Robot Workers and the Universal Living Wage - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/07/1184668/-Future-Politics-The-Automated-Workforce-and-the-Universal-Living-Wage?detail=show <comment><USER4> I fail to see in this article where the author backs up this claim:

> automation is replacing both brawn and brains and is leaving little for > humans to do that computers can't.

It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers.

At the moment, technology is making knowledge workers more effective and efficient. It's not even close to replacing them.

Let's not try to solve problems we don't yet have.

The claim of replacing physical labor is legitimate. But if you look at china or the US, the amount of kids getting educated in universities, whose parents worked as labours has exploded.

The key now is getting the kids to have useful skillsets to the industries that need them. Which is something universities have been failing to promote accurately compared to the demands of the market.

<comment><USER5> _It will be a very long time until computer automation can replaced knowledge workers._

That is true but I think it's not an interesting question to ask.

The interesting question is what we are going to do about the rapidly growing unemployment of the _unskilled_ workforce.

Case in point: This will jump to a whole new level when self-driving cars become cost efficient - which seems rather likely to happen within the next 30 years. Automation in other sectors is not standing still either.

"Educate them all" is not a solution. DHL and FedEx just don't need as many knowledge workers as they need truck drivers today.

<comment><USER6> I am pretty skeptical about self-driving cars, for the simple reason that we don't even have self-driving _trains_ yet, outside relatively small systems like the DLR, Heathrow Pod, etc, and it would seem to be that the job of driving a train (no steering, no collision avoidance, predetermined stops, etc) would be 100x easier.

<comment><USER5> There are actually quite a few driverless trains already[1] and Google's demonstrations of their driverless car are getting increasingly[2] impressive[3].

The question is really only _when_ the transition to driverless cars will happen - we're long past the _if_.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_trains>

[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRIOE1IZrq4>

[3] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >There will still be a need for computer programmers, but a lot of programming can already be automated [...] We could [...] flat-out ban certain types of robots and automated software.

I write software for a living and have no idea what this means. It's either horribly misinformed, or a call to ban compilers.

<comment><USER8> WARNING: Sarcasm is present in this statement :)

It seems, according to this article anyways, that the answer to developer unemployment is to rid us of efficient IDEs, compliers and other non-sense, and and get back to good old Assembly!

<comment><USER9> Yes, actually: if we wanted to ensure developers stay employed, we should make writing code less efficient. Yes, you're being sarcastic, but that doesn't mean your point isn't spot on: this is in fact what unions have been doing all along, and states like New Jersey don't allow you to pump your own gas, specifically to create inefficiencies in the market that promote employment. If the option is between requiring people to work meaningless jobs, or paying everyone a living wage, which really makes more sense?

<comment><USER8> Well... The very basis of my understanding of self causes me to say that there has to be a 3rd option... That said, a living wage would be less wasteful.

As for unions, I believe this is pretty much what killed the Twinkie manufacturer - they were not able to even optimize routes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems that similar concerns have been voiced with every advance in technology that replaced works with machines. The argument generally assumes that the amount of "work" needed will remain relatively the same. So, if society today requires 100 works to make one widget, and we can make the same widget with 1 worker and assorted machines, then 99 works will be left unemployed.

In reality, what seems to happen is that because the products of that work become cheaper, society starts to consume a lot more. In the end, something like 80 works end up supervising the machines, while 9 works maintain them and the other work is designing the machines.

I can't foresee what will happen if all basic service jobs are automated, but then again it will not happen overnight. The biggest question in my mind, is how well will the society repare the future generations with the skills they will need to remain relevant. Education is everything... and it will remain everything. (Not formal education mind you, but more so knowledge/training.)

<comment><USER9> The thing is, we've only really been seeing this boom since the 18th century. And for most of the world, not really until the 20th century. The solution, as you said, for most of this period was to have people consume more products. But with the rise of electronics, that trend doesn't appear to be continuing. We already live in a world where not everyone needs to work: in fact, we specifically push people out of working once they reach retirement age. That was one of the points of Social Security and pensions: to stop older workers from preventing new workers from taking their place.

Also note, our real unemployment isn't 7.9%. In fact, if we look at the number of non-farm jobs from the last census in 2010, we had 112 million jobs. If we assume about 3% of employment is farm jobs, then we have ~115 million total jobs. According to the census, there are 313 million people in the US, and 76.3% of them are adults. Therefore, we have 238 million adults, and only ~115 million jobs. This means our real unemployment rate is about 52% (given the roughness of my figures, I'd stick it at a range between 45 and 60 percent). Which means, not counting children, our country is already fully capable of supporting half the population not working. This wasn't the case in 19th century America (where yes, even women usually worked in some capacity), meaning we probably already are in a society where most people don't have to work, we just don't notice it because most of those who don't work are not labeled "unemployed."

Edit: Basically, I'm questioning your premise that employment rates have, in fact, remained relatively constant throughout the last few centuries.

<comment><USER8> You are questioning whether the current Labor Force Participation rate and whether it has gone down over the years. The peak in recent history appears to have been around 2000 at 67.3%. Currently, it's at 63.6%.

The furthest back I could find is 1948 for 58.6 at the start of that year. Last time we were in the 63% range was in 1980s. Guessing from 19th century, it has gone up.

Source: <http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet>

The key here is to understand what influences this rate. Many factors go into what percentage of population chooses to seek employment. For example, if my wife and I are rich enough, when we have kids, we may want to have one or even both of us take a few years off to raise them. This is a profound luxury in the current US society. Some countries have extended maternity leave that lasts for 3 years and includes some form of pay or other welfare payment. Such structures would easily drive the participation rate down.

Conversely, public daycares and other child-friendly services promote higher participation rates by freeing both adults to work.

These examples are meant to show that the "machines are taking our jobs" discussion to be a gross oversimplification of a much more complex system. So far, history tells us that we will adapt. That still leaves a possibility of a black swan event... In either case, I have faith in humanity :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 97% percent of us used to be farmers. Did the machines and processes that replaced us render us irrelevant and without other pursuits? No, it unlocked massive amounts of intelectual capacity that led to unprecedented scientific and economic growth.

I don't understand why people don't understand this basic economic principle. When you free up peoples time from monotonous tasks, we all benefit. These calls for a universal minimum wages are odd.

</comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of this piece of speculative fiction, which explores the theme of robotic automation in some detail: <http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm>

<comment><USER12> I endorse this work of fiction and encourage everyone to read it. At the very least it is an approachable, engaging and thought-provoking "what-if" scenario.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I mostly worry about this scenario of not enough work for everyone because too many people in my country (USA) will probably be unwilling to support a universal living wage.

A social safety net improves the lives of everyone because of lower crime and a generally more civil society.

The trick will be to provide life long educational and vocational resources. Hopefully almost everyone would want to produce extra value for society and improve their own material life style. There would still be room for very capable people to be "rich" and generally rewarded for skills and hard work.

So, a pure meritocracy with rewards layered on top of a minimal universal ling wage sounds good to me.

<comment><USER14> I don't know, it sounds too communistic-utopian. While communism is not a bad thing, and utopias are theoretically a great idea, humans thrive on opportunity and individualism. The world isn't a fair place _by nature_. Attempting to equalize everyone's talents and source of income, and not allowing them to be rewarded for whatever they pursue seems to cause less incentive for education.

Give the average Joe two choices: He can sit at home, make a decent $70,000 every year while he can comfortably watch TV, golf, and do many things that require little mental facility. Give him another option, where he gets the same income, but he has to study, become skilled at a craft, progress intellectually, and be an accomplished man.

~90% of people would choose the former.

<comment><USER15> "golf, and do many things that require little mental facility"

Does golf really require that little mental facility? Would Tiger Woods agree with you?

People are _extremely_ unpredictable in what they do with their leisure time. Over 10 years of working to encourage and develop amateur creators in the film world has left me with the conviction that we simply don't know what would happen if 100% of a Western country's people didn't need to work to survive any more.

We'd almost certainly hit a sudden epidemic of depression, to start with. Tim Ferriss' book "The Four Hour Work Week" has a fascinating section on surviving the transition to not having to work any more - it's harder than you'd think.

