A look at the Technology behind the 4D Game Miegakure [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZp0ETdD37E <comment><USER2> Still sounds wonderful, but when's the damn thing coming out? I first heard about Miegakure in an xkcd from 6 years ago, and was immediately ready to hand over my money. It's been hard to maintain that enthusiasm through one and a half Presidential terms...

<comment><USER3> I guess it's hard to do level design in a dimension you can't even comprehend...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As the creator of a 4D game, I can attest how hard it is to make such a thing fun.

Even though simpler, I think what I built is only partially successful at this. In the end I think the audience for my toy and Marc's game will only be people excited about new concepts and toying with theoretical math ideas where the bulk of the fun is just from that rather than game play.

I believe much of a game's fun comes from matching the users existing abstract ideas about the world. I suspect that 4D manipulation of objects is so deeply counter intuitive that doing this is extremely difficult.

But I for one will be thrilled by any from of Miegakure that is ever released whatever it's state or level of fun.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing. It matches the description I read in Michio Kaku's Hyperspace as a kid. Except the visuals, although similar, were said to be blobs. I'm not sure.

I like that the game creates the ability to move through a 4D space while seeing the effects in 3D. The fundamental is great. Also, how a 4D person might move through walls via the fourth dimension. I think an even more interesting angle might happen if a game tries to break the assumption that 4D movement is wide open: put obstacles in the way where a person must use intuition to navigate it by making a 2D/3D map of that space as well. Maybe the game does that, too.

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Each puzzle is about doing some crazy thing that only a 4D being could do, such as binding two rings without breaking them, or stealing something from a building that is closed from all sides but not in the fourth dimension. We'll show more of that soon.

<comment><USER5> "such as binding two rings without breaking them"

I can't wait to see that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most of the transcript of the video is on the main page ([http://miegakure.com/](http://miegakure.com/)), along with illustrative images and gifs.

They evoke how their inspiration was flatland, which when I read it I found strikingly unimaginative. To explain, the characters are 2D objects; the book describes some of the problems these beings encounter, but doesn't really solve them, so the described society doesn't really hold up. One instance is that their field of vision is just a line with a dimension for color, so you need to see a form move into space to understand what it is (maybe I'm wrong, but I think the author does not say clearly that points do bear some 'depth' and 'texture' information, otherwise this wouldn't work). But there are creative ways to solve these problems: for example the beings could 'see' using a bat-like interpretations of echoes to get a sense of the space around them (we see in 3D, not in 2D). Life under different constraints ends up having different features than us humans. So in a sense, it is a bit like somebody who would stumble upon a mathematical paradox (say, the barber's one) and would just deduce 'how funny are words and numbers' (well, a bit like Lewis Caroll).

<comment><USER8> I think the real cleverness of that book is the comparison of 2D creatures to 3D, and use that to guide our otherwise non-existent intuition of what 4D space would look like. I could imagine one thinking of that analogue before reading the book, making it seem less novel. But you have to remember that we've lived in a society that's had that book for nearly 150 years, so it would not be surprising if some of the ideas from the book became a mainstream meme.

<comment><USER7> But Erewhon came in 1872, and contained many ideas that are still very strong (emergent life, creation of the technological system and clash with the ancient order (Church))...

It's a bit like the 'Seinfeld is unfunny' trope; even at the time, some people found it unfunny. It does not mean that this effect does not play a role, but you seldom hear "well, Copernicus is such a greaaat guy for discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun", while it does suffer from it.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had devised such stories illustrating some mathematical concepts; it's just that more than 150 years ago, the audience for 'geeky stories' was not so big, as well as the potential writers for such stories weren't so numerous (although Gauss seems a bit cheeky on his portrait). HN just wasn't there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "What you see is a 2D projection of a 3D slice of a 4D object".

Poetry.

</comment><comment><USER10> But is it fun? The 4d is good and all, but is it playable and enjoyable. Otherwise it is just a gimmick, a cool gimmick but a gimmick.

</comment><comment><USER11> Key sentence:

"When you finally get to play Miegakure"

When it's going to be released!? Been waiting a long time now...

</comment><comment><USER12> Beautiful. Get someone else to narrate the video. But beautiful.

<comment><USER13> I don't know if it changed since your comment but there was absolutely nothing wrong with the narration.

<comment><USER14> As a non-native english speaker: He absolutely rushes through his explanation at break-neck pace, and he rarely changes the tone of his voice from a droning monotone. For me that makes it incredibly difficult to process and retain anything he talks about.

<comment><USER15> As a native speaker he was speaking at a fairly normal pace, and his intonation was fine, just more subtle. Voices like his are not uncommon, especially in engineering. That being said, based on his accent it is possible that english is not be his first language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> is the avatar in the game 3D or 4D?

<comment><USER17> if they make the argument that the 3D level geometry is a slice of 4D geometry, then a 3D animation frame of the character is also a slice of 4D geometry (the 4D geometry interpolated from 3D keyframes and timing curves)

<comment><USER18> A 4d collision boundary would limit the players ability to explore, just taking a few steps would require solving a 4d puzzle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What the hell is a 4D game? I just hate buzzwords.

<comment><USER20> Watch the video?

<comment><USER21> What the hell is a video? I couldn't resist.

<comment><USER22> A 2D slice of a 3D object.

<comment><USER23> Projection, not slice.

<comment><USER24> An image of a video is a slice of it for some constant time coordinate.

If you instead fix a spatial coordinate you get images as the two left and center images in

> > [http://electronicimaging.spiedigitallibrary.org/data/Journal...](http://electronicimaging.spiedigitallibrary.org/data/Journals/ELECTIM/929595/JEI_23_1_013016_f002.png)

<comment><USER23> You changed the assertion because you're including time.

The parent said "A 2D slice of a 3D object."

And that's wrong, it's a 2D projection of a 3D object.

If you include time then it's a slice in the time component, right, but that wasn't being discussed.

<comment><USER24> The third dimension _is_ time.

Videos can also be generated without using projections (though cameras use this method).

<comment><USER25> Time is a different type of dimension than the spatial dimensions. If you're really going to bring time into it, you need to use a dimensional signature, wherein one number represents dimensions that square to a positive number, another represents dimensions that square to a negative number, and another represents dimensions that square to zero.

A video is either {2,1,0}-D or {1,2,0}-D, depending on the mathematical sign convention you chose for your spacelike dimensions.

When people use a single number, they invariably mean spacelike dimensions, as null dimensions and multiple timelike dimensions tend to give people the screaming jibblies when they try to visualize them.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microkernel OS in C# - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080208-developers-create-open-source-os-kernels-using-net-tools.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't get the practical value of it. They cite low system requirements for embedded applications because unnecessary components can be omitted during compilation.

So? Linux kenrel can already be compiled with minimal configuration without performance-penalizing JIT in the kernel space.

</comment><comment><USER2> My oldest kid was part of the SharpOS project for a while.

