Ask HN: How would you automate my farm - <AUTHOR> I intend to fully automate my farm from soil prep to harvest within 3 years.
As a thought experiment, how would you imagine the automation of an one-acre farm? <comment><USER2> Why does there need to be soil? I would go aeroponics then go vertical. Rowbot seems a first step if you still wanna do soil based. I would say get fiveof your best friends start going vertical with aero.

Also if you want to put this up as a challenge on our co-creation platform, I urge you to do so at www.crowdraising.co/metacampaign We built a place where people can contribute to projects and get rewarded for work

<comment><AUTHOR> vertical aquaponics is a closed loop..high risk system which is limited to growing greens..maybe strawberries. i am not sold on the system.

rowbot is very specific to fertilizing corn. and they are working with just one or few corn farmers in the mid west now. automation of a farm involves several tasks.

have you worked vertical aquaponics? its very attractive as a concept. but farming is a business. lettuce glut is not a way to make money through diversified crop planning.

thank you for the pointer re crowdraising.co! i was not aware of that platform. regards.

<comment><USER2> You are right. I have not worked in aero/aquaponics .

You are saying the tech is still not scalable? I would love to know more. If it's pure automation then are robotics of any use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Soil farming is self correcting. Aquaponics...in my opinion..is the exact opposite. It is a fragile facsimile.

Having said that greens like lettuce and kale shouldn't ever be grown on soil. Again..just my opinion. Take lettuce for example..1.quick turn around crop..2.you can grow multiple successions..3.it's always in demand all year. 4.needs post harvest hydrocooling. 5. Very stringent packing rules because it's mostly consumed raw. 6. Cost too high to return on soil. It is THE perfect aquaponics candidate.

Another one is kale. I am even surprised that people consider it edible but it's a brassica and at least in California, (farmer hat on now) bagrada bug has been devastating and kale is the worst thing any farmer can grow. Guaranteed damage to other high value brassicas like cauliflower or cabbage. Again..great aquaponics candidate.

I also feel strawberries can be grown in aquaponics/hydroponics system. It's devastating to the soil. Very high value but harvest cost eats all profits(that's why we have so many u-pick strawberry farms)

And there are other examples which makes aquaponics worthwhile to extend seasons and have regular supply..also scalable. I like aquaponics and hydroponics for those reasons. Carries its risk because an entire crop cycle can become mush if you lose power for more than a few hours. It's easy to salvage crops in soil. Like I said..soil farming is a self correcting and forgiving mechanism. The flip side to the risks of losing an entire lettuce harvest on aqua/hydroponic set up is that you can seed and harvest next succession in 4 weeks.

And then there is the whole debate about the nutrient/taste issues re traditional soil vs non soil farming.

i think robotics in farm and field is a diff kind. It is repetitive manual labour that robotics will replace. Reduced tillage and soil conservation cannot be achieved with mechanized automation. Unlike large farm equipment mechanization and automation, replication of robotic platforms for non- commodity crops with conservation goals will recreate and rejuvenate our soil web ecology. Modern agriculture is crude and very fracturing to natural resources in more ways than one. It's ..I don't know..I would use the word 'obscene' and a somewhat coarse. Soil less automated farms(like aquaponics) is elegant but elegant on champagne glass stints..fragile and gauche and very breakable..and not terribly satisfying. There is something very viscerally and primitively satisfying about working with the earth. You know it when you know it. There has to be a happy middle ground with technology's help..where you can sniff the dirt under your nails to get high and still not die from manual labour...ya know?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> surely this must be crop-specific

<comment><AUTHOR> Row cropping. Vegetables.</comment></comment>


Centuries-old physics problem that baffled Newton finally solved - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/463382-student-solves-spherical-aberration-newton/ <comment><USER2> It looks like the paper is "General formula to design a freeform singlet free of spherical aberration and astigmatism", Rafael G. González-Acuña, Héctor A. Chaparro-Romo, and Julio C. Gutiérrez-Vega, Applied Optics Vol. 58, Issue 4, pp. 1010-1015 (2019), at [https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-58-4-10...](https://www.osapublishing.org/ao/abstract.cfm?uri=ao-58-4-1010)

> In this paper, an analytical closed-form formula for the design of freeform > lenses free of spherical aberration and astigmatism is presented. Given the > equation of the freeform input surface, the formula gives the equation of > the second surface to correct the spherical aberration. The derivation is > based on the formal application of the variational Fermat principle under > the standard geometrical optics approximation.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone who has a physical background: what's your opinion on that?</comment>


How Japan came to believe in depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36824927 <comment><USER2> If the BBC feels it absolutely must tie depression in Japan to comic books somehow, as part of its standard Japan narrative, it at least should have gone with discussing the comic book memoir _Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashite_ ("My Husband Got Depression") which got a lot of attention from 2009-2011 and helped raise awareness about modern medical attitudes toward depression.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wasn't _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ enough to convince anyone that depression was real, back in the 1990s?

> Word was spread about depression as _kokoro no kaze_ \- a cold of the soul.

Well, _kokoro_ means mind and heart as much as it means soul. It's a bit harder to describe a phenomenon when you don't quite have the words. David Lynch referred to four types of illness (via the Log Lady): physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Those concepts are a little more mixed together in Japan.

<comment><USER4> Well, _we_ watched it knowing about depression, and my personal (and for personal reasons, genetic ones unfortunately...) study of e.g. cognitive psychology and therapy made the original TV ending pretty comprehensible with effort, at least about what Anno thought important (people, not the giant robot/super-conspiracy gloss).

But wouldn't most people, including a large fraction in e.g. the US, just think Anno was weird (which as a successful creator he pretty much as to be anyway :-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > All this made Japan such a poor prospect as a market for anti-depressants > that the makers of Prozac all but gave up on the country.

This is false. Prozac was submitted several times for registration in Japan. The most recent one is here: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612) but there were other trials before.

</comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr because of a marketing campaign by pharma companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Chalk another win up to capitalism. _high fives all around_

</comment><comment><USER8> Yet Japan has hikikomori.[1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc)

<comment><USER9> I like this documentary better. It's a bit long, but I like real footage, and the interviews, and more in-depth discussion. [https://vimeo.com/28627261](https://vimeo.com/28627261)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Recommended reading: "Crazy Like Us" by Ethan Watters. I'm not sure about the validity of this article, but the Watters book presents a fair amount of evidence that mental disorders are in many ways socially constructed by individual cultures. And often the construction is sped along by inventive pharmaceutical company marketing departments.

</comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr by reading anime about depression</comment>


Web 2.0 Online Identity Video - <AUTHOR> http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2007/03/online_identity.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting watch. I very recently did a presentation on online identities (with mentions of Web 2.0) for a course.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I use golang for building a graphql API - <AUTHOR> I'm at the early stages of building an API, i've laid out my database structure and some idea of the functions/features I need from it.
However i'm a bit stuck on language for building the API itself, there will be a need for document upload and full user role based access control.
Is Go's graphql setup mature enough for this use case, or will I need to be building a lot from scratch, would something like Python with Django or Flask be a better choice for getting something off the ground ASAP?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Go is a great language for building GraphQL servers, the [https://github.com/99designs/gqlgen](https://github.com/99designs/gqlgen) library helps you by build type-safe GraphQL servers and reduces the boilerplate. You can find an example here: [https://github.com/prisma/prisma- examples/tree/master/go/gra...](https://github.com/prisma/prisma- examples/tree/master/go/graphql)

Otherwise I'd recommend TypeScript - the tooling ecosystem around GraphQL is definitely most advanced in the JS space. If you're interested, you can check out an example here: [https://github.com/prisma/prisma- examples/tree/master/typesc...](https://github.com/prisma/prisma- examples/tree/master/typescript/graphql)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the heads up on gqlgen. Have you used its subscription + websocket functionality? This is the part I haven't figured out with graphql-go yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm using graphql-go/graphql at the moment. Sparse documentation, but everything seems to work correctly. I'm not too familiar with the Python GraphQL stuff, but here I'm writing my own schema and resolvers, so I guess it depends on what you mean from "by scratch."

If you need something off the ground ASAP, maybe look at something like Hasura or Postgraphile: point it at your DB and get the GraphQL resolvers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have started with graphql-go/graphql but the lack of documentation is what i was getting at with the maturity aspect.

Thanks for the suggestions

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Strong, structural type systems are a good fit for GraphQL back ends. You should look into TypeScript and Reason before you decide.</comment>


The dot append mixtape: more d3.js tutorial videos - <AUTHOR> http://enjalot.github.com/dot-append/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for creating these videos. They are a GREAT resource.

For anyone looking to learn d3.js, I would highly recommend starting with the video tutorials by enjalot (the above linked or dot enter vol. 1). He does a great job of walking through how each visualization works.

Additionally, tributary (<http://tributary.io/>) is perfect for playing with d3.js.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it! The beats alone make these tutorials so much more enjoyable to follow than usual tech turtorials.</comment>


Type Systems Aren't Magic - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2016/11/25/type-systems-arent-magic/ <comment><USER2> Don't put C and Java in the same sentence.