But subsequently? A surprising amount of popular activities in leisure time right now are actually very mentally engaging. Both watching and playing sports are actually reasonably mentally engaged activities for a lot of people - try memorising half the statistics that the average baseball fan has at his fingertips and see how far you get. The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated, not less. And of course games are actively mentally engaging, and increasingly creative - Minecraft's the biggest gaming sensation since World of Warcraft.

The fact that the two biggest gaming sensations of the last decade are ones in which the primary activities are a) working with groups of up to 40 other people to complete complex, challenging, multifaceted choreographed tasks and b) building massive structures up to and including 1-1 replicas of goddamn _cathedrals_ does not lead me to believe that most of the population doesn't like to use their brain.

Add to that the fact that there's actually a startlingly large number of amateur musicians, painters, writers, bloggers, artisans, chefs and similar pursuits out there. Here's a link - <http://www.amateurorchestras.org.uk/> \- to a list of the _1,121_ amateur ORCHESTRAS in the UK, for example.

You might see a very interesting world develop after about 10 years.

<comment><USER16> _The most popular drama television is getting more complex and sophisticated, not less._

It probably helps that a growing lower tier of entertainment is siphoning off the viewers least interested in sophisticated plots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am basing my startup mostly on this discussion / meme - so I am happy to see it on HN. However the stage I think has been missed by the article (in the rush to say 2120!) is a transition away from commuting and into massive remote working, probably in the next ten years. The costs of commuting and office space is enormous compared to it's benefits for most jobs so we shall see a sea change in how jobs are measured and managed, leading to the path to remote working being freed up.

Oddly in software continuous integration / delivery is that sea change. In marketing? It's AB testing. In everything else? We shall see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you direct us to your startup's website, or provide a brief description of it here?

<comment><USER17> Brief idea: Continuous Integration is a step function in how software teams can function. By enabling CI or CD one can remove the major impediment to remote working - managers cannot see what you have done in a day.

If folks remote work in the software department, pretty soon others want to. The company needs to have the same confidence that people are working and things progressing daily. So let's say marketing moves to the technicalmarketing beloved of patio11 - you can have Market department run tests on it's changes, measure customer behaviour etc. And they don't need to do it in the office.

Apply the same to every business process. Business people need to interact so we are not going to abandon cities - but the most valuable interactions are inter-company not intra-company.

So from little acorns of CI we can see the world of the Race against the Machine coming to pass - White collar workers automated or their jobs changed out of recognition.

So my startup, yeah that. I see my one person consultancy not as a lifestyle business but as a forever company - where I and I hope others will work, but more importantly experience many new modes of future work - and teach others and produce products that fill niches we ourselves need or are very well placed to understand.

To be brutal, I want to turn a one person consultancy into a dispersed products company, solving the big work ideas of the next twenty years.

First three are the CI consultancy, a data warehouse scm driver and videos of bug fixes.

Please don't judge the book by the website - www.mikadosoftware.com. Ps - <USER3> think the auto farm is fantastic - keep it up

I have never met any of my coworkers - they are in various parts of the States and I in Kent. The world has changed, it's just not evenly distributed - <USER3> want to be part of that change - the view is best right out on the edge.

Big long dreams.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like interesting ideas to test out in the context of a company... good luck to you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Robert Heinleins For Us, The Living describes this kind of society. Everyone gets a "dividend" which is enough to live on and people do what would be a low wage/non-job such as being an artist for part time fun and high wages.

</comment><comment><USER15> One interesting anecdata point on the "everyone would just sit around and watch TV" front - my girlfriend and I just went through all of our reasonably close friends, and could only think of one person who might, possibly, not start or continue doing something challenging and interesting, given a "living wage" situation - and to be fair, we don't know that person very well.

The "everyone would just sit around" theory seems to be predicated on the belief that there are millions of people out there whom we don't personally know, but we somehow know well enough to believe they have no other interests that might blossom.

</comment><comment><USER19> While I'm sure the universal living wage will become reality in a few countries, I'd expect a shorter work week and more vacation time to be more politically solvent solutions to systemic unemployment in the US.

</comment><comment><USER20> The answer is quite simply, we are going to have to STOP having an economy that contains employment or money, at all. As I've put it before, either we all retire, or we're all sacked.

The economy, what little of it still requires humans, is going to have to run on vocations. And the part that does not, is going to have to run on allocation.

<comment><USER6> You still need some sort of unit to track resource consumption, maybe that's the Joule instead of the Dollar, but as long as there needs to be decisions made of the form, which is better/should we do, X or Y, then you need a quantitative way to think about it. Von Mises called this "economic calculation".

<comment><USER20> I'd consider the primary problems of early-Soviet style allocation economics to be (1) informational (2) computational. Money provides a quantitative (if not _nice_ ) solution to these because private economic decisions are intrinsically local, infinitely parallel and they self-aggregate.

Happily, look what happened in the intervening decades: mass connectivity and big data, plus the normalization of data mining over petabytes of raw information.

I think, in other words, that we have reached the point where we can batter down the economic calculation problem with brute force.

<comment><USER6> Even if you are correct, all that computation still needs to be done in some sort of unit. Money is good because it is abstracted from actual stuff. Joules are actually a bad unit, because how do you value an information product in terms of the energy of the computation it does? Hmm.

<comment><USER20> You use the natural units of the activity. Tonnes of ore or raw material. Hours of factory time. Joules of energy consumption. Production line machinery MTBF. So on and so forth. It's a lot of data, but nowadays we have tools to work with a lot of data.

<comment><USER6> No, that won't work. You can say, right now, and people do, "If we spend X building this thing, we estimate Y boost to the economy". You can't say "if we use X tonnes of concrete, we expect Y tonnes of Z to be produced" without the X/Y ratio _being money_. All money is is a way to abstract the worth of something from what it actually is.

Oh, and you can't pay your workers in concrete either. Or do you propose not paying them at all and just giving out rations to people living in barracks...?

<comment><USER20> Money abstracts demand-pull from production and supply. But abstraction is a complexity management tool you don't need if you can crunch the raw complexity.

What I'm proposing is a "you want it, you got it" economy, basically, that starts from a premise of equal allocation of resource control (not resource use) and allows unused allocations to be reflowed to the use of those with more ambitious projects, with direct-democratic oversight.

For example, if a hypothetical Elon Musk wants to build rockets (a resource hog activity) then he'd probably end up having to make a public case he was capable of it to avoid being vetoed, but case made, the resource allocations of people who prefer to paint at home or study Tudor history other low- expenditure vocations would be diverted to the rocket project.

No, this would not fall prey to hoarding. Hoarding is stupid and gains you nothing in a post-scarcity economy. You end up with a huge heap of copper or whatever that you aren't using, looking like a selfish idiot and with a trashed reputation that follows you around and makes people not willing to work with you.

<comment><USER6> What do you think Wall Street is, if not an attempt at "crunching the raw complexity"? It doesn't work and _can't_ work.

 _would be diverted to the rocket project_

Diverted by whom? The "owners" of those resources, or your central planning bureau?

Post scarcity relies on the assumption that if we have more than enough raw materials (and we don't, but let's assume asteroid mining or something), and more than enough energy (fusion maybe) and instantaneous transport of matter (otherwise scarcity exists by the stuff you want being _somewhere else_ ) then we _still_ won't be post-scarcity really, because people/civilizations will just take on bigger and bigger projects. There will _never_ be a time when there is no need to make a decision on how to allocate some finite resource to create some outcome by a quantitative means.

Even in Star Trek, someone needs to be thinking, how many planets do we colonize this year? How many starships do we build?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How much jobs we are loosing is not readily apparent. For example you should add almost all inmates and jailors and possibly half of the laweyrs and some of the goverment clerks (especialy the ones hired in branches created over last 20 years) to the unemployed to get the real numbers.

Our societies have a lot of pathological mechanisms for coping with inflow of people of diverse levels of education that have nothing to do.

I sincerely hope that people will be humane enough to create universal wage sooner than later.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm reading this like 'the singularity is upon us'. We aren't there yet, but articles like this are very good (even if they are slightly non-realistic at the moment) to throw a dart at where we, as a civilization, could end up. We have lost the ability to question where we'll go, because we move faster than our feet can take us. We are sliding down a snowy hill, holding on for dear life, hoping there's a nice landing at the bottom that won't end with us crashing. We've lost control of the sled, but it still moves forward because there's nothing to stop it.

