I think Catalina 10.15.4 broke SSH - <AUTHOR> https://feed.tyler.io/so-uh-i-think-catalina-10154-broke-ssh/ <comment><USER2> [https://archive.md/lvCKA](https://archive.md/lvCKA)

</comment><comment><USER3> To summarize OP:

Their 10.15.4 macOS built-in ssh terminal command is unable to reach hostnames when a port number higher than 8192 is used.

EDIT:

Comments differ; one indicates issues SSH'ing to lower than 8192 ports, another indicates _no_ issues SSH'ing to higher than 8192 ports.

<comment><USER4> chaos:1111

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Catalina is broken in many ways.

This complain and Remote Access in (so I can SSH to my $4k MacBook) disables itself anytime the computer is restarted.

But more importantly, I've still not found a Thunderbolt Display that doesn't routinely crash screen manager services upon idle user activity. 3 x $300 thunderbolt3 dock solutions later and not a one hasn't crashed this computer. All main brands, two of which sell accessories in the Apple store.

Problem also existed with a top of the line 13" MacBook Pro.

I've just gotten used to the shoddy-ness that is Catalina. Figure if I go to the bathroom, upon return I have a fresh, new clean desktop environment. Feature not a bug. Yay!

<comment><USER6> This is why I went back to Mojave. Apple has had a history of breaking dev environments on release for people who don't code under their ecosystem of dev tools (well on second thought, they make life difficult at times even for people that do), and I don't see that trend changing in the future.

Eventually every new release has stabilised, but it seems that doesn't hold true for Catalina.

<comment><USER7> haha oh boy. I was actually just about to install Catalina today, figuring I'd put it off long enough and everything has to be smooth by now (and system update bugs me about it often enough)... But lo and behold, I log into HN and see this thread....

<comment><USER8> Just FYI, you can disable that notification:

[https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop- getting...](https://www.macworld.com/article/3447396/how-to-stop-getting-a- reminder-to-update-to-catalina-in-macos.html)

It does not prevent the red notification dot on the System Preferences app, but it does mean at least you don't get the notifications pop up on your screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, some quick debugging here...

In his screenshot the bad login hangs at "Connecting to clickontyler.com port" (noting that no port number appears and no period at the end).

While I can't be sure exactly which "ssh" patch Apple may have, this seems to be the relevant file and logging code (starting at line 448):

[https://github.com/openssh/openssh- portable/blob/master/sshc...](https://github.com/openssh/openssh- portable/blob/master/sshconnect.c#L488)

In that code, the only thing that can set the "strport" value that is used in the log is a call to getnameinfo().

If that string is corrupted in any way, e.g. not terminated or perhaps has invisible characters that trigger bad terminal behavior (such as invisibility), the act of logging it might produce the apparent hang seen here.

Again, a guess but it is possible that getnameinfo() is not necessarily processing the record correctly (for whatever reason). One such example is in the "getnameinfo" man page at the end, under CAVEATS, where they show an example of not simply trusting the result of the first call.

<comment><USER10> Good sleuthing, but the missing port number is simpler than that. I just blacked it out of the screenshot. I know very well that running sshd on a non- standard port has no benefits security-wise, but it does lessen the length of my log files from dumb script kiddies. I redacted the port in the screenshot for that reason.

<comment><USER11> A port is mentioned in this line, you may want to redact it. Where I put X's below, is a port number.

> So, I tried ssh ip-address -pXXXXXXXXX

<comment><USER10> Thanks, but that's not the port number :-) That was just for illustrative purposes.

<comment><USER11> Ok great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "It just works" \-- Is Apple too large now? Is this a QA problem, product team problem? Management? Catalina is still stumbling and Im surprised to be honest after the past 4 years.

<comment><USER13> Well no business end-user or any typical Mac user is going to be bothered about something technical like 'SSH' breaking their system. Only actual devs here would care.

For those business users, it just still works. For developers it's a problem.

<comment><USER14> Apple's made huge inroads with developers over the last few years, partly coasting off of a social dislike for Microsoft. There's enough Apple fandom out there that they can probably annoy developers a good deal more without affecting the inroads. After all, exactly what can a dev do about it anyway?

<comment><USER15> Switch to OpenBSD ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's an actual bug report:

* [https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=4931259776106496](https://openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=4931259776106496)

From that and the discussions.apple.com. post, hyperlinked elsewhere in this discussion, it appears that the >8192 condition varies according to what the hostname actually is.

The bug report is datelined 2020-04-26, interestingly. There might be a bug in the bug reporting system. (-:

<comment><USER17> > The bug report is datelined 2020-04-26, interestingly. There might be a bug > in the bug reporting system.

No, you can type whatever date you want. The "add a new radar" screen is just a bunch of text input boxes: [https://i.imgur.com/nNf457J.png](https://i.imgur.com/nNf457J.png)

<comment><USER16> The ability to type whatever date one wants is often considered to be a bug. The ability to post-date reports a month into the future sometimes is, too. (-:

<comment><USER17> You can not only type whatever date, but also whatever non-date. The site just assumes good intentions and is working as designed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I can't reproduce this. macOS 10.15.4, ssh'ing to a very high (5digit) port with a hostname no problems.

<comment><USER19> I can't either, in fact all 10+ of the hosts that I routinely access have ports higher than OPs issue.

<comment><USER20> Offtopic but why are people using high port numbers? Additional security due to a nonstandard port? If so, does that go together with anything additional like port knocking? Or is it multiple hosts on the same IP, but different ports?

<comment><USER21> Some people think that it adds to security. Some people want to reduce noise in logs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had the same problem on a MacBook after upgrading to 10.15.4. However, I wasn't using a port number higher than 8192, the socket was 75 with a hostname. The problem was solved when I replaced the hostname with its IP or plugged in an Ethernet Cable. I tried to restart mDNSResponder and flush the dns cache and switch to a different DNS server. Nothing works so far.

</comment><comment><USER23> I experienced a similar issue with a git repository hosted on a high port, `brew install openssh` fixed it even though the homebrew `ssh` was not first on my $PATH. Didn't bother to investigate further.

<comment><USER24> Possibly that overwrote the config file for the system ssh?

<comment><USER23> I was thinking homebrew's git perhaps had a different $PATH (or was using shared objects?) that used the different openssh. Just guessing, didn't seem worth my effort at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I suspect this is due to a feature being enabled for canonicalization and that the key part is the presence of the colon rather than the port number. On a 10.15.4 system, I see a line in the debug output which is not present in the screenshot:

> debug1: resolve_canonicalize: hostname example.org:7999 is an unrecognised > address

If instead I use `-p` or a config-file option, everything works as expected.

<comment><USER26> hostname:port is not a valid destination according to ssh syntax. A destination may either be [user@]hostname or a URI of the form ssh://[user@]hostname[:port].

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina." Pretty sure that guarantees getting to the front page :D

<comment><USER28> This is truly the darkest timeline for that poor blogger. :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is macOS /user/bin/ssh just upstream OpenSSH, or does Apple maintain a fork? If no fork, this would be an upstream OpenSSH problem, no?

<comment><USER30> Apple includes a customized version of OpenSSH. From what I recall from the last time I looked at it, the changes were mostly integrating the key retrieval mechanisms with the rest of macOS. For example, Apple's ssh-add can store key passphrase in Keychain with the -K option, and then later access those passphrase with the -A flag.

<comment><USER31> If using the upstream version there is one line to add to a startup script or to your zshrc (et. al.) file ...

ssh-add -A > /dev/null

... and one default value to place in your ssh config file...

AddToKeychain Yes

... to get around this issue. It works fine after that.

(On mobile. Sorry for formatting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Maybe a weird ControlMaster/ControlPath config? I have had issues with the ControlPath result being too long with certain hostname/port combinations in the past -- which resulted in ssh to ip working but ssh to hostname not working. As a result, I haven since started using %C instead of %l%h%p%r in my ControlPath config.

</comment><comment> _-___________-_ If you have Homebrew or something similar, I recommend installing openssh through there -- you get a newer version to boot.

<comment><USER33> Oh god no. Homebrew managing openssh has been the cause of more command-line instability and forced reinstalls than anything else I've encountered in the last few years of OS X (sorry, macOS). I've started installing stuff from source again just to prevent a cascade of Homebrew upgrades breaking everything.

<comment><USER34> Why don't people use MacPorts instead? I've never had any problems with it.

Homebrew wants to screw around in /usr, Macports installs itself in /opt and doesn't interfere with things in the MacOS world.

Set your PATH to have /opt/local/{bin,sbin} and everything Just Works.

<comment><USER35> What is the practical difference between _/ usr/local_ and _/ opt_ or _/ opt/local_? I don't think macOS puts anything in _/ usr/local_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In case it's slow for you too: <removed since they wanted it taken down>

<comment><USER37> It's been taken down on purpose: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738841](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22738841)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm surprised nobody noticed this bug at Apple before the release. Is there nobody there that connects by hostname to a ssh server with a port > 8192?

<comment><USER39> I'm not. Not all 'testers' actually try to test edge cases. The /good/ testers do try edge cases, but for every /good/ tester you have, you'll have hired 100+ testers who do little more than check that the standard happy-path works correctly and sign off as "passes tests".

The good testers all tend to fall into what Bruce Schneier calls the 'Security Mindset' way of thinking: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_mi_1.html)

<comment><USER40> > _Not all 'testers' actually try to test edge cases._

Yeah, but surely macOS devs are eating their own dog food.

