Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame dissects the history of his famed programming language - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;408408016;fp;16;fpid;1;pf;1 <comment><USER2> "it [C++] was used by other people for simulations of various network protocols and traffic management algorithms."

Had Mr. Stroustrup used Prolog the simulations would have been much simpler and the world possibly spared C++.

</comment><comment><USER3> s/famed/infamous/

<comment><USER4> I still can't figure out why people had C++. None of the arguments seem all that convincing to me.

It has a significant niche, and fills it well, as far as I'm concerned. When I think of languages I hate, I think of Forth or BASIC, not C++.

<comment><USER5> Why do you hate Forth?

<comment><USER4> Oops, I meant FORTRAN. I learned it for a college class, and the next semester they wised up and took it off the required list.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


France's Censorship and Surveillance Initiatives Lack Judicial Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/03/frances-censorship-and-surveillance-initiatives-lack-judicial-review

<comment><AUTHOR> French citizens can find the contact info of their representatives here :

[http://www.assemblee- nationale.fr/13/qui/circonscriptions/?h...](http://www.assemblee- nationale.fr/13/qui/circonscriptions/?hc_location=ufi)

Information (in french) about why this law is bad can be found here : [https://www.laquadrature.net/node/9205](https://www.laquadrature.net/node/9205)

and here : [https://sous-surveillance.fr/#/](https://sous-surveillance.fr/#/)

The programs (that probably already exist to a certain extend anyway) permitted by this law are similar in scope (but not in scale) to what Edward Snowden revealed.</comment>


High precision air bearing CNC lathe and grinder [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFrVdoOhu1Q <comment><USER2> Part 10 [1] of his prototypes series also features incredibly impressive precision. He starts off with a $10 piece of aluminum that took maybe an hour or two to make, and is completely accurate down to nanometers. I worked in a nanotech lab with an electron microscope, and the idea that you could make a mechanical device that could accurately move a few pixels on my screen blew my mind. I thought I was hot shit with all my electrons and magnets... nope.

Dan's flexure is so sensitive that radiative heat from his hand moves the end stage 100x more than mechanical input. You could move it by shining a laser pointer at it. Insane.

The final part [2] is also very neat, and starts with a really remarkable demonstration of stiffness.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaypcVFPs48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaypcVFPs48)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxA20Q-Uss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxA20Q-Uss)

<comment><USER3> He is a great educator, he also replies questions in his youtube account. What a great guy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice, thanks for sharing this.

His Youtube series about "Building Prototypes" looks interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMP_AfiNlX4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMP_AfiNlX4)

Here is a bio about Dr. Daniel Gelbart: [http://graduation.ubc.ca/event/honorary- degrees/2009-honorar...](http://graduation.ubc.ca/event/honorary- degrees/2009-honorary-degree-recipients/daniel-gelbart/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand how it's accurate to a micron - that grinding wheel wears after use. Wouldn't that throw off the accuracy?

I was expecting some sort of laser calibration during cutting but he didn't say anything like that. (i.e. don't make the machine accurate to a micron, just measure accurate to a micron and adjust the cutting real time.)

<comment><USER6> That's why grinding wheels have such huge diameter (inner grinding is much harder because of that), clamps are typically non-distorting (magnetic) and the force involved is a very small fraction of what happens during normal turning/milling.

In finish grinding after your setup the trick is to remove very little per pass so the workpiece does not warm up which would cause it to expand removing too much material. That's why you use _coolant_ and not so much a cutting fluid (this also helps to flush out the residue from the stone and the material being ground). A single pass will remove a fraction of a micrometer (100 to 500 nm) and you count passes.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a lathe with an accuracy of motion of 1u produces workpieces with a diameter accuracy of 2u.

Doing this repeatably is _really_ hard, and doing it in absolute terms is witchcraft of a higher order.

Usually accuracy of a ground product is not only about the diameter or some other dimension of the workpiece but about flatness of the surface or roundness (runout).

<comment><USER7> Witchcraft is right. I tried really hard in college in the machine shop to accurately make parts, and failed pretty badly. The machinist who ran the shop would sometimes take pity on me, eyeball my setup, touch the tool bit to the grinding wheel, turn a knob a hair, and turn out perfect parts.

It was maddening!

A 4 jaw lathe chuck was my enemy. No way in hell was I ever able to center a part in it.

<comment><USER8> I know your misery. I've got a Logan 820 lathe (quick change gear box, does 8-224 threads per inch; change one gear and you can do 4 threads per inch). The ways are worn so to hold a 10 thousands over 5 inches I have to twist the bed. I twist it with a level like this on the carriage:

[http://www.starrett.com/metrology/product- detail/Precision-M...](http://www.starrett.com/metrology/product- detail/Precision-Measuring-Tools/Precision-Hand-Tools/Machinsts- Levels/Levels/199Z)

I didn't get that one, $863 is spendy. I got a Russian copy for $150.

Anyhoo, you put that level on the carriage and then crank the carriage back and forth over the range you want straight, adjust the levelers on the legs.

I can turn mild (cold rolled) steel and hold a 10,000 of an inch for almost 5 inches and then it goes to hell. And the head stock bearing is crap, the originals had some preload but the replacements do not so I have to use a live center in the tailstock to put some load on them or it doesn't work.

Watching that video? I'm in awe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing. I don't know anything about the gentleman's background, but obviously the term "master machinist" is insufficient to describe him!

<comment><USER10> [http://spie.org/x42147.xml](http://spie.org/x42147.xml)

"Creo was sold to Kodak in 2005 for about $1 billion, and I retired from optics a happy man."

<comment><USER9> Well, that kind of win will let you build as much cool stuff as you like :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> demonstration @ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=sF...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=sFrVdoOhu1Q#t=505)

</comment><comment><USER12> Now that's the deluxe model. Solid granite ways and air bearings.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool. I've been wanting to get into machining for a while (haven't had the time yet) and I was planning to do that by building my own machines (foundry, precision lathe, milling machine, drill press,..etc) with the aid of Dave Gingery's books [0] but I am still not sure about them (they use imperial units, which I loathe and they might be outdated).

[0] [http://gingerybookstore.com/index.html](http://gingerybookstore.com/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> That airbearing demo was surreal.

<comment><USER15> Yeah man i want my motorcycle to have bearings like that, also want valves for my motor with that clearance.....

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately the key to this design is you have to force air through it constantly. The weight of the inner part is pushing a miniscule amount of air through the gap constantly, but you need a pump for extended operation. Still, its possible, if you're willing to put down a few grand for it.

It still works without forced air, just not nearly as well. You really need to force the fluid to get the high carrying capacity, or use a higher viscosity fluid so it doesn't get displaced as easily, which is actually how standard ball bearings work. A moving ball bearing has no contact between any metal parts.

<comment><USER6> > A moving ball bearing has no contact between any metal parts.

In theory. In practice however balls do contact the races and eventually wear them out even when properly lubricated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Been watching his videos for months. What beautiful work!

<comment><USER6> Yes, it's amazing. That whole machine is a work of art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does he mount the internal cutting material to the shaft while making sure the two stay exactly concentric?