I have an anecdote from Germany, and one from Uganda that kind of flow with the idea of 'if you want to, you can, but why?'. We are talented creators, we can make awesome things. Almost anything you think of now a days can be created (and likely has). Some of these things shouldn't have been created, and if every time we want something we ask "but why?", I think it help us to realize where we're going. These are anecdotes from friends, I have no idea of their truth, but they're interesting nonetheless (if it's wrong, consider it fiction).

In Germany, the buses run _on_ time. When the buses are just a couple minutes late, people start getting mad. Ultra efficiency, where everything is perfectly meshed together like the gears on a Swiss watch. The timing is perfect, and it lets life progress with a minimum of fuss and extraneous endeavors. Get in, get out, get on your way.

In Uganda, when you invite someone over to your place to get together, you can set up a time. They'll get there, but they might be eight hours late from the time you set up. They might start walking, and talk to everyone they see along the way. They'll get the scoop on everyone's life, and share the human experiences that are happening around them. This lateness would sound like insanity to most people, but once you realize that everyone's clock is adjusted to the lag time of getting somewhere, it's not a big deal.

Now we, as humans, can create the most efficient complex world that we want to. But why? I think we have collectively lost a lot of modesty as our world has been progressing. We love to play games, we always need a challenge to solve. There's challenges all around us, and the money from solving the challenges is ripe for the taking. It doesn't matter what you do to get there - if you get the money, you get the prize and you won. The ripple effects are what does us in, and the ripples are the unexpected or unintentional differences that were created in our society after adopting the solution to the challenge. Some examples of technology with ripple effects are things like lead paint, leaded gasoline, clear cutting forests, asbestos insulation, etc. We might have been able to predict these things would be bad before we started if we thought a little longer. I'm sure a lot of people knew it would be bad, but it was the easier one that solved a 'problem' that we had. We're young as a civilization, and we are going to make mistakes. The mistakes we should not make though are ones that could have been prevented with a little bit of thought before jumping in head over heels (drunk driving for instance, if you don't do it, you will likely live a bit longer). It takes self restraint (from a person) and conditioning/education (from society) to reduce the number of drunk drivers. The trouble is that we have no restraint with advancing technology, and our society hasn't had the change to find the differences that are created when we advance it.

We're like dogs trying to resist the urge to pounce on a piece of meat. We simply can not let something pass us by. If there's a forest to ravage, or an ocean to destroy, we will do it, and we'll do it well. Try this - the next time you think of something cool to make, DON'T MAKE IT. Think about it, see it in your head, but resist the urge to make it. It's very, very challenging.

It's easy to know what you've lost after you've lost something, it's hard to predict what you're going to lose. When we do something, we have to change society, and we lose parts of society that we had before. Sometimes the changes are good, sometimes they're bad, but before changing it we should think about what we're doing.

<comment><USER23> Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick Germany.

You can say technology has its drawbacks, but people overwhelmingly choose more technology and greater riches over any alternative. And more importantly, if you don't choose technology and someone else does, they can easily conquer you (militarily or economically) and destroy your livelihood.

<comment><USER24> > _Your anecdotes about Germany vs Uganda are a big part of the reason the > average German is 30 times richer and can expect to live nearly 30 years > longer than a Ugandan. Ask anyone where they'd rather live and they'll pick > Germany_

I'd pick Uganda. And when a had a similar choice to make in real life, I picked the poorer country.

Screw efficiency and screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges, while f __*ing poorer countries over to maintain their wealth and superiority (sometimes literally: from colonialism and interventions to Nazi Germany and the extermination of the "undesirables").

<comment><USER15> "screw societies where people live like robots and survive on weekend alcoholic binges"

I agree. Not sure what relevance that statement has to Germany, though. I've spent quite a lot of time in Germany and traveled to a lot of the country, and I'm certainly not seeing the resemblance.

<comment><USER24> Well, our experience differs in this case I guess. There are some vibrant parts of youth culture in Germany (in Berlin, etc), but for the most part it is work + weekend binges. There is a coldness one cannot really explain, except if you have leaved in "warmer" societies.

I've heard from people living there that Sweden/Denmark etc are even worse in this aspect.

<comment><USER15> OK, that _certainly_ doesn't fit my experience of Denmark - or the United Nations' "Happiest Countries" index: [http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/06/where-are-the-worlds- hap...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/04/06/where-are-the-worlds-happiest- countries/) , which rated Denmark as the happiest country in the world last year.

My experience of Denmark has been that it's a vibrant, diverse, interesting society with some tremendously smart government policies, a lot of tolerance, and some really cool stuff going on, from great filmmaking to a massive Live- Action Roleplaying scene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For those interested in thinking about issues of a future society where most humans do not work, I'd highly recommend reading "Limes Inferior" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limes_inferior>), a thought-provoking book where many of these issues are raised.

The idea of paying people a basic wage even if they do not perform any useful work is not a new one.

<comment><USER26> It could go the other way: being able to live and be human without wages.

<comment><USER25> That's basically what Zajdel describes in his dystopian vision: the basic "red" points that you get allow for a basic existence (e.g. food and shelter) without performing any work at all. So one might say it isn't really a wage.

<comment><USER26> Not what I mean at all.

I mean, reduce the basic living _cost_. For example, a homestead that ran on its own power (solar, wind, etc.), can manufacture many basic needs products through microfabs, and grow enough food.

Reducing costs doesn't do away with capital expenditure. But once acquired, the ongoing cost of living approaches zero.

If you give everyone a universal income, you are still making people beholden to the grid of some sort. The red points are still a wage, because ultimately, you have to rely on someone outside your family group to redeem your needs.

Reduce the cost and make that available _en mass_ , and each household would be reasonably resource independent. Luxuries, of course, won't go away. Wants are endless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can everyone be a knowledge worker?</comment>


The Scams We Encounter Every Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/09/ten-scams-you-encounter-every-day/

<comment><USER2> Reluctant upvote. The point could have been made more effective without some of the imagery involved. Really, I like your writing James but that wasn't very tasteful.

</comment><comment><USER3> If money/stocks/etc is a scam, then the StockTwits bar at the top of your blog is a scam.</comment>


U.S. Net Neutrality Has a Massive Copyright Loophole - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-net-neutrality-has-a-massive-copyright-loophole-150315/

<comment><USER2> > "Nothing in this part prohibits reasonable efforts by a provider of > broadband Internet access service to address copyright infringement or other > unlawful activity."

I think the word "reasonable" shouldn't be allowed when governing parties that consistently prove to act unreasonable :)

</comment><comment><USER3> >"The language about 'lawful' content and applications creates a serious loophole that seems to leave it up to ISPs to make judgments about what content is lawful or infringes a copyright, subject to challenges after the fact about whether their conduct was 'reasonable'," Walsh says.

>"It's one thing to say that ISPs can block subject to a valid court order, quite another to let ISPs make decisions about the lawfulness of content for themselves," he adds.

Is it really practical to require a court order for each block?

<comment><USER4> It's probably more practical to drop the pretense that this or any government 'regulation' is a sensible basis for a strong, free, and useful internet.

<comment><USER5> I'll bite. So what do you propose instead as a balance for the power and abuses of the likes of Comcast, Verizon, etc? Bonus points for a proposed approach has precedent in some other topic/venue of public policy.

<comment><USER3> (I'm not the guy you replied to.)

I think that the ISP's need some way to discriminate between different types of traffic. "All content should be treated equally," is a nice sentiment, but not all content is equally important. A VoIP call is more important than a file transfer.

I'm undecided whether the FCC should mandate that ISPs allow settlement-free peering. On one hand, the current system encourages companies to consolidate to gain more negotiating power. ("Oh, you don't want to pay to connect with our network? I guess you don't want to sell your products to 1/4 of America.") On the other hand, mandating SFP would decrease incentives to build long-range infrastructure, since you could just borrow it from someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Duh. The current topic was fueled by a peering disagreement between two companies, fighting over who gets the bigger piece of the pie.

Nobody is ever going to _give_ you change; you have to make it yourself.</comment>


A Cryptocurrency Website Changes Its Data, and $100B in Market Value Vanishes - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-crypto-website-changes-its-data-and-100-billion-in-market-value-vanishes-1515443100?mod=ITP_businessandfinance_7&tesla=y <comment><USER2> To be fair, I would expect the same if a well-respected regular-stock website changed its data and suddenly shifted its reported values.

