How Opera makes money - <AUTHOR> http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10012796o-2000331761b,00.htm

<comment><USER2> " _We provide the browser for free, like Opera desktop and Mini, and then we generate revenue through our content partners._ "

Opera's been free for quite a while; does anyone know why it still hasn't gained popularity? I imagine a lot of Firefox users don't use extensions whose functionality isn't available on Opera, so they wouldn't really be losing anything. Is it something wrong with Opera's business model?

<comment><USER3> IE comes bundled with 90% of computers. Safari comes bundled on a good portion of the other 10%. Firefox has massive support from the open source movement and the tech community in general. Chrome has free advertising on the front page of Google.com.

Opera has... a small group of loyal fans?

<comment><USER4> I use Opera for my main browser, but I run firefox for app dev/debugging issues. FireBug is the best thing about firefox.

I believe Opera has the best dev team out there. Their pages render correctly more often than any other browser. If ever I wonder if something is working correctly, I check it in Opera. If IE looks like Opera, then IE is right. If Firefox looks like Opera, then Firefox is right. That's how it goes.

As I use Opera, I continue to find awesome features I really love, Their dev team is so creative. They are visionaries.

It's an amazing product. Unfortunately, a lot of websites will say, "You aren't using the right browser!" but it almost always renders correctly and sometimes they block me all together, so I just right click open in > whatever that site wants.

So awesome! I love Opera.

<comment><USER5> >I believe Opera has the best dev team out there. Their pages render correctly more often than any other browser. If ever I wonder if something is working correctly, I check it in Opera. If IE looks like Opera, then IE is right. If Firefox looks like Opera, then Firefox is right. That's how it goes.

I wish that were true, but my experience has often been otherwise. There are some sites that I just know won't work in Opera, either in stable or 10 alpha (which passes Acid3) or both. I'm still a die-hard Opera fan, though. It feels so much cleaner and faster than Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They make good software, have a solid business model and are profitable. What's not to love?</comment>


Tech workers in NYC make serious cash, apparently. - <AUTHOR> http://news.dice.com/2014/04/30/much-tech-worker-can-make-nyc/

<comment><USER2> $118 is pretty low, frankly.</comment>


Why musicians are so angry at the world's most popular music streaming service - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-musicians-are-so-angry-at-the-worlds-most-popular-music-streaming-service/2017/07/14/bf1a6db0-67ee-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html <comment><USER2> There's the "music industry" and then there is the music industry. Most independent musicians (which is like, 90% of us, and perhaps 90% of genre representation) are not represented by any agents of these large parasitic popular-music-peddling corporations, neither in unit sales (cds, downloads) nor streaming nor bookings.

While, in this case, we are discussing the large music distributors: Apple, Amazon, etc, I feel it a good time to bring-up the curious fact that, while copyright law exists in a large portion of the world, there are private entities: associations of lawyers, who purport to represent ALL copyright holders for a given nation. ASCAP, BMI, SPA, SUICA, etc...each nation has this private entity sitting on top of copyright law enforcement claiming to be THE money funnel by which people should pay for licensing of all media.

Venues where music is played are supposed to keep a list of songs played and pay accordingly, or more usually, there is a flat fee paid as a kind of tax, which ostensibly should go to the artists whose music was played. Copyright societies can visit venues or events with fiscal policing agents and control them. Copyright societies have a global accounting network by which they settle at various intervals.

The only kink in the works is that they also collect money for those they DON'T represent (aka, that's what happens when a private entity gets a government sanctioned collections role) and while it's supposed to be accessible for non members to obtain, the reality is that without the proofs of plays that the societies themselves have access too, one will have very little luck... The money sits in the various copyright societies coffers...</comment>


Responsive typography with Modular Scale - <AUTHOR> https://bugsnag.com/blog/responsive-typography-with-modular-scale

<comment><USER2> Well, it's a good idea, but in typography sizing and spacing is entirely based on a slightly more abstracted approach: the baseline grid. The baseline is the imaginary line which runs across the bottom of type, and the grid's vertical spacing is equal to the leading, or line-height. Therefore, body type set at 10pt/14pt will always align with a 14pt baseline grid so that elements on opposite sides of the page will always align and various type sizes will flow more naturally into the design.

Logically, type sizes from there (and this harkens back to manually setting type) should only be whole or half increments of the base type size (from my earlier example, this is 10pt), meaning appropriate sizes are 10pt, 15pt, 20pt, 30pt, etc, with agreeable modifications when necessary. However, good proportions would dictate that 10, 15, and 20 are too close together and as such designers would not use each, but probably restrict their designs to the highest and lowest point values.

I think it's important to remember that just because there are six included hX elements doesn't mean they should each be a different size. To create hierarchy, try changing capitalization, tracking (spacing between letters), weight, and other available styles in the type family you're working with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome, this is almost exactly the same approach I've adopted, right down to the double-stranded scale and breakpoint adjustments to font size. Looking forward to article 3.

The only notable differences in my approach have been using Compass's Vertical Rhythm ([http://compass- style.org/reference/compass/typography/vertic...](http://compass- style.org/reference/compass/typography/vertical_rhythm/)) and some mixins to opt out entirely or re-initialize scale for individual components. As a side benefit, using a preprocessor allows for a rem-like approach for all browsers.

</comment><comment><USER4> The default ms-ratio used here (the golden ratio) has been criticized in recent years for being little more than wishful thinking -- see [http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_07.html](http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_07.html) for example. May be worthwhile playing with other values when looking for the best typographic results.

</comment><comment><USER5> Thank you very much. Actually web typography and its automation with SASS deserve a book, even small one will have big impact. Funny thing canonical proportion. India have a different one, as far as I read some buddhist scripts on architecture.

</comment><comment><USER6> > We designed the Bugsnag dashboard with a $ms-base of 1rem and a $ms-ratio of > $major-third or 1.25

Nice music reference. Does it make your page feel sad if you use 1.2?

</comment><comment> adam-f is it

        $ms-ratio: $golden;

or

        $ms-ratio: golden;

    ?

<comment><USER7> It's $ms-ratio: $golden;

When you bring Modular Scale into your project it will include a number of global variables including $golden with commonly used ratios in design. They're useful to try out when you're experimenting with different $ms-ratios. Check out the list here [https://github.com/Team-Sass/modular- scale#ratios](https://github.com/Team-Sass/modular-scale#ratios)</comment></comment>


React Native at F8 and Open Source Podcast - <AUTHOR> https://facebook.github.io/react-native/blog/2019/05/01/react-native-at-f8-and-podcast <comment><USER2> At Artsy we made the decisions to use React Native a few years ago as a team of iOS devs, with a lot of JS folks on the web who were interested in React. We don't regret it.

While we've found ways to work within the boundaries of React Native - it's really refreshing to see how many of the points we considered to be negatives against React Native are getting addressed this year. Congrats team!</comment>


Scientists guilty of manslaughter for not predicting earthquake - <AUTHOR> http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/scientists-found-guilty-for-earthquake-deaths-20121023-2823y.html

<comment><USER2> No. That's not why they were found guilty. Sigh. [http://www.nature.com/news/italian-court-finds- seismologists...](http://www.nature.com/news/italian-court-finds- seismologists-guilty-of-manslaughter-1.11640) <http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110914/full/477264a.html></comment>


Doom running on a pregnancy test - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302820468819288066 <comment><USER2> I find the user's earlier threads to be more interesting. Foone deconstructed a digital pregnancy test and found that it's actually just a <$1 pregnancy test strip in the shell, with light sensors that check whether it shows one or two stripes, and then display the result on a screen.

<comment><USER3> I agree with this. It confirms that most "digital" devices like this (for example, scales) are just introducing greater inaccuracy whilst conveying a false sense of certainty.

<comment><USER4> > are just introducing greater inaccuracy

What makes you say that? This is exactly the sort of scenario where punting interpretation off to a simple algorithm is probably more accurate than leaving it up to untrained humans.

<comment><USER5> It might prevent false positive, but it can lead to false negative.

See for example [https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/comments/4pxghm/confli...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/comments/4pxghm/conflicting_pregnancy_test_one_positive_faint/)

<comment><USER6> That could happen with any two tests. That second test is _really_ faint. At first I thought "Ok, so they're both negative, so what?"

Not to mention, false negatives are far more common than false positives. If you have a false positive, then there's typically some odd health concern with the person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> More interesting was that before the current chemical strip-based test, apparently the best way to test for pregnancy was to inject the urine into the leg of an African clawed frog, then see if it laid eggs in the next 24 hours.

[https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301844281540239360](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301844281540239360)

<comment><USER8> One wonders how this method was discovered...

<comment><USER9> It's a good read about what scientists do when they have an idea of what they need but not a direct way to measure it, and it was a lot better than the mouse/rabbit tests which involved killing the animal:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/how-a- fr...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/how-a-frog-became- the-first-mainstream-pregnancy-test/525285/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Should probably be noted this isn't actually running on a pregnancy test, it's a pregnancy test plastic shell with a replacement CPU and display.

<comment><USER11> IIRC only the display is replaced, the cpu remains the same.

<comment><USER12> The CPU was changed.