The type system in C has no safety at all because there is no pointer safety.</comment>


Show HN: A conversational interface - <AUTHOR> https://www.talky.cards <comment><AUTHOR> The chatbot content is currently very minimal. I'll work on it more soon. I'm thinking of disabling api.ai's small talk, and taking on the absolute barest of personas.

I want to make useful things that present an authentic interface, and set clear expectations. "I'm a vending machine. What do you want?"

Pretty much all this bot can do is: tell you a little about talky.cards, get your email, get you to set a password, and checkout with Stripe.

</comment><comment><USER2>
      > "Sorry, but that isn't ready yet"

<comment><AUTHOR> lol, yeah that's pretty awful. I'll work on the bot content soon.</comment></comment>


ECMAScript regular expressions are getting better (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/es-regexp-proposals <comment><USER2> Aside, but I'd love for someone to come up with an alternative syntax for regexes that sacrifices speed-of-typing for ease-of-reading. Regexes are obviously still fantastically useful for things like command-line scripting and jumping around in text editors, but the fact that people still reach for regexes within programs that are meant to receive long-term maintenance tells me that we're missing a tool in our toolbox.

<comment><USER3> This was one of the places CoffeeScript really innovated, IMO (though of course Perl did it first). The "Block Regular Expressions"[0] allow whitespace and comments:

        NUMBER     = ///
          ^ 0b[01]+    |              # binary
          ^ 0o[0-7]+   |              # octal
          ^ 0x[\da-f]+ |              # hex
          ^ \d*\.?\d+ (?:e[+-]?\d+)?  # decimal
        ///i

[0]: [https://coffeescript.org/#regexes](https://coffeescript.org/#regexes)

<comment><USER4> Rust allows this too:

        Regex::new(r"(?x)
          (?P<y>\d{4}) # the year
          -
          (?P<m>\d{2}) # the month
          -
          (?P<d>\d{2}) # the day
        ")

<comment><USER5> Yup! rust/regex has had this for a while. More recently, its error messages have also gotten a lot better, which I'm proud of!

        <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~
        regex parse error:
        <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~
        1: (?x)
        2:       (?P<y>\d{4}) # the year
        3:       -
        4:       (?P<m>*\d{2} # the month
                       ^
        5:       -
        6:       (?P<d>\d{2}) # the day
        7:
        <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~
        error: repetition operator missing expression
        <comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~

Playground link: [https://play.rust- lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...](https://play.rust- lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2015&gist=c9fb1d58a8132d57d66417752a0f7282)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Javascript regexes are "getting better" feature-wise, but performance-wise not much have improved. The the a?a?a? example regex in Ross Cox article "Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast" from 2007 is still getting exponentially slower and slower with the number of "a?"-repetitions ([https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html))

for (let i=20; i<30; i++) { let str = "a".repeat(i); let regex = new RegExp("a?".repeat(i) + "a".repeat(i)); let t0 = performance.now(); str.match(regex); let t1 = performance.now(); console.log(i + " took " \+ Math.round(t1 - t0) + " milliseconds."); }

20 took 7 milliseconds. 21 took 14 milliseconds. 22 took 27 milliseconds. 23 took 52 milliseconds. 24 took 102 milliseconds. 25 took 224 milliseconds. 26 took 421 milliseconds. 27 took 814 milliseconds. 28 took 1604 milliseconds. 29 took 3470 milliseconds.

Tested today on latest Chrome on a MacBook Pro 2,6GHz Intel Core i7.

Here comes an idea on what could be done to improve performance for regexes that are actually regular, and to still keep support for non-regular advanced regexes that e.g. contain back-references:

Add a step immediately after parsing the regex, check if it is regular and can be handled by an engine like RE2, otherwise handle it using the normal regex engine.

An even more exotic idea would be to let multiple regex engines execute in parallell, and return the result for the one that finishes first.

<comment><USER7> You can also implement linear-time regex matching in user code with webassembly. In my tests it was faster than native regex matching ([https://jasonhpriestley.com/regex-dfa](https://jasonhpriestley.com/regex- dfa))

<comment><USER8> As someone familiar with JS engine regex internals, those results are totally shocking to me. How can I try your example? In particular I wasn't able to figure out which regexes you are testing with.

<comment><USER7> I tested with this regex:

      /^abcd(a(b|c)*d)*a(bc)*d$/

I used long strings of repeated "abcdabcd" as the test strings.

It's possible I made a mistake somewhere, and I can put together an open- source repo with the test setup when I get the time. But I'm curious why you find the results shocking?

<comment><USER8> The results are shocking because the native regular expression engines have thousands of man hours poured into them, with specialized JITs, exotic optimizations, etc. And your page is reporting the native one at 10x slower!

One thing I spotted is that you're asking the native engines to record capture groups, but your wasm implementation doesn't support those. For fairness you might switch to non-capturing groups: `(?:bc)` instead of `(bc)`. However this cannot explain the magnitude of the difference.

I dug into it some more, reducing it to this case:

        /^(?:abc*d)*$/

what happens is that the backtracking engine has to be prepared to backtrack _into_ every iteration of the outermost loop. This means that the backtracking stack grows as the length of the input; the engine spends most of its time allocating memory! These nested loops definitely make the NFA approach look good.

Regardless it's a cool project, thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER9> There is nothing shocking here, parent implements strictly regular expressions and compile them to DFA, so of course it will be fast, especially using only ASCII characters and hand chosen regular expressions. Russ Cox articles covers this very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's funny to see that in almost all langues the regular expression engines are not actually regular. This results in developers regularly (pun maybe intended) shooting themselves in the foot with overly clever expressions.

(Notable exception: Rust [https://docs.rs/regex/](https://docs.rs/regex/))

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the mention! I just want to expand on some things you said:

\- Rust's regex library was greatly inspired by RE2, which is a C++ library that also executes regexes in linear time.

\- Go's regex library also runs in linear time, however, it is still missing some optimizations that can make it run more slowly on non-pathological regexes when compared to RE2 and Rust's regex crate.

\- You don't need to use fancy features with a backtracking regex engine in order to shoot yourself in the foot. e.g.,

        >>> import re
        >>> re.search('(a*)*c', 'a' * 30)

\- Even with linear time regex engines, you can get big slow downs. You'll never get exponential (in the size of the text) slow downs of course, but regexes like `[01]*1[01]{20}$`[1] can generate large finite state machines, which can be problematic in either memory or match speed, depending on the implementation.

[1] - [https://cyberzhg.github.io/toolbox/min_dfa?regex=KDB8MSkqMSg...](https://cyberzhg.github.io/toolbox/min_dfa?regex=KDB8MSkqMSgwfDEpKDB8MSkoMHwxKSgwfDEpKDB8MSkk)

<comment><USER8> Does the linear time hold up in the face of capture groups? For example, say you have a bunch of capture groups in a loop:

        /((a)|(b)|(c)|(d))*/

If the string has length N, the loop iterates N times, and each iteration must clear capture groups proportional to the length of the regex. So in this case the time varies as the product of the input and regex length, not their sum independently.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it does. Capture groups aren't special here. The issue is a semantic quibble. Namely, when folks say, "a regex engine that guarantees matching in linear time," what they actually mean is, "a regex engine that guarantees matching in linear time with respect to the input searched where the regex itself is treated as a constant." If you don't treat the regex as a constant, then the time complexity can vary quite a bit depending on the implementation strategy.

For example, if you do a Thompson NFA simulation (or, more practically, a Pike VM), then the time complexity is going to be O(mn), where m ~ len(regex) and n ~ len(input), regardless of capturing groups.

As another example, if you compile the regex to a DFA before matching, then the time complexity is going to be O(n) since every byte of input results in executing a small constant number of instructions, regardless of the size of the regex. However, DFAs typically don't handle capturing groups (although they certainly can handle grouping), with the notable exception of Laurikari's Tagged DFAs, but I don't know off-hand if the time complexity of O(n) usually associated with a DFA carries over to Tagged DFAs. Of course, the principal downside of building a DFA is that it can use exponential (in the size of the regex) memory. This is why GNU grep, rust/regex and RE2 use a hybrid approach ("lazy DFA"), which avoids O(2^n) space, but falls back to O(mn) matching when the DFA would otherwise exceed some memory budget during matching.

<comment><USER8> > when folks say, "a regex engine that guarantees matching in linear time," > what they actually mean is, "a regex engine that guarantees matching in > linear time with respect to the input searched where the regex itself is > treated as a constant."

Well the Rust docs say "all searches execute in linear time with respect to the size of the regular expression and search text." Their engine compiles to a DFA, not an NFA or PikeVM; I suppose this is the basis for their claim.

> As another example, if you compile the regex to a DFA before matching, then > the time complexity is going to be O(n) since every byte of input results in > executing a small constant number of instructions, regardless of the size of > the regex. However, DFAs typically don't handle capturing groups

Now you have arrived at my question! Rust compiles to a DFA that supports capture groups. My question is whether capture groups ruin the linearity of the DFA matching.

Thanks for the Laurikari's Tagged DFAs reference, I hadn't heard of that. I'll check it out!

<comment><USER5> > Well the Rust docs say "all searches execute in linear time with respect to > the size of the regular expression and search text."