<comment><USER6> Usually there is some kind of 'runout correction' after the mounting. Reverse the process and it's the wheel that's ground, so simply running the newly minted wheel against a stationary one should do it.

<comment><USER17> I was wondering that, too. Thank you for explaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Thank you, djoldman. This video is incredible. I'm now watching all of Gelbart's YouTube videos on my phone. The depth of expertise shared in every one of them is unequaled. I hope he gets a better camera setup soon.

</comment><comment><USER18> The granite ways do a great job of absorbing vibration.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yikes, that needs a safety shield.</comment>


Flying faster with Twitter Heron - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/2015/flying-faster-with-twitter-heron <comment><USER2> Skimming the paper, I found it hard to get a handle on exactly what kind of abstraction and guarantees this system implements (I am a co-author on one of the cited papers, so I'm reasonably familiar with this space). Maybe it is easier to understand for people who are already familiar with Storm.

Most notably, I couldn't determine whether the system is stateful, or what kind of guarantees (if any) are provided regarding stateful processing.

For example, the paper says Heron is used to compute real-time active user counts. That implies that the system needs some way to keep track of and "remember" how many unique users it has seen in the last N hours or whatever. How does Heron model this state and how does it guarantee (if it does) that a crashing node will not lose its accumulated state?

In my experience this is the hardest part, by far, of stream processing, so when I see any work in this area it's the first thing I am curious to learn about. A system that guarantees strong consistency (ie. accurate counts) even in the presence of node crashes is way, way harder to get right (and a lot more expensive, resource-wise) than one that assumes it's ok to lose a little bit of data.

It looks like Heron implements only at-most-once and at-least-once semantics, so maybe that is my answer there. You need exactly-once semantics to get robust and reliable answers, and you need to guarantee that state changes are atomic with the exactly-once semantics.

Of course some systems are ok with their output degrading a little when nodes crash. It's not the end of the world if the active user count is a little off. But beware of tolerating this too much -- the bad thing about allowing data loss is that it tends to come in storms (no pun intended). Once something is going wrong, the answers can be way off. The error is not bounded in most cases I've encountered.

<comment><USER3> From the paper, "The design of Heron allows supporting exactly once semantics, but the first version of Heron does not have this implementation. One reason for tolerating the lack of exactly once semantics is that Summingbird [8] simultaneously generates both a Heron query and an equivalent Hadoop job, and in our infrastructure the answers from both these parts are eventually merged".

The industry term for this approach is lambda architecture ([http://lambda- architecture.net/](http://lambda-architecture.net/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what Nathan Marz thinks about this, as he is the guy that created Storm (which IMO, is some of the best OSS code out there)

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to see how Heron compares up to Spark wrt to performance. I keep hearing Storm is slower than Spark, does Heron now catch up and exceed in terms of performance?

<comment><USER6> I have run into the author in other contexts, and I believe (without quotable proof) that Heron must be massively faster than Storm - if he says it is. Storm has a wide variety of failures (I've presented about "when to use storm" at a few conferences), such as the difficulty of exactly once processing (trident attempted to solve that).

I am looking forward to taking Heron for a spin.

<comment><USER7> The linked blog posts show that is is faster that _Storm_. The OP was asking about _Spark_ though. That's a fair questions, since there is a good deal of overlap between the the typical Storm usecases and Spark usecases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Storm is not even 1.0 yet. Since Heron is API compatible with Storm, why can't Heron be simply a code name for Storm 2.0?

Storm is a much better name than Heron, IMO.

<comment><USER9> Storm has been moved under the Apache umbrella so Twitter coming out with Storm 2.0 would present a few problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> (DISCLAIMER: I am an Apache Storm PMC Member)

This could be very good thing for Apache Storm depending on how Twitter handles it.

Just to clarify, the Storm version mentioned in the paper and blog post is not an official Apache release and doesn't include many performance improvements included in the newer releases of Apache Storm. There are a lot, and many more on the horizon.

That being said, the performance numbers look impressive, even though there is no way confirm those since no code or benchmarks have been published. IMHO, until that happens, there's not much to see here (not that I doubt it -- I'd just like to see proof/code).

My hope is that Twitter is dedicated to the projects it has open-sourced, and this is not a case of NIH, but rather an honest effort on Twitter's part to contribute back to the open source community.

@haberman:

Storm implements exactly-once processing through a higher-level API called Trident, that I like to call Storm's "Streams API" since it's not unlike Java 8's Streams API (and largely inspired by Cascading). Trident processes data in configurable micro-batches, as opposed to one-at-a-time, which gives it an advantage in terms of throughput, but at the cost of latency. Trident topologies "compile" down to Core Spout/Bolt topologies (The Trident API has a planner implementation that figures that out -- not unlike an SQL query planner).

The Storm Core API provides at-least-once semantics through an acking mechanism described here [1]. The Trident API builds on top of that to support exactly-once semantics by essentially doing a de-dupe [2].

I'm not sure exactly why they don't claim to support this, since Trident is build on top of Storm's Core API.

[1] [https://storm.apache.org/documentation/Acking-framework- impl...](https://storm.apache.org/documentation/Acking-framework- implementation.html) [2] [https://storm.apache.org/documentation/Trident- state.html](https://storm.apache.org/documentation/Trident-state.html)

@filereaper:

Assuming you are referring to Spark streaming, forget about any benchmarks you may have seen. Either can be faster than the other depending on how you configure it, and what your use case is. See my presentation on the subject here [3]. With either, you can configure yourself into a corner and screw your performance.

Performance tuning distributed systems is a mysterious art. As is benchmarking. Unfortunately, that fact is frequently exploited for "benchmarketing" purposes. Don't trust any benchmark but your own unless it is fully open-sourced (including configuration).

[3] [http://www.slideshare.net/ptgoetz/apache-storm-vs-spark- stre...](http://www.slideshare.net/ptgoetz/apache-storm-vs-spark-streaming)

@vicaya

Version numbers don't necessarily equate to code quality, performance, or stability. I've seen many projects bump to 1.0 only for marketing purposes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Open source? No?

<comment><USER12> Bizarre, their blog post is tagged "open source" but I checked their GitHub page and no sign of it.

<comment><USER11> Storm is OSS, and referenced a few times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Developing using twitter open source and api is essentially asking to to robbed by them if anything you make is successful.

<comment><USER14> Why is that? Finagle, Mesos and Aurora look like solid open source projects from Twitter.

<comment><USER15> I started looking at finagle, finatra and scrooge. i love all three projects. but at the same time, the documentation is really really bad.

if you have the same requirement as twitter, nice -- but if you detour even a little bit, you are going to have a shitty time (for example, for thrift, i wanted to use buffered codec instead of framed and there was not a single document explaining how to do it. i spent ~2h perusing unit tests to find a way which i don't know if it's correct or not).</comment></comment></comment>


What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happens-when-baseball-stats-nerds-run-a-pro-team.html <comment><USER2> This is a great lesson for hackers in general. Many of us, myself included, have a tendency to expect data to automatically win arguments. I mean, if something is irrefutably true with the data to prove it, that's the end of the discussion, right? But just as in this case, in reality, it's not even the beginning. Whether you're trying to convince your manager to go in a particular direction, or you're trying to motivate your employees to rally behind a cause, the data will help you decide where to go, but you need the right story to get people to follow you there.

