MapSCII – Braille and ASCII map renderer for the console - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii <comment><USER2> As an author of the vector tile specification it is really exciting to see how many different things people can do with the format. People are using data in ways that constantly amaze myself and others. There is an ever growing number of tools that have been built around the format and the future seems bright. I really enjoyed your map, great job!

<comment><USER3> I wish there was more stuff happening outside of the Node ecosystem. It feels like _everything_ around vector tiles is written in Node these days; the only exception I can think of off the top of my head is TileServer-PHP.

And Node can be painful to work with on some platforms and in some circumstances, not to mention that JS is not everyone's favorite PL.

<comment><USER4> If you're more comfortable with Python, have a look at Mapzen's set of tools for working with MVT-formatted vector tiles: [https://github.com/tilezen/](https://github.com/tilezen/)

(Disclosure: I'm a Mapzen staffer.)

<comment><USER3> Perfect, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't listen, this thing is amazing. Kudos!

This is a wonderfully hacked project, exactly what I come to find in HACKER news.

Incredible, kudos again!

<comment><USER6> Thanks and enjoy :)

<comment><USER7> I completely agree this is awesome. Would be very interested in a detailed write up of every detail behind this project. In the meantime, you can just ride into the sunset knowing you've provided someone with their daily inspiration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The demo video reminded me of WarGames :)

Made a short video using [https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro- term](https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term) to get an even more 70s/80s feel, but some of the characters don't come out too well...

[http://vimeo.com/215864177](http://vimeo.com/215864177)

</comment><comment><USER9> Brilliant project. Congratulations.

What is the original source of the Tile Data? I'm totally ignorant on these topics and even after a pretty close look I can't see who provides the actual geographical data. Is this something that can be sourced from OpenStreetMap or something like that?

<comment><USER10> Says on disconnect: "map data © OpenStreetMap contributors" :)

<comment><USER9> Yeah I don't know why but I just didn't see it referenced initially even though it clearly is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Click and drag mouse events over telnet? What black magic is this?!

<comment><USER6> new old school magic ;) [http://www.xfree86.org/4.7.0/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking](http://www.xfree86.org/4.7.0/ctlseqs.html#Mouse%20Tracking)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought for a minute it was somehow zooming in on my current location and got freaked out, but then realized I'm just not that far from c-base at this moment, heh. :)

<comment><USER13> Am I missing something? If I hold `a` it zooms in on my location almost down to the street.

<comment><USER12> I meant in the demo video, which I didn't initially realize was asciinema.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is amazing.

I have to admit, though, that I felt _slightly_ disappointed that at the highest zoom levels the map does not resemble Dwarf Fortress terrain. ;)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is amazing, congratulations!

It happens that I'm building a game which has a CLI and map integration. I was going to left the map out of the CLI client but now there's a good chance I'll use your library sometime in the future :)

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know if you're interested in making the "telnet" experience better, but something I've seen used elsewhere is a well-known/advertised SSH login. At the very least you can enable compression on SSH connections. Compression level 1 is nearly free in terms of cpu.

For instance, try `ssh firstname.lastname@example.com`, and the password is again `joshua`.

If you're allowing anybody on the internet to SSH in, you could also use mosh (mosh.org) to make it feel even faster.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, mosh is _very_ CPU intensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very awesome!

Nitpick: If they want to make this Braille-useful, maybe instead of color- coding terrain types different chars should be used.

<comment><USER19> I don't think it's meant for blind people. Just that braille characters give consistent looking high resolution dots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why do people make terminal-based programs like this in NodeJS? I'm not trying to be snarky - it's a legitimate question. This program is relatively resource-intensive, and you're using NodeJS of all things to try to render things in the terminal. It seems like the most counter-intuitive tool for the job.

<comment><USER21> _> It seems like the most counter-intuitive tool for the job._

How so? What exactly do you think is more difficult about this in node than in other languages or frameworks? Is there something you would recommend as a better alternative?

As much as I like developing in C for fun, it's not a good pragmatic choice (unsafe, verbose, you don't need direct memory access to build an application like this one). Nor is bash, unless you think archaic syntax, primitive control flow, and a lack of modern language features are good things. If you'd suggest something like Python, it's basically exactly the same as node in terms of how high level it is, but (anecdotally) the package ecosystem is much richer in node and npm is easier to use than pip.

It's almost like people think because JavaScript started in browsers it should stay there and any other use case is somehow wrong or a hack. But ECMAScript is an open scripting language standard and has absolutely nothing to do with the DOM, or alert()s, or onclicks.

I write a lot of Java and C++ for pragmatic, work-related reasons, but if I need to write a command line application quickly I'll always come back to node. It's just so damn fast to develop with, and nearly everything I need is one npm install away.

<comment><USER22> But perl, python, ruby, and even bash have filled that role for years.

I'm also chiming in with a small amount of disgust at seeing nodejs in play, though at least this isn't an electron project.

<comment><USER21> _> disgust at seeing nodejs in play_

Do you know much about Hacker News? Justify your opinion or don't bring it here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23>
        telnet -E mapscii.me

May help mouse support a bit more by disabling the Escape Character ...

</comment><comment><USER24> I love this kind of stuff so much. Kudos.

I now need to find an orange plasma LCD and a trackball.

<comment><USER6> Its complelty self stylable (based on Mapbox Style definitions, [https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox-gl-style-spec/](https://www.mapbox.com/mapbox- gl-style-spec/)) - so no need for orange plasma, just set [https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii/blob/master/styles/dar...](https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii/blob/master/styles/dark.json#L17) to orange :D

<comment><USER24> Thanks, good to know they're not hardcoded but I need the real glow plasma

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Dang, this is super cool. Is there a way to specify a location, as in a city or coordinates, and have it come up on the map?

<comment><USER6> Not yet, heaps of CLI parameters in the ToDo though - until then, clone the repo and set it in [https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii/blob/master/src/Mapsci...](https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii/blob/master/src/Mapscii.coffee#L36) \- & thanks for the kudos ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> A map as it should be! Very impressive hack, and very much needed: this is one of the few things I couldn't do within the comfort of my terminal.

And it renders beautifully on my nearly 300-column-wide VTE. :)

</comment><comment><USER27> Did you add a blink command or something similar? On my terminal, the whole screen is constantly showing then hiding then showing again in 1 second intervals. Mac OS X 10.6.8, Terminal 2.1.2.

<comment><USER6> Very odd - na, that's a bug and not a feature, I'm just throwing color coded Braille characters at you ;) Most likely related to your Terminal version, [http://iterm2.com](http://iterm2.com) might help.

<comment><USER27> Thanks, iterm2 did indeed work great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Amazing work. What inspired / motivated you to create this?

<comment><USER6> Came across the vector tile format, fell in love with it, used it for some projects, idea came to mind -> wrote it as a side project :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are ... are there emojis in all the commits??

<comment><USER6> no, not in the inital one :) kinda freestyle gitmojis ([http://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me](http://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me))

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit confused about how this works. Can you just use markup like :zap: in a commit message, and GitHub will automatically replace it with an emoji? Or do you need to use some client-side scripts to handle that?

<comment><USER30> > Can you just use markup like :zap: in a commit message, and GitHub will > automatically replace it with an emoji?

Yes. GitLab does that too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Total old school videogame vibe, love it!

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a really cool hack - thanks!

</comment><comment><USER33> Great work! Inspiring hack!

</comment><comment><USER34> Now that's innovation.

</comment><comment><USER35> wow, emoji in github commit log..

</comment><comment><USER36> this is so cool! congrats</comment>


Why Wages Aren't Growing - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-21/why-wages-aren-t-growing <comment><USER4> Wages aren't growing because people aren't worth more. Most job growth is in low-skill jobs.

For wages to grow, _people have to be paid more than they 're worth_ as an economic unit. That's what unions are about. "More", as Samuel Gompers would answer when asked what he wanted.

This was a well understood concept in the 1950s, and was accepted by both management and labor in the major US manufacturing industries. The UAW - <USER2> company contracts of that era explicitly tied wages to increased manufacturing productivity. It still is somewhat accepted in Germany, but is dead in the US.

Part of what killed wage growth was the demise of Communism. Communism was once a serious ideological threat to capitalism. From the 1920s to the early 1980s, there was real fear in the business community that communism might work. It might deliver a better life to workers. There was competition in ideology, and capitalism had to provide an increasing standard of living or risk countries going communist. Communism never did deliver a better standard of living, but the presence of a competing system which more or less worked kept capitalism honest.