It's cool stuff. The article doesn't do the subject justice, though.</comment>


Open Letter to Joe Hewitt: Become a Gardener - <AUTHOR> http://andrewwooldridge.com/blog/2009/11/16/open-letter-to-joe-hewitt-become-a-gardener/

<comment><USER2> Metaphor stolen from the movie <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There></comment>


Is Jeopardy! a viable source of startup funding? - <AUTHOR>

Well, I'm on tonight's show, so I guess we'll see  (I'm co-founder of LALife.com, a local real estate site).  Tune in and find out. <comment><USER2> Good Luck! Just make sure not to spell the host's name backward ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Someone totally beat me to it:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnX-fqlo1M>

A guy also bet $1337 in the college tournament.</comment></comment>


Why is this little construction crane illegal in New York City? (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160515/REAL_ESTATE/160519910/dan-mooneys-skypicker-crane-could-save-millions-in-construction-costs-heres-why-its-gathering-dust-in-a-warehouse-in-astoria <comment><USER3> The New York Department of Buildings response to this article (June 2016) :

 _Skypicker presented the department with plans for a small, truck-mounted crane... However, when we inspected the Skypicker in use at a construction site, we found something significantly different: The crane was attached to a building slab, and appeared to be a hodgepodge of parts from other cranes, mounted on a homemade, untested base._

[http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160623/OPINION/160629...](http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160623/OPINION/160629905/why- the-city-shut-down-the-skypicker-crane)

And the inventor shoots back:

 _The executive director of the [Department of Buildings] Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved emailed me that [Department of Buildings Commissioner] Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane... He's the one that's misinformed._

[http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his- side-...](http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-of-the- citys-ban-and-backs-it-up/)

<comment><USER4> True, but remember this is New York City.

In the original article, when the crane was first used on jobs and word got around about it being less expensive and required fewer operator man hours, his job sites were picketed by unions. There were anonymous calls to 311 reporting violations but when the inspectors got there, they didn't find anything wrong.

In my mind, I'm skeptical and it could have been the cranes or it could have been union influence.

<comment><USER5> It's the unions.

On my way to work, I pass by a giant inflatable rat inflated by a gas motor that's hauled around by a truck. It's rather annoying when its tail gets loose and covers the sidewalk, as can happen on windy days when it's not tied down appropriately. It's probably 10 or 12 feet tall, at least, and the tail is maybe 12 feet long or longer. (3 feet is about one meter for those in metric land).

It's parked there because one of the buildings under construction here didn't use the right amount of union labor, so there's always a rat present. Walk around and you'll see this same rat in different places; they've got a number of them. They've also got some rather impressive pigs and fat cats.

This is the city that couldn't get rid of two operators per train on the L, even though technically they could more or less get by with zero (the trains mostly drive themselves on that line; the operator, to my understanding, just has to keep acknowledging that the train should proceed).

Why?

The unions protested and won, citing hitherto unknown safety reasons that should be plaguing cities like Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris, Washington D.C., etc. due to their lack of two people. Doubly so for those lines (including the AirTrain to JFK in NYC) that do not have operators at all...

<comment><USER6> Though it's possible that you're correct on this specific issue, you've offered absolutely no support for your argument.

Consider the possibility that the strong streak of instinctive union bashing that you see in typical professional class culture in the U.S. is very much the creation of decades of aggressive PR effort by those who consider unions threatening.

<comment><USER7> I live in NY and have lived here my entire life. I am very pro union but not pro NYC construction unions. If you have ever been on a job site, there are arcane rules that pad their pockets. Want to plug in a computer in a finished room? Sorry you are going to need an electrician for that. If you do it anyway they will bill you for the electrician coming over anyway.

Need to get in the building? Well the elevator operator that gets paid $40 hr is off for an hour for lunch. He sits on a cooler and eats and drinks all day and occasionally there is an elevator operator apprentice with him. These are elevators that are not construction elevators, but ones that work just fine automatically once the construction guys are out.

The teamster guys sit at the loading dock on lawn chairs also getting paid huge rates for doing absolutely nothing. They will not help you unload anything. They sit there hanging out.

Sounds like a racket? Well it is. And for a really long time it was a racket with the Mafia enforcing using union labor. If you didn't go union they would hurt you or somehow sabotage you, and conversely the union would walk off the job if you didn't take care of the Mafia.

Now the modern racket is with very low level politicians and regulatory boards. The only way you get in these unions too is by knowing someone.

These people make a bad name for unions, and drive costs way up for anything in NYC area.

<comment><USER8> > you have ever been on a job site, there are arcane rules that pad their > pockets. Want to plug in a computer in a finished room? Sorry you are going > to need an electrician for that. If you do it anyway they will bill you for > the electrician coming over anyway.

If you've ever worked in construction you'd know these "arcane" rules are there because someone died before they existed. Construction is one of the most dangerous professions around. Unions are the only thing standing between companies trying to cut costs and shorten builders life expediencies.

<comment><USER9> "Somebody died once" is not a valid reason for everyone thereafter to have to pay $80 (an hour of electrician's time) to plug in their computer to the outlet that comes as part of their trade show booth... or the same to have someone come vacuum their 10 sq ft piece of carpet before the show opens. Both of these are things someone could easily do on their own, but aren't allowed to because someone died once.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is sort of like how when the waterless urinal was first commercialized, the plumbers union blocked it from getting approved in the general building code. Eventually a compromised was reached that involves requiring a plumber to draw an water line (unutilized) to every water-less install.

Unions for skilled, high-pay jobs in highly regulated industries really extract a lot of questionable value from society.

<comment><USER11> Union acts in it's member's interests: "Terrible, we shouldn't allow this".

Corporation acts in it's own interests: "Well you can't blame them for that".

<comment><USER12> I tend to think that monopolies are bad, whether corporations or unions. Local 14 is trying to be a monopoly.

One of the best arguments I've heard for unions [0] is that a negotiation between workers and companies is usually very lopsided: a company can afford for an employee to quit, but a worker often cannot afford to get fired. A union is powerful enough to negotiate equally with companies. But in the case of Local 14, it seems like the power is actually lopsided in the other direction: Local 14 can afford to boycott one particular construction project, but the building developers can't afford to go without cranes.

[0] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non- liberta...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian- faq/) (see section 2.5)

<comment><USER13> > For decades, the local has had control over the training of new crane > operators—and therefore who can work on a job site.

That's a monopoly practice, right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The first subway in New York City cost about $100 million per kilometer in 1900 (adjusted for inflation of course). The new subway line being opened this year cost $2.2 billion per kilometer. This is despite _over a century_ of improvements in technology.

Here's an interesting HN post, "Forty Percent of the Buildings in Manhattan Could Not Be Built Today" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736696](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11736696) In that article is a statistic that three fourths of the square footage of Manhattan was built between 1900 and 1930. If a freak hurricane somehow destroyed New York, we would be literally unable to rebuild it. For both cost and legal reasons.

Someday soon we might be like the later generations of Romans. Living amongst the great crumbling structures built by our ancestors. Wondering how on Earth they could have achieved such things.

<comment><USER15> A big difference in subway costs is that subways used to be built by closing roadways and digging from above ("cut and cover"). But now it's almost always done by very slow, very expensive to operate underground boring machines.

<comment><USER16> [http://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new...](http://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2)

NYC subway construction costs exceed costs of similar projects in different countries, by quite a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 14-14B lays out the > wage floor for its operators at $73.91 per hour. That's $150,000 a year > before overtime, plus benefits equal to $32.50 an hour. When the operator is > behind the controls of a tower crane, he gets a $2-an-hour bump. On > weekends, when cranes are moved, pay doubles. With overtime, many union > members earn half a million dollars a year.

And they don't have to take their work home with them! Wow, I'm in the wrong line of work.

<comment><USER18> It'd should be a undocumented person getting paid 6.50 an hour. Looks ripe for some disruption eh? Send in the VC money and sociopaths! Whatever the market will bear!