Now, if the % change is more or less, I guess that indicates how many market participants have their own value estimates of each currency.

</comment><comment><USER3> CoinMarketCap is in a tough position here.

I can obviously understand not wanting to list massive outliers in an average, but at the same time there isn't realistically a way for them to "safely" adjust which exchanges they include in the averages.

No matter what, it's either going to cause big sudden jumps in either direction, or they can "smear" it across some time, which (in my opinion) would look really bad as it would imply sustained increase or decrease.

Giving advance notice should be expected of them, but I honestly don't know if they gave one or not, and I don't really think that many people would have read it if they did.

<comment><USER4> I visit CoinMarketCap every single day and I don't recall ever seeing a notice or message about a change to the exchange listing.

<comment><USER3> Yeah that's really the only thing I can fault them on here. They really should have given some advanced notice that they would be changing how they calculate the averages.

Especially since they have a widely used API that many people use, and I'm assuming some trading bots as well.

<comment><USER5> The problem with giving advance notice is the impact would just be felt at the time of the notice (bc smart traders will just determine the adjustment immediately.) I think the suggestion above to make the change immediate, but re-calc the historicals so the % change is still right, is probably not bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am deeply surprised by how few people are mentioning bots. This is no doubt directly related to trading bots that are polling coinmarketcap and then buying/selling through some API like the one bittrex offers. The number of bots that are actively trading is unknown, but if you do some digging the amount of resources and interest there is around trading bots leads me to believe that the pool of bots must be massive. I would love to be able to quantify the number of trading bots that are running wild, but my feeble brain can't come up with anything, maybe if I worked at an exchange I would be able to. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER7> Have a look at [http://http://www.dancingbots.com](http://http://www.dancingbots.com) which visualizes Orderbook positions. Most of the action (95%?) close to current price looks like positions from bots.

Compare the orderbooks of exchanges which have no fees for maker orders (like gdax, bitfinex) and are preferred by bots to those exchanges who do ask for a fee.

<comment><USER6> HEY! this site is amazing and is just what I am looking for. BUT the link you provided is missing a colon after "http" and I thought the site was down for a second. I am sure if others see this they will have similar issues. Please fix your link :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Archived link: [http://archive.is/l1kc7](http://archive.is/l1kc7)

<comment><USER9> Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Market cap isn't as interesting as people think: [https://blog.sia.tech/want- to-deflate-the-token-bubble-fix-t...](https://blog.sia.tech/want-to-deflate- the-token-bubble-fix-the-market-cap-indicator-d50f7f1e1ec4)

<comment><USER11> Yep, given that practically all altcoins are priced in bitcoin, market cap artificially rises extremely, or lowers extremely due to the inertness of the open trades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Possibly intentional market manipulation? They are in the top 200 most visited sites in the world and supply api data to hundreds if not thousands of cryptocurrency price apps. Surely they knew their change would impact the market.

<comment><USER13> I really think there is a considerable amount of market manipulation going on with crypto-currencies in general. There was an earlier thread to a blog post that got voted up quite a bit, but the comments all brought up that the author was just speculating and tried to pass it off as fact.

There was also a pastebin up earlier that showed how someone had found wallets on the blockchain that used their own hashes as passwords, and were potentially being used to funnel money around (security holes in exchanges potentially?) It was removed from HN; found it on Lobsters.

The trouble is that no one has really presented hard evidence, but a number of people I talked to who are developers in the regular financial sector do think it's highly probably that there is intentional manipulation. And with the blockchain being all hashes, numbers and mathematics, it also seems plausible that it's a system that can be gamed; or at least more easily gamed than regular fiat currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They removed data from the Korean exchanges which have always had higher prices due to Korean exchange controls - once you've changed money to bitcoin you've got it out of the country. That data should always not really have been included if you wanted a fair idea of value.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know where CMC gets the circulation numbers?

</comment><comment><USER16> But can I do Dollar Cost Average with BTC?

<comment><USER17> Yes, Coinbase allows you to configure repeated buys or sells of a specified dollar amount.

<comment><USER16> Ohh thanks I should look into that. Aren't the transaction fees huge though?

<comment><USER17> I think they are a bit over 1% right now. Not the cheapest way to get bitcoin, but not horrible.

<comment><USER18> If you use GDAX (the underlying exchange technology behind Coinbase and also owned by Coinbase) as a maker (meaning you use a limit order), you pay 0% fees. If you use GDAX as a taker (market order), you pay 0.25% fees.

<comment><USER19> That's not what the maker/taker distinction means—a taker is an order to the extent it is filled because it matches a pre-existing order when it hits the sysyem; a limit order can be a taker if there's a matching order on the book when it hits the system. GDAX supports marking a limit order as "Post Only", which cancels it if any part would fill as a taker order, but that's optional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Admins, could you correct the headline to say "crypto currency website"?

<comment><USER21> "cryptocurrency" is a bit of a mouthful, so I at least understand the urge to shorten it, but I wish we could agree to at least shorten it to "cryptos," as in: "A Cryptos Website Changes Its Data..."

<comment><USER22> Crypto means cryptography. Cryptocurrency should be shortened another way. Perhaps "Cryptotoken."

<comment><USER20> Cryptocash perhaps

<comment><USER23> What about "crash"?

<comment><USER22> <3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well that definitely contributed, but that alone didn't cause the crash. There was irrational price rise in the last few weeks for certain cryptocurrencies(Ripple, Tron) and this is part of the correction.

Also, The market as a whole should get away with global averages and depending on one website to track everything. I wrote an article on it if someone is interested - [http://coinsocial.io/2018/01/09/its-time-for- cryptocurrency-...](http://coinsocial.io/2018/01/09/its-time-for- cryptocurrency-investors-to-dump-global-average-prices-and-embrace-local- exchange-prices/)

<comment><USER25> >There was irrational price rise in the last few weeks for certain cryptocurrencies(Ripple, Tron) and this is part of the correction.

What makes their increase 'irrational'?

<comment><USER26> They were irrational because if you analyzed all the coins in the top 100-200 you'll realize that it was primarily cheaply priced coins that were making the outsized gains and a lot of it can be attributed to market psychology.

It feels better to own 200 of something you don't understand than 0.00159. But at the end of the day returns are returns and it makes no difference if you have 200 of a coin or 0.00159.

<comment><USER25> Isn't the worth of any crypto-currency down to market psychology though? By that metric any price movement is irrational.

<comment><USER27> Economics _is a social science_. It could be argued very few things have intrinsic value. It could be argued all markets are down to purely human psychology.

Birds, for example, don't really care how much you paid for those 3000 tonnes of wheat, only that there's a hole in one of the train carriages transporting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished. It was never there to begin with: market cap isn't something you can cash in on. It's merely the result of price multiplied by supply. If you owned a significant portion of all the coins in the world, and tried to sell them all at once, you wouldn't end up with number_of_coins * price, it would (realistically) be a smaller number given the market slippage.

<comment><USER25> >It's facetious (and bad 'journalism') to claim $100B vanished.

It's certainly not bad journalism, this is how all sorts of assets are reported on. Market Cap isn't a perfect metric but it's pretty good and keeps us from saying things like "AMZN is down 50%" when they do a stock split.

In the sense that yesterday if you summed up what all the individual holders saw when they checked their accounts you'd get $200b and today if you did the same you'd get $100b then $100b did vanish.

<comment><USER29> It's not black and white either, though.

If 10% of stock holders are able to cash out without changing the price significantly, market cap would be an inaccurate measure, but not _that_ far off.

If, on the other hand, only 0.1% of holders of some token are able to cash out without significantly affecting the price, the value they think they have just isn't there (to a much larger extent than the case above).

To use an extreme example: if I issue 2^100 tokens, and manage to get a couple of orders in an order book with a mid (and "last trade") price of 0.1 cent, and this price goes to zero, did 1.268^27 dollars of market value just vanish, or were the holders of this token misinformed?

The inherent inaccuracy of market cap value is inversely proportional to liquidity: the less liquid the asset, the further away from reality market cap value is. And these tiny tokens are some of the least liquid assets in existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm beginning to see how delusional it is to think you can make money by producing something useful or of value in people's lives. That's for lusers. Instead mess with the neural pathways of a large population such that they just give you their money.

