"There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home" - <AUTHOR> https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/09/14/home-computer/ <comment><USER2> > To understand the mindset of this period it is important to recognize the > distinction between a computer terminal and a free-standing computer. Some > experts believed that individuals would have terminals at home that > communicated with powerful remote computers providing utility-like services > for information and interaction. These experts believed that an isolated > computer at home would be too under-powered to be worthwhile.

Considering how the majority of the general population's use of "computers" is really interacting with remote and cloud services (Facebook, Netflix, etc) this is a valid argument today. While today's equivalent of terminals (phones, tablets, and even PCs) have a significant amount of local computing ability, for the most part they really are just used as fancy terminals. Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important.

The other quote that stuck out to me was this:

> "The personal computer will fall flat on its face in business because users > want to share files and want more than one user on the system,"

<comment><USER3> >Gaming is maybe the one mainstream application where local compute is important.

There are a ton of things our smartphones and tablets do that rely on very high levels of local computing power.

Biometric authentication such as face and fingerprint recognition is a heavily compute intensive application. It needs to be done locally in order to be secure. Face ID is just nuts.

Modern smartphone photography is heavily compute-intensive, from HDR to optical zoom to image editing and markup. Just look at what Apple is doing with portrait mode and lighting effects. I love using time-lapse and slow- motion video modes. What would instagram and snapchat be without locally applied filters?

Note taking, address book and time management. The notes apps on modern mobile devices are multi-media wonders with integrated text, image and handwriting recognition built-in. Calendar management, alarms and notifications all rely on local processing even if they do make use of cloud services. Without local smarts those services would lose a huge chunk of their utility.

Document and media management. I read eBooks and listen to podcasts. My ebook reader has dynamic font selection, text size adjustment and will even read my books to me. Managing media on the device is essential as contemporary networks are still nowhere near good enough to stream everything all the time. My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on-device and adjustable at my fingertips. That's serious sound studio level stuff in my pocket.

Playing digital video files. Even ones downloaded or streamed. So what if we've had it since the 90s. It's still proper computation, especially with advanced modern codecs. VOIP and video calling even between continents have also become everyday and absolutely rely on powerful local number crunching.

These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.

<comment><USER4> > My podcast app has sound modulation and processing options built in to > tailor the sound to my tastes and needs, including speed up, voice level > adjustment and dead-air 'vocal pause' elimination in real-time, all on- > device and adjustable at my fingertips.

Everything short of the vocal pause stuff an old Sansa will do for you, running a tiny embedded C based runtime.

> These things have become so everyday that we hardly notice most of them, but > without serious on-device processing power, some of which would have been > beyond $10k workstations just 15 years ago, none of this would be possible.

The modern photo and video stuff is super cool and uses a ton of processing power. Likewise for high quality video streaming, decompressing is hard work, though often offloaded to HW these days.

Everything else my desktop of 15 years ago handled just fine, with 256MB of RAM.

Heck my smartphone in 2006 with 64MB of RAM did most of this stuff.

The one thing that has remained constant across a decade of smart phone development is the Pandora app getting forced closed all the time.

<comment><USER5> "Everything else my desktop of 15 years ago handled just fine, with 256MB of RAM."

I hear this sort argument a lot. But I never hear of anyone doing it, that is working on a 15 yr old computer for a while. I imagine with Linux it might not be too bad.

<comment><USER4> > I hear this sort argument a lot. But I never hear of anyone doing it, that > is working on a 15 yr old computer for a while. I imagine with Linux it > might not be too bad.

The Internet has made this infeasible. Everything has moved online, and 90% of online resources have grown very bloated, though Wikipedia would probably still work well.

Security is another problem. Windows XP would work fine if you can find 15yr old hardware that still functions (hardware rot is a real thing), but the number of 0 days out there is far too high.

All that said, I wonder if any Shoutcast streams still exist. I'm using Youtube Live for the same thing now days (orders of magnitude more CPU being used!).

Coding would work fine, except the old IDEs don't support newer C++ standards, and I'm accustom to my niceties in life, but if you can ignore that, life would be fine for writing code. Modern web platforms wouldn't work that well, writing code would work OK, but the resultant webapps wouldn't run that well.

<comment><USER6> > All that said, I wonder if any Shoutcast streams still exist. I'm using > Youtube Live for the same thing now days (orders of magnitude more CPU being > used!).

Shoutcast is still around, at least as a protocol via Icecast. I dunno if it's still being used for widespread public streams, but I know people still use MPD + Icecast to stream their personal music collections.

<comment><USER7> Most of the FM stations in my city (in Argentina) have a shoutcast stream to listen online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Those not around (or aware enough) back then don't grasp how staggeringly little computing power there was, and how enormous the effort to do that paltry processing. Sure there were "desktop computers", but they barely did anything; a computer sophisticated enough to do anything meaningful in one's home would have required an entire room devoted to it - and still wouldn't do much.

Today's Lightning cable literally contains more processing power than a "home computer" from the early 1980s.

"Document processing", today a simple matter of scanning a paper at >300dpi and running OCR, was a huge undertaking just to identify & fragment documents (varying extreme compression of components based on differing legal importance of preprinted content vs handwritten content vs legally-binding signatures) precisely because there was so very little space to store anything in. One common image today could easily overwhelm an entire storage unit back then. (Tangent: I believe this is a major & widely-disbelieved source of much of the consternation surrounding Obama's birth certificate).

The notion of utility-level remote computing was necessitated by computing problems of real practicality requiring such scale, not just of straight capacity but of complexity to squeeze maximum usability out of such under- powered hardware, that doing it at home was unthinkable.

Nobody expected computing power would increase, per volume & dollar, so incredibly much. Some 40 years later, processors are about 10,000x faster, displays 10,000x more detailed, and memory & storage & networking 10,000,000x greater. I remember my brother taking all day to download a large book; today we use as much data for 1 web page.

"These experts believed that an isolated computer at home would be too under- powered to be worthwhile."

It was. Think: modern insulated automated-HVAC 2000 sq ft home, vs mud hut. They couldn't comprehend what was to come; most today can't comprehend where we came from.

<comment> compiler-guy One of my favorite examples:

The parent comment above would have been too big to store in main memory for one of these computers.

The comments on this thread wouldn't fit into secondary storage.

It's also useful to remember that was talking about his then present, not forever and ever. He didn't say, "and there never will be."

<comment><USER8> Nicely put. It's hard to get the orders of magnitude across; that's a good example.

One could argue that the "didn't say 'never'" was implicitly understood. What I don't think most grok is then-incomprehensible scale change; those loading multi-ton 5MB storage units on airplanes couldn't imagine a half-terabyte on your fingernail.

[https://imgur.com/uqKOX](https://imgur.com/uqKOX)

[https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1nA6XRpXXXXX1XXXXq6xXFXXXy/200...](https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1nA6XRpXXXXX1XXXXq6xXFXXXy/200PCS- LOT-MICRO-SD-Card-32GB-64GB-128GB-256GB-512GB-1024GB-CLASS-10-Memory-Card- TF.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> George W. Mitchell's quote was pretty much spot on considering the context of the time, he was basically describing an internet connected pc which was communicating with servers somewhere that do the real computing. Now obviously even the cheapest netbook has more computing power than anything he was thinking of at the time, and your average gaming computer is vastly more capable of computing than what the home terminal he was envisioning was, the fact of the matter is that we're moving more and more towards the thin client model where the majority of your computing is done in the cloud. Hell, I'm sitting in front of a macbook pro that could tear your face off but I rely on the web and a remote server to run my word processing software.

<comment><USER10> It hits me as i dig though the comment pile that what has changed is that while compute power has grown, storage has downright exploded.

The power of Google et al is not the compute, it is the storage. The amount of data that Google have on tap and sifts through is downright staggering, and clearly not something that is possible to store locally for home users.

<comment><USER11> Especially considering the petabytes of tape they use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Funny how we're now at a time where we're moving past computers. I thought this was going to be about how you don't need a computer at home anymore because you can do so much on tablets, phones, watches, and TVs.

When the Apple Watch with LTE was announced, I wondered when people will start to have a watch but no phone. When the iPad got LET, senior execs shifted to them and raved about the experience. It worked for them because they mostly just did email and a few other things, unlike worker bees who need a traditional computer OS. I wonder if a similar thing will happen with higher- ups foregoing phones for watches.

My guess is that in the next 3-4 years, we'll start seeing people talking about how amazing it is to go around without a phone. Perhaps a tablet for doing "real work" and a watch for everything else.

