Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020 - <AUTHOR> http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories <comment><USER3> I am always very impressed when I see these demos and how much can be done with so little. If you are like me you just jumped to Youtube[1] to see it in action.

When trying to make my significant other to understand what was happening I wanted to run it myself. I was amazed how simple that was!

\- Install the assembler[2]

\- Install dosbox[3]

\- Get the source[4] and put it into c:\temp\demo\memories.asm

\- Start nasm and enter:

        cd c:\temp\demo
        nasm.exe memories.asm -fbin -o memories.com

\- Start dosbox and enter:

        mount d c:\temp\demo
        d:
        dir
        memories

\- Press [ALT][ENTER] for fullscreen

The dosbox config is not optimized but it runs with sound with the default settings!

For me this is somehow much more impressive than simply watching the video.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imquk_3oFf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imquk_3oFf4)

[2] [https://nasm.us/](https://nasm.us/)

[3] [https://www.dosbox.com/](https://www.dosbox.com/)

[4] [http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories#Original_release_cod...](http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Memories#Original_release_code_.28complete.29)

<comment><USER4> For macOS users (with brew):

      brew install dosbox nasm
      nasm memories.asm -fbin -o memories.com
      dosbox
      mount D ~/Development/memories (or whatever)
      D:
      memories

So, almost the same!

Hit FN+Ctrl+F12 to speed it up (it's time-independent, for smoother animations, hit that combination quite a few times).

It didn't output any audio for me, but that's probably fixable.

<comment><USER5> Using `dosbox .` skips two steps by mounting the current directory (at least on linux where I tried it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a related note: 2019, "Dope on Wax" was 1st in the PC 64k section.

There is a breakdown of this demo on youtube, it's roughly ~2 hours. They explained how they made this demo. Really interesting to watch.

Demo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhqT0DhV9yE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhqT0DhV9yE)

Breakdown: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFIyj5Yv440](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFIyj5Yv440)

<comment><USER7> It's wonderful. More impressed with this being 64k than the originally posted 256 bytes.

<comment><USER8> PC64k is the main size constrained demo format, where people do seriously impressive things. 256b is the masochists category, where doing anything at all is hard. 4k intros are in between.

It's interesting that the demo scene is very Windows/DOS focused, unlike other hacker scenes. Linux or Mac demos are basically not a thing. You're far more likely to see C64 or Amiga demos.

<comment><USER7> Well I guess it makes sense after all, because in DOS you kinda have an "API", for instance using the default interrupts you can select video modes, and the video memory is mapped at a fixed offset and so forth. In Linux due to API fragmentation it would be hard to agree on something that works in the future, and even know likely more setup boilerplate setup code is needed.

<comment><USER9> Agreed. Just as a heads up regarding "future safety", the guys at NVIDIA - <USER2> now - seem to keep the door open for Dos/Bios with very high possible resolutions [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63522#c858522](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63522#c858522) and even without the need for going the VESA way. Nothing i would really rely on in a business case ;) but neat anyway. (Mode List for several current GPUs : [https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11672&page=1](https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11672&page=1) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > In 320x200 mode, instead of constructing X and Y from the screen pointer DI > with DIV, you can get a decent estimation with multiplying the screen > pointer with 0xCCCD and read X and Y from the 8bit registers DH (+DL as > 16bit value) and DL (+AH as 16bit value). The idea is to interpret DI as a > kind of 16 bit float in the range [0,1], from start to end. Multiplying this > number in [0,1] with 65536 / 320 = 204,8 results in the row before the > comma, and again as a kind of a float, the column after the comma. The > representation 0xCCCD is the nearest rounding of 204,8 * 256 ( = 52428,8 ~ > 52429 = 0xCCCD). As long as the 16 bit representations are used, there is no > precision loss.

Řrřola's trick. A bit like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root)

<comment><USER11> This explanation was so confusing that I had to write a program to get it clear in my head. [https://gistpreview.github.io/?9b252f267cd1fdf9754059bb73a18...](https://gistpreview.github.io/?9b252f267cd1fdf9754059bb73a18487)

More clearly: DI = (y * 320) + x

Multiply by 0xCCCD => (y * 0x1000040) + (x * 0xcccd)

Take top byte is equivalent to divide by 0x1000000. So that gives you Y. The next lower (third) byte is then (x * 0xcccd / 0x10000) == (x * 52429 / 65536) =~ (x * 256/320). And the lower two bytes are noise.

<comment><USER9> (author here) you're right (about confusing), i wasn't expecting more than a few people to actually read this ;) at least i quickly repaired the float/fixed thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The source code really looks like black magic. It's incredible they were able to cram the tunnel effect into 64 bytes [1].

The entire video is here [2], if you just want to watch the final product.

EDIT: link fixed.

[1] [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85227](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85227)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imquk_3oFf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imquk_3oFf4)

<comment><USER12> There's something beautiful about the fact that the video is FAR larger in size than the program that initially generated the output. Almost worth watching for that fact alone.

<comment><USER13> Your comment's html source code (the entire <div>) is also larger with its 380 bytes.

<comment><USER14> It always stings when I make a website/app pulled through all the optimizers and compression algorithms, and the content people fuck it all up by adding 10MB of images :/.

<comment><USER15> You are building a passenger airliner optimized to don't crash and burn, don't worry about the cargo :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A couple of other famous short demos:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE) ("Elevated", 4k)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp0t2jCMGZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp0t2jCMGZE) ("One of those days", 8k)

</comment><comment><USER17> Not MS-DOS, but my favourite 256 byte demo is for the C64: "A Mind Is Born", check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWblpsLZ-O8) that music is astonishing.

<comment><USER18> If i had experienced this out of my dads humble little c64 back in the 80's i think i would have passed out. That music is incredible esp considering how concisely it is stored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is a JavaScript implementation of this parallax checkerboards effect with just 140 characters of code, including 3D animated perspective: [https://www.dwitter.net/top/all](https://www.dwitter.net/top/all) In this page you can also find an implementation of Pouet's tunnel effect.

<comment><USER20> I immediately think about the dwitter crowd when seeing the video. I think I recognized several patterns. Seems sound that in the shortest size goal, everyone ends up using the same function classes to generate maximal impact with minimal bytes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone describe at a high level for a complete noob how this kind of thing works? Someone who is not going to be able to read a bunch of ASM and interpret it? I'm guessing that it is something along the lines of:

\- the graphics "driver" reads values out of certain registers (AL and AH?) at a set interrupt (maybe every X clock cycles?) and writes one pixel to the screen of whatever color those registers had in them

\- by writing values into those registers and aligning the number of operations the program does with the frequency of the interrupts, you can get animation?

Even achieving any sort of flow control so you can switch between the effects is mind-boggling to me.

<comment><USER11> It gets much simpler when you realise that in the original PC there's no "driver" in the way but bits of hardware are wired directly to various processor buses.