<comment><USER31> Depends on what you want in life. If all you care about is money, then yes, your post makes sense.

<comment><USER32> Caring solely about money often has the side effect of making others' lives better. Amazon gainfully employs over 500k [1] people, giving them means to put food on the table. Not saying that wouldn't happen without Amazon, but more job availability is always better than less. Bezos just became the richest man ever recorded [2].

[1]: [http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/26/technology/business/amazon-e...](http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/26/technology/business/amazon- earnings/index.html)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108295](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16108295)

<comment><USER33> Reminds me of:

"Oh, Father. You're so wrong. Let me explain.

[Puts and empty water glass on his desk]

Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed

[Pushes the glass off the table. It shatters on the floor, and several small machines come out to clean it up]

Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life. You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business.

<comment><USER34> Fifth element. That's a Deep cut.

<comment><USER13> I don't remember this scene. I might have to watch it again.

<comment><USER35> When Gary oldman is talking to the priest, then he chokes on a cherry and none of his machines can save him.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understanding the "GPL is a Contract" court case - <AUTHOR> https://perens.com/blog/2017/05/28/understanding-the-gpl-is-a-contract-court-case/ <comment><USER3> > There's been a lot of confusion about the recent Artifex v. Hancom case, in > which the court found that the GPL was an enforceable contract.

The author is reading too much into this. This was just a ruling on a motion by the defendant, Hancom, to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the "failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted" rule.

A 12(b)(6) motion essentially says "Let's assume for the sake of argument that every allegation of fact that the plaintiff made in their complaint is true. Under that set of facts, there is no way that a court could find that we are liable under whatever law plaintiff claims we have violated".

When a court rules against such a motion, it is not saying that the alleged facts ARE true, or that when those facts are applied to the laws in question the plaintiff will win. All it is saying is that they plaintiff has alleged everything that is necessary in order for it to be _possible_ for the plaintiff to win.

So in this case all the court really found was that it is possible that GPL is an enforceable contract in the circumstances alleged by plaintiff, Artifex.

<comment><USER4> Well, that's not exactly a fair representation. The court found as a matter of law (not fact) that the GPL is an enforceable contract. 12b6 standards require the court to interpret the facts in the most favorable possible light for the plaintiff. The facts, but not the law. No factual evidence is required for the court to determine whether the GPL can be a legally enforceable contract, so the plaintiff-favorable burden of proof has no bearing on the legal conclusion which is the subject of all this news coverage. The decision being made as a matter of law in a 12b6 motion indicates that the outcome of this particular case still remains uncertain, but that the court would interpret any other GPL in any other case as a legally enforceable contract.

<comment><USER5> Is this distinction equivalent to satisfiability of the contract wrt any case vs satisfiability of the contract wrt this case?

How do you constrain "any case" to something reasonable, or does it need no constraining?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope single-vendor commercial open source business model would be more common. [http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2009-2/the-commercial- ope...](http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2009-2/the-commercial-open-source- business-model/)

GPL + Commercial dual licensing seems to be really good option for small and midsize business where ake the code and take the business is real possibility. GPL is widely known and quite clear. GPL establishes open source genealogy, not just one point in time event like BSD licenses do.

Ghostscript, MySql, Qt etc. followed this path successfully. Qt is now a public company with open source product.

<comment><USER7> Why not AGPL + Commercial? To me this sounds like an even better option, as it closes some GPL loopholes such as "hiding" modified GPL code behind a service.

<comment><USER8> I thought they closed the loopholes with v3?

<comment><USER9> Different loopholes. V3 closes the idea of pretending to give someone permission to modify and share software, but then using encryption or patents to make it impossible in practice. Like selling a car but then withholding the ignition key.

AGPL closes the idea that someone just ship a thin client and have everything running on a server, which is an experience that can be almost indistinguishable from receiving a copy. Since GPL explicitly do not treat the transmission of a copy and using a service as identical, AGPL go as far as copyright allows and tries to fix that.

<comment><USER8> Ah, okay.

I knew about the AGPL and I thought it was merged into the GPL with v3.

<comment><USER10> It was included in GPLv3 drafts and then _removed_ and split into a different license. Insider politics, but story as I take it basically that Google and similar threatened nuclear war on FSF and GPL if it had the Affero clause. FSF decided it was more important to get buy-in on _other_ loophole-closings (tivoization, software patents) than to risk getting no buy-in for the update. Some people involved are still very frustrated about the compromise.

<comment><USER11> I was directly involved in the decision to split AGPL into a different license (as a lawyer for the FSF at the time). Your story attributing this development to pressure from Google is completely false (though I have heard something like it as well).

Early public drafts of GPLv3 did not exactly have an Affero condition - <USER2> they provided for compatibility with a then-nonexistent class of licenses with Affero conditions satisfying certain criteria (AGPLv1 was not one of them).

This approach was disliked by two different constituencies. One was a group of intellectuals who were associated closely with Debian, who largely would have preferred a full-fledged Affero condition in GPLv3. The other was a corporate constituency, but it wasn't Google (or other web 2.0-type companies); rather I would say it was essentially FinSec end users. This group seemed to be worried about the possibility of normalization of Affero-type conditions which it was thought the compatibility provision in early GPLv3 drafts would cause.

FSF certainly wanted to get buyin for the provisions dealing with software patents and 'TiVoization', but the companies preoccupied with those provisions were mostly unconcerned about the Affero issue.

Edit: There was some concern from corporate interests, at least, about the whole prospect of a proliferation of future Affero-like GPLv3-compatible non- GPLv3 licenses, which the early drafts of GPLv3 specifically contemplated. This was one of the motivations for redesigning the policy to have a single, FSF-authorized Affero license that would be, in all likelihood, the only (partially) GPLv3-compatible license with an Affero condition. The other motivation was to address the concerns of the 'Debian intellectuals' I refer to above.

<comment><USER8> lol, buy-in sounds a bit like the FSF sold out.

<comment><USER10> It's like people think that FSF is a completely dogmatic and uncompromising organization. In fact, they're interested in whatever serves their mission, including compromising when they feel it's worthwhile. This is nothing new. It's just that most of the compromises that other people wish they would make they feel do not serve their free software mission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Another interesting point in the case is that the court found Artifex's > claim of damages to be admissible because of their use of dual-licensing. An > economic structure for remuneration of the developer by users who did not > wish to comply with the GPL terms, and thus acquired a commercial license, > was clearly present.

Interesting development. This makes me want to dual-license my software so that violations have more teeth to them.

<comment><USER13> Well, why? If someone uses GPL only, it means they are not looking for money, but is more of a choice to not use more permissive licences. Dual licensing does not solves anything for them.

<comment><USER12> Because when I choose a GPL license, I do it because I want anyone that uses that code to share their changes back with me.

If all I get out of a long court case is _finally_ seeing their code, then it's not worth it for me to sue, and it's not worth it for them to comply with the license.

Instead: if I dual license it: when they don't comply with the GPL license, I can sue them for _damages_ : which makes things a hell of a lot more appealing for a lawyer to take my case, and not as much as a waste of my time.

<comment><USER14> "dual-licensed" is normally used to describe 2 Open Source licenses that user can choose from.

[Edited for clarity]

<comment><USER15> I believe here that the use of "dual license" here is about open source + paid proprietary, not two open source licenses. The idea being that you can claim damages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What Perens doesn't explain, and what I'm curious about is if the GPL is considered a contract in _just this specific case_ , or in general. As far as I understand, a contract requires agreement from the contractor (is that the right term? Contractee?).

The finding says:

> Defendant used Ghostscript, did not obtain a commercial license, and > represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was licensed under the GNL > GPU. These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract.

I read that as: Since the defendent publically aknowledged their use of the software under the GPL, they indirectly "agreed" to it, hence it's considered a contract.

If a company doesn't publically state that, is it then not considered a contract, and only a license?

<comment> vertex-four The issue, of course, is that if they didn't agree to it, then they're (probably) redistributing a copyrighted work without a license to do so. So it's likely expedient for a court to assume that redistribution of a GPLed work constitutes acceptance of the GPL, as the alternative makes no sense.

<comment><USER16> The issue here is not about acceptance of the license, but whether it is just copyright infringement or also breach of contract.

<comment><USER17> IANAL, but it makes sense to me that A) you've agreed to the GPL and thus have willingly entered a contract, or B) not agreed to the GPL and are committing copyright infringement.