And just because it's a "story" doesn't mean it's some BS you make up to get people to agree with you. It's more about considering the other person's point of view (their poorly-documented public API, if you like), and building an interface between that and your data.

<comment><USER3> The best manager I ever had was great at this. He was a former developer who understood the tech but knew how to speak the executives' language. You could convince him with a good tech story and then he'd turn around and sell to his bosses with a good business story.

<comment><USER4> Domain translators are undervalued. Anyone who can effectively translate the different needs and desires between groups is worth their weight in gold.

<comment><USER5> Agreed! I think this also cuts to the fact that data doesn't win arguments. Data + time spent studying and understanding data wins.

Most people can't or don't want to take time (it's inefficient). So they make decisions based on estimates / stories / approximations / biases / gut and the world keeps spinning.

Which means your goal should be to most accurately frame your data in terms of their stories (translating as much or little as they require).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like that this captures something very important about Data Science. The data may give the truth, but it's the story that makes people change. The story taps our emotions, which cause us to change behavior faster than hard data.

The chief analyst at a prior employer once commented that he liked people "with degrees that suggest storytelling" in addition to their math/science/engineering pedigrees.

<comment><USER7> Because what is a story really but condensed data?

<comment><USER8> A story can have a lot of noise too.

<comment><USER9> not the good ones

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The idea that a baseball team could ever go undefeated for even half a season is ridiculous. No amount of data analysis can make you do that.

That would be like saying that a perfect poker player could win every hand. Even if your opponent was playing with their cards face up, sometimes he is gonna hit his inside straight on the river.

<comment><USER11> I don't follow baseball. Are you saying that a large part of baseball is luck, and you are bound to lose regardless of how skilled your team is?

<comment><USER12> Practically everything in the world more complex than basic physics is non- deterministic, especially who wins games of skill. Things occur or don't occur with probabilities.

Even if you have a 95% chance of winning each game (unrealistic IMO), the probability of winning 81 games in a row is under 2%.

This is less apparent in other sports than in baseball, not because the outcomes of those games are more deterministic, but because fewer games are played per season.

<comment><USER13> You are a bayesian analysis with strong priors on the chance of winning. I'm not objecting to your critique (as I don't know much about sports), I just keep thinking of P(data | model).

<comment><USER12> Well, there is no sport or other organized competitive activity I can think of where the best in the world beats the second best in the world more than 95% of the time.

<comment><USER14> Maybe sprinting?

<comment><USER15> Competitions for "best score" (where score is a time, a number, etc) fall into a different category of sport than those where competitors are facing off head-to-head and there is interaction between competitors. And among the "best score" competitions, those which there is little variance in outcomes will result in a much higher win rate of "best" versus "second best" (a powerlifter or sprinter's score may only vary a few % between good and bad days. a bowlers' or golfers' can be much higher).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would be interesting to see some scouting models based purely on psychological and personel relationship data. What kind of metrics are best at predicting team chemistry. Sports analytics is going to complete change most sports, we are just getting started.

<comment><USER17> A different angle is player health. The Golden State Warriors are known for resting top players when they're in Denver because they found it can take a player up to a week to fully recover from the effects of playing at altitude.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of Football Manager (video game series). It's a turn based moneyball-sort-of game for soccer/football. Players have stats, potentials (which need to be scouted), training, etc. But there are other relevant details like how a player is likely to get along with other players that affect game outcomes.

<comment><USER19> > But there are other relevant details like how a player is likely to get > along with other players that affect game outcomes.

Time for creating mathematical models for predictors of how people are getting along... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For us nerds who want to effect change, and who are convinced data should be all you need, the book "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard" by Chip and Dan Heath is a highly recommended read. It'll tell you all about the story, or as they call it: the elephant.

</comment><comment><USER21> Expertise is knowledge within a problem domain. Art, and more importantly wisdom, is in the implementation and execution.

</comment><comment><USER22> No matter how good your analysis, data collection only told you what happened in the past.</comment>


Evolutionary algorithms and analog electronic circuits - <AUTHOR> http://hforsten.com/evolutionary-algorithms-and-analog-electronic-circuits.html <comment><USER2> That is really cool. I have been dreaming about creating something like that for a long time. Seems like circuit design should be about defining inputs, outputs, and some set of constraints, like available components, and board size, power, and heat requirements, and then optimize for a fitness function which is a weighted formula of price and performance.

I have used an evolutionary algorithm to do real work, saving real money for a company. Basically we had an extremely expensive tool that made vias one at a time. Since this tool was so expensive, it was always a bottleneck in the manufacturing process. I created a genetic algorithm that optimized the path of the tool, which significantly increased its throughput. I've stripped out all the proprietary stuff, and left behind a simple genetic algorithm to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem in Java and put it on github. Its got a GUI and its sort of mesmerizing to watch it evolve a solution. Works well, even with over 1000 different locations, which is unbelievable, considering that means a solution space of over 1000 factorial!

<https://github.com/YesSql/TspGA/wiki>

<comment><USER3> Nice and clean source code, I like it. Also, nice screenshots on the wiki page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a bunch of past work in this area. Circuits have been evolved in simulation (John Koza did a ton of papers on this) and directly on FPGAs (the seminal paper here was Adrian Thompson). There is a field concerning doing this, called "evolvable Hardware". GECCO is going on right now in Philly and should have some new papers on the topic.

<comment><USER5> I remember reading about combining genetic algorithms and fpgas in the 90's. The end circuits were over-tuned and could stop working if the temperature changed by even a few degrees. Or it would work only on FPGAs from a single output batch. Thanks a bunch for the names, I wouldn't have remembered the people doing the research otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rudolf Kalman, the guy who invented the Kalman Filter, seems to be interested in this kind of stuff, too.

He gave a talk at TUM a few years ago where he tried to motivate students to work on the problem of inverting transfer functions. The talk was for mathematicians, so I didn't understand a lot and might be completely mistaken. To make things worse I know little about circuits. So if I say something wrong here, plz correct me. The way I remember it was something along the lines:

For a given circuit, made out of resistors (R), capacitors (C) and inductors (I), it is straight forward to compute the transfer function (input/output relationship) F. Given such a transfer function F, what would be a corresponding combination of R's, C's and I's? In other words, can you invert F?

</comment><comment><USER7> I did my final project in undergrad on this type of stuff in 2006. It was a lot of fun:

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/28315319/final_project.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER8> There was a very good general overview of this in Scientific American in Feb. 2003 by Koza, Keane and Streeter:

[http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~rad/courses/cs266/papers/koza-s...](http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~rad/courses/cs266/papers/koza- sciam03.pdf)

The table listing patented inventions that had been recreated by the process was affecting.