This is sixteen-bit assembly, so you have the famous 640kb of RAM available to the user and a 64k bit of RAM beyond that (see "0xa000" in the program). The graphics hardware is continuously rendering frames out of there at 320x200, one pixel per byte, using the default system palette.

The rendering is rather like a pixel shader. There is a big for loop over all the pixels, and at each point it computes a pixel value. First it decides which frame number it is on (stored in BP register I think), then calls an "effect" for that pixel.

It then jumps three pixels. This gives that nice "dissolve" transition between effects.

Keyboard controller is wired directly to the bus, so you can read the keyboard with a single instruction.

A MIDI controller is wired directly to address 0x330 (not standard equipment, back in the day this required a Roland card or SoundBlaster 32?), so you can just write MIDI to that.

There is a system timer interrupt configured for the music. The graphics appear to run continously, I can't see a link to the timer or vertical sync in the graphics code, that appears to just run continuously.

<comment><USER9> (author here) The "three pixel jump" is just for the looks, and it smoothes the animation for more calculation heavy effects (f.e. raycast tunnel). The transition effect is not bound to this, it is rather using the "noise" (as you described it) from the coordinate calculation to offset the time (desribed in the writeup). The graphic output is linked to the timer via register BP, which is modified in the interrupt routine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is so cool

MS-DOS programming was overall a pain in the... byte but what I miss most about it was the simplicity of graphics.

Wanna draw? Just write to memory. Setting a mode was one instruction

(Wanna play sound? Fumble with 2 levels of IRQ controllers one DMA controller then sob uncontrollably. Or use Allegro. Wanna do multithreading? What's that? )

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a size comparison with a "hello world" program in my favorite language, Go.

      nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ cat > hello.go
      package main

      import "fmt"

      func main() {
          fmt.Println("hello world")
      }
      nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ go build
      nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ strip hello
      nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ ./hello
      hello world
      nchelluri@grugbarn:~/dev/hello $ du -h
      1.4M .

</comment><comment><USER24> This is amazing!

Here's another awesome 256b demo that I love: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66372](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66372)

<comment><USER9> That one is really amazing! I still don't understand how this didn't win the "Meteoriks" award (my "hypnoteye" did [https://www.pouet.net/awards.php#2015tiny- intro](https://www.pouet.net/awards.php#2015tiny-intro) ) Sadly, Baudsurfer has not been "around" for quite a while now ...

<comment><USER25> Memories is... going into the memory bank for greatest 256 byte demos for me, right above the one you linked and immediate railways. Dang dude

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The best demo I've found, also 256 bytes, is Pyrit by Řrřola (Jan Kadlec, a Czech developer). It's frankly incredible, something I wouldn't have believed was possible:

[https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78045](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78045)

I ported it to a boot sector so you can run it with a single (rather long!) Linux command line in qemu:

[https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/pyrit-by-rrrola- incred...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/pyrit-by-rrrola-incredible- raytracing-demo-as-a-qemu-bootable-disk-image/)

The source code for Pyrit is worth reading too (see first link). It's very clever and quite readable.

<comment><USER27> Video on youtube: [https://youtu.be/eYNoaVERfR4](https://youtu.be/eYNoaVERfR4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How do you handle time with such small code size? I see a timer interrupt for the music, but what about the animation? Is it dependent on the speed of the underlying CPU?

<comment><USER29> It depends on the speed of the CPU - if you look at the archive at [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85227](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=85227), you'll find a DOSBox config specifically for this demo. If you run it in DOSBox you can fiddle with the emulation speed by pressing C-F11 and C-F12 and you'll notice the speed of the animation change.

 _Later:_ Your question made me wonder what the performance of virtual 'target CPU' is - the 'cycles' setting in the config is 20000 and there's a rough estimate of what these numbers translate to here

[https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance](https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Performance)

So it looks like it's something along the lines of 'a 486 in the prime of its life'.

<comment><USER9> (author here) "you'll notice the speed of the animation change" that might be, but the demo is designed to run at equal speed on all systems (it hooks into the timer) if you experience animation speed differences, that means your system can not handle what dosbox (on high cycles) demands. It should be noted that DosBox is far slower than people expect it to be, and also, that in actual competitions in the demoscene, real modern hardware is booted to Freedos, but has no sound. So if you want sound (with MIDI) in a competition, you have to stick to the rather slow dosbox, and even optimize against an emulator which can be really really weird. ([https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11881](https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=11881)) I wouldn't claim the demo runs fine on a real 486, but a pentium should do, as a variation of the raycast tunnel part indicates ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_3CU6shKlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_3CU6shKlY))

<comment><USER29> Interesting, thanks! I _thought_ I saw it get faster when I turned up the cycles but maybe I'm misremembering or it's some other effect/artifact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I didn't know about sizecoding.org, it seems to be a very valuable and interesting resource explaining the "black art" of tiny demos, thanks ! I did not check yet all pages, but "Memories" entry in particular is very well written and explained.

</comment><comment><USER9> The final freedos version is available. It includes the Amiga Ball as extra effect. The filesize is still 256 bytes.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlW84fEHngM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlW84fEHngM)

</comment><comment><USER31> Since these are so small I don't see why we couldn't have a "demoscene launcher" with a "mailto:" style protocol handler and just let people click on base64 encoded links to start the demo.

<comment><USER32> A handler for executing arbitrary code. What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER33> We already allow arbitrary code to execute by clicking a link, in the form of JavaScript.

You may argue that JS is sandboxed, but so is DOSBox. At least DOSBox can't easily connect to remote servers over the internet.

<comment><USER32> Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't used DOSBOX for a decade but doesn't it have the ability to access hard drives and mount them?

Given that, it's not much of a sandbox.

Or does that require intervention from the host system rather than auto- mounting home and similar?

<comment><USER9> I would clearly prefer a web browser with a dosbox to the "real" dosbox when it comes to safety...

<comment><USER32> Then I agree completely, and must have misunderstood what was proposed by a handler. Typically a handler will launch an external application such as mailto, ftp, magnet, etc.

If we want to run code in browser there is WASM.

So is the proposal that it would it be beneficial to have a DOS-like OS or x86 emulator in WASM for running COM files?

Yes, that would be better and more sandboxed than dosbox running outside the browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> fun to watch this, like seeing the odd demo pop up on HN once in awhile and that code/techniques breakdown is incredible. Back in the day we rarely had that kind of insight into the mastery that went into a demo unless we really got into a discussion with the creator about the code.

another reminder of the 'art' of the demoscene and it's recent recognition as a piece of UN heritage in Finland which I thought was pretty cool [http://demoscene-the-art-of- coding.net/2020/04/15/breakthrou...](http://demoscene-the-art-of- coding.net/2020/04/15/breakthrough-finland-accepts-demoscene-on-their- national-list-of-intangible-cultural-heritage-of-humanity/) (HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22876961))

</comment><comment><USER35> I've always thought the demo scene looked cool. Problem is, I don't really care about graphics and sound and am not an especially creative person. Are there are competitions that are purely objective? As in, the objective criteria is quantitative?