You can then only be in breach of contract if you're operating under A.

<comment><USER16> I'm also not a lawyer. I assumed that since they're making such a big deal about the GPL being considered a contract in this case, that in other cases it wasn't considered a contract. It feels like they're saying a breach of contract is somehow different than just violating a license / copyright law, but I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is Linux immune to wannacry like attacks?

<comment><USER19> It's not, but Linux is immune to Wannacry and a lot of the other _actual_ garbage that's out there because they don't target Linux desktop users. It would probably be pretty trivial to come up with a Wannacry-like bit of malware that was equally (or more?) effective on a Linux desktop, but the market for doing so isn't very lucrative.

<comment><USER18> So the argument is Linux is more secure now because hackers aren't paying enough attention to it. That is no reason to gloat about how Microsoft is bad in terms of security.</comment></comment></comment>


Isn't it desirable to use .htaccess instead of tinyurl? - <AUTHOR>

If it is possible. <comment><USER2> care to elaborate? each one has its own function.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is there no search on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> There is search at the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER3> Or, if you prefer, you can bookmark [https://hn.algolia.com](https://hn.algolia.com) (which is where the search box at the bottom of the page takes you to).</comment></comment>


Panoramio: The day that we rejected an acquisition offer from Google - <AUTHOR> http://novobrief.com/panoramio-google-acquisition/

<comment><USER2> >I had no desire to have a boss and I wasn't sure how my non-technical profile could fit in with Google.

Given that they were acquired finally, I would be interested for a follow up to this portion as I am sure it applies to many people in startups acquired by big technical companies like GOOG.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious about this too. Are these kinds of acquisitions ever a simple buyout, where the founders and early employees take their money and walk away?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Loving these kind of stories, thanks for sharing</comment>


"tree" command on MacOSX - <AUTHOR> http://shaunchapman.me/post/329270449/how-to-install-the-tree-command-on-mac-os-x

<comment><USER2> And this is on the front page?! Apologies for the meta-discussion, but this highlights go me just how much HN has changed. This tutorial is simply download, untar, uncomment relevant (and labelled) lines of a makefile and type make.

<comment><USER3> I think in this case it hit the front page simply because people like me didn't know this tree command and immediately found it useful. That it be trivial to install is not the main point I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or, if you have Homebrew (<http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/>) installed:

      brew install tree

<comment><USER5> Amazingly (and the comments on his blog also seem to jump on this), he does acknowledge that you can do it with a package manager. There's advantages to learning how to build something like this from source.

<comment><USER6> Only in this case the learning effect isn't that great, because he doesn't explain the (to me) most confusing part: Why is the edit of the make file necessary? Isn't make responsible for choosing the right configuration settings for the current environment?

<comment><USER7> No. The usual three step installation from source is

1\. configure

2\. make

3\. sudo make install

Note the absence of 1, which would usually perform these kinds of things (checking for prerequisites, for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Useful `tree` aliases:

        alias l1 'tree --dirsfirst -ChFL 1'
        alias l2 'tree --dirsfirst -ChFL 2'
        alias l3 'tree --dirsfirst -ChFL 3'
        alias l4 'tree --dirsfirst -ChFL 4'
        alias l5 'tree --dirsfirst -ChFL 5'
        alias l6 'tree --dirsfirst -ChFL 6'

</comment><comment><USER9> Front page !? No offense but it is a brogrammer-class tip to be able to compile something on a mac...

<comment><USER9> # emerge tree

;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very good utility. Thanks for the tip.</comment>


Scat - Shrodinger's `cat` - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hatboysam/scat

<comment><USER2> At what point can one give a post a minus 1? :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Never, upvotes only. And it's just a joke, relax.</comment></comment>


WeChat Censoring Messages Even Outside China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-01/wechat-censoring-user-messages-even-outside-china-study-says <comment><USER2> And Facebook: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-23/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-23/facebook- may-have-tool-to-return-to-china-but-no-government-ok)</comment>


Twitter Won't Stop Harassment on Its Platform, So Its Users Are Stepping In - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/08/06/twitter_harassment_user_created_apps_block_together_flaminga_and_the_block.html

<comment><USER2> The article suggests Twitter should take a more active role in policing its community, and the author doesn't appear to think "don't engage trolls" is adequate advice... but, really, what position is Twitter in to take an obnoxious person and bar them from the platform?

One can imagine a solution that requires significant effort or cost to create a Twitter account, perhaps involving proof of identity, but how high can you set the bar without putting legitimate users off?

It may not sit well that people can't practically be removed for reprehensible behavior as it occurs, and I get that it can come across like victim-blaming to tell people they should ignore it, but somehow letting someone yell themselves hoarse (metaphorically) without realizing they've been muted seems even more satisfying than giving them a ban page and having them make a new account in five minutes.

<comment><USER3> I think people aren't used to the wild web and would prefer companies to look after them, rather than dealing with it yourself. I mean, ignoring haters is character building.</comment></comment>


When Tailwinds Vanish - <AUTHOR> https://luttig.substack.com/p/when-tailwinds-vanish <comment><USER2> Interesting read. Not sure I agree, though not my area expertise.

The idea that we're hitting full saturation, or that startups will have to push into market vs pulling sales from market gaps assumes that we're reaching full saturation across the board. That the reach of everyone being online also means they're all online in the same markets / products / verticals.

I've worked most my career consulting as a software engineer, primarily split in 4-5 business verticals. The giants in those spaces (hiring, healthcare, cosmetics, etc) have 8-15% market share. And there's constantly turn over where people for whatever reason exit and return to the customer pool.

So while from an economic and academic standpoint this seems pretty solid, I have a hard time accepting it practically.

Again, anything I know about this kind of thing is peripheral knowledge, so very likely wrong. would love some insight :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article, but I disagree with the author on a lot of points.

it largely revolves around: "But people can't spend more than 100% of their time or money on the Internet."

first off, although the internet is baked into everything, its not just about the internet. self driving cars, 3d printing, fake meats, and lots of other things I can't imagine.

2ndly, while you can't always take more time/money from a person, you can always add more people. there are something like 2 billion people living on 2$ a day. Its not inconceivable that the market/economy today is .1% of what it will be in 30 years.

even before covid19, businesses that were not taking advantage of the internet and tech was dying such as Macys... Businesses that dont invest like crazy into tech and R&D will go extinct.

I dont think the internet is maturing, its just getting started.

also: "The Silicon Valley of tomorrow will not look like that of today"

The SV of 1999 looked not much like 2004, which looked not much like 2009, which looked not much like 2014, which looks very different from 2020. Its not stating much, everyone knows that. It also furthers the point, there is a lot of growth in the future.

<comment><USER4> Was about to say the same, in particular this:

> also: "The Silicon Valley of tomorrow will not look like that of today"

I came to live in Silicon Valley in the 80's. At the time, the technical press was bemoaning that the glory days were gone, making chips had become a race to the bottom, engineers were being laid off, and there wouldn't be enough jobs for the people who were already in the valley, much less the people in school who would graduate in 1 to 5 years with engineering degrees.

It bummed me out because I was at Intel, which seemed like a good company when I joined them out of school, but they were laying off people and it was "clear" that the semiconductor houses were going to consolidate down to nothing.

At the time I took a "big risk" and left an established company and joined a startup that seemed to be doing okay. At least they weren't losing money. It was called Sun Microsystems, they had just gone public (the Friday before I joined), and were less than 2,000 people. They were building these things called "Workstations" which everyone figured would fail because as soon as the "Big" companies (HP, IBM, and DEC) decided to get serious about this space it would squash them like a bug. They were doing some crazy things, like telling you all of their APIs and letting anyone copy them. They were using computer chips they bought from Motorola and running a University's version of the UNIX operating system on them. Their marketing message was simple, "We're open, we may not be here next month but don't worry because everyone has the information they need to make compatible stuff for our systems so even if we're dead, you can still use our gear."

It was a very different message than what the "big boys" were saying.

10 years later they were the "gorilla" and DEC, HP, and IBM were having a hard time keeping up. Then the Internet caught on an suddenly they were in a maelstrom of innovation and change and couldn't change with it. Ex-sun folks like to joke they became the dot "." in Oracle.com.