</comment><comment><USER9> This was one of the areas I wrote about wanting to do research in in my college application essay, but never did. I'll keep my eyes open for an opportunity to apply genetic algorithms; it should be fun.

I'd like to hear if anyone's evolved significantly improved neural networks (instead of designing them). I don't know enough to say whether neural networks are good targets for genetic-algorithmic evolution, but it would be pretty fantastic to be able to easily evolve networks that are good at a simple specified objective (e.g. classification).

</comment><comment><USER10> This kind of work is OK for some simple block level circuit designs. In the real world designs, as circuits grow complicated, and parasitics add in, the SPICE convergence issue kicks in and automation becomes difficult.

<comment><USER6> In a way, do all these different side effects make automation even more important? Modeling them doesn't sound easy, but I would imagine that our mental capacity for evaluating solutions is the real bottleneck here.

<comment><USER11> I think even if you don't account for all of the side effects, you can still use these tools to develop useful circuits which you can then use to design real-world circuits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love seeing work using evolutionary algorithms.

This is a cool project of evolving a simple, yet efficient antenna:

[http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/11/11/evolution- produc...](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/11/11/evolution-produces- better-ante/)</comment>


Fraud fighter: 'Faked research is endemic in China' - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628910.300-fraud-fighter-faked-research-is-endemic-in-china.html

<comment><USER2> HN readers interested in scientific research fraud issues may like the blog Retraction Watch

<http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/>

(which I'm pretty sure I learned about from another HN participant) with its worldwide reach in reporting on retractions of scientific journal articles. There is another source some HN participants may find of interest, a special issue of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science on the topic of replicability of psychology research. The entire contents of the November 2012 issue of the journal

<http://pps.sagepub.com/content/7/6.toc>

are free to download for all members of the public, to spark discussion of research issues in psychology. There are some great reads by famous authors among those articles.

AFTER EDIT: Pertaining to the issue of submissions to Hacker News, one thing to look out for is mistaking the statements in a press release for statements actually supported by a peer-reviewed scientific journal article. Many journal articles that say a little are hyped by press releases that say a lot, which are then distorted by news articles by lazy reporters into announcements of "breakthroughs." We've seen a lot of submissions to HN like that over the years. The PhD Comics panel on "The Science News Cycle"

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174>

describes the process, with only just a little exaggeration for humorous effect.

Comments by earlier participants here on Hacker News alerted me to two particularly unreliable sources that I NEVER use as the basis of a new submission to HN.

PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit. ScienceDaily is just a press release recycling service, nothing more. Users here on HN think there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about PhysOrg:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869>

"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249>

"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

<http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/> (press release),

<http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/> (video),

[http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien...](http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1116.pdf) (paper).

"PhysOrg: just say no."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888>

"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857>

"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."

Comments about ScienceDaily:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992206>

"Blogspam.

"Original article (to which ScienceDaily has added precisely nothing):

[http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare- dn...](http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/abundance-of-rare-dna-changes- following-population-explosion-may-hold-common-disease-clues)

"Underlying paper in Science (paywalled):

[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1...](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/05/16/science.1219240)

"Brief writeup from Nature discussing this paper and a couple of others on similar topics:

[http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare- genetic-...](http://www.nature.com/news/humans-riddled-with-rare-genetic- variants-1.10655)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108603>

"Everything I've ever seen on HN -- I don't know about Reddit -- from ScienceDaily has been a cut-and-paste copy of something else available from nearer the original source. In some cases ScienceDaily's copy is distinctly worse than the original because it lacks relevant links, enlightening pictures, etc.

" . . . . if you find something there and feel like sharing it, it's pretty much always best to take ten seconds to find the original source and submit that instead of ScienceDaily."

Comments about both PhysOrg and ScienceDaily:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3689185>

"Why hasn't sciencedaily.com or physorg been banned from HN yet?"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3875529>

"Original source:

[http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole- asymmetry...](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hinode/news/pole- asymmetry.html)

"What ScienceDaily has added to this: (1) They've removed one of the figures. (2) They've removed links to the Hinode and SOHO websites. (3) They've added lots of largely irrelevant links of their own, all of course to their own site(s).

"Please, everyone: stop linking to ScienceDaily and PhysOrg."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3867361>

"Those sources don't have RSS feeds, and ScienceDaily and PhysOrg have a bad habit of not linking to such things."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766>

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what worries me in all science (US included). While I don't think labs are actively going out of their way to make stuff up, I think critical thinking is being replaced "oh shit, I need to publish this before I submit XYZ grant". This is how/why basic research is getting sloppy. Someone publishes a study, it goes through he peer review system of the authors' friends, it gets published and even if everyone hates the paper, it stays out there.

My YC application was made specifically to address this issue and the more I read about this stuff, the more I am motivated to get to work.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of less credible journals out there, it seems, that exist mostly to sell tickets to expensive conferences. Published is published, I guess.

Their (often volunteer) subject matter boards basically rubber stamp whatever goes through. It seems like a lot of these conferences have fallen for SCIgen- generated nonsense papers.

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, even the concept of less credible journals should NOT exist. The idea that a study is not good enough for a journal with some credibility, so lets get it published in Joe-Shmoe's journal of bad science is insane. Hence why we need a more open, social media based (ie, real time communication) method to communicate scientific data. Aside from the benefits of speed, you have a community of scientist that can talk about the data and if something sucks, it can get called out. I'm hoping this reduces the BS science that gets published and we can start to reserve resources for studies that actually progress knowledge.

<comment><USER5> " you have a community of scientist that can talk about the data and if something sucks, it can get called out."

This is the entire justification for credible journals in the first place.

You can't wish non-credible journals out of existence.

<comment><USER3> "This is the entire justification for credible journals in the first place." Care to elaborate? I'm not sure I'm getting your point.

Re: You can't wish... You are absolutely correct, it's something that takes an active effort. I'm optimistic that we can lower the impact of poor science that is published in those journals with open communications in science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The majority of cases exposed are plagiarism, the exaggeration of academic credentials and faked research papers, which are endemic in China."

This is not just a China problem. While researching some various programming challeges, I've encountered quite a few "articles", "blogs" and code-sharing sites with content of dubious and plagiarism nature. It pains me that the majority of the bad "authors' seem to be from certain cultures. This hurts the truly talented and honest people from these cultures/countries.

<comment><USER7> Your choice to compare academic papers with blogs and snippet sites, specifically on the metric of quality, confounds me.

We only expect one of the two groups of information to inform the life- altering (and potentially -ending) recommendations made by trusted physicians.

If we're in agreement about a general endemic of misinformation, though, that makes more sense. It does leave me wondering whether we underestimate the error rate of our native cultures' sources, though, due to subsumed experience with targeted fraud protection. In other words, maybe we miss local folly because we already know where not to look?

<comment><USER6> "We only expect one of the two groups of information to inform the life- altering (and potentially -ending) recommendations made by trusted physicians.

If we're in agreement about a general endemic of misinformation, though, that makes more sense."