<comment><USER36> The International Obfuscated C Code Contest

[https://www.ioccc.org/](https://www.ioccc.org/)

<comment><USER35> But people vote right? What quantitative metric could be possibly used to determine the most obfuscated C code?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> note the "type" dropdown at the top, and enjoy.

[https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php?type=32b&platform=&limit=5...](https://www.pouet.net/toplist.php?type=32b&platform=&limit=50&days=0)

</comment><comment><USER38> Wao this is pretty cool, I didn't know this site, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER39> That is pretty amazing.

</comment><comment><USER40> Pretty leet.

</comment><comment><USER41> The site has a login and lacks SSL. Hopefully this will be remedied soon.

</comment><comment><USER42> 256 bytes is in the "let's try every combination" range, I think. So, write a program that tries all of them and determines if any do something interesting enough to forward to a human for review.

<comment><USER43> Wouldn't that be 256^256? That's certainly a hell of a haystack

<comment><USER44> Unreasonably impossible as of yet, yes.

For handy reference:

8^8: 16,777,216

8^16: 281,474,976,710,656

8^32: 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336

8^64: 6,277,101,735,386,680,763,835,789,423,207,666,416,102,355,444,464,034,512,896

8^128: ...

8^256: ?

8^512: hello from the other side of the quantum dimension

8^8 sounds interesting. 16 million reboots of a real {PC,C64,ST,Amiga,Mac,Z80,...} sounds like a collectively highly entertaining kind of hilarious. The issues only begin when you start wondering if any of the programs wedges the hardware into "interesting" states that are preserved across reboots - or at least the _what if_ of that dimension of entropy... then the problem space becomes 8^8^8...

[I decided to compute 8^8^8. The result is apparently 15 million digits long. (`echo 8^8^8 | bc -ql | wc` -> `222814 222814 15596963`)

<comment><USER45> Thats weird "reference". Why 8 as the base number? Nobody works with 3bit bytes. 8^8 == 2^24 == 2^(8 * 3) == 256^3, i.e. the combination space of _three bytes_.

The smallest category in pouet for reference is 32b (or 256 bits), so 2^256 combinations to brute force. For comparison usually 128bit encryption is considered "safe" and infeasible to brute force.

You might be able to constrain the search space to only valid IA32 instructions, but realistically I don't see it helping that much

<comment><USER46> You could further constrain it to exclude a lot of instructions and instruction pairs that makes no sense given the context. E.g. any instruction pair where the second one makes the first one redundant, such as the second instruction clobbering the same register the first one modified. Or a "ret" in the first few instructions...

It'd probably not constrain the search space nearly enough though.

But even if it did and you'd somehow manage to even generate every combination, you'd still face the second problem of how to evaluate if they do something "interesting enough" to be worthwhile reviewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Tiny binaries probably relied heavily on the native OS's system libraries.

<comment> GuB-42 A common complaint on tiny demos. Here the OS is only used for setting graphics mode and setting up a timer. Plus all the boot code of course. Not much really, with 512 bytes you can probably do it on the bare metal, if someone didn't already.

There is even more debate in 4k. After all, most rely on graphics drivers that take hundreds of megabytes. But the thing to understand is that in any case, the intro ships all the code that produces the sound and image. The OS is just an abstraction layer. The exception would be fonts and MIDI instruments, that can be stored in the hardware or OS.

But not all intros have text, "Memories" doesn't. And many intros do their own sound synthesis, though in PC 256 bytes you are usually limited to MIDI or to that horrible buzzer.

<comment><USER9> (author here) Not quite, a 256 bytes PC intro CAN have decent non MIDI music as showcased here [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=79281](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=79281) (won the "outstanding technical achievment" award) I did some intros in 32 bytes and 16 bytes having that "horrible buzzer", looks like some ASCII effects and a dutch gabber bassline is the maximum you can get in this category :D ( [https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=76093](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=76093))

<comment> GuB-42 That's why I said "usually", the moment someone says something is impossible, someone does it ;)

Anyways, great job. I was there during the compo, it was epic, with everyone double checking the executable size, even the old guys who have seen it all. You got my vote BTW.

<comment><USER9> #truckbreaker ;) yes, the overall reception was overwhelming, i didn't expect that. i completely agree with your post before, just wanted to point to "ikubun" =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Normally these demos are filled with all kinds of 'tricks' to make things smaller.

Things like self modifying code, using bits of the bios or video ROM in ways they weren't intended by jumping into the middle of them, saving space by using code as data or vice versa, tiny packers which compress or uncompress the code, massive pregenerated buffers to do runtime lookups to generate data in one order but use it in another, etc.

This seems very vanilla in comparison...

<comment><USER49> Note your comment about how unimpressed you are is 214 bytes longer than the demo.

<comment><USER50> Obviously he didn't do any 'tricks' to make it smaller.

<comment><USER51> There's quite a few 'tricks' in the small bits of asm in the article.

Also, the tiny unpackers are generally used from 4096b and upwards. The size of the unpacker takes too much space and doesn't make up for the compression ratio at 256b.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best Programming Course for Complex Systems? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN!
I am currently interested in learning about Complex Systems and the theory that has been developed in the recent decades.
I am reading the excellent book called 'Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems' (https://www.amazon.de/Introduction-Theory-Complex-Systems-Thurner/dp/019882193X) which rigorously goes through the fundamentals on the theoretical framework.
It is however not very hands-on: I would like to code simulations on the side and get my hands dirty with coding.
I am looking for a course that specifically targets algorithms/frameworks that is used by Complexity Researchers. I know complexity sciences touches many disciplines, but the premise of the book is that there are underlying patterns in all types of complex systems, so a generalist approach would be preferable. (I am not interested in beginner course in coding, for eg.: Nature of Code (https://www.youtube.com/user/shiffman) touches on some algorithms to simulate multi-agent behaviour)
Please point me towards a good source :) <comment><USER2> You might find NetLogo interesting. There is also a free course on using it in terms of complex systems on the Complexity Explorer website. It is presented by the Santa Fe Institute, which you probably already know is at the forefront of this type of research. [https://www.complexityexplorer.org/](https://www.complexityexplorer.org/) for Complexity Explorer, and [https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/index.shtml](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/index.shtml) for NetLogo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah thanks, I'll definitely check it out (just saw I got a comment on this)!

Have you been involved in this area?

