. When > he died of cancer in 2016, there were thirty-seven warrants out for his > arrest. Whose definition of public safety does any of this serve?

On the flip side, the government is powerless to address chronic mental health issues without a paper trail. We all know that poverty and mental health issues are deeply entwined. The government can't just compel mental health care on a whim. They need evidence. Evidence like trespassing citations, public intoxication arrests, and citations for defacating in public. Evidence like 911 calls when a senile resident continues to forget to turn off the oven.

<comment><USER11> > _On the flip side, the government is powerless to address chronic mental > health issues without a paper trail. We all know that poverty and mental > health issues are deeply entwined._

Only in the absence of a civilized public welfare system.

<comment><USER3> I'm arguing for one of those, actually. But even though I'd like to see more resources focused on these problems, we can't just spend our way into good mental health care. When people are in danger or harming others, care and treatment sometimes _has_ to be compelled. People have a right to their day in court, so some amount of evidence _has_ to be gathered so judges can objectively rule on the relevant questions.

<comment><USER12> I don't think camping and sleeping under bridges are dangerous or harming others. I'm confused how this example shows your point, since your point is about dangerous people, and I'm not sure if people who sleep under bridges are necessarily dangerous.

<comment><USER13> Camping and sleeping under bridges harms _everyone_ because of all the waste that ends up in watersheds. I've helped out with cleaning up riverbanks a couple times after illegal encampments were removed. Those places were like disaster areas and toxic waste dumps.

<comment><USER14> There's no trash removal for these people, and they're shut out of all public bathrooms. What do we really expect?

i-5 in Seattle is absolutely trashed from Northgate to Downtown because Jenny Durkan and previous mayors have raided homeless encampments out of view, away from other homes, spending millions of dollars to displace them instead of just giving them garbage cans and a few porta potties. They end up on i5 and in tent camps downtown and it looks like a dump.

<comment><USER13> I'm not familiar with the situation in Seattle, but in areas where homeless shelters have open beds then I really expect people to use them instead of wrecking ecologically sensitive areas. And in the cleanups I helped with, there were multiple public garbage cans within a couple blocks.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.npr.org/2012/12/06/166666265/why-some- homeless-c...](https://www.npr.org/2012/12/06/166666265/why-some-homeless- choose-the-streets-over-shelters)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >In what might seem a clear violation of the right to a public defender, forty-three states bill clients for their lawyers—in South Dakota, the charge is $92 an hour. Even if found innocent, clients still have to pay—and not having the money is itself breaking the law.

There is zero chance this survives 4th Amendment scrutiny at the Supreme Court

<comment><USER16> which has 0 chance of happening because they can't even afford a trial lawyer

<comment><USER17> And the SC is looking like it will be stacked with "Originalists" before too much longer.

<comment> Mary-Jane How is that relevant?

<comment><USER18> People are afraid of rightwing ideologues on the Supreme Court because it means that certain cases might be reasoned from a point of view that is based less on sound legal philosophy and more on personal beliefs from the 1800s.

<comment><USER19> There is a proper mechanism for revising the constitution: constitutional amendment. If you want to be angry at someone for what the constitution says, then be angry at the legislators who have neglected their duty to update it.

<comment><USER18> I mean, I'm angry at a lot of people, legislators included. There's plenty of anger to around..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. While I live in the UK, I had never really thought about the link between wealth and privacy, and the potential for the state to discriminate in this way.

A thought-provoking read. Thanks for sharing

<comment><USER21> I live in the UK too and every day I am grateful we don't have the absolutely idiotic concept of paid bail - the police can only hold you for 48 hours without charging you with a crime, and then you _have_ to be tried within 51 days or released on unconditional bail, so idiotic situation like the one here where someone in the article was held for 3 years without a trial can't happen.

But yes, having read the article it just reinforces the impression I have of USA - that it's the "land of the free _but only if you have money_ "

<comment><USER22> I'm glad too, but some of your numbers are a bit off;

[https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights/how-long-you-can- be-...](https://www.gov.uk/arrested-your-rights/how-long-you-can-be-held-in- custody)

Also its worth noting our anti-terror laws seem to allow indefinite detention without charge. And ant-immigration laws allow for long (months even years) detention of migrants, without even suspicion of a crime.

<comment><USER23> According to your link, the longest you can be held without charge is 14 days under the terrorism act.

The longest ever proposed was 90 days (proposed in 2006), and the longest implemented was 28 days (between 2006 - 2011).

[https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human- rights/counterin...](https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human- rights/countering-terrorism/extended-pre-charge-detention)

<comment><USER22> Terrorism Act 2000 (which was partially ruled unlawful by the House of Lords for what its worth) allows for theoretically infinite extensions to the detention period with only a police superintendent needed to sign off on it.

as for imigration 'Just over one fifth of immigration detainees are held for at least two months' :

[https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/im...](https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/immigration- detention-in-the-uk/)

<comment><USER23> Have you got a source on that part of the terrorism act, it's not something I've heard of.

<comment><USER22> [http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/contents](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/contents)

more specifically section 29, 1, (d):

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/8/part/...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/8/part/III)

Though F1 seems to have been edited since i last looked.. still its in theory, unlimited detention without trial.

There is also the Terrorism Act 2006, which i think extended the standard limit to 26 days.. Not sure if this was ever repealed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2006](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2006)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > she suggests that poor mothers lose their privacy altogether if they accept > public assistance,

I'm not sure about the altogether part, but if I don't want people to know how much money I have, going to the government and saying "I need money from other people because I'm not capable of providing for myself and my kids" is kind of the start of a process of telling people about your life in exchange for getting money from other people.

The article makes some good points on bail and fines, but the idea that getting other people to pay for your living expenses should somehow be possible without giving up up any information about yourself is pretty silly.

<comment><USER25> It's not that they have to give information, like name, age, SSN, address, etc., it's that they have to answer very private questions about their lives, like who they are dating, how often they have sex, do they use condoms, do they have medical conditions, etc. It's not right to make someone answer these questions just to survive and help their kids survive, because they have literally zero other options.

<comment><USER26> I can totally see that.

But the other side is that they money they are asking for has to be taken from people who were responsible and can afford their families. Shouldn't we at a minimum require that if you seek help for family members you can't afford, that you take the same steps others take to not get any more kids you can't afford?

Because unless you have a good counter argument to that, you won't get anywhere politically.

<comment><USER27> It does sound quite reasonable when you put it that way. On the other hand, you could also describe it as, "we should starve poor families to death if the mother is sexually active and doesn't use approved birth control." Which sounds decidedly less reasonable to me.

But ultimately my counterargument would be that we should focus on helping people who need it, rather than on _not_ helping people who we think don't deserve it. This country has a puritanical mindset about public help, where we're outraged at _any_ person who receives it who we see as being in any way unworthy. For a pervasive recent example, look at drug testing for welfare recipients. It's more expensive than not doing it, but people love it because we see drug addicts as being evil and therefore unworthy of help.

We need to teach compassion, or at the very least rationality, rather than a punishment mentality.

<comment><USER26> >we should starve poor families to death if the mother is sexually active and doesn't use approved birth control.

We also murder people who have expired tags, as long as they don't pay the fine, don't show up in court, resist the police officers enough to get them to shoot them.

In reality essentially everybody stops before it gets to that point, and in your example the women buys (or ideally gets) a bunch of condoms, use them and no more children nobody can afford is brought into the world, and maybe she also avoids some STDs.

Look I don't want to compel her to do it, but at the very least make sure that she understands that the people who pay for her children have certain justifiable expectations.

>people love it because we see drug addicts as being evil and therefore unworthy of help.

If you work hard at a crap job that pays say 22 usd/hr, you don't want to pay for somebodies meth bill.