With the demise of the USSR, and China moving away from its strict communist roots, the competition disappeared. Capitalism became a monopoly. Then it started acting like one. There was no longer any need to deliver a better life to workers.

That's how we got here.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't explain it at all. If you look closely, corporate profits have been increasing (example compared to 90), but wages haven't. That means that workers have been more productive, but are getting paid less (they increased output/efficiency, but their wages have been stagnant).

That means that corporates have leverage over labour (ie, either importing from cheaper countries, or automation, or guest workers, etc).... My hunch is the increase of globalism (since the 90s) caused this. Communism fell, more skilled people available in the market, more open borders, etc... which gives global companies more leverage. It is very easy to spot:

[https://cdn.static- economist.com/sites/default/files/imageca...](https://cdn.static- economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/640-width/images/print- edition/20160326_FBC779_1.png)

<comment><USER6> The productivity gains are due to capital, not to any improvement on the part of the worker. When a more advanced machine lets you replace 10 unskilled workers with 1, you don't pay that operator 10 times the wage, you pay him the same wage or even less. Why less? Because there are 9 people waiting to take his job if he quits.

<comment><USER7> > Why less? Because there are 9 people waiting to take his job if he quits

This is the answer

<comment><USER8> I wonder where those 9 people are though. Locally, for a given job opening, that could perhaps be true. Nationally however, unemployment is at historically low levels in many Western economies; 4.3% in the UK, 4.4% in the US, 3.9% in Germany, 6.2% in Canada, 4.8% in New Zealand.

Which should then drive an increase in wages. But it hasn't, and economists don't know why - or at least as far as this armchair economist has read ;-)

<comment><USER9> The US unemployment rate is based on the labor participation rate, a measure of the percentage of people who are unemployed and currently looking for work. It does not account for people who are unemployed and not looking for work. There is a real surplus of labor and employers know it. The vanity statistic that the US publishes has no basis in reality.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's a very good description of U3, which is the headline rate the US typically uses. Specifically, labor force participation is usually a shorthand for overall workforce participation, looking at everyone of prime working age; that's not U3. All unemployment measures are linguistically indistinguishable from "labor force participation rate", so there's nothing special about the US there.

I agree that U6 and prime age labor force participation rates are both weak, and relevant to worker bargaining power, but to argue that U3 has no basis in reality is absurd.

If I'm looking for labor this month, my pool of applicants will be coming from the U3 pool, people who are actively looking for work.

High U6 unemployment suggests I might do better to raise wages slightly, rather than aggressively, if I urgently need workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> \- Two-income households: doubled the labor supply without making an equally large increase in demand ( _NOT A DIG AGAINST FEMINISM, JUST TALKING NUMBERS_ )

\- Automation. Not talking AI. Just old-fashioned mechanical engineering and micro-controllers. Not going to name any names, but almost every practical thing you buy is made in only a handful of factories, and those factories don't need very many people to run at full-tilt.[0]

\- BS Jobs. Most of the US defense spending is make-work for engineers/welders/managers/subcontractors/etc working on projects of dubious strategic value. It sure as hell doesn't go to the soldiers. 30% of hospital payroll is admin staff. Higher ed is the same story.

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-21/how- just-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-21/how- just-14-people-make-500-000-tons-of-steel-a-year-in-austria)

<comment><USER12> > Two-income households: doubled the labor supply without making an equally > large increase in demand

Interesting perspective. In Norway the consensus is that equal employment and the resulting doubling of productivity was a major force in increasing standard of living - way before the oil boom (corally: Sweden and Denmark are also rich/high standard of living - with no/hardly any oil industry).

<comment><USER13> It's worth noting that doubling the output of a tiny economy of 5 million people, and doubling the output of a large nation that in 1968 had half of all global manufacturing - are two very, very different things.

If you double America's output today, and take the GDP up toward $40 trillion - who is going to buy all of those products and services in the near term? Nobody, it couldn't happen over a short period of historical time (10-20 years); that supply could not be absorbed, it would be a disaster for the producing nation.

If you're Norway in 1990, and you have a $100 billion GDP, doubling that into a global economy of $28 trillion, is very feasible. If you're the US in 1990 with a $6.x trillion economy (20-25% of global GDP), doubling that quickly is essentially impossible. A global economy of $28 trillion can absorb an additional $100 billion in output from Norway fairly easily over a few years, assuming it's competitive / desired output. As a smaller economy selling into a massive ocean globally, you're dramatically less bound by the global growth rate; if you're the world's largest economy, you're tightly (not strictly) bound to global growth rates. From its smaller base, Norway can see huge economic gains and defy global growth rate limits; for example, imagine Norway having an Apple size company, that grew from $30b to $200b in sales over six or seven years, it would add 50% to their economy and that output could be easily absorbed by the global economy.

<comment><USER12> Good points - however, not sure if you're arguing against yourself here (or if you're talking about different time frames):

> If you double America's output today, and take the GDP up toward $40 > trillion - who is going to buy all of those products and services in the > near term? Nobody, it couldn't happen over a short period of historical time > (10-20 years); that supply could not be absorbed (...)

> If you're the US in 1990 with a $6.x trillion economy (20-25% of global > GDP), doubling that quickly is essentially impossible.

US GDP[1], inflation adjusted :

Dec 31, 1990 8.91 trillion

Dec 31, 2010 14.94 trillion

It's not quite double in 20 years, but it's closeish at 1.67x? (An actual question, I'm not sure if you'd consider it close). Looks like it'll be doubled this year - so I guess one could view that as the slow-down (the extra 7 years).

[1] [http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation- adjusted/table](http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-inflation-adjusted/table)

Apparently those numbers are in "2009" dollars - while the numbers in "current" dollars is more like 6 to 15 (as opposed to 9 to 16) in the same period - I guess this might have to do with the 2008 crash?

[https://bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls](https://bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Real compensation has been growing. It's just now a larger portion of 'compensation' is benefits rather than just wages.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB)

edit:

in the 60s/70s wages were 80% of compensation.

[https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/compensation-in- the-1970s.p...](https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/compensation-in- the-1970s.pdf)

wages are now 70% of compensation and 63% for public employees.

[https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf)

<comment><USER15> So if healthcare costs are benefits, some portion of the compensation is growing just because healthcare costs are growing. But that doesn't really provide any net gain in positive economic effects (such as through added disposable income).

<comment><USER16> Unless one is employed in healthcare.

<comment><USER17> One is usually _not_ employed in healthcare......

<comment><USER16> "In recent years, the proportion of workers employed in private-sector health services has exceeded 11 percent." says BLS in 2009 [https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/](https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks for supporting my point, in that 89% of the working population is "usually not employed in healthcare".

<comment><USER16> So back to the grandparent conclusion, employing 11+% of the workforce is not beneficial to the US economy?

<comment><USER15> It's not beneficial if the same or better output could be had with half of the inputs. I'm mostly comparing cost of healthcare in other first-world nations with universal healthcare here with the industry as a whole (as opposed to just the workforce). If you know the efficiency can be higher and you choose to operate less efficiently it's some form of the broken window fallacy - maybe the drafty window fallacy? You're basically paying people to move dirt from one place to another - with the excess of insurance claim/billing transactions as the new digital dirt.

Now if you're worried about the more immediate effects on the people displaced by moving to a possibly higher efficiency way of doing things - we'll that's a bigger general problem we have to solve as the displacement rate is seemingly already moving higher than the re-employment rate, and it threatens to accelerate for more areas than just better healthcare practices...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think there's another very simple, yet often overlooked, reason that wages aren't growing: information.

How do you decide how much to pay an employee? It's easy. You go online and see what the median wage in your area for the role you're seeking to fill. You then aim a bit lower than that either getting a below market rate hire, or giving them a psychological victory as they negotiate their wage up to the median. That's perfectly reasonable, but it's also in effect engaging in horizontal price fixing without so much as saying another word to another employer. This is an even better in cultures where discussing income and compensation is relatively taboo since workers themselves inhibit their own ability to effectively negotiate. Living abroad I was somewhat stupefied that "How much do you make?" and "How much is your rent"? and other such questions are perfectly normal.

Consider this thought experiment. Imagine employers were not allowed any access to historic or current wage data. They simply had to choose prices they felt appropriate for the work at hand. I think it's safe to say that wages would be much higher than they are now since naturally you would price wages relative to the value of the person being hired. Modern information not only allows but inadvertently encourages employers to engage in mass price fixing.