<comment><USER15> Perhaps there's a middle ground.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Question: Why didn't the guy just pack up the crane and take it elsewhere? The issues that make tower cranes unsafe and expensive aren't unique to New York City, and if Austin, TX was any indication, there has been a shortage of cranes due to construction activity worldwide.

Is there something about the economics or the licensing that makes this crane only work in New York City?

<comment><USER20> That was my thought too, I'm sure there's many cities to market his product. He needs to get on his GaryVee train and start calling every city until he finds places to land. Bring it up to Vancouver, most of our downtown is low rise and would probably make this ideal. And making $400,000 means he could probably take a year off as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Unions have a purpose. Suppressing innovation and competition to protect their gravy train monopoly should not be one of them.

<comment><USER22> Not all unions are bad.

Unions serve a purpose in many industries but today a lot of them are antiquated echoes from the past.

Uber drivers should have a union IMO, but the ATeachers Union and Manhattan construction industry should have theirs disrupted by something more fitting for the new reality they have too much power. The construction industry literally have people holdning signal flags the entire day.

Furthermore when it comes to Manhattan lets not forget how much wiseguys control many of the cities industries.

<comment><USER23> people are not holding signal flags bc the contractor wants to higher more people but DOT state or federal require it.

<comment><USER22> I wouldn't be surprised that it's because the unions have been fighting for it.

Other places around the world can figure out to slow traffic down without having flaggers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "In April 2014, City Councilman Ben Kallos, who received $2,500 over two elections from Local 14, introduced new legislation to prohibit climber cranes like the Skypicker from being classified as mobile cranes. The rule would treat the Skypicker like a tower crane, requiring it to carry more insurance and have a Class A operator."

Wow. So, for the price of a laptop I could influence NYC politics and have a councilman of my very own ?

I don't even live in New York and it's _still_ tempting, if only for the lulz.

Do you think Mr. Kallos would pull me in a rickshaw when I visit ? Or would I need an extra fifty bucks ?

<comment><USER25> People pay too much attention to the money. He wasn't "bought" with the $2500, he was "bought" with the guaranteed votes from union members for supporting it.

<comment><USER26> The monetary incentive aside - on principle, it's a good thing that a group of people can arrange with a politician to specify the policy they want to see and then vote for that politician to enact it, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> They do a really good job of painting the union as the culprit here without any evidence whatsoever. The first comment on the article suggests a competing crane company was responsible. I think that is just as likely.

Anyhow, as others in this thread have pointed out, the skycranes are back in business.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Mooney was told his crane didn't have to go through the long approval > process required for newly designed large cranes and that it could be > approved as a mobile crane.

There has to be some kind of miscommunication going on here. By what definition is his crane mobile? Because it's easier to disassemble and load on to a truck than a tower crane? While the DoB's classifications for cranes seems arbitrary, I can't say I blame them for not considering it mobile.

</comment><comment><USER29> Too bad they weren't as popular, well known, or well funded as Uber/Lyft to deal with this type of anti-progress nonsense.

I've been meaning for a long time to start a site to track these events of businesses getting sidelined over regulatory hurdles - similar to those sites who track police shootings. Collecting data is the best way to bring light to prevalent but maligned issues like these. I get the impression there are hundreds of these small stories that could have had an impact on the marketplace but get crushed by regulatory/incumbent barriers.

We only ever hear about it when a big company runs into these issues. But for the most part it's usually people who are already taking a huge financial risk to do an entrepreneurial activity and they don't have the runway/capital to deal with the problem, let alone invest the time to draw attention to the issue in the press or politically.

<comment><USER30> This sounds amazing! What's blocking you?

<comment><USER31> Oppressive regulations?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > During the many hours of downtime on job sites, perched hundreds of feet > above the street, he would pull out a journal and sketch new ideas for > cranes, hoping to solve some of the machines' fundamental problems.

Per last week's discussion, who owns those sketches? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921433)

<comment><USER33> Well, he owns the company, so it's moot:

> The 50-year-old crane operator and president of crane leasing company > Vertikal Solutions was helping to build the 34-story Hilton Garden Inn in > midtown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> tl;dr - It's like a crawler (mobile with a boom, street level crane) but you put it on top of something already there. Since its on top of something, it's not a "mobile" crane and couldn't get certified as one, however, it also didn't fit into the tower crane (tall, lifts things) certification. So it got stuck in between two classifications and as a result made it too hard for construction companies to bother including it in their building proposals (the only way that NYC would allow anyone to use it... maybe).

<comment><USER35> It could, and did, get approved as a mobile crane.

Then it was unapproved, thanks to political pressure.

<comment><USER36> Apparently the regulators thought it was mounted on a truck, but when they went in person to inspect it they discovered that he had built some sort of jury rigged contraption to move it around instead. This made it fall outside of their definition of a mobile crane.

The article insinuates that the union was behind it all, but I'm not convinced he didn't just piss off the regulators in this case.

<comment><USER37> That version of events turns out to be inaccurate:

\-- Delia Shumway, a professional engineer and the executive director of the agency's Cranes and Derricks Unit when the Skypicker was approved, emailed me that Chandler confused the Skypicker revocation with a ruling about an entirely different crane.

Shumway wrote, "He's the one that's misinformed. The piece of equipment that he's referring to was not the Skypicker but IBK's knockoff of the Skypicker. That machine was not in compliance. There was never any argument about that." \--

[1][http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his- side-...](http://buildingnyc.org/crains-crane-inventor-gives-his-side-of-the- citys-ban-and-backs-it-up/)

<comment><USER35> That link has the best quote I've seen in ages: "We know that building construction requires a great deal of fabrication..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This article is from almost a year ago; any update on what's happened on this issue since then?

<comment><USER39> It seems that this might be a new push by their PR firm (which is very good I guess, the article is very flattering and small-guy vs union side and all the right buttons)

[http://gothamgr.com/media-coverage/](http://gothamgr.com/media-coverage/)

<comment><USER38> It looks like they subsequently received their certification:

[http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/](http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/)

> NYC SKYPICKER CERTIFICATION

> The SKYPICKER MDS is approved for use by the New York City Department of > Buildings division of Cranes and Derricks

This article might have been organized by a PR firm, but if so, I guess it's already been successful.

<comment><USER37> Good find - the video of the crane 'vertically relocating' itself is pretty amazing.

<comment> joatmon-snoo Holy crap, yes, that video should be the center piece here. That's an absolutely amazing idea.

<comment><USER38> It looks like that feature is also part of what the regulators were concerned about the safety of (in terms of how firmly it manages to attach to the building levels).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is why it's so important to have government regulation, so that an interested party can use their political connections to guarantee themselves monopoly profits.

<comment><USER41> It can go the other way too. Sometimes interested parties use their political connections to guarantee themselves, you know, clean air and clean drinking water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder whether the inventor would have better luck shipping his cranes to another state where the regulatory barriers would not be so steep. Lots of mid/high-rise buildings going up in places that are not NYC...

<comment><USER43> I think the main advantage of this crane is that it is bolted to the building, therefore falls under the general insurance policy of the development, whereas tower cranes require a separate policy, which as the article states, are basically impossible to secure right now in NYC. It's interesting to see this article now, as I was just reading about the litigation following the crane collapse at One57 which involved a dispute with the insurer over whether it should be covered by the general insurance policy.

If your crane can be deemed a part of the structure itself, you save millions in insurance costs.