Yeah, that's ambiguous phrasing on my part. I meant that it was linear time with respect to _both_ the size of the regex and the search text.

> Their engine compiles to a DFA, not an NFA or PikeVM; I suppose this is the > basis for their claim.

No, it doesn't. rust/regex uses some combination of the Pike VM, (bounded) backtracking and a lazy DFA. It will compile a DFA ahead of time in some cases where Aho-Corasick can be used.

> Rust compiles to a DFA that supports capture groups.

No, it uses a lazy DFA to answer "where does it match," but it still must use either the Pike VM or the bounded backtracker to resolve capture groups.

> My question is whether capture groups ruin the linearity of the DFA > matching.

Yeah I think I would probably look at Tagged DFAs to answer this. You'll want to check out recent papers that cite Laurikari's work, since I think there have been some developments!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is nearly two years old. Not that this isn't a great article, but people should probably know that these features aren't entirely new.

<comment><USER12> I am also curious about which the the proposed features actually made it, and which did not.

\- dotAll mode (the s flag)

\- Lookbehind assertions

\- Named capture groups

\- Unicode property escapes

\- String.prototype.matchAll

\- Legacy RegExp features

<comment><USER13> I make sure to keep the article up-to-date. It correctly states the status for each of the features. They're all part of ES2018 with the exception of String#matchAll which is currently at Stage 3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hope you don't need such things anymore then: [https://github.com/sindresorhus/shebang- regex/blob/master/in...](https://github.com/sindresorhus/shebang- regex/blob/master/index.js)

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the `matchAll` feature. I now use the awesome/awful (depending who you ask) hack using `.replace`:

        var matches = [];
        "12345678".replace(/\d/g, (m) => matches.push(m));
        console.log(matches);

</comment><comment><USER16> This was a status report on multiple, changing features as of two years ago. The people who know best are probably busy building, but I can't help wondering if anyone is able to provide the current status of any of these things.

</comment><comment><USER17> Since this is from 2017, isn't the year missing in the title? When I initially saw the submission, for a moment I thought all the struggles I had some weeks ago had been solved... :-)

<comment><USER13> I mean, they _have_ been solved. With the exception of String#matchAll (which is currently a Stage 3 proposal), all these features are part of ES2018 and shipping in Chrome. Other browsers implement some of them already and are working on shipping more.

You can view the implementation status of the various features here: [https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/#test- RegEx...](https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/#test- RegExp_named_capture_groups)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> finally named capture groups

<comment><USER19> Finally lookbehind!!!

<comment><USER20> There's a difference, right, in that named capture groups are purely cosmetic, whereas look-behind can dramatically slow down matching? (I dunno in any theoretical sense, but that's the way it goes in Perl.)

<comment><USER21> Named captures means you don't have to count parentheses to figure out which group you want. I don't know whether it qualifies as cosmetic, but it sure is nice.

<comment><USER20> > Named captures means you don't have to count parentheses to figure out which > group you want. I don't know whether it qualifies as cosmetic, but it sure > is nice.

Agreed! (As a regex-heavy Perl hacker, I loved the day that they entered the language.) I didn't mean to minimise them; rather quite the opposite, to point out that they gave a great return essentially for free (compared to regexes that still have capturing groups, but without names), as opposed to look- behind, which (I think) can slow down a match dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there a linter that can scan ECMAScript regex constants and disallow any that go beyond what is allowed in a regular language?

<comment><USER8> Is the idea to avoid catastrophic backtracking? Unfortunately you aren't immunized from catastrophic backtracking by limiting yourself to regular languages. The catastrophe is a property of the implementation, not the matched language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is cool, but I really wish the TC39 was more focused on solving _major_ problems with the language instead of small incremental updates.

<comment><USER24> issues such as what?

<comment><USER23> For example, the lack of types.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Another proposal specifies certain legacy RegExp features, such as the RegExp.prototype.compile method and the static properties from RegExp.$1 to RegExp.$9. Although these features are deprecated, unfortunately they cannot be removed from the web platform without introducing compatibility issues. Thus, standardizing their behavior and getting engines to align their implementations is the best way forward. This proposal is important for web compatibility._

Interesting view. Is this better than a "let it break" approach?

Link rot already claims N% of websites per year. I wonder if cleaning up APIs like this one would increase N noticeably.

<comment><USER26> I think breaking JS tends to be much more destructive than dead links. At least with dead links there's a fairly clear non-technical fix. With a web standards break, maybe 8 years ago you hired a contractor to build a website that uses a library that uses a library that uses a library that uses some JS feature that is now broken, so your website is now completely broken. Some of those libraries are on older unmaintained versions, where the only upgrade would be through non-trivial breaking changes, or you would need to just find alternate libraries. Getting things working again is a huge undertaking, not just a matter of "don't use that weird JS feature anymore", and I think in that situation it seems reasonable to blame the browser for the breaking change.

It's also maybe more widespread than you'd think. Adding `global` seemed safe for a long time, but ended up breaking both Flickr and Jira because they both use a library that broke: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- global/issues/20](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global/issues/20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> 'matchAll' looks great but why make it an iterator vs a 'map' style callback? Just seems so arcane.

<comment><USER27> > 'matchAll' looks great but why make it an iterator vs a 'map' style > callback?

Because that makes it significantly easier to e.g. optionally collect into an array, or to only partially iterate the sequence (e.g. only get the first 3 matches) which is painful to impossible using JS's callbacks. An iterator is simply more flexible.</comment></comment>


My Life With a Hackintosh - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/tech-edge-my-life-with-a-hackintosh.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how many of the Hackintosh people have tried Linux. I would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look like a Mac... That is if you are into that sort of thing.

All you would need is Gnome, an OS X theme and AWN. It is free and legal.

I ran a Macbook pro for a few years in college and I cant bring myself to switch back from Linux. The only thing that might put me on Mac is developing an iPhone/Touch app. I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here?

<comment><USER3> I think most of the Hackintosh community has probably tried Linux, at least in VMWware or Virtualbox. After all, it's much easier to install these days.

Setting up a Hackintosh now is kind of like installing Linux ~8 years ago. That spare system you have might work (if it's semi recent hardware, in this case), but you might never get the thing to boot. However, if you buy a system with a Hackintosh in mind, if you read the forums and do the research, you will in all likelihood not have any problems and be able to treat it as if it were a real Mac.

> would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look > like a Mac...

I'm sorry but this is a pet peeve of mine, or at least it touches on one.

I ran Linux for ~8 years as my primary desktop. For most of that time I did not have a Windows machine. I used GNOME most of the time but also spent a lot of time in KDE and Enlightenment. I switched to OSX in '06 but I still install Linux every now and then to see where things are, and sometimes I pop by gnome-look or gnome themes sites to see what's going on there.

Point being, I have a lot of experience using Linux.

That said, you can maybe, _maybe_ get Linux to the point where you can take a screenshot and it would pass as OSX to a casual OSX user. You can never, ever get Linux to the point where it would fool an OSX user for more than 2-3 seconds. Pretty much to the point where if they interact with the computer at all they'll know.

It's like throwing a camo tent over a tank and saying "look, the tank is invisible". It might not show up from 10k feet but anyone that gets near it is going to know it's not OSX, or think it's a very, very broken OSX system.

I've seen the blog posts about making GNOME look like OSX and they're insane. They put some crap ass GTK theme together, throw in cairo dock, tweak crap for 4 hours and say "look, it's just like OSX but Linux". No, it is not.

> I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here?

I don't think Linux can hold a candle to OSX, my opinion of course, except that the one app I've always wished OSX had is Tomboy... best "sticky notes" app ever.

<comment><USER4> OS X looks good because it's visually consistent, something that cannot be said for Linux..

Just in terms of frameworks, on Linux there is (in common use today) GTK+, Tk, Qt, wx (and probably others). There's also different versions, and different themes (and the themes aren't interoperable, so if you have use a specific GTK theme, and start at a Tk application, they'll look completely different)

On OS X there is Cocoa, and that's about it. There is Carbon, but it's deprecated and used by very few applications

The default Ubuntu install looks good (colour-scheme preferences aside). It only looks bad when you start installing other applications - as soon as you install, say, a KDE application it looks horrible.. Not because that application necessarily looks bad, but because it's inconsistent..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hackintosh's are pretty old news. I'd love to see an article detailing some of the challenges in the actual hacking of it.

</comment><comment><USER6> My MacBook Air went belly up two days ago. For that kind of money, I'd expect better than 14 months of life and I've treated it like a museum piece. Our little $200 lenovo netbook is durable, we caught my son jumping on it on the bed yesterday. We scolded him but he did no damage to the laptop. My 6 year old ThinkPad churns away and has been used and abused.

I am seriously considering putting together a hackintosh before shelling out more to get my Air fixed.

</comment><comment><USER7> So I'd like to hear what people would actually DO with a mac tablet....

Are you going to use it like an oversized iPod? Type large documents with the touchscreen? Watch movies? Read books?

I took Spindler's comments during the presentation as a thinly veiled message of "look, the iPod touch/iPhone can do most of what you want here, so don't hold your breath for a tablet".

Then again, that's usually a sign there's one around the corner...

