One man, eight years, nearly 20k cat videos, and not a single viral hit - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/7709/meet-the-man-who-has-spent-the-past-years-making-over-19000-videos-of-himself-feeding-cats <comment><USER2> > _How an animal lover's hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats > exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web._

When I saw this subhed, I thought immediately of Robin Seplut, a Youtuber I had never heard about until a month or so ago when Youtube put a 5-year-old video of him into my recs for some reason [0] (I like cat videos, and have clicked on them for years, but this was the first time I've seen one in my recs).

In any case, Seplut has 900K subscribers and dozens of videos of him feeding the 5,000 feral cats in his city. And the videos are a hoot – his most popular video has 46 million views [1].

The guy at the subject of this article seems to have videos with the same kind of appeal. I wonder how much of his obscurity has to do with his videos just not being labeled well?

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTZUTvv_1Onm-f-533Hyurw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTZUTvv_1Onm-f-533Hyurw)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfIqLAyNLY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfIqLAyNLY8)

<comment><USER3> Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well, but I think most of it is really due to the fact no one's promoting his work at all.

Because nowadays, that's pretty much the only way to succeed in any form of content creation. * Getting people/companies/sites with thousands or millions of viewers to share your work, and using their audience to bootstrap your own.

This guy obviously doesn't have that. So no one's finding his content, even if they'd enjoy watching it.

Or at least he didn't. Since thisa rticle was posted, his channel's gone from about 2000 subscribers to 12,000 subscribers, just like how it'd gone from 100 to 2000 once it was posted on those deep into YouTube style subreddits.

So he's finally getting a following, because people now know he exists and makes videos.

* For 99% of creators anyway. There's always the 1% of people who strike it big from pure luck/timing alone, usually because they managed to catch an upcoming trend before it hit the mainstream.

<comment><USER4> >> Some of this guy's lack of popularity is down to his videos not being labelled well

I do not envy the life of a struggling content creator. Having to always come up with titles like...

"Man feeds CATNIP to crazy fail dog"

...sounds like a special kind of hell to me.

<comment><USER5> If working life is about being paid for your time by providing valuable skills, paying, or learning for yourself, to get useful clickbait seems like every other skill to me. Ultimately it's a bit like all other interpersonal communications so if you enjoy making headlines or captions or brand spiels you can probably learn to love clickbait titles.

Though if all of that is wooly to you then yeah it's probably not your cup of tea, but I can assure you for people who have invested in that skill they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop...

<comment><USER6> _> they probably quite enjoy the thrill of trying to craft the perfect clickbait title and now in the age of data the success of it is measurable, creating a tighter feedback loop... _

They probably do, but they get that thrill at the emotional expense of the consumers. It's a fundamentally selfish act.

"Clickbait" really means that the title sets an expectation in the viewer that is more engaging than the content itself actually is. The viewer clicks and then ends up disappointed because the actual content is less rewarding than the title suggested. But at that point, the author's already claimed their precious ounce of attention and got what they wanted.

The name stuck for a reason. Fish don't end up happy that they ate the bait. Only the fisher does.

So I don't think we should be happy that people find this skill thrilling or rewarding any more than we should laud the thrill of a skilled pick-pocket or con artist.

<comment><USER7> Headline writing has been a skill since long before there were clicks.

Sure, headlines can veer into the misleading and there are certain particularly annoying online patters. But the whole purpose of a headline is to entice you to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Cat Man is actually named Mr. Niiyama. He's 52 years old, and he's based in > the Chiba Prefecture, about an hour east of Tokyo. Niiyama feeds the cats on > the quay near his home, almost every day. "I will distribute breakfast at > seven a.m. every morning," he said. "We distribute over 360 days a year." He > started filming the videos because, as he explains, "I wanted to see the > life of a cat."

> Currently, he tends to seven cats, but he estimates over the years he has > taken care of 50. Why does he do it? "Because taking care of cats leads to > your own happiness."

There is something very beautiful and serene about this. He found a way of interacting positively with his environment, and has simply stuck with it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find these to be very Internet 1.0

Back when people posted things just because they wanted to share something they thought other people would find interesting.

<comment><USER10> > Back when people posted things just because they wanted to share something > they thought other people would find interesting.

That's pretty much the entire premise of twitter, instagram, facebook, reddit, 'hacker' 'news', etc today...

<comment><USER11> No, now people post things for Internet Points - likes and follows, rather than for the joy of sharing - and it shows in the kind of content that is popular. Some folks have optimised the hell out of their Skinner box solutions.

<comment><USER12> There is a joy in sharing, but is it really sharing if we're shouting into the void? People want to be part of a community, even if it's just a tiny one. We need that part of the web back.

<comment><USER13> I think that has changed to the off topic or memes channel of a Discord server.

<comment><USER12> When I mean the web, I really mean the open web. Not Discord. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for how it used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> According to the article, the translation of his twitter bio reads, "I live in harmony with the cats who have arrived in the tetra pot of Kashiwahama, Chiba Prefecture."

The cats didn't arrive in a tetra pot, they live among the tetrapods, which are artificial concrete objects that are ubiquitously placed along the Japanese coastline, ostensibly to prevent coastal erosion, although some have said they are basically government pork projects for the all-powerful construction industry.

[https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/07/22/general/tetrapo...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2007/07/22/general/tetrapods/#.XT3oi8opCfA)

<comment><USER15> >ostensibly to prevent coastal erosion

Nothing ostensible about it. They work well to protect harbours. e.g.

[https://i.imgur.com/Okxthdq.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Okxthdq.jpg)

Bigger question is why is anyone using the tetra design at all. The dolos one isn't patented and interlocks way better.

[https://i.imgur.com/nO6srwI.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/nO6srwI.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe he's just using YouTube as a giant backup machine.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just look at the titles of his videos, this is #1 reason why he hasn't received a viral hit. Then there is editing, no captions etc...

<comment><USER18> He certainly didn't even ask for people to like the video and subscribe.

<comment><USER19> How am I even supposed to know that's a feature on youtube then?

<comment><USER20> [https://youtu.be/bre0moeCMFU](https://youtu.be/bre0moeCMFU)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What utility does the individual gain from his video going 'viral'?

<comment><USER22> Getting noticed. Maybe being briefly remembered.

Most people don't use social media (or further back, blogs) to get paid or gain utility, they want to be noticed for something.

<comment><USER11> That _is_ the utility value. It's the primary utility value desired in human experience, even though most don't grasp it directly, and instead think they want money, or to be a pop star, or to be a footballer, or to own x, y, z - but these are all manifestations of the fear of being forgotten. In fact, many, many people are miserable because they've chosen a means that they didn't actually want, and the ends of fame are never quite what they expected.

Most of what humans do is to be noticed, to be remembered, for posterity.

I find the notion of being forgotten far more liberating.

<comment><USER23> _It's the primary utility value desired in human experience_

It is not. Also, most do not want to be a pop star or a footballer etc.

<comment><USER11> So what is? Why do you do what you do?

Edit: this was meant as an honest query, so thanks for the downvote. I love how just shooting my point down with no thought or counterpoint gets upvoted, but asking a question in earnest gets downvoted.

As I've had nothing but "no you're wrong", I can only assume you don't have a counter argument, and are just being contrary.

<comment><USER23> I didn't downvote you. FYI you are not even able to downvote a post that that is a response to one that yourself wrote.

You didn't put forward any compelling arguments for your point of view so I didn't bother to refute them.

It is a big question, but being remembered doesn't even register. Could not care the slightest. Now there are things that I do care about and they sort of implies that I will be remembered (by friends and family) if I get my way (wouldn't be a good friend if that wasn't the case).

But that is not why I do anything, and most certainly is not what motivates me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Don't know if it is the HN effect or what, but the article says that the channel has 100 subscribers whereas at the moment of writing this comment, the number is around 12.2K.

<comment><USER25> Not really, I've seen mentions of this channel during this week so it's all been gathered over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is really pretty interesting in a web centric sort of way.

I had to share it on FB. Half my "friends" there are cat ladies who'll all appreciate it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if he's just using YouTube like Dropbox and just wants to have a personal diary of something he enjoys.

</comment><comment><USER15> Going through old vids it seems some received spikes of attention.

...even spikes 4x the one created by this hn post.

12k subscribers...so clearly he's doing something right.

<comment><USER28> That's literally less than one subscriber per video

<comment><USER15> I guess persistence can pay off :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What is up with the website? I felt like a <blink> tag was just a JS scroll away. Can we also drop the gosh-damned animations for text articles and just make it load quickly? What a mess. Some designer out there actually thinks they are clever when instead I didn't even read the first paragraph.

</comment><comment><USER30> > How an animal lover's hobby of recording himself feeding stray cats > exemplifies the glory of the anonymous web.

There's nothing in this article to indicate being an animal lover. Cat lover, maybe...</comment>


Write: Distraction-Free Text Editor - <AUTHOR> http://wri.tt

<comment><USER2> Should probably mention that it's PC-only.</comment>


Paint.net is now available on the Windows Store - <AUTHOR> https://blog.getpaint.net/2017/09/29/paint-net-is-now-available-on-the-windows-store/ <comment><USER2> Does anybody make money with the Windows Store?