Corruption and fraud are damaging in all aspects of society. Which occupation does more "damage" to a community/society/culture as a whole? A doctor? A banker? A programmer? A military leader? It depends on the situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to see universities take up the challenge of verifying research as part of undergraduate and graduate training. Government and private subsidy of this work would be well worth it.

<comment><USER9> I once came across a final paper written by a student at an Indian university as part of his bachelor's degree. It was basically a selection of Plan 9 papers, and some simple how-to documentation I had written up, poorly copy- pasted together to reach 50 pages. Three professors had signed off on it. I tried to reach the one with a listed email, to point out that he had passed an obviously plagiarized document, but his inbox was full. Not sure if he'd have cared anyway, cheating and plagiarism is extremely widespread there (one of my girlfriend's relatives is paying someone else to earn her teaching degree... and thus the cycle continues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The headline should read 'Faked research pervasive in China,' not 'endemic'. The existing headline means that faked research doesn't occur outside of China, which is, of course, completely false. The word 'endemic' is incorrectly used in the headline of the article itself, and occurs in the article, so it is not the fault of the submitter. The editors New Scientist ought to know better.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _The existing headline means that faked research doesn't occur outside of > China, which is, of course, completely false._

I was just curious about this. So, I looked up on the definition of 'endemic' and found the following definitions

       (of a disease or condition) Regularly found among particular people or in a certain area.

       Denoting an area in which a particular disease is regularly found

In my limited understanding, I think 'endemic' means that it is a trait or found regularly in a particular region. It does not mean it is not found outside that region. Right?

<comment><USER11> That was my initial understanding of "endemic"'s meaning as well. However the Oxford English Dictionary does have the following supplementary definition:

Quote: "2 (of a plant or animal) native or restricted to a certain country or area: a marsupial endemic to northeastern Australia"

Where interestingly, the OED does use the word "restricted" which means that the word could denote regional exclusivity as the parent interpreted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting and I looked this up in the Oxford Dictionary and found the following two meanings -

       1(of a disease or condition) regularly found among particular people or in a certain area:
       complacency is endemic in industry today
       [attributive] (of an area) in which a particular disease is regularly found:
       the persistence of infection on pastures in endemic areas

       2(of a plant or animal) native or restricted to a certain place:
       a marsupial endemic to north-eastern Australia

Clearly, 'endemic' in the current sense relates to definition 1 (a condition) rather than definition 2 (a plant or animal). I still think that there is no issue in English in the title. The title may have been a bit more euphemistic but I think it conveys the correct issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We've heard of this once before in S. Korea in the case of the veterinarian Hwang Woo-Suk.

[http://www.asianscientist.com/features/hwang-woo-suk- disgrac...](http://www.asianscientist.com/features/hwang-woo-suk-disgraced- stem-cell-scientist-south-korea/)

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33476693/#.UKoiNeSzpIE>

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15340240></comment>


The Rent Hypothesis - <AUTHOR> http://esoltas.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-rent-hypothesis.html <comment><USER5> > Rents are not always bad. Protections for intellectual property make sense > not in spite of the rents they generate, but rather because of them. A > patent, after all, is a temporary monopoly. These monopoly rents give > incentives for innovation and allow innovators to cover the costs of > research and development.

This is a weird way to talk about IP and rent. Is profit from IP necessarily rent? The problem is that "rent" is defined as "profits earned above what would be earned in a competitive market," but "competitive market" isn't well- defined until you define a system of rights (namely property rights). Markets are just systems of trade, and "trade" is the exchange of _ownership_.

Thus, an action which most of us believe constitutes a violation of property rights (e.g. I buy a laptop and someone takes it from a cafe without my permission and then sells it to a third party) is not "trade in a competitive market." So is an IP right a legitimate instance of ownership? Many people (and most Western legal systems) consider it to be so. There are also people who _don 't_ consider it to be so, pointing out differences between physical property and intellectual property. And, to be clear, there are people who don't even accept certain aspects of well-accepted physical property rights.

<comment><USER6> The philosophy behind patents is that they encourage the sharing of research so that the total cost of rnd to society is minimized. Whithout ip protection, firms would rely on trade secrets. They would still charge more for their products but a competitor would have to spend the money on research to compete. I don't know if you would still call the premium they could charge rent or if you would amortize rnd over the product lifetime.

<comment><USER7> Linux and the open source movement pretty much disproves that theory. Better (or "at least as good") quality kernels than the two biggest software companies and biggest defenders of intellectual property rights on the planet could manage.

We should really look at the evidence rather than repeating the mantra.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if Linux/Open Source/Free Software disproves the theory, or actually proves it.

The argument would be: Microsoft and Apple feel that existing IP protections on software would not sufficiently prevent competitors or consumers from 'stealing' the results of their work. So, they don't release the source code. Because they don't release the source code, there's a duplication of effort between Microsoft, Apple, and any other kernel-writers.

If there existed extremely strong IP protection laws for software, that required release of source (like a patent, basically), then Apple and Microsoft might release source, duplicate less effort, and their disadvantage to Linux would be reduced.

Open Source is what happens when you have a system that encourages these secrets to be shared. The _only_ difference is, Linux manages to get R&D effort without the benefit of a monopoly-grant, or indeed, without any direct profit motivation.

<comment><USER7> Apple didn't manage to build a decent kernel themselves so took a "free" one. Nothing to do with stealing their work. You are aware that Apple uses an open source kernel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the beginning of civilization, the research budget for the invention of fire was zero, while the benefits of fire were incalculable. Compare this to the development costs of the next generation of Boeing aircraft relative to the small improvements in air travel. This dynamic has enormous implications for the presumed benefits of increases in government spending beyond some low base.

Over time and with increasing complexity, returns on investment in society begin to level off and turn negative. Once the easy irrigation projects are completed, society begins progressively larger projects covering longer conduits with progressively smaller amounts of water produced. Bureaucracies that started out as efficient organizers turn into inefficient obstacles to improvement more concerned with their own perpetuation than with service to society. Elites who manage the institutions of society slowly become more concerned with the their own share of a shrinking pie than with the welfare of society as a whole. The elite echelons of society go from leading to leeching. Elites behave like parasites on the host body of society and engage in what economists call "rent seeking," or the accumulation of wealth through nonproductive means--postmodern finance being one example.

Excerpt from: [http://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global- Crisis/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Currency-Wars-Making-Global- Crisis/dp/1591845564)

<comment><USER10> David Graeber has made me not trust any allusions to archeological events which aren't based in archeological understanding. We have had bureaucracies since at least the Sumerians, and its growth has not been monotonic across the last 5,000+ years, which the paragraph you quoted implies.

Presumably many people died or were injured, and property and landscape burned down during the development of fire as a commodity item. While there was no formal budget or currency, lives, property, and R&D time surely are not zero in the budget.

It's also a bit odd to refer to the incalculable benefits from a process done by our Homo erectus ancestor. The controlled use of fire surely pales in significance to our early tetrapod ancestors who learned to live on land.

<comment><USER11> > We have had bureaucracies since at least the Sumerians, and its growth has > not been monotonic

People gain experience as they age, but that doesn't mean people are wiser today than 1000 years ago... _because they 're different people_.