<comment><USER2> It depends on your definition of involvement. I used to archive alife project code on an ftp server in the early 90's, so there is that. Infosec got me too busy to keep with alife, which was really slowing down until recently, and only in the past year I started to get back into it again. I was working for a quantum computing startup which renewed my interest in complexity.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Visible Comment Scores - My Biggest Problem - <AUTHOR>

Okay, I know.. showing/not-showing comment votes has been rehashed in at least a few front-page posts at this point.. but there's one effect that I feel hits me the hardest with the not-showing-votes change and I'm not seeing it talked about. So, I'm wondering if I'm alone.
Bottom line is that since the display of comment votes was suppressed, I feel like the inertia of early comments is too strong. In summary, I believe there is psychology behind voting on comments whose scores you're aware of that allows users to evaluate the proximity of a comment's score to the 'right' score for that comment.. as opposed to making just a boolean thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision on whether the comment is good or bad without relative context. It's flawed.. the point of the scores are to seqeunce the comments, so not being able to see the scores leaves the reader without any context for making a decision.
Here's how it affects me:  I visit the comment thread on a post early-on. Maybe there's 6-20 comments, I get a sense for how the discussion is going and if the story is interesting to me I often want to revisit later to see what people have to say. Since comment scores were suppressed, I'm sure that the likelihood that the comments at the top of the list are much less likely to have changed. That is to say, there's a greater weight now placed on commenting early, and it's hurting the ability for voting to reflect the quality of the comments in the thread. I'd expect a system to stabilize and for the comments scores to become more useful and relevant over the life of the thread, not to begin polarizing in the very beginning of the thread's life. I think this is the biggest fault of the comment score change, and the reason it ought to be undone.
It ought to be provable. I'd posit that if you were to look at timestamps of comments before and after the change you'd find that it's now much more likely for comments with very early dates to appear at the top of the list than later ones...
That said, I feel like if I'm gonna complain I ought to provide an alternative. The comment scores are hidden for a reason, so what would I replace them with? I'm not sure. I've seen or imagined a couple of things that I think are worth trying. One is to quantize the displayed comment score.. "0,1,5,10,20,50,100" or something. That's an interesting idea. Another thought that intrigues me is to weight the comments score by the karma of the scorer.. giving well-respected user's more say in the value of a comment. I wonder if a combination of the two might help us arrive at the 'best' display of compelling comments  the fastest.
At any rate. </diatribe> <comment><USER2> Agree with showing visible comment scores, disagree with karma of a scorer adding more weight to comment scores.

Ok first the agreement.

When I was a non-member of HN, I use to skim through the comment thread and pick out good comments based on the score and most of the times, the HN community was great at identifying the best comments (Key phrase = "most of the times"). Then the scores were removed and I found myself regularly having to sift through the comment thread cause, like what the OP says, the top comments are more than likely the people who commented the earliest on the thread. In a comment thread where you have at least 30+ comments, you do sometimes find some interesting comments in the middle of the thread but again, without comment scores, I have to go through every one of them to pick out what is good or not. I would more than likely not be bothered if the thread had 100+ comments unless I'm absolutely interested in that topic or if it had comment scores.

As for your solution, I disagree with the bigger the karma of the scorer = the more points is added to a comment score.

I've seen this before in a particular forum and what I noticed was that users will start "blindly" agreeing or pandering to users with high karma just to get them to vote on their comment. I.e. If pg disagrees with say climate control, and a topic comes up in regards to that, you'll more likely see the comment thread heavily gravitating towards pg's views. Basically, what I am saying is that, doing this may result in a lot of comments being partial towards a user with high karma points if he/she participates in that comment thread.</comment>


How to Live on a Narrowboat - <AUTHOR> http://www.canaljunction.com/boat/liveaboard.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Lots of vlogs about this:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6SNxiLzSlh8e0yjndE9o_A/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6SNxiLzSlh8e0yjndE9o_A/videos)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sbb9qm- pqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sbb9qm-pqw)</comment>


We do not use C to build web apps - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3079153/why-do-you-not-use-c-for-your-web-apps <comment><USER2> Cause we have to kill every hacker existed on this planet first unless if every web developer had a team of 100+ specialists for free. For example, from a hacker perspective writing web apps in C is like running Windows 98 as a server in 2019 unless if you're Google and you willing to sacrifice 5000 devs for a web application from scratch in C.</comment>


Bill Gates Expected to Create Billion-Dollar Fund for Clean Energy (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/us/politics/bill-gates-expected-to-create-billion-dollar-fund-for-clean-energy.html <comment> rm_-rf_slash If a "clean energy" philanthropist really wanted to steer the world away from fossil fuels, they would lobby for the replacement of coal and oil with nuclear.

It is impossible to meet rising global energy needs without either a: nuclear energy as a wedge, b: divine advancements in renewable tech and cost, or c: burning a ton ton ton of fossil fuels.

I dream of a post-energy-scarcity-star-trek future pretty often, but the fact is that barring some revolutionary technological advancement, nuclear is the only long term hope we have to wean ourselves away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies. "Green" tech it ain't either: refining rare earths is environmentally disastrous and even recycling the waste can be quite hazardous, such as lead battery recycling plants in Africa resulting in lead poisoning in surrounding communities.

If we want to be serious about renewable energy and the long road it will take to get there, we will have to get over our fears of Chernobyl and Homer Simpson running the power plant

<comment><USER3> Gates _is_ supporting nuclear initiatives, including backing specific ventures, such as the TerraPower "Nuclear Candle" in situ sealed breeder design that "burns up" current spent nuclear fuel (plus a breeder initiator of uranium).

More generally, though nuclear faces considerable obstacles, among the most serious are designing a high-risk, high-complexity system for a very-long-term deployment. How long do you expect nuclear to be human's primary fuel source, and how do you plan to deal with non-technical challenges.

Modern technical society is about 200-250 years old -- most sources date the start of the Industrial Revolution to about 1800. Virtually all our present institutions, companies, science and understand, etc., have emerged or substantially evolved during this time (though of course many trace back further).

Running nuclear power at global scale from here until Doomsday means planning at the level of centuries, if not millennia or even millions of years. That's timescales exceeding the oldest people, companies, governments, schools, religions, languages, even basic systems of morality and ethics.

Provisioning global-scale nuclear power would require on the order of 15,000 plants operating simultaneously. Unavoidable metal embrittlement limits these to a practical life of about 40 years. That means commissioning and decommissioning plants at the rate of one per day, and both processes are themselves 20-40 year endeavours.

That occurring through political and economic crises, wars, natural disasters, political and moral revolutions, and more. Things which are somewhat difficult to engineer around.

Even trace amounts of some nuclear contaminants are exceptionally poisonous, and at the proposed scale of operation, risks of release are decidedly non- negligible. Present human experience is limited to about 400-500 reactor cores, and there have been at least 4 major core integrity breaches, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. Substantial fault in _all_ accident cases devolves to human and management practices, again, exceptionaly difficult to engineer around. With 30 times that many reactors operating from now until Doomsday, what acceptible accident rate are you targeting? We're at about 1:50 reactor years. Are you going to bump that up 10 - 100 fold?

At 1 per 100 reactor-years, we're looking at 150 core meltdowns pere century. At 1:1000, 15. You'd need to exceed 1:10,000 to limit yourself to 1.5 failures per century, and again, that through political strife, economic crisis, mob and mafia involvement, corruption, war, and natural disaster. Forever.