</comment><comment><USER8> Why did this get any votes? The information boils down to "you can install OS X on a netbook with some effort", which surely is very old news?

Is it enough to sport the word "Hack" in the title to get on Hacker News?

<comment><USER9> I agree, this article hardly provided any useful information or anything relatively new. It hardly even discussed the hack of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Apple didn't make it. I did. The machine I'm using is known as a > "Hackintosh" -- actually a 9-inch Dell netbook that I've hacked to run > Apple's Macintosh operating system._

> _In the end, I had a crude version of the Mac tablet computer that the rumor > mill always says is just around the corner._

When did Dell come out with a 9" TabletPC?

> _Turning a netbook into a Mac certainly isn't a task for technical naïfs > [...]_

Oh... _that_ 'Tablet' PC.

<comment><USER11> A netbook is not a tablet pc; it's a mini-laptop. Nowhere does the author refer to a tablet pc. Indeed, he specifically mentions the Dell Mini 9 netbook, which has been on sale for the past year.

<comment><USER10> Sarcasm... The 'Mac Tablet' that has been rumored forever is an Apple version of the TabletPC. He claimed to have a 'crude version' of a the rumored 'Mac tablet.' It's hard to have that when the _Mac tablet's_ main feature is a touchscreen. I doubt the Dell netbook has a touchscreen. Ergo, he _does not_ have a 'crude version' of such a device unless your definition of 'crude' includes 'missing the most important feature.'</comment></comment></comment>


Sam Altman: About 300 of the companies YC funded have shut down - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sama/status/636586179970752512 <comment><USER2> I think that is normal. 300/X?</comment>


Why do you think people are poor? - <AUTHOR> http://harpers.org/archive/1997/09/0074349 <comment><USER4> New York Times obituary of Earl Shorris, the author of this 1997 article, who died this year:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/us/earl-shorris-who- fought...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/us/earl-shorris-who-fought- poverty-with-knowledge-dies-at-75.html)

New York Daily News obituary:

[http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/06/rememberi...](http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/06/remembering- earl-shorris-who-thought-the-poor-could-also-read-plato)

Obituary in The Nation:

[http://www.thenation.com/article/168212/remembering-earl- sho...](http://www.thenation.com/article/168212/remembering-earl-shorris)

A list of his articles published in Harper's:

<http://harpers.org/subjects/EarlShorris>

</comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading an article at one point about a study done on high school students. I can't remember exact details, but there was a program where students in areas with bad high schools could apply to be sent to better high schools. If I remember correctly, admission to the program wasn't merit based, but first-come, first-serve. The study compared the students who got into the program, and the students who applied but didn't get it. The kicker? Their performance in school (I don't remember the metrics, though I agree its a relevant difference whether its GPA or standardized test scores or something else) was about the same.

The takeaway point? The ones applying were the ones who were motivated to learn (or had family who encouraged them to take education more seriously). Those that want to learn, will learn.

Not to be discouraging, (as I read this article and found it incredibly inspiring), but the students in these classes are the exceptionally motivated, who stuck through this education despite the difficulties. The hurdle that must be overcome for this to have widespread implication is how we get more people to find that motivation.

<comment><USER6> Why is it, then, that despite the school someone goes to not mattering in outcomes once you control for external factors, rich people still disproportionately prefer to send their kids to private schools, and are willing to pay 20-30k per year over a decade to do so?

I could totally believe that it's totally irrational on the rich parents' part: kids and health are places where people lose much sense of rationality and perspective. But it's still worth considering that the people who are typically most invested and knowledgeable about their kids and the benefits of a good education do usually go for private school if they have the means to.

<comment><USER7> It's because it _does_ matter to the outcome, if you consider the outcome to be more than just GPA. GPA is not the best indicator of whether it's a worthwhile investment. The selection of a private school takes in to account additional factors like the environment you learn in, the connections you make, the college prospects you get and also the mere existence of religion.

<comment><USER8> Could you expand on the "mere existence of religion?"

<comment><USER7> Private schools are often affiliated with religious groups (Catholic, Jewish, etc.) For many people who choose private education, the existence of religion classes in school is a large factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Life is a series of scenarios, each leaving the person slightly better equipped to deal with future scenarios or slightly worse equipped.

Small disadvantages multiply, as to small advantages.

<comment><USER10> And so we get a lognormal distribution where small positive differences (arguably ultimately due to luck; genes, environment, continent, family network etc) combine to give enourmous advantages.

That said, regardless of your starting point it pays to try to position yourself to gain as many positive points as you can - with luck you can ride that same multiplicative unfairness to achieve better than linear progress.

<comment><USER11> Power law (Pareto distribution), not lognormal.

But you're partly right. Simulate random exchanges at random prices and the wealth distribution will come out Pareto.

However, we cannot conclude that because [a] random exchanges lead to a power- law dist and [b] we observe a power-law in reality, that [c] the real wealth distribution is tantamount to random.

<comment><USER10> As far as I'm aware the debate of lognormal vs power law distribution on wealth is unsettled.

EDIT: google search suggests power law tail - log normal bulk.

<comment><USER11> You are maybe thinking that it is difficult to identify powerlaws? (EDIT: s/identify/statistically verify/; s/powerlaws/TRUE powerlaws/)

But look: <http://globalrichlist.com/how.html> The bulk is indeed powerlaw.

Maybe you are thinking that a sufficiently winsorised US income distribution is lognormal.

<comment><USER10> To the contrary I think people are too eager to find scale free and power law phenomena.

There are several papers discussing log-normal bulk and then power law tail.

[http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2002/feb/26/the- phy...](http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2002/feb/26/the-physics-of- personal-income)

<http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/wp671.pdf> and more

For what it's worth my initial statement was meant to hold beyond income and wealth and generalize to say achievement and productivity and so a lognormal assumption was fitting as the distribution to pick. It also chimed well with grandalf's statement on how advantages multiply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> She's completely correct that it's the culture of the rich which make them rich.

What she's completely wrong about is that it's their morality that makes it so.

We, the rich, the middle and upper classes, are the ones who fund prisons, we are the ones who do not share our food with our neighbors, we are the ones who refuse to mix with them and share our culture.

It's like Terrence McKenna said - "Culture is not your friend". Culture is a tribal way of life - it's a gang sign, whether that sign be dressing in red or blue or wearing a suit. It's our culture which judges that those who perform certain jobs are more deserving of comfort than others. Yet without that farmer growing his crops how would you eat? Without that garbage collector removing waste, how would you stay healthy? Without that secretary, how would your business function properly? It's these value judgements which really hurt us. Someone will always need to do those jobs (until our machinery is smart enough, anyway) and, as it stands, they will always be deemed by the rest of us to be undeserving of the comfort that we have just because we do something essentially far less fundamental.

Just as power corrupts, so inequality breeds resentment and poisons society. There's a word for the solution I'm hinting at but it's too dangerous to even mention.

<comment><USER13> I don't know what the exact unutterable "dangerous" solution you have in mind, but I can assure you, that's not it. The concept of inequality is bred into the human psyche (our hardware or software), you cannot get rid of simplistic social constructs such as communism, etc. Even if technology advances to the level of creating robots to do all menial tasks, our concepts and need for inequality will not go away (for a more pop but stronger version of this idea see Mr. Smith's monolog to Morpheus in _The Matrix_ ).

Now, there _is_ a solution that _will_ work and is dangerous: Huxley's eugenics/genetic engineering solution described in _Brave New World_. And we're fast approaching that solution, I think.

<comment><USER12> >The concept of inequality is bred into the human psyche

If it's inherent then why are there examples of societies which lack it?

<comment><USER13> The concept of a society with a strong form of equality is, I think, an utopia, and AFAIK, no such society exists. Even if you look at primitive societies, there are better hunters, the tribe leader has more wives than the regular guy, the shaman is revered, etc.

One can say that's not what this discussion is about, i.e. it's the _potential_ for equality, the right to be equal rather than the radical definition above, but then the discussion becomes muddled, how to measure inequality, economically (e.g. the Gini index), by asking people, etc. "Inequality" then becomes a very complicated word like "democracy" or "justice".

I think it's interesting to draw a comparison with democracy: "true" democracy, i.e. radical democracy, is likewise impossible to maintain. The closest form in Athens degenerated to tyranny many times. And probably Athens was the largest collection of people where such pure democracy is feasible, i.e. it cannot be scaled up to a whole country. Judging from the lack of other examples in human history, one can see that the order of things in Athens was not the natural state of society.

So, I maintain that pure forms "liberté, égalité, fraternité" are not practical and cannot be achieved.

Now, one can argue back, saying "Yeah, yeah, we know that, but surely you can rank countries on how much they have achieved these, e.g. surely no one would debate that the US is more democratic than Saudi Arabia." This, of course, is true, but (i) means that we should leave behind "a brotherhood of men, and no possession, too" crap behind and (ii) leads us back to the question of measuring inequality.

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities>

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

>One can say that's not what this discussion is about, i.e. it's the potential for equality, the right to be equal rather than the radical definition above, but then the discussion becomes muddled, how to measure inequality, economically (e.g. the Gini index), by asking people, etc. "Inequality" then becomes a very complicated word like "democracy" or "justice".