If you want a system that can help people then you need it so that it is politically palatable enough -- or you won't be able to focus on it at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> the privatizing portion of the the article time and such is a bit out of place. the poor are subject to abuse by those in positions of power and it all has to do with insufficient laws to protect everyone from the abuse of government officials.

A recent story on Reason (yes I know their leanings) pointed to a suburb of Atlanta with excessive fines for issues that harmed no one except of course those who could not afford it [1]

the poor are not just hit by the justice system but they are hit by all sorts of government fees and regulatory policies that can force them into expensive schools just to do simple jobs like braid hair. Occupational licensing costs can keep many from productive jobs to get themselves out of the poor house.

so if you want to fix it it has to be done at the legislative level. restrictions of how fines and fees are assessed. people joke that HOAs are bad have seen nothing when faced with over zealous county and city code enforcers.

[https://reason.com/blog/2018/05/24/georgia-town-brags- about-...](https://reason.com/blog/2018/05/24/georgia-town-brags-about-fining- resident)

<comment><USER4> What seems a bit out of place is framing occupational licensing (meant to increase consumer safety) and codes enforcement (meant to increase public safety) as some kind of war on the poor. The fact that some things cost money is not in and of itself a negative or evil thing.

<comment> Mary-Jane How does occupational licensing to braid hair improve consumer or public safety?

<comment><USER29> There are safety and sanitations concerns a hair stylist must take into consideration, and they are expected to understand how to properly use chemical treatments in both styling and sanitation.

There was a time where getting a scratch from an unsanitized blade meant an infection that could kill you.

<comment><USER27> Still could. It's unlikely to kill you from an acute bacterial infection as would have been common before, but there are still plenty of deadly blood- borne infectious diseases out there. Wouldn't want to go for a haircut and come home with hepatitis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Before I started taxi driving, I had limited exposure to the struggles of the underclass. I grew up at the upper end of "middle class", where my parents both worked for a living and made enough to save for retirement and go on vacations.

One of the things I came to appreciate was the harm done in the name of "justice". I blogged about some of my experiences (most were originally posted at kuro5hin.org [RIP]). _America 's Make-Work Sheriff: The Anachronism of Joseph Arpaio_ [1] examines the United States' criminal justice system as a "make-harm program", which is a jobs program where the government puts people to work making work for themselves.

[1] [http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/09/americas-make-work- sheriff-a...](http://www.taxiwars.org/2017/09/americas-make-work-sheriff- anachronism.html)

This submission mentions _Gideon v. Wainwright_ , which is a rather important Supreme Court case that found the accused have a right to counsel for all criminal prosecutions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_v._Wainwright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_v._Wainwright) After Gideon got the Supreme Court to find that he had the right to an attorney, he was re-prosecuted and acquitted.

IMHO, the next phase in the evolution of the United States' criminal justice system is moving away from "punishments" (revenge) towards helping the convicted with their actual problems. Something like how Germany treats the people they've convicted: [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/this-is- prison-60-minutes-goes-...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/this-is- prison-60-minutes-goes-to-germany/)

(edit: shifted order of paragraphs)

</comment><comment><USER10> There are hard problems with no clear solutions and then there's the 'Vera Cheeks' case outlined in the article. That should be an easy legislative fix. Minor traffic infractions (like rolling through a stop) should never result in incarceration.

</comment><comment><USER31> As was explicitly stated by the government in Ferguson, the poor were considered a resource to be mined so that taxes on the middle class could go down. Yet nothing has changed.

</comment><comment><USER32> I hope this is not just "another article" for those reading it; this is the reality for poor people in general.

</comment><comment><USER33> How did it get this way?

Why doesn't Department of Economic Security fix this?

<comment><USER14> Trickle-Down Economics (Trickle-Up really), wages haven't grown in relation to inflation for lower 60% of the country since the 70's, the bottom 40% even seeing negative real wage growth since the 70's. Rent costs have gone up in most areas, security deposits and first/last months rent requirements keeps poor people out of housing.

The system has been rigged in favor of the rich for decades. Someone said it above, but it's the Land of the Free _only if you are wealthy_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> edit: --clipped for correction--

<comment><USER35> _> According to the bureau of justice statistics, 77% [2] of individuals are released from jail without financial condition._

Where are you getting 77%?

>Except for a decline to 57% in 2004, the percentage of defendants released each year varied only slightly, from 62% to 64%. A more pronounced trend was observed in the type of release used (figure 1). From 1990 to 1998, the percentage of released defendants under financial conditions rose from 24% to 36%, while non-financial releases dropped from 40% to 28%.

The only mention of 77% I see just says total release - not release without financial condition.

>Defendants with a prior conviction (51%, not shown in table) had a lower probability of being released than those without a conviction (77%). This was true even if the prior convictions were for misdemeanors only (63%). The effect of a conviction record on release was more pronounced if the defendant had at least one prior felony conviction (46%).

 _> A bail of let's say $250 for a minor offense is, in effect, a bail of $25. Though again, in the vast majority of cases a minor offense generally means you're released for free._

Why say $250 when the median of released defendants was $5,000?

>The median bail amount for detained defendants ($15,000) was 3 times that of released defendants ($5,000); the mean amount was about 5 times higher ($58,400 versus $11,600) (not shown in table). For all defendants with a bail amount set, the median bail amount was $9,000 and the mean was $35,800.

<comment><USER34> I definitely made a mistake there. These numbers were only for people charged with felonies - as is all the information you're mentioning. I'm currently looking for the information on all arrest data, which would crucially include misdemeanors, and am unable to find it on on the BJS site.

<comment><USER35> All good - was just making sure I wasn't misreading it :^)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the ways in which the poor are isolated is through economic barriers to working and operating businesses. You can't run a food stand without a license. You can't work in many occupations without meeting minimum skill standards, which often requires undergoing an expensive licensing process.

Even minimum wage is a barrier for some. Marginalized groups (e.g. chronic drug users) can find it difficult to find an employer who values their labor at the minimum wage. The stepping stone of working below minimum wage is made illegal for them, which leaves them with bottle/can collection, squeegee-ing, panhandling and petty crime as the few other alternatives.

Overall, it's good to be aware of problems afflicting the poor, because the adverse effects of repressive government policies seem to fall disproportionately on this subset of the population.

I think where the article discredits itself is when it presumes that people are entitled to welfare:

>>If they want to get public health insurance while they are pregnant, they have to answer questions and give up information about their sex lives, their romantic histories, their medical past, their incomes, their ideas about the future of their families. In some states, if they want to receive public assistance, they must agree not to have more than a certain number of children. Their family lives are subjected to a routine scrutiny that is entirely different from the experience of middle-class families.

No one is entitled to public health insurance. It is provided at the expense of others, through the taxes they are compelled to pay. Where is the privacy for those who are required to file an income tax return? Where is the privacy for those who are audited, and forced to produce an untold number of documents to prove their reported income and deductions are accurate? Where is the individual liberty in the entire process?

The mandates imposed on the taxpayer fully justify conditioning use of public welfare on information disclosure. That the article overlooks this completely indicates an ideological narrow-mindedness, and callousness toward the other, who is forced to pay for these public benefits.

The ideological angle is seen again here:

>>It is true that the decimation of the American welfare state has helped to create a tremendous pool of people living on remarkably low incomes, who may be only tangentially connected to the labor market.

The idea of the American welfare state has been decimated is a common, and inaccurate trope, often peddled by leftists. Since the War on Poverty began, per capita social spending has rapidly grown.

It was vastly greater in the 1980s than the 1970s and it was vastly greater in 1990s than the 1980s:

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fivethirtyeight- gov4/16fivethirtyeight-gov4-blog480.jpg)

[https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fiv...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2013/01/16/us/politics/16fivethirtyeight- gov6/16fivethirtyeight-gov6-blog480.jpg)

By all indications, the War on Poverty has failed, given the poverty rate was declining far faster before its institution than during the 50 years since it began. Social welfare spending's negative unintended consequences, like having a measurable effect on the proclivity of women to have children out of wedlock, appear to outweigh its positive effects.