[https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302453805057896448](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302453805057896448)

"The existing CPU can't be reprogrammed and the existing LCD can only show 4 things, so I had to replace both to make any changes. And the current version doesn't even fit into the shell! (although I'm certain it will when complete)"

<comment><USER11> Ahhh, I stand corrected :)

Sometimes Foone's threads go on so long that twitter UI just gives up on linking them, or so it seems.

<comment><USER13> There's a Twitter App for Firefox [https://addons.mozilla.org/nn- NO/firefox/addon/nitter-redire...](https://addons.mozilla.org/nn- NO/firefox/addon/nitter-redirect/) that makes it possible to view _several_ 160 char messages at the same time. Computers are so fast these days it is amazing.

<comment><USER14> The fact that you need to install a browser extension or use some other tool to view tweets in this manner is a big indicator that something is either wrong with Twitter for these kinds of posts or these kinds of posts are better served elsewhere.

It's akin to writing a novel on post-its.

<comment><USER15> Someone -- it may have been OP actually -- has said that his ADHD makes it impossible for him to focus long enough to write and publish a blog post for things like this, but Twitter is low-commitment, low-attention enough that he can get it done.

I really hate Twitter for this kind of content as well, but I'd rather have it there then not have it at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Regardless of the CPU being replaced, am I the only one who thinks this to much electronics to put into, what I assume, is a single use pregnancy test?

This has so be sorted as "small electronics" when you dispose of it. Even before you can start dealing with the the e-waste part, someone has to manually open the thing and separate plastics and electronics.

<comment><USER17> Especially when you know that all the electronics actually do is interpret the result of a standard paper based test.

<comment><USER18> I was surprised to discover that the tests as used without expert supervision had a 25% misread rate, vs 1% with the display.

I think that's a dire indictment of the education system, but we need to make stuff for the people we have, and a quarter of them can't read the test.

<comment><USER19> Check out [https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TFABLinePorn/)

A subreddit where users post positive or probably positive pregnancy tests.

Pregnancy tests generally measure hCG concentration in urine, early in the pregnancy concentrations are low and the test line will be very faint if visible at all. It's only later on in the pregnancy when the line will become more visible.

Pregnancy also involves a lot of emotion, hope & fear, in combination it's not that surprising that a portion of people misread pregnancy tests.

<comment><USER20> Wow I did not expect that! Many of them are really hard to read actually!

A quick example of two positive tests side by side [https://i.redd.it/llw9fmn6dxk51.jpg](https://i.redd.it/llw9fmn6dxk51.jpg)

Even worse, sometimes the reaction is so strong that there is a "dye stealer" effect, where the test line steals the ink from the control line. See for example here: [https://i.redd.it/skdynwwi6ll51.jpg](https://i.redd.it/skdynwwi6ll51.jpg) (Notice how the line is on the "wrong" side)

No wonder the misread rate is so high indeed...

<comment><USER21> Those aren't misreads, those are ambiguous tests. The computer would get false negatives on those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations it's a Cacodemon

</comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing how the brain can fill in the details. I had no problem identifying the levels and the enemies. I wonder what the images look like to someone who has never played Doom?

<comment><USER24> It sounds a bit like having a cochlear implant fitted late in life. I've heard that you can listen to music you know well and your brain will fill in all the details, but anything new just sounds terribly low def and isn't really enjoyable.

<comment><USER25> I've heard about phonemic restoration, but this is even more interesting. Thanks for sharing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Just last Friday. It was pretty quick.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24371703)

</comment><comment><USER27> > and to get it; you have to pee on it

Is this a joke? Is there no other way to start the CPU?

<comment><USER28> It seems that the "power switch" is the moisture conducting between two leads [https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301709777383292928](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1301709777383292928)

<comment><USER29> So is the only way for two-player to... you know

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> During the latter half of the 1990s and onwards, there was a saying in tech circles along the lines of "It isn't a computer unless it can run DOOM."

Perhaps that was the original motivation behind this tweet, even if it isn't running natively.

</comment><comment><USER31> Both CPU and display has been replaced. Nothing about the headline is true. 100% clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER32> That's it, I've finally seen all of the internet.

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone know what board he is using in the pic?

</comment><comment><USER34> Mandatory comic reference: [https://www.smbc- comics.com/?id=2158](https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2158)

</comment><comment><USER35> I saw Doom running on a pregnancy test 7 years ago... But I've subsequently learnt to love him.

<comment><USER36> Give it another 6 years. 13 years is when the monster comes out.

<comment><USER35> IT GETS WORSE?!?!?!?!?

<comment><USER37> Teenages tend to revolt against their parents no?

<comment><USER38> It mostly depends on the _parents_ , not on children. Teens are finally independent and strong enough to be able to revolt - if they do or not is in many cases just a reflection if their parents treat them as equals or not.

Before you answer "but they are not equal...", please think.

<comment><USER39> Yeah. My early years (up to age 12) were ok. After that though was very... not good.

One memory really stands out though, from about a week (rough guess) before I turned 13. It was my mother saying she was dreading my 13th birthday, as that's when things go bad.

It completely surprised me, as I hadn't thought anything special about it.

However from (literally) my 13th birthday onwards, life became hell. On the day.

My mother turned into an absolute control freak, full on, with no-let up. For years. If I didn't do something she wanted, in _exactly_ the way she wanted (generally with no explanation), it was name calling, taking away of <whatever she knew I felt was important>, and doing whatever she could to belittle and degrade me try try and "teach me a lesson". There are no words to describe the mental abuse from that day onwards. It never stopped, and there was no way of getting it to stop.

I eventually dropped out of school (age ~15), lived on the streets for a while, then went to live with my grandmother.

All because some idiot bitch thought _teenagers_ were the problem. :( :( :(

Please, don't take this approach with your kids.

<comment><USER40> This is so scary! I mean both being a teenager in your shoes and thinking about whether I will manage to be a good enough parent and not ruin a miracle.

<comment><USER38> Just treat the kinds with the same level of respect you would grant an adult, and you will be fine.

<comment><USER39> Yeah. If she'd spent even a fraction of the time to try and understand me as a person, rather than on figuring out ways to "make me comply" (via abuse and punishment) things could have been so much different.

But, she never did. And she never got better. Probably worse if anything. There were signs years later (after her mother - my grandmother - died) that she might have reflected on things and matured.

But no. Given an opportunity, she reverted back to form and went with the abuse approach.

That time, by (literally) forging my signature on paperwork to ASIC signing me out of being the director of my own company. Which she took over.

I _wish_ I was joking. I'm really not.

One really sick thing about it is _from her point of view_ she justified everything as doing it "for my benefit".

Like, you cannot make this crap up. :( :( :(

Anyway, if someone's in my situation then I truly feel sorry for them. I don't know of any way to fix it other than "get out and don't look back".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's a movie of somebody playing Doom, not actually Doom running on it.

<comment><USER42> The tweet clearly states that it is not a movie, but the actual game.

> Yesterday I had a lot of retweets and reddit posts and such for playing Doom > on a pregnancy test.

> But as I explained then, it wasn't really PLAYING on a pregnancy test, it > was just a video being played back, not an interactive game.

> Well, now it is. It's Pregnancy Test Doom!

<comment><USER43> But it's still not actually running on the pregnancy test, or even the MCU he replaced the electronics with. It's still playing on a PC and transferring the picture: [https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302834931421175809](https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1302834931421175809)

So it's for all intents and purposes still playing back a video, it's just a live recording instead.</comment></comment></comment>


Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the Political Process (2002) - <AUTHOR> https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/real-time.html <comment><USER2> (2002)

It's nice to put the year of older articles in the title. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> (2002)</comment>


Inside the Southern California factory that makes the Donald Trump hats - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-trump-hats-cali-fame-carson-20151124-story.html <comment><AUTHOR> "The company employs about 100 people in a 30,000-square-foot warehouse. About 80% of the company's workforce is Latino"</comment>


A Default Identity Value for Programming - <AUTHOR> https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com/a-default-identity-value-for-programming

<comment><USER2> J has a similar feature: when applied to an empty array, /\+ returns 0 and /* returns 1.

J doesn't have user-defined types. In a language with user-defined types, you would probably have to declare which operations are monoids.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would concur with npryce. I your structure would adhere to the monoid interface and the default value could be cast automatically to the corresponding identity this will work. It wouldn't even break mathematics</comment>


Ask HN: Is there any way to make a MCU send a signal like keyboard? - <AUTHOR> I want to make a device with MCU, something like Arduino or Raspberry Pi, which can connect the computer through USB cable and is programmable to send some key signals like keyboard.<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> Yes, you can find everything you need if you search for the right thing. As you know, a keyboard is a Human Interface Device. What you want to search for then is "arduino USB HID library".</comment>


3 years later, Facebook still can't delete photos correctly - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/nearly-3-years-later-deleted-facebook-photos-are-still-online.ars <comment><AUTHOR> Of all of Facebook's behavior online, the advertising, the tracking, the privacy snafus.. this is probably the one that bugs me the greatest.

How this was not made a priority zero, drop-everything-and-fix-this-crap- yesterday internally is beyond my comprehension. I hate to think of the condition of their internal systems if they can't even get files deleted from their CDN in a timely manner.