<comment><USER13> I immediately got excited about the idea of replacing my phone with a watch, until I learned about the constraint of needing a phone to setup the watch. That shows that the phone isn't completely replaceable right now, but I guess Apple will fix that in a year or two. I'll definitely get rid of my phone then.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, even though I don't currently have an Apple Watch (go Pebble!), I wondered whether this would be feasible now. You could just choose to leave your phone at home all the time, but you'd still have to pay for the wireless plan. Currently, carriers charge $10 extra for the Watch, but you can't yank coverage for the phone. They use the same phone number, so you still have to have both.

<comment><USER14> My iPhone is a three year old 6 Plus. I have no problems leaving that giant at home to rely on a watch. I'd hope it would bring more attention back to my day, and help break me of the habit of going to my phone when bored.

The watch would do everything I need, texts, phone calls, email alerts, and I can even use it for navigation. While it would be better not to pay the $10 a month surcharge, that's a fairly small price to pay if it's an improvement in my daily experience.

<comment><USER12> Yep! And one issue Apple will have to deal with is: if people routinely leave their phones at home, will they pay $600+ for new phones every 2 years? My guess is that Apple will not be too eager for that scenario...

<comment><USER14> Apple isn't dumb enough to think they have a choice. When Android finally figures out watches as well as Apple, a hundred watch makers will start chipping away at the phone market. Apple has always been smart enough to try to cannabilize its own products if cannibalization was inevitable.

<comment><USER12> What do you think the ETA is on a good, LTE-enabled Android watch? I feel like nothing out now is as good as the original Apple Watch, and it took them 2 more years to get the LTE stuff worked in there (and even then, the battery life isn't as good as Series 2).

And to be clear, I'm not a fanboy who sees the Apple Watch as the gold standard — I don't have one and probably won't purchase the Series 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An interesting talk by Ken Olsen on his history with DEC: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNBS0I1h42k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNBS0I1h42k)

Sadly, the names DEC and Digital barely resonate with the average under-30 developer. In fact, I'd guess that DEC/Digital on a resume not only counts for much less than AirBnB or some other trendy, frivolous startup, but probably even hurts, given how prevalent ageism is in our industry.

</comment><comment><USER16> We laugh at these quotes and yet we keep making them.

"640K... nobody would ever need that much memory"

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

"Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency."

It seems inevitable that despite knowing better we will keep putting our collective foot in our mouth. I'm ok with that. The takeaway is that limiting predictions aren't useful.

<comment><USER17> > "640K... nobody would ever need that much memory"

The Gates quote was "640k ought to be enough for anybody", and it's been _wildly_ misinterpreted by basically everyone.

The IBM PC had already picked the 8088, which had a 20 bit addressing architecture regardless of whether or not 1MB was "enough" or not. The issue Gates was addressing was whether or not DOS's choice of 640 as the barrier for loadable program memory management was enough given that it was only about half the space in the machine. And he wasn't really wrong. The time frame between DOS programs bumping up against 640k and "DOS" programs wanting to use the multiple-megabyte flat spaces available on the 80386 (which couldn't possibly have been architected for in software in 1981) was like three years.

If you want to ding DOS, complain not about the 640k limit but about the complete lack of architecture and discipline in the _high_ 384k. Really no one ever got this space under control, and it was a bucketful of undetectable device I/O hazards and too-clever-by-half hackery well into the 90's.

<comment><USER16> the quote was "When we set the upper limit of PC-DOS at 640K, we thought nobody would ever need that much memory."

"640K... nobody would ever need that much memory" was just a contraction

[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I guess some of the ideas were "half" right of the future to come, considering how many of our devices now make use of "cloud" computing.

</comment><comment><USER19> But less and less do we have personal computers in the home- the PC is being converted into a dumb terminal, a screen and keyboard, with all the real brains on the other end of the wire.

</comment><comment><USER20> The computers there were talking about would be analogous to the big iron supercomputers of today. The quote "There is no reason for any individual to have a supercomputer in their home." is much closer to reasonable.

It does show a lack of foresight on their part, but it's not as completely wrong as it looks on the surface.

<comment><USER21> True, but... for that era, a "supercomputer" was a Cray 1. How many Cray 1's do you have in your home? That is, how many devices do you have that can do 160 MFLOPS? For many HN readers, it may be in double digits.

<comment><USER10> Then again said Cray1 was a liquid cooled beast that acted as much as a piece of furniture as it did a computer.

What blew everything up was how fast Intel and "friends" could get ICs to shrink.

But even then we now have vast warehouses that we access remotely that is mostly there to store metadata that is sifted and sorted on command.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As an adjunct, here's a journalist in 1979 struggling to comprehend Ted Nelson's vision that the computer would become a creative tool for the masses, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVU62CQTXFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVU62CQTXFI)

</comment><comment><USER23> From the same period, a radio interview where Ted Nelson tries to convince, unsuccessfully, a skeptical radio host that home computing has a future: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVU62CQTXFI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVU62CQTXFI)

</comment><comment><USER24> "Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of having a computer in your own home."

\- Ed Yourdon, _Techniques of Program Structure and Design_ , 1975

Yourdon had been at DEC, but left the company prior to 1970.

<comment><USER25> Awesome quote. Added to [http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is, in large part, still a popular sentiment in Japan.

</comment><comment><USER27> Failures in imagination can be deadly for businesses.

</comment><comment><USER28> To me the amazing thing isn't that DEC pooh-poohed the idea of the PC, but rather that IBM was agile enough not to!

<comment><USER10> The PC was really an outlier.

Not only was it an IBM product, but beyond the BIOS everything was off the shelf (even the OS).

So once the BIOS was cloned, and the clone defended as clean in court, they promptly tried to reassert control with the PS/2 and spiraled into irrelevance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> There is no reason for any individual to have a high energy particle accelerator in their home.

35 years later...

</comment><comment><USER30> Why didn't the investigator contact Dave or Gordon both of whom are alive and well?

</comment><comment><USER31> For these quotes I always wonder if we put them in the right time context. Is it fair to assume that the quote was meant to mean "never", or was it implied a time frame such as "during this decade" etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> There is one big reason and that's privacy!

</comment><comment><USER33> And 640kb ought to be enough for anyone :)

</comment><comment><USER34> This would have been true today if people no longer felt the need to buy desktop computers. (They still do it to play games.)

</comment><comment><USER35> "There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence" \--Henry Adams</comment>


Your customers do know what they want - <AUTHOR> http://rubyglasses.blogspot.com/2008/07/your-customers-do-know-what-they-want.html

<comment><USER3> So blatantly obvious, yet so often misunderstood.

I'm always reminded of that old Henry Ford quote whenever this topic comes up:

 _If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse._

The beauty of this quote is not that customers don't know what they want, it's that they're saying what they want exactly by saying "faster horse".

<comment><USER4> As always, it's about asking the right questions. Asking a customer what they want, and you'll come to the conclusion that they don't know what they want.

Customers know what they want to do. In your Henry Ford example, they know that they want to get from point A to point B faster.

Customers don't know the right way of implementing it. That's why they hired you to implement it for them. They don't know that there are better alternatives to "a faster horse" out there, or better alternatives to an access-based exchange-and-IIS-powered monster out there.

In the end, you have to find the right questions to ask to find out what the customer wants -- this takes skill, and it takes digging, and extracting the essence of their responses. It's part of your job to find out when a customer is telling you what they want, and when they tell you what they think they want, but are really describing the way they think something should be implemented.

Figuring out the difference is the hard part.

<comment><USER5> Yep, good way of describing the difference. Sometimes it's tough to tell the difference too - but once you have, you can move forward and get on with bringin the customer a solution that'll make you both happy :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this article is somewhat misleading, because "make something people want" is said in the context of a product business, not a service business.

Of course your freelance business customers know what they want - <USER2> they wouldn't pay you to build it. But product customers are an entirely different breed. They do have some idea what they want, so it's certainly still correct to go back to your customers to get feedback about your product, but it's misleading to equate these to service customers. With product customers, they won't tell you what they want until you spend much energy eliciting that feedback. It's not "simply a matter of translating business needs into technical jargon".

<comment><USER5> That's very true. My article was written with the service-industry in mind. That being said, the person I was talking to was also talking with the service industry in mind ;)

Still - you're quite correct that perhaps when creating "things" you may need a different appraoch - as I've never really worked in the "things" industry I can't comment. Anyone have any experience that would care to share their viewpoint?</comment></comment>


Nokia opens positions on new Linux-based OS Maltemi - <AUTHOR> http://www.intomobile.com/2011/10/10/nokia-job-listing-confirms-existence-meltemi-new-yet-announced-linux-based-os/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IntoMobile+%28IntoMobile%29

<comment><AUTHOR> The [original job offer]([http://nokia.taleo.net/careersection/10120/jobdetail.ftl?lan...](http://nokia.taleo.net/careersection/10120/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=RES000002D6)) is not available anymore, unfortunately.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's good to see Nokia out of Microsoft umbrella.</comment>


How Google plans to rule the computing world through Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/05/22/how-google-plans-to-rule-the-computing-world-through-chrome/ <comment><USER2> I don't think I could disagree with the author more, and I am coming from the perspective of someone who also bought a pixel. (Actually we agree there, it is the best put together machine I've ever used... more on that later.)

