Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America - <AUTHOR> https://nytimes.com/2018/06/27/books/review-squeezed-alissa-quart.html <comment><USER2> This. I was lucky enough to fall for a German woman who was studying in the states. We married and moved to Berlin when we realized having a family in the US would be a struggle. We could have moved to the suburbs, but we really hate car culture and wanted to live in a biking city. I worked in tech - didn't have to learn German or jump through hoops to get a job.

Now, on a single high 5 figure salary, I'm 15 minutes biking to work and live in one of the nicest parts of the city. We have two kids in free day care. My wife works part time, and she is finishing a year off of 60% paid maternity leave. She really doesn't earn much after taxes, but we save all her income - more than 15k per year.

Salaries are lower here and things are getting more expensive for sure. But for 400k+ EUR, we should be able to buy a place for a family of four and bet set for a long time.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you consider the suburbs but I'm confident you could find that same situation or better so long as you looked at medium size and smaller cities or towns in the US.

<comment><USER4> You can't. US cities are uniformly car-centric. The exceptions to the rule are too expensive to buy property in anywhere close to city center.

Aside: I lived (and grew up) in several small-to-medium sized US cities prior to settling in Berlin. None come close to offering a similar range of cultural infrastructure to the typical medium-size European city, and quality of life is totally incomparable - again in Europe's favor.

<comment><USER5> Sure you can. I live in such a place. Housing around $200k for 4br, 2ba, decent salary, etc.

I don't know what your vision of cultural infrastructure is, but I feel culturally satiated.

<comment><USER6> Where do you live that a decent 4br/2ba goes for 200k? I'm in the Midwest and that's at least 100-150k lower than I'd expect in an urban area (rural communities, sure - but not the city).

<comment><USER7> Rochester and Buffalo are this affordable, and have the added benefit of being in New York State.

<comment><USER8> I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Being in NY is a negative, not a positive. NY has some of the highest taxes in the country and much of the money gets funneled to NYC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am Brazillian

Still, sadly that stuff also applies here...

Me and my friends around my age, that were born in solid middle-class families (of the sort that could own only one car, a cheap house or apartment and so on), were taught that the path of life was: go to college, get a job or public sector job (here in Brazil those are popular), marry, have a boring life.

Instead we went to college paid with crazy loans, found no jobs, jumped around from gig to gig trying to repay the loans, people don't want seriosu relationships, only flings, and now I am 30, living back in my parents house, still with no job.

A 30 year old college friend of mine that is excellent designer and know some coding, is living on his parents home with his kid (no wife), to pay the kid bills he found a illegal-ish gig as construction worker, and after he lost that job, he can't find a new one.

My grandparents used to tell me what was their "poor life", where they had to walk to school, work their asses off early, date in front of dad of the bride, eat eggs because other food was expensive...

Now we have a "rich" life, with cars (that belong to parents, I never could afford my own, neither my friends), computer, internet... but can't afford our own house, we can't "work our ass off" because there is no work, eating enough protein in some months have been hard, as food prices inflated way beyond the wage growth and what is affordable now is basically cereals and starchy foods (like potatoes), and your food choice become: eat enough nutrients and baloon in size wildly as all food availble has too much calories comapred to other nutrients, or control your calories, have nutrient deficit...

To me is no surprise people live in slums or invaded areas, one time I rented a apartment with cracked walls, non-working fire alarm, elevator that often had issues (like operating with doors open and stopping 20 centimeters off- level), no garage, and the rent was 4 times the mininum wage, I could only afford living there when my income due to some coding contracts landed me in the top 3% highest earners of the country... made me wonder, where everyone else was living. (or one time I shared a normal 3 bedroom house, with literally 35 persons, most of them already had bachelor degrees, several in STEM, and were there to train in a nearby police academy, hoping such dangerous work was better than having no work at all in their own field)

<comment><USER10> Wow, things have gotten really bad since I left the country. Mind if I ask in what state you live? I never had trouble finding a full time programming job in Rio Grande do Sul.

<comment><USER9> I am in São Paulo

I never got full time job offer, only contracts, some that were joblike (ie: company treated me as actual contractor but expected me to be present 9-5 every day in the office).

When I was fresh out of college I did got some offers for part time work, but with wage so small it wouldn't cover any of my costs at all (for example wages were smaller than my monthly debt repayments of student debt alone).