3 years is not a timely manner. A month and a half (their target, FTA) is not a timely manner.

A few seconds to a minute would be great, thanks.

<comment><USER2> You generally don't delete files from a CDN. They just get evicted when they are the least recently used, which may never happen if the URL is still in circulation.

Facebook may have set near-infinite Expires/Cache-control headers on their static content, since it never gets overwritten. In that case, the CDN never goes back to the origin to check if the file is still there. The CDN they are using probably does have the ability to explicitly remove files (e.g., to respond to DMCA take-down notices), but probably doesn't have the ability to do this at Facebook picture deletion scale.

In other words, Facebook probably can't do much about it unless they get the CDN provider to make a big investment, build their own CDN, or switch to another provider that does support it (usually a costly decision).

<comment><AUTHOR> Doesn't Facebook run their own CDN, though? (At least that's what the URL's would suggest).

And in the case of major CDN providers like Level 3, removing assets is _dead_ simple. They provide an API for you to pass assets to expire immediately. Or barring that, having a person spend 5 seconds on the keyboard to log into the control panel and paste in the URL to kill.

It _is_ possible - the author of the Ars article had his pictures erased after writing the article.

<comment><USER3> """having a person spend 5 seconds on the keyboard to log into the control panel and paste in the URL to kill"""

Few people, even technologists, can grasp what it means to have 800 million users. Anything involving individuals just logging in is a non-starter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not on a one off "Hey FB support, this image needs to be really _really_ gone, make it happen." basis.

Even Google can provide that level of support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do people really think a company whose engineers wrote a PHP-to-C++ compiler because PHP is slow as balls are incapable of solving this engineering problem?

This is either advantageous for them (somehow) or the cost to make it happen it isn't worth it.

<comment><USER5> The cost to make it happen is developer time (money). The benefit to making it happen is... appeasing a few geeks? They haven't lost many users because of this, and they probably never will; I doubt their value from doing this will _ever_ justify the expense.

Not to imply they shouldn't do it, merely that they have little motivation to do so, aside from it being a good thing they should do.

<comment><USER6> How about if you replace " _appeasing a few geeks_ " with " _adhering to the privacy laws in most countries Facebook is active in_ "?

<comment><USER7> Really?

There are privacy laws somewhere that cover the case of "you published a photo, and sometime later changed your mind and decided you didn't want it publicly available any more."?

I'm not only not-at-all surprised at this, but I'm somewhat amazed that anybody even thinks it's a thing worth commenting about. You upload a photo to a website and make it public (or allow the defaults to make it public) - it's now out of your control. Changing your mind later is _exactly_ the situation the phrase "close the stable door after the horse has bolted" was coined for - and the used of stables and horses in that idiom shows at a minimum how old the type of problem is.

I love hating on Facebook as much as the next privacy-concerned-geek, but I find it hard to feel any sympathy for people who are calling this a problem - any more than I'd feel sympathy for people who want to unscramble their eggs.

<comment><USER6> Privacy laws in most Western countries outside the US (at least all of Western Europe) are based on the principle that you _own_ your data.

The rest simply follows from that. If you tell Facebook to remove your data, they are, within reason, obliged to honor that request.

Now that photo may still be out there if it has been copied (of course when then come into the realm of copyright and such), but Facebook should no longer have it in their dataset, let alone be publishing it.

The privacy angle isn't about the photo being public, it's about Facebook having it in their database along with all the other stuff they have on you.

This is why American companies like Google and Facebook tend to run afoul of European privacy laws: even if the data they collect comes purely from public sources, doesn't mean they have the right to collect, and especially collate it. At least not in the European concept of privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

                         --Upton Sinclair

<comment><USER9> "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

        -- Phil Karlton

<comment><USER10> There are two more actually: off by one errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't see how it makes much difference. Removing the link from the site means that nobody will discover the photo. People who discovered the photo and saved the link could equally well have saved the file, and in fact I think saving the file is more common.

<comment><USER12> I doubt that. If the image is being removed, say because it contains an embarrassing picture that was accidentally posted, you can bet someone copied the link and shared it or posted it somewhere. Also, image lookup services like tineye could also grab a hold of them unless they are gone for good.

Don't get me wrong, I still believe that posting ANY picture on Facebook you don't want the whole world to see is just plain stupid.

<comment><USER13> Let's remember that it's not only the people in embarrassing pictures who upload them. Sometimes rude friends or colleagues take pictures of us without even telling us, and upload them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a point of reference, Amazon CloudFront charges $0.005 per file to invalidate, after the first 1000/month.

 _No additional charge for the first 1,000 files that you request for invalidation each month. $0.005 per file listed in your invalidation requests thereafter._

<http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/#pricing>

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm currently an undergrad in Computer Engineering. As an engineer we are taught to look ahead when designing software and to do it with the "good of society" in mind.

I find it VERY hard to believe that Facebook did not plan ahead and implement an efficient method of photo deletion. If they truly did not, I seriously call upon their skills and insight in creating software for the public.

Come on Facebook ... it's deleting a damn image! This should be top priority in the modern age of personal privacy.

<comment><USER15> Facebook is proud of their hacker culture.

Sometimes a hacker is one who is expert at programming and solving problems with a computer.

Sometimes a hacker is someone who hacks particularly, one who cuts with rough or heavy blows.

In the race to the deadline, the next release, the IPO, a lot of good engineering fails by the wayside.

<comment><USER16> I heard someone say their policy is "Move fast and break things". :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In social software you, the operator of the service, never delete anything. Everything is a datapoint - valuable now and potentially further valuable in the future.

The contract a user makes with most social sites is that the social site can monetize the user's data and that the user gives them a non-exclusive royalty free license to use that data.

Well, when the user then ask them to 'delete' the photo, they are saying that _they_ no longer have any interest in that photo sticking around. That doesn't mean that Facebook (or whoever) shares the same view that said piece of media is now useless.

They have no moral or legal reason to delete their copy of the media just because the user no longer needs it.

"Don't hate the player, hate the game" - and if you don't like it, don't upload your media to social sites like Facebook.

<comment><USER18> Social contracts and morals are not defined solely by corporations and their interests. We have a right and responsible to declare our opinions to converge on a mutually acceptable standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The response headers indicates photos are set to expire in exactly 14 days. Does Akamai not honor cache-related headers from the origin URL? If it does, couldn't Facebook just generate URLs that includes an rolling expiration date so that when the CDN pulls from the origin URL again, Facebook may send a file-not-found placeholder image?

</comment><comment><USER20> The article doesn't make it clear, are these direct-link photos still subject to the permissions set on them? Would setting a photo's permission to "Only Me" prior to deleting it work around Facebook's failure? If they _aren't_ subject to the photo's permissions, that's a giant security hole, or am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER14> I don't think permissions apply since the files in question are served from a CDN.

<comment><USER14> For example, this photo is only visibly by me,

<http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=706480749906>

You can see it if I give you the special link which skips the permission check,

[http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=706480749906&l=a5...](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=706480749906&l=a526510db3)

Or on the CDN, which doesn't know about permissions,

[http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- ash4/432125_706480...](http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak- ash4/432125_706480749906_15500496_34073701_1120627926_n.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the genius of Zuckerberg. He had a clear idea as to what was important and what was not.

Or rather when something was good enough.

Of course if your building a probe for outerspace you cant do this but Mark knows exactly what he can punt on and what needs to be done.

The absolutely most necessary skill in a CEO.

</comment><comment><USER22> I am not a lawyer, but this seems to be a solution. Did I miss something?

1\. Find a friend.

2\. Write "I, Mr. Me, hereby transfer the exclusive right to publish the attached image online to Mrs. Friend, for the consideration of $1." Sign it and have your friend sign it and pay you. (At least in the US, consideration is required!)

3\. Hand your friend a filled-out DMCA takedown request. Have them sign it and send it to Facebook. (If you're not in the US, figure out the local equivalent and do that.)

It is _possible_ that you violate Facebook's ToS in (2), but Facebook doesn't look too closely at DMCA requests - and losing your account might be worth it anyway. Facebook is obviously not going to fight a takedown request on your behalf, so this almost certainly does get the photo removed.

It is ridiculous that one would need to do this, of course.

<comment><USER23> _If you're not in the US, figure out the local equivalent and do that_

I don't think any other countries have anything like the DMCA with it's safe harbour and take-down requests.

I'm also pretty sure that once you upload a photo to facebook, you give them copyright on the image, and hence you are unlikely to be able to claim copyright infringment,

<comment><USER22> Honest question: aren't ACTA and the like all about cross-border copyright enforcement? I can't say I'm an expert, but...

Note that it's your friend claiming copyright infringement, with an exclusive license in hand. Legally, the question is whether you can actually give an exclusive license after uploading a photo to Facebook (the ToS has been challenged and changed on similar issues), but that is not between your friend and Facebook.

Google "facebook dmca": Facebook will happily take pretty much any page down (e.g. [http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101007/01244411320/facebo...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101007/01244411320/facebook- fails-at-the-dmca-promises-to-restore-counter-noticed-content-but-doesn-t- updated.shtml)). Do you really think that Facebook is going to risk a court case where it has to prove (on its own dime!) that you actually did have copyright on the image when you uploaded it, risking its DMCA safe harbor status?