Insurance costs for tower cranes are insane in NYC due to the risks - <USER2> were big payouts after a few collapses which killed people. As there are not that many tower cranes in NYC to begin with, this risk pool is not very large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> "Crain's Cranes of New York"

</comment><comment><USER45> Correct me if I'm wrong (the article is now behind a paywall for me), but the skypicker was fast-track approved under a Bloomberg program, then unapproved under a new administration, perhaps because it hadn't been tested properly and was miscategorized.

Given that it is a boom crane, normally mounted on a truck, with a custom mounting and lifting system (the kind of thing that has peeled off of buildings before), I'm not seeing the big deal.

[http://www.jomacltd.com/mobile_cranes/telescoping_boom/](http://www.jomacltd.com/mobile_cranes/telescoping_boom/)

</comment><comment><USER46> Unions are great. It's also great the whole world isn't run by unions. Meaning, I don't understand why a less union friendly city in the US, china, UAE, anywhere, doesn't pick up his equipment and run with it. After years of drug testing perhaps other cities like NYC will be ready for human trials.

</comment><comment><USER47> This machine seems brilliant.

Those super tower cranes are legit massacre machines. Seeing one of those cranes go down was disturbing

<comment><USER48> I definitely feel a bit nervous whenever I walk under one of those on a windy day on NYC. This article did little to assuage my fears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why is this little construction crane not being used in other cities?

This is what is the oddest piece of the story to me. There are lots of cities where these buildings are built. Mid-size cities. If the cost of the tower crane is so much more than this one, then the cost of transport should be minimal.

</comment><comment><USER50> He should try peddling it in Toronto. There are over 100 high-rises under construction in the area.

</comment><comment><USER51> I found a video [https://youtu.be/5_PjCwMEdSY](https://youtu.be/5_PjCwMEdSY). It looks like the crane elevates itself before a new concrete floor has forms built and is poured.

</comment><comment><USER52> Judging from a recent Nova I watched on current advancements in nuclear technology, he should pack up his cranes and move shop to China. China seems more willing to try industry changing tech these days.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why not just hire a "Class A operator" to operate it? It'll still be huge cost savings, right? And the union will stop stonewalling them, and they can go into business.

</comment><comment><USER54> How operation of this machine is different from pretty standard small derrick cranes? Like Liebherr DR? Or even spider cranes (Maeda & others)?

<comment><USER37> The Liebherr you reference is a dismantling crane, so obvious difference in usage there, and spiders/mini crawler are mobile cranes.

The Skypicker is bolted to the floor of the building, and when the next level is ready to go in, it hauls itself up to the height of the next floor through a hole, which is then finished around the crane, which is once again bolted to the floor. The last 30 seconds of the video on this page show how it relocates: [http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/](http://vertikalsolutions.net/products/)

<comment><USER38> I watched that video on that page earlier, but now that I saw your description, I'm wondering how they get it down again at the end!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm sorry, but I steadfastly refuse to complain about the unions. All you NYC based software developers probably have no idea to what extent the overall high standard of living in the NE is largely due to so many laborers being able to make a good living doing something that isn't tech.

</comment><comment><USER56> Many cities need his cranes. Why not relocating the business?

</comment><comment><USER57> Dumb admission of the day: the domain name, crainsnewyork.com, combined with a story about cranes caused a temporary brain short circuit. I thought "holy shit, this is a really impressive website for NY crane wonks".

<comment><USER48> Ha! I didn't even register that the domain was not spelled cranesnewyork. I, too, saw the URL and thought "a story about a crane on a crane blog, I should be a bit wary of a bias of some sort"

It is, however 1am for me currently and I did not sleep well last night (beware drinking Armenian homemade vodka (a.k.a. Moonshine made with things other than corn) with native Armenians, they don't allow empty glasses until the vodka is gone), so I'm not firing on all cylinders.

<comment><USER58> Just a side not, I have to admit that I love the nested parens.

<comment><USER48> Haha, programmer's grammar. I couldn't be bothered to construct the sentence correctly, nested parens did the job clearly enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> This is interesting. That said for some reason I think that posts like this stray far from the purpose of a site like this as it is more of a general interest and not specific to startups or technology.

I wonder if PG's 'anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity' conflicts with his 'If they'd cover it on TV news' (where I assume TV news is actually broader than just what would be on TV news and includes items of a more general audience business interest).

What's the issue exactly? It crowds out and distracts from stories that might be of more value and relevance than simply something that is interesting.

Maybe a new way to describe would be 'of interest to hackers and relevant to what they do in a strong way'.

<comment><USER60> This has everything to do with regulation, certification, union relations, etc., issues in some ways similar to what an AirBnB, Uber, or other tech company will deal with when introducing innovations or different business models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Does this little crane also construct the paywall ?

</comment><comment><USER62> Just an exposé of Corrupt Bureaucracy.</comment>


Closures in Java 7: Not Likely - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidflanagan.com/2010/05/closures-in-jav.html <comment><USER2> This highlights the difference between open and open.

java is technically open source, yet the decisions are made behind closed doors without any transparency.

<comment><USER3> And the standard open source response is "fork it". Are you prevented from building your own java with closure support and distributing it?

When ubuntu recently altered where window icons appear there was a lot of complaining even though linux is "open". Someone is in charge of all "open" projects and likely whatever decisions they make will upset some people.

<comment><USER4> It's actually difficult to get a fork of java going that people will actually use because of the technology compatibility kit. See here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to_obtain_a_TCK_license_from_Sun)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think "Java 7: Not Likely" will be the next news. The fact that the only people excited about it are non-Java JVM users should reveal something.

</comment><comment><USER6> Speaking as someone whose current long-term main project is Java-based: Java's development has stalled. Go and learn Scala, Clojure, Python, Haskell, <brand x>. (Note that is not to say that you need to abandon whatever Java you're working on, just that Java's pain points getting fixed looks very unlikely.)

<comment><USER7> Working on it. But it's the steepest learning curve since I learned to program the first time.

It almost feels as though already being able to program is actually a hindrance.

<comment><USER8> Which? Scala, Clojure, Haskell ...?

<comment><USER7> Clojure.

<comment><USER9> This has been my experience too. I found CL, Scheme, and Haskell pretty easy. Clojure has taken me more time. I think it's because there aren't many good books yet, and because Lisp-speaking émigrés have to learn a set of new ideas that's mostly separate from the new ideas Ruby/Python/Java users need to learn.

What specifically has been giving you trouble?

<comment><USER7> That there is no side-by-side comparison of how a seasoned 'imperative' programmer would set up a fair sized website (not some toy), so something with user authentication, database access, templates and some serious business logic and internationalization compared to how you'd tackle the problem in clojure, functional style.

Then I'd be able to take a section from the one, compare how the 'natives' get the same effect on the other side of the line.

It would be nice to have a 'reference' website that gets ported to every language that is used in a web context following best practices for that language/environment.

That way you'd already understand the problem they're trying to solve and you can concentrate on how it is solved.