Renewable energy systems based on solar, wind, geothermal, and hydroelectric sources have far more benign failure rates. And I say that _despite_ the fact that the worst power plant disasters are included in that list. China's Banqiao Dam failed in 1975 (itself a story of engineering, design, management, communications, and meterological factors) killing 171,000. _Despite that, the region is now home to over 7 million people._ The _long term_ effects of such failures is relatively minimal, compared to the nondiscretionary multi-century wildlife refuges now surrounding the former Chernobyl and Fukushima sites, as well as smaller-factor radiation problems at locations such as Hanford, Washington.

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

More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of the 1972 book _Limits to Growth_. There are limts to growth, and at exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those limits need to be embraced.

Nuclear power is just one of numerous cases of pleading for exceptions from the Gods of Complexity. The real challenge (and one Gates also acknowledges, though generally privately) is of accepting the limits of humans' footprint on this little, and rare, and lonely planet of ours.

<comment><USER4> It's worth noting that, afaik, none of the reactors that have failed have been built using the "newest generation" of reactors, which are supposed to be much safer. This is a double edged sword, of course, because that also means they haven't been tested nearly as long. But I don't think the math to scaling nuclear power is as simple as we've fucked up 4/500 times, just extrapolate the numerator and denominator and you've got it. As we get more experienced with the technology we'll get better. And any conversation about the safety of nuclear needs to contain the relative risk of _not_ using nuclear.

> More generally, the problem I see is that which was the real core message of > the 1972 book Limits to Growth. There are limts to growth, and at > exponential scales, those are reached rapidly even with increasing resources > or pollution-absorption capacities by powers of 2, or 10, or 100. Those > limits need to be embraced.

Embracing those limits requires, as far as I can tell, eugenic-style control over breeding. Personally I'd rather the human race burns itself out than go down that path.

<comment><USER3> I'm a fan of empirical over theoretical data and arguments. The 4:500 rate is what we've achieved, and, belabouring the point, _all_ accidents have had massive _sociological_ elements. I very strongly recommend reading Charles Perrow ( _Normal Accidents_ , but also other works).

Yes, something's got to control human breeding. Either humans or something other than human. Most likely viral or bacteriological, in my book.

<comment><USER4> I generally agree, but in the case of the environment we're not going to have clear data on what to do. How are you comparing the risk of building nuclear to the risk of not building nuclear? It's a _very_ difficult thing to do.

<comment><USER3> That gets into some pretty profound discussions of just what "risk" is.

The current benchmark (e.g., used in the IPCC's own assessments of carbon- neutral energy options) is of lives per GW generation. I find this naive on numerous counts, e.g., my citation of the Banqiao disaster -- horrible if you were caught up in it (though also note: the bulk of the deaths werev from disease and starvation in the aftermath, the acute toll from the inundation was ~40-50k).

Virtually all deaths due to conventional processes -- physical, heat, trauma, even chemical -- are _fairly_ ameliorable by direct precautions. Even in the case of a massive dam failure -- Banqiao, Johnstown, Vajont -- advance warning of a few minutes would have reduced fatalities tremendously, and with hours or days, all but entirely. Each of these disasters was precipitated by clear warning signs, though they were unheeded, for various reasons. In the Johnstown and Vajont cases, state of the art in engineering and geology was a major component. Perverse incentives to plant operators existed in _all_ cases.

Looking at instances of explosions also suggests that warning, evacuation, and shelter could save virtually all lives, assuming a proper understanding of circumstances. Halifax, Canada, Galveston, TX, West, TX, Martinez, CA, Tianjin, China, and Lac Megantic, Canada all represented substantial loss of life which could have been avoided through both better advanced risk management and notice in advance of the precipitating disasters. Contrast the Pepcon disaster, among the largest non-nuclear blasts ever. Immediate deaths, though, were only two (another 370 or so injured), in large part due to the facility's isolation from any surrounding structures.

By contrast, long-term chronic exposures can be quite debilitating. Minimata, Japan, Love Canal, Hinkley, CA ("Erin Brokovich"), Bhopol, India, Agent Orange throughout Vietnam and SE Asia, and industrial contamination throughout China, will likely be with us for a long, long time. Flint, MI, can be added to that list.

Chemicals can generally be mitigated through binding and sequestration operations, nucleotides are more difficult. Long-term low-level chronic emissions, or perhaps worse: punctuated equilibria, concern me.

The bigger concern I have though is for _systemic_ failure. Nuclear energy provisioning, particularly based on very sparse fuel sources (uranium from seawater, thorium from rare earths mining) creates a long-term dependence on a large and potentially fragile technological stack. By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and even geothermal is _fairly_ straightforward.

"Complexity is the enemy of reliability" is a phrase first occurring in _The Economist_ newspaper, January 18, 1958. It's been repeated, usually as "complexity is the enemy", many times since, though I suspect those citing it don't know the origins (my first encounter was through Eric S. Raymond's writings).

Creating a civilisation-supporting technological stack that _isn 't_ complex seems a strong goal. And quantifying _systemic global risk_ part of the problem.

[http://books.google.com/books?id=aDsiAQAAMAAJ&q=%22complexit...](http://books.google.com/books?id=aDsiAQAAMAAJ&q=%22complexity+is+the+enemy%22&dq=%22complexity+is+the+enemy%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_tZgU9ncAYGQyATBp4GYDg&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24cxgc/program...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24cxgc/programming_sucks_or_a_young_ladys_illustrated/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for a very well thought out reply.

> By contrast, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power are rather simpler, and > even geothermal is fairly straightforward.

My understanding is scaling these technologies is where the complexity may lie, and that it would so extremely difficult to support the growing energy needs of the world's population using these technologies that they aren't really even an option. I'd like to be wrong. Am I?

<comment><USER3> I don't know.

This gets into a whole mess of considerations, and there's not a lot of agreement.

There's little doubt that there isn't a gross surplus of solar energy incident on Earth's surface. But that surplus is, by orders of magnitude, fairly thin relative to present human energy demands. By the time numerous factors are applied, you end up with infrastructure requirements which are truly prodigious.

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the real lesson of _Limits to Growth_ has largely been missed -- not _what_ limits are, but _that_ they exist, and even highly generous assumptions of abundance (or effluent absorption capabilities) are rapidly overwhelmed with even modest rates of growth. That is, the lesson is _humans must embrace limits._ There's considerable more math on how far in advance clear warning signs do or don't exist, though fundamentally the principles are simple.

This turns the typical statement of sustainability on its head. The question isn't "how do we provide energy, food, and other resources for the people we see coming", but "how many people can be supported, at what level of affluence, for what duration?" It's not energy supplies that are insufficient, it's humans which are overabundant.

Answers to "how many" vary, though I've seen published values ranging from 50 million to 50 billion -- three orders of magnitude. Someone's off by a lot.

Going by history, the range of 50 million - 2 billion corresponds to human population from early prehistory to about 1920. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the value stood at about 500 million.

Levels at or above present populations would require a large number of complex problems be solved for a very long time.