<comment><USER11> It sounds like you have good programming experience and can write decent English. I would look for remote work with a North American or European startup, send them your GitHub account and recent work. That would be better than trying to find a local opportunity

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it just me or do these articles about economic hardship always seem to use the most unsurprising examples for their prototypical struggling subject. The example they use here is freelance writer. Hasn't that job title always had poor prospects? I remember a similar article posted here about people struggling to find work after the 2008 crash and their example was a person who had been laid off but instead of trying to find a new job they purposely blew through their savings for a couple years and were then surprised when they went to look for work and something didn't immediately materialize.

<comment><USER12> One of the other examples in the same article is a middle-aged aerospace engineer, so maybe that's more to your liking.

<comment><USER13> An aerospace engineer who decided to become a personal chef and went into deep dept at a culinary school. I'm guessing this individual is a bit different than the engineers I know.

<comment><USER14> If you're an in-demand engineer, you're likely surrounded by in-demand engineers, and that might seem like the norm to you, but that path might not be available to everyone.

I think it's worth thinking about the conditions that could lead to a person seemingly torpedoing herself with an expensive, debt-ridden culinary certificate. Things really have gotten tougher for many Americans over the past few decades. Some people make it extra tough on themselves by refusing to handle downward mobility gracefully and taking the best options available to them. On the surface, borrowing money for culinary school seems like an objectively (very) bad choice, but people are complicated, and I'd be interested in understanding what brought her to this.

<comment><USER13> > On the surface, borrowing money for culinary school seems like an > objectively (very) bad choice

Well that is kind of my point. I don't know any engineer that would go to an expensive culinary school as a way to enter another career. I have yet to meet a competent engineer that wouldn't look at the return on investment of something like that. I'm not saying they aren't out there, but the things that make you a good engineer are the very things that keep you from going into debt at an expensive culinary school.

I'm not trying to insult the person who is looking for a new career, but too often I hear these stories about how hard life is for someone, but when you look at the entire story it doesn't add up. In this case, I think there is a reasonable chance that calling her an "aerospace engineer" is an overstatement of her engineering skills. It is possible she is an exception is actually a skilled aerospace engineer, but it seems unlikely or that there is something being left out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are all sorts of aspects to this. In terms of the bigger, longer term trends, I think the dynamic described by Thomas Picketty is the most important aspect. Long term trends towards increased wealth disparity.

On the other hand, at the micro level people actually experience, I think the cultural dynamic is more important. It determines how people feel about the economy.

 _The people she talks to believed their educations and backgrounds (most of them grew up in middle-class homes) would guarantee some financial stability_

Upward mobility is ideologically important to any major, modern political camp. Few deal with downward mobility in any way. Individuals will have a much tougher time politically tolerating being poorer than their parents (or their cohort) than just being poor. Losing is more emotional than winning and the grudge lasts longer than the opposite.

Ideologically, I think most of us would say that social class should not be inherited. Emotionally, few of us can live with downward moves in the economic hierarchy. It creates an unmistakable feeling of having been robbed of one's birthright.

<comment><USER16> Nope this guy has a good job. Not about mobility. This is about rentiers. People need to read "Progress and poverty" by Henry George. Land prices are the issue.

<comment><USER15> Not having a job isn't the only way to move down a tier. I think what a lot of cohorts are feeling (the economy is broken) comes down to (1) middle class upbringing (2) did the things middle class kids are supposed to do, like college, "professional white collar job" (3) results are worse than expected.

People's expectations can be set all sorts of ways, but the most obvious is comparatively to the group they believe they are or shoybe part of. Ie, parents, friends...

This is all at the personal level. There are also macro trends and dynamics in the economy overall. Haven't read George, but Picketty (recent Nobel laureate) has a very good theory for this. I don't know how George uses "rentier" but "returns to capital" probably encompasses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of things in America are really cheap, but there are a few areas where we are denied cost effective options. I like colleges as an example because you don't need any domain specific knowledge to see the excess.

I went to a cheap state school. The buildings were made of red brick, the paths were paved with brick and replaced every 3 years, and the gardens were meticulously maintained...the place was meant to look like a palace, and this was one of the most cost effective options I could find. If I don't strike it rich, I'll probably never live or work in a place as fancy as where I went to school.

Of course there are ugly colleges too, but the point is that the price of tuition includes a lot that has nothing to do with education, and a lot of this is stuff people wouldn't pay for if given the choice.