<comment><USER37> > Even minimum wage is a barrier for some. Marginalized groups (e.g. chronic > drug users) can find it difficult to find an employer who values their labor > at the minimum wage. The stepping stone of working below minimum wage is > made illegal for them

I find this line of reasoning flawed, if you relaxed the constraints around minimum wage, the "stepping stone" would become the new minimum

<comment><USER36> That assumes no market rate for labor, and only government wage floors maintaining current wage levels, which given labor statistics, which show the unemployment rate being extremely low, and the vast majority of jobs paying above minimum wage, is clearly not true.

<comment><USER4> It's probably best to avoid the word "clearly" on topics where economists with PhDs can disagree widely and come to drastically different conclusions from the same data.

<comment><USER36> Economists don't disagree widely on there being a market rate for labor. This is a basic economic truism.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thoughts on Go after a few days - <AUTHOR> http://bklimt.tumblr.com/post/38104505318/go

<comment><USER2> > I've been learning Go the last few days.

Great! But it might have been more productive to hold off on the blog post until you've been using it for a few weeks, at least. You make a few barbed comments about the language designers, but you are nowhere near familiar enough with Go to be justified in doing so (IMO).

> If Foo is derived from a struct, and it doesn't work when zero-valued, then > there should be a function somewhere called something like NewFoo. Good luck > finding the right one.

I've never needed luck, here. This isn't a real problem for actual Go programmers.

> Why is there this special function that construct these three random types?

They're not "random types". They're special built in types that are managed by the language runtime. That makes them distinct from anything you can write as a user, and that's why they use the built in make function for initialization.

> I think channels are value types, which is strange since it's the only other > type created with make.

No, channels are reference types, too. Just like everything created with make.

There are more misconceptions and inaccuracies.

<comment><USER3> There's nothing wrong with making a blog post about his early impressions. It's just an opinion on the internet. There's millions more out there, and we all probably disagree with a few of them.

But even aside from that, it's valuable to have someone's early impressions of a language. They may change later. That's cool. But it's also cool to know what they think early on, because it's fairly likely other people will have the same experience. Whether or not his comments represent misconceptions and inaccuracies, they still report his experience. Other people can benefit from knowing others shared the same experience, and if he blogs later when he has more knowledge they can also see how his experience changes over time.

I encourage more blogging of this sort.

<comment><USER2> > There's nothing wrong with making a blog post about his early impressions.

I totally agree, but he makes a number of conclusions (or at least strong statements) throughout that, to me, seem premature.

For example, in the introduction: "I get the feeling that Go was designed by System Engineers, who focus on implementation." Systems engineers focus on APIs as much, if not more so, than other programmers. Systems engineers build the things at the bottom of the stack, where API design decisions have a fundamental effect on everything built above them.

It's definitely worth reading this: <http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's worth noting that some of the Go inconsistencies derive from the language designers desire to make the grammar regular (facilitating extremely efficient and simple parsing). In order to do this, you need statements that mean different things to the compiler to look different. This manifests itself in the (I admit, very inconsistent) var x int foo vs. x := 5 declaration. They mean the same thing to you, but different things to the compiler -- to preserve a regular grammar, they have to look different.

It's definitely a little ironic that what is needed to make a regular grammar makes the language more inconsistent.

<comment><USER5> Supporting declaring variables with new(), make and local variable assignment isn't mandated by the need to make the grammar regular. It's simply a braindead idea. Go might have significant improvements over C, but they screwed the pooch on this one.

<comment><USER6> Another uninformed comment, I can't freaking believe you created a troll account just to spread your ignorance about Go.

The difference between make and new is well covered in documentation and on the mailing list.

<comment><USER5> So, when faced with criticism mentioned in the blog post and referred to in a post, instead of thinking about it you mindlessly insult others and say absolutely nothing about what has been said. Who exactly is the troll here?

<comment><USER6> What do you want me to say? Everything in the blog article is addressed in the two very short documents that have been mentioned all over here.

Do I literally need to link you to the FAQ entry for "make vs new"? Or the docs for initialization? You're the one spreading FUD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yes, make versus new is confusing for beginners and I consider them unfortunate. But fortunately they're easy to avoid most of the time. You can initialize local variables like this:

foo := map[string]string {}

bar := []string {}

</comment><comment><USER8> I really like Go. My team has been working on a Go application at work for the last two months and I've had a great time of it.

That said, like all good languages, it's perfect until you run into the small list of warts that enrage you. In particular, as the author said, the fact that the make() types are different can get pretty annoying. What's really going on there are that _make is really the only generic function in Go_. That's why it's special -- unlike a lot of Go builtins, it's impossible to write make() in Go. I really do think this is the biggest single wart in the language (although there are others).

I don't really agree with the author's complaints about declaration syntax. I don't find it distracting: just figure out an idiomatic way to do things and move on.

Not having nil-able strings is annoying though. There are plenty of functions both in the standard library and in my own code that return ("", error) simply because the first return type is a string -- in a similar function with a different return type, I'd just return (nil, error) and be done. Not a big deal but it is a wart.

There are also some definite problems with the standard library, but I expect these will get fixed by OSS packages in time.

Before we all dump on Go though, it's worth pointing out some of the really cool innovations in the language that work great:

* Dependency management in the code is awesome. I love that importing a package and not using it is a compilation error. This seems to be so successful that they went and made declaring unused variables an error as well, which also does wonders for readability.

* Once you understand how you're supposed to use it, the GOPATH story is pretty great. Package management can get tricky and it's cool to see a language attacking it head on from the beginning -- you don't want to end up like Ruby.

* The notion of a Go "package" for namespacing -- and the exporting of CapitalizedVariables but not uncapitalizedVariables makes for very readable code. I really like it.

* The multiple return types for error handling definitely makes for more verbose code than the try-catch-finally pattern, but it also feels a bit cleaner. It takes a while to fully see the benefits of it, but it works great in the end.

I'm really excited for the future of this language. I think with a few more years, a few better frameworks, etc, we'll be able to do some really cool stuff very very easily in Go.

<comment><USER9> But is it that make is inherently confusing or that "creating" things in general is muddied by being conceptually too crowded? There are at least 6 concepts jostling around (make, new, zero values, special reference types, literals, pointers-to-literals). For starters, it seems like that could have have been reduced to 5 by eliminating new(T) completely and allowing the already-idiomatic &T{} to pick up the slack.

I must agree with your overall praise for the language. The package/export system and the official tooling is masterfully done!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The language has such a limited set of keywords and concepts that I think the issue with having a separate way of creating arrays and channels isn't really a problem. For me the killer idea is that of Go's interfaces ... its really great. And of course the fact it generates a standalone .exe with no dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER11> _> I don't think Go is a terrible language. It has some really great features,...But all the inconsistencies in the language design have made learning it feel like a chore._

In comparison to other languages out there, like Objective-C and C++, this sounds like an i-th world problem.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what you mean, maybe it is Apple's tools and Cocoa but I feel like Objective-C is very easy to pick up and consistent.

Though I felt the same way about Go, I may just be terrible at noticing things like this.

<comment><USER13> Objective-C is only very easy to pick up and consistent if you only consider the parts of it that are different from C. The parts of it that it has in common with C can be pretty nasty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For constructors, why notabstract that away all the inconsistencies with a function call. Such as

        Foo foo_module_new() ?

I don't know Go, but I would do that in C for example and just create an opaque struct for example.