And in a world where employment is, more than ever, something that's very temporary (a quick search shows the average time of employment is about 4 years) - the price set for new hires is arguably the single biggest factor in long term wage levels.

<comment><USER19> > Imagine employers were not allowed any access to historic or current wage > data. They simply had to choose prices they felt appropriate for the work at > hand

I think employers would have to get a lot better at measuring the value produced by individuals, which always seems to have a chequered past with knowledge workers. Offering the going rate for an average employee is IMO a way of throwing your hands up and saying "I don't really know what this job entails or how good you'll be at it, but I know it needs doing so I'll offer what everyone else is"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why does everyone jump to "demise of unions"? There is a far simpler explanation. For decades official government policy (especially in the us and Japan) has been job creation. Have you ever heard of a politician that hasn't advocated for job growth? The policy tool deployed to create jobs has been to use the central bank (via its mandate to maintain employment) to inflate the currency. Inflation works to goose employment by decreasing the real cost of labor (because, sticky wages). [0]

Wages are not growing because of a policy to screw labor out of its earnings, and the policy is working. No reason to impute other mechanisms or make things unnecessarily complicated.

[0][https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for- hi...](https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-higher- inflation/)

<comment><USER21> This is ass backwards. Central bank/fed policy in the US, Europe, and Japan has consistently been to keep inflation low on behalf of the investor class for a long, long time now.

<comment><USER22> Investors and the Government are the first in line to profit from inflation, since it devalues the one thing only they can afford: debt.

And investments in the stock market, real estate or anything else than actual money are at least protected by usually rising with inflation.

The one group that suffers disproportionally from inflation are the elderly, who receive a fixed pension (/social security) based on their lifetime dues.

Right after that are employees, because wages typically lag behind when inflation picks up.

<comment><USER23> >And investments in the stock market, real estate or anything else than actual money are at least protected by usually rising with inflation.

Quantiative Easing is used as a tool to increase inflation by the central bank through buying stock. Of course this means stock keeps it's value with increasing inflation while everything else doesn't keep up with inflation. Obviously this is bad for those who don't own stock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > That means wages haven't kept pace with gains in productivity, as economics > says they should,

This is a misreading of economics. Total cost to hire for a job should match the productivity of that job.

Long ago when I worked for Boeing, the benefits package cost the company an additional 40% over one's pay. Add into that the cost of the so-called "employer's contribution" to social security, etc. I recently read that the benefits package these days can approach 100% of the salary. This likely reflects increasing health care costs, increased maternity leave, and all sorts of new benefits mandated by law, and the cost of the HR department needed to monitor compliance with the ever-changing employment laws.

Economically, these all ultimately come out of the workers' paychecks, one way or another. There isn't any free lunch (and if the company does offer a free lunch, it's accounted for as part of your compensation package and ultimately is reflected in a lower paycheck).

<comment><USER25> OK, fair enough. But, how are corporate earnings during this time? [https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/business/economy/corporat...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/business/economy/corporate- profits-grow-ever-larger-as-slice-of-economy-as-wages-slide.html) "CORPORATE profits are at their highest level in at least 85 years. Employee compensation is at the lowest level in 65 years." Maybe via taxes USA should provide an incentive to invest or to pay employees more. There is $250b in Apple's bank accounts, $100B in Google's coffers, $100+ in MSFT's...maybe they should pay more in salaries, invest it or whatever.

<comment><USER24> > Employee compensation

The article didn't say total compensation. Most articles only consider the paycheck as compensation, and do not include benefits.

<comment><USER26> The significant majority of jobs are not those with considerable non cash benefits, so I don't think it's worthy of much discussions. It's well known there is an increasing income and wealth gap, and it's the increasing portion of those with non benefit jobs that is problematic.

<comment><USER24> A properly done article would account for this. It's like doing a medical study and failing to account for the sex/age/etc characteristics of the people being studied. I.e. it's sloppy and can't be taken seriously. Even worse, such omissions may be intentional on the part of the author, and then the article tips into being propaganda.

I have seen articles (in the WSJ) that used total compensation. Meaning it is possible to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/the-economy- is...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/the-economy-isnt- broken.html)

 _In 2015, median household incomes rose by 5.2 percent. That was the fastest surge in percentage terms since the Census Bureau began keeping records in the 1960s. Women living alone saw their incomes rise by 8.7 percent. Median incomes for Hispanics rose by 6.1 percent. Immigrants' incomes, excluding naturalized citizens, jumped by over 10 percent.

The news was especially good for the poor. The share of overall income that went to the poorest fifth increased by 3 percent, while the share that went to the affluent groups did not change. In that year, the poverty rate fell by 1.2 percentage points, the steepest decline since 1999.

The numbers for 2016 have just been released by the Census Bureau, and the trends are pretty much the same. Median household income rose another 3.2 percent, after inflation, to its highest level ever. The poverty rate fell some more. The share of national income going to labor is now rising, while the share going to capital is falling._

<comment><USER28> Ok but that doesn't really reverse the decades-long trend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wages don't grow because there isn't a shortage condition for labor. If there was a shortage, the price of labor (wages) would increase.

From what I've read, it became fed policy to make sure this labor shortage condition doesn't happen around the 1980s as a response to the stagflation of the 1970s. It was believed that one of the causes of the inflation was wage growth.

From what I understand, wages tend to go up when the red line is below the blue line in this graph, and you'll notice the red line is under the blue line a lot more before 1980 vs after. You'll also notice interest rate spikes start around the point where the red line meets the blue line, and spikes of unemployment happen soon after.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=3uOu&utm_source=direct&...](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=3uOu&utm_source=direct&utm_medium=exported- chart&utm_campaign=myfred_referrer)

<comment><USER30> _> If there was a shortage, the price of labor (wages) would increase._

If price of labour was increasing, that would suggest that there isn't a shortage[1].

 _" In economic terminology, a shortage occurs when for some reason (such as government intervention, or decisions by sellers not to raise prices) the price does not rise to reach equilibrium. In this circumstance, buyers want to purchase more at the market price than the quantity of the good or service that is available, and some non-price mechanism (such as "first come, first served" or a lottery) determines which buyers are served."_

What I believe you are saying is that we have reached equilibrium, so there is no pressure to push prices up or down when measured across the population as a whole (individuals may still see increases and decreases).

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

<comment><USER31> I don't know if we have reached equilibrium. But I think it's more complicated when it comes to the labor market to just say "oh ok, we'll raise wages to get rid of the labor shortage." This is especially true if the shortage is in a high skilled position. For example, if there is a labor shortage in software engineers, raising wages won't help, at least not right away, because people will need to learn the skills required to do the job and maybe go to college before they can fill the shortage gap. I don't think people are sitting there saying "I need a job, but you won't pay enough so I'll stay unemployed," at least not in the higher skill fields.

<comment><USER30> > For example, if there is a labor shortage in software engineers, raising > wages won't help

As long as it prices businesses out of the market it does. Mom and Pop probably cannot compete with Google and Facebook, so when the price rises Mom and Pop will stop hiring developers. When they do that reduces the demand for developers. With reduced demand, the existing supply comes closer to meeting the needs of what demand remains.

Demand, of course, does not measure what someone would like to have, it measures what they are willing and able to pay for. And a rising price usually means that more and more will no longer be able to pay the price (money isn't infinite). I expect not even the likes of Google and Facebook are willing to pay infinitely (the value of having a developer stops at some price point), so eventually even one of them will have to step out of the market if price reaches that level, leaving all of the developers in the world theoretically available to work for the last company who can still afford them.

This is why shortage and rising price typically do not go together. As long as the price is rising, then demand should be falling (especially when it is something like labour that quickly loses appeal with rising price), until the point that the supply and demand meet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Wages are growing dramatically, just not near Bloomberg HQ.

[https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages](https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages)

[https://tradingeconomics.com/south- africa/wages](https://tradingeconomics.com/south-africa/wages)

</comment><comment><USER33> Labor productivity is up.

That means workers are producing more per hour for employers.

Yet wages are flat.

Who captured that extra productivity?

And what changed in the economy to allow them to capture incremental worker productivity instead of the workers themselves?

<comment><USER34> The Marxian response, although unpopular, is the rate of exploitation has increased. For Marx, technological development leads to more constant capital versus moving capital (i.e more machinery and tools of production) being employed which means that there is a drop in demand for labour-power; while the total value inputs and outputs are identical, only the composition of the value has changed. The falling demand for labour-power means that labour has less of a negotiating place at the table which can lead to real wages decreasing.