Does it make sense to pay for an upper middle class lifestyle when you're a broke 19 year old? Don't worry, the government will give you a loan...

<comment><USER13> > the price of tuition includes a lot that has nothing to do with education, > and a lot of this is stuff people wouldn't pay for if given the choice.

This is a very good point. There are colleges that are quite a bit less expensive, but as a whole the fact you can get a loan for pretty much any amount without needing to justify the return on investment guarantees that colleges will keep increasing their expenses to get students to spend their debt at their school.

<comment><USER18> On undergrad, there is a life time limit of $60k, so expect the average cost to go up to that. And then the limit will be increased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's the concentration of wealth causing this as the economy is being bled dry. the fix is to restore the progressive tax code, income in excess of $5M/yr taxed at 99%. not rocket science, but nearly impossible because politics, so get used to being poor America. currently half of jobs in usa pay less than $18/hr. only going to get worse unless the root cause is addressed.

<comment><USER20> Extremely progressive taxation isn't effective. The very rich have ways of hiding or deferring income.

There's also the problem that there simply isn't very much money at that level. Just to put it into perspective, the top 1% of tax payers only had an AGI of about $2 trillion. Let me get even more extreme than what you propose. If you taxed at 100% over $1M/year, you'd only get $431 billion. So that would only add about $200 billion (about 15%) of Federal revenue per year since they're already paying about half of that on earnings over $1M/yr. Oh yeah, BTW, how would they pay local and state taxes out of that?

<comment><USER21> The problem isn't the tax rate, it's the growing wealth inequality. Since you seem to have thought much about this already - do you agree it's a problem, and how would you fix it, if not for progressive taxation?

<comment><USER20> Growing wealth/income inequality is bad. Transfers can be effective for reducing wealth inequality. We'd need more revenue for that, however.

Progressive taxation is good. Progressive taxation that only targets the top 0.1% isn't effective unless income inequality were much worse than it is.

To make a meaningful amount of more revenue via income tax without hurting the bottom 90% too much, we'd need to target the top 10%. That probably means the top tax bracket should kick in around $130K. Much lower than where it is now, but high by the standards of many other rich countries (in the Netherlands 52% kicks in at $63k/yr, in Denmark it's 60% at $55/yr).

We should add a VAT too. Possibly with a simple UBI-style system to offset its impact on the poor (since they consume more of their earnings than the rich)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> All the explanation you need in two graphs:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ki8y](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ki8y)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ki8A](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=ki8A)

Cost of education over real median household income, and house price index over real median household income. Education is more than twice as expensive as the start of the century, and houses are almost twice as expensive as the start of the century.

<comment><USER23> You're forgetting health care costs, which have skyrocketed since the 80s. Interestingly, all of these costs are not part of official inflation numbers, so real inflation for middle class is much higher than the reports say.

<comment><USER24> Why _wouldn 't_ you include health care costs in inflation figures? Seems to be something that most people have to pay one way or another?

<comment><USER23> It is a game played by the American government so the economy seems better than it really is. Another example is that large part of the GDP growth in the US is related to health care, so you get here a double effect: higher economy growth compared to other countries with socialized medicine, and lower inflation numbers when in fact it is the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> High housing prices are a massive tax on both middle class and investment. It all flows to landlords and lenders. Cut housing prices by 1/2 - 2/3 and the middle class has money for other things. We need an Elon Musk for housing.

<comment><USER26> I'm in the bay area, and the main thing that is expensive is housing. Groceries are cheap. Eating and drinking out are the same as other cities. To help the middle class, remove restrictive zoning policies. It's a uniquely American problem because these policies were the product of racism. Requiring single family homes kept out poorer, usually black, renters.

<comment><USER27> How is it a product of racism? I always assumed it was due to the city's constituents wanting to protect their real estate invesments

<comment><USER28> A simple Google search on Redlining ([https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+times+redlining](https://www.google.com/search?q=new+york+times+redlining)) will reveal how current housing laws and massive wealth transfer that interest mortgage deduction is from less fortunate to the wealthy. There is a near unanimity among economists that housing subsidies are a bad policy and exacerbate rent seeking behavior. If not racist, those policies are downright classist (the line can be very blurry), designed to keep a small minority of homeowners (akin to landed gentry) in power.