<comment><USER6> Hear, hear. I am quite at the point where I play too much with Python's itertools and want a more pure language - but Clojure is seriously unhelpful in telling you how to actually construct any Clojuriffic code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's Oracle for you. In the end the only way for the JVM environment to advance would be if large users of the JVM push for new features until the FOSS community forks and begins patching up.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm more disappointed that continuations don't appear to have made it. They're available as a patch, but actually compiling an OpenJDK with them is evidently an arcane art I haven't yet mastered.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're still interested in closures for Java, my port of Ruby's Enumerable module, Enumerable.java, has a limited version for valid Java 5. The current release is 0.2.4, but this post is the best introduction: [http://www.jroller.com/ghettoJedi/entry/closures_in_valid_ja...](http://www.jroller.com/ghettoJedi/entry/closures_in_valid_java_limited)</comment>


How 'honey trap' hackers stole Syrian rebel war plans - <AUTHOR> http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/how-honey-trap-hackers-stole-syrian-rebel-war-plans

<comment><USER2> There is a slightly better version of this story on NYTimes:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/world/middleeast/hackers-u...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/world/middleeast/hackers- use-old-web-lure-to-aid-assad.html)

And the original report by FireEye:

[https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat- research/2015/02/behind_...](https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat- research/2015/02/behind_the_syrianco.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> The internet has become just another weapon in war, with offensive and defensive tactics constantly improving over time in reaction to each other. If you have cavalry and I have tanks you are going to be dissapointed.

</comment><comment><USER4> _> >Then the hackers would send the target a photo of themselves loaded with malware that penetrated their personal files and stole information._

The mainstream public is going to freak out over this line. What I assume this means, is that they sent a malware destined URL claiming it was a photo... or an email attachment like MyPicture.jpg.exe/vacationPhotos.zip.exe to the target and triggered some code execution.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is amazing! Sounds so much like a Hollywood movie.

Though this is most probably true, I worked at an ISP in North Iraq. The amount of ignorant high profile Internet users causes us lots of trouble.

<comment><USER6> Yes, when I saw "rebels" and "plans" I immediately thought of Star Wars.

But, unlike in cinema, there are many real lives at stake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "posing as female supporters". This adds a new spin on the words 'honey trap'.

<comment><USER8> I think this is actually the original definition of honey trap.

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_HUMINT_asset_recrui...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_HUMINT_asset_recruiting#Love.2C_honeypots.2C_and_recruitment)</comment></comment></comment>


IT Contractors: How do you take lunch? - <AUTHOR>

To you DBAs, Developers, Sys Admins etc. working as contractors: do you eat lunch on the clock that you bill for, or do you take time out of your personal day to eat lunch?  Also, do any of you have mandated half or full hour long unpaid lunch breaks in the middle of the day? Please add the state - if you are in the US - or country that you work in. (Assumption: It seems to me that in the US this varies across states - in the southern "right to work" states it seems there is an expectation for an unpaid hour during the day. Blue states I have worked in often forgo accounting for lunch and let it slide under billed time.) <comment><USER2> This really depends on the contract. I almost never work on site let alone charge for taking a lunch. However, some contractors may get away with charging even for travel time. In a contract situation, anything is possible, it just depends on what you can negotiate and how much leverage you have.</comment>


Ask HN:  How do I deal with a control freak as a startup employee? - <AUTHOR>

I have a coworker who I'm constantly getting into disagreements with.  Which actually isn't a huge deal in and of itself.  If you ask anyone I've ever worked with, the last thing they would tell you is that I'm afraid of disagreements.  The problem is that I always find myself disagreeing over silly, pointless things.
At first I figured it was just a personality clash that would work itself out.  But I'm beginning to think that it's not me that's the issue here.  It's beginning to affect my productivity as I'm constantly going back and fixing quibbles this person has with my work (in once instance, I spent almost an entire day on this kind of thing).
If it were just that they were a disagreeable jerk, it wouldn't be a big deal.  I'm pretty sure they'd be dealt with quickly.  But I'm beginning to realize that this person has decent political skill (despite having sub-par people skills on average).  I won't go into details, but I realize that some public discussions I had with them seem to have been more politically motivated than I realized at the time (with this person subtly blaming me for my people skills and ability to work with them).
The other problem is that they have kind of worked themselves into a position where management can't just get rid of them because they simply know too much about how our servers and code work.  It would be far, far more convenient for them to just blame the new guy (me).
So is this a hopeless situation?  I'm a bit hesitant to jump ship because my work history in the Valley hasn't been terrific.  And besides that, I enjoy my job and the people I work with besides this person. <comment><USER2> > _I realize that some public discussions I had with them seem to have been > more politically motivated than I realized at the time_

That's something I have also struggled with repeatedly over the years. There are quite a lot of people who appear ignorant, needlessly antagonistic, and generally unlikable - yet they somehow mastered the art of getting a lot of support and sympathy. Often you realize too late that a pointless little discussion was actually a pretty good setup to gather support from the other people on the team. This is usually the moment where you discover that your opponent isn't as stupid as you always thought.

I wish I had something more positive to say, but in my experience it makes little sense to go up against those people, mainly because they're simply better at manipulating everyone, but also because doing so will eat a lot of your time and energy for trying to beat them at their own game. In my experience there is often a reason why this kind of person works at your company: it's either because management failed at hiring decent people, or it's because they hired someone who actually reflects their own morals there. In any case, the company's culture has probably already been subverted. Staying away from these environments is more rewarding than adapting to them.

> _So is this a hopeless situation? I'm a bit hesitant to jump ship because my > work history in the Valley hasn't been terrific._

You know, it doesn't sound like you are working there for the awesome product and the great team experience to begin with. If that assumption is valid, I would suggest you start looking for another job immediately. What do you mean your work history isn't terrific? I believe you can always look for a startup with a concept that motivates you and simply jump onboard as long as it's a good personality match this time?

<comment><AUTHOR> > You know, it doesn't sound like you are working there for the awesome > product and the great team experience to begin with.

Actually, I like the product and the team. The person I don't get along with is actually pretty likable until you discover that there's a nasty mean streak underneath the surface. It's not that I figured that they weren't smart as much as it is that I figured that they genuinely meant well.

That said, I think it's probably a good idea for me to start looking around now anyway.

> What do you mean your work history isn't terrific?

I was fired from my last job after 3 months for much the same reason, albeit with me being much more naive about what was going on than this time.

> I believe you can always look for a startup with a concept that motivates > you and simply jump onboard as long as it's a good personality match this > time?

The problem is that it always _seems_ like a good match at first. It's just very difficult to tell how things will work out before joining a company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We've only heard one side of the story here.

My inclination when I consider _my work history in the Valley hasn't been terrific_ and _they simply know too much about how our servers and code work_ would be to suspect that the _silly, pointless things_ that you're disagreeing over might not actually be nearly as silly or pointless as you think they are. And perhaps in the process of figuring out how to do those things reliably, you can improve yourself.

Of course that depends very much on what the silly things are, and what the person is like. Which I obviously don't know. If the silly things are things like unit tests, check-in comments, maintaining the existing coding style, or maintaining documentation, then I'd consider my suspicion confirmed. Those may all seem silly and pointless, but they're not.

If the things complained about are things that I'd consider truly silly and pointless, then I'd agree with you. But if they're not actively harmful, then I'd try to figure out how to adapt myself to the rules, because that is easier (and more likely to lead to productivity) than initiating conflict.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, and as I'm not about to notify the other party that I'm posting this here, I suppose you'll just have to take my word for what I say. Let's just say that this particular developer requires a much more rigorous coding style than the language's community does. And I would be thrilled to death if we had more rigorous rules about unit tests and documentation, but as it is there are practically none of those things. Suffice it to say, the rules seem to be less about improving our code and more about satisfying arbitrary whims.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The problem is that I always find myself disagreeing over silly, pointless things._

Such as? People disagree about what counts as silly or pointless so much that I don't have any concrete idea of what you're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Don't quit_ just because you have disagreements. Some studies have shown that disagreement is actually healthy and encourages learning, as long as it isn't bitter tit for tat disagreements (as long as it's not personal).