I just went there and search for "paint.net" and the app wasn't in the results. The closest thing was the book _Getting Started with Paint.NET_.

It also returned _Wild Gorilla Slots_ , and a bunch of fantasy games like _Grim Legends 3: The Dark City_.

Why do app stores have such a hard time with search?

<comment><USER3> From the link, near the top:

> (It may take a little bit of time before you can search for Paint.NET on the > Windows Store. I'm told that things take up to 24 hours to "propagate.")

<comment><USER4> Does Microsoft's database run on DNS?

<comment><USER5> I wonder if every machine stores the entire catalog, and periodically syncs.

<comment><USER6> I assume on limited connections, it will never sync, meaning if you use a latop tethered to your cell-phone, you will see the windows-appstore of 1984. (any old date would have done, but this one rhymed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Supporting this, for all the work the developer (Rick Brewster) has done over the years, $5.99/$8.99 is a really small price to pay.

<comment><USER8> But 30% goes to Microsoft. I think better option would be to donate directly to Paint.net project.

<comment><USER9> I'm with you. Been using paint.net on and off since my high school days, and now that I am a wage earning adult, I'll be making a donation today even if I no longer use it all that often, because of how much I've used it in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firstly, Paint.Net is an awesome program. Thank you.

I don't have a problem with the author wanting to charge for it as it is his software afterall, but I really wish more software vendors would follow Redhat's model of charging for the stable and supported version of their software, and giving away the bleeding edge 'Fedora' version for free.

As a techie, I love getting my hands on the new and most innovative stuff; I'm okay with breakage.

As an IT manager, I just want the stuff to work and be stable, with well planned upgrades.

I'm not sure where software authors got the idea that charging for their newest and buggiest features was a good idea. When I'm buying software, I am buying robustness and stability. I just want it work.

<comment><USER11> If redhat charges for stability, then won't they make the free stuff as little tested as possible.

I won't pay for redhat style software at all. It's based on locking people with fud.

<comment><USER12> RHEL is a subscription for their support, if you don't need it then run CentOS - it is as rock solid if not more.

<comment><USER11> If it's Rock solid, what support do I need? Besides if they are selling support, they are not selling the software as a product. Paint.net is a product and not some support subscription.

<comment><USER12> here you go: [https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost- rhel-d...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel- developer-subscription-now-available/)

Paint.NET via Windows Store has one major advantage: automatic updates. Besides it's still is a free software and it's not a subscription - as far I understood it's just one time payment. I wouldn't mind paying for that if I used Windows.

The bigger issue is 30% MS tax:

> And you can still send a donation if that's your preferred way of providing > financial support. This is actually more effective because Microsoft does > take a 30% cut of every transaction that goes through their Store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I went to college with Rick. He's an awesome guy and deserves to be paid for his work on this. He's the only developer of it. Look at what photoshop costs. It's a tiny amount to pay for what you get.

</comment><comment><USER14> Still lacking text outline, which is still available as a dll plugin.

Other than that, one the best software on earth. I have never used photoshop, and I don't need it.

<comment><USER15> My biggest issue, as a web developer, is my inability to handle PSDs. There is a Paint.NET plugin that does a semi-okay job, but it's not good _enough_.

Do you have a good plugin for working with PSDs, or are they not in your personal scope of necessity?

<comment><USER14> I don't know, I don't really use photoshop. If PSD is binary, I guess it would make things hard, but easier if it's text or xml.

<comment><USER16> It's a binary format which has 20 years of backward compatibility shims present to support 14 versions of PS. And it's huge and complex. No fun at all.

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of this PSD parsing code comment that isn't happy about the file format.

[https://github.com/zepouet/Xee- xCode-4.5/blob/83394493f51991...](https://github.com/zepouet/Xee- xCode-4.5/blob/83394493f51991748b9b4706e6d37a8ed874bc05/XeePhotoshopLoader.m#L108)

<comment><USER16> Yep, pretty much. I started on a parser long ago as a side project and... quickly decided there were better uses for my free time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is one of the few applications I'm missing badly since I switched to Mac.

Is there a decent free equivalent for Mac? I've tried Gimp, but many things are complicated, hidden or slow.

<comment><USER19> Patina isn't free, but it's only a few bucks and is a decent "Mac-first" paint program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _> The Store release of Paint.NET is not distributed free-of-charge. This allows many things to converge and solves a lot of problems, while still providing value for new and existing users (err, customers?)._

So let me see if I've got this straight. I can go to the Windows Store to get Paint.NET, in which case I will have to pay USD$8.99 for it. Or I can go to getpaint.net to get Paint.NET for free, in which case I will expose myself to a barrage of misleading ads designed to get me to download malware (see [https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/google-and-paint-net- need...](https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/03/google-and-paint-net-need-to-stop- misleading-users/) \-- I wrote that four years ago, but the ads are as bad today as they were then).

"Now you can pay us money to skip past the part where we try our hardest to screw up your computer!" is a real innovation in software marketing.

<comment><USER21> Google said they were going to go after those ads on AdSense with misleading "download" and "install" buttons.

[https://consumerist.com/2016/02/05/google-hates-those- fake-d...](https://consumerist.com/2016/02/05/google-hates-those-fake- download-buttons-as-much-as-you-do-will-now-block-sites-using-them/)

But right now, the misleading ad showing on getpaint.net is an ad for a Google product. Lol.

[https://imgur.com/a/OdgpG](https://imgur.com/a/OdgpG)

<comment><USER22> I don't think the Duo ad is confusing - it clearly shows that the install button will take you to somewhere to install Duo.

The misleading buttons are ads on download sites that just say "Install" and make the user think it's the button to download the item the user is looking at (in this case, Paint.NET).

<comment><USER23> I don't think that's clear at all; there's no border around the ad, so you've got quotes about how great Paint.NET is, some info about Google Duo, and then a big INSTALL button. It's not at all obvious that Duo and Paint.NET are unrelated, if you don't know what Duo is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just can not see how the windows app store is a good thing.

Firstly, it adds a 30% surcharge to every application. Secondly, it is a walled garden, and everything is fine until microsoft decides they don't want your app there, or it conflicts with a product they want to sell.

I fully support the developer right to monetize his application but, I think once there is a large ecosystem of profitable applications on their store, I look for Microsoft to update their TOS, to require exclusive distribution rights on application. By then, it's lose your largest revenue stream, or lose your donation based customers.

I think most developers will stick with the store, and that's a shame.

</comment><comment><USER25> What is this "Windows" "Store" you speak of? /s

<comment><USER25> Or... why would I help anyone who locks my options down as hard as Microsoft?</comment></comment>


Analyse Asia 74: Vizable and Tableau in a Mobile First Asia with Dave Story - <AUTHOR> http://analyse.asia/2015/11/18/episode-74-vizable-tableau-dave-story-mobile-first-asia/ <comment><AUTHOR> Synopsis: In this episode, Dave Story, VP, Mobile and Strategic Growth at Tableau Software, joined us for a chat to discuss his perspectives on how Tableau is poised to grow in a mobile first Asia with the vision of analytics everywhere, and their new free mobile app, Vizable, which helps to turn data into beautiful interactive graphs. Sharing his experiences as the CTO of LucasFilm and Move to how he landed his current role in Tableau, Dave also told the back story of Vizable app that combined Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Last but not least, through the conversation, he shared the lessons as a manager of products and focused on asking the right questions on what the product should do rather than figuring out the users first.</comment>


IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://economistsview.typepad.com/files/formation-of-capital-and-wealth-draft-5-07-2017.pdf <comment><USER2> I really thought it was corrupt politicians giving away public resources to private mega corporations, irresponsible financing systems, wall street selling lel bonds, the undermining of the national working class, bogus copyright laws that are designed to squish small and upcoming competition, and people purchasing garbage degrees instead of useful ones with money they don't have guaranteeing they'll be indebted for at least two or three decades.

But no, it's just IT. How wrong I was.

<comment><USER3> There does seem to be a hostility towards people who work in tech on the left. To me this feels like pandering to that by Clintonian types who don't actually have any interest in dealing with class issues.

<comment><USER4> From what I've seen, I don't believe it's universal. The hostility is toward certain kinds of people who encourage and enable centralization or crystallization of power. People like Richard Stallman are generally liked, but people like Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg are not. Mind you I don't know what the Tankie side of things really says because I loathe them.

<comment><USER3> It's definitely not universal. But in my opinion, it's more like there are people who think they're better than us that are upset that we're as successful as we are. And being predominantly white men doesn't help, even if we do tend to lean left. That shitty documentary Nancy Pelosi's daughter made is probably a good example of that. The premise is basically that tech workers are terrible and are destroying San Francisco. I'm sure there's similar sentiments on the right as well, but theirs seem to be more of "these rich tech liberals want to tell us how to live" or something along those lines.

<comment><USER5> Do software engineers predominantly lean left? I think the left / right debate is quite outdated, with both sides having equally good (but also bad) ideas about certain subjects.

Why can't you lean left on healthcare and LGBT rights, yet more right on certain economic policies and tax issues?

<comment><USER3> I think both are true. Software engineers tend to vote Democrat, but they're also much more likely to be libertarians than the average person. Or even "alt-right" to be honest. Outside of a general leftward bias, I think we seem to be more prone to exploring ideological extremes.