</comment><comment><USER15> _> The standard library also seems to be missing a lot of the most common data types. As far as I can tell, there are no standard stack or queue types. ... How can a language provide an http server, but no stack type?_

I've never really done any Go, but aren't these just different use cases for a Slice? Why would they need their own data type?

<comment><USER16> You are absolutely correct. Indeed, it is rather trivial to do so.

Pushing onto a stack is equivalent to `s = append(s, obj)`. Checking if the stack is empty is equivalent to `len(s) == 0`. Peeking at the top (assuming its non-empty) is equivalent to `top := s[len(s)-1]`. Popping from the top (assuming its non-empty) is equivalent to `s = s[:len(s)-1]`

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Why is there this special function that construct these three random types? > I don't know.

It's reasonable for someone to be confused about this; my rationale is that these three types are basically where go allows "magic": all of them support special syntaxes (the range operator, optional multi-value context when looking up a map, the select operator on channels), so they have a magic initialiser, ignoring Go's usual "declaration is initialisation" rule.

As others have said, it's not too bad a special case in the context of the language. The problem I have with it is that it introduces the possibility of run-time errors that in a language this advanced and generally so well- designed should probably be compiled-time errors: panics when you assign to keys in nil maps or deadlocks when you send to a channel you forgot to initialise are both errors of a class that the language generally doesn't have.

</comment><comment><USER18> your general impression is correct, fwiw.

however, that doesn't necessarily mean that go is "a bad language". it's more a cultural thing, as far as i can see.

go has some nice ideas and is a big advance over, say c or c++. it's also made by people with a lot of experience and, for want of a better phrase "good taste".

but it does have a certain culture (or, if you like, a disregard for a certain culture).

nothing very useful seems to have come from these observations, and many people have made them. it's probably better to simply consider the language as a tool and work with it on its own terms. perhaps the most you can say is that, because it does choose its own path, you really do need to use it in the way intended by the authors.

</comment><comment><USER19> Simple: new() is for memory allocation, make() is for the more complex initialization of reference types. <http://research.swtch.com/godata> <http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#references>

Why can't you add methods to types outside of your package boundaries? Because Go aims for clean, comprehensible, robust boundaries between components: <http://talks.golang.org/2012/splash.article>

</comment><comment><USER20> > But all the inconsistencies in the language design have made learning it > feel like a chore.

That's interesting. Go is one of only two languages that I've been able to learn by writing production code without feeling like I'm getting "held back" by my inexperience (or, on the flip side, holding others back). It never felt like a chore to me; there was only one "gotcha" that caused me a significant amount of frustration.

> So what's the response from Go's designers about the requests for nullable > strings? To treat the empty string as a special value. Sometimes it's like > they haven't even read their own design justifications.

The only time I've run across this is with JSON encoding/decoding, but there's a really easy solution to this (take a look at gobson, for example[1])

[1] <http://labix.org/gobson>

</comment><comment><USER21> I was interested in Go because of its brevity, speed, and because Rob Pike wrote it.

Reading this I see a lot of the reasons I like Ruby: no worrying about different constructors or needing to worry excessively about types. If only Ruby treated everything, even the little bit that is syntax, as mutable objects, it would be near-perfect (and it would basically be Lisp). But, it's close enough.

Maybe if Go could become Ruby...

<comment><USER10> Having done a bit of development in both, I found I got productive in Go quicker than with Ruby. With Ruby, there's many ways to do the same thing. That might be great when you're experienced with the language, but for someone starting out it can be daunting. The compexity of installing RVM put me off also - I was never able to install it on Linux properly so ended up using the version that came with the Ubuntu package manager, which was an old version.

<comment><USER21> You don't have to install RVM, but it does help. It was never that difficult for me, but I use OS X for Ruby dev mostly.

And there may be a variety of ways of doing things, but that's because (1) Ruby has been more well-used than Go, and (2) it has more flexible loops, etc. to make it less verbose, and yes there are a variety of ways to add methods, attributes, etc. but after you spend a little time to understand how the Ruby object model works, you'll understand why- almost everything is an object. Also, the language has evolved, so there are some differences in syntax between 1.8 and 1.9 but you can still use 1.8 syntax in 1.9.

<comment><USER10> Yeah agreed Ruby is more powerful especially with loops. The object model and that methods are messages passed between objects is also great, once you understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nullable types? I thought that was one of the bad things about C#. I asked Anders Hejlsberg about it when he was in the country, and he said if he could go back, he would remove nullable types from C#.

<comment><USER23> There is at least one way for a language to have nullable types that is both type-safe and memory-safe: Option types.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll just summarize my ramble with: the author of this blog post could have at least read the short Spec or "Effective Go". Would have dispelled his confusion on several things and would have prevented a few of the inaccuracies.

</comment><comment><USER5> He forgot to mention how programmers need to add each project directory to $GOPATH to be able to include files stored in project subdirectories. Talk about a braindead idea.

<comment><USER24> I interpret this as encouragement to use fully-qualified package names (eg: [https://github.com/burke/zeus/blob/master/go/zeusmaster/zeus...](https://github.com/burke/zeus/blob/master/go/zeusmaster/zeusmaster.go#L8-L14)), which I don't really have a problem with.

Go code is nothing if not explicit.

<comment><USER5> That approach is nice and all if we are dealing with modules which we wish to reuse. If instead we would like to organize our source tree following a deep directory structure, we are forced to screw around with $GOPATH, which is a braindead idea.

<comment><USER25> You keep asserting that this $GOPATH is "braindead" but you provide no meaningful criticism of it or suggest any better alternatives.

I haven't messed with Go, but nothing about the idea of defining a path for source modules sounds braindead on its face to me. I certainly would give the benefit of any doubt to the designers of Go over some random troll.

<comment><USER5> These are not source modules I'm talking about. If it was only necessary to set $GOPATH to point to source modules then everything would be fine. The problem is that go requires that $GOPATH points to a project's source tree to be able to build it, if the project is organized to store other go source files in subdirectories. We aren't talking about packages or modules intended to be reused in other programs. We are talking about how source code trees are organized.

<comment><USER25> _The problem is that go requires that $GOPATH points to a project's source tree to be able to build it_

How is that different than the /I ${INCLUDE} path of C/C++ compilers (and many other languages)?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WolframAlpha Drops iPhone App Price by 96% to $1.99, Offers Refunds - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/04/01/wolframalpha-mobile-site/

<comment><USER2> Sometimes I wish there was a button on HN labeled "Yawn" or "Goldfish" that I could press when someone posts yet another link that just repeats a story that has been posted n times before without any additional detail or analysis.

I am not looking for an option to vote the post down just to sort of register my feelings.

Perhaps the addition of a "Goldfish" score would be a useful adjunct to many posts - maybe it's just the date...

am I getting to you?</comment>


Elon Musk's 'insane' call: Tesla worth $700B - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/12/investing/tesla-apple-elon-musk/index.html

<comment><USER2> If the company is worth so much, why are insiders selling their shares?

[http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own- disp?action=getissuer&CIK=000...](http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/own- disp?action=getissuer&CIK=0001318605)

<comment><USER3> It could be lack of confidence, but it could also be that they just want to cash out.

To some people, a few million might be more than they'll ever need or want. Or maybe they just need cash right now (pay off debt, start a business, upgrade lifestyle) and a few million is enough.

Tesla was founded in 2003. That's a long time to wait for any kind of return, and some people are going to be impatient.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Franchise - Open Source SQL Notebook - <AUTHOR> https://franchise.cloud/?ref=hn <comment><USER2> That looks really cool. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention here on HN. One thing I would have liked to see is smarter display of JSON/JSONB columns for PostgreSQL.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would like Firefox support :P

Why isn't it supported? I don't understand. HTTP calls to localhost are not supported, is that real?