<comment><USER23> I'm also not an expert, but we've had cross border copyright enforcement for over 100 years with the Bern Convention. The UK will recognise and enforce USA copyright that happens in the UK.

Facebook has to take down DMCA requests to stay with the DMCA and the safe harbour rules. However that's a US law. I don't know if non-USA people can invoke it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't mean to sound snarky, but: that's because they hire people who know how to merge linked lists or reverse words in a string or (insert interview problem du-jour) ; they don't hire people who can really solve real-world problems.

I may sound old when I say this, but my impression of interviewing there was that they're just a bunch of kids who like working on 'cool' or new things, and don't really care much about the real-world impact.

No, this is not sour grapes; I was recruited for my skillset, but was really disappointed to be tested on bullshit problems; I pointed out specific issues with their site that needed fixing and how they could be fixed, but it didn't really matter to them.

<comment><USER18> > _...and don't really care much about the real-world impact._

Except Facebook is one of the places where your software work has the most impact on the world.

Also if you don't want people to think it's sour grapes than don't even mention the word.

<comment><USER24> Letting people poke each other is having the most impact on the world?

<comment><USER18> Your post is heavy on snark, but name one other product that has as many human hours invested in using it.

<comment><USER24> Television?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Surprised that Ars didn't jump to the most obvious conclusion: a legal compliance issue.

Presumably, five or six years ago, someone from the DOJ or FBI told Facebook it would be really handy if they stored user images indefinitely, and Facebook, not being a company that insists on seeing warrants or subpoenas, said "Sure, why not."

<comment><USER23> Are you advising that a site just make up conspiracy theories about the cops spying on people?

Where is the evidence?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can't or won't?

</comment><comment><USER27> Also they don't let you edit comments or posts, which is super annoying to me.

</comment><comment><USER28> Can somebody remind me why we use facebook again? The argument that it's somehow more convenient than other communication channels is utter bull shit. It's just herd behaviour.

<comment><USER23> I use Facebook because it's the only way to communicate with lots of people who are important to me and my life.

Social networks are the definiton of a network effect. They are boring and simple technologically, but are phenomenally valuable when lots of people I care about use them aswell.

You cannot beat facebook with technical solutions, only social solutions.</comment></comment>


Peter Thiel on Progress and Stagnation - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zao_AyBhNb8TPWrQqgXn5NzNAgfEqzTIaFYos7wdqGI/edit?usp=drivesdk <comment><USER2> I disagree with Thiel on almost every page on this document. And I don't know which topic to really critise. Like his view on regulation, which he calls a burden. I don't want to live in a world w/o regulations, I want to know what is in my food, I want to know that the devices I use are safe. We could see what happens, when regulation fails, when two 737MAX crashed due to the fact that Boeing was able to hide MCAS from the FAA and the FAA let Boeing go forward with the plane.

At one point Thiel is quoted with "The public transportation systems don't work." Which is a bold and false statement, because public transportation can work extremely well. And in the source they don't even talk about public transportation but about Uber, which I think is a failure and pointless and not really innovative at all. Services like Uber existed long before Uber, Uber just put an app on it instead of a phone call. Also Thiel complaints about parking. That he can't think of any other modes of mobility than a car, it rather telling.

His definition of progress and innovation is not technical or defined by quality of life but merely what he as an investor can earn money from it. This is very visible when Thiel dismisses incremental progress with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells.

<comment><USER3> I'm saddened that you think it's okay to make it a federal crime to create a jelly/marmalade with more than 4 fruits (seriously).

What you're doing now is imposing the current day to the past, like looking at the current Airbnb and pretending that's how it was when it first started.

What if perhaps today wouldn't be achieved if there had been so many rules and regulations? So picture the same government from now and place it in say 1870. What would you say the odds are we DONT end up anywhere as advanced as we are today?

<comment><USER4> Why is it not permitted to create a jelly/marmalade with more than 4 fruits?

<comment><USER5> There's nothing saying you can't. You just can't call it a jam or a marmalade as that has a very specific definition in people's minds. The law itself is detailed here[1].

[1] [https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfCFR/CFR...](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfCFR/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=150.160)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I was trying to set them up for a "Chesterton's fence" situation tbh ;)

<comment><USER5> I hadn't come across that before! Very nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thiel is interesting to me because he is so different than others in the SV bubble. Whether you agree with him or think he is the devil, at least he has independent views. I find a lot of people don't think for themselves anymore.

<comment><USER7> What strikes you as different about him? I can't really articulate why exactly, but to me he's right up there on the list of archetypical SV personalities.

<comment><USER8> He's not irrationally optimistic about the future.

<comment><USER9> A rather predictable position for a person owning a business that makes the future worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Google also has $50 billion in cash. It has no idea how to invest that > money in technology effectively ... if we 're living in an accelerating > technological world, and you have zero percent interest rates, you should be > able to invest all of your money in things that will return it many times > over. The fact is you're out of ideas._

Idea possibly bad: Free market progress is a force in balance with consolidation of power and interests. So some lack of progress can be explained by reaching a tipping point in the monopoly power where concentrated interests just kill anything disruptive. Michael Seibel has written about this.

<comment><USER11> I think Eric Weinstein would agree with you on this point. You should really listen to his podcast with Peter Thiel where they talk about similar interests disrupting advancement (The Portal - Episode 1).

I don't buy the argument that the whole system is therefore useless and corrupt, but that it very much needs intervention to keep this sort of regulatory capture from occurring.

<comment><USER10> FAAMG is like 20% of the GDP of the USA, the state can't intervene with itself

<comment><USER12> Where did you get that idea? FAANG companies are valued at ~5 trillion USD (rough estimate). The US's GDP is 20 trillion USD. But the GDP is measured annually! The US has a GDP that's 4 times the value of the FAANG companies every year.

<comment><USER10> Thanks, I just found this better stat: "The "FAAMG" basket accounts for 18% of the total S&P 500 value"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we > reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be > offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as > measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then > perhaps so has scientific and technological progress.

My eye-opening realization of American stagnation came in history class during high school. The teacher told us the narrative of progress through the 1800s, how industrialization brought more wealth and electricity improved quality of life. He spoke of an increase in wages that came with it: each decade, Americans were wealthier than before.

People assume the lives of their children would be better than their own. But in the 1960s, an American man could support a family of five: himself, his wife, and three kids was the norm. Sure, part of that can be explained by sexism and gender issues of the time, but the point was that women didn't have to work because a single income was sufficient to support a family. Today, most families are dual-income[0] as a matter of necessity, not necessarily desire. It's no longer obvious that progress will continue, and certainly not obvious that the progress we are making is a good thing for most people.

My grandparents, separately, once remarked that they had seen "perhaps the last real changes in quality of life any generation would have." Running water in homes, indoor toilets, microwaves, refrigerators, and the development of computer networks all happened in the 20th century. They predicted continued stagnation in human innovation, that most of the universe's great ideas had already been discovered.

Where are the big, boundary-pushing changes to life that the relentless pursuit of technology had promised? Where do we go from here? My father once speculated it would come from far-field wireless power transmission. That would kick off the next space race, pushing humanity farther into space than we could ever imagine by fuel. And certainly it would push a new generation of innovation forward, enabling ideas that would not have been possible before. What are the next transformative technologies waiting just around the corner, capable of changing and improving life for everyone on the planet?

[0]: [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm)

<comment><USER14> Only a part of the mission, but there should be ambitious action taken to dramatically improve education and provide truly equal opportunity for all in the US. Pay teachers properly, give a proper education in all schools especially impoverished neighborhoods. The US should be ranking higher than it is in Math/Reading/Science scores compared to other countries. Other special programs to remedy the huge racial wealth gap from the slavery/Jim Crow/other institutional racism legacy. The US can and should do a much better job at providing better education and opportunities for all of its citizens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> On Page 92, under Biotech,

>The problem that I remain the most passionate about is for us to make some real and continued progress in the fight against aging and death.

But how does one help? Really. I've been in academia for more than 10 years. I've had done some really promising stuff and know people with pretty cool projects that are 1,000% worth pursuing. Yet I have found virtually zero support as I don't play well with the "the politics of science".

The problem is that the "politics of science" are typically against "actually doing science" as there is no surplus of time, energy and willpower that allows one to pursue both ends.

I would like people to consider that this is one of the biggest obstacles hindering human development (in science at least). This thing really needs to change, for the benefit of everybody involved.

<comment><USER16> the way my and my partners look at this is an infrastructure problem. our hope anyway is we can build tools and methods (better mathematical modeling, better bioinformatics software, faster/more accurate sequencing, eventually standardized gear for continuous process chemistry) that can serve startups of a bioengineering bent while also making it more practical for independent researchers to work outside academia. the biologist of our team is particularly interested in longevity research herself so partly we're trying to make the things that she'd need to do her own research 5-10 years down the line

I'm pessimistic about institutions but optimistic about people. I think the academy is an impediment to a lot of interesting and necessary projects, not just here but in general. risk-averse, prestige-obsessed, heavily bureaucratized. most of the institutions in our society are like this, hollowed out. there's a lot of basic research that needs to be done, so I think the highest leverage thing we can do is knock down barriers to more people being able to do it. route around the institutions

<comment><USER15> Hello Alice, off-topic but it's great to see you here.