<comment><USER6> Alt-right is white nationalism. So you've gone from libertarian which is not really left or right (depends on issue but revolves mainly around a weak central government except as it relates to protecting civil liberties and national defense), completely skipped moderate conservatives, conservatives, and right wing, and even hard right, and landed on a blatantly racist movement that has no f'n idea how the economy even works which is why they keep thinking tax cuts for people who make over $10 million a year creates jobs, but bank deregulation is good, but the banks f'd them over in 20008, but for sure stop importing brown people, legal and illegal, and especially if they're Muslim.

Most alt-right are just deeply ignorant people. But some are malevolent. The base ideology requires people believe vicious things about "the other" who happen to be merely different. They refer to liberals as libtards, and prefer strong leaders like Putin, Kim, Duerte, Erdogan, and even weaker autocrats, as compared to "vile libtards" like say Clinton (who is something like a cross between Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Thatcher). No doubt they'd prefer Putin as president of the United States than a Clinton.

<comment><USER7> "The base ideology requires people believe vicious things about 'the other' who happen to be merely different."

The "alt-right" are not the only ones who are guilty of this, unfortunately. This is a characteristic of the extremes of pretty much every political position or ideology.

Personally, the whole "if you're not with us you're against us" mentality of both of the mainstream political parties is what drove me to vote Libertarian last election. Johnson's campaign seemed a lot more focused on welcoming folks with differing political views (which is unsurprising, given the rather long range of libertarianism from libertarian socialism to anarcho-capitalism, and given the fact that the Libertarian Party is in no position to be alienating voters), which was very refreshing amid both Clinton and Trump basing their campaigns on how bad the other candidate is (and further on how bad the other candidate's supporters are).

<comment><USER6> The American political system punishes general election voters for not compromising on one of the two major parties. It lacks runoff elections, as well as range or preferential voting strategies so that voters are not so harshly punished by deviating from consensus candidates.

The ensuing dissonance upon understanding this punishment is what encourages our low voter participation rates, as well as hyper-partisan politics, tribalism. In addition, there's a pervasive "government sucks" that contemplating a state by state change in voting law, and it would have to be state by state, seems like dark comedy. It would take a lot of political committment way beyond that of voting 3rd party to fix the problem we have in the American political system. Americans are politically lazy, content to not vote, or vote 3rd party, and suffer the inevitable result, engage in political denialism, than the critical thinking required to fix it.

The effect of closed primary elections also enhances this tribalism and discourse problem. It's maybe 8-12% of the total eligible electorate that get a presidential primary candidate the nomination for the two major parties.

Both major political parties sabotaged the Electoral College by stacking it with party loyalists rather than, you know, smart people or even contemplative people or even randomly selected citizens. We could hardly do worse choosing dead people for Electors.

A case to watch is Gill vs Whitford before the Supreme Court next year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's another possibility: The highly increased value of intellectual property that comes from IT has made transfer pricing a much more efficient means of tax avoidance for companies, who are free to move almost all their profits to the Cayman Islands and other tax havens. Expecting our tax authorities to judge whether a trade between two subsidiaries of a multinational is at 'fair market value' makes sense if they're trading steel bars, not so much if they're trading e.g. a 'license for the Google search algorithm'. Intellectual property, pretty much by definition, is unique rather than a commodity.

<comment><USER9> The authors of the paper identify a trend of "growth that began in the 1970's", and say that correlates with the emergence of IT firms being able to erect barriers to competition. It might be coincidence, but the late 1970s is also when:

1\. The US Copyright Act of 1976 extended copyright from a fixed term of 28 years (with opt-in 28 year extension) to the life of the author plus 70 years.

2\. The Patent Cooperation Treaty became active in 1978, making it much easier to obtain patents in multiple countries.

It would seem that IP was strengthened (both as a method of avoiding tax and suppressing competition) in the late 1970s. The deregulation of the banking industry which happened in the early 1980s seems like it would have helped also.

<comment><USER10> I'm just going to throw this out there as well, but 1973 was when the Great Stagnation began ([http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/great- stagnat...](http://macromarketmusings.blogspot.com/2011/02/great-stagnation- and-total-factor.html)), and it coincides quite closely to when Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system and allows the value of the American dollar to float relative to other currencies.

In other words, globalization is a _huge_ factor that the authors of the paper don't seem to be accounting for.

In fact, after Ctrl+F'ing "foreign", I get:

>By December 2015 holdings of liquid assets by foreign subsidiaries rose to $2.4 Trillion (see Whalen and McCoy (2016)) while domestic holdings of liquid assets rose since 2008 by about $1.9 Trillion. These foreign assets increased due to a legal provision that allows Indefinitely Reinvested Foreign Earnings to be free of US income tax. Hence, $2.4 Trillion are kept abroad not out of productive needs but rather as a device to save income tax hence not necessary for productive capacity

...so maybe American companies are using IT to store wealth abroad, but maybe American companies are being taken over by foreign entities? That would explain how our trade deficit has persisted for several decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> // Automation replaces men. This of course is nothing new. What is new is that now, unlike most earlier periods, the displaced men have nowhere to go. The farmers displaced by mechanization of the farms in the 20's could go to the cities and man the assembly lines. As for the work animals like the mule, they could just stop growing them. But automation displaces people, and you don't just stop growing people even when they have been made expendable by the system. Under Stalin the kulaks and all those who didn't go along with the collectivization of agriculture were just killed off. Even then, if they had been ready to go along, Stalin could have used them. But in the United States, with automation coming in when industry has already reached the point that it can supply consumer demand, the question of what to do with the surplus people who are the expendables of automation becomes more and more critical every day....

...As automation spreads, it will intensify the crises of capitalism and sharpen the conflicts among the various sections of the population, particularly between those working and those not working, those paying taxes and those not paying taxes. Out of this conflict will grow a counter- revolutionary movement made up of those from all social layers who resent the continued cost to them of maintaining these expendables but who are determined to maintain the system that creates and multiplies the number of expendables. This in turn will mobilize those who begin by recognizing the right of these displaced persons to live, and from there are forced to struggle for a society in which there are no displaced persons. //

James Boggs, _The American Revolution: Pages From a Negro Worker's Notebook_, 1962(!!)

[http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/amreboggs.html](http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/amreboggs.html)

<comment><USER12> Another argument for basic income? The displacement of any worker who drives for a living as at our doorstep.

<comment><USER3> I think that sort of depends on your perspective. Some critics of UBI would say it's basically a scheme to keep a capitalist system and a ruling class in place that we'd be better off doing away with.

<comment><USER13> This is literally the first time I've seen someone call UB I a capitalist scheme, as the absolute most of these capitalists would call UBI a socialistic measure.

<comment><USER3> I know it sounds odd, but the idea is that while it is a socialist program, it actually helps maintain a capitalist system by preventing that systems failures from leading to it's demise. A UBI paid for with a tax system similar to our current one wouldn't really harm the ultra rich much, it would be paid for by the middle class and wealthier people who still work for a living, rather than just sitting on a giant mountain of cash and collecting interest.

Edit: plus, if everyone views it as socialism, and then they eventually get it 20 years from now, maybe that will keep them from pursuing the real thing. Although I'm getting to be a bit of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with that line of reasoning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The low labor share in the 1980's is then out of line with the rest of our > results. However, it is compatible with the fact that wage growth and labor > share started to fall early in the 1970's, caused by factors not present in > our study. Political factors such as laws to weaken unions, automation, > outsourcing, and globalization were operative even before the rise of > monopoly power in the 1980's. Hence, by the time monopoly power came into > play, wages and labor share were already low. Hence, apart from rising > monopoly power, other factors had an impact on the dynamics of wages and > labor share which are not examined here.

Indeed when we compare the inequality present in different industrialized nations with varying degrees of unionization, nations with stronger unions seem to have lower inequality despite experiencing an increase in automation. As stated in an IMF report [1]:

Traditional explanations for the rise of inequality in advanced economies are skill-biased technological change and globalization, which have increased the relative demand for skilled workers, benefiting top earners relative to average earners. But technology and globalization foster economic growth, and there is little policymakers can or are willing to do to reverse these trends. Moreover, while high-income countries have been similarly affected by technological change and globalization, inequality in these economies has risen at different speeds and magnitudes.

So perhaps the combination of automation together with weakened unions is responsible for inequality in industrialized nations?

[1] [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/pdf/jaumo...](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/pdf/jaumotte.pdf)

<comment><USER15> IT codes knowledge and techniques into machines and by that makes workers with low and medium skill levels more exchangeable reducing their negotiation power vs. the capital providers. Over time this leads to salaries lagging for this part of the working population. Unions may slow this process but their negotiation power is slowly eroding too. These days it is not unheard of that whole factories are shifting across borders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It isn't the technology that's to blame for how the wealth it creates is distributed. That's just silly. And honestly, an efficient socialist economy is made much more realistic by modern technology. There's a lot that can be done to offset some of the downsides that have been associated with it in the past.

<comment><USER16> Not the least of which is mass automation, which removes one of the worst aspects of socialism and communism; the permanent working underclass.

A friend of mine says Communism arrived 100 years too early, I'd say that's an excellent way to put it.