<comment><USER41> "I've learned that Apple engineers have internal tools which allow them to delete macl xattr as well as to bypass other Catalina privacy and sandbox protections without rebooting and disabling SIP.

"Inside Apple they don't suffer the same problems as external users and developers."

— [https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/121929275891082854...](https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1219292758910828544)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One more data point: just tried to repro with hostname and port 8193 and failed, so the issue is probably more intricate than described.

(Guest in my test: OpenSSH 7.6p1 on ubuntu bionic, stock config other than sshd port.)

<comment><USER42> Tried with dropbear and sshd on Arch, port 9022 from 10.15.4 Beta (19E258a) - no issues with a variety of hostnames that end up at the same host.

<comment><USER42> Just updated to 10.15.5 Beta (19F53f) and still no issues with dropbear or sshd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've been a Linux user for the last ~15 years, and now I need to do some iOS development so just a few days ago I've ordered a Mac Mini. I guess I'm in for a bumpy ride. Oh well.

<comment><USER44> I used linux on all my laptops/work machines for about 7 years, then switched to macbook pros 5 years ago. Definitely some things you have to adapt to (I _still_ miss focus-follows-mouse). But for the most part, you'll find it's a smooth ride. When bumps like this happen, they tend to push out a fix quickly - especially when it gets traction on HN like this.

<comment><USER45> For me, focus-follows-mouse is most useful for terminal windows. It is a feature you can enable in iTerm2.

This doesn't help across applications of course, and there's a reasonable argument that the inconsistency is worse than the absence -- but for me, iTerm2's FFM feature helps.

<comment><USER44> Didn't know iTerm2 did that. Thanks, I'll check it out - might help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm on mac OS 10.15.4. SSH has worked on all betas and the official release from Apple.

<comment><USER47> Using a port above 8192 and connecting by hostname?

<comment><USER46> Yes, but maybe I've mucked around with my ssh too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> As an aside; is there a reason to host SSH on a non-standard port? I recently came across a system that had it listening to a really high port number. I dismissed it as security through (bad) obscurity but is there a valid security reason to do this?

EDIT: Thanks to everyone who answered my question! It makes sense to me now why one might do this.

<comment><USER49> There's actually a good reason to not use SSH on a non-privileged port: It allows an unprivileged user to bind their own binary to the port when SSH restarts or otherwise stops listening.

<comment><USER50> That unprivileged user will not have the SSH host key, which will create a warning for any user who connects, just as though someone had conducted a man- in-the-middle attack.

Of course, there are plenty of privileged ports to choose from.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=random+number+between+1+and+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=random+number+between+1+and+1023)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I faced the same problem two weeks ago with the previous version of Catalina (I don't remember the correct number but was a previous on 10.15.4) and git (I use SSH to authenticate with the server). So I did a report to Bitbucket with a solution that worked for me after investigate more about the problem: [https://twitter.com/di3goleite/status/1239596891471581189?s=...](https://twitter.com/di3goleite/status/1239596891471581189?s=20)

Thank you about that clarification. Also your website seems to be down actually.

</comment><comment><USER52> "I'm not even going to go into it. I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina."

+1

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Apple's stance is that it didn't happen unless someone reports it using Radar (internal) or bugreport.apple.com (external). Unfortunately, they don't believe in Linus's Law, which states that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

<comment><USER37> Things that end up on the front page of Hacker News get fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is an anecdote but the latest update forced me to rebuild my Mac from a hard/factory reset. My Dell D6000 on my 2019 MacBook Pro no longer charges the laptop. I've tried.

My Mac's resources were getting gobbled up by an internal process I coudln't terminate and my keychain was borked and I couldn't log in after a reset (to try and get around the resource hogging). Recovery didn't get me any where so I used Recovery over the Internet to do a clean install.

I'm running 10.15.4, no issues as of yet. And this all occurred after the security update. I'm running on the version prior for now but will make sure I've got a good backup and give it another go.

<comment><USER54> I had a d6000 and had to update the firmware (with a borrowed windows machine) before it would charge my mbp.

<comment><USER53> Hadn't considered that, I'll give it a go. Thanks!

<comment><USER53> If anyone comes across this comment, this 100% worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I've moved to Linux for 99% of my computing but still use macOS for some audio production work. Catalina is unusable for me personally (most of the software I need just silently crashes) so I disabled the upgrade prompt:

      sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"
      defaults write com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs 0
      killall Dock

Apple should really slow down on major releases of macOS or stop altogether in my opinion. macOS Mojave is a great OS and it's basically feature complete. Just stick with that, introduce bug fixes and security patches as needed and I think people will be happy.

</comment><comment><USER56> _At this point I'm thinking maybe the permissions on my local private key got screwed up. So, I blow away ~ /.ssh and recreate all of my keys from a backup_

Is that a common thing to do, or any reason why the OP would do that? Doesn't ssh reject your key, saying it does that if there's such a problem? And even if not wouldn't it be advisable to at least look at the permissions; I mean suppose they're not -rw</comment><comment>- or so, wouldn't you want to know that, and also _why_ they are not ok?

</comment><comment><USER57> > Am I and this one other forum poster just doing something totally bizarre > yet the same?

One might uncharitably suggest that using macOS and expecting standard decades-old Unix behaviour is itself bizarre … but that's also true of using Linux with systemd (viz., nohup no longer nohups, or systemd-resolved, or innumerable other broken bits).

It's almost as though no-one cares about quality anymore.

</comment><comment><USER58> I agree, that's an annoying bug/feature.

However, there is an amazingly easy workaround, assuming the IP and port don't change often: create a ~/bin shell script that connects via IP and port, make it executable, and add ~/bin to PATH.

This workaround doesn't excuse Apple of doing something so egregiously stupid, but it's so easy that you may as well do it and move on.

</comment><comment><USER59> Well, the description of this bug is not generally reproducible, so whatever is causing it, it's not as simple as using a high port with a server name.

I tested this specifically on a number of servers that I run with port numbers > 10000, using /usr/bin/ssh on macOS 10.15.4, with and without IP addresses. Nothing broke for me.

</comment><comment><USER60> Catalina also broke `apropos`. [https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/374025/errors- from...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/374025/errors-from-whatis- command-unable-to-rebuild-database-with-makewhatis)

</comment><comment><USER61> Catalina seems to have bust Wifi monitor mode on tcpdump on my MacMini 2018, yet it works fine on my Mac Air.

Still not sure if that is my machine, or a general fault - but the lack of monitor and promiscuous mode is playing havoc with IPv6 multicast packets from VMware Fusion VMs.

</comment><comment><USER62> "I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina. I just hope I've stuffed this post with enough keywords so that anyone else searching on Google might come across the answer." Ok. And did you actually report it as a bug to Apple?

<comment><USER63> Whether or not he did, there's absolutely nothing wrong with posting about a problem in case others come across the same. In fact it's damned helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> It is time to move to Linux or Windows desktop. Really if you are not hostage of Apple ecosystem then decent desktop is much more reliable in my experience (got old MacBook which is ok too but eg can't connect to old vpn on it)

</comment><comment><USER65> What's the backstory to why apples bash has to be different than gnu bash?

I love having the Linux kernel with a nice UI but there are some useful commands that are missing.

There are ways to get them set up but in any case it's kind of a pain

</comment><comment><USER66> Wow, just the other day this started happening to me as well with one of my serversfrom my MacBook. It used to work fine, but now only that laptop can't connect to it. iIt's on a high port too.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm using ssh to a named server online using a port >8192 from a 10.15.4 machine right now.

Have had no issues with it at all.

</comment><comment><USER68> >I'm not even going to go into it. I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina.

Whoops

</comment><comment><USER69> > Next, I ssh into a different server and then hop to the problematic one. It > connects without any trouble. At this point I'm thinking maybe the > permissions on my local private key got screwed up. So, I blow away ~/.ssh > and recreate all of my keys from a backup. Still can't login.

Someone should have paid more attention to that verbose SSH output first.

</comment><comment><USER70> Are you talking about the new apple feature?... non working ssh? It's all the rage.

</comment><comment><USER71> In my experience the breakage is with IPv6. Try forcing IPv4.

'ssh -4 <hostname>'

</comment><comment><USER72> Thank god I did not upgrade. Software upgrades are the best way to waste time.

<comment><USER73> They're the best way to stay secured and receive new features.

The issue with them is lack of testing before deploying them.

<comment><USER74> I think proprietary software and staying secure are contradictory ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Am I the only one who thought this article was about Apache Tomcat?

</comment><comment><USER76> If I'm still on Sierra, which version should I upgrade to?

<comment><USER77> I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) and Mojave runs very well on it. I have no plans to upgrade to Catalina.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Looks like the post was just deleted.

</comment><comment><USER79> _laughs in Linux_

<comment><USER80> Please don't do this here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> "I'm not even going to go into it. I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina."

Welp.

<comment><USER82> With this foresight he sadly didn't enable CloudFront and the website went down.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it's a $5/month DigitalOcean box with only my blog on it and nothing else. All assets come off a CDN and Varnish is sitting in front of WP, but looks like that still wasn't enough this time. It worked fine for my previous two HN'ings earlier this year.

<comment><USER83> I am still able to access it. So I don't think it's doing so bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> >I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina.

 _Ends up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina._

<comment><USER85> I don't wanna pay taxes.