I'm not running ChromeOS on my pixel right now. I tried it for a weekend, it wasn't my cup of tea, and I slapped Debian onto it instead. No big surprise there, I have different needs from most computer users. I want a web browser, a tiling window manager, and a metric fuckton of urxvt's on my screen at once... it doesn't surprise or concern me that I didn't like ChromeOS. I also don't like OSX and Windows 7/8; clearly I have minority interests.

Who _is_ the target user of these systems then? Well, I may not like OSX or Windows, but I certainly understand at least a segment of their market. If my mother asks me for an opinion on what computer to get, I'm going to tell her to get a mac, or to stick with the windows Thinkpads she's traditionally gotten. Either of those are great for her, great for browsing the web, watching videos, and viewing pictures from her camera. Now, as I understand the marketing materials, this should make ChromeOS (probably not the pixel, considering the cost, but ChromeOS) a perfect choice for her. I wouldn't even _consider_ recommending ChromeOS to her though, the reality of ChromeOS does not seem to fit the marketing materials or the author of this article's described reality.

I tried browsing pictures from my phone on it. My _android_ phone. Fucking awful experience. All of the shine but none of the grace of OSX. Wasted screen-space everywhere, piss-poor file navigation, the works. Alright then, how about watching some videos? Plug in my portable harddrive only to discover that the video player on the thing has all the codec/container support of a bargain-brand smart-tv from 2007. My _stock android phone_ does video a thousand times better than this shit. Fine, maybe I was expecting too much of the default video player. I don't expect my preferred mplayer to be available, but my brothers got my mother hooked on VLC a few years ago. Can I try that? Hahahaha no, what was I thinking? Alright, alright, what about webbrowsing? Well I guess it works exactly as you would expect. You open chrome and browse the web... nothing to complain about, nothing to get excited about. So score one for ChromeOS I guess?

The Pixel's hardware though.. my god it is fantastic. Well, aside from the absurdly tiny harddrive which would cripple any offline user with usage patterns terribly dissimilar from mine (for example: my mother). And aside from the uninspired RAM and processor offering... Those are not big complaints though, those failings don't represent significant technical challenges. They are things that could easily be fixed in the next revision. If those things are resolved the next generation of Pixel could be a serious contender, as a piece of _hardware_ , to any of Apple's offerings. They just don't have the software to do it though. If this ChromeOS crap does end up taking off in a few years it will be _despite_ the current state of affairs, much like Android's current popularity is _despite_ the abysmal quality of earlier versions. The market for desktop OS's is entirely different from the 2007-era smartphone market though; ChromeOS isn't _"that thing you use if your executives shit their pants when the iPhone was unveiled."_

Who would I recommend a pixel to? Nobody... nobody except for a very small list of users that I know have usage patterns very similar to my own (and to them I could not recommend the computer strongly enough). This could easily be fixed though. Their hardware could have a future for itself.

Who would I recommend ChromeOS to, with any imaginable hardware? I honestly have no idea, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

<comment><USER3> You're confusing me, honestly. If you have a Windows box, and want to view photos, would you settle for Paint? No, you'd be nuts to.

So when you want to browse pictures from your phone on your Chromebox, upload them to flickr, and the experience is awesome.

When you want to watch some videos on your Chromebox, you watch Netflix Instant Watch, or YouTube, or Google Play Movies, and the experience is awesome.

It's like you're comparing Vanilla Windows to Vanilla Chrome. Why are you tying one arm behind your back, like that? Install some programs on that Windows box, and use the best of the web on your Chromebox.

<comment><USER4> But you wouldn't use Paint. The Windows Photo View and Explorer actually do a more than adequate job. Windows Media Player too does a reasonable job of playing video. Netflix, YouTube and Google Play Movies don't solve the problem of plying _my_ videos. The Mac, modern desktop Linux distos and Windows support the functionality that the OP and you crave out of the box - as do most tables, including the iPad. I just don't see where Chrome OS fits in.

<comment><USER3> Yes, YouTube does solve the problem of playing your videos. And sharing them with your friends. And archiving them, in case of disaster. If you're willing to use YouTube, of course. If not, you can use Smugmug or Flickr or Vimeo or...

ChromeOS is inherently an operating system that uses the internet to solve users' problems.

Expecting ChromeOS to have BUILT-IN ways to do what you want to, is kind of silly, in my mind. I validate that you may reject the design idea, but you're forcing it into solving problems in a way it was inherently and intentionally NOT designed to solve them.

<comment><USER5> YouTube or any other Internet Only service does not solve the problem of playing my videos very well.

Why would I want to upload gigabytes of video instead of downloading a small program to play them locally? If I care about archiving things - why would I want to archive just my video files?

I don't think anyone expects ChromeOS to have many built-in ways of doing things - but I also don't expect ChromeOS to be very widely used because it's not solving users' problems very well at all. Unless of course...they add native apps ;) Then it could be something.

<comment><USER3> > Why would I want to upload gigabytes of video

To archive them. To share them.

> If I care about archiving things - why would I want to archive just my video > files?

You wouldn't. You'd want to archive anything. I genuinely don't understand the point you were trying to make here.

> it's not solving users' problems very well at all

I disagree. It solves my problems better than most other devices. "Playing my videos," it does extremely well. Step one, I shoot them on my Android, so they're instantly uploaded. If I have a video that's not on Android, I upload it to YouTube to archive and share it.

Many people in Moore, OK are shifting through rubble, looking for family photos. I think backing photos and videos up online makes a ton of sense...

<comment><USER5> I don't want or need to publish _many_ of my videos or photos online. They are private; I'm a fairly private person.

Also - where am I supposed to put the terabytes of legally obtained digital media that I own? Can you upload every movie you own to YouTube? Furthermore, my NAS serves things quicker than any online service.

I also like a local player in case there's no Internet connection or if it's slow. I go camping in the mountains and my mobile provider has spotty coverage in remote regions.

So no, it doesn't solve the problem real well. I'll keep using _my_ NAS and _online backup service_ and _general/full_ operating systems such as Windows, OS X, Debian and CentOS.

<comment><USER3> > They are private; I'm a fairly private person.

You don't need to publish them. I have YouTube videos uploaded which can only be seen by me - with my two-factor authentication. I bet they're more secure than most backups that most HN'ers use.

> So no, it doesn't solve the problem real well.

I'd wager most users don't have terabytes of data, or need to watch movies when they go camping in the mountains.

Bummer it doesn't work for you, but I still think there a lot of people it would work for.

<comment><USER5> > I have YouTube videos uploaded which can only be seen by me - with my two- > factor authentication.

How can you be so sure? I think a Google employee or a three letter agency could probably look at them if they wanted to. What if Anonymous gets hold of them and wrongly identifies you as a bomber?

Also, I'd wager that most users don't _need_ to have all of their videos, photos or other media available to them wherever they go or on whatever device they're using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Both Packaged Apps and Native Client apps work on any computer that has the > Chrome browser installed.

Hmm. On my Mid 2011 MacBook Air, I searched for the referenced "Cracking Sands Racing" game on the Chrome Web Store, but found no results. I clicked on the link from the article, and am told "This application is not supported on this computer. Installation has been disabled." I guess they don't work on any computer after all.

When I try the Chrome Web Store, I find it difficult to distinguish between apps and what I would call just links to websites. For example, the top result in the "Lifestyle" section is an "app" that is really just a link to a random shopping site, full of the usual tracking cookies and advertising crap.

I feel tricked: if I wanted a shopping site, I'd have searched for it. Does Google just let anyone submit a link to their site and call it an app? Applications ought to have a higher quality bar.

<comment><USER7> They're in the process of reorganizing the store to do exactly that. Preview is available on Dev/Canary channels: [http://blog.chromium.org/2013/05/preview-new-chrome- packaged...](http://blog.chromium.org/2013/05/preview-new-chrome-packaged- apps.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A bit overly dramatic. Long term, I think there will be a harmonization between Chrome packaged apps and Firefox OS apps, and maybe even Surface RT. I personally prefer 'drive by' apps and I think install should really mean "bookmark and pin my cache".

The real issue is keeping the Web viable, as it is under attack from native platforms, and both Google and Firefox have to keep aggressively upgrading the platform to keep to competitive with what's available.