<comment><USER17> I'm curious as to where this mass automation story originated. I haven't seen any real evidence that anything besides the most basic repetitive tasks will be automated in the future. This automation would also likely just lead to a new set of low pay, desirable jobs.

Sure, Moore's law and advancements in machine learning/vision push to make automation more economically viable for certain areas that were already good candidates. For other areas where human's adaptability is even moderately valuable, technology is a long ways away from coming anywhere close to beating out humans.

Technology breaking the chains of toil is a very idealistic thought. I can see technology augmenting more jobs and allowing humans to toil more efficiently, but not total automation.

<comment><USER3> Trucking, fast food, and retail could face huge amounts of automation in the next few decades, and thats a massive amount of low end jobs that could disappear. I think the idea of "fully automated luxury communism" is pretty silly, but there's almost definitely going to be substantial job losses, and I think we're approaching a limit where we don't have good low skill jobs to replace them.

<comment><USER17> I think the problem comes down to simple economic factors.

How much will it cost upfront to automate a specific area and how long will it take for such automation to turn a profit vs human alternatives.

Right now:

\- the upfront costs are high

\- continued maintenance and update costs are uncertain

\- human are really not that expensive for what they can do

My view is that humans are actually a much more valuable resource than most HN/reddit/social media users seem to think. Solutions that fail to account for the __massive__ available decision making and processing power of the ~7 billion existing humans will just not be competitive. Someone will always find a way to harness the human resource and put people to work. I just hope the people get compensated fairly and the work won't be miserable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Serious question: if technology makes everyone better off but increases inequality, is that a bad outcome? Why or why not?

<comment><USER19> To answer that you need a way of equating money with "utility" (i.e. the use and/or pleasure that people get from their money).

I believe that utility is logarithmic with rate of expenditure. Hence doubling your spending rate gets you a constant increment in utility. This is why we measure pay rises in percent rather than absolute value. Another $100/week would make a huge difference to someone on the breadline, but is lost in the noise for a millionaire.

This means that money transferred from a rich person to a poor person will increase utility, because the decrement in the rich person's utility is more than outweighed by the incremenent in the poor person's utility. This difference can also accomodate the transaction costs (i.e. running the IRS) and the "deadweight cost" of decreasing the rich person's incentive to earn more.

This would seem to suggest that money should be redistributed so that everyone has the same amount, as that would maximise utility if the total amount of money is constant. But of course that condition isn't true: in a world with zero economic incentives there would be no economic activity. In reality of course such a world would go horribly wrong in any number of ways.

So there would seem to be an optimum amount of inequality in a society. Too little, and you destroy incentives to create new stuff, thereby making everyone poorer than they would have been. Too much and you are wasting valuable resources on gold plated baths that would be better spent giving poor people a tolerable standard of living, education, health care etc.

<comment><USER20> My guess is it would be more of a logistic curve (S-shaped) rather than logarithmic. $1 does not make you much happier than 1¢, but $50k/year is a big step up from $30k/year.

At the low end, at some point you can afford to have a roof over your head, and an extra $20 might mean that you're eating much better for a whole week, or you can buy new shoes, or whatever. But if you're homeless, $20 won't feed you for very long or get you out of the rain for very long.

At the mid range, a salary bump from $30k to $50k might make a world of difference if you're trying to raise a family. It might mean that you're not worrying about how you're going to pay for groceries, or it might mean that your kids are always wearing reasonable, well-fitting clothing.

<comment><USER21> Why do you think going from 0k -> 20k makes less of a difference than 30k -> 50k?(And we're talking about consumption not production, so weird things like having government benefits removed don't factor in).

<comment><USER20> I'm saying that $3 -> $5 is less of a difference than $30k -> $50k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> turk- Globalization is the cause of inequality. Technology just facilitates it. Capitalism leads to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and periods of globalization have resulted in high levels of inequality. Inequality today is comparable to the levels during the gilded age and there was no IT back in the 1870's.

<comment><USER22> Globalized capitalism has caused the largest reduction in poverty ever. If you had to be randomly born anywhere in the world, only getting to pick the date, you'd be smart to pick today if you wanted a decent shot at life.

Now, with regard to inequality in the US, that's mostly self inflicted. Moving production to cheaper areas lowers prices. It just so happens that the US chooses policies that increase inequality, rather than decrease it, like how education is funded.

<comment> chroem- >Globalized capitalism has caused the largest reduction in poverty ever.

This is a non-sequitur that often gets touted, despite totally ignoring efforts of NGO's, improvements in technology and industrialization, as well as decolonization. Further, the majority of the world's most developed economies, e.g. China, Japan, and the US, all relied on heavy protectionism to at first foster the creation of local industry. Forcing open the economies of developing nations is a surefire way to keep them poor and totally dependent on foreign imports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Noah Chomsky says technology is neutral: it can be used to empower companies, automate jobs away (as it's the case right now). It also could be used to empower employees (into super craftsmen??) but so far this direction isn't pursued.

<comment><USER24> Technology might be neutral, but capitalism is directing it.

(Nothing against capitalism. I just think the general direction will be profit maximisation.)

<comment><USER23> policy & regulation within capitalism determine whether corporations can be commoditised by customers (a lot of market competition) or labour can be commoditised by corporations (monopolies & job scarcity, collusion)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b This is a very long, very technical article. I really won't understand much of it as it is now. And that's a pity because this is a question that needs to be understood and debated.

I think that unless there is a digestible version of the arguments along with the general counter arguments, it's not a very useful read. And comments are just going to be undocumented reaction to the title...

</comment><comment><USER25> This article shows that IT has emerged as an important new industry, but it doesn't really convince me that it is the primary cause of inequality.

One of my favorite surveys of income inequality is a Krugman essay from 15 years ago (before he went full political). [http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/ForRicher.html](http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/ForRicher.html)

He briefly covers globalization, technology, and returns to scale for celebrities, but ultimately argues that changing social norms and the resulting drop in taxes from 1980 onward explains most of the dramatic rise in income inequality.

</comment><comment><USER26> The rise in inequality also corresponds to the availability of "cheap" personal credit.

The availability of credit also corresponds to a decreased rate of rise in wages.

It's almost like the two are linked. Stop paying people more and give them loans instead.

<comment><USER27> That's exactly what happened. To keep the system working given both rising inequality and rising productivity, the money was loaned to workers instead of provided as salary; see Richard Wolff: [http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Capitalism-Hits-the- Fan-T...](http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Capitalism-Hits-the-Fan- Transcript.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't think it makes much of a difference whether it's IT or any other segment of economy that generates the most increase in inequality. Creating and/or maintaining some level of equality is always an uphill battle on ever changing ground and there are enough "capitalism hackers" who know how to leverage "the system", the market, influence, etc to make that battle harder.

</comment><comment><USER29> industrial revolution, IT, next is AI (in all shapes, from self-driving to self-kidney-transplanting to self-QM and space-exploring) ... and that is the emotional foundation of that scene from the "AI". Though cyborg-ization of people may open other options. May be it will be natural that "all cyborgs are equal" as a result of being connected to the same global AI net, etc... Though most probably the cyborgization would be subject to heavy market segmentation too.

Also, it seems that the short period of lesser "income and wealth inequality" in US (all the other places were just poor, thus there was natural "equality") during around 195x was just a temporary aberration. Not that it wouldn't be good to repeat it, mind you.

<comment><USER30> Are you implying that all countries except the US were poor in the 1950s? While the US was at the head of the per-capita GDP ranking in 1950, there were others that followed close: [http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/stats/Economy/GDP-p...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country- info/stats/Economy/GDP-per-capita-in-1950)

Notably Venezuela was 4th, which seems especially sad given the recent developments there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Yeah, I was kind of afraid to say this, but software is getting really efficient at so many things, so free markets just decided to reward software.

Just like everything, once there is an evolution, if you're out of it, you're obsolete and you matter less.

Just made me think about this article where those few indispensable engineers that get a high pay.

In a capitalist environment, technological improvement goes fast (although technology was also developed under soviet russia), and the reward gets very concentrated. Property means that innovation is not really shared, only sold.

One could endlessly talk about how IT seeds from the internet technologies being developed from DARPA and made public. Hard to say if markets really improved what DARPA developed, IMHO I'd say no.

</comment><comment><USER23> Throughout my career 90% of my work's aim was to directly or indirectly eliminate jobs. That pushes pressure on labour and lowers / stagnates wages.

Corporations rarely use tech to fight other Corpos. When they do the best strategy is to commoditize competitor's main market [1].

Ex1. free Google maps have killed many GIS / mapping businesses.

Ex2. Free Google Docs hurts badly MS Office (office is 33% of their revenue)

[1] Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements. [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy- letter-v/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

</comment><comment><USER32> There is a huge gap between the real and financial sector regarding the value added that goes from 70tis on.

[https://tcf.org/content/commentary/graph-how-the- financial-s...](https://tcf.org/content/commentary/graph-how-the-financial- sector-consumed-americas-economic-growth/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Guns don't kill people. People kill people.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why is income inequality bad anyway?

<comment><USER35> Generally speaking, income inequality leads to social instability. In the limit, that means violent revolution.

<comment><USER36> I'd rather say that high income inequality leads to people realising class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the synthesis of this conflict is Socialism.