<comment><USER27> I agree that the motivations are primarily driven by investment protection/greed. I am failing to see the racist aspect to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> My total comp this year is ballpark $240K. I'm still paying student loans. I'd like to buy a home, but in my area, there's nothing in a reasonable commmute from work under $750-$800K and anything less is getting bought in cash for some ridiculous amount over asking price.

You might argue that $800K is justified on a $240K income. I have anxiety from the thought that I could lose my job, and the barrier to entry in my field at other companies is so high that I would burn through my savings/investments and not be able to pay mortgage, taxes, + insurance.

<comment><USER30> You can easily afford that mortgage. It's $4100/mo. Aren't you netting $12-$14k/mo after income tax? Not sure what the property taxes are where you are.

Everyone faces the same anxiety when buying, but what's the alternative? Is your rent that much cheaper? If you lose your job, you still have to rent a place to live.

You're also missing out on a big capital gains tax exemption.

If you do lose your job, you can rent it out.

$800k is nothing in a city with $240k jobs. You should see other big cities in the world!

<comment><USER31> > If you do lose your job, you can rent it out.

Will you pay him back the difference if he can't? If not then why such definitive statements about what someone else should be comfortable with.

I could easily borrow a million or more from the bank to buy a house, but that wouldn't make it a wise decision. Instead I live in a house far smaller and more modest than what I could be living in and I feel better for it knowing that in a downturn (when most likely more people are experiencing a downturn) I will not have to change my life-style one bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Honestly as a Dutch man with a family but only one income (the norm about 40 years ago), we are are also really at the edge. And I have a relatively decent income (1.5-2 times modal as we call it). And where does all that money go? Well, more than 25% goes to interest on our mortgage. We get some of that back but from tax money so it's a cigar from our own box.

Whatever we earn more as a family is taken away by the banks by allowing us to loan more, which increases housing prices, which increases the interest they receive. Our economy is very much rigged to keep everybody working near full time to be able to live.

<comment><USER33> Do you have an opinion about what caused this situation where people are in a constant chase to keep up with their expenses, especially in Netherlands? I have my opinions but I am really curious what is the perception of a middle class western person. Thanks!

<comment><USER32> I think it is housing prices. Banks sign money into existence as your debt. And then you work to pay it off plus interest. We bought our house from a single old lady for about 195.000 euros (plus 40.000 for restructuring and then some for taxes), this woman bought this house in the sixties for 19.500 guilders (8.850 euros), she got about 186.000 euros just for living there for 50 years.

Meanwhile we pay the bank 4.85% of 245.000 yearly for 30 years (ok, it's less now for sure) but that 4.85% would amount to 349.000 euro's for the banking system, just for signing my debt into existence. In this way they constantly squeeze society.

If you do the math you see that you pay over 300 a month to decrease the debt while paying about 1000 in interest. If housing prices rise more than wages at some point both parents have to work full time and can afford less and less luxury items. Then we are at "maximum squeeze".

Can you imaging that my parents once payed 12% mortgage interest! of course houses were cheaper then (this was early 80's) but still.

People with 2 incomes by the way can save a full income (although I know some people that really can't afford to have one parent at home), they really don't feel anything, but banks are eating away are our wealth people, wake up. And when the banks fall because they took to much risk, they require our money again, to be saved!

<comment><USER34> > Can you imaging that my parents once payed 12% mortgage interest!

Yeah, it got up to around 17% in the US back in the 80s. It sounds crazy, but I've actually been told that it doesn't matter too much because the house prices would be lower to compensate for it (because people don't magically have more money to buy stuff, so if the rate goes up the house prices have to go down).

I've actually read that it's better to get a high percentage mortgage, especially if you know that mortgage rates are about to go on a downturn, because you can buy a house at a much cheaper sticker price than you would normally, and then you can refinance your mortgage once the percent goes down and get the lower mortgage rate on top of that!

It's actually supposed to be a lot worse to get a house with a low mortgage rate when they're about to start shooting up (which is right when we bought a house, four months ago, yay), because a) you won't want to refinance to a higher mortgage rate, and b) if you do decide to sell in a higher mortgage rate market, then the sticker price of your house is going to have to go down quite a bit to reflect that in order for the house to sell, so you might end up losing money on your house, or at least see much more reduced gains.

<comment><USER35> My real estate philosophy is "how much more can the next person borrow"? I think that once you adjust for inflation and borrowing power of interest rate changes, housing is a lot less attractive as an investment.