Personally, I think that it's very simple to define. We know from research that having more money, past the point of no longer being in poverty, does nothing significant to increase happiness. So, in my opinion, equality, in terms of money, is about nobody having to live in poverty and discomfort.

The democracy we are used to is Representative Democracy. When a few people hold all of the power, and we just get to vote for our dictators, what kind of democracy is that!? Personally, I think that Direct Democracy deserves more attention and experimentation. Some countries have been running it for years and their quality of life is among the best in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Because the system makes sure people stay poor.

How many of you were taught in school that if you pay yourself a minimum wage and make up the rest as a dividend/bonus you can avoid paying a significant amount of tax (legally)?

Or how many of you were taught how to become "employable" so that you can earn the same amount of money and pay considerably more tax, unavoidably - <USER2> you aren't in control of your own finance.

How many of you were taught to open a bank account as a good way of "organizing your finances" (read: filling the pockets of fat men).

How many of you were taught anything about running your own business and being in control of yourself and your securities?

There's a reason this isn't taught in public schools folks - it's because the people at the top want more for themselves and less for you. They don't care about you - except when you're gullible enough to believe you're making a choice when voting season arrives.

The poor are poor because they think "that's just the way it is," and continue about their lives. It's only when you realize that's not the way it should be, because you're being fucked, that you start to do something about it and make yourself.

Then there's the moral effect. You either see the need to do something to change the system, and remain poor - or you accept it, and realize that the best way for you to make more money is to keep poor people poor (and gullible) - thus prolonging the system.

<comment><USER15> There's a lot to be said for that. If somebody had _really_ sat down and hammered me on the power of compound interest and taught me a little bit about the capital markets, when I was, say, 14 or so... I think I would have made a lot of decisions differently and would probably be better off today. Although, to be fair on this point, I'm not _sure_ it would have helped, because I can't - in retrospect - say that my 14 year old self would have taken those lessons to heart. You think about time differently when you're young... the idea of saving for "the future" and building wealth slowly... would I have appreciated the idea of Dollar Value Averaging back then? Hmmm... hard to say.

But anyway, I agree with you in principle, sparkie. What we're taught about how the world works, when we are young, is tremendously influential.

<comment><USER14> I only really discovered the advantages of creating my own business when I was around 23, I'm 25 now. I also got into a significant amount of debt in order to get a degree to make me more "employable" - and I'm still paying it back.

I'm perhaps most irritated by this because I'm mostly self-taught (in computer science) and university did very little for me. I should've studied business instead, but probably like you suggest, I would've considered that idea incredibly boring at school leaving age.

Boredom aside though, I do wish I'd learned more about business and life in general during school. I'm still trying to learn my way around the system now, but there aren't enough hours in the day. I'm sincerely grateful for the people who've taken the time to explain things to me anyway.

<comment><USER16> Maybe what we need is less of a udacity for coding and one for business, expressed in a way anybody can understand but not as rigid as a bschool or mba program? Reading the Thiel lectures for instance is very educational but without the basics how do you apply something like that?

<comment><USER17> That's what I do: <http://personalmba.com>. Business is not that difficult once you know the basics.

The best place to start is my book: <http://personalmba.com/book/>

Hope you find it useful!

<comment><USER15> You're the guy behind PersonalMBA? Awesome, I have the book and I love the site. I haven't put as much time into it as I should, as I've been too busy with the nitty-gritty, day-to-day "stuff" of doing a startup.

I do fully intend to get through the Personal MBA stuff eventually; but right now, I'm spending more time with the stuff from Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, etc. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's about brakes, accelerators, and random (mis/good)fortune.

Brakes are the things that slow you down. Accelerators are the things that give you a boost.

Any one of us has these both imposed on us and has some degree of influence over them, though to what specific extent varies a lot.

The point of the essay (confession: I skimmed it) is that an _effective_ education is among the more powerful accelerators which can be applied. It's actionable (lifting a concept from a thread here) in the sense that both individuals and communities / society as a whole can engage productively in efforts to increase the availability / efficacy of education.

It's a fact recognized by the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, and the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's hard to write this, and my opinion is probably biased because of it, but this article is nothing but a giant load of horse shit and is a carefully constructed as "feel good" to reinforce the preconceived notions the author had going into it. A little bit of background; I grew up poor, people randomly leaving food on our doorstep poor, my parents giving the bike I had bought with my own earned money to my brother for christmas poor, moving every couple of years because my dad would make a bad enough name for himself in an entire town/city that he couldn't get a job poor. I was rejected from his classes (I was actually living in Queens at the time) when they were first available. I may have been one of the two 16 year olds turned away, but I'm pretty sure I was older than that at the time, I may have been one of the people who was "too poor" to take the class. I distinctly remember being told that I "wasn't what they were looking for" and that they "wanted the classes to be as beneficial to all attendees as possible." So, given that, my opinions may be a bit biased.

What I learned, clawing myself to where I am (I currently make more than twice what both my parents combined ever made), is that independent of the person, you HAVE to get the out of the situation they are in. Being "poor" or below the poverty line, life is not what you would expect. There is nothing extra, there is not even enough to sustain yourself. Each month, you make decisions of what bills to pay (food, electricity, gas, rent) based on which is most likely to be shut off. You spend money you can't afford on things you don't "need" because you need just something, anything, to make it feel like you are actually alive and not just some "thing", only there to feed on the remains you can come across. Learning about the humanities doesn't change the fact that you're working a minimum wage job 3rd shift and rarely making it to your classes at high school (just often enough to keep from being expelled) just so you don't end up homeless. It doesn't change the fact that you try to cheat and go through the lunch line twice to get two free meals just so you can have something to eat that evening (breakfast? The programs that give kids breakfast ends at middle school).

I escaped from poverty because I am significantly above the average intelligence level and I managed to make the right decision at the right time. For a point of reference, not the last time I talked to my dad, but the time before that, he was letting me know he may not have a phone for a while because the lady's cell phone plan he was on had passed away almost a year ago, and now that it was up for renewal and she was dead, he likely would not be able to put it in his name. I was paying someone I knew $30 a month to sleep in a sleeping bag in their closet when I joined the Army (shipped out January of 2000). I blew the ASVAB out of the water and had my choice of MOSes with all sorts of bonuses as well. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was removed from the environment I was in. I was able to see how other people lived while being provided for and then having some extra money on top. When my enlistment was over, I moved on and have done great things and I am now in a wonderful place in life now. But I'm unique in that aspect. A large number of people I served with would not be able to once they were discharged and I hope most of them stay in, because it's a better life for them.

Just as having middle class or better contacts, friends, network and confidants can help you maintain or better your station, being poor and having poor contacts, friends, network and confidants will help you maintain or lose ground. If everyone you know is working for minimum wage, you don't ask where a good place to work is expecting good work, you're expecting somewhere that will actually give you full-time hours, or enough to barely sustain yourself.

Downvote me, rail against me, disagree, defend the article all you want to, but the article is full of as much hope and potential as the government programs that are available to help the poor go to college, all the way up to covering the entirety of their tuition. It sounds like such a great idea, but the reality is that fully covered tuition means jack shit when they are working 70-80 hours a week just to make rent and keep the lights on. It's feel-good drivel by people who never truly understood (and never will understand) what it's like to be at the poverty level or below.

<comment><USER20> I don't think you're as much at odds with the author as you claim. What I read in the article was him trying to teach a different way of looking at things, a new angle, which is what I read you got out of your enlistment.

<comment><USER21> Yes, this quote from the reply jumped out at me: "What mattered was that I was removed from the environment I was in."

The author is saying the same thing, though perhaps more to do with mental models than physicality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sad that he tells the students "This will be proof, I hope, of my idea about the humanities".

It's Viniece Walker's idea, the woman he met in prison, who earned the idea with her struggles.

I wish more people of privilege were aware of how often they "forget" to give credit where credit is due, especially when credit is due to someone of less privilege.

<comment><USER23> Well, he did preface the entire article with that fact; it's not as if he doesn't give credit. There are any number of reasons not to go into the details of the inspiration during the course itself, and anyway, there's nothing whatsoever to indicate that he didn't mention it at some point.

To imply that this most selfless, compassionate, and generous person not only forgot to give credit but did so as a result of some inbuilt insensitivity to wealth disparity is an egregious misrepresentation. I mean, did you read what the guy's work was about? Is this really a nit to be picked?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [September 1997]

[Edit] and still relevant...just pointing out the date.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for pointing that out. As i was reading the article i was having flashbacks to Bunny Colvin attempting to 'socialize' his students in Season 4 of The Wire. It's reassuring to know that the study and science probably inspired the television show, and not the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We became poor after deciding to adopt agriculture and systems of debt - previous to that, your wealth was momentary and related to your immediate friends, the seasons, and location, so the concept didn't really exist as we know it.

As civilization gained wealth, some people became rich, but they were only rich relative to everyone else's poverty. The wealthiest people of Rome had, in most respects, less than what someone on Western unemployment benefits may have now. They could do better on basics(which are important), but the technology of today was unfathomable.