Paying taxes anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> >I don't want to end up on Hacker News again bitching about Catalina.

<comment><USER87> To be fair, full context tempers that sentence:

> I'm not even going to go into it. I don't want to end up on Hacker News > again bitching about Catalina. I just hope I've stuffed this post with > enough keywords so that anyone else searching on Google might come across > the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> > I changed the server to listen on standard port 22 and tried connecting via > the hostname once again. Holy crap, it worked.

Shocking!

Granted high ports shouldn't be broken, but running SSH on a non-standard port is security (read obscurity) theater at best.

There's really not much benefit, unless you need multiple sshds on the same IP, but at that point I'd question the sanity of the approach.

<comment><USER89> Security through obscurity shouldn't be used as an edict that something is not effective. You are talking about the fact that it doesn't increase the security of the protocol itself or the passphrases/keys used. This is true. However, there are tons of bots out there that scan 22 and try to exploit common logins. There are presumably quite a few less that are port scanning every machine for every possible high port and attempting to handshake ssh and then try logins. Do you disagree with that? If not, this is not security through obscurity, it has a very real impact on the volume of bots that have knowledge that this service is running and are actively exploiting it. It's just a different type of security, it's discoverability of the service.

Here's another example. Say you have a web server running that is only for internal employee use. But you want to expose it externally so that they can reach it without a VPN. Even if you follow proper security protocols, why would you not turn off search engine indexing on this page, and limit the pages that link to it? It will not increase the inherent security of the protocol or the user accounts, but it will drastically lower the # of bots using up CPU and iptables entries trying to fail2ban or blacklist them.

Security is a spectrum and you want to have defense in depth. Moving ssh to a nonstandard port is a security best practice and you shouldn't be advising people not to use it. But should they also have good key setting, fail2ban, ip whitelisting/blacklisting, etc? Of course they should.

<comment><USER88> > Moving ssh to a nonstandard port is a security best practice

For whom? Could you please cite this?</comment></comment></comment>


There's That Facebook "Everyone Button" We Told You About - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/24/facebook-brings-privacy-controls-to-publisher/ <comment><USER2> So now "Fan" pages work essentially like Twitter accounts in terms of letting people follow and receive updates. I wonder what they'll do for normal profiles, where you can't look at a person's feed without their accepting. If they figure out a nice solution, then they may have done away with my attention-whoring friends' need for services like Identi.ca, which they use currently to push both to a private profile and to a public Twitter account.

</comment><comment><USER3> If there's one thing I can say for certain, it's that you're not going to beat Twitter (or any other dead-simple niche service) by trying to be everything to everyone. I am certainly painting in broad strokes here, but this feels a little Microsoft-y to me.</comment>


Evolvr.io – IMDb for Products and Companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.evolvr.io/

<comment><USER2> Very cool I just added [https://ivyleads.co](https://ivyleads.co) and now browsing around. It has some rough spot on the UI but not bad. Where are you looking to take this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not the creator unfortunately.. I just thought it was pretty awesome!

<comment><USER2> got it. They have a pretty good roster products already.</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese researcher w. link to military in hiding in consulate in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/5492095002 <comment><AUTHOR> Working link - sorry about that - [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/07/23/chinese...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/07/23/chinese- scientist-hiding-consulate-san-francisco/5492095002/) Thanks SyneRider!

</comment><comment><USER2> Was this article taken down? Link is broken.

<comment><USER3> I got the same thing, and looked for the story to supply the proper link, but couldn't find it.

<comment><USER4> Might have been renamed to this one:

FBI believes Chinese researcher with links to Beijing's military in hiding in consulate in San Francisco

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/07/23/chinese...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/07/23/chinese- scientist-hiding-consulate-san-francisco/5492095002/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, added it above but couldn't edit</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Twtr.im - A fast, low-bandwidth application to tweet from your mobile - <AUTHOR> http://twtr.im

<comment><USER2> Can't you use SMS?</comment>


The Mathematics of Music [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://imaginary.org/sites/default/files/20190911-lala-booklet-v0.4-web-text.pdf <comment><USER3> C, E-flat, and G go into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, but we don't serve minors." So E-flat leaves, and C and G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished, and G is out flat. F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough. D comes in and heads for the bathroom, saying, "Excuse me; I'll just be a second." Then A comes in, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor. Then the bartender notices B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and says, "Get out! You're the seventh minor I've found in this bar tonight." E-flat comes back the next night in a three-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender says, "You're looking sharp tonight. Come on in, this could be a major development." Sure enough, E-flat soon takes off his suit and everything else, and is au natural. Eventually C sobers up and realizes in horror that he's under a rest. C is brought to trial, found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of D.S. without Coda at an upscale correctional facility.

<comment><USER4> Made my day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another good book in the same vein is Dave Benson's 'Music: a Mathematical Offering'.

[https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths- mus...](https://homepages.abdn.ac.uk/d.j.benson/pages/html/maths-music.html)

<comment><USER6> That's an incredible book! The observation that harmony depends on the timbre of instruments was mind blowing (e.g., if we used different musical instruments, the consonant and dissonant intervals would be different).

<comment><USER5> William Sethares has a good webpage about this ([https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html](https://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html)). He talks about how you can create a synthesised instrument to fit a given scale. He even has example pieces you can listen to that are written in scales that would sound terrible with our usual instruments.

<comment><USER6> Notice that the "scalelab" tool of TFA allows you to also synthesize dissonant octaves and whatnot: [https://github.com/IMAGINARY/ScaleLab](https://github.com/IMAGINARY/ScaleLab)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Musimathics is great [1].

If you want a more interactive source you can play with python notebooks from the music information retrieval site [2]. I've found it helpful, as you try some of the described music theory concepts in a programming environment.

Shameless plug, I've also written about how audio fingerprinting works [3], which touches on some of the topics regarding music theory.

[1] [http://www.musimathics.com](http://www.musimathics.com)

[2] [https://musicinformationretrieval.com](https://musicinformationretrieval.com)

[3] [https://emysound.com/blog/open-source/2020/06/12/how- audio-f...](https://emysound.com/blog/open-source/2020/06/12/how-audio- fingerprinting-works.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Recommended:

A Geometry of Music by Dmitri Tymoczko - [http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of- music.html](http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html)

The Geometry of Musical Rhythm by Godfried Toussaint

\- Original paper - [http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/geometry- of-r...](http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/geometry-of- rhythm.pdf) (PDF)

\- Book - <USER2> [https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.2/mto.13.19.2.gotham.php](https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.13.19.2/mto.13.19.2.gotham.php)

<comment><USER9> I picked that book up on a whim a couple years ago and was surprised how engaged I was. It introduces you to some very interesting concepts.

<comment><USER8> I admit much of it's over my head, but that's exactly the kind of books I like. I keep coming back to chew on different parts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In a similar vein, there's the Topos of Music book[0], which, according to Wikipedia, has been somewhat controversial among mathematicians and musicians alike.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts- Perfor...](https://www.amazon.com/Topos-Music-Geometric-Concepts- Performance/dp/3764357312)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the book recommendation. I was curious about the controversy, so dug into it a bit.

From the Wikipedia page of the author:

> Dmitri Tymoczko..said of Mazzola: "If you can't learn algebraic geometry, he > sometimes seems to be saying, then you have no business trying to understand > Mozart."

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

The critic, Tymoczko, is the author of A Geometry of Music. Oh, his review of Topos of Music is online.

[http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/files/publications/mazz...](http://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/files/publications/mazzola.pdf) (PDF)

Abstract:

This paper critiques Guerino Mazzola's derivation of traditional counterpoint rules, arguing that those rules are not well-modeled by pitch-class intervals; that Mazzola's differential treatment of fifths and octaves is not supported musically or by traditional counterpoint texts; that Mazzola's specific calculations are not reproducible; that there are a number of intuitive considerations weighing against Mazzola's explanation; that the fit between theory and evidence is not good; and that Mazzola's statistical arguments are flawed. This leads to some general methodological reflections on different approaches to mathematical music theory, as well as to an alternative model of first-species counterpoint featuring the orbifold T2/S2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Have posted this link before, but so relevant to the discussion: [https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1360...](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/136085/is- musical-notation-turing-complete)

If music were Turing complete, it could imply we've been developing the ability to derive theorems in it as a species forever, which has some speculatively interesting philosophical implications as well. :)

<comment><USER12> What would some of those philosophic implications be?

Also, this link asks if music notation is Turing complete, not music itself. Is out method of writing musc turing complete or is the music itself turing complete? What about something like maqam or other microtonal systems? Or temperament beyond the twelve-tone temperament we know and love?

Good find though, that's a very interesting question...

<comment><USER11> IANA-Philosopher, but if music, geometry, and logic could each encode all the same things, and we have a musical "sense," for its rules and symmetry, it's reasonable to speculate that music is an artifact of patterns and theorems that appear in these other areas, and where we don't have an matching rule in one area, it implies one should exist in the other.

It's stuff like the machine learning kit that produced a new AC/DC song ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpEVsDN84Hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpEVsDN84Hc)), meaning that machine learning has discovered an algorithm for producing outputs from rules effectively hidden in the band members heads.

The function the ML model discovered that produces theorems in the domain of plausible AC/DC songs isn't as useful to us as the one that produces plausible fluid dynamics models, but the possibility that the properties (or category) of that function might contain other analogies and isomorphisms to geometric figures, graphs, and other objects may imply that when we listen to music or compose, it our minds could just be in effect, "doing math," \- and whether we in fact do anything that is "not math," either.