We've seen an astounding amount of innovation in the browser in the last few years. As Larry Page said at I/O when asked, eventually developers should not have to think about the platform.

<comment><USER9> Not so sure. The Internet and the browser make _many_ scenarios _very_ easy (Joel Spolsky makes a great case). Jeff Attwood, with ego firmly in hand, named a law after himself that says any software that can be written, will be written for the browser.

While entirely possible, that's an extreme view, and maybe not very realistic.

The web's "viability" as you put it, will naturally shrink into its natural niche. First and foremost it's probably good to remember that the web relies on a transport layer. There are apps (web sites, email and so on) that live on top of that. That transport layer is what makes the web compelling, but that's not the only possibility (or future) that that layer affords us.

I think the real viability question is not the web, but rather data ownership. Users' personal information created Facebook, user knowledge created Stack Exchange, and user behaviour generates Google's income (amongst many examples on the web).

Users that _are_ the raison d'être for these web sites have no power over, or control of their data. And it's that fact that will shift (and on mobile, already is shifting) focus back to native client apps that are completely decoupled from the browser. These apps use the Internet as a transport layer, in much the same way a browser does.

The shift then, as I see it, is towards one in which the balance of power over data is maintained in a natural equilibrium.

In that world, the Stack Exchanges will do well online because their acquisition of user knowledge benefits users directly. The Facebooks and Googles will (I imagine) remain relevant, but not in the way they'd like to be.

In conclusion, what the article posits will probably come to be, to a degree and for a while.

But it ain't the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good luck. There was a company in Redmond trying to do the same with IE.

<comment><USER11> Difference: IE was ugly and IE experience was ugly.

<comment><USER4> I personally find Chrome 'ugly'. Surely 'ugly' is an opinion? Also, I challenge your "IE experience was ugly." comment. Many seem to forget how revolutionary and influential IE 6 _is_. Google are very much standing on Microsoft shoulders here, like it or not.

<comment><USER3> > Google are very much standing on Microsoft shoulders here, like it or not.

That's a fine point of view, but I think that it's more accurate to say that Google and Microsoft are standing on the same shoulders.

<comment><USER4> Really? I'd suggest that Microsoft development of XMLHTTP and by extension XMLHttpRequest were pretty big developments for the web as we know it today. They certainly enabled Google to produce many of their services that are taken for granted today.

<comment><USER3> As I said, there's nothing wrong with your point of view. There's no denying that in the history of the web, those were important moments.

I'd say the creation of the web browser, HTML, HTTP, were even larger moments. And in that regard, Microsoft and Google are standing side-by-side on the shoulders of giants.

And I'd go further and say that when Google decided to make JavaScript performance a top-priority, and started pushing HTML5 standards, Microsoft has been the one playing catch-up. I'd say that those efforts enabled Microsoft to produce Metro, which is core to their new push.

<comment><USER4> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> deepak-kumar I used to be a Firefox fan but not anymore, I made chrome my default browser and I am highly satisfied. Now I use FF just to test while developing things. I love lightness of chrome and have shifted all dev related work to chrome. I wont be surprised if chrome becomes the first choice all the developers in next couple of years.

<comment><USER12> On a side note the only problem i had with chrome is that you cannot disable disk cache. The problem was easily solved with junctions to /Device/Null for the Cache and MediaCache folder.

<comment><USER13> Not sure if this is valid but:

User Bapabooiee:

Well, you guys are in luck (BTW, great work-around, Xenofon), since Chrome now has two startup switches that you can use:

\--disk-cache-dir and \--disk-cache-size

Simply close Chrome, right-click your Chrome shortcut, click Properties, and then in the field labeled "Target:", make it look something like this:

"...chrome.exe" --disk-cache-dir="CACHE_DIR" --disk-cache-size=N

Where 'CACHE_DIR' is the new cache location, and 'N' is the cache size limit, in bytes.

Use whichever switch you need, or both. Keep in mind, however, that these features may not be completely stable yet. But you probably shouldn't have any problem with using them.

And to anyone who's interested, I caught gander of the existence of these switches directly from a source code file for Chrome. See here:

[http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_s...](http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc)

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER14> Thanks! I'm trying it now. The caching directives work. Hopefully this will fix the performance issues I've been seeing with Chrome the past two months.

The issues I'm talking about are constant disk access and freezing the entire machine when I open multiple tabs simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This stuff seems like an excellent reason to go back to Firefox.

<comment><USER16> I tend to agree. Google is looking more and more like the MS of the new century. Chrome's performance advantage has all but been erased by FF (and in some cases FF is better in my anecdotal experience), and I find FF's add-on ecosystem _still_ better than Chrome's for development.

FF is OSS (as far as that goes) and certainly not sitting still. Seems like the obvious dev choice to me these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google is missing a key thing in its personality or repertoire. The ability to create god solid concepts that everyone understands. A nice tight category of thing that can have a name and a meaning.

Apple is the example of a company that did/does. iOS apps were a clear concept of day one. What are they? Where are they? How do you get them? How do you get rid of them? The average user is much less likely to be confused by that question on iOS than any other platform. They're one indivisible thing with one icon and no hair.

Google's exploratory Failure is OK, Let The Users Figure It Out mentality is good too. It produces some really good stuff. But, for a lot of the things that google is trying to do, the ability to create really strong concepts is important. "Packaged web app" or "chrome app" or even "web app" are not clear concepts. Users don't understand them. Is it a website? Is it a Link? Is it on my computer?

It's not just here that this ability would make a difference. Hangouts. Plus. Wave (rip). They all had definition problems.

</comment><comment><USER12> The precedent of Microsoft + DOJ and in Europe about IE means that some walled garden vendors will be somewhat reluctant to restrict browsers - especially if google has big enough legal guns. Which could give a (complicated) holes in the wall for vendors and users that like the hardware but hate the appstores.

</comment><comment><USER18> Or rather, how Google plans to rule the _consumer_ computing world.

It's been a while since the average Facebook addict really needed a computer anyway, they can all throw their laptops away and switch full-time to phones and tablets and I won't care.

But businesses and professionals have different needs. I don't see web apps and NaCl apps replacing Office suites, IDEs, or 3D graphic design tools anytime in the next decade, no matter how much Google tries to advertise Google Drive (Docs) as an Office replacement. There's a lot more to "computing" than shiny new consumer-grade gadgets. Although I vaguely remember a Chrome add-on that can SSH into remote machines, why would I use it when I have GNU utilities running natively on my OS?

> _What does your desktop look like a year from now?_

Probably the same as it does now. Lots of terminals and text editors, maybe a browser window or two in the background.

<comment><USER19> FWIW, the company I work at just moved from a windows+office+outlook setup to google apps.

And it just worked. Very smooth migration.

Just a random datapoint, not claiming its a trend.

<comment><USER20> and what do you do when the network is down ?

<comment><USER21> Keep working offline? [http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1628467)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If we for a second assume this is happening, I can't decide if it's worrisome development or something I should try to exploit..

<comment><USER23> I think it's the nature of business that those two opinions aren't mutually exclusive in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This observation brings some potential context to the rationale for the Dart language.

</comment><comment><USER25> Well thought-out post, but probably a little sanguine on the timeline. People are still digesting App Store and other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER26> There are a lot of caveats to the stats.

First, look at the browser marketshare table.

Notice how Net Applications shows Chrome only at 16% while the others are close to 40%? Wonder why?

Net Applications attempts to measure what individual users are using, while Statcounter tries to measure how much of browsing is done though a particular browser. That is, if you browse 1000 webpages a day and use Chrome, and your girlfriend browses only 50 but uses Firefox, Statcounter counts you as 20 times more marketshare than your girlfriend! In this hypothetical scenario, Statcounter will give Firefox 5% of marketshare and Chrome 95%, even though half of people use Firefox.

This is like setting up a lookout on a road in a typical US city and concluding that the Ford Crown Victoria is the most popular car in America, based on the fact that you see it most since the taxicabs and police patrol cars drive back and forth all day(since you're not tracking the license plate) while the best selling cars like the Honda Civic/Accord, Toyota Camry/Corolla are not driven as much during a typical day. So, if you're writing a Chrome app, you're targeting only around 16% of people, not 40%.

Google bundles Chrome by default with Flash, Acrobat and Java updates which are installed on 98% of computers by paying a lot for it, Mozilla has nowhere near the huge ad revenues like Google does. Not to mention how Chrome is pushed on Google properties like Gmail and Youtube. I keep seeing a "Slow browser? Upgrade to Chrome." message on Gmail sometimes while using the latest version of Opera.