Similarly, bureaucracies and societies also "die" and dissolve.

<comment><USER10> I can't tell, but it seems that you agree with me?

That is, as given, the quote gives a sketch of cultural development which almost unconnected to archeology and history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> See also: The Law of Rent

Land, and natural opportunities in general, are the original and most fundamental source of rent.

Even the electromagnetic spectrum is monopolized. And although the holders of these exclusive rights do pay the FCC, they pay very little compared to the actual value.

Likewise, people pay very little in taxes compared to the true value of their land. Imagine if instead of having to pay income taxes and sales taxes, which disincentivize labor and business, we instead charged people for the use of land.

We could reform property taxes such that we exempt all building and improvement value, and just tax land.

This would encourage efficient use of land, reduce sprawl, and boost productivity because it would remove the deadweight loss of other taxes.

It would also be cheaper and simpler to collect, and less invasive.

<comment><USER13> My gripes with land tax and property tax is that they are linear.

They should be highly progressive. It should be so high that it would be more economical for you, if you own 10 apartments to sell one or few than to pay tax on all 10.

To avoid loopholes ... if you own entity that owns some land or property, you need to pay the tax as if that property was your own (minus the tax already paid by this entity).

Also arable land should have slower progression to not discourage efficient farming.

<comment><USER12> Taxing land by value encourages efficient farming. It will make farmers want to economize on land, just like a carbon tax would make people want to have fewer emissions.

Also, the gini coefficient for landownership, by value, is actually higher than income virtually everywhere. Thus, a land value tax is actually more progressive than an income tax.

Taxing by market value also raises the most revenue, for the same reason why a rational landlord only wants to charge market rent. Charging either more or less is just leaving money on the table.

And if it is less, the difference _will_ be pocketed by landlords. Because they know what the market value is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a very important topic as robotics and automation begin their exponential curve of running our lives. Who will own the robots? Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?

<comment><USER15> "Will the majority of humanity be enslaved to rent-seekers who own patents on a robot hinge?"

Actually, that's easy: No. Humanity will not be enslaved to a small number of capital owners.

But the reason isn't necessarily a happy one, which is that humanity will revolt and start destroying and probably kill lots of people and even potentially kill the goose laying the golden egg by destroying the robotic infrastructure. Should they fail to destroy it, then you still face questions as to who ends up with the power and how it is distributed after the fact; you can find places in history where there was a lot of blood and violence on a recurring basis to answer the question "who gets the power?" because the matter wasn't settled even after the first victory.

That's the outcome I'm more worried about, not the possibility of somehow getting 99% of the population "enslaved".

<comment><USER16> I don't think violent revolt is quite necessary. We certainly seem to be seeing a non-violent revolt happening in the entertainment industry. People, unhappy with the way the music and movie industry have been trying to leverage their monopolistic power over certain franchises, have turned to non-violently pirating media, to the point that, for a lot of people, and many properties, the easiest mode of obtaining them _is_ piracy.

Étienne de La Boétie wrote in one of his earliest writings 'Discourse on Voluntary Servitude"[0] that tyrants only have power because people voluntarily give it. All that the people must do to overthrow the tyrant is to just sit down on the ground and give up helping him, because the tyrant has no true power of his own.

One of the more reassuring aspects about the Internet and the global economy is that ideas can spread in an instant, and it really enables people to be able to freely associate, even in many cases despite their governments' express attempts to prevent them from doing so. I think the Internet is growing a sense of global community, where it's a lot harder for the average joe to think of someone on the other side of the planet as a faceless enemy, specifically because it puts a face on people.

And it also allows us to trade with so much more ease. It doesn't matter if it's in dollars or bitcoins or euros or whatever. Currency is whatever is convenient. And the technology we have today makes it incredibly more convenient than ever before.

So in sum total, I think it means that it's so much easier today to just ignore the tyrants and go about life in your own way, on your own terms. The more people do that, the less support the tyrants have, until they either capitulate to be able to capture at least some of the pie for themselves, or starve to death.

[0] granted, the full text is a bit childish in its view of the world, but I think there are some decent take-aways to be had.

<comment><USER17> > All that the people must do to overthrow the tyrant is to just sit down on > the ground and give up helping him, because the tyrant has no true power of > his own.

I think the fear here is that at some point the relevant servants of the tyrant will all be technological constructs unable of sitting down. If we're really careful about making sure our robot army doesn't revolt then what happens when a tyrant controls them?

<comment><USER16> I would call that a phobia, not a fear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wait. Historically, the purpose behind patents was to spur _the theft of other states' property_, not "innovation". The King would grant a patent to whatever foreign engineer was willing to immigrate with a particular invention or industrial technique that another state was keeping secret (printing presses and coal refining both crossed the English Channel that way). The same language of "patent" was used for early colonial charters, too, because it was the same process: somebody willing to take something from somebody else is granted (some) legal protection by the state that benefits from that taking.

Patents were developed as a way to aid piracy, not a way to prevent it.

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems that he's mostly considering the value of the idea of economic rents in terms of how well they explain corporate profits as a means of testing the idea of economic rents themselves. However, the core idea of economic rents comes from analyses of land rents and monopoly rents in the 19th century: application to contemporary corporate profits is a derivative application of the idea.

Land rents, for example, were the rents generated by idle 18th and 19th century gentility simply for inheriting the land at the basis of economic production in an agricultural economy, rather than for contributing useful labor towards agricultural production. This idea has gained renewed attention with the rise of extreme inequality and inherited capital.

He also seems to be conflating these different kinds of rents together: land rents, monopoly rents, IP rents. The economic value of IP rents can be easily seen in patent trolling, defensive patents, &c. But trying to explain the corporate profits in terms of unspcified "rents" sound more like a project to discredit the idea of economic rents by conflating a lot of variables. That might be because I'm skeptical that economic rents are a predominant explanation of rising corporate profits, of course.

<comment><USER20> It's true that I'm talking about all different types of rents in the article. I've written about land rents and land taxes here, if you're interested: [http://esoltas.blogspot.com/2012/06/on-land- taxes.html](http://esoltas.blogspot.com/2012/06/on-land-taxes.html). Also, as old as the Henry George analysis of land rents is, it is still quite relevant. If you look at some of the rebuttals to Piketty's capital (eg., this one: [https://ideas.repec.org/p/spo/wpecon/infohdl2441-30nstiku669...](https://ideas.repec.org/p/spo/wpecon/infohdl2441-30nstiku669glbr66l6n7mc2oq.html)), what you see is that most the growth in capital/income ratios comes from increases in the value of land capital. That would suggest George is still relevant to our world, and that conversations about IP might be secondary.

<comment><USER19> Thanks, I've long wished there was a well-informed contemporary reappraisal of Henry George. There were a few municipalities in the U.S. that went to land value taxation in the late 19th century, but their economic history is not especially remarkable. Most, IIRC, have shifted to conventional property taxes, mostly because the original impetus for Georgist taxes are now obscure and out of fashion, and there is a perceived value to having tax structures common to other municipalities (easier to attract businesses and professionals if taxes aren't unusual).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree with the author about the problem with rents; unfortunately this argument is almost always framed politically (including, probably not intentionally, this article).