I keep a binder at my desk with printed articles from the web that I find interesting enough to want to keep forever (and give to my children one day). In there is your take on 'playing to win' on the minecraft economy. Thanks for that.

<comment><USER16> hi! thanks for the kind words aha, always nice to hear people appreciate what I put out. trying to get a bit better than my current average of one post per year lol

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From first paragraph: this is a 56,000 word summary of Peter Thiel's view on progress and stagnation in his own words, sourced from a number of his interviews and articles. This document consists only of direct quotes from Thiel, lightly edited for clarity (except for headings and where marked otherwise). Key quotes are in the summary. Compiled by Richard Ngo (@richardmcngo) and Jeremy Nixon (@jvnixon).

</comment><comment><USER18> I've listened to some of these interviews and agree completely with the basic premise. However, I don't think it's correct that China's success is entirely explained from simply copying America. Of course copying is responsible for part of their success, but there are clear examples of the reverse. For example, integration of payments into WeChat, which has been duplicated by Facebook and others (but not as successfully as in China). They certainly disruptively innovate by making extremely cheap electric cars that poor Chinese can afford.

<comment><USER19> The language barrier is really making it difficult to see progress in China even for people interested in a particular space.

For example, in just the VR space, if I follow the most popular VR related subreddits and podcasts I often miss important Chinese VR hardware and software. And sometimes the hardware is better than anything available in the US.

I only found out about these cutting edge haptic gloves called Dexmo because I happened upon a review of an American product on an expert blog and the review compared them to a Chinese version.

[https://skarredghost.com/2020/04/07/senseglove-vr-haptics- gl...](https://skarredghost.com/2020/04/07/senseglove-vr-haptics-gloves/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can recommend listening to Thiels episode on Eric Weinsteins The Portal podcast if this sounds interesting to you.

<comment><USER21> I recommend that people listen to that episode even if it's _not_ interesting to you. Very good food for thought.

Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s) Audio: [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter- thiel/id146999...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-peter- thiel/id1469999563?i=1000444670908)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >"Clean tech" has become a euphemism for "energy too expensive to afford,"

. . . oh the non-clean is cheap for you. Expensive for the rest of us.

<comment><USER23> Some of these quotes are 8-10 years old, referencing events older than that. Back then solar wasn't that good of an idea financially and you had scandals like Solyndra. Now it's finally beating the cheapest dirty energy sources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting that many of his date coincide with the WTF happened in 1971 website: [https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/)

<comment><USER24> Wait, despite the perfect timing for a real cause that page is really trying to attribute it to monetary policy?

<comment><USER23> That is their take, but you gotta admit, something happened in the early 1970s.

<comment><USER24> They use the exact year of the oil crisis on their title. There was nothing financial about that one, it's entirely on the real part of the economy.

Yes, something happened on the early 70's. But that article is a biased gathering of disconnected evidence surrounded by a story that was set independently of any of that evidence and doesn't even make sense. It is still useful to point people to the problem, but it would be incredibly more useful if there were an actually good source we could use.

<comment><USER25> All the work done by wage earners when the US dollar was backed by gold alone was more valuable than the gold itself.

Even after the federal gold confiscation of the 1930's, maybe more so eventually because of increased productivity.

The vast majority of that wealth not only remained in the US, but was leveraged toward greater production in the US.

This led to increasing prosperity, and back when the system was half a century closer to being of the people, by the people, and for the people, prosperity was truly felt by the vast majority of people more than what you get today.

Half the charts on the site were fully predictable the day they turned the dollar into fiat currency.

As the value of the dollar declined, the work done by the wage earners became worth less than the gold their dollars were worth, and far less than when still backed just a few years earlier. Even though they were doing the same jobs for the same pay in US dollars so it didn't seem so bad at the time.

This was a serious reversal.

US consumers were manipulated from participants in a producer economy, into targets of an extractive economy.

At the maximum rate the _market_ could bear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So lets cut to the chase shall we: what would be the non-biotech arrangement of atoms that we can conceive of now that would be mega technological leaps for our species and achievable within 10 years of investment?

I think making things not accessible for a single person financially would be the my main focus. You can do things today that your ancestors had no chance of accessing, so what things would be the next quantum leap for your productivity that currently only the uber-rich have access to?

I will start:

\- Robot Servants - Eliminate of all trivial work and leave the creative endeavors for humans. Think about if 1 person could start a factory with the capital he saves from his full-time job.

\- Space Elevator or equivalent - Access to space is achievable for even small 1 person operations.

\- Fusion Reactors - Unlimited clean energy for said people, robots and factories. Couple that with some infrastructure to beam it into space and you could have some VERY interesting things emerge.

My theme is: Access to labor, access to resources, access to energy.

Anyone have any other ideas?

</comment><comment><USER26> > There are people who say that death is natural to which I think the response > always has to be that there is nothing more natural for us than to fight > death.

I think this is an excellent quote, but it doesn't convince me. Death is one of the only things we humans all have in common. It is the only great equalizer.

Unless _every_ human is able to live forever, I will remain skeptical about a death cure being a good thing for humanity. Sure, you can argue about defeating death by degrees (e.g. extending a lifespan to 150, 200 years) but again, if it isn't available for everyone, I can't see that going well.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm kind of confused. What is the purpose of this document? Did Peter Thiel put this together? Is the target audience people that like him? Or is the target audience people that are critical of him?

Or just plainly, is there a particular reason why I should care what a tech billionaire thinks about culture?

I'm not a fan of Peter Thiel in the slightest so maybe this isn't for me. I think it is a bit weird that at least one person finds his lofty opinions about stuff to be so important that they painstakingly collected them for... some purpose. Again, did Peter Thiel put this together??

<comment><USER28> Whether he put it together or not, an argument can be made (I make it as well) that it's worth reading it. Any one can have valid arguments, even (or especially) if you don't agree with the conclusions. The only question you can ask is if they're being logically consistent. If they are then they deserve to be listened to, if you truly want to understand how to join them or fight them.

I despise this guy but will listen to everything he has to say. He correctly predicted and bet like ford bet on Nazis that Trump will win, and is reaping the benefits. Given that we have a nincompoop at the top, I'm scrounging to get whatever meaningful literature I can find from the other side to see how they convince themselves of their deeds. This guy is probably up there as the best bets you have on this regard.

<comment><USER27> I don't think anybody had to be a super genius to predict the outcome of the 2016 election. I'd bet a good chunk of road comedians could've told you that in 2016.

Also, I don't think backing a candidate and using their victory to enrich yourself is a particularly brilliant or unique move, at least not one that warrants "listen[ing] to everything he says."

Beyond that, backing a candidate that's (at least arguably) detrimental to a country simply for profit or to prove a point about how smart you are doesn't really engender a lot of respect from me. Leveraging your existing billions to make even more billions might be somewhat impressive but this brings me back to my original question: Why should I (or anybody) care what Peter Thiel thinks about The Enlightenment or whatever?

This whole thing reads as "here's a grand study of one of our greatest thinkers" despite his main qualification is being rich and litigious.

It's like if I painted a self portrait where I've got angel wings and Dwayne Johnson's physique. It might be fun and pleasing for me, but why would anyone else want to look at it? And why would it end up on the front page of HN?

Sorry I don't mean to be rude but I am still genuinely stuck on What is the purpose of this document? and Why would anyone necessarily care about its content?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the fundamental problem is that we have grown so used to the idea of advanced progress within our own lifetime that we now refuse to do anything where we cannot see the payoff within our own lifetimes, this means we will likely not have any more major multi-generational project timelines, which are necessary for things like mass human space travel, or even solving global warming.

<comment><USER30> Don't worry - I think it's pretty clear we're at the point now where if we don't solve global warming within a single generation, it's too late.

<comment><USER29> We're the wrong generation to solve this problem, it's already too late.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Some interesting insights. I never thought of "stagnation" of non computer tech as something due to overregulation. However, I'm a bit hesitant to allow unregulated biotech/medical research.

<comment><USER30> I am super ok with "stagnation" of technologies that have the potential to cause the extinction of our species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The author posted his Twitter announcement on HN a few hours ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899990)

Couldn't edit the document so I added a few corrections there

</comment><comment><USER33> As a PDF: [https://6761deed1591e2a2-buzzertdotnet.s3-us- west-2.amazonaw...](https://6761deed1591e2a2-buzzertdotnet.s3-us- west-2.amazonaws.com/junk/Thiel+on+Progress+and+Stagnation.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER34> First, Wow, this is going to take some time to chew through.

On deregulation: I totally disagree. I think he has the cart before the horse. To me, it's under regulation. $1.3B per new drug is a _bargin_. Look at exercise machine infomercials, that's what the drug environment looks like, at best, without regulation. To have a drug checked over, tip to tail, pregnant or not, old or young, etc., costs a _lot_ of money. Not centralizing this process would be fantastically more expensive and error prone.