(Edit: Why are my comments receiving instant downvotes within less than a minute of posting? Who exactly is doing this, without explanation, and more importantly _why_?)

<comment><USER35> Because it's HN, where opinions other than "hooray libertarian technocracy" are frowned upon.

<comment><USER34> I know what you mean, but I wasn't even espousing an opinion here; I was offering the view of a particular school of economics which has found a recent resurgance in academia from names like Anwar Shaikh and Richard Wolff. I simply can't think what would mean that someone comes along, reads my comment, for whatever reason disagrees with the fact (not the view, as there is very little view in my comment) and then clicks the downvote button.

I'm sure I've read that dang has said that downvotes shouldn't be used to mark opinions you disagree with - yet here we are. I would really appreciate explanations, surely this is not above those people who have 500 karma - <USER3> I am, they are entrusted with extra powers over the content on the website; perhaps if they behave in such a way antithetical to the idea of Hacker News (that of sharing strangely interesting ideas and perspectives) perhaps they should not have that ability.

<comment><USER36> > _dang has said that downvotes shouldn 't be used to mark opinions you > disagree with_

I didn't say that. People think this, mainly because they hear it from other people who think this, but it has never been the policy on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Everyone should read Piketty.

As for why wages aren't growing, there's many reasons. For one, automation and increases in efficiency undercut wages. In economic terms, income from capital is increasing faster than income from wages.

Second, immigration. For example, in Canada, if you can't fill a job at a certain wage, you can bring in temporary foreign workers or sponsor an immigrant. This means the wage of that job will never go up because if the labour market is tight, you can simply draw from another labour pool. The US and most western countries have been affected by this.

So on one end you have less need for labour and on the other, a limitless labour pool. Low 'unemployment' stats don't necessarily tell the whole picture since low wages drive up employment, but because the demand for that labour is only at that wage, it doesn't put upward pressure on wages.

<comment><USER38> I'm curious of what you think of Piketty's policy suggestions in Capital.

<comment><USER37> They'd reduce inequality but will never be fully realised as it'd be too politically unpopular. Perceived fairness is more important to most people than equality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think the author is missing something- when labor productivity goes up due to automation, the increase in profits goes to whoever owns the machines not to the people working them. I mean after all, if you invest money in some equipment, you expect to be the one to get the returns on that investment. Altering that equation could take, as the author suggests, an outside force such as labor unions or government intervention- but the only long term solution is probably for the people who own the machines, and the people who work the machines, to be the same people.

</comment><comment><USER40> As a software developer in EU, sometimes I find it absurd that I'm only paid 2x as much as the average office drone for which the company would see no difference if their department disappeared tomorrow.

The only way to be paid according to your real value is to freelance or start your company.

<comment><USER41> And there are major differences even in the EU. The wage gap for a developer in the V4 compared to e.g. Germany (UK/Switzerland in a broader context) is staggering.

[https://www.wageunion.eu/](https://www.wageunion.eu/)

[https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does- a-w...](https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-wage-gap- look-like/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how much online job marketplaces are driving this. If talent is fluid then the very top talent will iterate through jobs with increasing higher wages as it's easy to find that talent. For the rest, hiring managers may see you as replaceable limiting your ability as an employee to demand higher wages.

</comment><comment><USER43> the internet + globalization mega-trend unleashed in the 1990s has caused deflationary pressure on wages of any blue-collar labor that has the property of being easily transferable to the developing world. The effect lingers for decades are capital assets are slowly shifted around the world.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is a really poor article. Wages are growing, and have doubled in the developing world since 1990. China has seen 13% per year wage growth since 2000. Japan is not the world. Worldwide, labour's share of income has declined modestly, but that can be fully explained by the global decline in the labour participation rate:

[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS)

And a declining LPR is an expected result of higher incomes (more people can afford to go to school, live on government assistance and retire when per capita income increases).

</comment><comment><USER44> This is a really poor article. Wages _are_ growing, and at their fastest rate in history. Japan is not the world. Worldwide, labour's share of income has declined modestly, but that can be fully explained by the global decline in the labour participation rate:

[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.ZS)

And a declining LPR is an expected result of higher incomes (more people can afford to go to school, live on government assistance and retire when per capita income increases).

</comment><comment> taw-an "For unions to regain ground, governments will have to give them a nudge. Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich recommends Washington make it easier to form unions, impose harsher penalties on companies that fire organizers, and banish "right-to-work" laws in states that allow workers to benefit from unions without paying dues, considered a back door to weakening them."

Well no duh, we're in this mess because worker's powers have been completely gutted. But does he actually believe this current administration or Congress will give workers an inch?

</comment><comment><USER45> Wages aren't growing because people don't ask for more money. It's not any more complicated than that.

Go to a store - there is a price on the product. That is not the real price. You can negotiate a different deal, but almost nobody does.

So you have a society of price takers, not price makers.

In that society, the people who set the price are people with the money - business owners/managers and they will set the price as low as they can get.

People need to ask for more money. Then they will get more money. It's not much more complicated than that at the core.

</comment><comment><USER46> I don't really hear anyone talking about this often, but is it possible that there is systemic deflation across the economy as a result of efficiencies and prices falling in the digital age? As companies get squeezed on price due to more efficient competitors and high tech alternatives to their products, they have less money to pass onto workers. When profits are fat, companies can afford to pay workers a lot.

This would explain why the inflation rate has been much lower than some people (like the Federal Reserve) had expected.

<comment><USER47> Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Corporate profits have been hitting record highs for years now [1]. Companies simply aren't passing along these profits to their workers.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-hit-new- rec...](http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-hit-new-record- high-2012-11)

<comment><USER41> _Companies simply aren 't passing along these profits to their workers._

Best tldr

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> How does the wage growth is calculated? I work remotely so I have to be employed as a contractor. I doubt I'm included. Significant portion of my colleagues are "permtractors" with companies registered in Channel Islands and other places. Another example is a friend that is paid only half legally.

I don't think the situation is as bad as press is describing.

</comment><comment><USER49> > overall labor costs aren't growing nearly as quickly as they did in the > years before the 2008 financial crisis, even though Europe is enjoying a > surprising revival.

What if access to cheap debit has allowed people to survive in jobs that don't pay enough, preventing their exit from the workforce (dwindling supply) from pushing the price of labour up?

</comment><comment><USER50> Wages aren't growing because ZIRP is artificially increasing demand for plant and equipment (a labor substitute). When Fed Funds get to about 3%, I bet we'll start to see some healthy wage growth.

</comment><comment><USER51> Can you have both "creation of lots of jobs" by government policy

and at the same time

Higher wages for all workers

?

</comment><comment><USER52> For much of big picture economics, what we do is define a few fundamnetal concepts with which to narrate the economic story.

The 20s - 80s "theory" that you refered to narrates its story with productivity and bargaining power. It makes sense and is based on microeconomic fundamentals. It makes sense for union-esque bargaining and politics. It also implies a constant relationship between production and wages.

Like any narrative choice, the productivity-bargaining power story works better in some cases than others. For example, productivity (and output generally) is just more abstract in 2017 than 1967^. It's hard to adjust for inflation and its hard to measure productivity of office/info workers.

An alternative set of fundamentals to narrate our stories is now gaining popularity because of the Picketty "family" of economists. It's early to tell if that school of thought will have influence on economics and policy, but for now we have some new terms, new characters for our story.

In this corner of economics, labour & capital are the main protaginists (or antagonists :)

All net income in an economy goes to either labour or capital, our two forms of income. For example, my back-of-the-envelope^^ suggests that about $60bn has been paid by Google to employees in the 10 years since IPO. About 600bn in capital has been created in that time.

Should we define this as high labour productivity or capital productivity? Either way, I think the point illustrated is that economic productivity/growth can go to one or both of these. There's no economic rule ensuring proportions remain constant.

So, what is capital? To dip a toe into Marxist grand history, capital was mostly land. Then it was mostly factories. Today, it is more ethereal. The only way to define it is financial terms: discounted future income. $600bn in capital is a $40bn annuity.^^^

Anyway... I don't have any big profound conclusions to share. I just think labour-capital aggregates will continue to be adopted in these discussions.

For example, if the post work automated future happens, I think these terms will be more useful. If Elon Musk automates the machine that makes the machine, making driverless cars,then what is he creating? It will be a bundle of capital requiring very little labour inputs to generate value. You could try to describe it in labour productivity terms, but it starts to get ridiculous and totally unlreated to wages.

^ I ws starting to write in examples, but stopped. This needs its own thread.