<comment><USER35> Violent revolution is manifested throughout human history, before there was even a concept of Socialism. They were called "slave rebellions."

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

<comment><USER36> This is the point - it is class conflict, Marx took this into account in his materialist conception of history. The antagonism of proletarians and bourgeoisie is the modern manifestation of the class war; slave rebellions the ancient manifestation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Infuriating!

An high-priest of the church of the economists does his job of exonerating politics from ugly social change, with "IT" as the sacrificial goat.

The obvious counterpunch "what about politics" gets this answer doubling down slimy-leech style:

(Quote)

A Final Note The IT revolution has brought about improvements in living standards and its great technical achievements enjoy a very high level of consumer and political support. However, these sources of social benefits are also the cause of social losses and rising inequality that threatens the foudation of our democrastic socieity. Th uniqueness of this study is that it focuses on the effect of technological change on efficiency and distribution and although we show modern developments in IT enabled higher barriers to entry, rising market concentration and increasing monopoly power of firms, we have avoided a policy evaluation. Yet, although these developments enjoy substantial public popularity it is only a matter of time before we shall need to debate the appropriate public policy to response to the social changes we face. To illustrate the need for some urgency consider the exmple of social networks. These are, in fact, privately owned public utilities. Subversive and terrorist groups have used the internet and social networks for coordinating their activities and these social networks have been a key tool for spreading rumors and conspiracy theories or, more generally, for proliferation of "fake news." These are national security problems and are challenges to the proper functioning of an informative press in a Democracy. The question we face is who should make the decisions on how to respond to these problems? Today it is entirely up to the private firms who own these channels to formulate good public policy decisions. This is not likely to remain a satisfactory solution. (End of quote) What about salaries and negotiation powers, financialisation and asset-prices inflation?

<comment><USER38> Would you please not post ideological rants to HN? Even if you're right, it lowers the quality of discussion below what we're hoping for here. Actually being right makes it worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hey its not our fault our line of work provides a highly valuable service of which few people enter.</comment>


Borland Object Pascal X/Y/ZMODEM/LPTPORT Library circa 1991 - <AUTHOR> https://gitlab.com/charlotteip/object-comm <comment><USER2> That's great! An implementation of X/Y/ZMODEM and FTP. I'm still occasionally using an old PC/XT with Turbo Pascal. Thank you for releasing this under an MIT license.

To convert CP437 to UTF-8, use iconv -fcp437</comment>


How Have the Seattle Seahawks Sold Out 127 Consecutive Games? Fan Experience - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/how-have-seattle-seahawks-sold-out-127-consecutive-games-and-counting-a-relentless-focus-on-customer-experience.html <comment><USER2> False.

The real answer? Being good.</comment>


How Amazon's Choice of Tape Encourages Your Packages to be Stolen - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/105090921986557589815/posts/gNRZF3k4dZY

<comment><USER2> If they put windows phone or blackberry tape on that might defer theft.</comment>


Why I wrote my own CMS so I could write a novel in a month - <AUTHOR> http://benwerd.com/blog/2012/11/02/why-i-wrote-my-own-cms-so-i-could-write-a-novel-in-a-month/

<comment><USER2> Interesting.

For the books I'm working on (<http://justthebestparts.com>) I went with CommentPress to allow per-paragraph comments.

I also wrote some local tools so that I could write locally using vim + markdown, then export to HTML and upload that into the remote WP instance.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing that about CommentPress, what a great project.

<comment><USER2> It is really sweet. Just be sure to activate Akismet to help contain the comment spam. :)</comment></comment></comment>


What Little Babies See That We No Longer Can - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/what-little-babies-see-that-you-no-longer-can/ <comment><USER2> Now here's an interesting little tidbit. I'm deuteronopic colorblind and I've always had troubles with color identification under odd lighting. I have no idea which of the blocks in the top two pictures are supposed to be red (several candidate colors could possibly fit the bill), but if I go by the text that says that the red ones are actually purple in one picture and orange in the other, I can tell which ones must be red.

Apparently I haven't lost the distinction that babies are supposed to lose at five months, because I lack some information the rest of you are getting.

<comment><USER3> What was your opinion on the dress? Blue/black or white/gold?

<comment><USER2> Blue/black. I never could see the white/gold.

<comment><USER3> Understandable. The white/gold is caused by misinterpreting the lighting. I've seen it as white/gold on one site and blue/black on another, just because of the different colours the site had around the photo. It's really interesting to experience what context does to your perception, and it also underscores just how unreliable and subjective our perception really is. Well, yours is less so, apparently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The more I look at the three snails, the more I find A and C to be similar in their pattern of illumination.

EDIT: the closer I look the more I'm convinced. C is the matte rendering of A; B is the different environment map. Figure 2 in the paper bears me out; I think the authors managed to fool themselves while editing :(.

EDIT#2: make that figure 2A & 2B that bear me out ... 2C they seem to have used the same image twice in the bottom row. Am I mad? I know these errors are easy to make in the rush to publication, but my senses disagreeing with the text in so many places is starting to freak me out!

<comment><USER5> I came here to make the same comment. Overlaying the images with crossed eyes, you can easily see that snails A and C share the most similar pixels. The mistake is in Figure 1 of the original paper and has been copied to the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a very interesting learn-to-draw book, "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", which takes a similar tack. Its premise is the reason people find drawing realistic scenes hard is because your mind is busy categorizing what it sees in to nice big-picture abstractions like "house" or "eye". You need to re-focus you mind to be able to see what is in front of you (how the lines converge, how shading affects shape, etc.), and once you do that, it becomes easy to draw in a realistic style, and not have your drawings come out like they did when you were 8 years old. Some of the exercises in the book are to copy line drawings that are turned upside down. This is so that it is easier for your mind to ignore the high level concepts, and just be able to copy down the lines as they are. I was certainly impressed and I wouldn't have guessed that by reading just one book and working the exercises I could have learned to draw so well. Highly recommended.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of...](https://www.google.com/search?q=drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain)

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.c...](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:news.ycombinator.com+"drawing+on+the+right+side+of+the+brain")

<comment> mycroft-holmes On a throwaway account here. I'm currently teaching myself to draw using that book and I think the author is really onto something.

My first experience with psilocybin is also something that led me down a similar line of thinking. When the drug really hit me and I looked at anything visually appealing (a painting or a movie) all I could think was, "So this is how a kid sees the world!" A tree (I still knew it was a tree deep down) just looked different. I saw all the little parts that made up a tree. There was no longer a filter to intervene and say, "Yeah that's a tree. You've seen a million." It was like my brain did a revert to its state years ago and it was _amazing_.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I've taken mushrooms, and my memories of being a young child are in retrospect very psychedelic, minus the visuals. (I imagine visuals _are_ present at very young ages, say 0–1 years, before you learn how to fully separate your senses.) You take things at face value, it's easy to lose context and permanence, you draw connections between things, and you feel insightful.

For example, I remember being about 3 years old, and realising that other people couldn't hear my thoughts, and that I couldn't hear theirs—it was mind- blowing. Of course, you tend to come to slightly more complex realisations while taking psychedelics as an adult, and therein lies the value: it's a kind of renewal of your personality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is kinda the same thing as the himbu experiments - about how language and cultural taxonomy cause us to bucket things and then compare them on higher order dimensions.

With practice, you can turn this mechanism off and with sufficient focus and sincerity of purpose, see things without such taxonomy.

The extension of this exercise is when you are able to reconstitute things in different ways without necessarily any known categorical words.

De then re pattern things.

<comment><USER9> I think you'll find "language and cultural taxonomy cause us to bucket things" is mostly/all bunk.

The whole Eskimos have xxx words for snow BS goes along these lines as well.

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17970)

<comment><USER8> Are you making a counter claim that every language has the exact same number of words split the exact same way and that cultural context has absolutely zero bearing whatsoever in how events are seen or interpreted?

<comment><USER9> Yep. The essence in what you said.

Languages have different amount for the words snow, but it's not relevant to time in the environment AFAIK.

As long as you have snow, you'll be exposed to all forms hence similar amounts of names. England or Arctic. The increased exposure for the Inuit does not make for more words.

> cultural context has absolutely zero bearing whatsoever in how events are > seen or interpreted.

As long as seen means by sight, and interpreted means lower level brain. And by zero you mean insignificant (Or way way less than these theories state.

<comment><USER10> I think if you research it more, you'll be surprised.

<comment><USER9> Universalism vs relativism.

What makes logical sense?

Language is used to describe the world around us seems very logical to me, it came second for starters.

If you want to go the other way, language shapes the world around us, actual evidence is needed for me.

It is full of "just so stories" which I find troubling. It's a meme that can spread without proper evidence beating a boring "language just describes things".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> >The baby looks at things all day without winking; that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself within the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental hygiene.

-Chuang Tzu

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what impact this will have in creating toys for babies in that age range. Even if for marketing optics.

<comment><USER13> None what so ever, as it is the parents who purchase the toys... They won't notice any difference.

<comment><USER14> With the right branding, dog owners by balls that they know their dogs can see.

<comment><USER15> That and DOGTV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's weird to call it an ability of babies to perform well in a very contrived task, but perform worse in any real life object recognition.