 _Don't quit_ before you have discussed the issue with management. If the managers are good, they will be open to your point of view and try to come to a common understanding. They should explain their point well enough that you can come to that common understanding as well, whether or not there is common agreement on the issue.

If you still wholeheartedly disagree with their viewpoint and can't come to a common understanding, then it may be time to move on. If they dismiss your point of view out of hand, it's definitely time to move on.</comment>


Taming Gmail like a pro, label it! - <AUTHOR> https://exe.ac/blog/2020/03/14/taming-gmail-like-a-pro-label-it/ <comment><USER2> I agree with the article that labels are an incredible feature of Gmail, but over time I find the filter rules a bit too simply. There are certain rules that I would like to create and is not possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that filters need more love from Gmail, but a simple text search can cover a lot of specific use cases.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you improve this app description to increase sales? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to change my iOS app description in order to improve sales. What would you change [below]? :
"If you want to write more often and freely, Couch Writer can help you. We've created a writing style that will let you truly enjoy the beautiful art that is writing. The experience is crafted with love to suit mobile devices well, so you can finally stop wrestling with apps that confuse your phone/tablet with a desktop.
A DIFFERENT WAY TO WRITE
• Write in 'pieces'. You're writing is made up of pieces that you can add whenever you like.
• You'll find that adding pieces to your stories, poems, essays, blogs, and other types of writing feels as seamless with your day as text messaging has become.
• Focus only on your writing. When you're in writing mode all other text fades away.
NEED SOME INSPIRATION?
• The random title generator can help you get started whenever you can't quite think of what to write about.
STATISTICS
• How many pieces are you writing per day? How many words have you written in total? Get cool insight into your writing habits.
GREAT FOR
• Writers that want to have fun writing casually • Students that find it hard to carve out time to write papers • Getting your thoughts out freely and worrying about editing later • Quickly hitting a target word count for an essay or blog post
You can finally enjoy writing on your iOS devices. Download Couch Writer today and get going!" <comment><USER2> To be honest the copy looks fine. What swings the decision to download an app for me are the images showing the interface (generally a walkthrough) and the app icon. That and the reviews.

Possibly tie the random title generator to the 'pieces' idea? It is essentially writing prompts yes?

</comment><comment><USER3> There are quite a few errors in the copy, which are likely to put off some users. For example: "You're writing is made up of pieces" (rather than the correct "Your writing").

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have done a better job of proofreading before asking for advice. Thank you very much I'll fix that.</comment></comment>


Current Inflation Has Different Effects on Different Age Groups - <AUTHOR> https://macroaffairs.com/inflation-per-generation-avocado-index-millennials/finance-economics/ <comment><USER4> The claim of a difference is 'slightly' exaggerated (~1%) However, the overall inflation data is quite interesting.

\- Best tracker of inflation - <USER2>

\- Most inflated - Learning and having a roof over your head

\- Least inflated - Changing location and playing dress-up (you or your home)

As always, rent seeking behavior is an issue (or a good investment area).

Getting smarter is getting more difficult (or at least more costly) and unfortunately compounds. If you are already educated and ahead, you don't have to pay those costs, and you have a higher vantage point from which to choose opportunities (like charging other people rent).

Not sure if I believe food - or else probably has a huge amount of spread within it. Some food has dramatically risen, others not (tuna - high, bread - low). Noisiness of food line probably reflects this. An unlikely friend in bulk negotiators like Walmart / Kroger / Amazon. "-> Tyson, Coke, Gen. Mills, keep your prices low."

Transportation is opportunity. Don't like where you are? Leave. Potential foraging range - up. Go live in India, where food is $4 a day, and rent is $100-200. Course, this helps baby boomers too. Retire in Kathmandu, Tangier, Santiago. Lots of money just goes further.

<comment><USER5> > rent seeking behavior

So many people are confused about the meaning of this term lately, to the point where I think we might need to scrap it and come up with a new one. In traditional economics, rent-seeking is a bad thing, because it involves lobbying the government to increase one's revenues without performing any economically beneficial function. This is why the term has a negative connotation. Almost all economists think this type of behavior causes inefficiency.

Buying a house and renting it out does not fall under this category. In this case, you are performing a beneficial economic function (i.e. you are providing someone a dwelling, in exchange for money). There are related rent- seeking behaviors, such as lobbying the government to prevent building new housing stock for the purpose of increasing the value of your dwelling and the amount of your rents. But the act of investing itself? Not rent-seeking. Not considered bad by most economists.

<comment><USER6> "Rent" in the colloquial sense of payments pursuant to a residential lease is a different meaning from "rent" in the economics sense of the word. The use of this word falls into the trap of many words with differing colloquial and technical meanings. I don't see how abandoning a word's technical definition because of a competing colloquial definition helps anyone.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that rent seeking, in the colloquial sense, is an attempt to paint a normal activity, like getting paid rent for housing, with the same brush as bribery type behavior.

It's very similar to say, how Trump co-opted fake news to just mean any news he disagreed with. Original creators of the term fake news are rightfully mad because technically it should refer to news that is clearly factually untrue, like pizzagate.

<comment><USER6> I've never seen "rent seeking" used with the colloquial rather than technical meaning of the word "rent".

Can you point to an example of this usage?

<comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269230](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17269230)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This strikes me as lazy data science and full of overreaching conclusions, because nowhere is uncertainty/spread/variance discussed. What are the errors/variance on these estimations for each year and each spending category? Are these inflation differences statistically significantly different? Comparing 7% vs 8% is already cutting it close without even knowing this crucial information. The headline vastly oversteps the analysis itself, there is simply not enough information presented to make these conclusions.

This is one reason why peer-review is essential. This author can throw out a claim like millenials get inflation 14% worse than everyone else, failing to mention it's a difference of 1% over 7-8%, and moreover he did not even look at variance or statistical significance. This would not pass muster in a statistics 101 course, never mind a reputable journal.

<comment><USER9> In general I agree that more reporting should include measures of uncertainty. But I also think there are cases when talking about inflation where uncertainty measures are inappropriate.

You can have uncertainty in the average price of avocados, or in the number of avocados that millennials consume on average. But those aren't very holistic views of inflation.

If I define my holistic measure of inflation to be the CPI, then there's no margin of error. Its just a number that the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes every month. I can say, for example, that the CPI for June 2009 was exactly 215.693. Or that the CPI increased by 1.47%, exact to the nearest 0.01%, between March 2012 and 2013.

On the other hand, if you want to ask whether the CPI is any good as a measure of inflation, then in general inflation isn't precisely enough defined to talk about that with a simple margin of error. There is no exact definition of inflation that we're trying to approximate, so we can't say things like "we're 95% confident that the actual inflation value was between 1.4% and 1.5%".

<comment><USER10> It looks like there's a principled way to compute it:

"Variance is a measure of the uncertainty caused by the use of a sample of retail prices, instead of the complete universe of retail prices. Each month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics collects prices from a sample of approximately 77,400 commodities and services (C&S) quotes in approximately 21,500 outlets around the United States for the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In addition, we collect approximately 5,100 housing quotes each month."

[...]

"Margins of error are usually expressed as a statistic's point estimate plus or minus two standard errors, so the margin of error on this CPI's 1-month change is approximately 0.15 percent plus or minus 0.06 percent."

[https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/variance- estimates/home.htm](https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/variance- estimates/home.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how much higher it would be if medical costs were taken out. Housing is the biggest problem for my generation, but it gets almost no traction nor solution.