^^Just assumed 150k global average salary, I could be way off.

</comment><comment><USER53> Increased population + Increased automation = Huge demand for jobs = Lower wages . In my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER54> Search for 'velocity of money'. It's a Fed chart and shows what happens when every citizen, business and government is swimming in debt. You printed all that money and gave it to the banks, but you didn't relieve the debt logjam. Oops.

<comment><USER55> Velocity of money doesn't have much to do with debt; money is a medium for negotiating the exchange of value between economic actors, the transmission fluid, as it were. If you were happy to get paid in very small increments very regularly, and similarly pay for other products in very small increments at very high speed, the economy could function with a numerically small amount of money, moving very quickly. Since that's not practical, we need lots of slack, buffer as it were, for converting our labour into money, before we in turn consume that money by exchanging it for other goods and services. There's a direct tradeoff between velocity of money and the supply of money; you need less of the latter when the former is high.

Debt is about moving around consumption and production relative to one another. It's inherently based on predictions about the future, which is why it's risky.

"Printing money and giving it to banks" is not how it works either. Rather, the government prints currency and buys debt with it. The debt represents future money, and is an asset today. But the currency isn't just given away.

The relationship, such that it exists, is thus indirect; buying debt increases money supply which makes up for low velocity of money.

<comment><USER54> Spoken like a true believer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> >The very first thing any college freshman learns in Economics 101 is the law of supply and demand.

I beg to differ. They do not learn this.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a problem which has, unsurprisingly been attacked from the angle of Marxian economics rather than only orthodox economics; Andrew Kliman who is particularly famous within Marxian economics for his TSSI solution to the charges of Marx's inconsistency in Vol. III of Capital has addressed it in the context of the operation of capitalism in general in his book _The Failure of Capitalist Production_ [0], though its name spells something already reiterated many times by Marxists, he takes the lens through the panic of 2008 and what has followed it. It's a very good read even for those who aren't looking into Marxian economics.

He finds, contraray to mainstream Left accounts of the economy that "U.S workers are not being paid less in real terms than decades ago; their real pay has risen and their share in the nation's income has not fallen. It is higher now than it was in 1960 and it has been stable since 1970." nevertheless he pursues a Marxist analysis throughout the book even bearing this seemingly fatal attack to claims of worker exploitation in mind.

For a more theoretical investigation into the roots and effects of automiton on employment, I must recommend Ernest Mandel's short work "Marx, the Present Crisis and the Future of Labour"[1] from 1985 which marshalls statistics, with examples from Japan, for the validity of Marx's claims.

[0] [https://libcom.org/files/The%20failure%20of%20capitalist%20p...](https://libcom.org/files/The%20failure%20of%20capitalist%20production.pdf)

[1] [https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html](https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html)

</comment><comment><USER57> The economics are lying.

YES, I mean all the economic things together is a big fraud.

With more and more tools help us track money.There are more clear that they are wrong.

We are slaved by money.

<comment><USER58> Low effort post? Why don't you provide more context and sources for your opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> TL;DR

For real growth to happen, paychecks need to be fatter.

But not all companies are willing to tie performance with pay.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a terrible TL;DR. The article is about wage growth first and foremost not economic growth. The article actually does a pretty decent overview of the many factors affecting wage growth, from the macro factors (cross border labor competition, automation) and micro factors (weaker unions, more unequal distribution of profits within firms).

<comment><USER30> _> weaker unions_

In Canada, where we have experienced wage stagnation that mirrors the US quite closely, our unions started to get stronger _after_ that stagnation began. The peak union years in Canada were in the 80s and 90s, more than a decade after the incomes stopped growing. While unionization has declined slightly since that time, unionization remains quite strong, and Canada is named the 6th strongest union country in the world.

Despite that, wages have remained stagnant regardless. It seems this one is completely beyond what unions can achieve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Weird. Nothing in this article seems to relate to reality. I wonder if this is a story to keep people healthy minded, who are too scared to switch to another company or two incompetent.

I mean, we know for about a decade now that the way to get raises is by switching the company every 3 years. That's just how it is. And there are even people that go corpA->corpB->corpA to make more money.

It would be reasonable to assume though that this kind of growth is shared unequally. Some people just can't make that step to accept that this is the system now. Some people really wouldn't get a job at the next company no matter how hard they try. And some people are just shy.

But I don't think that the average here on HN is from the second group. It should be common practice for people here to get their raises by getting new jobs.</comment>


The regress argument against Cartesian skepticism (2012) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://individual.utoronto.ca/jmwilson/Wilson-The-Regress-Argument-Against-Cartesian-Skepticism.pdf <comment><USER2> The paper argues that, because it is possible to doubt whether you are doubting, and to doubt whether you are doubting you are doubting, and so on and so forth, that this is an infinite regress, and because infinite regresses are ugly and inconvenient, we should just throw out the whole chain and declare ourselves sure of the world.

Frankly, this is a bad argument. The author mentions you can solve the regress by simply denying that you can even know your own mental states, but dismisses this on the grounds it doesn't help reach the desired conclusion. (!!!) The author also goes to the trouble of claiming that some infinite regressions are 'psychologically stable' while others are not; no real argument is provided as to why it matters whether a regress is such or not, except that the author wants to get rid of inconvenient ones but not convenient ones.

The way to attack Cartesian skepticism is on its grounds and assumptions, not to accept the premises. Descarte was right, if you assume his priors. There are many people who do this, but the most systematic and determined one is probably Heidegger. I suppose that people who want to believe in 'pure reason' are not especially likely to go down that route, though.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you. Replace "the external world exists" with some logical tautology such as De Morgan's Law (not (A and B) <=> not A or not B). Formalism has all sorts of gotchas, so I'm going to assert that it's possible to be skeptical of De Morgan's Law being a tautology...

...which - as the author describes - implies I can go down that infinite spiral of regressive speculation. But this is not the reason that De Morgan's Law is a tautology.

Even worse, the author's argument really let's us assert anything, doesn't it? I've read the paper twice and I can't see any protections from using this argument to assert a contradiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In short, could your mind be so utterly irrational that that you're mistaken about the most basic questions of what you yourself know or think?

It's far from a purely hypothetical scenario. After all, while dreaming we often follow nonsensical or self-contradictory chains of reasoning while thinking they make perfect sense – hence the term "dream logic". There are ways to try to identify that you're dreaming, and you can train yourself to use them more consistently, but they're far from perfect. Sometimes it just won't occur to you to do a dream test, and sometimes you'll fool yourself into thinking you passed the test.

In my opinion, the only real solution is a pragmatic one. You can never be certain that you currently have any degree of rationality, and so you can never be truly certain about anything, period. However, you may as well _assume_ you're rational for the purpose of making decisions. After all, if you're currently 100% irrational, then you're going to make 100% nonsensical decisions, and that's all there is to it. It doesn't really matter what you believe or disbelieve, so it doesn't hurt to falsely believe that you're rational. And there no point hedging on any action on the chance that you're being irrational, because the idea that "if i'm irrational, it's best to take/not take action X" is itself validated by rationality.

That said, there are degrees between complete rationality and complete irrationality. In dreams you're often still partly rational, and you can also get a sort of replica of rationality by training yourself to follow specific thought patterns during times when you _are_ mostly rational (i.e. awakeness). So it is theoretically possible to hedge based on the possibility that you're dreaming – albeit not very useful, since making bad decisions in a dream doesn't usually have any serious long-term effects. However, if you want to narrow things down to more specific possibilities than "I'm dreaming" – as you get to scenarios in which you're hypothetically being less and less rational, it becomes less and less useful to hedge on those scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Does the external world exist, as it so concretely seems?"

I know this is not the direction of the paper (or question) but physics already gives us an astounding 'No!'.

<comment><USER6> Only if you subscribe to some pretty tortured interpretations of quantum mechanics. QM still describes an objective state of the external world, and exactly how it changes over time.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's what the poster meant. I think it was probably more along the lines of how you experience e.g. 'light' vs. what it actually _is_ :

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4

(The vast majority of light is effectively _invisible_ to you.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cartesian skepticism always assumes some external entity manipulating your mind. So, at least you can be sure you have a mind and there is an external world.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it pretty easy to convince the world exist. If you assume you yourself exist, and think, and if you assume the contrary, that the world out there doesn't exist, you should ask yourself what alcohol and drugs are.

Because if the world out there doesn't exist, these things shouldn't effect the way you think. If something is simulating the world for you, you have to assume every time you drink, that thing alters the way you think somehow, which means it can access your actual real brain, whatever it is.