Maybe a thin browser extension could solve that. I would write one if you told me what it should do.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing.</comment>


Understanding Programs Using Graphs - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/understanding-programs-using-graphs <comment><USER2> One of the many neat uses of Observable is quickly prototyping these kinds of graphics - often by starting with a notebook someone has already created and iterating on it.

I have a notebook here which can visualize the table structure of any Datasette-hosted database: [https://observablehq.com/@simonw/datasette-table- diagram](https://observablehq.com/@simonw/datasette-table-diagram)

My first version used a force-directed graph for this, but then Thomas Ballinger from the Observable team showed me how to use a DOT diagram, which is a much better visualization for relational tables.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seas of nodes are also used as IR in Java Hotspot and the V8 engine ([https://doar-e.github.io/blog/2019/01/28/introduction-to- tur...](https://doar-e.github.io/blog/2019/01/28/introduction-to-turbofan/))

</comment><comment><USER4> I started learning Blueprints in Unreal Engine recently, I swear it has helped my problem solving ability in other general areas of programming. Watching the links light up as nodes are executed is pretty great for debugging.

<comment><USER5> I honestly feel I had a similar feeling when I played Little Big Planet 2 when I was in my late teens. It had a creative mode where you could use basic logic gates like and gates and or gates, and other utilities like counters and the like (including not just digital inputs but also analog ones). Understanding inputs and outputs from a chip level was quite interesting to me. I tried to make a calculator and learned all about bit adders and such, but was never able to figure out as a teenager how to make a conversion of the binary bits to decimal so that I could display it. I'm still not entirely sure what the proper algorithm is for that (if by chance anyone knows that would be nice to know), but I'm sure I could find it out now that I have a degree in CS (just saying that's plenty sufficient but not necessary to have a degree).

<comment><USER6> You'd use a BCD to 7 segment display circuit [0]. At least that's what we did in my digital systems design course. Depending on what number you're trying to display you light up different parts of the segmented display.

[0]: [http://electronics-course.com/bcd-7-segment](http://electronics- course.com/bcd-7-segment)

<comment><USER5> Sweet! Thanks for sharing! I'll have to look into this more when I have time. I think the missing key for me was the BCD part. I had figured out how to do the seven segment display at some point using other utilities that LBP2 had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was a nice article, and I thank you for providing those references at the end.

The article makes it seem as if TruffleRuby is a Shopify project, where this GitHub repo seems to differ on that point: [https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby](https://github.com/oracle/truffleruby). What's the deal?

I'm also very curious about how much TruffleRuby helps you save in infrastructure costs. It looks like Shopify is starting to put together serious systems around optimization of Ruby code.

<comment><USER8> We're working on TruffleRuby at Shopify, but it's an Oracle-led project yes.

> I'm also very curious about how much TruffleRuby helps you save in > infrastructure costs.

We don't have an empirical answer to this yet. We're working on it. We're investing in MRI, TruffleRuby, and many other parts of the Ruby ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> Cool. Another question since you are around: How many of your sea-of-nodes- level optimizations do you think can be applied instead as AST-level optimizations?

<comment><USER8> Well you can see the one in the article about sharing the computation from the two branches - there's no way to represent that in an AST, for the very reason that it's a tree - there can only be one user of a node in an AST, but in a graph, multiple nodes can use it.

You could introduce some kind of hidden local variables and assign to those, but then you're kind of building a graph in an AST, and might as well use a graph, and those variables are harder to understand for other optimisations.

(Note that these aren't 'my' optimisations, I'm just writing about them.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aren't we coming full circle back round to UML? UML is very good at designing and documenting complex code and it's interactions at many different levels, and having a common graphing notation helps ensure everyone is on the same page by looking at the same diagram.

The problem comes when the design and the code get out of step, but there are tools available to round-trip the code and model to keep everything in sync. Executable UML used to be a thing too, but I was never very convinced by it.

<comment><USER10> Hopefully they get it right this time when someone reinvents UML.

By right I mean, the first time someone comes along and says "it's not a visual language anymore" the response is "wrong, and you're fired."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> not _directly_ related, but one interesting thing my coworker has been working on is visualizing ML models using graphs, which has made them much more interpretable for business stakeholders. Being able to break the model down into steps, feed the graph individual observations to see how the model flow would work, etc. I was surprised how receptive non-technical people were to the concept

</comment><comment><USER12> I enjoyed the article, but am maybe too dense to understand the repercussions. My understanding of the summary is that a goal is to be able to develop these graphs and then convert them back to ruby so that developers who know ruby can see how the compiler is optimizing. My honest question is, why does this matter? If the developers then start writing code more in line with what a compiler would do, then it seems compilation would be faster - is it significant, and is this a reason why? What else could it be? Thanks for the article and any thoughts!

<comment><USER13> My apologies if you know this, but by graph it means the mathematics definition (a type of data structure) and not the actual visualization image: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_(discrete_mathematics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_\(discrete_mathematics\))

Compilers convert source code into graphs and then perform optimizations on these graphs. They never work directly on the source code itself. Once the graphs have been optimized, they're then converted into the target format, which is typically assembly language or bytecode.

So mostly this is about techniques compilers use to optimize and transform code.

<comment><USER12> I didn't know that, thank you for kindly enlightening me! So from the blogpost, the "compiler debug dumps" are the optimized graph data struct, and instead of converting to assembly or byte code, they want to "decompile" or convert back to ruby. Do you think they're doing this to better understand and improve the compiler? Or to write code that is more easily compiled?

<comment><USER14> I suspect this may have originally developed as a debugging aid, your "to better understand and improve the compiler", but also to better understand how Ruby programs execute. With non-trivial data structures and algorithms (such as sea-of-nodes here), being able to visually introspect statically, and/or visualise its operation dynamically, can often provide informative insights.

Instead of, or perhaps as well as, converting to assembly or byte code, here the author is producing a visualisation of the internal graph structure contained within the compiler.

The graph isn't necessarily a one-to-one match with the AST derived from the source, due to graph transformations that take place during the optimising phase of the compiler/runtime. This makes it even more important/interesting to see what is going on under the hood.

Usually, in high-level programming languages one rarely has concerns regarding how easily the compiler might deal with the code - one just codes, and uses language features appropriately, as needed. With the only caveat here being the extreme performance crew, e.g. games programmers might use a restricted subset of C++, and also might disassemble compiler output, and use that information to help try and optimise their source somewhat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is a simple tool to produce ASTs from code? Can it work cross-language?

<comment><USER16> I would start with [https://astexplorer.net](https://astexplorer.net), which handles many languages, and provides interactivity: click on a node within the ast, and il will highlight the corresponding code and vice versa.

The ast's are usually language specific, therefore it's not cross language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The big value of the visual representation is if it is dynamic. That is, it gets updated while you are running the code and can use it during debugging. Otherwise, the novelty wears off quickly.

Static graphs are still useful to understand a new piece of code, see Source Trail[1] [1]: [https://www.sourcetrail.com/](https://www.sourcetrail.com/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Interesting topic. I feel like the representation of the Ruby fib misses the mark though because of how many language implementation details are caught up in it. The lack of abstraction here takes away from the usefulness of using a graph for understanding control/data flow in a program.

<comment><USER19> > I feel like the representation of the Ruby fib misses the mark though > because of how many language implementation details are caught up in it.

The article's title is not optimal. It's really about compilation to machine code, and for that you do need all these details. The only "understanding" of these graphs is about understanding what the compiler is doing with the code, it's not for program understanding on a high level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting article and good question about whether we should program using graphs. In a different domain, languages like halide, tvm and tiramisu or in a way letting programmers create graphs for high performance.

<comment><USER21> Programming via graphs is common in big-data machine-learning as well. Apache Beam and Tensorflow are both programmed by creating an execution graph object, and handing that off to the runtime.