High level, I suspect this may have been what Hofstadter, Dennett, and Searle were on about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> the software can be found here, [https://imaginary.org/programs](https://imaginary.org/programs)

</comment><comment><USER14> I started learning music recently, and another type that I would like to see, is mathematics for music genres, mathematics for music effects and mathematics for music theory

<comment><USER15> Mathematics for music effects is called digital signal processing. Proakis's book is good if you can handle analysis.

Also, a word of warning/advice: Music theory is not mathematics - it's just a way of storing patterns that sound nice on western instruments. There are some musical genres that you can basically generate algorithmically, but if you want to actually learn musicianship stay well clear.

Mark Levine's books are a good "textbook style" music theory book with lots of examples of actual jazz music.

<comment><USER16> Actually, there is lots of nice maths in music theory.

Yes, music theory is descriptive rather than prescriptive. But messing around (mathematically) with its ideas can help one find nice musical possibilities one might not otherwise have considered.

For example, the major scale, the (ascending) melodic minor scale, and the harmonic minor scale are all seven-note scales such that all scale-wise thirds are major or minor.

This is important, because people like using harmony built on stacking major and minor thirds.

But are there any other seven-note scales whose thirds are all major or minor, beside the aforementioned (and their modes)?

Yes, the harmonic major scale (and its modes). Not so well known, it presents lots of different, but still ultimately convential, possibilities.

<comment><USER17> After digging a bit into math approach to music, I'd agree with mhh__. Music is the business of making vibrations sound good. Definition of "good" is cultural and changes with times (see Devil's interval). The standard mathematical approach to music starts from axioms that are only applicable to western music and imply no evolution.

Maybe linguistic methods would serve composers better, as they deal in similar problems: how to to create meaningful whole from meaningless parts that relate to each other in complex way. Just as linguistics, music involves not only the mechanics of ear sensing, but also pattern recognition machine that likes to have just the right amount of repetition, and just the right amount of new stuff.

<comment><USER16> Yes, ultimately taste, or `what sounds good' decides. But mathematical approaches to all the building blocks of music can bring new materials to the ear which might sound good.

For example, I love the third mode of harmonic major (Phrygian flat 4) because I like the way it sounds. But I wouldn't have discovered it if I hadn't been thinking about scales in a systematic, mathematical kind of way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> aaron-santos Absolutely fascinating section on Lissajous figures. I had only been exposed to the concept through orbits.[1]

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

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure whom this is aimed at. The name "La La Lab" and the interactivity suggests kids, but there's a Fourier integral on Page 7 which immediately suggests undergraduates.

<comment><USER19> Why would the interactivity be limited to kids? I think the name is a pun on "La La Land", a musical film.

<comment><USER20> Neither... I suggested the name in a brainstorming session. We wanted to transmit the exhibition was like a Lab and I joined with the "La La La" you would use to warm up your voice, or the onomatopoeia of singing.

We were concerned of the movie association, but this exhibition was initially targeted at Germany so it wouldn't be as strong as in the US.

Edit: the exhibition IS kid-friendly though... we have lots of families and schools visiting.

Surprised and happy to find a mention to LA LA LAB here  We just launched a digital exhibition on AI at www.i-am.ai

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I highly recommend Drew Nobile's book or papers on functional circuits as an adjunct to this on how to recursively generate songs from an initial seed progression.</comment>


I have resigned as the WordPress accessibility team lead - <AUTHOR> https://rianrietveld.com/2018/10/09/i-have-resigned-the-wordpress-accessibility-team/ <comment><USER2> I think the consensus on making accessible React sites is via using Live regions [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/Accessibility/ARIA/ARIA_Live_Regions)

<comment><USER3> Fixed it for you:

"I'm super ignorant about accessibility, but I heard this one time. Here, accessibility experts, I googled this link for you. Should be easy to implement."

<comment><USER2> I'm sure they're more expert at accessibility than I am, but the article complained that they were not very expert at React. I'm not that great at React either but I get by.

At any rate I'm sure that nothing I have ever worked on is as accessible as anything you have ever worked on just because what are the odds that I could have been part of anything worthwhile and what are the odds you are not just an amazing genius dropping by to let me know it? Pretty slim I bet.

in fact, you seem somewhat rude - are we acquaintances in some way?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, welcome to freaking HN? FYI, "Live Regions" is an ARIA feature and has nothing whatsoever to do with React specifically. ARIA, also commonly known as WAI ARIA. Which stands for Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications. It's a W3C suite of standards literally all about accessibility. That's probably what made it so mind-boggling that you'd think it's news to an accessibility expert.

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing yours is some sort of sockpuppet account otherwise welcoming me would seem sort of beside the point; given my relative length on the site compared to yours, evidently.

That said considering I was just lectured on civility for much less rudeness (I of course think I was not rude at all) in a politically charged thread where rudeness is sometimes expected I believe your opinion of the site is at odds with what is at least hoped for and my surprise at the tone given the circumstances was warranted.

However where rudeness is concerned I believe I can give better than I get if need be, and you're also quite rude so here are some points:

1\. When I post a link to an MDN resource it is not because I think MDN is the standard place to get React specific information. That should be obvious to anyone on this site who claims technical expertise in Web matters, and you should have stopped with the patronizing let me tell you about ARIA spiel.

2\. I believe a reading through my posting history on HN will show that I at least have enough familiarity with accessibility that you don't need go give me the Aria intro. Even if linking to a part of it on MDN wasn't a clue enough. (I could have linked to W3C but as introductory pieces they are much less successful than MDN content in my opinion)

3\. The article was mainly about problems with doing accessibility in React, which I agree is problematic (for big SPAs at any rate) and live regions while helpful is in many ways more difficult to do right where accessibility is concerned than a normal HTML5/JavaScript application. Many people interested in React might read that article and say damn you can't do accessibility in React, because those accessibility experts couldn't do it. I made an offhand comment on a technology I have some experience with in React, and pointed to a resource on the technology trusting that anyone interested would either research matters further or at worst ask me for clarification ( which I would hate because the reason for writing a small offhand comment and providing a simple introductory link to a technology is because I don't have time for much more)

<comment><USER3> Dude, I don't know you and this is not personal. Breathe and remember there's always someone wrong on the internet. Far as I've ever been able to tell, HN is full of rudeness. It's why I don't have activity. Bigger bunch of circle jerking, back patting, myopic pedants I've rarely seen. YMMV. And I just so happen to have different accounts logged in on different devices 'cause I lost the password to my more favorite username and had to create another. _shrug_ There's not a sneaky agenda.

I really, with all goodwill this time, recommend you spend your limited time and energy on more important matters than my misdirected flames. You spent it less than fruitfully in a tailspin over this, seemingly, and I'm sorry for that; I've been there. I should probably remember those hours when I post, but I am a deeply flawed and bitter person.

<comment><USER2> well I'm probably going through a flawed and bitter period myself so I understand, sorry if I got upset but lack of sleep and a lot of stress sent me over the edge.

I didn't think you had a sneaky agenda necessarily, I just thought that account must not be your normal account if you're welcoming me. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a bit puzzling for me:

1\. A React app is still DOM-based. Normal accessibility practices still apply, as they do for any other SPAs

2\. It takes maybe a week to learn enough of JSX and React to get started on accessibility tasks

This sounds like refusing to work on a new codebase without actually being invested into it. Also got a combative feeling from reading a few PRs, where simple style issues are discussed at length vs just fixed with one variable change. Am I reading it wrong?

All the best luck for Matthew.

<comment><USER6> It takes more than a week if you're not already a JavaScript software engineer.

<comment><USER5> You can't do proper accessibility work today without JS, regardless of React. Either for dynamic content, or features like a focus trap that browsers don't offer natively.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't work in Gutenberg nor in a11y, but I know that WordPress is hugely focused on Gutenberg (which I mentioned in [https://ayesh.me/talk/No](https://ayesh.me/talk/No), my shameless self-plug).

With Gutenberg almost at the edge of releasing, the a11y team lead resigning will only make things worse. Lack of understanding in accessibility is a huge problem in many software projects, and documentation alone wouldn't help it.

During the Gutenberg time, accessibility, secure updates, modern PHP, and a few other initiatives started with little to no progress in them. There is no way Gutenberg is almost released if all these initiatives were to go parallel, at least not without enough resources.

</comment><comment><USER8> Isn't Gutenberg optional? Can't you have a checkbox that says "I'm disabled, I can't use Gutenberg, give me the old editor"

<comment><USER9> But that's kind of a bad approach for developing software. "Sorry, handicapped person, you don't get the new hotness. But it's ok, you can continue using this old software that we super-duper promise to continue supporting."

<comment><USER10> Also, that would mean maintain both editors going forward. Two UI-s means double the chance for regressions.

<comment><USER3> And guess which one is the priority for bug fixes? Hint: it's not the old, unexciting one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Indie – A Competitive Advantage - <AUTHOR> https://schier.co/blog/indie-a-competitive-advantage <comment><AUTHOR> If you have anything to add to the list, I'd love to hear it :)</comment>


Pay Transparency: Is There Such a Thing as "Too Much?" - Salary.com Business - <AUTHOR> http://business.salary.com/pay-transparency-too-much/?scm=b-n-022013 <comment><AUTHOR> Any startups here operate with similar transparency? How do you plan to scale that out later on?