When the dot com crash hit I was older and had gone through the semi-conductor crash so I wasn't sure that this was "the end" as everyone was predicting. There would never be another VC who would be willing to risk giving you money. There would never be another retail investor that would buy and IPO for a company that wasn't making money. There was no "moat" or anyway to protect your market share so the only companies that would survive would be the distilled and conglomerated husks of the old dot com dinosaurs.

Then Google and Facebook exploded.

So what does it all mean?

It means that if this is the first time you've seen the phoenix burst into flames you will just _know_ that its dead and there isn't any left to do but sweep up the ashes. But if this is your second, or third, or fourth, trip around the block you know that the last trip found a match between value and technologies ability to deliver it with enough margin to support building a company. And you know that people are going to spend what they earn and there will be new things to do and new ways to spend. If you can see the things that made gave the market wings over the last 10 years, often there are hints about the next thing that will generate the excitement.

And if you can't, that is okay because the person that can? They are going to need talented engineers to help them bring it to market and make it work. There is something magical about taking $0.02 cents of electricity and turning it into something someone will buy for $1. People that can internalize the value of information will understand how to capture value while building new products. And that in turn will fund an entirely new ecosystem of businesses, large and small.

There is nothing more creative, and innovative, than a group of engineering friends with too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for sharing your experience, that was insightful.

The long view of history, rising and falling waves of innovation, funding, market demands, new ideas and shifts in technology.. After each winter, a new cycle begins with a search for:

> a match between value and [technology's] ability to deliver it with enough > margin to support building a company

Which sounds like "product-market fit".

That makes me think, what may seem like a downturn in the industry or saturation in a market segment, could be a sign that fresh pastures are needed, with new opportunities for those who can see where things will go, the next big ideas (which often start small and look like a toy to the established/entrenched players).

> If you can see the things that gave the market wings over the last 10 years, > often there are hints about the next thing that will generate the > excitement.

This is what I love about the world of computers and technology. The people who inhabit it, who push it forward, are driven by imagination and a kind of undying hope, to see the blue skies beyond the weather of today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There was not that much tailwinds in the rest of anyway, SV will probably become more like London or Berlin.

What is more interesting to me is that the Internet is no longer magical. It's not more fun that the electricity and everything revolves around few apps and services that produce the same content over and over again. Tiktok is the only new big thing in years and it's not from SV.

The interesting things happen in the finance and news media. Right now these suck and innovations are happening there. There's many things that suck too but nothing interesting is happening on most of these.

In other words, the internet as we know it is about finding and connecting what's out there and that's almost complete. The internet of tomorrow is about making sense of what is out there and restructuring it.

I think there's a lot of green fields for tech just around the corner. But unlike the previous boom that one will be heavily connected with politics. It's probably going to be just as destructive but less constructive and less fun.

</comment><comment><USER7> One underlying assumption behind the article: information technology stands still.

The big boys and behemoths of current and past eras emerged when there was a major change in technology or adoption. The two are also interdependent. New technologies drive new use cases and adoption in new segments, which drive further technological inventions.

Ubiquitous wireless devices, new AI capabilities, and wearable sensors are some areas that provide opportunities for startups today. Many more are still to come in the next few years and decades.

<comment><USER7> Some technologies I keep an eye on: Adaptive Robotics for everyday tasks, Autonomous Vehicles, Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), Quantum Computing

They are still far from practical, but hold great long-term possibilities.

Feel free to add some that interest you.

<comment><USER8> Distributed on-demand manufacturing is something I am following. With different types of what you might consider "No Tooling Change" manufacturing methods getting better and better, we might see the economic viability of manufacturing on demand in local manufacturing centers. These depots could make items asked of them on the spot with no upfront re-tooling costs or bulk orders needed. This could enable small businesses to have novel ideas that can easily scale across these near instantly available manufacturing nodes, avoiding hefty tooling and bulk buy costs, and also avoiding having to ship things across the globe.

Imagine you order SomeDeviceX from coolthings.com, they send the order sheet to the town's local fulfillment center in a standardized format they accept. The fulfillment center sends the files out to it's manufacturing devices, think CNC, 3D printers, laser cutters and PCB laser etchers. Some time later the device is assembled, ready to ship out to the neighbourhood.

What I like about the idea is that some items are valuable to only some people, so could never achieve economies of scale that make them viable to a business, and never be manufactured cheap enough locally to meet the market at the right price point.

The only kind of manufacturing being done in many places is large scale plants for things outside of the community, and everyone relies on products shipped in from around the globe. There is a gap missing, between expensive boutique items and mass produced cheap items, where affordable locally produced items could exist if manufacturing could be cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a heavy R&D type, I enjoy these trends, though suspect it's predicated on a big and historically wrong IF: no new compute platform.

mainframe -> pc -> laptop -> phone -> cloud/gpu/ai -> blockchain/vr/... -> quantum/self-driving-car/... .

Each of those bring massive high-margin software tides to ride.

In practice, life's still pretty sweet for cloud/gpu/ai startups, so we still seem to be roughly at that point. (We do a lot of gpu cloud accelerated security/fraud visual graph analytics: most enterprises still do it on-prem and basically just hope splunk can run regex without dying.) In GPU land, it's pretty clear they're being way underutilized, esp. due to slow SW rollout by various incumbents like cloud vendors.

We're still early on the transition to the next phase. The blockchain/vr/quantum startups raised a ton of funding, but have largely fallen flat. Some of the fundamentals in them seem sound, so they seem more of a matter of being early, not necessarily wrong. Current teams just couldn't get the tech together, or a true killer app: those are a question of time. Likewise, we know quantum etc. are coming, just need ~5 more years for what most general sw people start to get into.

IMO bigger risk is monopolies. Maybe the market reasoning is more from VC perspective, where everything feels 'expensive', and SaaS metrics era made investors forget how to take tech risks while the coming gen of platforms emerge.

EDIT: Some other potential near-term up-and-comers - synthetic bio (crispr,..), NN moving into program synthesis (so past perception and into automation), serverless. I don't follow agtech, but drones/robots/etc. are increasingly here.

<comment><USER10> Except that VR and "blockchain" were duds.

Self-driving cars ought to be big, though. Sooner or later, someone will get it right.

The Next Big Thing is probably wind and solar + batteries. Bye bye, gasoline industry. In twenty years, you may need to plan out a route in advance to be sure of finding an open gasoline station. Heating oil will last longer.

<comment><USER11> > Except that VR and "blockchain" were duds.

Based on limited experience, albeit going back about 30 years, VR won't become popular before visual and proprioceptive inputs can be synched. And I doubt that'll be practical before direct brain input works well.

About blockchain, it'll succeed once users don't know that it's there. I mean, how many understand how HTTPS certificates work?

<comment><USER12> I mean, I think the key difference is that HTTPS certs are actually useful.

<comment><USER11> Orchid creates multi-hop VPN connections using servers from multiple providers. It uses a private blockchain cryptocurrency to ~anonymously distribute value from users to VPN providers. That's useful because users don't need to trust any single VPN service.

Loki is an onion network. Currently the Session messaging app is the only service implemented, but I gather that there will be others. Loki uses a private blockchain cryptocurrency to hinder Sibyl attacks. That's useful because users will less likely get pwned by malicious nodes.

If those work out, there's no reason why most users would need to even know that blockchain cryptocurrencies were involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Found some of the points in this article to be contradictory. Author argues that carefully measured growth will win in the years to come, but also suggests that companies need to go all in on SG&A since having more staff means more growth.

Personally, I agree with the carefully measured growth part, but I also think small teams still have a lot of power. Investing in SG&A still isn't going to be as fruitful as R&D. The Internet hasn't halted yet – there's still a lot more to uncover. The physical world gives us a perception that everything is finite – that everyone's fighting over the same resources. A zero sum mindset (which would certainly make the case for more capital spend on SG&A). But in the virtual world of the Internet, the universe is ever-expanding and new ways of doing things are being discovered at every corner.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an incredibly blinkered view. Even if you think the US is saturated, which I doubt, there's a literal entire world out of there, many parts of which are still taking their first baby steps onto the Internet. Places like Indonesia and Vietnam are growing their "internet economy" (money spent online) at 50+% CAGR, and COVID is _accelerating_ many (not all) companies in spaces like e-commerce or online collaboration.