<comment><USER22> Makefiles basically just trees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The graphic is too fuzzy -- but I'm trying to figure out why the AST for fib in Ruby would be so complex...

<comment><USER8> Ruby has more complicated semantics.

An example of a concrete difference here is that Ruby checks for overflow on integer maths, where Java does not. This means each maths operation is a little cluster of nodes, rather than a single node.

Another example is that Ruby has dynamic typing, so values that come into the function need to be type checked, and values going out need to put into a format where they can have their type inspected.

One more example is that the call to fib in Java is static - we know exactly where that goes. In Ruby the call is dynamic, so we need to check we're calling the correct method.

Here's a full SVG copy of that diagram [https://www.dropbox.com/s/k68id9aqu258blw/fib- ruby.svg](https://www.dropbox.com/s/k68id9aqu258blw/fib-ruby.svg).

<comment><USER23> Thanks - I knew all that, but I guess I expected those semantics to be implicit rather than explicit. I guess because we're not really looking at an "AST" but an intermediate executable representation. Certainly this is good for understanding what Ruby is doing, but not so useful for understanding what fib is doing - trees vs. forest. I guess what you really want is to be able to zoom into IL-semantics only if you care about such things, otherwise you show only enough detail to get across the algorithm being expressed -- possibly with the addition of declaratively showing additional constraints that have been added by the runtime without showing how the contraints have been satisfied.</comment></comment></comment>


Frustrated Mom Creates 'Ignore No More' App To Get Teen Kids To Return Call - <AUTHOR> http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/08/15/frustrated-mom-creates-ignore-no-more-app-to-get-teen-kids-to-return-calls/

<comment><USER2> Yes, I suppose that's a good idea? It doesn't solve the root problem though, if your children ignore you then there are some parenting issues you need to resolve.</comment>


Which programs or projects you made donation to? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> My list:

\- Wikipedia, 2 x $20

\- Subler, Mac MKV to iTunes converter/muxer, $20

\- Sublime Text, editor, not donation but ST is usable for free, $80

\- OPNsense, firewall/router, $50

Donating is ultimate approval of the work, it means a lot.</comment>


Cockatoo identified in 13th Century European book - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-44610271 <comment><USER2> I feel like this could be an interesting device for a novel. It could tell the stories of all the people involved along the journey from its home to the palace of Frederick II.

<comment><USER3> Or a computer game. I have fond memories of Sid Meier's "Pirates" on the Amiga. It taught me some stuff I wouldn't have known otherwise about the colonization of the Caribbean. I've always felt there was scope for a much richer world with modern computers. Probably it already exists, I don't follow computer games much these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The fact that a cockatoo reached Sicily during the 13th Century shows that merchants plying their trade to the north of Australia were part of a flourishing network that reached west to the Middle East and beyond, "_

North of Australia is a big place, the article mentions that the specie may have originated in Indonesia.

It also possible that the birds may have been bread in captivity for a while before one of them ended up in a book.

With this in mind , I find the quote curiously free of content.

<comment><USER5> It would be interesting to know when this cockatoo was last seen if at all in west papua or papua new guinia.

Even so it is a fascinating story.

<comment><USER4> For all we know, this cockatoo was born Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is just medieval supply chain details. At one level the origin of the cockatoo might not have been important then to those entertained by such things, at another level the true origin of the cockatoo might also have been a closely guarded secret.

If you buy a fancy new car then the guy in the showroom has no idea who the supplier of the seats was, never mind who supplied the leather to the seat supplier or whom the farmer was that brought the cows to market for the supplier of the supplier to buy. This applies even if it is a Rolls Royce type of car where the marketing material says the leather comes from cows grown in Norway where there is no barbed wire. None of this information is secret but you are not going to find out the name of the farm the cows were 'grown' on.

With illegal substances - drugs - there is a matter of secrecy, the guy down the pub who can sell your intoxicant of choice is not going to tell you who he buys from and you wouldn't ask that question anyway. Then there is the rest of the chain to the port of entry and it gets to be a big mystery after there. Yet somewhere in the Bekaa valley or in darkest Afghanistan there is someone making the stuff that ends up a continent away. At each step of this black market supply chain things are far from transparent.

Spices and silk were like this for a long time, nobody knew where the guys in Venice got their silk from, they didn't even know yet they controlled that market until the Turks worked it out. Cockatoos were probably just another of those type of novelty items.

</comment><comment><USER7> This story reminds me of the giraffes that were sent from Malindi (in modern day Kenya) as tribute to the Forbidden City in China in the early 1400's. (1)

1\. [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peculiar-story- gir...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/peculiar-story-giraffes- medieval-china-180963737/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This story reminds me of Abul-Abbas [1], an elephant given to Charlemagne by the caliph of the Abbasids. Frederick II wasn't the first Holy Roman Emperor to collect exotic animals, it seems.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul- Abbas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul-Abbas)

<comment><USER9> The Romans had war elephants [1]

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

<comment><USER10> Hannibal? He fought the Romans in Spain and then took the elephants over the Italian Alps and attacks Rome from the North. That is the greatest military feat for me.

[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/03/where- muck-h...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/03/where-muck- hannibals-elephants-alps-italy-bill-mahaney-york-university-toronto)

<comment><USER9> Yes the Romans had elephant idea probably from Hannibal, the article references the Punic wars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> a bit off topic, but does it exit a list of old books, sorted by dates ? I mean the really old ones. Wikiepdia gives this :

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

but is there something more graphical (to get a picture of the history of these books)

</comment><comment><USER12> They should probably explicitly mention the native habitat for the species in such articles; it would clarify a lot.

That said, trade between Asia and the Mediterranean basin via the Red Sea was highly developed at that point, with seafaring trade routes over 2000 years old. So it's not exactly shocking.

<comment><USER13> They do mention it's Australasian.</comment></comment>


How Game Theory Solved a Religious Mystery - <AUTHOR> http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2008/06/10/how-game-theory-solved-a-religious-mystery/ <comment><USER2> Fascinating.

The talmudic-inspired process would reduce to our modern proportional instincts if debt can be subdivided and resold.

Consider the case of the 100,200,300 creditors against the debtor with only 100 left. If being owed the larger amount is a disadvantage, the 200 and 300 can each sell their amounts in excess of 100 in 100-unit chunks to third parties.

Then, there are 6 creditors each disputing the 100, and all of them get an equal 16.6-. Assuming the original 200 and 300 sold their excesses at only a small discount to that expected return, they get nearly their proportional shares of the original 100.

</comment><comment><USER3> The restaurant "divvying up the bill" example is a classic managerial accounting issue. What the classic solution (separate checks) fails to take into account is the fact that it can sometimes create quite a bit of hassle for a single server, esp. when people can't make up their minds! :)

Yes, I spent many undergrad years in the restaurant business: serving (waitressing), hosting, running the register . . .

<comment><USER4> Thats why the server gets tipped. (Generally, the polite thing is to tip more if they do more work for you.)

<comment><USER3> But you seem to be forgetting that it's not just the server who is doing the work. . . it's an entire staff of people, not all of whom are accounted for in the "cost" of a restaurant meal. Usually the server makes _less than_ the federally-mandated minimum wage (which I know I did: $2.25 per hour in Utah) and then is she expected (by co-workers) to tip _them_ from her tips only, and by the end of the night it's a whole lot of work for whole lot of practically nothing. Pennies, really. This is why I almost never go out to eat . . . even to this day.

I guess the point is, the longer a group of people sits, trying to figure out "how to split the bill," the poorer people like myself get (got). Wait staff make $ on turnover, not intellectual patrons with financial stinginess.

That being said, I agree that nobody likes to "hurry" through a meal. I can totally understand this, having numerous years of waitressing experience and even having had a few generous customers. There is something to be said for a good dining experience. This is something I always sought for as a server.