"The real question for SumAll, and organizations like it, is whether the approach scales beyond the start-up phase. Will the 9 fixed salaries work as the number and diversity of jobs increases? Will this approach work globally or with thousands of employees? Will the corporate culture change over time and be less supportive of pay transparency?"</comment>


LazyTruth - truth detector plugin for Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.lazytruth.com/

<comment><USER2> I applaud the technique -- combating the misinformation immediately and alongside it, with no expenditure of time or effort. A boon for those without enough search savvy for debunking. Speed is of the essence: debunk it while the person still cares, hasn't repeated it or passed it on to anyone, and hasn't built long-term memory of the misinformation.

Unfortunately, the "About" page says nothing about how it actually works. Does it just search "snopes/[fact-check website] [string from email long enough to be unique]" and parse the results?</comment>


British Airways flight disruption was caused by someone unplugging the power - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/2/15728276/british-airways-power-supply-turned-off-reports <comment><USER2> There is some good speculation about what happened here [http://up2v.nl/2017/05/29/what-went-wrong-in-british- airways...](http://up2v.nl/2017/05/29/what-went-wrong-in-british-airways- datacenter/)</comment>


I was asked to get onboard with a startup. How should I structure payment? - z-magic I will be getting paid and I have the opportunity to get equity depending on the extent of involvement. I am a college student and will be working remotely and the ball is in my court as to how I get paid. What is the best way to structure this so I can keep the most money e.g. freelance, employee, under the table, etc.? Also, it is a corporation if that matters. Thank you! <comment><AUTHOR> _" What is the best way to structure this so I can keep the most money e.g. freelance, employee, under the table, etc.?"_

Definitely don't suggest to them that they should pay you "under the table" (i.e., off the books payments that are not reported to the IRS). That would be asking them to enter into a conspiracy with you to commit tax evasion, which is a federal crime. No legitimate company would do that, or want to deal with somebody who would suggest that they do that.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not aware of a startup specific formula (e.g. if startup then do XYZ,) we don't know all of your details and it really depends on what you're planning for your life/career.

If you are trying to build a career and a life, you should seek a documented form of payment, else you'll have a hard time convincing future employers, your government, and lenders/creditors that you're legit. In general, I've heard the advice "pay yourself first" which when pondering jobs I interpret as: make sure you are getting enough compensation every month to pay rent, groceries, health insurance, etc.

At that point hopefully you can start negotiating(/deciding) between more salary versus more equity. Only take equity if you're sure you won't need the cash any time soon, because lots of companies are staying private for a long time these days, so you may be waiting around for an acquisition/IPO.

</comment><comment><USER3> Structure your time first.</comment>


A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/295515/quora-poetry-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> > Can karma, sometimes, be unfair?

I often say, "Karma is real. It just has horrible aim."

What I mean by "Karma is real" is that it is not some mystical gobbledygook, but a real a phenomenon as natural selection or the free market's invisible hand.

But most people discount karma because so often, as the line in the poem suggests, "bad" people seem to often get away with it and the "good" people often pay.

But if you consider that individuals aren't entirely responsible for who they are and what they do, that people are born into arbitrary places in a complex system (society), and how this has a huge impact on how they perceive the world and the choices they have, both perceived and real, then karma's "shoddy aim" may in fact be as accurate as it should be.

For example, we have social inequalities that result in many children having far rougher and insecure lives than others. Instead of fixing these inequalities, and giving all children an equally good childhood, we use violence including forced incarceration to contain the delinquents the unlucky children are more likely to grow up to be. The karma of all this violence should rightly fall on all of us. If anything it doesn't fall on all of us enough.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome

</comment><comment><USER4> funny funny

man of the rhymes were not from questions about Silicon Valley

Nice theme for the setup, I enjoyed it

</comment><comment><USER5> Haha.

Art Imitating Life.</comment>


Wage Stagnation - <AUTHOR> https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/25/wage-stagnation-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ <comment><USER2> Real wages haven't increased since 1970.

We only feel richer because:

* Most households have two wage earners now.

* We use lines of credit to borrow for discretionary purchases, we lease cars, pay by subscription for things more.

* We have more gadgets. (Note that this has been proven to make people any happier.)

<comment><USER3> This is false. [1] Real income has doubled since 1970 for individuals. I'm not sure why so many people seem to think that, I'm constantly having to reply to posts like this on HN and Reddit with real data but a lot of people just go along with it even though the people that post these claims never substantiate it with data.

I think there must be a psychological factor that makes people feel good about how our generation has it so hard? I would truly appreciate if someone could explain why.

[https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-p...](https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time- series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-people.html)

<comment><USER4> The general claim about 'Real Wage' stagnation is based on the median of full time workers. There is data for this in your link:

Men: 51,885 (1970) => 55,834 (2017), a 7.6% increase

Women: 30,733 (1970) => 44,379 (2017), a 41% increase

Also note that this data is using CPI-U-RS adjustment instead of CPI which is what is normally used for 'Real Wages'. There is some debate over the accuracy of CPI-U-RS, but it's worth noting that it's not directly calculated prior to 1978 so becomes more questionable. Comparing to 1978 your numbers are basically equal to 2017 income for men. For women there is still significant growth but I think it's hard to draw any conclusions since a very large number of women entered the full time workforce and took on higher level positions between 1970 and 2017.

I'm assuming you are getting 'doubled' by reading the per capita income data which is not a particularly accurate way to look at this. That is just taking the sum of the total income and dividing by the US population, i.e. it's a mean not a median. It's going to be skewed by high income individuals and also by the nature of labor force participation.

<comment><USER5> It would be interesting to see a graph over median wage similar to the one in the article, but with separate lines per gender.

> very large number of women entered the full time workforce and took on > higher level positions between 1970 and 2017

If we look at US numbers that actually not the case. As I wrote in an other comment, between 1940 and 1970 it doubled from around 25% to around 50%, but from 1970 to 2017 it only went up to current 55%. It actually went down from 2000 which topped at 59%.

<comment><USER4> > If we look at US numbers that actually not the case. As I wrote in an other > comment, between 1940 and 1970 it doubled from around 25% to around 50%, but > from 1970 to 2017 it only went up to current 55%. It actually went down from > 2000 which topped at 59%.

Using the data source provided from the post I replied to (table P-36) the number of full time, year-round workers looks like this:

Men: 36.1M (1970) => 66.4M (2017) increase of 84%

Women: 15.5M (1970) => 44.4M (2017) increase of 186%

So within this group we went from ~30% female to ~40% female and I would venture that the types of employment accessible to women in this time frame has also expanded quite a bit, though I have no immediate data handy to back this up.

Without digging into your numbers, I suspect they may come from total labor force participation which is a notably different metric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem here is that the comparison is between _median_ wages and _total_ productivity, without demonstrating that the median worker is in any way responsible for the increased productivity.

If the median worker _isn 't_ responsible for the increased productivity, are they entitled to a share of the work of other people?

I'm not necessarily saying they aren't, just that such an argument should be made explicitly.

<comment><USER7> Shall we also discuss how much of other people's work capital is 'entitled' to?

E.g Uber's executives are very well compensated, and are nothing but middle- men. Middle-men that are easily replaced, as demonstrated by the Uber clones in cities that banned Uber.

<comment><USER8> if they're as easily replaced as you say, they won't be very well compensated for long.

<comment><USER9> It seems pretty naive to think these market mechanisms are the primary factors affecting wages. Maybe this is the case in the US, certainly not in Europe. Otherwise teachers and caregivers would earn at least as much as engineers.

Top managers wages are completely fictitious. Investors generally don't care though, since it is basically nothing compared to turnover as a whole.

<comment><USER10> In the US there's an excess of teachers (unsure about caregivers) and it seems the market forces are expectedly causing low salaries.

I believe as an American I'm missing some important context to understand this comment.

<comment><USER9> Context: A lot of countries in Europe have problems filling positions with teachers and caregivers, because younger people tend to evade these careers because of bad economic conditions and huge workloads.

<comment><USER11> I would say that is still market mechanisms affecting wages.

The purchasers (taxpayers) are not willing to pay sufficient wages in order to incentivize [the right] people to pursue it as a career.

<comment><USER12> It's my opinion that taxpayers are the worst people to drive business decisions around education. The median tax payer will only care about education quality and availability for around 15 of their ~40 years as a tax payer.

For those remaining 25 years, they will tend to prioritize money in their pockets over a teacher's salary; a situation that does not align with the betterment of our society at large.

<comment><USER11> A million dollar teacher won't be able to do their job effectively if the child lives in a broken environment, so it's something that has to be attacked from all angles simultaneously, from the teachers, to providing the child's parents (and neighbors) with economic opportunities (and/or educating them), and even then it would be a slow process taking effect over generations, so no politician could claim it. Seems almost impossible to accomplish in a democracy.

<comment><USER13> There are plenty of million dollar teachers, but they work in private tutoring or corporate education positions.

The million dollar teachers will do things like actively manage the student's home life or business trajectory, give them personalized curricula, connect them with opportunities to gain hands-on experience, etc.

Not saying you're wrong re: the incentives or anything, but a lot of people don't even know this segment of the market exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There appears to be a section missing: the one that discusses the consequences of the globalization of the labor market, especially with regard to non- physical labor. Arguably, this is a consequence of policy changes, but it is not discussed in that section, either.