The biggest challenge Chrome apps will have is that they won't run on the hottest devices right now, the iPad and iPhones. Apple prohibits any sort of native API or dynamic code in iOS apps so Chrome apps will be confined to HTML5 and WebGL.

<comment><USER27> Net Applications count unique daily users, so if you surf all day you'll be counted as exactly the same as your friend who only surfs a little each day. However, you will both be counted 7 times more than someone who only surfs once a week.

So both give weight to more regular web surfers, it's just that Net Applications caps it at the level of daily use.

<comment><USER28> In addition to counting vistors rather than hits, Net Applications has a global number of 6.22% for Internet Explorer 6. No, that is not a typo, that is the number pulled today, because Net Applications performs geographic weighting of their data, and China has 24% usage. That inflates the global Internet Explorer numbers and is higher than IE7. Last time I looked at ie6countdown.com, the US and European numbers were 0.2%.

Sources: [http://www.netapplications.com/newsletter2/20090803/nanl.htm...](http://www.netapplications.com/newsletter2/20090803/nanl.html) [http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=2&...](http://netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0) <http://www.ie6countdown.com/></comment></comment></comment>


Australian Government wants Google to filter YouTube like it does for China - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/google-baulks-at-conroys-call-to-censor-youtube-20100211-ntm0.html

<comment><USER2> _Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally._

When your communication minister is making reference to Chinese internet policy in a favorable context you know something's gone badly wrong somewhere.

<comment><USER3> The Chinese censorship that Google is pulling the plug on?

<comment><USER4> _The Chinese censorship that Google is _supposedly_ pulling the plug on._

A lot of talking, but so far everything looks business as usual in China, AFAIK.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know what would be awesome? If Google just shut down youtube for australia. Even for a day. (With a site explaining that the government wants to censor it).

I know it will never happen - but would be so awesome if it did.

<comment><USER6> I really like this idea, actually. Though even a splash page would probably be enough. If put in the right terms, I think the majority of people would cry shenanigans on their gov't, as many probably have no idea it's going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's going on down there? There's been a burst of these sorts of stories lately.

I mean this seriously, since I live about 10,000 miles away; what's the story behind this burst of censorship lately? (A link is fine, but I don't have a clue what to even look for to get an answer.)

<comment><USER8> It's a few things. Both the communications minister and the PM are, despite being in the Labor Party, actually quite religious and conservative. There is a very strong wowser attitude from this government in particular which has resulted in increasing taxes on alcohol to discourage young drinking and various other forms of "nanny state" initiatives. We need to be protected from ourselves it seems.

Also, there is a single Australian senator (Steven Fielding) from a religious right party called Family First who holds the balance of power. His support is often required for the passage of government legislation, and the strong suspicion is that deals on things like internet censorship have been done behind the scenes.

Finally and most critically in my view, we have no enshrined right to freedom of speech or expression in our constitution and most Australians are too apathetic to demands these rights, and protest the government's actions.

<comment><USER9> " _Also, there is a single senator ... who holds the balance of power._ "

This seems to be a serious design flaw in democracy. One person (or one small party), with the ability to swing the majority vote one way or another, ends up with a disproportionate amount of power.

We see this with the Quebec separatists in Canada, and in the US, with their "independent" senators.

<comment><USER8> It gets worse. Australia has a preferential voting system where you rank the candidates from first choice to last. It's not too bad a system if there's a small number of candidates, but the senate has dozens.

So the alternative to numbering every box (and what most people do for the senate), is to just put a "1" in the party of your choice. They then decide who the preferences go to. I'm not kidding.

In the case of Steven Fielding, the 2 major parties both gave him their "preferences" above each other, but neither of the major parties got enough votes to get the seat, so he got it. How many people actually voted for him as their _preferred_ candidate? 56,376

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> so the australian communications Minister Stephen Conroy has just set the democracy and freedom of speech and internet to chinese standards? this is sad. could someone just tell these peoples to wake up!

<comment><USER11> It obviously isn't to Chinese standards. China censors dissent and political opposition. The Australian Constitution protects freedom of political communication. Therefore, any laws that restrict the ability of residents to discuss and criticise political decisions and issues would be unconstitutional.

In regards to euthanasia, it is perfectly fine to discuss the philosophical and political arguments on each side. However, it is currently illegal to provide explicit how-to instructions on performing euthanasia. This has led to the disappointing decision to ban The Peaceful Pill Book, written by Australian euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke.

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

The proposed Internet filter will limit access to extreme porn, excessively violent material and instructions on how to commit crimes. It's regrettable that the government is even proposing such legislation, but it doesn't help anyone to make inaccurate comparisons to countries like China and Iran. A more sensible comparison would be to Denmark, which already has an operational internet filter.

<comment><USER10> Quote: "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally." Well , this sounds like referring to chinese standards to me, and it seems to just be a first step, they already imposed censorship on other stuff, not quite sure what it is exactly,a kind of blacklist: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia) so if you give these Guys the power to filter everything they don't want you to see, they will use it, google has a search engine and this search engine help peoples " find what they are looking for " so I think maybe they should figure out how to educate people to not look for some kind of content and not ask google to do that, and maybe some parents to do their homework with their kids looking for porn and other sensitive content.

<comment><USER12> I imagine Conroy was making the point that it was technically possible. I don't think that bringing up Chinese internet censorship was the most politically astute way to make that point, mind you...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The really stupid thing about this is that most of the kinds of material that Conroy makes a big deal about (child porn, fetish porn, etc) is already banned on Youtube. The kinds of things that they're asking Google to go the effort of filtering are videos about things like how to do graffiti, and information about euthanasia. Not really worth it, is it?

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be brilliant if President Obama could bring this up as a discussion topic when he visits here, next month.

I've noticed some intelligent and balanced commentary from the US State dept recently regarding Internet censorship, democracy and human rights.

</comment><comment><USER15> Population of China: 1,325,639,982

GDP of China: $4.33 Trillion

Population of Australia: 21,374,000

GDP of Australia: $1.02 Trillion

As unfair as China's censorship is, they can have it because they have a large enough market. Is Australia _really_ large enough for Google to be that concerned about?

It's not fair. But then again, business isn't fair either.

<comment><USER16> China has over 60x the population of Australia but only 4x the GDP. Sounds like Australia is quite a honey pot relatively speaking. Especially when you consider YouTube ad revenue probably does better in Australia than in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What kinds of videos do the Australians want Youtube to filter? I think this might be someone to score political points out of a minister misstatement. I suspect Youtube already does a good enough job filtering porn to satisfy the Australian government. It's not like the Australians want to start blocking words like "freedom" and "nirvana".

<comment><USER11> The full interview can be seen here, and is worth watching:

[http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/stephen-conroy- extende...](http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/stephen-conroy-extended- interview)

Conroy wasn't talking about YouTube specifically, but about Google and high- volume websites in general that currently aren't possible to filter through software. I'd be surprised if YouTube did contain material that the OFLC would consider Refused Classification.

<comment><USER5> Possibly. I wonder if a video game playthrough (say fallout 3) is RC? The US version of the game is, but is a video of said game (esp. as there's an R rating for video). Also - the crime instruction issue, might be something like that on youtube

<comment><USER11> There is only one worldwide version of Fallout 3; the Australian version is identical to the US copy. The item Morphine was renamed Med-X to pass through the Australian Classfication Board. The name change was also applied to all other international versions of the game.

A better example would be a game like L4D2. However that should be perfectly fine. Although video games lack an R18+ rating in Australia, such a rating exists for television and film. Therefore, a video of a RC computer game should be fine (as long as it is within the constraints of the R18+ rating for film).

I think it's unlikely that YouTube would a host a video on crime instruction that would be severe enough to be considered RC. I may be wrong. Perhaps someone could try uploading a euthanasia how-to video on YouTube describing explicitly the steps involved in performing euthanasia - the drugs required, how to obtain and smuggle such drugs through Australian customs, and the dosage required. I suspect that YouTube would probably take it down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Our current affairs programs such as 'Today Tonight' and 'A Current Affair' feed on stories like these, which only provide more fuel for newspapers, radio talk shows and even schools for discussion.

The general public here is still of the naive opinion that the internet is dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER19> So lately I've been thinking, there seems to be a large push globally towards greater censorship on the web. At the moment it would seem as if the US has been immune, but it makes me consider the possibility that in the future it could come to us too. I had this idea of building a backup system for easily and covertly passing information around on the web using the existing infrastructure in order to bypass existing filtration systems. It seems really important that we should be prepared, just in case.</comment>


Practical Pair Programming - <AUTHOR> http://blakehaswell.com/post/69781756807/practical-pair-programming

<comment><USER2> "Secondly, pair programming is proven to increase code-quality and clarity, while reducing the number of bugs"

Isn't it true that its only shown to slightly improve these metrics? At 2X the cost of development, perhaps there's a better way.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there are better ways. But this is something we're trying, and in the early stages it seems to be working well for us. YMMV.