<comment><USER12> Housing is largely a problem to do with interest rates and mortgages inflating the land. The actual construction materials themselves (at least here in Canada) aren't too bad.

I keep wondering why someone doesn't kickstarter a town. It has all the right incentives. Make guidelines that enforce density in the core and do common sense things from day 1, like wire fibre to every domicile.

<comment><USER13> There are already quite a few cheap places people could move to. But the demand is increasingly geographically concentrated, instead.

<comment><USER14> there are few jobs or opportunities in cheap places, its not like everyone lives in large cities because they are unwilling to entertain alternatives.

<comment><USER15> I call bullshit!

More than 50% of companies have positions that could telecommute and 24%+ of people telecommute fully or partly now.[2]

People do want to live in large cities because of all the cool shit there to do, and that convenience costs money.

You can afford a two-bedroom house in the south-eastern part of the US on $15/hour, which wouldn't even cover the costs of being homeless in SF or NYC.

I understand people want convenience and people want to be close to friends and family, but many of them (not all) could easily solve this problem by simply moving. People seem to think they are "owed" affordable housing regardless of where that housing is -- which is absurd!

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/06/22/the-g...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2017/06/22/the- growing-army-of-americans-who-work-from-home/#391b29cd4ff7) [2] [https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/24-percent-of-employed- peo...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/24-percent-of-employed-people-did- some-or-all-of-their-work-at-home-in-2015.htm)

<comment><USER16> So, in order for that 24 percent to be free to move where they please, that needs to be a figure where they can telecommute full time or where going to the office occasionally from farther away costs less than the amount saved by moving farther away. On top of that, all other household members would need to be equally portable, such as a working spouse or children attending school.

I got myself off the street in part by developing portable earned income and moving someplace cheap. It is something I am willing to recommend as a method. But my entire household was free to move. That isn't always the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Over the past five years" \- I feel that in order to formulate "a historical price index per generation" you need to look at inflation over the entire life of the generation. Baby boomers went through the seventies, when inflation was significantly higher than now.

<comment><USER18> I was coming here to say that. Inflation rates in the double digits is something millennials have never gone through.

<comment><USER19> My parents "suffered" through 14% interest rates, wages were rising at breakneck speeds and their mortgage was largely inflated away before they even paid any of it off.

By historical standards it was actually a great time, a single wage family could afford their own house. Such similar circumstances is impossible today in the same city.

<comment><USER18> There is a reason they called it stagflation. It wasn't a good time at all in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-c-hewitt This is a great example of how you can make up anything by aggregating unrelated statistical measures and then mislead people with a new definition on top of another woozy commonly used definition.

<comment><USER20> We can certainly argue the technical merits of how they created their 'generation-weighted price index', but differential impacts of inflation seems plausible on the face of it.

If you are looking for work in a big city, and big city real estate prices are growing much faster than nationwide, that is a real effect.

<comment> j-c-hewitt Well... sort of, but why call it 'inflation'? That certain age groups tended to act in certain ways and were impacted by differences in price trends in different ways -- that's accurate. What's misleading or confusing is to then redefining the already-muddled term of 'inflation' from an absolute index to multiple indices and then trying to say that because Index B went up more than Index A that some group of people were much more impacted by Index B than another people were by Index A.

The Fed has a price index that most entities in the US use to measure what it calls inflation. There are plenty of arguments out there that go into detail about how that index can be misleading and how certain institutional prerogatives encourage the people who maintain that index to keep it misleading (e.g. many entities are obligated to increase salaries and pension payouts tied to the CPI).

<comment><USER20> > why call it 'inflation'

Sibling comment also asks this question, so I'll just respond here: inflation measures the purchasing power of some nominal currency, but that measurement is _always relative to a basket of goods_.

CPI is a basket of 'typical' consumer goods that an average person might buy. But if you're not the average consumer, then in what sense is CPI relevant to you, rather than to a macroeconomist?

I agree that there's a risk of confusion, but I think the confusion is inherent in what we're trying to measure (I have some dollars, how much stuff [that I care about] can I buy with them?), and not mainly a function of terminological confusion.

You could imagine a service like Mint that has all your spending data and calculating your own 'personal CPI', privacy considerations notwithstanding.

<comment><USER14> not to mention CPI dosent include costs like education, housing or healthcare, which is completely absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Expensive health care is worst for older people (until you hit 65 and qualify for single payer)

Expensive education is worst for younger people, unless you are an older person who wants to pay for your children's education.

Expensive housing is (mostly) good for the old and bad for the young. If an oldster got settled in Palo Alto back in the 8-bit era, they've paid low taxes since they've never sold their house and will take a stupendous capital gain.

</comment><comment><USER22> I feel like technology has led to such an efficient form of capitalism over the past 20 years, that there's no room left for any possibility of social mobility. It's this system where there is just enough room for you to live and get by, but never get ahead. Prices for everything are so efficiently optimized at this point that there is no more "wiggle room" for a working person to build wealth. The basic necessities of life have risen to perfectly match your income. It's a new kind of slavery. As a single male with no family or debt, making 3x the median wage, I am _just barely_ doing ok. I literally can't even imagine how other people are still surviving.

<comment><USER23> High marginal income tax rates are designed to keep you from building wealth-- the capital-holding classes don't want the competition for assets.

<comment><USER24> Income tax rates are not the problem, stagnating wages are the problem.

<comment><USER25> High marginal tax rates create a major barrier for building wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Medical care, especially drugs, greatly increasing in price for old. 2/3rds of over 65 have at least one cintinuing prescription.

<comment><USER27> Not all prescriptions are for expensive medicines. I'd say many of them are generic drugs which cost pennies per day.

<comment><USER28> In many cases, drug companies come up with ways to keep prices high. For instance, asthma drugs are reconfigured with different delivery mechanisms that allow them to get new patents for what are essentially long-ago- discovered drugs.

For instance, the CFC ban in 2008 caused generic albuterol to go off the market: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unlikely- victims-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unlikely-victims-of- banning-cfcs/)

<comment> drunken-serval I can't use albuterol due to side-effects. The CFC ban caused the medication I used to disappear completely. The alternative is half as effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The government has all kinds of built in incentives for inflation to be reported as low, whilst simultaneously being high.

This kinda points at the ideas, though I don't actually agree with all the content: [https://dailyreckoning.com/revealing-real-rate-inflation- cra...](https://dailyreckoning.com/revealing-real-rate-inflation-crash- system/)

</comment><comment><USER10> You could slice up inflation in all sorts of ways: by city, state, homeowner versus renter, how long ago the home owner bought their house, singles versus families, where they want to college (if anywhere), and so on.

Remember that inflation is supposed to measure the prices paid by the average person, but most people make some purchases that aren't average.

</comment><comment><USER30> This result shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has thought about what the construct of money/debt actually does.

Every bubble in the history of finance has always been the overvaluing of one asset in exchange for the devaluing of other assets. By overvaluing houses today, we are screwing over every field that requires property/land, retail stores for example. And renters which are predominantly youth. Now, the overvalued houses don't actually consume value directly - they give money to the people who have these assets or are employed in their use - home owners, property management companies - construction companies - etc etc.

Money has always allowed for bias and inequality in resources and work allotted. One sector like housing in exchange for sacrificing other sectors. Or sacrificing one nation/locale's wealth in exchange for another - ie. many 3rd world countries/ exchange rates. Or sacrificing young peoples' prosperity in exchange for old peoples' \- inflation / housing / medicare / social security / stock market inflation.