It is the other way round. We adults have a great capability to identify similar real life objects in various lighting conditions. Hints like the reflections on the snail tell our brain about the lighting conditions and we automatically correct for it.

<comment><USER17> There's a bizarre but very fashionable form of self-loathing in which any way in which we differ from someone else, it is automatically assumed that the other thing is objectively superior. Do we, as adults, see one way but babies see another? Babies see objectively better! Does another culture eat differently than yours? Other culture is objectively better! Does the other culture have different music, art, story structure preferences? The article about how their way is objectively better than mine is already templated and ready to go in the minds of people held in thrall by this fashion.

I have to warn you that once you start seeing this, you'll see it in a surprisingly large number of places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems strange to phrase this as something that adults can no longer see. If anything, it just shows that adult brains are more sophisticated in interpreting visual information.

<comment><USER19> > Seems strange to phrase this as something that adults can no longer see.

Its factually accurate.

> If anything, it just shows that adult brains are more sophisticated in > interpreting visual information.

"Interpreting" is mostly throwing out the parts that are less likely to be relevant and keeping the parts that are more likely to be relevant. Obviously, this is a good thing on balance, and nothing in the article suggests that it is not.

It also involves not being able to as easily recognize certain difference (which are less likely to be important in most practical cases, but nevertheless are real differences.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> They've no prejudice and they question every status quo;</comment>


A General-Purpose Counting Filter: Making Every Bit Count [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~rp/tech_reports/sbcstr-c6ff764fdd8f9d2b5ea3b31972a787bc/report.pdf <comment><USER2> This is misleading for some aspects of the cuckoo filter.

 _> The cuckoo filter can also support a small number of duplicates of some items. In the authors' reference implementation, each slot can actually hold 4 values, so the system can support up to 8 duplicates, although its not clear how this will impact the probability of failure during inserts of other items. One could attempt to add counting to the cuckoo filter by associating a counter with each fingerprint, but this would increase the space usage._

Cuckoo filters support buckets of arbitrary size. (They can also support an arbitrary number of candidate buckets per item, but that requires a different scheme for the partial-key cuckoo hashing. It also reduces how much compression is possible, as described in the note below.)

The upside of larger buckets is better load factors; the downside, in theory, is the need for more bits per item and longer query times. Cuckoo filters are amenable to compression via integer coding within buckets, though, so in practice reasonably large buckets are free.

 _> The space savings from these optimizations make the RSQF more space efficient than the Bloom filter for false-positive rates less than 1/64 and more space efficient than the cuckoo filter for all false-positive rates. In contrast, the original quotient filter is less space efficient than the cuckoo filter for all false-positive rates and the Bloom filter for false-positive rates larger than to 2^-36._

The reference semi-sorted cuckoo filter is more space-efficient than the RSQF at +2 bits per item, vs. +2.125 for the RSQF. The same can be true of a cuckoo filter with compressed buckets, e.g. Golomb coding gets you down to ~+2.54[1] regardless of bucket size, while also allowing the load factor to approach 1 thanks to larger buckets. For low false positive rates, that makes the cuckoo filter quite a bit smaller.

1\. Assuming two candidate buckets per item. Specifically it's +(1 - Bth_root(1 - ε))^(-1) bits per item, where ε is the desired false positive rate and B is ε * the number of candidate buckets.</comment>


Automate movie downloading with The Rotten Pirate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hjhart/the_rotten_pirate/

<comment><USER2> I prefer flexget. It has a lot more features.</comment>


Leaving Behind the Digital Keys to Financial Lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/25/your-money/forgotten-in-estate-planning-online-passwords.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><AUTHOR> Your personal bus number is one. Plan for this with a partner, family member, executor, or employer, for work-related accounts & passwords.

It would seem a reasonable approach to maintain some 'passwords to passwords' (like: disk encryption, password manager, browser password) and appropriate account identifiers in a sealed envelope (or a digital equivalent), and to put the envelope in a home safe or safe deposit box, or the digital package with one's off-site backups.

This approach implies using 'passwords to passwords' that persist for as long as the package does. Any financial account numbers are likely to be more stable over time.

Managing access to whatever container is yet another layer of turtles.

I'm thinking that storing encrypted files off-site (or in-cloud) and leaving access codes & passwords to both the files' storage and to the contents of the files in a sealed envelope with a trusted person (perhaps an attorney or accountant) would be adequate.</comment>


China smog: Red alerts shut down factories, schools - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/19/asia/china-smog-red-alert/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This seems to get worse every time I hear the news about pollution in China. I wonder how was it like in US cities before the Clean Air Acts or if this is as bad as Great Smog of London.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah, but think how more competitive they are without a pesky EPA holding them back. /s</comment>


HTTP vs. HTTPS - <AUTHOR> https://www.httpvshttps.com/

<comment><USER2> According to Chrome the difference is "waiting" for the server response (47 ms Vs. 473 ms). You can tell that nginx is configured very differently between the two response types just by looking at the response headers.

I suspect the author set out to prove this and then made the environment fit their agenda. Nothing to see here. I'm sure Spdy is faster than HTTP/1.1 but nowhere near what this site claims.

<comment><USER3> The "Waiting" time listed in the Network panel of Chrome is actually the TTFB for each HTTP request/response. It is the latency from browser to server, server processing, and latency coming back. And because of the difference between latency and our huge bandwidth connections, your browser spends most of its HTTP networking time waiting.

This is exactly where the "SPDY vs HTTP" factor comes in. With HTTP, you request each item, and wait for a response. This can only be done one item at a time[1] per HTTP/TCP connection, with a limit of 2-6 (depending on the browser) HTTP/TCP connections per unique hostname. As I mentioned in a comment below, this benchmark is using a single hostname, which is the worse possible situation for HTTP.

SPDY, or HTTP/2, instead using a single TCP connection, and multiplexes all the requests over it. In other words it can be downloading pieces of many other responses, all while waiting on other requests.

[1] - Yes, I am ignoring HTTP pipelining, because every other person who implemented a piece of HTTP software did as well. And no, neither I nor anyone else cares about older Opera supporting it :-)

<comment><USER2> But I am seeing the initial page response take longer on HTTP than HTTPS, not even just the subsequent images...

Everything on the HTTP channel is slower, even stuff that shouldn't be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't this say more about Spdy than https?

<comment><USER3> Its not even HTTP vs SPDY. Its HTTP vs SPDY, when all content is coming from the same hostname. This is the best possible environment for SPDY, and the worse possible environment for HTTP.

You are looking at one TCP connection for SPDY, with everything multiplexed. With HTTP, you are looking at, best case, 4 TCP connections to the server, that all start cold, doing 350+ requests in parallel. That's not even considering the potential for the server push feature with SPDY.

I love SPDY and all, but this is not even close to a real world scenario.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what multiple XORs have to do with SPDY, but yeah, they should have done it with one site, a CDN for images, some javascript loaded from weird other CDNs, etc.

—— [1] Multiple XOR –> Multiplexor –> Multiplexer, an electronical circuit that hakes multiple bundles of lines and returns the values of the bundle which has been selected via the control input.

<comment><USER6> Multiplexing matters if you make 300 requests: with HTTP 1, you have to submit a request and wait for each response to transfer completely before making the next one (HTTP pipelining was supposed to solve this but has never been enabled by default because compatibility problems).

With SPDY, you can request all 300 requests up front and receive replies out of order so the server can send each chunk of data as it's ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >For best results, disable plug-ins

Why? It's perfectly reasonable to be more concerned with real life behaviour than with benchmarks under optimal conditions.

<comment><USER8> Each plugin is a potential confounder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't want to be a killjoy but here I got HTTP faster than HTTPS

3 tests

      63%
      59%
      60%

     Mac OS X 10.9.5
     Google Chrome 39.0.2171.71 (64-bit)
     Google Chrome Helper disabled

<comment><USER10> Off-topic but how do you disable Google Chrome Helper?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do the images load in a different order between https and http? Https seems to load them in order and http seems to randomly fill them in.

</comment><comment><USER12> In a regular browser chrome with all my extensions, https is faster by a factor of 2-3, but in incognito mode, they're about the same.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, everyone. I'm the site's author, and I increased the ulimit and worker_connections to 4096, so you should see better perfomance and no more errors now. My apologies...I'm a web guy, not a networking guy. Rookie mistake.

And yes, you did break it :/

</comment><comment><USER14> Well it doesn't look like a fair comparison, it uses SPDY for HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER15> Of course SPDY keeps the same TCP connections alive, the encryption and even TLS handshake time is insignificant compared to the latency in creating a new connection for each HTTP request.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks pointless to me. Because choosing between turning your resource to user with http or https is not about speed. There are other considerations on the first place.

<comment><USER17> It's not pointless because many sites don't care about privacy/security so speed is more likely to sell them on TLS/SPDY.

<comment><USER16> Thank you, you are right from the marketing point of view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Faster for the client or for the server?

<comment><USER13> for the client

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Try it a second time, it gets faster.

<comment><USER3> It does. That is because, if you look at TLS handshake, they are using session resumption to avoid 1 RTT and the need to renegotiate ciphers and session keys.

[http://moz.com/blog/enabling-https-without-sacrificing- web-p...](http://moz.com/blog/enabling-https-without-sacrificing-web- performance)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can we disable SPDY? That's like comparing FTP and sockets...