[https://www.temasek.com.sg/en/news-and- views/stories/future/...](https://www.temasek.com.sg/en/news-and- views/stories/future/Southeast-Asia-accelerating-internet-economy)

<comment><USER15> The question then becomes is SV the best place for technology to be built for India/Malaysia/Vietnam or others. My guess is that the answer is no, and after the success of China we'll see protectionist policies that ensure that the answer is no. A lot of the power of US companies comes from US branding, which I think still holds at the individual consumer level. But at the country policy level, is the US still the gold standard that developing economies should aspire too? It was pretty clear to people living in the west that cracks have been forming for a long time, but the COVID situation has enough propaganda potential paint various government structures in a different light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Aside from the other great points that have been made already in other top comments, I have a little nitpick (or feedback for the author, if they're a reader): charts should have axis labels, units, and ticks. Otherwise you might as well not have them.

Take the second chart on the page for example, as soon as I saw it a little warning light turned on in my mind. That chart says incremental spend (y axis) vs time (x axis), but no values or ticks on either axis. A chart like this could literally mean _anything_ because you have no idea of the rate at which those lines are getting smaller. You have no idea how much more revenue to startups there is compared to incumbents, the difference that _looks_ big in the chart could even be 0.001%, just "zoomed in".

</comment><comment><USER17> That article seems to have some /very/ bad advice shifting away from R&D. Did they not remember what happened to everybody else who did that? Eventually overtaken when they got comlacent. They all thought themselves the controller of matured markets or the emerging ones as a completely separate domain. They thought wrong.

There is no guarantee that R&D will get thr same raw returns or even stay on top of the market but neglecting it from trying to not cannibalize their own markershare has proven a fatal mistake to companies.

Even being an "also ran" is better than getting your lunch eaten when the next new thing comes along.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looking at this from a FOSS perspective, some of the "negatives" this article discusses strike me as significant reasons for optimism.

Collaborative, community-driven, open source projects sometimes struggle to be as innovative as startup executing a singular vision – but FOSS projects _excel_ at providing compelling alternatives to existing, entrenched platforms. If the pace of new "breakthrough innovations" slows a bit, it could provide FOSS exactly the opportunity it needs to catch up on features before users move on to a new paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think there's room for growth.

There's still a big part of the growing world population who doesn't have internet access.

Internet connects not only people but also devices.

However, the growth of online businesses will mean shrinking elsewhere which I am not sure it is good. Amazon and the like will replace brick and mortar stores, Netflix will replace TV, food ordering will replace restaurants and so on.

There will be less time spent outside, less social interaction and the jobs created in IT industry might be less than the jobs lost elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER20> Am I the only one confused that this might be about the CSS framework?

<comment><USER21> I've never heard of it. The meaning of the title was clear to me. The title wouldn't even make sense without modification if it was about a CSS framework.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you schedule fixes for new bugs during a sprint? - <AUTHOR> When planning a new development sprint (for us one sprint lasts 2 weeks), we take in any known, serious bugs, new features and a couple of planned refactorings. Once the sprint gets started new bugs will pop up, most often very fresh ones that were discovered only after the previous sprint has finished. Bugs don't wait for the sprint planning – it's their habit to also show up at any time during the already planned and started sprint.
The challenge for us is now to take out already planned stories from the active sprint, in order to make room for those new bugs.
Except from tracking bugs in your favorite bug/issue tracker, how do you factor in crucial bugs while your sprint is already running? Do you reprioritize the sprint stories with your team to compensate for the bug? Do you squeeze in the bug fixing and hope you can still stick to your entire sprint goal? What's your methodology that works for your team? <comment><USER2> Prioritize things as needed, don't be so scrum board focussed, it's a tool to help track and organize, not a playbook which is etched in stone on a Monday for the next two weeks.

Do the work which matters most today. Damned are those who can't modify their scrum board.

When I was on a DevOps team, we allocated 20% of our capacity for unknown task which inevitably come up. Some weeks it was less, some weeks it was more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


The Stack Overflow Tag Engine – Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://mattwarren.org/2014/11/01/the-stack-overflow-tag-engine-part-1/

<comment><USER2> interesting read!

<comment><AUTHOR> glad you liked it, it was fun to figure out</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is using TensorFlow right now? - <AUTHOR> Who is using TensorFlow right now (outside of Google), for what purpose, and where are they hosting it?<p>I am researching what a TensorFlow-as-a-Service would look like and so far there is very little out there except for a few consulting shops. <comment><USER2> I'm using it - (not at google, solo founder of 2 startups)

As a backend to Keras, which has my highly modified version of NEAT ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroevolution_of_augmenting_topologies)) which is trading Forex.

I have just finished a port of TensorFlow demo app to iOS, which is doing image recognition, I'm focusing on performance at the moment, will probably open source it in a couple of weeks when I'm back from vacation</comment>


Need Help in Designing Ranking Algorithm - <AUTHOR>

Hey Guys, I have this site called http://rivals4ever.com. In one line it is "Community based on Rivalries". You can create your own rivalries on this site and invite your friends to join and have kinda virtual fight with each other.
Now we need help in divising proper algorithm for the homepage listing of Rivalries. We tried 2-3 so far but none is giving satisfactory result.
We want something like this site where news on homepage constantly gets changed everytime you refresh or something like reddit or digg. But in our case there are many more parameters which can be considered while designing the algorithm.
1) creator rating 2) number of videos/images/weapons/weakness 3) quantity and quality of content etc etc etc.
Can anyone please guide me on this ? I want the best rivalries on homepage same as this site where best news are on homepage.
Any kind of help is greatly, sincerely appreciated :)
Abhishek <comment><USER2> I'm not completely sure I understand the problem-space, so excuse me if this if way off-base:

It appears to me that what you are looking for is not really an algorithm per se, but a formula. If you have a series of parameters, and you want to weight them to create an overall ranking, the challenge is really one of choosing the appropriate weights.

So, to use your example:

RANK = (X * CreatorRanking) + (Y * NumberOfVideosEtc) + (Z * QuantityOfContent)

where X, Y, and Z are chosen to emphasize whatever factors you think are most important to determining the "best" rivalry.

Is that what you had in mind, or am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you are right, I am talking about Formula only. Sorry for using the wrong word here. Can we have some formula which gives most interesting rivalries everytime on homepage ?

<comment><USER3> Well if the formula you need is as given in this thread then the only thing you need to define is the parameters X,Y, and Z...

The method you use to find these parameters would then be the problem

<comment><AUTHOR> the only problem with this kind of formula is that it does not get rid of older rivalries from homepage because they will be having maximum fans, contents etc. for e.g. pepsi vs coke. I dont want this rivalry to be on the homepage everytime someone gives a visit.

<comment><USER2> In that case, you make "time since creation" one of your parameters, and assign that an appropriate weight.

<comment><AUTHOR> That formula is already applied in the site but I think time variable should be less now

<comment><USER2> Well, there you go. You're really the only one who can decide what the appropriate weights are, based on your own individual preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be interesting to hear you enumerate all signals you're considering, as one part of the problem will be to consider what other signals should be used.

Also, do you need the formula to be resistant to spam?

\-- Dave

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes Dave it should be spam resistant. I am looking at to utilize quality and quantity of contents to rank a rivalry. Contents are in form of weapons, weaknesses, images, videos, passion talk and news. Other sub contents can be comments on each of these contents. We can have number of fans on each side into consideration. Plus ranking and loyalties of those fans. So there are many things we can take into account but the problem is how we can make sure that homepage has good amount of variations in terms of rivalries it displays.

I hope I am clear here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> do you want the organic-style "cream of the crop rises to the top"-style ranking that the digg and reddit front pages use?

what have you tried so far?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes cream of the crop rises to the top style ranking will be better but that does not mean we dont give proper exposure to new rivalries which are being added. We have tried this kind of ranking before but in that case old rivalries remain on top because they have the maximum contents, fans etc. We dont want that. We want dynamism on the homepage.

<comment><USER5> have you tried adding a simple decay (exponential might be too sharp - i start with logarithmic and tweak from there) based on the amount of time that the rivalry has existed?

hotness could be as simple as starting with #votes/time alive and playing around with the variables from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Time is a factor right now but it is linear factor which i guess is not working right now. Need to make it logarithmic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> this book may help: <http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) looks cool

<comment><USER5> good book</comment></comment></comment>