As for the metrics… from the studies that I have seen, the effect pair programming has on these metrics is related to the complexity of the tasks.

For simple tasks, pairs don't complete work significantly faster or with significantly fewer defects (so you're essentially spending 2x effort for the same result). But for complex tasks, pairs tend to complete the work slightly more quickly and with significantly fewer defects (so you're spending nearly 2x effort for a better result).

Given that our team was taking a long time going back-and-forth in this code review stage, we decided it would be worth expending the effort up-front to produce more correct code and (hopefully) reduce the time we were spending ensuring the code was correct after-the-fact.

I'm not sure that this will increase our teams velocity, but I think it might increase moral. Nothing sucks harder than finishing a task and then being told it's not good enough.</comment></comment>


Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/12/books/review/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-joseph-henrich.html <comment><USER2> _> The centerpiece of Henrich's theory is the role played by what he calls the Roman Catholic Church's Marriage and Family Program, featuring prohibitions of polygamy, divorce, marriage to first cousins, and even to such distant blood relatives as sixth cousins, while discouraging adoption and arranged marriages and the strict norms of inheritance that prevailed in extended families, clans and tribes. "The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in 'figuring out' how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread."_

</comment><comment><USER3> I did very much like "The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt, which mentions this WEIRDness on several occasions to make a distinction so he is able to speak about a certain cluster of political and social environments today.

The book actually tries to draw more evidence-based claims to explain some of our core political differences as rooted in psychological differences that are rarely salient to us, let alone mutable. It also makes a very compelling case for trying to understand and empathize with core values that people on different sides of the political spectrum fight for, which is especially convincing if we accept that these values are not always the result of a conscious decision. They rarely are the result of something egocentric like selfishness but rather the result of how we prioritize different parts of society, and some balance is probably desirable between opposing views here.

</comment><comment><USER4> This reads like thinly veiled racism. Replace "weird people" with "superior people" and "West" with "white" and this article leaves a bad taste.

> what it doesn't need, and shouldn't provoke, is ideological condemnations

The whole premise of western cultural superiority in this book is on very thin pillars, I'd venture to guess.

<comment><USER5> It's not racism to point out differences between cultures.

Is it racist to observe that homosexuality is severely punished in Islamic societies?

<comment><USER6> It was severely punished in all societies until recently. Islamic societies have not developed yet, and its not entirely clear that it's because of Islam. First you have to accept that ideas, rather than the material conditions, are primarily responsible for changing society. That's not obvious, and it's not obvious that the material conditions primarily change society either. Both culture and material conditions are responsible, and things are unimaginably complex, to the point that we as humans collectively can't control the direction of history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic.

How precious.

<comment><USER8> Right. That's the silly part.

As the reviewer says, "This book calls out for respectful but ruthless vetting on all counts."

The main point seems to be "The accidental genius of Western Christianity was in 'figuring out' how to dismantle kin-based institutions while at the same time catalyzing its own spread."

Do societies with strong kin-based structures have scaling problems?

<comment><USER9> I would say they do have scaling problems in the form of rampant corruption. You need to destroy local power to form a bigger nation. Nobility has always resisted kings and kings emperors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looting and ruling most of the world did help. Too bad the locals could not match up to the capability of the West.

<comment><USER11> Too bad the locals were weakened by other overlords who already crushed their armies.

The Indian Mughal Empire, the South American Incas, Maya and Aztec empires, the Chinese Manchu - they were all already looting and ruling. For the locals, nothing changed. The West just conquered conquerors.

Actually, life may have improved for the locals. The American slave trade tapped into the already existing African slave trade. Where are the descendants of the slaves who didn't make it to America?

<comment><USER10> I do agree with this premise but many intellectual discussions in the West simply gloss over the importance of colonialism in their history. Literally having access to the most resource rich lands and conquering new territories for yourselves (USA, Canada, Aus, NZ just a few examples). Till recently (historically speaking) non whites were not allowed to these places unless as slaves or for specific reasons (Chinese building first US trans continental railroad).

Having said that a lot of importance should go to the internal fights between European nations that helped them learn human behaviour to rule other countries. Off course mainly though propelled by development and spread of scientific ideas, industrial revolution and simply the need generated by the same.

One of the problems in old India was that we always had enough: Culture, food, weather and this led to many internal divisions and no need for invading foreign lands. The internal divisions were nicely exploited by Mughals first and British after.

I do not view these issues as Black and White, however i feel Western intellectuals really does not give enough respect to Eastern schools of thought. The Bhagavad Gita or Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War' as well as Chanakya's 'Kautilya Arthashastra' etc. developed far before. The pertinent question is why didn't these societies ever develop like the West ? The answer then always takes a form of a thinly us vs them narrative.

<comment><USER11> >no need for invading foreign lands.

Apart from India itself being invaded by the Hindu culture. If I am not mistaken, then the lowest castes are the tribes that resisted conquest the most. It's conquests all the way down.

>The internal divisions were nicely exploited by Mughals first and British after.

>The pertinent question is why didn't these societies ever develop like the West ?

The usual argument is that Europe prospered because of the internal struggles and conflicts. But as you write, India had them too. India also invented 'Arabic' numbers, and had iron very early on.

Similarly, why did Arabic culture stall when they translated and thus had access to all the Greek treatises? Why didn't the Romans or Greeks get to it initially?

Could Weird be right, and it was the destruction of tribal structures?

There was a submission about Singapore some days ago that mentioned in passing that the long-term leader introduced Western thinking - whatever that is.

Personally, I think that it is observable in nerd culture. If you have a bunch of nerds, but no math, chemistry or physics, then it will take some years and it will be reinvented. With those weapons, whoever is left with some bully tendencies can conquer the world.

The question is: why are there not enough nerds in other cultures? Maybe for lack of the printing press? Not for the books, but books need paper, and you need cheap paper to write down your notes.

<comment><USER10> Hinduism has been a part of Indian culture since times of recorded history. I am not sure who told you that Hindus invaded India. A so called Aryan invasion theory was promoted by British historians in India and has been disproved time and again.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a huge fan of Dan Dennett's online lectures. Reading a few comments here, and the first few paragraphs of the text I started to despair. I fear in his efforts to bring the reader into the piece, he is missing the current cultural climate. Brrr.

Dennett's lectures are very engaging, and I appreciate not being put to sleep on a topic I only tangentially engage with, and I hope someone who is not in his 'ivory tower' at Tufts mentions it to him.

Though, fear not, for Dennett rights the ship. In fact he seems to speak directly to this community (and exchanges I had here recently about fake- science) with this passage:

"A good statistician (which I am not) should scrutinize the many uses of statistics made by Henrich and his team. They are probably all sound but he would want them examined rigorously..."

On point I should say.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'll try to read the book because maybe it answers this, but I struggle to see how they determine causal relationship in the direction of "prohibiting cousin marriage" to "more individualism and less kinship and less nepotism". Seems more likely that it could have been the other way around (or, more directly, cultures with strong kinship were just less likely to prohibit things that strengthen those bonds, like allowing cousins to marry).

<comment><USER14> Good question. Did the church come up with accidentally ingenius doctrines, or were they simply codifying cultural norms that emerged as people realized that inbreeding had negative effects?</comment></comment>


The Zero-Sum Bias: When people think that everything is a competition - <AUTHOR> https://effectiviology.com/zero-sum-bias/ <comment><USER3> I see this most clearly in people who will not trade in a board game like Monopoly _unless_ the deal is extremely slanted in their favor. They simply can't understand that people who trade will always beat people who don't, and the easiest way to trade is to trade fairly.

If four people are playing a game of Monopoly, and two trade with each other but the other two refuse, now two people are playing Monopoly and the other two are begging for it to end.

(Please don't reply by criticizing Monopoly, I know that many people don't like it, I suspect this is a major reason why.)

<comment><USER4> It's one of my all-time favorites. My favorite 'house rule' was invented by my nephew: He negotiated a % of rent I collected utilizing properties he traded to me.

<comment><USER3> Funny corollaries because Monopoly _is_ a zero-sum game (at the end there will be a ordering of players by relative wealth, and their absolute wealth ceases to matter): players should be trying to 1) trade as much as possible, even if some trades are slightly slanted against them, 2) spread their trades evenly amongst the other players, and 3) to actively discourage trades between other players.