But one of the technologies we haven't found is a way to escape the status differentials, complexities, and failures of our debt system; solving that problem is the key to solving poverty.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have no clue. I think I know why I'm not poor

1\. Luck to be born in Germany 2\. My parents did everything despite their low incomes to get me to university and support me with everything I've ever tried - and got me out of stupid situations I got myself into 3\. Luck to get a job in the early 90s for programming web sites when very few people could do that, although the job offer was out there already for 3 months. Because someone at university told me during holiday about something called "WWW" 4\. Luck that my girl friend left me - somehow - and I wanted to get over that by working a lot 5\. Luck that I got VC financed and become CTO of a startup during the dot com boom

</comment><comment><USER28> In order to accumulate resources, one must use the resources available wisely, consuming just a portion and investing the rest to produce more resources.

Individuals and societies that don't do this grow poorer.

<comment><USER29> But your investment returns are someone else's uninvested consumption. Aggregate demand is like a field of crops, and our society seems to have chosen to eat its seed corn.

<comment><USER28> Not all returns are someone else's consumption. If that were the case, there would be no industry.

You can invest in a business that makes things for businesses or things that are actually investments for consumers.

An education is not (usually) consumption for a consumer. Neither is a car that more than pays for itself with the time it saves. Using the same car to go traveling around the country instead of getting an education is more consumption than investment.

Our society has chosen to water down the natural incentives to make prudent investments. Saving money no longer pays meaningful interest. The government gives you large incentives to buy a much bigger house than you might otherwise buy or rent. That "extra" house is consumption.

<comment><USER29> _Not all returns are someone else's consumption. If that were the case, there would be no industry._

It is a good approximation of reality, created by the fact that people have varying preferences for consumption versus investment.

 _An education is not (usually) consumption for a consumer. Neither is a car that more than pays for itself with the time it saves._

In neither of these cases does the provider of the car or education receive monetary returns for the car or education beyond the actual price. When I said "investment", I should perhaps have specified _capital gains_ : interest, dividends, or asset appreciation that return monetized value to the investor.

So an education is _metaphorically_ investment for the student, but not for the university. Even for the student, there is no asset owned that can be sold and no legal contract of debt or equity that "their education" has to pay for. There's just a hope of a better-paying job. Hence, "metaphorically" an investment.

 _Our society has chosen to water down the natural incentives to make prudent investments._

Well no. Our society is struggling to keep its head far-enough above water to avoid a deflationary spiral.

<comment><USER28> The maker of the car does receive a return. Its the price paid for minus all the costs of being in the car business.

A return is not guaranteed, of course. But if there were no return possible, no one would go into the car business.

You say for student there is no asset that can be sold. Not true, at least when the student chooses his education wisely. He can now sell his time for more money. Education is a "factor of production" of his work, which he then can sell.

When I first spoke about investment, I did not mean the narrow meaning you've understood. I was talking about why people are poor and I discussed consuming resources versus using them to produce more resources.

Investing in one's own capabilities or making your own garden are investments that don't involve giving money to someone else and waiting for a return. Successful businesses and successful people make such investments.

<comment><USER29> _When I first spoke about investment, I did not mean the narrow meaning you've understood. I was talking about why people are poor and I discussed consuming resources versus using them to produce more resources._

Ok, but in that case, most poor people simply don't have much to invest in themselves. Most of their efforts are consumed each day in just getting a living (by implication: most people are poor).

<comment><USER28> That's not true. We were all poor once. Yet here we are. I grew up poor myself.

Where people are not free, where the government or thieves take their resources, they cannot accumulate anything. And in countries that are still largely poor, that is exactly what happens.

But, when people are able to escape these countries to where they can be free, they are then free to improve their situation. And many do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I see lots of people blaming "the system" and whatnot for not teaching you to be rich..... and getting you into debt. And to be sure, the financial industry has been given too much rope to hand out credit without enough risk.

But I seem to recall seeing many other forums about university, mortgages, etc, where people who's parents paid for their education, helped with a house, etc, are ridiculed - and I don't mean super rich dynastic trust fund babies....

It only takes a generation and some common thinking for a family to stick together and get _ahead_ , and ensure their children never need to borrow money from a bank to get an education, or buy a house. You don't have to be rich... but why can't we live, you know, a generation ahead? I know a guy who told me his parents paid for all his stuff, his house, etc, and therefore all his work and all that (good tech guy) was just being saved up for HIS kids, ad-infinitum. They aren't trying to be rich - they just stay a generation ahead.

How many people, 10 years into their working life, have a year's minimum expenses in liquid cash, a cushion, just in case? How about 6 months? Most don't even have 2 weeks.... most live _hours_ away from disaster if they don't get paid on time, and they blame everyone else. Get a couple months ahead and you no longer think about when payday is.... it's not relevant. Want to be an entrepreneur? great. Do it. People don't understand what money is for, or how to really use it to their advantage. They learn abou their "credit rating" - that's it.

My rules: \- There's nothing wrong with cash in the bank (really secure, liquid assetts). People tell you you are losing out because of inflation..... most of those people got smashed when the stock market crashed. I'm not knocking investment, I'm just saying, cash is okay. I've weathered the ups and downs of the financial world without worry or concern while everyone else was freaking out. A good credit rating is good - but it should be a side effect of good financial practices, not a goal in and of itself. My credit rating probably isn't great - it's not _bad_ because I've done nothing wrong, but I haven't borrowed large sums and paid them back, that kind of thing.

Credit cards should work for you, they are not a privilege. They should protect you from risk of theft, and help you balance out and manage cache flow. They should never be used for money you don't have. There are other ways to go about that (and in a circle of friends with similar practices, you borrow from friends - imagine a society based on the same)

Avoid debt. Debt is okay - but don't get over your head... stay far, far away from that kind of debt. Debt carries a psychological burden as well.... for me it feels great knowing that when I get paid, my money is mine. If I borrow some money, pay some interest so I can keep some liquidity rather than spend cash on something big the interest payments are worth keeping my security cushion adequate - but if push comes to shove, I can just pay it off - that's what I mean.

You want a simple credit card without fees or nasty interest rates. You want protection and no nonsense. You want cash in the bank, always growing - <USER3> don't mean retirement savings, I mean a cushion - it should grow all the time. After 20 years of working you should be in a position where you could have no job for a year or more without screwing up your life. (not saying you SHOULD do that, you probably shouldn't - but you should be able to - that makes negotating salaries and dealing with employers much, much easier).

It's really simple. Avoid debt. Build and _keep adding to_ a cash cushion. Dip in once in a while, no problem, but keep it growing. It'll hurt at first, but before long you'll LOVE it. Be as aggressive as you can. Liquidity = opportunity. (Imagine having a rented home and lots of cash in the bank rather than an underwater mortgage when the housing market crashed. Most people tragically sufferred - you would be in a position to take advantage of the situation immediately.

<comment><USER31> "After 20 years of working you should be in a position where you could have no job for a year or more without screwing up your life."

We call it - "Go fuck yourself, boss" money.

<comment><USER30> Call it whatever makes you happy I guess - but personally, as much as I might want to, I htink it's abad idea to burn bridges. "go fuck yourself boss" is the wrong mentality - if the place isn't for you, you just go, move on, and leave it in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I read his book years ago, the one this article references. It was wonderful. I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Thanks for posting this article. It was extremely well written, so much so that I just bought some of his books. It feels like this should be a movie. Sounds more inspiring than Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER34> May be because the feeling of 'being important' has died inside them.

A lot of social factors can be blamed for that situation and truly though; but the important fact is 'it starts with the very individual'. Unless that individual feels the need, the situation won't change, no matter what. So if non-poor part of the society wants to do anything about it, the first thing that should be tried is to 'awaken' the poor.

</comment><comment><USER35> Great article - thanks for sharing.

It's a shame that most comments here respond to the title of the article and not its contents. Hint: it's not what you think

</comment><comment><USER36> It's interesting that this article mentions Heisenberg. Although the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was formulated for quantum particles, it can be paraphrased as saying that measurements disturb the system being measured. It is perilous to apply quantum physics to the behavior and interactions of humans, but here I believe it is illustrative. Specifically, I think Shorris' study perturbed the system he was trying to measure while he was still in the process of trying to measure its different aspects.

Shorris' argues that the key to escaping poverty is the study of the humanities. His evidence is that a group of carefully selected students who, after being given a year of quality education, seem to be able to escape the poverty that entrapped them. Learning the humanities therefore provides a way out of poverty. While this is an uplifting, perhaps even inspirational message, the conclusions he draws are highly questionable for a plethora of reasons.

1\. Response bias: Students expressing interest in the course are likely the most motivated individuals in their respective circles.

2\. Selection bias: Students deemed "too impoverished" or "too uneducated" were rejected.

3\. Intervention by study conductor: Education and career advice was not only given freely, but volunteered to promising pupils.

3\. Variables not controlled: The education included high quality instructors who might have been capable of "inspiring" their students, regardless of the subject being taught, as well as providing an "in" to their respective institutions. Disruption of routine: Students were required to leave their immediate neighborhood and social circles regularly and engage in rigorous study.

4\. No control group.