<comment><USER15> Particularly telling is that he compares the gap between the US, Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.

I really want to see the same charts for coastal vs inland China and Mexico. Did a rising tide lift all boats there or not?

<comment><USER16> The problem is mostly one of data availability. China has plenty of data, but not all of it is credulous. That, and the fact that comparisons of any two nations will always be susceptible to the accusation that the data has been "cherry-picked" to show a favorable result.

But the global data on poverty is basically unassailable. Poverty has declined absolutely everywhere. The rising tide lifted at least the very poorest boats, whatever can be said for the American middle class notwithstanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with this entire discussion is that we use terms like "wages" and "productivity", which have meanings in the English language, and associate them with metrics which are utterly divorced from those meanings. To have a sane discussion, we're forced to use these shorthands, but the fact of the matter is that if we spelled out what we were actually measuring it would be very clear that all of these phenomena being measured refer to things disconnected from any of our actual experience.

Even more so, the methodology for most of this data has changed so much over time, with so little overlap between methodologies, that we have literally no idea what the state of the world was even a few years ago. All we have are a mixture of giant measurement artifacts, and when two of them correlate we celebrate because we might have found a metric that can bridge the divide between methodologies, but that correspondence disappears as soon as we try to find out if there are systemic changes -- our ability to determine whether something has changed has an implicit reliance on the assumption that nothing has changed, so all of these arguments become circular.

Econometrics is a philosophical dead end that just ends up producing broken policies disconnected from reality and causing us to make up a new suite of politically-motivated metrics to match the outcomes that we're looking for, and then give the metrics names that refer to things that have intuitive meanings and pretend we've found insight.

You really have to go back to non-econometric-based economics (the Austrians, von Mises and Hayek) to get any sort of insight into how economies can be made to work at scale, and the answer is that we don't understand them, and that technological progress and population changes mean that attempts to push them in a direction will have side effects that far outweigh any of the attempted influence.

<comment><USER18> This isn't true, the study of applied economics (new Keynsian) saved the US in 2008 when the Fed decided to shore up liquidity and helped bail out industry in concert with the government. Austrian policy would've let the entire system collapse and rebuild itself to avoid the construction of perverse risk incentives and the zombification we are seeing in the economy today. You can argue which would be better long term (I think Austrian) but short term we needed Keynesian measures to save jobs and lives from being consumed in a downward spiral of debt chain triggering and collection.

Productivity has a precise economic definition - ratio of output to inputs - and correlates highly to standard of living. We don't fully understand how and why technology advances, but we measure increased technology through a variable called the solow residual. Economic policy can help lead to technology breakthroughs that increase productivity and the standard of living. It's very shortsighted to dismiss economics out of hand as something we don't understand. A lot of it is politically motivated but let's face it politics is what happens when groups of people get together and try to collaborate. There's a lot of important work to be done around productivity economics and I'm glad it's getting more mainstream coverage

<comment><USER19> > Productivity has a precise economic definition - ratio of output to inputs - > and correlates highly to standard of living. We don't fully understand how > and why technology advances, but we measure increased technology through a > variable called the solow residual.

What happens when you can't measure the outputs? What's the total value added by the financial sector? Or the legal sector for that matter? If I invent an inexpensive cure for a disease that renders expensive medicines obsolete, has productivity gone up or down?

Regarding the Solow residual, you certainly _can_ put income on one side of a regression, and estimates of labour and capital on the other side, and set them equal using a residual term. I don't think you can convincingly argue to anyone besides an undergrad economist that the residual represents technology though. Don't think too hard about what the units of that residual are...

<comment><USER18> It's an approximation that needs to be imputed, and can't be measured directly. It doesn't need units to be a useful measure against itself at different periods, to measure the rate of change of how environmental variables effect a nation or firms production function. I think it's cool and useful that someone tried to quantify how much infrastructure affects productivity by abstracting away all the immeasurable variables into one term. It's an extremely important concept that deserves more work because of how closely it is tied to advances in standard of living. It's not perfect but it's very interesting and could be ripe for a revamp given how much data we are now collecting from all sources

<comment><USER19> My point about units is that (depending on the exact model) if you change the units, your conclusion may change, which is absurd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Once you realise that workers are compensated according to their bargaining power rather than their productivity, none of this should be surprising.

<comment><USER20> I was going to say something similar. I'm 41, and when I was a child in the early 80s, work was simultaneously higher paying, a bit more intense than today's standards, but also had shorter hours and more leisure time. Where I live in Idaho, my family and friends were: a dentist (dad) dental office manager (mom), carpenter (godfather), minister, interior decorator, teacher, artist, mechanic, lots of military workers on the airbase by my hometown, etc. Maybe half or less of the mothers I knew worked outside the home. Fathers hunted in the fall to feed their families.

But our community was largely self-sufficient. We didn't have Walmart yet and its associated trade deficits which contributed to the national debt. I'll admit that we were dependent on the nearby military base, BUT that was during the Cold War. Had the base closed (as it probably should have after the Berlin Wall fell, say 1990), I think my home town would have survived on ranching, timber and mining (none of which I support by the way, as Idaho's environment is under constant attack).

Yes I see the contradictions in what I am saying. But I also believe that we could have had a more sustainable future had we faced facts and started the process of transitioning to a 21st century economy earlier. That might have even led to Gore being elected instead of Bush. So it's complicated, and not always easy to discern cause from effect. It's all been 20 years delayed, but there is work in green energy here today.

My feeling is that the American worker HAD MORE LEVERAGE then - in terms of being able to walk onto any construction job, or specialize in a 2 year education trade, or even get free college in many states. We still had unions. We didn't have the welfare cuts that happened under Clinton or the 100,000 factories shut down under GW Bush yet. Quality of life and the feeling of making one's own way was higher then.

If we want to fix our economy, we need to get organized and take a bigger piece of the pie for workers (perhaps we should call them makers or producers), rather than giving it to people who already have money. We can moan and complain about this simple fact from all political angles, but until we start electing people who understand how this works, our long slow decline will continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> One more mystery: if all of this is true, why isn't small business formation higher? After all none of these factors (besides mismeasurement) applies to you if you have a small business.

But if anything, business formation is down.

(Also, the charts by educational attainment are meaningless. There has been a huge shift within categories. Being a high school dropout in 1960 meant something completely different than today)

<comment><USER22> Is it because more and more areas of business activity are conquered by large entities and thus are hard to enter into? As a small guy, you won't achieve economies of scale of Wallmart or marketing of McDonalds, while 70 years ago, if you were opening a convenience store or a restaurant, you only had to worry about local (non-chain) competition.

<comment><USER23> > Is it because more and more areas of business activity are conquered by > large entities and thus are hard to enter into?

Is that true though? Artisanal, craft, handmade, premium, bespoke, etc. of every kind of bullshit is booming. Etsy, indiegogo, kickstarter, eBay and whatever else is big business for small producers of gadgets, trinkets and everything cute, right?

That said, yes, Amazon and other forms online shopping, is pushing out small shops, but cafés are opening everywhere in cities. (Urban revival and whatnot.)

But ... without hard numbers there are just feely-goody impressions, so I have no hard belief about this, just trying to offer a coutnerpoint.

<comment><USER24> >Is that true though? Artisanal, craft, handmade, premium, bespoke, etc. of every kind of bullshit is booming.

Only in markets where there's a high enough density of rich people with nothing better to spend their money on. Businesses selling hand crafted bagels don't exist outside areas where there's a lot of people willing to spend their discretionary income on craft bagels.

<comment><USER25> Well, the internet helps with this. But granted, you're not going to sell artisanal sandwiches over the internet.

And folks willing to spend $40 on specially roasted and ground coffee are far, far fewer than folks spending $2 for the grocery store brand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Because of energy. Productivity going up means one person uses more machines, and as time goes, the machines do an ever increasing part of the job, because the energy feeding the machines is so much cheaper than human labour (in the order of 200 to 400 times cheaper).

This is not by chance that wage stagnation appeared in correlation with these events: US oil production peaked in 1970. Dollar convertibility to gold ended in 1971. Oil crisis came in 1974. OECD countries enter a permanent trend of public deficit in 1974. Unemployment soared in OECD countries at the same time.

As the ability to augment energy consumption became more and more capped by the ability to extract energy from the ground, workers gradually lost their capacity to obtain their part of the cake because it's always cheaper to put more capital than people at work, so far. The trend intensifies, nowadays we're talking of ending employment and of the necessity of basic income and similar tools.

Until the (unavoidable) end of cheap energy, that is... Then we'll be back to the ancient order of things, when a country GDP was entirely correlated to the size of its population.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm having trouble understanding why, in a society with ever-advancing technology, why wages _would_ trend with productivity. I'm seeing it like this (and please correct me if I'm off base):

Input = (Labor portion) + (tech & automation portion) + (other portion including things like land, materials, and overhead)

Productivity = output / input

Wages reflect the labor portion's contribution to "input." We know that tech and automation's portion is continuing to increase in relation to labor. Therefore, with this understanding, wages must decrease in proportion with productivity.

<comment><USER28> > Wages reflect the labor portion's contribution to "input." We know that tech > and automation's portion is continuing to increase in relation to labor. > Therefore, with this understanding, wages must decrease in proportion with > productivity.

Let's say I make widgets for $10 an hour, and make 100 widgets per hour. That's $0.10 per widget.