Then that brain of yours, even if it's outside the world, must be so similar to all the other brains you see, which are effected similarly by those same substances.

<comment><USER10> > you should ask yourself what alcohol and drugs are.

A way of inducing an altered state of consciousness, just like sleeping and meditating. This isn't problematic for the "brain in vat" scenario.

<comment><USER11> If the brain is in a vat, why is it affected by alcohol outside the vat?

Sleeping and meditating are both internal to the brain, but alcohol only becomes internal to the brain if it has some physical access to the brain.

For the brain in a vat theory to work, the computer controlling the simulation would have to monitor the amount of alcohol that is in the bloodstream of the simulated being, and adjust the alcohol in the vat accordingly?

<comment><USER5> I'm confused.

IF a consciousness was housed in a black box (a brain, but we're ignoring it's internals) AND that black box had inputs connected to a computer that can send signals to the black box that it WOULD interpret as signals of sight, sound, touch, hunger, intoxication, etc.

THEN how is one suppose to conclude that they are not just a consciousness in a box because they 'feel' drunk after they 'feel' they've ingested alcohol.

There's no need to monitor alcohol levels because the alcohol hasn't been proven to exist!

<comment><USER12> I think your confusion arises from the fact that this discussion is about two different thought experiments: the _brain in a vat_ [1] (a la _The Matrix_ ) and proper solipsism (which implies no real world at all, not even a vat). [2]

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I Develop a Temporal Database in the Advent of Byte-Addressable NVM - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@johanneslichtenberger/how-i-develop-a-temporal-database-storage-engine-in-the-advent-of-byte-addressable-nvm-ba152860e71 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

the system has its roots in a university project, for which Marc Kramis had already predicted in 2008 that fast random, very fine granular reads are the key to efficient persistent, durable data structures, which retain its previous versions. We drastically shrink the data to write due to the asymmetry between reads and writes. Batched, sequential writes without in- place updates are also beneficial for nowadays common "traditional" SSDs.

[http://kops.uni- konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/5914/...](http://kops.uni- konstanz.de/bitstream/handle/123456789/5914/report.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)

Kind regards and happy holidays Johannes</comment>


WordCamp 2007 registration now open (WordPress conference, nearly free, San Francisco, July) - <AUTHOR> http://2007.wordcamp.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Anyone interested in going to this?</comment>


YouTube is deleting comments with two phrases that insult the CCP - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270290/youtube-deleting-comments-censorship-chinese-communist-party-ccp <comment><USER2> This one was 1224 comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219)

</comment><comment><USER3> The key thing here is that Ars Technica got YouTube to respond:

> "This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are > investigating," YouTube said.

<comment><USER4> Too bad this post has already been removed from the front page of HN. It barely survived 30 minutes.

<comment><USER5> That is one of the reasons to stop using the front page of sites like HN (and lobste.rs and other similar 'popularity-driven' sites) and access the site through the RSS feed. This way you get to see all posts, popularity be damned. On news sites it sometimes gives an interesting insight in the editing process where they first rush out with articles with descriptive titles only to change the title (and, often, the article) to something less descriptive but more 'correct'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks like no response on the support ticket. Upvotes keep growing...

[https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/19190975?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/19190975?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER7> I would be interested in seeing a list of all the banned phrases for some perspective. It's hard for me to understand why they would ban these phrases in particular. From the outside looking it it would certainly seem that Google is taking it's cues from the Chinese government directly on this matter.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I suspect (as another commenter said) that these might be phrases that have been used in some 'political spamming' campaign flooding youtube with hundreds of thousands of OT comments on random videos. So they might have been treated as garbage and deleted.

I can understand that if every youtube video starts to be spammed with "Trump sucks" comments, Youtube might decide to auto-delete them. It doesn't have to be pro-Trump censorship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305149)

</comment><comment><USER10> Clickbait/fake news.

Proper title is "Youtube auto-deletes lots of phrases that are commonly used by spammers, including phrases critical of the Chinese government"

<comment><USER11> This seems to be likely. Google has an awful track of things like this.</comment></comment>


How to animate Google Earth with R - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2010/08/how-to-animate-google-earth-with-r.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Original Link: [http://probabilitynotes.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/r-and- googl...](http://probabilitynotes.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/r-and-google-earth- comparing-tuna-tracks-vs-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-extent/)</comment>


Pipedrive's pipeline metrics are to be digested with caution - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4c_AgKEwBqSY21ySkNGZ2ZaTkU/view?usp=sharing <comment><AUTHOR> Just to be aware: If you use Pipedrive and drop a deal in the pipeline, move it back and forth between 2 stages it counts as 2 deals moved forward. their wording is wrong.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's not that it's Volkswagen Emissions. But if people are compensated on dealflow, that's a great way to fake it!</comment>


MacBook Air hacked with internal EV-DO -- finally lives up to its name - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/29/macbook-air-hacked-with-internal-ev-do-finally-live-up-to-its/

<comment><USER2> I was disappointed this wasn't built-in on launch. They fit it in the iphone but not the Air -- ridiculous.

Constant internet connectivity is as big a reason to get a laptop for me as form factor. Combing from someone whose last two laptop purchases were 17 inch screens, this might not mean much.

<comment><USER3> > Combing from someone whose last two laptop purchases were 17 inch screens, > this might not mean much.

I'd buy a second laptop as light and easy to take along as the Macbook Air is. With WLAN HotSpots popping up everywhere I roam, I don't mind the missing wireless connectivity too much.

It's just the availabe combo of slow harddrives that is killing the device for me :'( According to ArsTechnica's "No Spin" review, not even the SSD option saves you from frequent idling.

link to the review: [http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd- revi...](http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-review.ars)

<comment><USER2> Having driven cross country twice in the past 5 months, I tell you that wifi is not nearly as common as you might hope. Edge network from an iPhone was absolutely necessary.

<comment><USER4> theres nothing like checking in code between shows (on tour w/ my band) from a car flying down the highways of rural nebraska :)

<comment><USER2> I had to get wifi to support <http://tipjoy.com> while in Cheyenne Wyoming. While it's the biggest town in Wyoming, I'm pretty sure any single block in SF has more hotspots than the whole town.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please test my app for Twitter, which makes conversations from your tweets - <AUTHOR> http://taskeri.com <comment><USER2> You need a privacy policy to get users (or subjectively me) to grant read and write access to a user's twitter feed. There's no imprint, no links to a contact and domain is registered with privacy protection enabled. In other words: who are you?</comment>


Ask HN: Strange: Why haven't TI graphing calculators dropped in price? - <AUTHOR>

According to Moore's law, graphing calculators should be super cheap right now, but TI sells standard graphing calculators for about $140 still. What's the deal? <comment><USER2> The deal is that they are pretty much required and if you have a captive market then you can make your price whatever the poor folks will be able to pay for it.

Or would you like your child to be behind the rest of the class?

This sort of thing will happen whenever a piece of gear becomes 'mandated'.

<comment><USER3> This is why simple GNU/Linux based computers with open-source software should become the mandatory platform for schools.

There's no reason that TI graphing calculators should be mandatory in this day and age

<comment><USER4> Well, part of the reason why TI _hardware_ is required and not just graphing _software_ is that students often need something they can take home with them.

Laptops running GNU/Linux, despite having no software costs, will still be significantly more expensive than even $140 calculators.

What is needed is an open source, cheap hardware calculator, and as far as I know, nobody has anything like that on the market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of the reasons TI calculators are so popular in schools is because TI works a lot with textbook producers. I worked for a company developing math books for a large publisher and we had a lot of contact with TI. they gave us tons of calculators, gave us pre-releases of new calculators and various other accessories. Thus we wrote our textbook targeting the TI calculators. This is why many textbooks come with TI specific instructions and come with software that only works with TI calculators.

This is probably the reason that many schools mandate these calculators, they're written into the curriculum by default. so it only natural to require them.

</comment><comment><USER6> The cost of making them is surely getting lower, in accordance with Moore's Law.

I would assume the price remains the same because they have little competition (almost a pseudo monopoly - it seems like they're the only one because their brand is so powerful) and a lot of demand.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would think that if someone manufactured a similar product which costs $15, the TI brand name wouldn't compensate for the price difference.

Perhaps it's a complex product and teachers won't switch products because they've invested so much into learning how to use the TI? And teachers decide what calculators are required for a given class? Maybe a competitor would have to get to the teachers first and convince them to use a cheaper alternative.