I could go on for a while, but this is sufficient. Shorris' study group consisted of the most highly motivated members of the poor minus those who were the least educated. He then intervened in their lives, not just to give them a quality education, but also by changing their habits, exposing them to the unfamiliar, enhancing their motivation and giving them career/education counseling plus networking connections to the educational institutes of the participating teachers.

I will not dispute that this course was a fantastic idea that enriched the lives of those lucky enough to take it, but it simply cannot be used as evidence for the notion that study of the humanities specifically can be used to combat poverty. Instead, it should be used a model for other similar courses.

</comment><comment><USER37> Could somebody do a TL;DR, please? I am interested, but I am not sure where the article gets to the point?

<comment><USER32> Real education is the path out of poverty. It always has been. Real education teaches people to think more effectively. Not everything called "education" fits that requirement. The poor are often subjected to training rather than education, which very often doesn't resolve anything. Training tends to reinforce the social trap they live in.

I suggest you not only read the article but also the book it is about. It is one of the more important books I have read.

<comment><USER38> Did this project have good results? Have other people successfully replicated those good results running the project themselves?

I suspect, like most projects, it didn't meet both of those criteria. However, if it did, I would be extremely interested.

<comment><USER39> > A year after graduation, ten of the first sixteen Clemente Course graduates > were attending four-year colleges or going to nursing school; four of them > had received full scholarships to Bard College. The other graduates were > attending community college or working full-time. Except for one: she had > been fired from her job in a fast-food restaurant for trying to start a > union.

It sounds like it was successful to me.

<comment><USER12> So the solution is to make _everyone_ a nurse or an engineer or a manager? Who's going to sweep the streets and grow food?

<comment><USER40> There is so much wrong with this statement and way of thinking that I don't even know where to start. I'm upvoting, because I don't want this comment to disappear, but it's still wrong-headed.

1\. Answering the first quesiton directly:

No, that's not the solution proposed by the article. The goal was to get the poor involved in politics, in the largest sense of the word. At the end, he reported that almost everyone in the first class was either in school or employed full-time. No mention of managerial roles, or what they were training to be. One tried to start a union, so she is not heading towards a managerial role.

There are plenty of programs out there that do try to train people in technical skills, like nursing, engineering, or management, but this was _not_ one of those programs. This is a way to help the poor break out of the vicious cycle of poverty themselves by giving them the tools to think about their situation. Who knows what they'll do with those tools.

2\. Answering the second question, allowing for your premise:

Robots, programmed by all of these engineers we wouldn't've had otherwise, and the people that are too poor to be helped, or unable for other reasons. This is what we call a _good_ problem.

3\. Making fun of you/sarcasm:

OK, sure, lets not help the poor at all, because what if we're _too successful?!?_ That would be horrible! We'd starve to death in dirty streets, because people would be too busy nursing, engineering, and managing each other, and not realize there was no food!

4\. Rejecting your premise and addressing the second question:

Who's going to do the blue collar jobs? Mostly the same kinds of people that do them now, except they will have more political empowerment, and a greater capacity for reflection and critical thinking. I know a few educated people that choose to work as farmhands, so it's not impossible, and I myself enjoy an "honest day's work" (speaking as someone with the privilege of an education in the humanities).

Can you imagine how awesome it would be if we had a society of critical thinkers and moral philosophers, instead of the reactionary, anti- intellectual, gullible, fundamentalist society we have now[1]? Can you imagine if the lowest common denominator weren't so low? I'm not saying it would be a utopia, but for at least the last few hundred years, people have been dreaming of a time when machines had taken over every menial task, and humans could spend their time as they wished, free to follow pursuits of their own choosing.

[1] I'm not trying to say 100% of society is like that I'm just saying that significant fractions of the American population at least show one or more of these characteristics, and I don't think it's making for a better society.

<comment><USER12> Whoa there. I merely questioned the notion that simply educating everyone will solve all of our problems. I was implying that there's a lot more to it than that. Look at the media industry, for example - we have developed technology which makes information freely accessible to everyone yet we have a considerable amount of resources being thrown at locking that down, which makes no sense in the grand scheme of things.

I agree that education is a must, but it's also about addressing the social structures we currently have in place and recognising that they will fight tooth and nail to keep things the way they currently are.

<comment><USER40> Please forgive me for misinterpreting, since at the only clarification you had at the time of my comment was

> And the implication of everybody being well educated is that everyone will > have white collar jobs or prestigious blue collar jobs. If everyone is well > educated then who will want to take a job as a street cleaner when they've > just spent $80k on their education? The solution is clearly not limited to > just educating everyone, is it?

While the latter part of your statement is the same as the beginning of what you just said, I took the former to mean that educating everybody would cause additional problems, not that it wouldn't solve all the problems we have. If you didn't mean to imply this line of thinking, or if you have abandoned it, then great.

To address this new point, did you see anything in my comment that suggests I want to keep our current social structure? The very act of empowering the poor into participating in politics (again, not just in the election sense) on a large scale will change the structure of society. And then, instead of the privileged deciding what the poor need and pushing potential solutions, we would probably start to see the poor creating their own solutions, and further changing our societal structure. I imagine that their solutions would work better than those that came from outside, and they might even be highly resistant to recommendations from a model society (some didn't even trust that this education would help, since "the white man wouldn't let you up no matter what.").

It's like the various Housing First problems out there. Most of the homeless have a host of other problems (addiction, mental illness/disorder, lack of education, etc) but these programs get them an apartment first, and merely make the other services available. And from what I've read, they work. People stay off the streets and clean themselves up, for the most part.

That said, there is _no_ reason we can't educate everyone in the humanities and do other things, too.

<comment><USER12> I've thought a fair bit about this now and finally understand what point I was trying to make. Educating the poor is not enough because the rich are an integral part of the problem. Just as the poor are so because they lack education, so the rich hold deep prejudices against the poor because of _their_ lack of education. It's just like psychotherapy on an individual scale - the problem is never limited to just the person in question. The problem is the whole family, the whole society, not just one aspect of it.

In other words, our entire society needs to be re-educated in order to solve this problem, not just the poor.

>we would probably start to see the poor creating their own solutions, and further changing our societal structure.

Indeed we would, but we would also see a great deal of resistance to it from the powers that be. This needs to be addressed with equal importance. What's the point of bringing people up when others will just try to push them down more? We need to bring them up _and_ make space to accommodate them.

<comment><USER40> Thank you for engaging me in this thread. I still think you're missing the point, if you think people need it pointed out to them that there's more than one reason the poor are poor. Well, they do, but not if they've read this article, since the author is more than aware of this, and illustrates what he calls the "surround of force" throughout.

In terms of educating the rich, what exactly do you propose to teach them and how do you suggest convincing them to give you the time of day?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> _If you want to get out of poverty, stop thinking like a poor person._

<comment><USER20> As ismarc above states, half the battle is also being surrounded by poor people who disregard accomplishment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> People are poor when a market doesn't employ capitalist methods.

In a purely capitalist job market the hardest working, most productive people would get paid the best and have job security.

<comment><USER43> This sounds like religious dogma. How do you define "hardest working"? Would someone holding down two and three jobs count because these people tend to be some of the poorest.

I can imagine that if we could somehow make compensation transparent to the point that, say, buying bananas is so that every single worker has a rough idea of the value their work provides that would help raise wages but I would still struggle for a definition of "hard working" that would mean those that engage in it will become the richest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> bad luck. (bad genes, bad parents, bad country...)

</comment><comment><USER45> Just one more apologist for the 1% telling them it's ok that you have so much and most other people have none. It's their choice. They choose to be poor. It is very simple. So go back to cheating on your taxes so you can afford shinyer rings. It's not your fault our infrastructure is crumbling, its all those poor people who refuse to choose to not be poor. Shelve next to other right wing wacko screeds like Ayn Rand.

</comment><comment><USER45> Gotta love all these ditto heads doing the 'start your own business' chorus. 99% of all new businesses fail.

The 1% have been working very hard to pull up and destroy the ladders they used to get where they are.

In the current fascist economy there is simply no way 100 out of 100 people can all strike it rich. The handful at the top are busy cementing their position.

The game is rigged.

</comment><comment><USER46> In a recent fictional book about poverty in the UK, two types if poverty were identified.

One was unintentional poverty- someone falls into trouble due to no fault of their own. Maybe illness, trauma etc

The other is intentional- individuals taking full advantage of government benefits. In the UK generations of families have been stuck in this category.

One group feel more deserving...

<comment><USER47> > _The other is intentional- individuals taking full advantage of government > benefits. In the UK generations of families have been stuck in this > category._

The UK tax and benefits system creates perverse incentives. The systems are baffling (advisors for tax or for benefits need a lot of training (accountants need degree level studying and qualifications)) and interlocking. They are handled by different government departments. Mistakes are common. If the people paying the benefit make a mistake to your detriment nothing happens. (Or if you make a mistake to your detriment.) (And if you don't notice in time you're unlikely to get that money ever.) But if they make a mistake in your favour that money will be clawed back, no matter how long ago the mistake was made. And if you make a mistake in your favour, or if you don't report their mistakes in your favour, you risk interview under caution, arrest, and prosecution.

Compare this treatment of people who are poor with, for example, very wealthy companies taking extreme borderline legal tax avoidance measures.