However, I think it would be an economically-beneficial requirement for all VCs to have paid their dues with 3-5 years of "on the floor" restaurant experience.

Or maybe if VCs could figure out a way for student loan expenses could get erased with proven work time.

/irony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is indeed an interesting application of game theory, but I should point out that this "Talmudic" rule of division is one of _several_ rules proposed for the same problem, and the rabbis of the Talmud ended up rejecting this particular rule.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand it. In the case where the guy leaves 200, the first 100 is contested by everyone, so an equal split should be 33.3. The second 100 is contested by the bigger two creditors, so that should be split 50-50, leaving totals of 33.3, 83.3, and 83.3.

Clearly I'm missing something.

<comment><USER7> You have to consider _pairs_ of creditors, i.e. for _any_ pair chosen, the amount they are awarded must satisfy the principle of equal divison.

From the article:

 _The same condition needs to be met: the assets are divided up such that the amount received by any two people reflects the principle of equal division of the contested sum. Furthermore, the division is a unique solution._

He also gives the algorithm at the end of the article.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I got that, but why when you can do it without pairing? This method would get exponentially more complex as the number of creditors increases, especially for a people who still had nothing but an abacus to work with.

<comment><USER7> He just explains the pairwise equal division of the contested sum as a social custom.

In some ways it makes sense if you want to maintain the best pairwise relationships in a small community.

If you did it without pairing, the person who is owed the least might resent the people who received more.

<comment><USER6> I guess it does sort of force a minimum on repayment. Those sorts of things tend to create much resentment. I'd be curious to see if this would be a better solution than the one we currently use.

<comment><USER5> I have seen the argument that this system is more fair to small creditors. Under the current bankruptcy, if I extend $1000 of credit to a financially shaky company, and then some bank extends a million-dollar credit line, and then the company becomes insolvent, we all have to line up for our X cents on the dollar; the bank's easy credit effectively reduces the amount I can recover. Under the system the OP described, small creditors are far more likely to get repaid in full or mostly in full, regardless of how much the debtor also owes to large creditors.

But I'm not sure how this system could be extended to a world where, for example, a company takes out loans from Bank A and Bank B, both of which are actually subsidiaries of a bank holding company that owns 75% of A and 30% of B. Talmudic law doesn't recognize corporate personhood, so the Talmudic discussion doesn't have to consider that problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main difference between this scheme and propotional division becomes apparent if the heirs discover another 100 hidden in a cupboard after the initial distribution has been decided on. Should they start a new round or should they distribute it as if they had known about it from the start? With a porportional distribution scheme, the outcome is the same, with the talmudic scheme, the outcomes might differ and you have to decide which one is more consistent or just. So both schemes give a consistent allocation of assets in simple cases, but proportional distribution is far easier to generalize to consistent allocations in complex situations.

</comment><comment><USER9> Fair division, the win-win solution, etc, also have some roots in the Nash equilibrium (a beautiful mind). Also known as adjusted winner: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjusted_Winner_procedure>

Fair division is really an algorithm based in game theory on fair distribution. There's actually a bit of software based on it... a couple examples:

<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1352161> <http://www.fairoutcomes.com/>

and a patent: <http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5983205/description.html>

I first read about it because of conflict resolution:[http://www.amazon.ca/Fair-Division-Cake-Cutting-Dispute- Reso...](http://www.amazon.ca/Fair-Division-Cake-Cutting-Dispute- Resolution/dp/0521556449)

There's also some interesting analogies in OS, multi agent systems, and Database conflict resolution. But that's probably for another thread.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't see the game theory part? Interesting to learn about the "equal division of the contested sum" convention, but that alone is not game theory, or is it? From game theory I would expect to see some explanation of why that convention is a good solution for the problem? Merely listing alternative game outcomes in a table is not game theory.

</comment><comment><USER11> The real lesson here is to always make a large claim OR conversely, always lend large sums. Either way, with this sort of "all-in" mentality that the tradition apparently espouses, is it any wonder that (aside from Hindus), Jews are one of the oldest continually existing cultural groups?

</comment><comment><USER12> For those interested in game theory (like me) and have yet to actually understand it (like me), the Teaching Company has a lecture series on it. I've heard it's good.

<comment><USER7> Is this the lecture series?

<http://www.teach12.com/ttcx/coursedesclong2.aspx?cid=1426>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This doesn't surprise me.

There is much much more wisdom (read: concentrated intelligence) in _real_ religion (like Judaism or Christianity) than any modern/post-modern mind is willing to agree...

<comment><USER14> This isn't wisdom. It's just a weird (and in my opinion unfair) method of dividing contested assets.

Regardless, it's annoying that you're trying to turn a mildly interesting solution to an old puzzle into a statement about how close-minded atheists are.

<comment><USER13> So you _mean_ that I _mean_ that atheists are close-minded?

What does 'atheist' really mean? It's the negation of God, OK?

Many of the best scientists out there initially were atheists, and have been convinced by science itself of the existence of some kind of 'God'.

So please don't try to convince me, try to back-convert them to atheism!

<comment><USER13> (I'm simply too curious to listen to some convincing argument against my poor expositions... is there really no really convinced atheist out there willing to contrast my poor opinion? If it is really this way: poor poor poor atheism...)

<comment><USER15> While I am not an atheist the logical argument is simple.

If a god or gods wanted people to warship them then they could demonstrate their existence and define a single world religion. The wide range of religions around the world suggest that the god or gods don't care about warship. So either their is no god or there are gods but it its impossible to tell anything about them which means acting like there is no god is the most rational choice.

<comment><USER13> Do you know the definition of (christian) faith?

Faith informs us: God himself talked to us (see the Bible), and even visited us (see Jesus Christ). But you need faith for that, and faith is not something that _we_ can produce or create, it's something we only can _accept_ or _deny_.

So, it's not that it's impossible (as you say) to tell anything about God. It would even be enough to observe Nature.

As I said in another comment, many of the best scientists converted to some kind of deism, because they _saw_ the great Intelligence inside Nature, and they could not find any other explanation than the existence of a Supreme Intelligence.

2 examples? Albert Einstein; Antony Flew.

<comment><USER16> Einstein did not convert to any kind of deism as a result of seeing the great Intelligence inside Nature and concluding that there must be a Supreme Intelligence. More specifically, (1) he did not believe in a Supreme Intelligence (he explicitly disclaimed belief in a personal God, and likened his view to that of Spinoza who more or less used "God" as a synonym for "Nature"), and (2) there was no "conversion".

Antony Flew is not one of "the best scientists" for the simple reason that he was never a scientist at all. He is a philosopher. Also, there is much reason (entirely independent of his conversion to deism) to believe that his mental faculties are in pretty bad shape. Which is fair enough for someone in his eighties, of course, but the argument "this must make sense if an eminent philosopher is convinced by it" -- which is a pretty hopeless argument in any case, considering some of the things eminent philosophers have been convinced by -- really doesn't work at all when the eminent philosopher no longer has the sharp mind that made him an eminent philosopher in the first place.

<comment><USER13> Einstein explicitly stated to believe in God (but not in the christian or hebrew one), and he explicitly derived this from the supreme intelligence which he found in natural laws.

And philosophy _is_ science, but it's no natural science. And Flews book "There is a God" seems written in a really intelligent way, no signs of "brain damage".

Many many good scientists convert from atheism to some kind of deism. Yes, they _convert_ , because it's a radical change of the very base of our thinking.

<comment><USER17> _Einstein explicitly stated to believe in God_

Source? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Religious_views>

_In 1929, Einstein told Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." In a 1950 letter to M. Berkowitz, Einstein stated that "My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment." Einstein also stated: "I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth." [...] Einstein clarified his religious views in a letter he wrote in response to those who claimed that he worshipped a Judeo-Christian god: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly._

<comment><USER13> You cite from 1929? There are many many citations, and often contradictory ones.