</comment><comment><USER35> "The easiest way to see this, and this is always my challenge—people don't agree with this—is challenge you to name me one science fiction film that Hollywood produced in the last 25 years in which technology is portrayed in a positive light, in which it's not dystopian, it doesn't kill people, it doesn't destroy the world, it doesn't not work, etc., etc."

Interstellar?

</comment><comment><USER36> He's right about process vs substance. There are so many people involved in box-checking in this world, it's amazing. People whose job is substantially to ensure some process is followed, rather than think up better processes. Even when we are talking about ostensibly innovating orgs, there are people there to make sure everything follows a plan that cannot possibly contribute to the discovery of knowledge.

I sound bitter about this, but actually a lot of friends of mine are in that type of position. Heck, I myself have to do process-box-ticking type things in my day-to-day as well.

This ends up being a sort of glue that's poured over all of society. Each checklist on its own seems reasonable, but put together we make change quite hard. We also end up creating a class of people who are incentivized to make sure there are rules and procedures to follow. I don't just mean lawyers, there's a whole slew of pseudo-lawyers handling things such as GDPR policies and IT Security policies, compliance officers, and so on.

All these process people depend on our continued desire to seem reasonable ("Make sure schools check for child molesters before hiring anyone"), but also abdicate responsibility for those decisions to the new policy expert class. GDPR has been around for not very long, but already you'd better hire someone who is an expert in it if you're going to do serious business (this in fact happened at my day-to-day, there's no way to do business without).

</comment><comment><USER37> It's harder than ever to escape local optimums. Invent a better drug for high blood pressure? It needs to compete with several older, cheaper "OK" drugs for the same condition. Invent a better electricity source? It needs to compete with fully depreciated power plants that were built 25 years ago. Invent a better large scale search algorithm -- an innovation on the order of PageRank? Googlebot is welcome on billions of pages that will aggressively try to prevent you from crawling them. Google's "good enough" search plus stronger position in content acquisition will prevent people from escaping the local optimum.

</comment><comment><USER38> Some of the links are from 10 years ago, and it shows. His views on solar being too expensive for practical use seem anachronistic now, and I'm sure his opinion has changed with the market.

<comment><USER39> It _was_ too expensive 10 years ago. Technology improvements have brought efficiency up and cost down since then.

<comment><USER40> Sounds like progress to me. But since we can't travel at 2,000 MPH...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > I'm more scared of the stagnation world I feel ultimately goes straight to > apocalypse.

What apolcalypse is he worried about? Or is it the breakdown in politics, due to the stagnation, the problem? Why should the breakdown lead to an apocalypse, rather than a reformation?

</comment><comment><USER35> What is meant by "SAS enterprise software, really overrated"? Does he mean SAAS as in Software-as-a-Service?

</comment><comment><USER42> I think Thiel is worth listening to, but sometimes his contrarianism flips into derangement:

> [Peter Robinson: In 2016, how many professors at the top five law schools > endorsed Donald Trump?] [2] Zero. And the law school example's interesting > because you would think it's one where if you took the, a lot of academic > fields are more internal to academia, but law is one that cashes out in a > governmental political context, and taking a contrarian position in theory > is quite valuable. If you're a tenured law professor at Harvard, and you're > the only law professor at a top law school to endorse Trump, I don't know, I > think there would be like a 50% chance you would've gotten nominated to the > Supreme Court or something like that. So it seems like it's the sort of > thing where the contrarian thing would be quite valuable, and then if nobody > takes that bet, I mean, wow, there must be some unbelievable enforcement > mechanisms, and it's sort of like a gentle version of North Korea.

What's more likely: Harvard law professors don't endorse Trump because he's unfit to lead a parade, or they are subject to (gentle) totalitarian barbarism?

<comment><USER43> I think his point is that, Trump provided the opportunity for these law professors to get their "dream job" (a seat on the supreme court, your name is in the history books for centuries). And yet, NONE of them took this up.

His point is that the groupthink at Harvard is so strong that people will actively demolish their dreams to stay within the group.

<comment><USER44> Thiel's insistence that Harvard law professors ought to have put [in this instance highly unlikely] personal advancement opportunities ahead of their actual beliefs about the fitness of a presidential candidate for office when deciding whether to make an endorsement says much about Thiel and little about groupthink at Harvard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Just take all the money and build loads of solar and wind power.

</comment><comment><USER46> It would be nice if there was an .epub format version of this.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is old. What's the date?

<comment><AUTHOR> The doc itself was only put together recently, but it's composed of quotes and interviews from over the last decade.

<comment><USER22> Seems like he's stagnated.

<comment><USER48> as an obsessive observer of his over the past decade, I've been concerned... It could be a product of his increased concern over public media coverage in general (he keeps his _really_ interesting views _just_ to himself, as Nick Cammarata mentions on Twitter), and this trend may have only intensified recently, as he has been strangely quiet

<comment><USER34> The IPO has likely been taking up a lot of time. Also, there is a blackout period before most IPOs where those in the company are not allowed to talk about the company or 'sell' it. The SEC guidelines are pretty strict and jeopardizing XYZ% of the IPO can result in millions on the gambling table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I highly recommend the website [https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/) and in particular their excellent newsletter. Surely, it would be an oversimplification to reduce everything to one cause but how much the setup of the original gold standard of the bank of England in the late 1770s spurred on the industrial revolution and how the centralization of gold and the final abolishing of the gold standard and ensuing financial tinkering led to malinvestments and threw wrenches into the engine of capitalism, wealth generation and ever increasing living standards has IMHO not yet sufficiently been investigated (Prof. Saifedean Ammous work here being one laudable exception). In an interview from 2019 Peter Thiel mentions that Paypal would have never succeeded had the Patriot Act existed at the time. Banking regulations would have never allowed Paypal off the ground. Just a few years between Paypal and that monstrocity: We would not have Tesla. We wouldnt have SpaceX. There wouldn't be any Boring company or any Neuralink. The opportunity cost of all of that is unfathomable.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm biased because I already expected to disagree with much of his worldview, but I think a lot of Key Quotes Summary are bad takes:

 _The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled._

Actually the real price of oil was basically the same for the decade before 1973 (ranging $22.21 - $27.37) as 1993-1999 (ranging $18.86 - $33.63): [https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted- prices...](https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted- prices/historical-crude-oil-prices-table/)

It's true that it spiked in 1974-1985, and was elevated from 1986-1992 (ranging $32.48 - $45.65 — far from quadruple), and has been much higher than pre-1973 prices since 2000, but that doesn't really match up with the stagnation of wages. Policy changes in the 80s (Reaganomics) causing rising inequality are a much better explanation:

[https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/](https://www.epi.org/productivity- pay-gap/)

[https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo- compensation-...](https://www.epi.org/publication/reining-in-ceo-compensation- and-curbing-the-rise-of-inequality/#_ref5)

 _Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started._

He thought that was a problem under Obama and he sought to change that by elevating...Trump?

 _Tesla was out-competed by Edison, even though Edison had an inferior technology. The Wright brothers came up with the first airplane, but they didn't get to be rich._

Edison having inferior technology is kind of a myth, or at least a vast oversimplification. DC is superior to AC in many situations; ironically, Tesla the car company is all about innovations in DC technology, as is Musk's SolarCity.

The Wright brothers are arguably the first to privately achieve powered controlled flight, and it's obviously impressive that they were "just" bicycle mechanics before, but it's an American myth that they "invented" the airplane. French-Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont actually publicly demonstrated his independently developed powered controlled airplane in 1906 before the Wright brothers did in 1908, and there are many other claims to having been first, all independently developed: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_fl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_to_the_first_powered_flight)

More importantly, the Wright brothers did a bad job of turning their prototypes into useful airplanes, while Glenn Curtiss and the European aviators did a better job; instead, the Wright brothers focused on guarding their patents and promoting their names as the first inventors. If anyone would agree that execution matters more than ideas, it would be the HN crowd.

 _If you 're a professor in academia, [you say]: the tenure system is great. It's just picking the most talented people. I don't think it's that hard at all. It's completely meritocratic. And if you don't say those things, well we know you're not the person to get tenure. So I think there's this individual incentive where if you pretend the system is working, you're simultaneously signaling that you're one of the few people who should succeed in it._

Um...and what reason is there to believe that the VC-based tech industry isn't exactly like this, and that is how Thiel himself became successful? Cancer researchers are at least objectively making progress against cancer. Thiel got rich by founding or investing in some companies that he sold to other rich people.

On the other hands, some of these are interesting thoughts:

 _Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what's most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance [...] A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. [...] In a definite world money is a means to an end because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world you have no idea what to do with money [...]_

 _I think there is a big hysteresis part to this where success begets success and then failure begets failure, where if you haven't had any major successes in a number of decades, it does induce a certain amount of learned helplessness, and then it shifts the way science gets done or the way innovation gets done in to a more bureaucratic, political structure where the people who get the research grants are more the politicians than the scientists. You're rewarded for very small incremental progress, not for trying to take risks._

The "two perspectives on China" thing might be interesting, but I'd want to see a lot more substantiation. Who is saying what, exactly?