Then, a new tool comes along, and allows me to make 200 widgets per hour. The cost of a widget is now $0.05 per widget.

Who "deserves" this extra profit? Yes, my employer paid the expense for the new tool, but this is (more or less) a one-off expense. They will recoup this cost, and eventually the increased productivity will be pure profit,.

I, on the other hand, am still spending eight hours a day making widgets. My time is now worth twice as much as it was, but I'm still being paid the old rate.

The issue we're seeing with wage stagnation is that companies are making one- time investments and recouping increased profits _forever_ , while employees are working just as hard, but seeing no increased benefit.

And that's just from a simple math perspective. This discussion entirely ignores the fact that when you employ someone, you are essentially renting a human being, and in order for our society to function, that cost must have a floor. Society as a whole suffers when you are able to rent a person for less than it costs to live.

<comment><USER29> > My time is now worth twice as much as it was,

no. your time is now worth half as much as it once was. the tool is what brings the increase in value, not you nor your time.

the owner can now replace you with someone who costs half as much and is half as efficent and get the same result as before the new tool was brought in. even with this decrease in time efficiency, the cheaper less efficient worker has the same value as you did before.

so lets say the owner still wants to increase efficiency but cut costs. ok, they fire you and hire someone else for 75% of your wage and 75% of your efficiency. the owner can still make the same amount of widgets as before in less time and for less cost.

your value has decreased, not increased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When did China enter the global market? Am I the only one to think that this might be a natural cause of an extreme growth in world-wide working population? I think we are already through the worst parts and the dividends are beginning to pay.

<comment><USER16> I have thought that for a long time, too. It's natural that, on a global scale, developed-economy wages would appear to "stagnate" if developing- economy wages are increasing while competing for the same jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Returns on investment always exceed wage growth. And as wealth concentrates, the effect is cumulative even over generations. It happens to be tech. It could just as easily be empire.

There was a moment after the world wars when this was intentionally compensated for and now it isn't. There is no William Beveridge, no Roosevelt brain trust and, Keynesian is apparently a bad word now.

<comment><USER32> I think one of the biggest concerns that governments are having is that the more you try to re-balance wage stagnation and wealth, the less competitive you are in the world, leading to other types of stagnation.

<comment><USER31> Intuitively this seems quite reasonable.

Yet the period 1946-1973 saw enormous growth in all western countries and wages kept up with growth during that time.

Of course, it seems likely there are government interventions that damage growth. But apparently there are some that don't. In particular, progressive tax structures and social safety nets don't seem to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is really great!

I have to toss something in re: unionization and the percentage it may explain.

Executive salaries have exploded while worker salaries have stagnated. Could this be because executives by virtue of the social networks they belong to are effectively unionized? Unionization of executives is not necessarily explicit, but the executive pool is smaller and more tightly connected and therefore executives will tend to behave more like a coherent social group. The worker pool is enormous, more diverse, and far less organized with far less opportunity for "out-of-band" social connection.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's worse than it looks when you add massive education debt and in states like California we have seen the vast share of tax increases landing on wage earners plus incredibly high rent.

<comment><USER35> Yes, I'm not sure if the linked post discusses education debt. Even if wages increased 50% more than we think due to inflation issues, as the blog post claims, I don't know how a slightly better wage makes up for vastly increased education/housing spending. I don't know if the CPI or productivity account for either of those, either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> >>"We shouldn't dismiss this as irrelevant, because many things that close only a small part of the gap may, when added together, close a large part of the gap. But this doesn't do much on its own."

I'm not saying is not true, but I find this idea highly suspicious when there is a clear trend that start at some point.

I mean, what are the chances that many independent things move the trend, in the same direction at the same time, every year?.

<comment><USER37> The author addresses this in the conclusion, and is also suspicious, but presents some possibilities that explain it.

"This surprises me, because the dramatic shift in 1973 made me expect to see a single cause (and multifactorial trends should be rare in general, maybe, I think). It looks like there are two reasons why 1973 seems more important than it is...."

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if there's an impact from the increase in startups? Since most early employees are getting paid in equity rather than real dollars wouldn't there be a stagnation for a few years until the equity is transformed into cash?

Also any conversation about wage stagnation has to take into account collusion, in recent years Google, Intel, Adobe and others were avoiding poaching each other's employees.

</comment><comment><USER39> Of course, if this continues long enough...

At some point the workers rebel, and bring back the guillotine. Or something worse (see Soviet Russia). This can't continue long term.

Populist politicians promising to make things better relieve some of the pressure in the short run, though.

</comment><comment><USER40> Of course any discussion about labour vs capital share of gdp needs to talk about land as well. So '5. Could Wage Decoupling Be Explained By Increasing Labor-Vs-Capital Inequality?' would be more interesting with land.

That also came up in the discussions around Piketty.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've thought about this for the past decade or so. It's obviously going to be many simultaneous factors for any type of decoupling this pervasive in society, but I tend to simulate things out in my head and here is what I've largely ruled in and out.

1\. It isn't gross executive compensation. Holding everything else constant, executives are very good at negotiating the very best deal for themselves and corporations live and die by the law of the jungle. These two forces balance each other out. Higher executive compensation probably means that executives are more important than they used to be, which I would expect with an increasingly technological society.

2\. That said, executives and the wealthy class pay way less in tax than they used to because they're less tied to a region which means they're less civically minded and they're more able to region shop for lower tax rates, leading to a race to the bottom.

3\. Computers automate tasks that used to require a high school education. IBM is IBM because they started with cash registers before computers came along. There used to be a banker with a real education in every single town. There isn't anymore and we (especially we!) know why.

4\. Communications—starting with the telegraph, but certainly not ending there—make locality irrelevant. Combined with the forces of capitalism (e.g., comparative advantage, re-invested returns) this hyper concentrates specialization.

5\. Standardized shipping, especially sea containers. The Chinese government's greatest insight was the importance of physical freight and they leaned in _hard_ to become the centre of the worlds manufacturing by essentially[0] subsidizing it.

6\. Many decades of low interest rates, on the half-baked ideas of Keynesian theory of productive capital. Surprise! It turns out that injecting liquidity doesn't necessarily expand business activity. There's plenty of cash locked up in corporations and monied investors. They're desperate for return, but the hyper specialization issue stops them from getting alpha once they hit the market's carrying capacity. Instead these low interest rates go to...

7\. Asset bubbles and arms races! Everyone needs a home. Everyone wants a good education at a prestigious university. People buy whatever sugary drink advertises the most. Inflation isn't really low. When a small family home in Toronto costs more money than the _median_ family makes after tax in twenty years we know its bullshit. The inflation rate is papered over because of cheaper manufacturing due to technological progress and international trade, but it doesn't work for housing and many other things.

8\. The more complex world is inherently less governable by democracies. A ballot only has a byte of information tops and it only operates over a period of four to six years. This is why lobbyists win, especially in larger democracies like America where the ratio of governed to lawmakers is higher.

9\. Surveillance capitalism relies on inexplicable insights and returns. This hyper centralizes wealth whilst simultaneously shrouding the mechanism.

[0] Solving coordination problems is a form of governmental subsidization even if the government in question makes a huge profit. Canada does the same with forestry. I don't know how to square it with global trade.

<comment><USER42> That all sounds like it's well thought out - two questions.

So your entire thing is that it's a race to the bottom? What is the purpose of it all then, and how do you think this goes for the next two or three decades?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Wages have been "decoupled" from productivity because they weren't be coupled in the first place. They were _correlated_ because productivity and economic growth are correlated and economic growth and demand for labor are correlated.

However, wages (like all other prices) in a market are set by supply and demand. Wages will rise to meet demand but not higher, irrespective of productivity. Furthermore, productivity increases through automation decrease demand for human labor and therefore suppress wages.

<comment><USER44> This, exactly. As technology continues to move forward and make things even more efficient, I would expect this gap to continue to widen. I'm confused as to why anyone would want it to remain linked. As the gap widens, the demand for Universal Basic Income will rise and gobble up the working class and, eventually, even the most complicated jobs, until money is considered worthless and all basic needs are met by robots. Given the option to have robots do all the work and humans reap all the benefits (besides skynet), who wouldn't take it?

<comment><USER45> > As the gap widens, the demand for Universal Basic Income will rise and > gobble up the working class and, eventually, even the most complicated jobs, > until money is considered worthless and all basic needs are met by robots.

The problem here is that nobody knows when we'll get there, if at all. UBI seems like a solution designed for a society where _most_ people have been displaced from the need to work, but it doesn't look like society is there yet. In the meantime we still have people who are struggling to even exist. If the gap to achieve Full Automation in most sectors is multiple generations, you might long reach social unrest before you can even "justify" UBI from a political perspective.

Right now billions in capital investment haven't quite mastered the art of getting cars to navigate roads by themselves, and some industry leaders (Waymo CEO) are skeptical we'll ever get level 5 autonomous cars. And this is all for one single and self-contained task in the human existence (which doesn't even rely on human appendages! try to imagine automating handiwork).

If 70% of people are without work, UBI is an obvious solution. But if 1-10% of people are without work and 40-60% are paid peanuts for shit jobs, what's the solution? If UBI is still best here, how do we justify that to society without appealing to Full Automation?

<comment><USER46> A possible justification is crime.