He certainly changed his opinion during his lifetime.

My source is a book (here in Europe, from 2008, not english). If you google a bit, you can find any kind of contradictory stuff, so internet and truth are not always friends (and we all know this).

<comment><USER17> >> Source?

> My source is a book

What is the name? Who is the author?

<comment><USER13> Do you know Italian? If yes, it's a book I'd recommend to _everybody_ :

Author: Antonio Socci (a really good and meticulous italian journalist)

Name: "Indagine su Gesù"

It's a plain scientific research about the life of Jesus (with many many citations from every direction, including many atheists).

The book sells very well these days...

<comment><USER17> _Author: Antonio Socci

Name: "Indagine su Gesù"_

Thank you.

 _Do you know Italian?_

No. I know Google Translate. [http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpaparat...](http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpaparatzinger2-blograffaella.blogspot.com%2F2008%2F11%2Fcaccia- delle-orme-razionali-di-ges-il.html&sl=it&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8)

 _Socci continues in this introductory chapter showing the positions of the greatest contemporary scientists, from Einstein to Hawking, by scholars of the Big Bang to those of DNA: all agree that the most reasonable answer to the mystery and the great dell'infinitamente 'infinitely small, as well as in front of the surprise at the amazing complexity of even the most minute living organism, is to admit a Creator. In short, something we call God But if science and reason - more and more, contrary to what one wants to believe - leads to the recognition of the existence of a God, the more dense is the enigma if we try to go down ' existence the essence._

Could you please provide the evidence (quotes, etc.) that Socci cites?

<comment><USER13> OK, in the first chapter of the book (page 19), there is this paragraph (I'm not good in translating to English, but I'll try):

"Einstein said that the natural laws are revealing such a superior reason, that all of human thinking and ordering are only an insignificant reflection, compared to them."

The next paragraph explains that Flew has been influenced decisively by the opinion of Einstein. It informs that many people said Einstein to be atheist or spinozistic pantheist. Then it cites Einstein again:

"I'm no atheist, and I don't think that I could define myself as pantheist. We are in the situation of a child which enters a huge library, full of books written in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written these books, but doesn't know how. And it doesn't know the languages the books are written in. The child suspects being a mysterious order in the disposition of the books, but doesn't know which. This seems to me the human position, even of the most intelligent ones, in front of God..."

(there follow some other sentences, but this should already be enough).

Happy now? The book is full of citations and annotations (they are counted, and the last one has the number 529). The author collected the material for the book in several years, and he's a really meticulous writer, I know him quite well.

<comment><USER17> _Then it cites Einstein again:

"I'm no atheist, and I don't think that I could define myself as pantheist. We are in the situation of a child which enters a huge library, full of books written in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written these books, but doesn't know how. And it doesn't know the languages the books are written in. The child suspects being a mysterious order in the disposition of the books, but doesn't know which. This seems to me the human position, even of the most intelligent ones, in front of God..."_

Thank you. Here is the actual quote: [http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+child+library+books+...](http://www.google.com/search?q=einstein+child+library+books+intelligent+human+toward+God)

<http://www.deism.com/einstein.htm>

 _(The following is from Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer, Princeton University Press)

"I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

Here is the Google Books page for Einstein and Religion By Max Jammer: [http://books.google.com/books?id=TnCc1f1C25IC&pg=PA48...](http://books.google.com/books?id=TnCc1f1C25IC&pg=PA48&lpg=PA48&dq=%22Einstein+and+Religion%22+by+Max+Jammer+%22most+intelligent+human+being+toward+God%22&source=web&ots=Uhcl1SWaTx&sig=ABT7ObACiZBPgHPJil576WJ- Tgw&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPA47,M1)

The previous page of Jammer's book states:

_Unrestricted determinism, Einstein argued, does not admit a "God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and whose purposes are modeled after our own."

Like Spinoza, Einstein denied the existence of a personal God, modeled after the ideal of a superman, as we would say today.*

On the next page, Jammer extends the above Einstein quote:

 _"[...] Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things."_

Jammer attributes the Einstein quote to:

 _G. S. Viereck, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930), quoted by D. Brian, Einstein - a Life, p. 186._

This webpage advises: <http://kirtimukha.com/Krishnaswamy/Einstein/on_atheism.htm>

_You might want to take this quotation with a grain of salt. According to Brian, the Americanized German Viereck became known as a "big-name hunter" after "capturing" Kaiser Wilhelm II; Premier Georges Clemenceau of France; Henry Ford; Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis; and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Because of his desire to interview the great and because of his inordinate egotism, Freud accused him of having a "superman complex." Upton Sinclear referred to him as "a pompous liar and hypocrite," and George Bernard Shaw questioned his accuracy.

Is the quotation authentic? For what it's worth, here it is.

When asked whether he believes in the God of Spinoza, Einstein is supposed to have replied as follows:

      "I can't answer with a simple yes or no.
      I'm not an atheist and I don't think I
      can call myself a pantheist. We are in
      the position of a little child entering
      a huge library filled with books in many
      different languages. [...] Our limited
      minds cannot grasp the mysterious force
      that moves the constellations. I am
      fascinated by Spinoza's pantheism, but
      admire even more his contributions to
      modern thought because he is the first
      philosopher to deal with the soul and
      the body as one, not two separate
      things."

Did Einstein actually say this? The nonsense phrase "mysterious force that moves the constellations" troubles me. This seems much more likely to have been inserted by the scientifically ignorant Viereck than it does something that Einstein would say.

The Viereck interview with Einstein appeared first in the_ Saturday Evening Post _(Oct. 26, 1929, p.17) under the title "What Life Means to Einstein."It is curious that Einstein's statement about Spinoza does not appear in that article. Did Viereck choose not include it? Did Einstein object to its inclusion in the article? Or was the Spinoza material removed by the editors? [...]

The quotation may not be completely inauthentic. It seems improbable that Viereck could have recorded Einstein's answer verbatim during an interview. Surely Viereck would have taken brief abbreviated notes that he expanded later. Or perhaps he jotted down the conversation at some time afterwards, putting down Einstein's answers from memory. In neither case would you expect 100% accuracy._

<comment><USER13> Thanks, personally I never take any citation literally, both parts (agreeing and opposing) could have, even subconsciously, changed some parts.

As for the book I mentioned: it didn't influence or change my mind, it has only been a very, very interesting read (because there are opinions from a few christian people, but most are from non-religious people, who recognized the geniality of the New Testament, and the absolutely unique position of Jesus Christ in history (in both past and present).

Few people know how deeply the whole european history has been positively influenced by christianity. One of the best statements of the book is: christians don't ask people not to be rational, but to be it profoundly!

(If you only stay on the surface of the things, everything seems possible. Only a deep understanding shows the whole reality...)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Loftium Unwittingly Forms General Partnerships with Homebuyers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jleahy/yesterday-the-new-york-times-trumpeted-a-new-internet-company-loftium-and-its-interesting-new-1754b6cdfed <comment><USER2> What happens if local regulators ban or limit AirBnB use of that property?

<comment><USER3> Also, what's are the tax consequences of getting income from a partnership? Would the partners need to get a tax ID number for that entity, fill out corporate tax forms, etc.?</comment></comment>


IP and Licensing Basics: A One-Day Review [by LES USA/Canada] - <AUTHOR> http://www.lesusacanada.org/chapters/usa/houston-chapter/september-5-2014-houston-chapter-ip-licensing-basics (From poster:)  Disclosure: I'm part of the planning committee and one of the instructors. <comment><AUTHOR> (From the poster:) Disclosure: I'm part of the planning committee and one of the presenters.</comment>