Another possibility: perhaps TI has some vital patents?

<comment><USER7> I know many of my classes required that I own and use a TI throughout high school. Other types of calculators where not allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When I was in school, many classes were standardized on particular models such as the TI-83 and TI-85. On the first day of class, my teachers would always say "I teach using this model and if you don't have it, you are on your own". I didn't want to be on my own so I bought the recommended model.

In business, you can price based on "cost plus a markup" or you can price based on what the market will bear. In the case of TI, they price based on what the market will bear.

</comment><comment><USER9> i remember thinking the same thing when i saw this:

<http://xkcd.com/768/>

 _maybe they cost so much now because there's only one engineer left who remembers how to make displays that crappy_

</comment><comment><USER10> Just an ineresting tidbit, wolfram|alpha originally tried to sell their iPhone app for $50 dollars with the rational that they offered a product that in many ways exceded the capibilities of a graphing calculator. Nobody bought it, because it was overpriced for an iPhone app. I know that I feel just as familiar using wolfram as I do using a TI.

<comment> m-photonic Also, a large segment of the market for TI calculators is composed of high school students who wouldn't be able to use an iPhone app on a test (teachers often ban phones from tests since they could be used to get answers from a friend).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have my chartered finanial analyst (CFA) designation and the ti-ba II+ is the only calculator allowed for the 3 years of exams required to get the designation. It is a very simple device and this lock-in is the only way I would have paid $65 for each of the three I own.

<comment><USER12> Really? I thought the HP-12C was still the gold standard in finance.

<comment><USER13> It is, and the HP-12C is allowed for the CFA exams.

That said, it's a very short list of what calculators are allowed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A brand new TI (or HP) calculator might have a 150 MHz processor and 20 MB of user-accessible storage space, which is quite a bit better than the 6 MHz / 28 KB from my 18 year old TI-85. By Moore's law, we'd expect 9 doublings in that time period, which is almost exactly what we get in terms of storage. It's harder to judge the jump in CPU capabilities (not everything can be measured by clock speed), but we're no more than a couple of doublings away from what Moore's law would predict.

Graphing calculators are probably also overpriced, but that's not a matter of Moore's law, it's a matter of market inefficiencies and lockin.

</comment><comment><USER15> HP calculators defy Moore's law far more dramatically, after nearly 30 years the price has dropped slightly more than 50%.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-10C_series#HP-12C>

[http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-215348-...](http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/215348-215348-64232-20036-215349-33525.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> When I was in high school, a TI-83 was required. Not just a graphing calculator, but specifically a TI-83 graphing calculator.

I'm guessing a lot of students are in the same position where the exact tool is specified which means there isn't much room for competing graphing calculators. No competition means no incentive to reduce pricing.

</comment><comment><USER17> The major components of the calculator are the screen, buttons, and batteries -- I think those cost more then the silicon chips inside -- and those prices have not dropped as fast.

Nonetheless, they are overpriced.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is a (graphing) calculator necessary to learn calculus?

<comment><USER19> It's not. In my calculus classes we weren't even allowed to use graphing calculators.</comment></comment>


Low Earth Orbit billboard for 7B people - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-startup-wants-to-launch-ads-in-the-sky-2019-1 <comment><USER2> > According to project leader Vlad Sitnikov, this commodification of the night > sky is the next logical step in advertising.

And the next logical step to _that_ is guillotines.

</comment><comment><USER3> Advertisers feel entitled to ruining the night sky? Color me surprised.

Fucking disgusting. Advertisers are scum, and if you're reading this and working in ads or adtech, shame on you.

</comment><comment><USER4> > When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name > everything: the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

(Fight Club, 1999)

</comment><comment><USER5> Cue skunkworks long range, focused EMP / Maser project in 3... 2... 1...

</comment><comment><USER6> Not sure if aircraft safety will be a defensible complaint.

But something along lines of UN Humanity Heritage Commons could be. There is a rather effective way to control launches - whatever goes to orbit passes that, or else - so it might get challenging to launch this kind of advertisement. At least for now.

<comment><USER7> We already have aircraft based adverts (on beaches or the Goodyear blimp) so probably not a good avenue.

Also every time we launch something in space there are pieces of garbage that stay there in low orbit for years, so it doesn't look like the place is considered of very high cultural value at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> a fitting end to humanity: kessler syndrome caused not by war but by advertising

</comment><comment><USER9> Could motivate anti satellite weapon research.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't want to live in the future anymore.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pls can be go to war with Russia to stop this?</comment>


PH7 – An Embedded Implementation of PHP (C Library) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/symisc/PH7 <comment><USER2> This seems like madness to me. It's "PHP", so it inherits everything that's bad about that language. But it's also incompatible with PHP, so you don't even get the power of being able to reuse the world's existing PHP code and expertise.

        * PH7 is case-sensitive unlike the standard PHP engine
        * Unlike the zend engine which passes arrays by copy, PH7 pass arrays by reference exactly like PHP5 does with objects (class instances).

I'm not saying the extensions and changes they've made aren't for the better, but they mean this language is effectively _not_ PHP. And, if you're going to use a language that's not PHP, why not use one that's significantly cleaner and simpler?

<comment><USER3> It's still great for embedded devices when your main language is PHP.

<comment><USER4> > when your main language is PHP.

There is your problem.If you cant learn anything else pretty sure you havent the skills to program any "embedded device".

<comment><USER5> I'd normally agree, but "embedded device" in this situation means "network router" (which are reasonably powerful computers in their own rights), and the application is not mission critical with hard deadlines and strict memory requirements, but just a web interface that is rarely active and can take as long as it wants running in the background. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to set aside some portion of memory for the web interface, give the PH7 process low priority, and hire some PHP web devs that actually know what they're doing to make the interface for them. More sense than letting the firmware developers hack something together in C anyway.

<comment><USER6> I'd say the better way would be to develop the entire GUI with static HTML + JS files talking to the embedded device through a REST-ish interface.

That way you can get a clean separation of the front and back ends, and the web developers get to work with exactly the tech they are used to.

<comment><USER5> I'm not a web developer, but that sounds pretty sane to me. However, the important part of their decision, I'm guessing, was not so much the PHP part, but the "get people who actually know about the web to do this for us." Someone has to build the site either way, and I'm guessing the embedded engineers they had working on it didn't really know how to go about that.

EDIT: Another possibility is that they already had PHP devs working on their corporate site or whatever, and they wanted to use them instead of hiring another team.

<comment><USER7> I am a web developer and the static HTML + JS with a RESTful API sounds excellent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > gcc -W -Wall -O6 -o ph7_test ph7_intro.c ph7.c

Nice! I wish creating Lua executables were this easy. With Lua you have to create a wrapper C file, use squishy to combine multiple lua files into one, and finally a script to turn the lua script into a C byte array. I have a boilerplate project that I use so that I just have to run `make`, that avoids the need to ever touch C for the most part. But it would be nicer if luac and luajit did this automatically.

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, the single-source engine is so large, GitHub won't display it on the web. :/

<comment><AUTHOR> SQLite style: The amalgamation is a single C code file, that contains all C code for the core. With one big unit, the compiler can perform several smart optimizations that cannot be done if the source code was split between different C files.

<comment><USER10> Also makes it dead easy to download and embed into projects! Hurray for single source files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That is one big C file. Curious if you've ran against any of the Zend tests in the original implementation [1][2]. I do not see anything on [http://ph7.symisc.net/](http://ph7.symisc.net/).

1 - [https://github.com/php/php- src/tree/master/tests](https://github.com/php/php-src/tree/master/tests) 2 - [https://github.com/php/php- src/tree/master/Zend/tests](https://github.com/php/php- src/tree/master/Zend/tests)

</comment><comment><USER12> The developer have also two other interesting projects on their website:

* jx9 - programming language based on JSON (like Lua with a JS syntax): [http://jx9.symisc.net/](http://jx9.symisc.net/)

* unQLite - NoSQL database engine (like SQLite but NoSQL): [http://unqlite.org/](http://unqlite.org/)

<comment><USER13> Unqlite is very good, we use it as our main in-memory key/value store in Duda I/O [[http://duda.io](http://duda.io)].

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been looking for something like this. Originally I had planned to do it with Python, but Python only seems to allow one interpreter at a time.

Does anybody know if it's easy to make new functions available to PHP that would call into the C main program?

It says "Built with more 470 function" how does that compare with standard PHP? If I take some PHP I've previously written or a library, is it going to run with minor modifications? Or is this a subset of PHP?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, most of the built-in functions (over 470) are foreign C/C++ functions installed exactly using the same interface: ph7_create_function();

<comment><USER15> Yeah that was pretty nice to see.