Money is a tool for giving value, and hence prosperity, unequally for any kind of sociological category of people by way of empirical categories of valuables.

I don't hate capitalism but it is unavoidably discriminatory.

The very act of a loan is essentially an exchange of value temporally - <USER3> shouldn't the natural consequence be to see money as a way of moving allotted value around both spatially, sociologically, and temporally?

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't buy this. Medical cost has risen faster in recent years. Older aged boomers surely spend more in medical needs than millennials.

</comment><comment><USER32> Official inflation numbers are based on a basket of goods that are thought to be representative for the purpose of broad economic policy.

But it's certainly true that inflation is not the same for all goods or for the basket that is highly relevant to one person or to one firm or industry.

So like any economic policy it has winners and losers. Just because the policy may be reasonable does not mean that the winners and losers are irrelevant.

During the startup boom many developers saw their _wages_ inflating rapidly in spite of little skill growth. Some also saw their rent increasing if they lived in the bay area.

Landlords in the bay area saw their income increasing, and firms hiring developers in the bay area saw the cost associated with wages inflate rapidly.

The mistake this article makes is that it puts all its eggs into the young vs old theme when really this is a fairly obvious consequence of a dynamic economy.</comment>


Return of incandescent light bulbs as MIT makes them more efficient than LEDs - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12093545/Return-of-incandescent-light-bulbs-as-MIT-makes-them-more-efficient-than-LEDs.html <comment><USER2> Nanomaterials are very cool. However, have you actually seen many of them come to market?

You know why? It's extremely complex to manufacture them in any high-yield, high-throughput process. Since the mechanism relies on the properties of a nano-structure (however that is made via any number of techniques to record and make tiny 2D or 3D patterns, tubes, strings, etc), it is very difficult to make.

It's very sensitive to vibrations, the kind you can't feel and requires fancy highly-stabilized tables and vibration isolation systems that cost a lot to isolate a small area. You need a special room away from traffic, city noise etc if you want good, repeatable results.

I've yet to see this fundamental problem with production addressed. Would be curious to hear from someone working in the field.</comment>


WEB Résumé – An Online Résumé for Everyone - <AUTHOR> http://webresume.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> Services like Sumry and About.me are great for showcasing yourself but they fails to visualize your personality and feature your works. WEB Résumé helps you to show off with a visually appealing resume and also provides a portfolio to showcase your work.

This is a work-in-progress project. I'm a one-man army and currently hoping to raise some funds to improve this as a service. Let me know what you guys think.</comment>


Skype's principal architect explains why they moved from peer-to-peer - <AUTHOR> http://markmail.org/message/exc3srjkx3uu66bz

<comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5930600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5930600)</comment>


"Ayn Rand's Revenge" - NYTimes Book Review of new Rand biography - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Kirsch-t.html

<comment><USER2> I purchased and attempted to read Atlas Shrugged a couple of years ago. I failed, because rarely have I ever come across a more tedious, sermonizing, simplistic and unconvincing philosophical treatise poorly disguised as a novel.

She could have distilled her viewpoint into a couple of paragraphs (it doesn't seem particularly subtle or complex), but that would probably have made it too easy to argue with her supporters, who can pointedly ask, "well, have you read it?"

No, I have not. I tried and it was terrible.

For great fiction with a healthy dose of philosophy, I'd recommend reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco instead.

<comment><USER3> Your opinions regarding Rand are not a justification to be insulting.

I enjoyed it as a novel, and find significant parts of the philosophy convincing, but I'm not going to fill my comment with insults that apply to you.

What would be better than insults is arguments. You haven't given any argument that someone who likes the book could find convincing. If you don't want to debate that's fine, then don't. But if you choose not to converse in a way that either side could change their mind, then you should at least be nice about it.

<comment><USER4> Hardly an insult, really, when the reviews of Atlas Shrugged of its publication period got far deeper into the thesaurus to describe how terrible the writing really is.

Besides, that's his honest reaction to the text. Why throw a fit over somebody else's aversion to the novel?

<comment><USER5> _Why throw a fit over somebody else's aversion to the novel?_

Because it's often assumed that anyone who complains about the writing actually dislikes the politics and is bashing the writing as a disingenuous cover for that; and that anyone who claims to have enjoyed her novels for their own sake is actually promoting the politics and only talking the novels up to serve that end.

In short, debating the quality of Ayn Rand's writing as fiction is a proxy battle for the associated politics, and we all know how _enlightening_ political debates on the internet can be.

<comment><USER6> Respond to what he wrote, not to what you've inferred him to have thought.

<comment><USER5> To read any text is to attempt to infer its meaning. This is English, not C.

I was mostly trying to suggest that, just _maybe_ , it'd be a good idea to not turn the whole conversation into one about politics, but apparently that's inevitable. There seem to be a lot of people on HN whose feelings about libertarianism (either for or against) are a core part of their self-image, and that makes discussing anything related perilous.

See also: <http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html> and <http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/>

In the future I think I'll just flag any article that mentions Rand and I encourage others to do the same, regardless of what they think of her ideas.

<comment><USER3> Do you also plan to flag every article mentioning Marx, socialism, Chomsky, environmentalism (for or against), etc, etc?

I don't think flagging is the answer. Just don't read it.

<comment><USER5> Sure, thanks for the suggestions. I guess I might give Chomsky a pass if it was purely about linguistics and didn't involve his politics at all.

Look, I'm not out to push my politics here, if that's what you're thinking. I read HN because of the high-quality discussions about _technology_ and related matters. If I want to see flame wars over libertarianism, environmentalism, or whatever else there's an entire internet full of that dreck, and the amount of political content usually has a pretty direct negative correlation to the quality of discussion at a site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt's oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life."

On the contrary, actually. The idea of artistic integrity is a _very_ central point of her preceding novel, The Fountainhead. The book's main protagonist, Howard Roark, is constantly refusing to compromise with his artistic vision.

<comment><USER3> I think it's even simpler than that. She wanted something (more pages) and she paid for it. There's nothing even slightly uncapitalist about resolving a disagreement by paying to get your way. It's the epitome of capitalism.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. The conclusions from the reviewer in that section didn't make much sense to me either. I'm also glad to see that some people are actually focusing on the content of the submission instead of the usual politics. There are some interesting tidbits in the review (and no doubt the book as well).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "... if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt's oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life."

Nonsense. She may just as well have concluded that adulterating her work would have made it less potent and thus reduced its impact, resulting in fewer sales.

That the reviewer believes conceding to accept less money in the short term contradicts capitalism betrays his or her understanding of capitalism.

Disclosure: I've never read any of Rand's writings.

<comment><USER9> Rand's ideas are about maximizing personal freedom, with money only a means to that end. Most of the characters in Atlas Shrugged give up fortunes that they've either earned or inherited when they realize that holding onto them limits their personal freedom. So there is actually no contradiction at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre."

I don't agree that recognizing that money is a means to an end and is not to be put before that end disqualifies you from being a genuine capitalist, or that being a capitalist and an intellectual are mutually exclusive. I also don't agree with the subtle denigration of capitalism slipped in with the synonym "lucre."

<comment><USER11> Yeah -- the quoted comment reflects a remarkable ignorance of the intellectual content of Rand's novels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The NYT's book review of a Rand biography seems to be little more than a tedious, sermonizing, simplistic, and unconvincing ad hominem against Rand herself. This is what qualifies as journalism these days?</comment>