<comment><USER34> Yeah I don't personally see houses as investments, myself. We bought the house to live in, although I don't know if this house will last us for 30+ years (we've done a pretty good job filling it up already and we don't even have kids yet). So it would be nice if it at least kept its value for when we do end up selling it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This raises two questions in my mind:

I admittedly come from a very privileged background (in terms of both an upper-middle-class family and genetics), but how have so many people found themselves in places where it's so hard to make ends meet? My parents paid for college (like I said, admittedly privileged) and the State of North Carolina actually gave me free tuition and paid me a stipend to get my Master's degree (free/cheap government education is a benefit which you don't have to be privileged to get, at least not as privileged). I chose the "wrong" programs from a job prospects / earnings perspective - Sociology and Public Administration. I still managed to fall into a career as a data scientist. I'm not paid a bay-area salary, but then the suburbs of Raleigh/Durham don't have a bay-area cost of living either. My wife and I have a bigger house than we need, drive two old (2005 & 2009) but functional cars, have two kids, take a reasonably nice week-long vacation each year, and give quite a bit away, all on one salary. We've both made sacrifices to be debt free other than the mortgage, which helps. Most of my close friends went to very reasonably-priced state schools (e.g., NC State University), got the "right" degrees, and are now gainfully employed and able to support a family. Do I just live in that much of a bubble? Are my and my friends' experiences really that out of the ordinary in America in 2018?

Second, is it just because I'm young? This article suggests a lot of programmers/engineers end up being un-hireable by middle age, and struggle to find another career to make ends meet. Does that match the experience of a lot of folks here? From my perspective, most of the middle aged programmers/engineers I know have just moved on to become software architects, managers of development teams, CTOs, consultants, etc. - in other words, they're doing even more lucrative work facilitated by their years of experience.

<comment><USER37> I'm sorry but you do live in a bubble. Here is a UN report on poverty and rising inequality in the USA: [https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536/files/A_HRC_38_...](https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536/files/A_HRC_38_33_Add-1-EN.pdf).

Here are a few notes from the report:

* In September 2017, more than one in every eight Americans were living in poverty (40 million, equal to 12.7% of the population). And almost half of those (18.5 million) were living in deep poverty, with reported family income below one-half of the poverty threshold.

* In the OECD the US ranks 35th out of 37 in terms of poverty and inequality.

* The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD with one quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14% across the OECD.

* US healthcare expenditures per capita are double the OECD average and much higher than in all other countries. But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average.

* The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks the most well-off countries in terms of labor markets, poverty, safety net, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The US comes in last of the top 10 most well-off countries, and 18th amongst the top 21.

* According to the World Income Inequality Database, the US has the highest Gini rate (measuring inequality) of all Western Countries

The truth is poverty and inequality is uncomfortable and pushed to the edges of society.

<comment><USER27> I don't understand the inclusion of wealth inequality stats. How do rich people making more money affect the "average" American? The idea of forcing an upper limit on wealth is the exact opposite of the American system.

<comment><USER38> "How do rich people making more money affect the "average" American" Because we live in a world where some things are effectively finite. So the relative wealth of other people does indeed have an affect on what you can afford. This is like an econ 101 idea.

<comment><USER27> Most of Jeff Bezos (and other rich people) money will be invested. These investments include government bonds, stocks, corporate debt etc. These investments will likely lower costs by providing liquidity to markets and funding for future innovations

<comment><USER38> That is effectively the growing pie argument which is great however if the inequality grows faster than the pie you are left with a smaller relative wealth which means you will be at a loss when it comes to any finite resource.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A large part of the problem is the psychology of being middle class. No one wants to be poor, or to think that they are poor, they affiliate themselves with the middle class. The social definition of what is middle class has been broadened to include people who would otherwise fit in the poor definition. Thinking themselves to be middle class, they try to act it and over spend and never save. A more stringent definition used to be something along the line of being a professional that would allow you to be able to afford to retire early and have the funds to get into politics or some other service. Poor people will continue to be bled dry, while the middle class shrinks and everyone refuses to accept they are technically poor and they need to act with purpose to improve their situations.

<comment><USER39> Isn't it just percentiles? I recall 30-80th percentiles being considered the middle class. 50th percentile household income is around 55-60k. 30th-80th is somewhere around 40-160k/year ish in income.

The problem is that "incomes have stayed relatively flat" aka, people were still making the same 40-160k/yr 20-50 years ago, thus they have lost earning power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> > some sharp points about how workers are expected to "deny their biology" and > "how little American businesses and legislators care about care,"

These are two wonderful, succinct statements that perfectly describe the American experience.