You might as well give both players who trade a trade point, and award the victory to the player who has the most at the end.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Monopoly more or less is (there are ways to gain and lose money without taking the other players' money, but they almost do not depend on players' choices). I think the parent's point is that trade in monopoly, however, is not. By making an exchange that allows both traders to complete a color set, they end up both much richer than before the trade.

<comment><USER3> I understand the parent's point because I am the parent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of my favorites is the economy. People constantly talk about there only being a finite number of resources or money. While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations. It is easy to see when you take the historical perspective, that the vast majority of us are living much better off than those a hundred years ago and amazingly better than those of just a thousand years.

<comment><USER7> _While this is true, there is not a finite amount of wealth. The whole point of an economy is to generate new wealth and goods. Inventions and innovations._

This is a frustrating hand-wave that I've been subjected to for far too long. It's absolutely possible that there is a finite amount of wealth.

Moreover, even in an economy with positive growth, if a small fraction of individuals capture a large enough amount of the growth, wealth has effectively been capped for everyone else.

<comment><USER8> If by the wealth you mean land, then yes it's finite. But the ownership of man-crafted things is not. You can always create new apps or websites that generate values. Those man-crafted things can become useless someday as well. For example, a 3.5" floppy disk drive probably isn't worth what it used to be anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see people interpret personal comfort as zero sum and it drives me nuts. Like somehow other people being safe and comfortable devalues ones own safety and comfort.

<comment><USER10> I suspect it is because many humans derive self-worth from seeing other people who are worse off than they are. If you have that mindset, personal comfort really can be a zero-sum game, sadly...

<comment><USER11> Protip: please don't say "humans" when you can just say 'people', or even 'folks'! It makes you sound a lot more, well, _human_ , and less like a poorly-programmed, clunky robot.

Related: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not- soundi...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/style-guide-not-sounding- like-an-evil-robot/)

<comment><USER12> this feels like a superfluous nit

<comment><USER10> Thank you human :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Modern Life is so complex.

And in many situations , telling whether they're zero sum, is uncertain, and hard. Look at the debates here for example.

So people default to what they already generally know.

They know that society is very competitive. The job market is very competitive. The mating market is very competitive. Zero sum games are everywhere.

So it's no wonder they have this cognitive bias.

<comment><USER14> None of those markets are really zero-sum. People value different things in all of those markets (jobs etc). Zero-sum is an edge case.

<comment><USER13> Interesting answer.

The people aiming for a certain position or role mostly care about similar things though.

So don't they play a zero sum game ?

<comment><USER15> The most effective person gets hired into a role. The firm performs well, moves more product, lowers prices for customers, sends larger orders to its suppliers, invests some surplus in R&D, grows its payroll, generates return for shareholders who then invest their gains in other enterprises, etc. Or an ineffective person is hired and the opposite happens.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _people tend to assume that if a product is superior in one dimension then > it must be inferior in other dimensions._

Assuming price is one of the dimensions, this is generally a true statement. Otherwise we'd have a bunch of best-in-class products that are cheaper than inferior competitors.

This _can_ occur for products sold at massive scale and with large tooling costs. This dynamic enables the producers of premium products to manufacture at lower cost than smaller-scale competitors. But usually they don't set their prices lower--they just enjoy higher profits.

<comment><USER17> Would this be dissimilar to undercutting a competitor? For example Ryzen 3rd gen chips seem to out perform, and undercut the price, of Intel chips with a similar feature set. Maybe brand is a dimension?

<comment><USER16> Sometimes this happens for a period of time, but in the medium- or long-run, the manufacturer of the superior product will raise prices. Undercutting is just a way of getting attention in the short-term.

<comment><USER18> The other alternative is that the inferior and more expensive version simply stops being produced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This will be controversial, but this is true everytime there is a pitchfork- inducing "the rich got richer in 20XX" thread. But it's not that the rich stole from the poor in order to become richer (though undoubtedly people will argue this).

If I stick a million dollars in an index fund and passively get richer, am I stealing from the poor? Wealth is not zero sum, yet we seem to treat it like it is (in order for poor people to become wealthy we need to take from the wealthy)

<comment><USER20> Not that I necessarily agree with them, but some people would say that your index fund _is_ stealing from the poor in a sense, because corporate profits (distributed to you, the shareholder, as dividends) are derived from exploiting the working class, when they could be raising wages instead.

This is obviously not the entire story, because the economy certainly has grown historically and continues to grow, and that growth comes from somewhere. But it is plausible that _some_ amount of wealth accumulation _does_ come at the detriment of the poor.

<comment><USER21> Well labour prices (for whatever the industry is) is driven by market forces. The Salary / Rate has to match the market expectations.

If the market rate is artificially inflated (minimum hourly wage) then companies will find a way to automate those jobs away. I am sure people will say that this would have happened anyway with certain unskilled labour jobs but you could argue that this only further incentivises them.

I would argue that the UK fast food chains and supermarkets are a good case study to illustrate this. In the UK most of the cashier staff are slowly being removed. Now they normally have 6 - 10 checkouts that are automated and have the customer scan their own items. Tesco (that where I normally go) instead of having 10 checkout staff you can buy 10 machines that are managed by one or two people at most. All the machines in the major supermarkets are using the same vendor for their machines and the software appears to the same for each supermarket but skinned, with the only exception being the german supermarkets.

Similarly at the other end of the scale in the UK. A C# .NET + MVC + JS with some SQL Server experience contract rate is about £350-400 a day. In London because developers expect higher rates (and the higher cost of living pushed the rate up by about £100-200 a day.

<comment><USER22> >Well labour prices (for whatever the industry is) is driven by market forces. [...] If the market rate is artificially inflated [...]

First, are all markets just markets?

Second, what if the market rate is artificially depressed - what if it is systemically artificially depressed?

Do market expectations align with an appropriate distribution of wealth to labour under conditions where the first is false or the second is true?

<comment><USER21> > First, are all markets just markets?

I am not sure what you mean by this.

> Second, what if the market rate is artificially depressed - what if it is > systemically artificially depressed?

Regarding artificial depression. Well this is where we get into some somewhat controversial territory.

Some will argue that immigration artificially depresses wages as you can artificially increase the supply of labour and thus drive down the prices. Those that are conspiratorially minded would claim that large companies would make efforts to lobby Political parties to have a more open doors policy on immigration.

Now there is some evidence of the market rate being depressed due to immigration e.g. construction wages have increased in the UK after the "Leave Vote".

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/24/constructio...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/24/construction- pay-rises-as-eu-workers-weigh-up-leaving-uk-survey-brexit)

But I remember reading about a Bank of England report which is somewhat recent and this is the published paper:

[https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the- impac...](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2015/the-impact-of- immigration-on-occupational-wages-evidence-from-britain)

However the stats themselves go over my head. I have google'd around for a simplified explanation (because I don't trust any of the newspapers to be honest as they will each push their own agenda). It appears that the effect on a native workers on minimum wage would have only lost less than a penny per hour due to immigration. A penny per hour is a rounding error for most people.

However that seems to be at Odds at what we have seen recently with construction.

So I don't know what to think tbh and I won't claim to be any definitive authority on the matter.

> Do market expectations align with an appropriate distribution of wealth to > labour under conditions where the first is false or the second is true?

Sorry it isn't clear what you are asking me to compare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "People sometimes view gender hierarchies in the workplace as being zero-sum, which can cause them to be more opposed to gender-fair policies."

Can someone explain why this isnt zero sum? If the hierarchy moves from being women at the bottom, men at the top to a fair mix, the 'gains' that women make are balanced out by 'losses' for the men. There isn't extra power/prestige/influence introduced to the system by being gender fair.

To clarify, I'm pro equal opportunities, this isn't a sexist rant.

<comment><USER6> You can still have a hierarchy and the sum of the individuals within that hierarchy does not need to add to zero. It can definitely be positive.

There's many joking examples about governments/lawyers/insert hated group making tasks more difficult or harder. This would be a negative value person and potentially a negative sum hierarchy.

Conversely we can see groups of people working together and forming coalitions that have better payoffs than what the individual members could achieve on their own (like a union coming together and fighting for workers rights. Which can also lead to a more productive business that profits more, thus meaning the boss also profits).

Tldr: Just because someone has a positive worth doesn't mean someone has a negative worth.

<comment><USER23> That's just the benefit of working as a group though.

Bob, Bill, Jill and Joan are already working as a group when Bob and Bill are the bosses. If we make Bill and Jill the bosses we don't inherently gain anything from that. Yes Jill and Joan might work better because they feel appreciated, equally though Bill and Bob could work worse because they've lost something. Hell Joan could still be annoyed because she didn't get the bosses job.

<comment><USER6> A hierarchy is a group structure. You could even call this a coalition game.