I believe it is cheaper to pay someone enough money to allow them to survive and educate themselves, than to put them in a position where they weigh the risk of being caught with a crime with the risk of them/loved ones dying due to not having enough wealth to purchase the things they need.

Currently progress leads to more poverty as wealth is concentrated to landowners collecting rent. Every increase in productivity is consumed by increases in rent payment. Holding land and waiting for it to become valuable is absolutely insane to me. It is theft from the common good to allow that speculation of land, out premium finite resource.

Without land and labor combined their would exist no capital.

By taxing land value, increases in productivity are swallowed up by increases in taxes, leading to increases in social wellbeing.

I believe, along with most people who would call themselves Georgists, that private property is theft from the public

<comment><USER43> If you look at the results of welfare programs, it would be hard to argue that they reduce crime. Crime isn't just about subsistence money. For a certain segment of the population, it's the only way to make _significant_ amounts of money and also to get some sort of respect, status and power.

If criminals could just be educated and get jobs and become ordinary members of society, then our social programs would work. They don't, because from a sober perspective, if you're already a criminal (or so inclined), then crime is more attractive and ordinary members of society appear as the powerless suckers they really are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's because of femi nism: now every household has two wage earners, so it makes sense for wages to split in half.

<comment><USER44> This is a good point. It's simple economics. If there is a sudden rise in worker supply, but not a corresponding increase in demand for those workers, wages must fall to accommodate the influx.

<comment><USER48> No, it's not a good point. Do you think women were just shuffling their feet at home before they became wage earners? Technological improvements that reduced the total domestic workload for a household made it feasible to have two earner households (as a side note it didn't eliminate domestic work which working women continued to do disproportionately to men to this day).

So the total labor required to live and work successfully in industrialized nations dropped but instead of that leading to more individual wealth it just meant that households now had allocated more of their labor to wage labor compared to before where half or more of the labor of a household was simply unacknowledged and unpaid.

And it should be noted that poor women had _been_ working. For less compensation than men, while performing domestic labor. Middle class and upper class women getting jobs was another story.

Boo, hiss. Feminism. What an odious little comment thread.

<comment><USER49> > What an odious little comment thread.

Why? You're the one who injected the "Boo, hiss".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Aaaah, scott! So much information! It's a long read, and I have work to do, but ... is there a summary?

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm glad for wage stagnation, so long as inflation stays down.

For people at or near retirement, it's a great thing. Nothing erodes savings like rising prices.

<comment><USER52> Wage stagnation that comes attached to increase productivity could be offset by a shorter work week.

I mean if you are ~2.5 times more productive but the wage can't increase due to other reasons, why not take different actions to consider employee happiness just just employer profits?

<comment><USER53> You could also lower the price of the items sold so that the average consumer can afford more stuff

<comment><USER52> I'm not an economist but can imagine forcing the lowering of prices could have far more impact on the whole economy, not all good. Off the top of my head it would lead to shortages and thus to increased prices. You'd have to produce more while having less money available to invest in that. Possibly a whole lot more.

But reducing the work week only impacts the employer's profit via _slightly_ decreased productivity. On the other hand with 3 free days per week you'd be more likely to put more money back into the economy.

The problem is today's balance of productivity vs. wage is only perfect for the employer and not much else is taken into consideration. What kind of bargaining power do employees have to change this?

<comment><USER54> It would only lead to shortages if at the current price there is a perfect match of buyer to product with no waste, AND no capacity to produce a larger volume of supply. That's hardly ever the actual case.

<comment><USER52> The price is dynamic and usually set by supply and demand. Is there a reasonable way to enforce a decrease? The work week and day have been historically static and more importantly _arbitrary_. To my knowledge there's very little to support a specific number of hours (per week/day) is optimal, except for upper limits dictated by the limitations of human biology.

Can price drops be forced on things that are in very limited supply, like homes in coveted areas? Or even on products or services that already have very low margins? Would the seller be there next year to tell you how it went?

The technicalities of forcing a price drop feel out of reach while shortening the work week has been done successfully twice already just in the past 100 years. Profitability is still higher than ever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which hostnames do you choose for your PCs? - <AUTHOR> I'm setupping a new personal laptop for the n-th time. Everytime gets harder and harder to choose a hostname...so I'm curious, how do you choose them?<p>I usually pick spaceship names from movies/shows, but I'm running out of ideas. <comment><USER2> Back in the very early 90's, I ran a small ISP that fed UUCP news and email to BBS systems. As it grew, I had 3 servers. Toronto, where I live, has 3 major rivers, so the servers were named Humber, Rouge and Don.

My Raspberry Pis (of which I have quite a few) have patterned names. One set of them, for example are 'evil' names. EvilEye does monitoring stuff, EvilMind is the main host of a clusterHAT cluster, EvilGenius has a lot of my Lisp programming stuff on it, and so on. Since I don't purposely access the nodes on the pi cluster except to update them, I just give them boring host1 to host4 names.

As for laptops, I'm boring. My laptop is ksaj-laptop, my SO's is similarly named, and my old one that I rarely use anymore is crappylappy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always used the Solar System as a source of names. Planet names for the main machines, with the names of moons for lesser devices like printers and scanners. The router and connection to the internet is called "Sun", of course.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow that's so cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Periodic table. Rare gases for mobile devices. Metals for "non-mobile" devices. Most everything else is just random across the table, some of my preferred devices get "special" names like fantasy metals.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some suggestions:

Greek gods / Roman gods / Other gods / Characters from the chronicles of Narnia / Characters from Marvel or DC / Characters from Donald Duck / Animal species / Plant species / Musical genres (e.g. electronic music)

Good luck :D

</comment><comment><USER6> I've adopted a naming scheme after Pokemon. My main rig is called Raichu, whilst one of my dedicated servers is called Onix.

The main reasoning behind it was to ensure a large pool of names without having to reuse any from past machines.

</comment><comment><USER7> Cities. There are lots of short, memorable city names. And they don't get old. (Fictional characters or band names tend to get tiresome after a while.)

</comment><comment><USER8> My home network is *.fishnet, all hostnames are fish, laptops are flat fish; I type this on flounder.fishnet ...

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahah very clever!</comment></comment>


Sugru: a silicone molding compound for hacking around the house - <AUTHOR> http://sugru.com/

<comment><USER2> My two personal experiences with Sugru so far:

1\. The stuff is amazing. As an experiment, I completely coated an 802.15.4 temperature sensor in a thin coat and threw it into an autoclave (to test the temperature claims, etc). It held up.

2\. Customer service has been amazing. The Sugru I received came from a batch with a slightly shortened shelf-life because of mixture issues, so they sent me a second order for free. No questions asked, no forms, nothing. Just an email "sorry about that, the replacement is in the mail."

</comment><comment><USER3> Despite the clever marketing (and it is quite clever), hand-formed room-set silicone has been used in the building trades for almost a decade--mostly for long-run ductwork dampening and high-service-interval electrical junction box seals.

It's precisely analogous to when cyanoacrylate adhesive compounds were re- marketed as Krazy Glue.

<comment><USER4> Merely "clever" doesn't seem quite strong enough. Taking something already well-known and useful in some specialized context, thinking of a way it would be useful for some non-specialized target market, and then successfully marketing it to that demographic is a very elegant move, and potentially quite lucrative if successful!

In fact, if I was going to critique this at all, I'd _question_ the choice of marketing. They're targeting younger, geeky DIY-type internet people well, which is not a bad market at all to be sure, but there's definite potential for something like this in going for older, less tech-oriented demographics (I bet I could get my mother interested, for instance).

But I suspect they've already thought about that sort of thing--sounds like they can't keep up with the current demand as it is, so reaching new markets is probably not a priority!

<comment><USER5> _there's definite potential for something like this in going for older, less tech-oriented demographics (I bet I could get my mother interested, for instance)_

That is not the demographic that orders random puttys from the UK in anticipation of perhaps needing it someday. To be successful in that demographic, it needs to be marked through traditional means, and it needs to be available at the store. That is expensive and difficult. Making a website and some Youtube videos is much easier, and less likely to be a financial problem if there is no interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This stuff reminds me of ShapeLock (aka Friendly Plastic):

[http://www.creatrope.com/blog/make/friendly-plastic- shapeloc...](http://www.creatrope.com/blog/make/friendly-plastic-shapelock- tools/)

<http://www.lonestarairsoft.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8822>

[http://www.micsaund.com/2006/03/13/plastic-you-can-mold- in-y...](http://www.micsaund.com/2006/03/13/plastic-you-can-mold-in-your-home- for-diy-projects/)

The differences seem to be that ShapeLock:

\- requires some heat to get it in to a moldable state

\- is firm, not rubbery when it sets

\- is not sticky

\- is reusable (just heat it up again, and you can re-shape it)

Here's something made from it:

<http://www.xrobots.co.uk/android10.htm>

</comment><comment><USER7> What's with introducing female engineers and designers as "lovely"? That's generally speaking, since it's probably just precious copywriting in this case.

<comment><USER8> Lovely _and_ Irish, how twee. I am a female Irish engineer and I would be very disappointed and a little insulted if a copywriter couldn't find a better description other than 'cute with a funny accent'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4a4O7kXQo>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought the best short introduction to the product was this interview w/ pictures:

[http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view...](http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4294:introducing- sugru)

</comment><comment><USER10> FYI: They are sold out while they work on upscaling their production process.

</comment><comment><USER11> If more product websites were like this, the world would be a better place.</comment>