The arguments he is making are logical, but the premises he is using are only true in the academic economics echo chamber. For instance, he doesn't even mention the fact that government is, almost by definition, either the largest or second largest rentier in modern America (their main competitor being "to- big-to-fail" financial institutions). This is probably unintentional on his part but not on the economists he mentions such as Tom Piketty and Paul Krugman, because of their personal politics. To exclude government from this discussion is probably not correct.

It is not hard to see evidence of this by the way... take healthcare.gov for instance. If your company had $500 million CASH to build a website, what level of quality could you produce? Government also encourages rent seeking by other actors in the economy, even leads to rent seeking becoming the main game in town. Real entrepreneurs end up getting hurt by this because it steals away resources from their customers. Also economists like Piketty and Krugman then paint all companies with a broad brush and advocate that their legitimately earned profits be redistributed, which thankfully the author of the article seems to be defending against.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm going to be proposing a solution to the issues with economic rent in a upcoming talk at the Texas Bitcoin Conference on March 29th at 9am.

The solution involves insuring the inalienable right to the full output of one's labor and a social contract that lets the economic rent seeking continue. It probably won't work, but sure has been fun unwinding the thread.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, impressive article especially considering it comes from (I think) a junior at Princeton [https://www.linkedin.com/pub/evan- soltas/29/5/b44](https://www.linkedin.com/pub/evan-soltas/29/5/b44)

My only gripe is that he thinks that entrepreneurship and investment are struggling. If they're struggling now, then they've been struggling through all of human history.

<comment><USER24> > My only gripe is that he thinks that entrepreneurship and investment are > struggling.

Entrepreneurship is extremely hyped right now, despite being at a relative low historically (Figure 1 of [1]). More companies are failing in their first year (Figure 4, 5, D1, D3 of [2]) and an increasing percentage of employment is at firms 16+ years old (Figure 2, A2, C2 of [2]).

Less people starting companies, more companies failing in the first year, more people employed at well-established companies. That sounds like entrepreneurship is struggling to me.

[1] [http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/resources/2015/...](http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/resources/2015/soe/2015_state_of_entrepreneurship_address.pdf) [2] [http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/...](http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2014/07/aging- america-increasing-dominance-older-firms- litan/other_aging_america_dominance_older_firms_hathaway_litan.pdf)

<comment><USER20> Someone beat me to posting the Kauffman research... Also, the investment to GDP ratio is here, although a lot of the decline was housing: [http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=14LZ](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=14LZ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> im posting this comment for my friend :

It's funny how high the inverse correlation is with CEO pay and start-up success. I think Shumpeterian forces may invert in the near future and leave these examples like Oracle/Larry Ellison relatively dated.

When automation dominates economic growth, you'll be in this situation where basic income is the only way most people can get by - how to facilitate that? 90% taxes on high capital gains incomes like in the mid-20th century? That's more of the communism angle, where fixed property becomes de-facto state owned. Pikkety doesn't get it, there was a good interview with Andreesen to that effect.

What about stuff like bitcoin and decentralized apps that are open source, thus not protected by rent-levy's in IP law, yet gain huge economic power directly through usage? Could basic income be tied into that? Perhaps indeed it could, a more decentralized alternative to the commie scenario (which probably isn't politically feasible in the US anyway, hopefully...)

\- Patrick Dugan @patrick_dugan

</comment><comment><USER26> Look at all the rent Apple is seeking on the new 12 inch Macbook, for example. In 2015 the world supply of 12 inch Macbooks increased suddenly and unexpectedly. Nobody saw it coming. The world simply has a great new product in it starting in 2015 that it didn't have in 2014 or 2013. On HN there were 1269 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9172373)

One thousand, two hundred, sixty-nine! The current front-page has 6-12 comments on most stories, and tops out at 59 for a popular OpenSSL security advisory people care about and are discussing, to up to 141 for a large piece of news about Tesla direct sales being allowed in NJ. (A big issue because people feel strongly about this.)

1269 comments on the 12 inch macbook. Clearly people feel strongly about the sudden discovery of 12 inch Macbook deposits worldwide! It's a totally new thing, amazing.

The top comment at that link states that this is a beautiful machine. Another comment says "The overall design of the new MacBook is revolutionary."

This is a spontaneous revolution that happened worldwide in 2015. Now let's turn to rents. As another poster said in the present thread[1],

"A graph of world economic growth since the invention of fire shows anything but diminishing returns however. If rent-seeking behaviour is increasing, it's because the pie is - at least on a global level - growing at an accelerating rate."

The amount of value this machine has for users is way more than the incremental increase in what was available between 1982 and 1983, for example, at the same number of inflation-adjusted dollars.

But that other poster continues in the same comment (still [1], in this thread):

"Elites always have and always will seek to take disproportionate shares of that wealth because they can."

Apple is an elite market-maker. Although there is a spontaneous increase in 2015 in the availability of the highly desirable 12-inch Macbook, in fact Apple is not giving them away at cost. Or even within 5% of cost. It has positioned itself as a rentier sitting on its laurels and enjoying the profits of the worldwide spontaneous existence of a large deposit of totally new 12 inch Macbooks. It is taking a _disproportionate share_ of the wealth, the actual, true, value that has just spontaneously sprung into existence this year without any work from Apple.

Out of nowhere, you have a trackpad that responds to a force-push.

Out of nowhere, you have a machine that weighs just a hair over 2 pounds, a full pound lighter than the previous 13-inch macbook air and 16% lighter than the previous, impossibly small 11-inch Macbook air. But with a full-size 12 inch retina display, and lasting 9 hours on a charge.

People want it. I want it. But Apple is hoarding this spontaneous innovation and creation. Truly, no clearer example could possibly be found of "Elites have and will always take disproportionate share of wealth", than Apple, which has secured a one hundred percent monopoly on a spontaneous natural resource that everyone could enjoy.

This is rent in action. It has led to a smart phone in every single person's pocket when they did it with the iPhone in 2007. It has led to a proliferation of tablet PC's that changed the face of mobile computing the world over, when they did it with the iPad.

And it makes my blood boil to see them do it with the 12 inch Macbook. It's just bald-faced theft of a disproportionate share of the world's wealth. They're even blatant about it, with this graph:

[http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c01b8d0e769...](http://www.patentlyapple.com/.a/6a0120a5580826970c01b8d0e769c0970c-800wi)

How can they get away with this? This is an absolute blatant boast that they are taking a disproportionate share of the wealth that is spontaneously created, and that they have absolutely nothing to do with. They do so at prices that show obvious and blatant rent.

Are we just going to idly sit by and let them do it? Even cheer them on?

 _(for the satire-impaired: yes)_

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9233624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9233624)

<comment><USER21> What you're describing is just smart business. Producing a desirable product that people choose to buy is not rent-seeking, it is the free market fulfilling a need/want at price people are willing to pay.