We can also say that everyone provides a positive value to the group. We can also say that certain people in certain positions provide more value to a coalition. None of this is zero sum. Someone being placed in a certain position does not require value being taken from elsewhere. This is not _required_ in a hierarchical job structure.

A zero sum game is one in which where one player gains value that results in another player losing value. Coalition-al games are games where members form groups.

<comment><USER23> "A zero sum game is one in which where one player gains value that results in another player losing value"

Yes that's what I'm contending. There can only be one boss, one deputy boss, one assistant deputy boss.

Your point about putting the right person in the right role is a fair point, but its from an organisational POV, not from an individual POV. If I'm the deputy manager, and I get demoted because Tina is a better fit, I have lost, and Tina has gained by the same amount. For Tina and I, it is a zero sum game. I am not misinterpreting that situation as a zero sum game, because for me it _is_ a zero sum game.

<comment><USER6> I understand then. We're talking about two different games. (I believe) You're talking about the game of obtaining positions. Yes, those games are "mostly" zero sum.

I am talking about a game which describes how well off everyone in the structure is. This is part of why I say "mostly" above, because if the structure is functioning efficiently it can expand and new allocations can be made, but I'd agree that in that instance it is again a zero sum for obtaining those positions (but now with more allocations than the previous game).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Men making games for men doesn't prevent women from making games for women, but somehow people always assume that the incumbents must adapt to serve the entire market. Why don't people see this as a great opportunity for women to carve out their own place in the industry? Literature already works like this, we have erotic romance novels with explicit descriptions of men's bodies catering to women and we have action novels with explicit description of women's bodies catering to men.

<comment><USER25> Gamers go apeshit over games for other men that they don't like. Or doritos. Gaming is absolutely worst example for this, because the community tend to be volatile over stupidest nonsense.

<comment><USER24> The game industry is not zero sum, but a game series is.

If a company made a new IP based around nerf guns and cell shaded graphics then nobody would complain. However if the next call of duty changed all weapons to nerf guns and used cell shaded graphics people would go ape-shit on it because it killed their beloved series. If the switch to nerf guns came as a result from gun-ban activists then people would send death threats to said gun-ban activists for killing their beloved series. This behavior is stupid and insane, yes, but it isn't as random or unreasonable as many think it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Every single example of zero sum thinking the author used was of whites and men trying to protect their own interests though zero-sum thinking which I found interesting. The author also seems to ignore that altruistic policies which could garner majority groups indirect benefits are themselves based on zero-sum thinking.

When I hear people justify affirmative action policies and racial and gender quotas some of the most frequent stats I heard bring up is relative income levels, relative employment levels, relative everything. Essentially the argument is based around the idea that "majorities' succeeding must have come at the expense of other groups. Even in say... a field like computing in America which is an economic juggernaut that popped up from nowhere which funnels money into the country... the very fact that more White/Asian/Indian men have gotten more jobs than other groups is framed as a crime against those other groups when this is not obvious. Specific needless discrimination and bias is brought up to bring home an argument that majority groups have been playing a nepotistic zero-sum game to their benefit and others and the greater good of societies detriment by keeping talented people with diverse perspectives down. Which isn't an obviously wrong argument yet the solutions on how to fight against this issue like affirmative action are fundamentally couched in zero-sum thinking. People who oppose it do not have zero-sum bias although they are arguably bias towards selfishness. Those are not the same thing.

I don't believe the author made his argument very well. He's confusing zero- sum bias with other types of bias. Singling out white men in all his examples also makes him come off as acting as if it's one group which has the problem which is unlikely to persuade anybody that it's personally wrong for them to engage in zero-sum bias.

P.S. Is zero-sum thinking truly irrational with the future repercussions of population growth and global warming? Time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER27> This article just kicked me off into a one hour tangent thinking about voting reform activism and my frustration with staunch ordinal voting advocates.

I've found that a lot of ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel that in order for a voting system to work well, it must impose a total order on peoples' preferences. Although they might say that people's preferences are naturally totally ordered, and that it wouldn't be an imposition at all. For me, ordinal systems are _destroying information about equal openness to multiple choices_. They are filtering the nuances of my preferences through a strict and destructive hierarchy. All just to distill these hypothetical "favorites" that I don't actually have, but which ordinal voting system advocates seem to feel are _real anyway_.

But I just don't believe that. It's like a whole different worldview. I believe that this sort of bias is at play in that broken, age old gap between ordinal and cardinal voting system advocates.

I wish some funny people would get together and do skits exposing the quirks of different voting systems by playing them out in an everyday, relatable situations e.g. a group of people choosing what restaurant to go to.

I can just imagine a Rob Richie character enforcing that everyone must have a strictly ranked preference between pizza and Thai food. No you are not allowed to be open to both. You must declare which is your ultimate favorite of the two. Even if it means alienating our lactose intolerant friend. They'll be fine since there's salad at the pizza place.

</comment><comment><USER28> The textbook example of zero-sum thinking is how most people (specially those involved in politics) talk about imports and exports.

<comment><USER29> All trade is a victim of this.

In reality, trade always creates value, and you can argue that all wealth in the world is created from trade, most of it interpersonal.

But people still feel instinctually that each transaction has a winner and a loser.

<comment><USER30> That'll likely depend on the definitions of trade and winning/losing.

If you're starving and I'm the only one around and I sell you a loaf of bread for a million dollars, did we both win? Sure, you'll live another week, but I sold you a bread that you'd usually pay a few bucks for and got a million in return.

If I'm paying the mafia for protection, do we both win? Sure, my restaurant doesn't burn down, but if the mafia didn't exist, it wouldn't burn down either.

What about forced trades without perceived value, like a mandatory membership in organizations whose services you don't care for? What do you gain, besides not being thrown into jail?

<comment><USER29> It certainly does depend on the definitions.

The unstated assumption is voluntary trades in a system of private property rights. Under those conditions, neither side will agree to the trade unless they benefit from it, so value is created for both sides.

So the mafia protection fee is a robbery, not a trade. The mandatory membership probably too.

The bread loaf _is_ a trade, and both people undeniably profit.

Emotionally, it feels "exploitative", but if you think about it, things are less clear. In reality, people stock up food to be prepared to sell it during famines in order to make profits. But this is often made illegal as "profiteering", and as a result no one stock up food, and more people die when the famine comes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would say it's a natural thing: our biases are mainly a creation of our subconscious, multigenerational experience starting from prehistoric times, our instincts. And before industrial era and before long-range maritime trade started, world has been pretty much a zero-sum place, so perceiving everything as zero-sum is "natural" to us.

Come to think about it, there must be a class of businesses based on this bias, it must be one of the hardest for people to overcome (just as it is hard to overcome lure of sexualized ads: that too, is an instinct, requiring too much conscious power to reject, especially when seeing it casually).

</comment><comment><USER32> People are also dumb.

</comment><comment><USER33> One thing that grinds my gears is how the article is shoehorning all these examples of zero-sum bias into a precisely zero-sum situation. It doesn't actually have to be zero-sum for that "bias" to become rational. For example, prisoner's dilemma (which would actually better describe most of the situations put forth in the article).

</comment><comment><USER34> A common one on HN is cryptocurrency energy use. If crypto didn't exist that energy would have been "wasted" on something else.

<comment><USER35> There's a huge hole in the ground a 100 or so miles from me and several trains a day rolling up the valley that would disagree with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It seems that the authors do not understand the 'zero-sum' definition and apply it to various situations where it simply does not apply.

To pick for example the first article, the only one linking to the full article and not just an extract:

Australians probably do not believe that there's a fixed sum of humans in the world and every new Iraqi means one less Australian. The demand to pick a nationality might be a bias (though plenty of states do not allow dual- citizenship), but it's not a 'zero sum' bias as commonly understood - <USER2> believes that there's an 'Australia-Iraq' game where only one side may win.</comment>


Sunrise was the best calendar app ever and now I feel lost - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/31/sunrise-was-the-best-calendar-app-ever-and-now-i-feel-lost/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.sunrise.com](http://www.sunrise.com) used to be great, but I agree it's time to find an alternative.</comment>


Obama Opens NSA's Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2017/01/13/obama-opens-nsas-vast-trove-of-warrantless-data-to-entire-intelligence-community-just-in-time-for-trump/?n=1 <comment><AUTHOR> It's _" funny"_ how Obama chooses his decisive moments:

He signed the NDAA act [0] into law on New Year's Eve a few years ago while every one was out partying. And now this. Do you see the pattern?

[0] Military can detain any American citizen and put them in a secret prison facility indefinitely. The President can order a US citizen's assassination - on US soil - with no oversight.</comment>