</comment><comment><USER21> And we broke it.

<comment><USER13> Ha. My apologies, wasn't expecting so much traffic. Fixed now.</comment></comment>


50% Of Internet Traffic Comes From Only 35 Sites/Services [video] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2013/07/latest-backbone-data-50-of-internet-traffic-comes-from-only-35-sitesservices.html <comment><AUTHOR> Slides can be found here: [http://blog.streamingmedia.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/20...](http://blog.streamingmedia.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/2013CDNSummit-B102A.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Christmas gift ideas? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone had any awesome ideas?<p>I already got some hand printed year calendars from crispinfinn.com (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2595/3931755944_2259ef928a_b.jpg). I'm also getting A Pattern Language for an architect interested dad (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199). <comment><USER2> If you have a voracious reader in your life, consider a Kindle. I enjoy it more than anything I have ever bought.

<comment><USER3> IMHO, I think the Nook makes for a better product than the Kindle (disclosure: I haven't used either one). But the post-Christmas ship date means that it'll only make a good gift for a nerd who's already excited about it but hasn't pre-ordered one for themselves.

<comment><USER4> I don't know how to take your comment seriously. You haven't used either product and you are suggesting that one is better than other? On what basis? I have Kindle and I think it totally rocks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Things I may buy for people this year:

      * Super Mario Brothers Wii
      * The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception
      * Forbidden Lego: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You  Against!
      * Bluray player
      * Netflix subscription / renewal
      * Lomography film camera(s)

<comment><USER6> Wow, I may have to look into "The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception" myself. I remember a Discovery channel show, I think it was, where an agent was showing the camera how to disappear. He went into a bookstore or something and you couldn't tell he came out, because he was walking away as an old lady.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anything from ThinkGeek! <http://www.thinkgeek.com/>

With the obvious exception of "Star Trek Cologne and Perfume". What they hell were they thinking.

</comment><comment><USER8> A Pattern Language presents a compelling way of thinking about "place". It clarifies what so many have longed for in the way of community, and shows clearly what's wrong and what to change to fix it. I highly recommend it for everyone!

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm thinking of getting my parents a roomba. Anyone have any experience with those?

<comment><USER9> I got a Roomba 530 recently and it works great. I have both carpet and hard wood floors, and it does fine with the transitions. I'm thinking about getting one for my parents too. Tip: I got mine from Bed Bath and Beyond for 20% by signing up for their email list and printing off the coupon they sent me for doing that.

<comment><USER6> Awesome, thanks for the tip! I'm looking at the 530 too, and I was wondering about the transitions. I was on Amazon reading reviews since they seemed to have the lowest price, but your tip is better. The main concern I saw was a frequent need to clean the brushes, especially with pets that shed fur, but the only pet my parents have is a parrot, so it should be great. :)

<comment><USER5> I have a very shedding prone cat, a wife whose long hair is deposited all over the place, and a newer Roomba. The brush cleaning can get old, but the thing to remember is they built them for it. Included in the box (should be) a circular cleaning tool, though if you don't read the instructions it will look like extraneous plastic. The brush roller pops out, and the sides pop off the roller such that getting pet and wife hair out of it isn't all that bad if you do it every couple of runs.

The nice thing is that if it ever does get bound, or stuck the Roomba knows when to quit. It'll start dinging and whining until you fix it up.

Pro-Tip: Don't leave Roomba alone with cords and/or fabric. It will try to eat it, and it will get stuck under your TV unit all while crying for help only after running out of juice. :)

<comment><USER6> lol, cool thanks. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ruby vs. JavaScript as a first programming language - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/constructorlabs/ruby-vs-javascript-as-a-first-programming-language-2f2c944629fe <comment><USER2> Feel like both languages aren't great first programming languages, but might edge towards Ruby if only for being a strongly typed language.

As I explained to a friend who was doing a python data science course, the beauty of Ruby and Python are that they get pretty damn close to the semantics of your code. As such even someone who doesn't understand the language could have a reasonable stab at trying to understand what's going on.

The bad side of this is that that syntactic sugar and other magic obscure what is really going on under the hood and can funnel students down false assumptions about how a language works.

Personally, I'd recommend Scheme as a first language, but apparently that's far too arcane for some...

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree regarding semantics and the problem of too much syntactic sugar.

Where JS wins for me, is that you can quickly create something that you can click on and have it do something. From a teaching perspective that kind of interaction and quick feedback is very empowering for students. This experience will quickly inspire students to think "what else can I make this thing do". I appreciate this is not the traditional CS approach, but making things fun for students is key to getting them started coding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Agreed about JavaScript's chaotic origins - I can feel that it wasn't designed as much as Ruby and ActiveSupport are, but with ES8 JS feels like it's paved over the shoddy foundations

\- things that should have always been there, like array.includes() and multi line strings are there out of the box

\- 'class' means you're not having elaborate discussions with newcomers about prototypal vs class based inheritance or asking them to writr elaborate boilerplate

\- async and await makes JS feel similar to traditional direct style languages

<comment><AUTHOR> Class is a bit of a shambles. Yeah, it does make it easier to create constructors. But it also papers over the underlying prototype inheritance structure and can mislead beginners into assuming there is class system in place.

<comment><USER4> Class was one of the things that summed up ES678* for me - its nice, but it's pure syntactical sugar.

The fat arrow notation and destructuring are part of my everyday code lexicon, promises are hawt, im genuinely excited you can cancel a fetch() now, but so many other thing (proxies ffs) feel like they haven't added anything meaningful.

Which isn't to say I dislike the sugar, I have a hella sweet tooth, it's just that ES8 feels like it contains perhaps a little too much abstraction.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you can cancel a fetch - cancelling Promises was abandoned.

<comment><USER4> Do you mean cancellable promises were cancelled, or AbortSignal was cancelled? Because they went with the latter in the end. It got a bit fuzzy for a couple of years tbh. Personally I wanted cancellable promises because reasons, but i can appreciate the DRY aspects of AbortController and stuff going on in other APIs.

As recently as September the AbortSignal approach was implemented in Edge 16 and Firefox 57!

Pertinent piece from prominent professional Promise proponent Jake 'i don't only write about bloody promises' Archibald...

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/abortable-...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/abortable- fetch)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A new programmer could learn both at the same time because mostly what a new programmer is learning is programming not a language. Javascript and Ruby are more like Excel and Powerpoint than English and Italian. Ruby and Javascript are software.

</comment><comment><USER6> My opinion might be unpopular but I think neither are good as first languages.

The reason is that both languages mix many programming paradigms.

I think it is better to introduce programming paradigms one at a time. Once you understand the paradigms, you can move from language to language effortlessly.

When I introduce people to programming, I start without code. I start using cooking recipes as an example. The ingredients are the input, and the recipe is a function that produces an output.

</comment><comment><USER7> >Whereas Ruby is quite opinionated with one "correct way" to perform each task ..

Aren't you confusing Ruby with Python?</comment>


Is Snapchat worth more than Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.barrons.com/articles/snapchat-keeps-climbing-1461990757?tesla=y&mod=bol-social-fb <comment><USER2> Yes, about double the value.</comment>


Ask HN: Review My Startup, Agavesi.com - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Your Google blurb is: _" This site uses cookies, if you continue browsing you consent to the use of these cookies. For more information see our Cookie Policy. Got it!"._

It might be worth switching that for a description of your website.

Seems like an interesting startup, though!</comment>


Churches and States - <AUTHOR> https://placesjournal.org/article/notre-dame-churches-and-states/ <comment><USER2> "The only church that illuminates is a burning church."

Durruti.</comment>


Kauffman Foundation Announces 1st Class of Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Fellows - <AUTHOR> http://www.kauffman.org/newsroom/kauffman-foundation-announces-first-class-of-postdoctoral-entrepreneurship-fellows.aspx?utm_source=Alerts&utm_medium=Opticast&utm_campaign=0910_postdoctoral_fellows_announced

<comment><USER2> This is a very good start. There is a huge need of inculcating entrepreneurship attitude among researchers in STEM. I see a lot of innovation around me being a PhD student but a lot of money is wasted at the same time. Good luck to these postdocs. Hopefully, they will be successful and more researchers will move towards researching on real world solutions.</comment>


Show HN: Find/post Ethereum jobs and news, discussion and much more - <AUTHOR> https://slackpass.io/ethereumjobs <comment><USER2> Did you build Slackpass? I was under the impression that Show HN's were more for something you built, as opposed to creating a social resource on a service.</comment>


Orbital Mechanics - <AUTHOR> http://www.braeunig.us/space/orbmech.htm

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if I missed the wrong lecture somewhere in my math education, but seeing that diagram of the conic sections was definitely an "Aha!" moment, tragically. I'm coming from a background where I've taken multiple calculus classes...</comment>


Zuckerberg asserts Facebook stands for free expression - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/business/zuckerberg-facebook-free-speech.html <comment><USER2> The passive voice of "Facebook...has been assailed" is amusing given that the present publication has been the one leading the charge.