My first thought on seeing this project was wondering how hard it would be to hook up to nginx, or similar. I don't really "do" PHP, so I'd probably not attempt it myself, but I get the feeling from having written nginx modules in the past that this doesn't look too hard - the PH7 API seems decent enough.

<comment><USER12> Interesting, please write a blog post if you investigate this. It could be like OpenResty (Lua + Nginx): [http://openresty.org](http://openresty.org)

I am using HHVM (Facebook's HipHop PHP w/JIT) with Nginx. that works great... but it requires a 64-bit server. So for smaller servers or embedded systems Ph7 sounds interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty cool. First I was wondering what for, but its great for their use case (embedded devices). Why not use a language for the web interface the developer is familiar with.

Unfortunately, they're a bit late. Nowadays it would probably be cooler to use JS, if language popularity is the focus. Or maybe python.

(Aside: I learned web development in the good old LAMP times. My silly gut feeling is still that PHP is pretty fast and flexible compared to Python which seems slow (on the server), and JS which is way too slow and fragile. I know it's completely backwards nowadays, but funny how what you've learned sticks. When I hear "JS on a Arduino" I always think "yeah sure....", but it's actually a clever idea, just like this.)

<comment><USER3> Is it Python really slower than PHP? If you could notice the slowness it seems like the difference would be pretty large.

<comment><USER4> > compared to Python which seems slow

This sentence doesnt mean anything. What Python task? What library ? what framework ? on what server? with which version ? ect... I can say PHP is slow too, just look at any PHP framework, lowest scores according to techempower benchmarks :

[http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=ec...](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r8&hw=ec2&test=plaintext)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Normally I wouldn't touch PHP due to the long history of security issues. Would this do anything to improve it? Love the idea of an embeddable interpreter.

<comment><USER18> you're right, RoR is WAY more secure...

<comment><USER19> What made you jump to RoR?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Curious, what do people who work with embedded systems usually use to get a web interface for their device? Routers, for as long as I can remember have had a web UI though I'm not really sure what sort of a back end runs it.

<comment> up-n-atom A few that I've come around and evaluated are

[https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/Libfast](https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/Libfast) \+ [http://www.clearsilver.net/](http://www.clearsilver.net/)

[http://appwebserver.org/products/appweb/server-side- javascri...](http://appwebserver.org/products/appweb/server-side- javascript.html)

[http://duda.io/](http://duda.io/)

[http://luci.subsignal.org/](http://luci.subsignal.org/)

<comment><USER13> i would be interested into your evaluation of Duda I/O, let me know your comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For embedded device normally LUA is used, how does PH7 compare to LUA? as PHP/LUA is normally used to provide web interface, how does PH7 do CGI?

</comment><comment><USER22> Erm...how would people feel about having this as an available module for Node.js?

No reason. ;)

<comment><USER23> ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 62022 lines of code in a single file... is that a joke? :)

</comment><comment><USER25> Pretty cool, but why's it all in one .c file?</comment>


What's the Difference Between Artisan Bread and Regular Bread - <AUTHOR> https://fasteasybread.com/whats-the-difference-between-artisan-bread-regular-bread/ <comment><USER2> Wheat strength hard or soft, and sourdough rising probably go directly to gluten and FODMAP diet issue. But not entirely linked to artisanal since French bakers may well simply be using softer wheat with more interventionist modern baking and proving techniques. But, slower proving may also alter gluten and so FODMAP reaction by consumers.

Most non artisanal bake choices are about speed and consistency.

So I think at the core this article has the moment: it's an undefined virtue signalling marketspeak term. You need to get specific information on how the bread is made and what's in it and even then treat it with a grain (sorry) of salt.

I buy bread from a favourite baker. I don't much care what they are doing since it tastes nice

</comment><comment><USER3> About $5 a loaf</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of cool stuff in your office - <AUTHOR>

We've just moved into our new office. New staff and there's no real 'office' culture built yet.
What kind of cool examples do you guys have in your offices? that makes it an awesome place to work.
Most team members are Sales reps.. I remember reading somewhere a startup having a bell that they would ring everytime a sales rep closes a sale.
stuff like that? Would love to hear your suggestions :) <comment><USER2> " _I remember reading somewhere a startup having a bell that they would ring everytime a sales rep closes a sale._ "

The engineers in your office would HATE this. Imagine, you are deep in concentration developing the latest feature and someone rings a bell. Distracting at best, detrimental to morale and code quality at worst.

<comment><USER3> I think it depends on the pace of sales.

If I worked on a team which had just closed a $10mm enterprise sale, I'd probably be at the bar with the sales reps, and the only bells ringing would be in my head.

At Amazon, this would get absurd.

<comment><USER4> They did this at Amazon in the early days, but had to stop because it got annoying when sales became huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a chaos tower in my office

<http://www.chaostoy.com/>

We just got a wii (team has been playing mario kart)

Thumbprint scanner for the lock instead of key cards - not installed yet, hope it works

Thinking about foosball table, massage chair or high end espresso maker

</comment><comment><USER6> The internal glass panes in our offices have motivational quotes written in marker. Words like "Less is more." and "Why would you study it when you could be doing it." by M.Z.

</comment><comment><USER7> We have a toy sloth hanging from our emergency sprinkler system!

<http://carbonmade.com/about>

<comment><USER3> You have a very nice looking office, too!

<comment><USER7> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> later this summer we'll move to the 95th floor...hopefully we'll get to keep our ocean view (currently 21st floor). possibly not what you meant.</comment>


Javascript Fundamentals: Development for Absolute Beginners - <AUTHOR> http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Javascript-Fundamentals-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners <comment><USER2> I feel a bit frightened and overwhelmed by this long running time. I now couple hours aren't a long time, but seeing the actual number of minutes gives me second thoughts.

I do prefer something like codeacademy or Udacity, that makes a step-by-step, and even that I spend more time there, it will not look the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> I only looked at the first couple episodes, but be warned that this is javascript for the absolute beginning _developer_. They are really slow-paced if you have ever done any coding before.

Not to knock the videos, if you are in the target audience, they are really good, and fill in a lot of gaps that other tutorials may not. Things like "Wait, why am I saving this file like that?" or "What is a DOM?"

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to take away from this, but I'm currently learning JavaScript via Code Year @ Codeacademy. It is the furthest I have ever been in learning a language. Usually I buy a book and lose interest. I'm really loving the constant exercises.

So if the headline caught your interest and a video series is not what you're looking for, you should really check it out. I'm on the 10th section and on a 25 day streak, and I think about it everyday now, not wanting to lose my streak. I don't know if it is for everyone, but they really hit the mark with me.

<comment><USER5> I am on the same (js) track, I second this recommendation for code academy learning the language by actually using it is twice as fast at least. Imhexperince

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> would be nice if our tutorials mixed with familiar story/fables. just like i tried to mix up jquery and 'Hare and tortoise'

[http://lixonic.blogspot.in/2012/08/once-upon-time-jquery- wen...](http://lixonic.blogspot.in/2012/08/once-upon-time-jquery-went-on- journey.html)

Whats your opinion?

</comment><comment><USER7> funny to see a js tutorial using notepad and IE for the dev.

you'd be hard pressed to find ANYONE developing like this unless it was a video from microsoft.

<comment> k-mcgrady They might be doing it like that because those programs come on every Windows PC sold. In other words, you already have everything you need to get started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for this. I'm still a newbie in Javascript.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for posting this.</comment>


California wastes $500k for non-working wi-fi hot spots for the poor - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-missing-wifi-20160403-story.html <comment><USER2> > children in after-school programs sit at computers in several rooms. But > they have no Internet connection.

When I was a child I could only dream of such things. School let me stay behind after classes and play on the Research Machines 380Z [1] the school owned but that was about an hour a day.

Later a friend got a ZX81 [2] and we would hack on that. Someone my dad knew got a BBC Micro [3] and the family let me go round one evening a week and use it. I learned to program it from books & magazines.

I think back to those times when I have no internet connection and think my laptop is useless and marvel.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Machines_380Z)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro)</comment>


The Internet Association Shows What's Wrong With The American Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/09/19/the-internet-association-shows-whats-wrong-with-the-american-economy/

<comment><USER2> Everything what's wrong with American politics is that the campaigns are so dependent on lobbyists. As long as this doesn't change, the Government will always listen to their big donors more.</comment>