An example of rent-seeking however would be if Apple set up deals with schools and colleges to roll the cost of devices into their tuition, which is really mostly malinvestment paid with student loan debt. If the amount of student loans were to reach $1 trillion for example, the government might start talking about forgiving those loans or making them eligible for bankruptcy... if that happens, Apple doesn't have their profits clawed back, even though they actively contributed to the problem. That would be rent-seeking.

<comment><USER26> you didn't read the author's definition of rent, which was more technical than "rent-seeking". For example, if you self-publish an ebook for $49, nearly 100% of that would be considered rent by the author. Read his definition carefully.

<comment><USER21> My apologies, I got lost inside my own brain, as I often do. After re-reading I realize that I did not detect the tone of your commentary, so I respectfully withdraw any criticism of it. I still stand by my own statement however :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm happy to see frank and intelligent conversation about rent. There seems to be a general understanding that the wages earned and the capital inherited by the very tip of our society does not speak to high levels of merit but instead to some form of malfeasance or at least market failure.

But when pressed to pronounce what mechanism explains these impressions, theories depart - sometimes violently. There are hundreds of thousands of wealthy families in this upper crust and hundreds of millions of people churning in the domestic system that in part begets it. What's more, the finances of the US are owed to far more than domestic productivity - <USER2> example its role in the IMF and World Bank as well as its being the defacto fiat currency make international activity, macro- and eventually micro-, spanning between a billion or two people crucial to understanding its economy.

Any explanation of the impression that the class society forming in America is not due to actually earned wealth must be sufficiently complicated to capture around _2 billion_ people and close to a half of the globe! This is a tall order to demand of a blog post.

In any case, let us examine some of the questions the author asks - <USER3> particular about finance.

> Why does finance make so much money? Can it really cost that much to do what > financial intermediaries do?

There's a number of reasons. Moral hazard, quite plainly. Regulatory capture ([http://www.propublica.org/series/fed- tapes](http://www.propublica.org/series/fed-tapes)) too. These are domestic explanations and do go to some length to explain how these powerful enterprises are able to meet with law enforcement and regulatory bodies. Others say that HFT, legal barriers to trading, and delayed entry into IPO concentrate the gains of Wall Street into small hands. On the macro side Piketty offers a simple and compelling mathematical model (plus data to back it) that suggests that large wealth all on its own balloons exponentially over smaller wealth because both grow as an exponential over time but large starting wealth increasingly will win out in terms of total proportion - <USER4> would be exacerbated by the savings rate available to those 'in the know' of the finance industry (whose full time job it is to grow wealth through investment and speculation as fast as possible).

But in a country where it's difficult to find investments that grow fast enough to beat inflation, where do the mammoth amounts of growth that sustain and feed the highest levels of American finance come from? Outside the country, unfortunately. Take Soros who seems to have wizard like capabilities to predict the future given his alien levels of success 'speculating' on currency exchanges and international companies. Soros does not speculate on markets - at least not in the traditional sense. Nor do the top brass. Soros actively partners with the US government to install organizations in countries around the world encouraging their 'transition' to foreign investment - usually through revolution and regime change.

He, others who do the same, and those others in the sphere of 'civil society', are able to invest early in existing and new international companies as American companies consume the revenues and bring the customer base of newly freed local resources to the international community. The US government is happy to partner here because it can engineer regime change in its and its allies favor but launder the activity through private citizens and companies - this allows it to continue to wave the banner of self-determination, of individual rights and of international law.

Do these things count as rent seeking? Probably. Actually, almost certainly. But its important to understand how complicated - and more importantly opaque - the system that benefits the few is. I hope the conversation continues to make it mainstream - maybe some day we will be able to have a mass informed debate.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is entrepreneurship struggling. I would have assumed we were in an entrepreneurship bubble.

</comment><comment><USER28> Unrelated to the content - do people find that the bolding of linked words/phrases makes the article easier or harder to read?

<comment><USER29> Yes. I didn't realize they were links till I got to the ones labeled "here". If those hadn't been on the page I would have likely finished reading and left completely oblivious to the links.</comment></comment>


Revisiting thread priorities and the new GIL - <AUTHOR> http://www.dabeaz.com/blog/2010/02/revisiting-thread-priorities-and-new.html <comment><USER2> Can anyone explain shortly, or point to a source describing why is the GIL actually needed? Lots of sources say "it would make GC very complicated otherwise", or "current design would need lots of changes", but I cannot find any detailed answers. The question is - why cannot python migrate to a Boehm- like GC with "stop the world" step and kill the GIL completely?

What is the biggest problem?

Update: actually the official wiki turned out to have some of the answers... <http://wiki.python.org/moin/GlobalInterpreterLock> \- it seems that backwards compatibility (extensions, destruction timing) is the biggest problem

<comment><USER3> You're asking a bit more than is answered directly here, but it may help, if you haven't seen it yet (skip to the middle of the page): [http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/01/python-threads-and-the- glo...](http://jessenoller.com/2009/02/01/python-threads-and-the-global- interpreter-lock/)

<comment><USER2> Yup - that link's got a lot more details missing elsewhere. Thanks a lot!</comment></comment></comment>


Deletionpedia - A repository of deleted Wikipedia entries - <AUTHOR> http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307004></comment>


It Began in a Manger - <AUTHOR> https://literaryreview.co.uk/it-began-in-a-manger <comment><USER2> I have thought about this quite a bit recently, sort of the "how?" of christianity. I can never shake that jesus' lifespan coincided with the formation of the empire. Augustus was in power for his childhood, and tiberius for the remainder. You had this seismic shift in social and political policy of the continent's dominant power that rippled out over the following centuries.

It's a topic that I've always been curious about, how the backdrop late- republic and early empire created conditions for christianity to take root? Were there, dare I say it, other people like jesus that didn't have the same impact because the conditions weren't conducive?

</comment><comment><USER3> Late to this, but I have written why I believe in Christ, in some detail, at: [http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854587400.html](http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854587400.html) .

</comment><comment><USER4> > 'To dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a > revolution', writes Holland, 'is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is > to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a > Christian.'

Is the author seriously trying to assert that the process of societal improvement and the longing to live in a more just and fair world started with Christianity? That's a rather naive world view to carry...

<comment><USER5> In pre-Christian antiquity, the gods ruled all men absolutely, and the high ruled the low. It was simply not the place of commoners to dream of a better world. That was the purview of lords, of patricians, _maybe_ of scholars. The notion of equality is very much rooted in Christian thought. Pre-Christian peasants might've thought that having very little was perfectly just and fair, because they would never question that they were born lesser than their lord or king. The insight the Christians contributed was that all are created equal before God, and that all had moral authority and responsibility for their own actions. The example, as the article says, is Jesus, an ostracized and dangerous radical of ignoble birth taking on a mighty empire and winning the war for hearts and minds. This was heady, revolutionary stuff to an ancient European.

<comment><USER4> This is still a very Europe-centric analysis though. There are many non- European civilizations that precede Christianity though, are you talking about all of those as well?</comment></comment></comment>