The central exhibit of this piece is an assertion is that a political ad should be censored by Facebook and others because it "falsely claimed [Biden] committed corrupt acts in Ukraine". It did not make such a claim. The ad, which was much harder to find than the dozens of articles declaring it "false", repeated a video statement by Biden that he used a US-backed loan deal to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired, and it repeated a statement by the Ukrainian prosecutor claiming he was fired because he was investigating a company associated with Biden's son. But other sources assert that the US wanted the Ukrainian prosecutor fired because he was corrupt himself, or because he was getting in the way of other corruption probes.

See [https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/fact-trump-tv-ad- misleads-...](https://www.factcheck.org/2019/10/fact-trump-tv-ad-misleads-on- biden-and-ukraine/) and [https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/436816-joe- bidens-20...](https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/436816-joe- bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-revived) for the ad and two fairly well researched but opposing takes on the issue.

This isn't libel, this isn't accusing someone of a crime, this didn't fabricate sources or quotes: it's just political innuendo. Demanding censorship of electoral material because it's tacky or slightly misleading by dubbing it "false propaganda" doesn't seem right.

<comment><USER3> I'm pretty confident every one of those articles attacking the ad knew exactly what they were doing and knew it only showed Biden's own words, and took advantage of the fact that the vast majority of readers will never research this themselves and are happy to believe lies they wish were true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As another poster notes, Facebook's speech codes are far more restrictive than those afforded by the First Amendment. Of course, as a private entity Facebook is not constrained by the 1A.

This is simply pandering by the CEO to placate possible investigations by a conservative administration.

<comment><USER5> _This is simply pandering by the CEO to placate possible investigations by a conservative administration._

That doesn't really make sense, since the current issue at stake is some pro- Trump ads, which Facebook allowed and CNN did not. This speech is more like Zuckerberg defending this action as neutral, while the NYT and Elizabeth Warren are attacking it as unfairly supporting Trump.

<comment><USER6> It makes perfect sense in the broader context that the current administration has been bloviating about "looking into" Facebook and other tech giants to investigate alleged anti-conservative bias. Keeping the video up and defending yourself as a neutral entity is precisely what I would expect Facebook to do if they wanted to keep the DOJ at bay. Not because they're breaking any laws by having a bias, but that they're currently staring down the barrel of anti- trust investigation. If they wanted to win some points with the current administration, this is exactly how they'd do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It was a good speech. Reasoned and thoughtful, providing historical precedents, and examining the benefits and risks unique to global internet platforms. Can't say I agreed with everything, but on the whole, I think it's a great direction. Worth a watch, or a read when the text comes out.

</comment><comment><USER8> Its been beat to death but Freedom of Speech is a limit on Governmental Power to silence citizens.

What is often missed in the Free Speech discussion is the concept of the "marketplace of ideas", that is the importance of Free Speech is allowing the market to decide which ideas/speech is the best. The problem with FB and all other platforms is they are replacing the market with their own algorithms to maximize advertising revenue.

Facebook standing for Free Expression is such a play on words...Facebook stands for monetizing the content users give them for free.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that a little bit overly reductive? Facebook is also where likely >90% of political discussions happen, and Facebook's own self interest is aligned with societies if they promote free speech.

<comment><USER8> >Facebook's own self interest is aligned with societies if they promote free speech.

Facebook's interest is in capturing more market share and maximizing their profits...not sure how that aligns with the interest of society, but I guess it sounds good to call it promotion of free speech.

<comment><USER3> Profits are a good thing as usually some portion of them are brand new wealth, which makes us all richer. And if Facebook can create new wealth while promoting free speech, then society wins twice. Profits are simply the creation of new wealth and it is ridiculous to think they're bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The text of the speech is available here: [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/mark-zuckerberg- stands-...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/mark-zuckerberg-stands-for- voice-and-free-expression/)

It's too long to paste here. I found it interesting to read, though. You don't have to be logged into Facebook to read it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Facebook suppresses free expression every day — by consistently promoting clickbait above factual content.

Ranking algorithms constitute editorial intent, for which Facebook is responsible.

<comment><USER10> The argument that ranking exists and therefore FB and other social media companies get to censorship what they want is invalid. There's no reason for ranking algorithms to take _viewpoint_ into account. You can rank in a viewpoint-agnostic way that preserves freedom of speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> [http://archive.is/ocSqN](http://archive.is/ocSqN)

</comment><comment><USER12> Zuckerberg continues to increase my support for a breakup of the facebook/instagram/whatsapp/oculus. He's not the sort of person that should be entrusted with the awesome power he's wielding over the world, if there are any.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious why you think that. I find Mark Zuckerberg to be measured, reasonable, thoughtful and I believe him to genuinely care about the values he espouses.

Personally I could not think of anyone I would rather have run Facebook. With such great power, I think it's positive to have a platform that represents a diverse set of views, and is committed to not policing content unless absolutely necessary.

<comment><USER14> His own words. His inability to have moral standings that interfere with his company's profits.

He not only runs FB, he owns it and has 100% control over it - he has the majority of vote share on the board.

If he goes bad or power gets to his head, there's nothing to stop him but government.

<comment><USER15> They could easily go the Apple route and sellout their own mission to be a product in China but they didn't. That's a moral standing which does interfere with an enormous amount of profits.

<comment><USER12> You sure about that? [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook- censo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censorship- tool-china.html) I know they're not operating in China but that appears to be because Chinese authorities have blocked them and not any particular moral stance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's see how this works out. Certainly I think they are in their rights to censor illegal activities and speech. But we'll see if the delve further into censoring otherwise legal free speech.

If they start looking into truthfulness of political ads, they'll eventually have to monitor all ads for truth and deceit. They probably don't want to go there.

I also hope this turns into a productive discussion.

<comment><USER4> They would likely lose Section 230 protections as a "provider" and be relegated to that of "information content provider" if Facebook begins editing political speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook's Community Standards are the antithesis of free expression.

<comment><USER18> It's 2019 and "free speech" is now widely considered a dogwhistle word for "white supremacy".

<comment><USER19> This is both untrue and likely to start a flame war.

You're likely thinking of the debate over reddit, YouTube, and Twitter policy changes, where the people banned were largely white supremacists.

Of course in _those specific debates_ , "free speech" _was_ being conflated with "the right to say racist stuff on private companies' networks".

<comment><USER20> Of course it starts with the actual bigots and racists. It's how they forever expand the meanings of various terms to "anyone I don't agree with" is when it starts getting ridiculous and dangerous. It's a predictable outcome with plenty of evidence supporting it.

<comment><USER17> Kind of like how the existence of terrorists and pedophiles justifies putting backdoors in all encryption. It ends at a place where all your rights get eroded away, and doesn't even end up protecting anyone anyway.

<comment><USER20> The 'terrorist' label is a great example of how the meaning of terms get conveniently expanded and broadened for political ends.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is meteor.js still a thing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I was a big fan of Meteor early on, but the decision to go Mongo and only Mongo killed my interest. I can't think of anything that I can do on Meteor that I can't do faster and better with a set of tools that I assemble myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> I saw people talking about it all the time a few years ago, and then I saw some posts that described it as messy garbage, and I haven't seen much about it since then. Angular 1 went through the same process here on HN, except it's highs were higher and lows were lower.

The most recent JS trend is to complain about how trendy JS is and how hard it is to keep up.

</comment><comment><USER5> A very legit question.

Given the amount of frameworks, libraries and `the correct way` of writing proper code and using the `correct` tools, I think meteor has his own place in the world, but I guess, there is much noise, and I guess they are not hot anymore.

Few years ago, meteor was the next big idea of the web, then:

 _angular

_ node

 _react

_ react native

 _ember

_ then no libraries anymore, as we can do it manually.

Even JQuery seems to recover and become a nice cool alternative :)

<comment><USER6> I am always about 3 years behind the times in JavaScript.. means by the time I finally switched from ProtoType.js to JQuery, it was pretty sure it was a safe bet :)

I think meteor was too short of a blip to ever land in my land..

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is, but it's very targeted towards a specific use case. My company started out with Meteor given its ease of 2-way data binding a event listeners - <USER2> to mention built-in mobile support. It seemed like a great solution for rapid prototyping and proving our concept.

Since then, we've navigated away from Meteor to our own custom stack that better suits our needs.

Bottom line, it's freakin awesome for prototyping real-time web/mobile apps in a VERY short period of time. There are a few companies rolling it in production, though, it just depends on what you require.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes it is. To answer a few of the comments here, it's currently going through an overhaul. They are making integrating a lot better for certain tools and switching out others such as replacing their own virtual dom tool with React. They are also working on supporting other DBs besides Mongo (I believe they currently have Postgres support).

Basically, with skimping on details, they're really increasing in the future of the framework right now. You can check on their blog for more info and skim their accomplishments, upcoming releases, and current goals in the pipeline.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes and you can get a good idea of the activity by looking at the forums: [https://forums.meteor.com/](https://forums.meteor.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> One a similar note, what about Opa? [http://opalang.org/](http://opalang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I believe they are going through a transition. Check out this blog post [http://info.meteor.com/blog/meteor-night-1.3-and- beyond](http://info.meteor.com/blog/meteor-night-1.3-and-beyond)

Who knows if they will be successful, but there is opportunity to improve web development without being a javascript front-end library.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes: [https://www.meteor.com/](https://www.meteor.com/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Meteor is used a lot in Dapp development for Ethereum</comment>