The answer to your question may well be not that you're wrong, but that you're asking the wrong questions.

Put another way: there's nothing inherent to the Universe (or even this small speck of it) which gives humans any right to existence or level of affluence. Predicating reality on what we'd prefer is the definition of wishful thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is dated November 27, 2015. Shouldn't he have created it by now?

<comment><USER6> He did, a couple of days later.

[http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/29/news/economy/bill-gates- brea...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/29/news/economy/bill-gates-breakthrough- energy-coalition/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, I can't change the url

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure we don't need billions of dollars of investments in clean energy, we need billions of dollars of investments in energy storage across a variety of scales ranging from household/vehicle level all the way to geographic regions. There are plenty of existing clean technologies that are as low or lower than the existing cost/kWh of dirty energy technologies. They are just intermittent and unreliable for base power distribution. Unfortunately energy storage is not as glamorous as clean energy production and doesn't get anywhere near the investment levels that it deserves.

<comment><USER8> Grid scale energy storage is a 'solved' problem.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped- storage_hydroel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped- storage_hydroelectric_power_stations)

EX: A single location is storing 4,200 gigawatt-hours per year:

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

<comment><USER3> Pumped hydro / storage sites are largely built out. To meet full needs, or alternatively, the equivalent dispatchable generation capacity of present fossil-fueled generation, would require something on the order of 2,400 Hoover Dam equivalents.

Siting and water flows for such installations are somewhat lacking.

[http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the- stor...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/)

<comment><USER8> Solar and wind never produce zero energy in a single day. So, at most you may want ~30% of one days worth of storage which less than ~1/20th of what he wants. Extra capacity is actually fairly cheap (winds cost are ~2.5¢/kWh now) and something we already do. In extreme events like a heat wave, traditional hydropower can make up the long term difference as it's designed to store power over long periods already.

There math is also wrong on energy density, you get ~30% efficiency with gas > electricity. So one gallon of gas takes less water on balance. ~4 cubic meters of water dropping one mile ~= 1 gallon. A 10 meter drop in water level over 1 km^2 = ~2,500,000 gallons of gas _per day_ and 0.9 billion gallons of gas per year.

Sure, you would need two ~1 km^2 square body's of water within ~3 miles of each other with one ~1 mile higher than another. But, building two 10-20m deep pools is cheap, so now you just need a large flat hill or an unusually deep valley.

PS: People talk about how variable wind is, but if you ignore the peak and compare median power to minimal power it's actually surprisingly steady. Yes, we will waste a few days at peak power, but that's not actually a lot of wasted energy.

<comment><USER3> Solar produces, to a reasonable approximation, zero energy _every_ night.

If you want to see seasonal trends, the Fraunhoffer Institute in Germany has excellent actual production plots for Germany. Solar does well in summer, not so much in winter. Some of the slack is made up for with wind.

There's additional other sources, including wastestream processing, though that itself is just derivative of biofuels. Germany has surprisingly little geothermal potential.

And though Germany is a high-latitude country, it's fairly representative of about 450 million people living in modern high-energy lifestyles, throughout Europe.

<comment><USER8> People use vastly more energy in the day time. Peak solar and usage don't line up 1:1, but they are fairly close. Further, Summer cooling uses a lot of energy and you get more solar energy in the Summer.

Solar hot water heating is much more efficient ~90% and easy to store locally. Payback is ~3-5 years in most of the US even if you only need heat for a few months out of the year. Granted, it does not work in Alaska, but it does work in Mane.

Thus, Wind for base load 24/7/365\. Solar for peak power usage. Toss in a 30% buffer + ~20% extra generating capacity get's you to 5 9's.

<comment><USER7> > People use vastly more energy in the day time.

This isn't guaranteed to be true. Before electrical household appliances were common, we used far more energy at night because indoor lighting was the primary use case for energy. And we are likely to revert to this pattern again if we ever have a mass move toward electric cars which will be charging at night.

<comment><USER3> To be fair: EVs (or other high-demand storage-recharge uses) will most likley operate _when supply is abundant_.

Presently with inflexible base-load power generation (coal and nuclear), that's at night.

Given nondispatchable opportunistic generation, that's likely to be during daylight hours.

Storage is the electrical demand of last resort, along with other very-high- energy uses (e.g., thermal banking, aluminium smelting, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I never understood why we don't do geothermal? I guess it's just more expensive to dig giant holes than do prettying energy sources?

<comment><USER10> There are geothermal plants but from what I remember they aren't that amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why isn't the government doing this? Why do we have to depend on the benevolence of billionaires to do something so essential?

<comment><USER12> There isn't a strong consensus among the worlds people that global warming is 1) real 2) bad, and 3) preventable.

I myself doubt whether there will be strong action until major changes already start.

And unless the whole world agrees to act in unison, it doesn't make sense for America to act unilaterally. China and India will just eat our lunches and do the polluting for us.

<comment><USER13> I agree about the former, but not with the last two sentences. China and to a lesser extent India have massive incentives to get clean energy ASAP. The pollution in China is out of control, and is a major toll on public health, tourism, and agriculture (especially fishing). In the US, with its low population density, we worry more about climate change, which is more abstract than the local environmental pollution that is so visible and problematic in Asia.

While unilateral US action through regulation and taxation might not directly do anything to ameliorate the global problem, US investment in technology might. The US can absolutely sell technology to China and India, whether it's intellectual property sales/licensing, product sales/licensing, or simply by charging huge amounts of tuition for Asian engineering students to learn at US universities (this is currently a very large subsidy to US education).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A good time for shady energy companies to get some funding ;) Germany had cases like Prokon [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cbd86008-8394-11e3-aa65-00144feab7...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cbd86008-8394-11e3-aa65-00144feab7de.html) destroying quite some investor money.

<comment><USER15> You say that as if the consequence is that we should not invest into alternative energy production.

Prokon used unregulated financial instruments to take investments, and they obscured their financial situation by spreading their balance sheet over dozens of companies. It took the bankruptcy administrators a year to even figure out what the financial situation really was.

I think what we should take from that is that oversight over companies that take financial investments, especially from consumers, should be tighter. That really has nothing to do with alternative energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Look, guys, some of you are all wound up, concerned, alarmed about the effect on the climate of CO2 from human activities and, thus, are eager to reduce burning of fossil fuels.

Well, since you are concerned, I have some really good news for you. For your concerns, the news is much better than anything from research on solar cells, energy storage, wind farms, geothermal energy, nuke energy, carbon-taxes, etc.

The news is really, really simple and says how to address your concerns in the best way, absolutely, positively the best way possible.

In three posts in this thread, I've given a reference to a quite well done BBC video available at YouTube.

The secret solution, best possible for your concerns? Sure: Do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do zip, zilch, and zero. Totally f'get about it.

Why? Because as in the video, CO2 has nothing at all to do with the climate -- in any meaningful sense at all. None. All details are in the video. It's like you had some doctors tell you you had a very sick child and then a week later told you that it was all a mistake, that some lab tests got mixed up, and, in fact, your child is fully healthy.