</comment><comment><USER51> Almost every time I see an SV libertarian try to discuss social issues from an apparently disinterested, logical standpoint, they always seem trapped inside of libertarian bubble and unable to expand this viewpoint to consider other possible causes.

1) What's the evidence that technological progress has slowed? Is this nostalgia? Thiel is weighting more heavily "big" engineering projects like military hardware or aerospace above "soft" engineering projects. The Moon landing was a $150 billion project by the government BTW. Is LHC and LIGO not huge achievements? All three were science experiments, not consumer technological progress.

2)"only 3.5% unemployment". Quantitative vs Qualitative fallacy. Majority of new jobs created since 2005 are temp or gig economy jobs.

3) Is it regulation, or is it just diminishing returns in a cycle that is a punctuated equilibrium. Thiel expects steady progress, but between big cycles you have iteration and incrementally. Most of the low hanging fruit has been picked and reaching the next local maxima will require time. But SV libertarians always start out with the premise that government is the problem, and then try to tie their thesis at the end back to that.

4) Thiel criticizes Steven Chu for backing Solyndra. Fine, post-facto due diligence shows it was a bad investment. But the DoE's investment portfolio has better success rates than most VC funds, it's not that Thiel himself has never made any dumb investments. Broadening your portfolio over a large number of companies (some of them starting with a dumb idea) is not necessarily a bad strategy and even companies with unworkable ideas can sometimes pivot to companies that are big hits. Solyndra didn't, but there are numerous examples of others who did. Even PayPal is an example of a pivot, I did technical due dilligence on the original idea, Confinity, in 1998, when it was about peer- to-peer payments between Palm Pilots. Switching to Digital Wallets was also a failure. None of the eWallets that were installable apps on the desktop got traction. It was only when it pivoted to email that it worked.

5) Thiel himself built Palantir on the backs of US taxpayer money. Hypocritical for him to criticize the government and government investment. He also got lucky from a serendipitous meeting between him and Zuckerberg, did he really know then when he gave seed money to Zuck Facebook would be so big? Was FB technological progress?

So in summary: 1) we don't have a way to measure technological progress in a way that permits computing the rate. Lots of flawed proxies, e.g # of patents, etc It's subjective, and your wonderment as a child at changes in technology become disillusioned and nonplussed as an adult.

2) wages are stagnated. Unemployment isn't "low", not when your replace a big chunk of stable middle class jobs with benefits with temp/gig work.

3) public transport is successful all over the world, and Thiel ignores the billions spent on other modes (like airports). e.g. California government has spent $60 billion on SFO/LAX/OAK/SJC/ec

4) no evidence regulations are stopping technological progress, there is evidence that risk aversion from conservatives attacking government R&D for decades has, especially in areas of renewable energy or climate (e.g. ARPA-E program)

The only thing I agree with him on is that our Sci-Fi is predominantly dystopian now. The United Federation of Planets (ironically, post-capitalist according to Picard), a multicultural society of tolerance and freedom from want, has been replaced with cyberpunk misery.

But this is largely a reflection is the fact that 40 years of wage stagnation, and continued attacks on collective action in building a better future, gave way to rugged individualism and survivalism. In Sci-Fi, grand utopias usually aren't built by spontaneous order, but by collective action.

</comment><comment><USER47> The future is coming. In China.

Energy:

\- Million-volt DC power transmission over thousands of kilometers is routine.

\- Solar panels get cheaper every year.

\- 46 nuclear reactors in operation, 11 under construction.

Transportation:

\- 35,000km of high speed rail.

\- Several major cities, including Shenzhen (16 million people), use all electric taxis and buses now.

\- 600km/hr maglev train in test.

Medicine:

\- First coronavirus vaccine approved and being given to PLA soldiers.

\- Epidemic under control, most of country back at work.

Electronics:

\- In-country manufacture of everything except largest CPUs.

Finance:

\- Country runs financial system; financial system does not run country.

Government:

\- Government is mildly oppressive but not incompetent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ten years ago I'd agree, but I don't think outright genocide qualifies as "mildly oppressive".

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

<comment><USER47> That's not genocide, it's forced assimilation. China is trying to break the stranglehold of Islam. That's tough, as two decades of wars in the Middle East have taught the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why should I think this man has special insight into the state of the world? He is quite rich, that is true. But if anything, by definition that means he is deeply out of touch with the needs, desires, and problems of the vast majority of the people on this planet.

<comment><USER52> Taking your comment at absolute face value, this essay is about technological progress, not the needs desires or problems of anybody.

<comment><USER30> "progress" has a few definitions. It can mean simply "forward motion", in which case you are right. Or it can mean what I usually take it to mean: "gradual betterment" \- unless you're a shark, what's the point of moving forward if not to improve. How can you improve if you don't understand what "better" is?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The premise of Libertarianism in this doc is flawed. The idea that fewer laws gives rise to freedom is a Conservative distortion. Fewer laws gives freedom to the most powerful few to do what they like to the rest. The freedom we need for social progress and innovation, is the freedom and rights of the productive class, ie workers, to help society through creative destruction. Their freedom and rights can only be provided through robustly defended and well-crafted economic opportunity laws, including a permissive patent & copyright culture. Since certain Conservative interests will always be opposed to certain creative destructions, when they are too powerful it doesn't happen. That's why autocratic empires don't develop at anywhere near their potential rate, except in the narrow channel they point themselves in (war for Nazi Germany, manufacturing for modern China). That's why the printing press languished in the Han Empire, but lead to the Scientific Revolution in less autocratic/fragmented Europe, where people were able to say heretical anti- establishment stuff by hopping between legal jurisdictions.

In jurisdictions where/when those laws have been well crafted, spectacular social progress has followed:

\- in Athens, the crafting of the Solonian Constitution created broader property rights which lead to the renaissance that was Ancient Greece; which was later destroyed by the absolute rule of Alexander's heirs

\- in Rome, the crafting of the Law of Twelve Tables lead to the Roman Empire; it was destroyed by Marcus Aurelius when he eliminated the last voting rights, handing hereditary power to his son

\- in England, the crafting of Parliament led to the Industrial Revolution because it undid domestic Royal Monopolies; it has been continually eroded by Conservative interests over the centuries, today the UK is not epicenter of economic opportunity

\- in the USA, the crafting of the Constitution designed a classless, more equal opportunity society, far from perfect, it nevertheless resulted in unprecedented economic growth resulting in the USA's dominance during the 20th Century; it almost died at the end of the 1800's as the robber barons sought to create monopolies that would define a new Conservative class system based on the wealthy people of that day; today it is under attack again by large companies who are eating/disappearing upstart competitors; Republican policies, and activist Republican judges are eroding antitrust. Libertarians want to disassemble what made America great, whether they know it or not.</comment>


What it's like to be a startup in a 3rd world country - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/asia/2011/04/24/building-a-startup-in-a-developing-country-the-pitfalls-and-opportunities/1/

<comment><USER2> I'm the co-founder of a startup in Indonesia [EDIT] (<http://bazarooma.com>) and would like to share some of the experience. I've been to both Indonesia and the Philippines for business over the last three years and I observed that, compared to the pace in the west, development is significantly faster resulting in a quicker increase of quality of life. However my feeling is that Indonesia surpasses most of the neighbouring countries by far in both the quality and volume of its development, maybe excluding China.

On the plus side, we encountered an open market which makes placing new products and ideas easy. Internet users are reasonably experienced, our server logs show that Indonesian visitors use modern browsers and understand common UI concepts easily. It has a thriving tech and startup scene and is well- connected. Indonesia is the second biggest Facebook user and we found that you can indeed efficiently reach people over Facebook.

The cons we encountered so far are few, but they hurt. Throughout our communication with either individuals, the media or businesses we found a recurring pattern of either ignoring our communication attempts (mail, twitter, phonecalls, facebook) or deliberately misreading them regardless of them being on a business or personal level. As soon as we switched to personal contact (we visited them) the situation improved, leading me to believe that they have some catching up to do with modern media.

<comment><USER3> Insightful, thanks.

Ok now this may come across as ignorant but is language ever the problem? Maybe your emails are in english and the subtext doesn't translate over to Indonesian via written forms easily?

Also, any comments and insights on the Indian startup scene? Bangalore has been making a lot of noise lately...

<comment><USER2> Hello namank,

We wanted to rule any language problems out from the beginning and have access to native Indonesian speakers for all of our communication.

As an anecdote I could mention that they are very mindful about where in Indonesia the addressee originates from, because social protocol advises towards custom addressing and language.

<comment><USER3> Yes, thats exactly what I was wondering, thanks. So you must need to accommodate all the different regions.

Implementing localization within the country! Wow!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It makes me cringe to see the original title changed from "developing" to "third world" country.

The term was originally used to either distinguish countries non-aligned with either capitalism or communism during the cold war but has since gained an economic connotation and become synonymous with "poor".

The Philippines is a capitalist country and consequently doesn't fit the first definition; it most definitely is not poor, so it also doesn't fit the last.

<comment><USER5> I think it shows a profound ignorance of how the world works. I hear it all the time living in Thailand.