People who have learned dependence might not feel deserving, but getting them off benefit and into work isn't as easy as clubbing them with punishments. Especially since it was society that put them there.

Here's an example of Vodafone:

([http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/22/vodafone...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/22/vodafone- tax-case-leaves-sour-taste))

They owed maybe £6bn, probably £4bn. They paid £1.2bn in a deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Surely genetics plays a huge role, one that's ignored in this article.

<comment><USER49> What would be the point? It's not an issue we're equipped to address, so what good would come from dwelling on the topic, even discounting the risk of muddying the author's point with divisive claims?

<comment><USER48> It makes all the difference in the world. If people are poor _because that's the best they're genetically equipped to do_ , then there's not much we can do about it.

Look at pigeons. They eat out of garbage cans. They die within a few years. They get run over by cars rather a lot. But we don't really worry about this, because they're _just fucking pigeons_.

<comment><USER50> _if that's the best they're genetically equipped to do_

Gosh I'd be ashamed to make such an argument. It's a) incredibly loaded, and b) carries incredible risk in the event that someone takes it to heart and actually starts acting along those lines. Though perhaps you are just not used to your words having any force, and have yet to learn circumspection.

And I sense a certain hubris: "I am not a pigeon." Well, so you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> There are poors so rich can stay rich.

<comment><USER52> The richer are some, the poorer are others.

There is a limited amount of money/wealth in the world. If some people take/earn/inherit more than average, then less wealth will remain available to others. The only way to fight poverty is to prevent exaggerated accumulation of wealth (the rich must be incited to spend his money, if not through creating jobs, then through taxes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Swing low. Give it all away.

</comment><comment><USER54> Because they're stupid and lazy;No because they're oppressed and victimized LOL ROFLMAO TLDR

</comment><comment><USER55> Poverty is structural. Why are people poor? Largely because they are working jobs that pay shit wages, or live in areas they are too poor to escape, where there are not quality jobs matching the skillset taught to them by society.

This article is elitist bullshit coming from someone who has lived their life completely alien to poverty, who struggles to understand it.

When every type of worker makes enough money to afford to live in a school district with resources and quality educators, have health care, buy groceries, and care for their kids, we'll be in a lot better condition as a society.

</comment><comment><USER56> Evolution encourages diversity. At any given point in time and place, some people are better adapted than others. The least adapted make up at least some of the poor. By this relative definition, some poor will always be with us, even though their standard of living is rising continually.

<comment><USER57> Social Darwinism, really? I thought that went out of style with eugenics.

<comment><USER58> Stylishness is not equivalent to truth.

<comment><USER59> In science, they are quite highly correlated.

<comment><USER60> This hasn't been true historically. Almost all of the times we have been confident that we understood something, we have been wrong.

<comment><USER61> That is because almost all the time we are wrong, whether we were confident or not. However, we were generally less-wrong that were were before.

I recommend Asimov's article on the matter: <http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm>

<comment><USER58> There are also step functions when dogma comes into the question. Copernicus and Galileo were both right about heliocentrism, but when heliocentrism was politically incorrect, the scientific consensus was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This article is breathtakingly ludicrous. The 'humanities' and the culture that espouses them are essentially pre-scientific. The exercise described by the author is an embarrassing demonstration of that.

Inequality is built-in to the structure of our 'civilization'. There are social science studies which have demonstrated how that works. [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=inequality&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=10&q=inequality&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5) Some of those might not be as ludicrous as the article (although many of the authors of those studies may be social Darwinists which would probably invalidate many of the results).

My current perspective is this: there is a very simple, stupid set of beliefs which are supporting the structure which leads to the maintenance of vast inequality. Basically, we still have castes and have gone through a few different rationalizations and slight variations over the centuries.

So I think that good social science will look at income inequality over generations in terms of social class and look at social class as an extension of ancient caste systems. I also think that at one time caste systems may have provided an overall benefits to societies, but modern technology has long since made them obsolete.</comment>


Women are happier without children or a spouse - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert <comment><USER2> _"Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they're asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable," he said._

 _"We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you're a man, you should probably get married; if you're a woman, don't bother."_

Obviously this guy is speaking off the cuff. And the article is light on detail and doesn't reference any studies.

Study from 2017 that makes the opposite claim:

[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-017-9941-3)

 _Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, we control individual pre-marital well-being levels and find that the married are still more satisfied, suggesting a causal effect at all stages of the marriage, from pre- nuptual bliss to marriages of long-duration._

A brief APA article describes possible marital bliss confounders:

[https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/marriage](https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/10/marriage)

In short: marriage _qua_ marriage won't make anyone happy; children reduce reduce happiness; economic insecurity causes unhappiness.

<comment><USER3> I've seen another report that said children reduce happiness if you are poor and increase it if you are rich. I guess the rich can afford to outsource some of the parental responsibilities.

<comment><USER4> I'd expect that it's less about outsourcing responsibility and more to do with the financial pressure caused by having children. As money finances is the factor used to separate the two groups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Being childless and alone at 50-70 sounds like heaven. Old people hate being visited by their grandchildren.

<comment><USER6> Sounds like you are joking. Not all do. And a lot of seniors are getting laid a lot.

<comment><USER7> Some without knowing it unfortunately. My eldest child worked at a nursing home and there were situations where lucid consent was not likely in one or sometimes even both of the people involved.</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook, Gmail, Skype face Russia ban under 'anti-terror' data snooping plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/facebook-gmail-skype-face-russia-ban-under-anti-terror-data-snooping-plan-7000028740/ <comment><USER2> If you think about it, these softwares the best attack surfaces for secret services. A prime example is the Google hack, when the hackers used Facebook as the attack vector.</comment>


I open-sourced my EV Li-on Battery Management System - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ricksta/openBMS

<comment><USER2> Awesome to see something like this out there. A BMS can get very advanced, and it would be very interesting to see a complex open-source system down the road.

I'm not sure I understand the balancing code. It looks to me like the gate is turned on for any cell over 3.509 V (the conditionals all depend on constants). Doesn't this unnecessarily drain your cells?

<comment><AUTHOR> thats correct. I'm typing this on my phone bare with my short response.

From 20 to 80% state of charge. The cell voltage will be around 3.3v. When the battery gets charged to more than 3.5v, it is pretty much full. The bms will cut the charger off when the first cell reach 3.6v. Most cells will still be around 3.5. So the ones that are above 3.5 will get drain down to 3.5v and in turn balances there battery pack.

balancing battery is tricky, and this is just one simple algorithm I find to work fairly well.

<comment><USER2> I see, that makes sense. A potentially better (and still simple) algorithm you could use is to take the differences between the cell and the lowest cell, and try to balance to the lowest cell's value. This should give a slightly tighter pack, and has a side benefit of the ability to balance at any state of charge.

I can send a pull request if you'd like to do some benchmarking. :)

That also seems like a small voltage swing. Do you have any more information on the cells you're using? Maybe a voltage vs. SoC chart?

Edit: wording

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually my original algorithm did exactly that. The problem with that approach is the amount of energy required to change the cell voltage by 0.1V goes up exponentially once it's below 3.5V, where the charge curve flattens out. An example would be a 40% state of charge battery could be 3.30V and a 60% state of charge battery would be 3.33V. When the batteries are usually about 1-3% difference in SoC, it become very difficult to balance them based on just looking at the voltage alone. The measuring error is probably more than the actual voltage difference. That why I decided to not bother balancing the battery once they are below 3.5V.

The numbers I'm getting is for LiFePo4. There are many other chemistry of Li- on variant, and LiFePo4 so far is the safest. It does not burn up like the ones in your laptop, but at the cost of slightly less energy density.

The type of batteries we had in our EV was these ones made by Winston Battery: [http://en.winston-battery.com/index.php/products/power- batte...](http://en.winston-battery.com/index.php/products/power-battery)

They were kind enough to donate almost $20,000 worth of these babies to us. We had 160Ah x 3 in parallel.

<comment><AUTHOR> and of course the BMS can work with any other type of Li-on battery chemistry by changing it's protection parameters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can you explain what this does, as if to a 10 year old?

<comment><USER2> A Battery Management System contains all the onboard controls necessary for a battery to manage its components. Depending on the complexity of the battery, this includes when to (dis)charge, temperature control, cell balancing, high voltage connections, safety monitoring, and more. A good BMS is crucial in using a battery efficiently and maintaining a long life.

An open-source BMS could play a huge role in the advancement of battery technology. If only automakers would do the same. :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for explaining! Sounds like something that could really benefit from more eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Excuse my EEE ignorance, but can this be scaled down to say a small robot (think Roomba size), or even smaller to a Li-on battery backup for something like a Beagleboard/Pandaboard?

Thanks for open sourcing this!

</comment><comment><USER5> This is indeed awesome. I was literally just thinking about the importance and potential of something like this. FLUX Power bms are too expensive but remarkable technology. Thanks for doing this. It is open technology like this that will change the market for electric cars.

</comment><comment><USER6> good work! just what I was looking for for my ebike project. thanks for open sourcing it!

</comment><comment><USER7> Well,can not understand those open-source things that is not written by programming language,lol</comment>