And from CO2, the earth is fully healthy.

Again, why? Because in fact, CO2 has no effect at all meaningful. It didn't in the past several hundred thousand years, isn't now, and won't for the foreseeable future.

Best news you can get. Why? Because to save the planet from the dangers of CO2, you don't need to work on solar, wind, nukes, carbon-taxes, home insulation, subsidies, EPA shutdowns of coal plants, have cold houses in the winter and hot houses in the summer, etc. All those things you were doing to save the earth from CO2, you get to stop all of them.

Now, is this a happy day for you?

I'm not joking.

Watch the movie. If you have any questions, then post them here and I will respond.

</comment><comment><USER16> If his concern is CO2, then he might want to watch a good movie, the BBC

 _The Great Global Warming Swindle_

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg)

</comment><comment><USER17> People will say: don't look a gift horse in the mouth. But that's exactly the trap we have fallen into: A very few obtain most of the wealth, many of them fund an anti-tax and anti-government agenda; as government shrinks, the power of these people relatively increases; and so the public has to depend on oligarchs rather than on a democratic government including for national issues like energy and climate change. Then the oligarchs say: Look how generous we are; how you depend on us; who dares complain? And governments and people have to focus their efforts on pleasing them on all matters so as not to lose precious funding they control (instead of the legislature).

It's anti-democratic and, to use a provacative but applicable term, un- American. National issues should be decided democratically, not by a few oligarchs. We were founded on the rejection of an aristocracy.

It may be unfair to Gates and to this fund but unfortunately, even with the best of intentions, he is part of the problem.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I think this is really unfair. In no way is Gates a part of the problem, the country would be in much better shape if there were more like him. He innovated, created tens (hundreds?) of thousands of jobs, and one of the biggest companies on the planet. To top it all off, he puts the majority of his personal wealth in a foundation that he and his wife run to the benefit of humanity in general. It has been my dream since I was a kid to do the same (on a much smaller scale, likely). I wish there were thousands more like Gates and Buffet.

<comment><USER17> > In no way is Gates a part of the problem ...

But he is, by amassing and using power that should be democratic, whether or not that was his intent. Doing good things with that power only makes one an "enlightened oligarch". Though to be fair to him, I don't know what he should do - at least lobby for higher taxes for the super-wealthy, and economic policies that don't result in such conncentration of power - Bill Gates of all people can't claim to be a helpess, innocent bystander.

I'll add that his power, even well-intentioned, can distort things for the worse. For example, there was (maybe is) a problem in some African nations where foreign AIDS (and/or malaria or TB) funding was so much greater than local health care funding that they hired away all the talent and net more people were dying from a lack of basic health services.

In fairness, there is a middle ground. Realistically money always will provide some power, some people will have more than others they have a right to use their money as they choose, and it's great if they use it to help others. However, when that concentration of money becomes so great that it undermines democracy, then it's gone too far.

> He innovated, created tens (hundreds?) of thousands of jobs, and one of the > biggest companies on the planet. ...

A side point but let's not whitewash Microsoft's history, which wasn't all bad, but wasn't unicorns and rainbows either.

<comment><USER18> You have a strangely socialistic way of looking at the world. I can't say I agree with any of your points.

<comment><USER17> > socialistic

Just characterizing someone's statement and then disagreeing with your characterization is an internal debate for you. If you have a respose to something I specifically said, that's valuable.

Also, it's sad that democracy is now seen as such a liberal idea that people call it socialism (though it's not that at all).

<comment><USER18> Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options. It can only be as intelligent and effective as a mob of of its average citizenry - which if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.

The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship. This is closer to the form of governance of corporations and open-source projects. The problem is, there's no easy way to guarantee the benevolent part.

I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates. Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system. There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism - which has the same economic problems seen in any communist country past or present. So for better or worse, I think we have to accept the influence of the wealthy.

<comment><USER17> > Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch > brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a > capitalist system.

It's not. Don't accept the status quo as inevitable. Money wasn't always so enormously concentrated in a few hands, and the disparity wasn't always so great. It's worse now in the U.S. than in modern history, and worse than on other Western nations. It's now in an extreme state.

The current rules of the economy, the tax rates, etc. that yield this situation are not inevitable or somehow natural. They aren't the result of capitalism or the free market. They are simply the product of politics that favor one group (a group that now has enormous power over government) over others.

> There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism

I disagree. They can have their money, and we can separate money from politics. If we take money out of elections then money loses a great amount of influence. If we decide and fund public issues democratically, as our nation fundementally believes, everyone gets a vote in deciding things for their community. For example, I was reading that because government is so under- funded a park in a New York was being funded by someone wealthy. Now who decides where that park should go and what it should look like? Instead of being decided democratically by everyone in the community, it's dictated by the oligarch. That's not democracy.

> Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a > lot of bad options.

I agree, but it's clearly the most effective; almost all the nations that lead in their citizen's welfare, from health to education to safety to civil rights to economic issues, are democracies. Also, there is very importat moral component - nobody has a right to tell me what to do, and if we have to come to an agreemet, we should vote on it with everyone getting an equal say.

> if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where > your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.

I disagree that the results are necessarily worse than they would be under other forms of government. Also, we're talking about the United States and not a developing country.

> The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent > dictatorship.

Hmmm ... I haven't heard that from anyone but the dictators who want people to think they are benevolent. If they are so effective and benevolent, why not hold an election? No doubt everyone will vote for them.

> I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, > and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your > average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and > less intelligent than Bill Gates.

Let's assume Gates is more intelligent than the average (almost certainly true) and is purely benevolent (certainly not true, and remember the corrupting influence of power). He still can't do better because he can't possibly understand the interests and needs of millions of people; nobody has that capacity. That, along with the lack of true benevolence, is one place where central planning fails and where free markets and democracy succeed. The people who don't have a seat at the table are the ones who get their interests trampled on because either nobody cares, or people think of course, the other person's priorities really aren't as important as their own.

<comment><USER18> Now you're making some reasonable points, higher taxes on the rich and on corporations _might_ help. It has to be weighed against the cost in lost innovation and investment. For example US corporate taxes are so high that companies don't repatriate their international profits - they invest the abroad when in many cases they would rather bring the money back to the US. The international "market" of countries and tax system also functions as a free market, and the money has a tendency to flow to where it will be taxed least. It's the the free market and competition (between countries) at work. Where the optimal point is for reducing the wealth gap while still maintaining optimal levels of innovation and investment is something nobody knows - <USER2> issue is very complex.

Removing (reducing to be more realistic) the influence of money on politics is a great idea. I'd love to see a system that leverages technology to provide a finer-grained representational democracy. One where you can vote for a representative on any given issue, or group of issues, or type of issues, etc and you can change that vote whenever you want. Google experimented with such a system internally at one point. Pure direct democracy is too dangerous, it's mob rule and would stomp all over minority rights and issues. Representational democracy is too far removed from the people. Something in between is likely the sweet spot. But it may never happen. Politicians have no incentive to dismantle the system that supports them.