To put that in perspective, Thailand ranks 23rd by GDP, has a literacy rate in the high 90s and has an unemployment rate of around 1%.

The average professional _does_ make around half of what they would in the US, but their taxes are lower and their cost of living is also half or less. The health care cost/quality ratio makes many countries look barbaric.

I think "third world" could be safely replaced with "economy I know nothing about" in the majority of cases.

<comment><USER6> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita) puts Thailand in the 80s in GDP per capita. The Philippines is 125, 113, or 132 depending on the list. All three lists agree that Thailand has less than 1/4 of US GDP, and the Philippines has less half of Thailand's, putting it on the edge of the bottom quartile.

So jumping down someone's throat for calling the RP a poor country looks a little premature to me. (I lived there for two years and my gut feeling doesn't disagree with that, although if you've only been to Makati I can see how you might not realize that.)

That said, to me "3rd-world" has pejorative connotations regardless of income levels, and I also wish the submitter had left the title alone.

<comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)>

Quote:

"Using a PPP basis is arguably more useful when comparing generalized differences in living standards on the whole between nations because PPP takes into account the relative cost of living and the inflation rates of the countries, rather than using just exchange rates which may distort the real differences in income."

Thailand ranks #24, #23 and #24 in those lists. I rounded up. You picked a list to illustrate your point (that Thailand and the Philippines are poor?). I picked one that better reflected GDP vs cost of living, which was my point.

I wasn't jumping down his throat specifically, I was saying that the term "third world" as applied to Thailand (and other countries) is a worthless description today. As the original commenter pointed out, it's related to the geopolitics of the Cold War. People often swap it for "developing nation" which is a euphemism for "undeveloped by Western standards" which I think is condescending and a culturally biased value judgement. When someone says "third world" I would say they either don't really understand the economics involved or are deliberately being derogatory to another people/nation. I think that's pretty safely called ignorance.

<comment><USER7> The PPP is not without flaws for these uses; compare the average standard of life in China or India to the average standard of life in the Netherlands or Canada, and compare their PPP rankings.

If you're looking to compare quality of life, while not perfect, I would imagine the Human Development Index would be closer in line with average experience: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was a bit disappointed that infrastructure issues were only touched on in the briefest way, and then not by the writer but by the interviewed Filipino entrepreneur.

That's a shame, because after investment capital the biggest problem in the Philippines is lack of infrastructure. Government corruption is extreme. Even in the better-off cities there it can be tough to get any work done because of the constant brownouts, and high-speed fiber buildout is lacking.

</comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone read cost-effective manpower as cheap? :(

I'm from Serbia, and still living here. The local market is small and extremely undeveloped. Telecommunication infrastructure is sub-standard, no non-ISP/corporate data centers and no multiple backbone links. While the cloud/grid hosting solves that particular problem, there are others.

Running a company here costs you around 300€/month, whether you have profit or not. That doesn't include office space or bills, taxes only. Note that it is the average net monthly salary, but you can't live of it really.

Corruption. Shitty infrastructure. No Paypal and no widely available (and inexpensive) card-processing options. I'm not sure about getting a proper, signed SSL certificate either.

All of the above can be circumvented, yes. The problem is that when you are so far behind everyone else society wise, ideas and visions that are popping in your head are being sold as a commodity in the rest of the world, and even if you have a nice, modern, innovative idea, unless you are wealthy, you wont be able to implement it because of so many bureaucratic obstacles.

So, what do we have here? A bunch of IT service and programming sweatshops, outsourced of course. Because of relatively cheap labor.

It is my opinion that having an inspiring and motivating, if not competing environment helps innovation.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is it only me or calling it a 3rd world country really sounds humiliating?

</comment><comment><USER11> Almost the same story here in Armenia.

</comment><comment><USER12> a little bit of a side track, does anyone have opinions on the emphasis of pretty/slick/minimalistic UI/UX on apps in developing nations. It maybe due to my ignorance, but there doesn't seem to be much emphasis/value placed by stakeholders on that front, the focus particularly in asia seems to be on content rich rather than UX rich.

</comment><comment><USER13> <http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/>

</comment><comment><USER14> "We've heard of tons of successful startups from countries like US and Europe" ... :(</comment>


Is the Aeneid a Celebration of Empire or a Critique? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/is-the-aeneid-a-celebration-of-empire-or-a-critique <comment><USER2> It is an odd work. Homer's works are well constructed, but extemporized from, probably, many public performances. However Virgil was more Tolkien than Homer, writing an epic divorced from public performance. Personally I think to ascribe anti imperial (or pro) ideology to the book is anachronistic. I don't think the ancient world would have seen ideology as a force in the ascendancy of empire. These things are the result of chance and the will of the gods in the ancient world. Philosophy in Virgil's time had much more to do with how to handle life as it came at you rather than how it ought to be shaped (think Marcus Aurelias's Meditations).

<comment><USER3> > Homer's works are well constructed, but extemporized from, probably, many > public performances.

I was listening to a greek history podcast where it was suggested that the performance of Homer's works wasn't for entertainment, per se, but as part of public religious rituals, and that the formulaic aspects of it (the wine-dark sea) are similar to the kinds of ritualistic repetitions you get see in the catholic mass for example (amen, peace be with you, etc). The catalogue of ships makes more sense if you think of it as an oft repeated public ritual that was striving for inclusion for audiences across the greek world. They also suggested that it wasn't often performed all at once, but different sections of it would mark different special occasions-- again, similar to the way the bible is used in Mass. I'm not at all a greek history expert, but it was interesting.

<comment><USER4> That kennings etc. show that the Homeric poems come from an oral tradition, was eventually accepted on the basis of Milman Parry's studies of Balkan folk poetry. That folk poetry (and similar traditions worldwide like the Kyrgyz Manas) is for entertainment. So, there is no need to claim that Homeric recitation must have been bound with religious ritual. Certainly Homer's forebears might have performed at public festivals that also included a religious element, but that doesn't mean the poetry was of the same nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rome of that age was very self aware of the histories of the many city states that had risen and fallen before them, as I think the very story describes. The personal choices made by leaders of those many prior city-empires were the very reasons for each to fail on the global stage. The Aeneid was the zeitgeist of Roman manifest destiny under the imperial banner.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is The Stars and Stripes Forever a celebration of the US?

"The subject world shall Rome's dominion own, And, prostrate, shall adore the nation of the gown. An age is ripening in revolving fate When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state, And sweet revenge her conqu'ring sons shall call, To crush the people that conspir'd her fall. Then Caesar from the Julian stock shall rise, Whose empire ocean, and whose fame the skies Alone shall bound; whom, fraught with eastern spoils, Our heav'n, the just reward of human toils, Securely shall repay with rites divine; And incense shall ascend before his sacred shrine. Then dire debate and impious war shall cease, And the stern age be soften'd into peace: Then banish'd Faith shall once again return, And Vestal fires in hallow'd temples burn; And Remus with Quirinus shall sustain The righteous laws, and fraud and force restrain. Janus himself before his fane shall wait, And keep the dreadful issues of his gate, With bolts and iron bars: within remains Imprison'd Fury, bound in brazen chains; High on a trophy rais'd, of useless arms, He sits, and threats the world with vain alarms."

([http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0052))

Editors of Virgil have pointed out that he grew up in badly unsettled times, with civil wars. A bit of imperial peace looked pretty good compared to that.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is literally an essay topic for every high-school Latin program.

It is hard not to see the contrast between Vergil's pathos for the costs of war and the Iliad's celebration of aggressive machismo. And yet the Aeneid is ideologically committed to the Roman project of empire as a civilising force.

The best modern parallel is something like Saving Private Ryan, which combines sympathy for the costs and losses of war in general with full support of the motivations of the particular war. Neither work is remotely subversive (they skate close to being outright propaganda for their militaries and societies), but both are profoundly humanistic.

<comment><USER8> I took Latin a long time ago, but one passage supporting your point sticks in my brain. Virgil is recounting the many steps that led to the Empire, and he says something like, "Of such great difficulty was it to found the nation of Rome." To me it read like he recognized the awesome power and accomplishments of his civilization, but at the same time he saw the amount of blood that it cost to achieve that greatness. The two were not separable, and the theme was not about one or the other, but both as one.

<comment><USER9> That is literally from the first few lines of the Aeneid...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whatever it is, it's not very good. It always seemed a very pale imitation of the Odyssey to me. If I'm reading semi-mythical Roman history, I'd rather tackle Livy. Or better yet Sallust or Appian.

<comment><USER11> I disagree; I found the Iliad to be quite boring, either with Achilles not fighting due to the slave girl, or Achilles defiling the body of Patroclus for far to long.

I didn't know the material when I read these, and I was looking for the sack of Troy. I found it in Virgil, and it was well paced.

<comment><USER7> The only way reading the Iliad made any sense to me was as history told by and for mob bosses. The primary concerns are honour and 'face', stealing stuff and killing people with maximum brutality. I think it is hard for a modern reader to admire any of the figures in the Iliad, but seen as a story of rival gangsters, it makes much more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like most great literature, it's an insight into the reader. How you interpret aeneid says more about you than the book. No different from the bible or hamlet.</comment>