I too disagree that alternative systems would work better in Africa, but it's clear that democracy doesn't work very well either compared to developed countries.

Well Gates might not be investing in things that people in the US would vote for, he's doing a great job in service of humanity. One could say that maybe the people he's actually trying to help, e.g. in Africa should vote on what to do, rather than him making the decisions - but would they make smart decision? These are uneducated people who don't know anything about economics, or science, or anything outside of their day to day struggle for survival. Well they might be better aware of the issues that they face, they almost certainly are not well equipped to solve them - democracy is of no help here.

Anyway it's all moot, the money is his, and it's his right to decide what to do with it. Good on him for using it to help humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Gates seems to have bought into the propaganda FUD that renewable energy isn't today cheaper than fossil fuels. But it is, so why not invest in it. Yes, some money should go on longshot and forward looking R&D, but there's absolutely no need for Bill Gates to be talking down the existing solutions that are clearly better than coal in order to promote his own speculative investments.

Luckily, the free market, despite the excessive subsidies that are granted to coal and other fossil fuels, has caught on to the trend and more and more money is pouring in. 97% of economists that publish in this field agree that doing nothing will cost us more than action right now. But still the "common sense" hasn't caught up with reality and relentless propaganda has convinced large numbers of people that solar, wind, efficiency and demand manangement are the domain of idealistic tree huggers and/or parasitic boondoggles rather than a pragmatic and cost effective solution.

<comment><USER20> > propaganda has convinced large numbers of people that solar, wind, > efficiency and demand manangement are the domain of idealistic tree huggers > and/or parasitic boondoggles rather than a pragmatic and cost effective > solution.

The problem is that renewable energy is very capital intensive. Without some kind of price fixing (thank you tree huggers) it is excessively risky. When you have price fixing it is very attractive to speculators who make unpopular profits from electricity bills.

The best way to make money is to already own a big power station and not bother reinvesting or maintaining existing capacity (coal). You reach a situation where no one has any incentive to build anything unless they are heavily subsidised. The public are stuck renting ever more expensive energy whilst funding massive building projects that they will never own.

<comment><USER19> Electrical grids are capital intensive anyway, one of solar and winds big advantages is how non-capital intensive it is compared with the competition, that's why it's making up such a large share of newly built generation capacity across the globe.

As you say in places where demand isn't growing quickly, it's more about shutting down and replacing existing plants, and that's where it can get political, see the "war on coal" in the US. But even there, it's an economic no-brainer to shut the coal plants that are killing people and replace them with gas and renewable, the only thing stopping it from happening is politics, not anything inherent in renewable tech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't think Bill Gates has much of a clue about what the world needs, he's very hypocritical. He lives a very consumptive 1% lifestyle (nothing wrong with that in my eyes - he earned it) but yet he turns around and preaches that everyone needs to change. Start with the man in the mirror bub.

Elon Musk is a bit better than him since he doesn't preach - but I would agree with Gates that he's a little gung ho on space travel. I honestly don't think it is humanity's place to leave earth, we are fish in water. Whatever comes after us (speaking in terms of evolution) will be the alpha in terms of space travel.

<comment><USER22> How do you mean whatever comes after us?

We are the only form of life we know of that can get into space using ingenuity. The alpha could be our descendants or created by tying our ingenuity in with the genetic background of other creatures.

We are the best chance known of getting life off of one small planet - I think it is our place to expand life through the universe.

<comment><USER23> > I think it is our place to expand life through the universe.

Not sure if it's our "place" but for damn sure it's a good goal, getting life off the Earth and becoming sustainable in space massively reduces the risk of humans going extinct.

The solar system is rich in resources we are going to need at some point.</comment></comment></comment>


Young New Yorkers Make a Brand New Start of It, on the Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/nyregion/25scrimp.html?_r=1&oref=slogin <comment><USER2> To rephrase Freakonomics, "what do drug dealers, high school football players, and young New Yorkers have in common?" <http://freakonomicsbook.com/thebook/ch3.html>

<comment><USER3> could you add "employeers on a startup" in that list? What's the ratio of people that made good fortune (500k+) on a startup, with those that just got scraps, and an ok paycheck, for a lot of work, or nothing at all.

<comment><USER4> In the 90s, I heard it was 4.7% of computer (I guess that's software) startups made the fortune 500.

The odds of a startup taking off are about one in three or four, which isn't all that bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I did more or less the same thing in Chicago in the 90's. It's a miserable existence, but you feel so hip, cool and victorious knowing that you've escaped the burbs. A lot of the buzz in Silicon Valley about living in San Fran reminds me of that, too.

Isn't that what your 20's are for, though? Trying new things, being able to risk a bunch and learning that perhaps there are other things that are more important than being hip and trendy? And, you gain a lot of experiences and lessons learned, so even though you're malnourished, it's not all bad.

</comment><comment><USER6> You know, you could just rewrite this article and the replace the words "New York" with "London", and "Oklahoma" with "Scotland"!

</comment><comment><USER7> >Adam Leibsohn, a 27-year-old communications strategist who makes roughly $60,000 a year and pays $1,650 a month for his own apartment in the East Village..."It's kind of a spartan lifestyle," he says.

We admire your frugality.

</comment><comment><USER8> "You've got to forget about brands, you've got to forget about, you know, what your mom made you growing up, and take what's out there."

So?

Isn't this what people always had to do to get by?

But now it's so unusual it merits a NYT feature story?

Cry me a river.

<comment><USER9> Seriously! That's exactly what I thought. I'm a (married) consultant living in Queens. I work at businesses all over Manhattan and I find that I'm the only guy bagging my own lunch (seriously - never seen anybody else do it in the two years I've been doing this here). I'm from the south, so I find the NYC idea of "budgeting" to be absolutely laughable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is outrageous bordering idiotic. I still don't get why youngsters refuse to be intelligent.

<comment><USER3> it's called sex and the city. I am not exagerating, but there is a whole generation of women that want to be in "the City", and living the fun/glam life. Anything else is just too boring. Hence, there is much more women than men in NYC. Well, the reality of living in the city, is completely different, way too expensive, and too many sacrifices to be made.

But, when you are young (early 20s), you are used to live in dorms, sharing a room with another person, etc... so you could put up with those conditions for a while, until it wears you off, and you either get a good paying job, or move out.

<comment><USER11> There is probably a bit of the sex and the city effect, but this lifestyle has been a part of new york since new york began.</comment></comment></comment>


How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities - <AUTHOR> https://hub.zhovner.com/geek/how-skype-fixes-security-vulnerabilities/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227480](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13227480)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5jj3t4/how_skype_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5jj3t4/how_skype_fixes_security_vulnerabilities/)

<comment><AUTHOR> D'oh. Didn't even realise it was posted 10 hours ago (as of writing). Perhaps this should be taken down from front page / merged?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> by going offline, like the link?</comment>