</comment><comment><USER41> People often lump freelance/contingent work and the "gig economy" together, but they're actually two different things. Yes, both are often used to avoid the cost of taxes and benefits, or to gain flexibility and not have to lay off regular workers if the business doesn't thrive. However, freelance and contingent work has generally been about hiring people who _chose_ to work under those terms, to accept the uncertainty and some of the costs in return for gaining their own kind of flexibility or a higher hourly wage. The gig economy to a large degree seems to rely on a pool of _involuntarily_ unemployed (or under-employed) people who would very much prefer to have a more regular job with a more regular paycheck if only they could find one. If the economy, or economic policy, changed so that there were more _decent_ jobs available, the freelancers and contractors would go on as they always have but the gig workers would all bail and the gig-economy companies would have to make some serious adjustments to stay in business (if that would even be possible in such a different labor environment).

</comment><comment><USER42> I can tell the ages of people posting on here from their comments.

I love Berlin because of the nightlife and culture. 20s.

I love Berlin because of the free schooling. 30s and 40s.

I love Berlin because of the free healthcare. 50s+

</comment><comment><USER43> > Quart describes her own experience of slipping into the "falling middle- > class vortex" after the birth of her daughter seven years ago, a time when > she and her husband were freelance writers facing new child care costs and > hospital bills.

TBH, couple of "freelance writers" deciding to have a child sounds like recipe for financial disaster right from the bat. I understand that "freelance writer" is a broad term, but most of the writers I know are very far from affording a child or two.

I understand that having a child, unlike, say, buying a sports car, is a luxury a __lot __of people around the world decide to indulge in even if they don 't really afford it. But if you spend money and resources on something you can't really afford, at least be honest with yourself about it.

<comment><USER44> Raising children being relegated to luxury status is a symptom of an oppressive and/or failing economic system.

<comment><USER43> Not at all - it's a sign of an economic system that finally accounts for ecological externalities. If we want to save the planet, human population needs to stop growing. So, on average, a person should only be able afford one child. And when you remember that wealth inevitably follows a pareto distribution, it's obvious that most families won't be able to afford any children at all.

<comment><USER44> That's not what happens. Population growth is outsourced to the third world (immigration, manufacturing, etc.) The planet (biosphere) will be hollowed out beyond repair by our ever growing economy. "Wealth inevitably follows a pareto distribution" is just an excuse for terminating your thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> > _They are people on the brink who did everything 'right'_

One of my favorite lessons of software engineering: it doesn't matter how right you think you are.

</comment><comment><USER46> TFA is a rather thin "review" of the book, almost completely unsubstantive.

> _"It's not your fault." Based on the diligent people she meets, it's hard to > disagree._

Sorry, but one can be diligent and still have made wrong choices. And the irony is thick. The author found herself in this boat through years of being a freelance writer, and now in heavy debt from culinary school.

I haven't read the book but I very much doubt I would find it compelling. I do agree, some and maybe most of the blame doesn't lie on the middle class's shoulders (except for lack of civic engagement), but it doesn't seem like this book is going to get to the heart of it.

I also laugh at this quote from TFA:

> _Even lawyers, a traditionally risk-averse bunch who tend to choose their > profession for its stability, are getting caught in the vise between > increasing law school tuitions and decreasing job prospects. Precarity, > Quart suggests, can translate into solidarity._

 _Even_ lawyers? It is well known that law schools are pumping out too many and too low qualified grads. The information about job prospects is available. Those who went into tier 3 law schools thinking that they would come out the other end successfully have made their own bed. Yes indeed much fault lies with the law schools themselves, but let's not absolve the students of blame here.

</comment><comment><USER47> Is it worth reading or is it just about how things are more expensive and we don't make enough?

<comment><USER48> It's that, + "middle class going broke after being conned by Trump University & the gig economy."

<comment><USER47> I like the writing from Paul Krugman. He tries to explain systemic reasons for inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Death of the American dream was a decent doc about this subject. All of this has been engineered into place over a long period of time.

<comment><USER50> > has been engineered into place

You're conveying an image of handwringing illuminati in a room who are out to get us. Is that what you mean? If not, _who_ has been engineering this and why?

<comment><USER51> Corporate entities evolve and adapt akin to biological organisms competing for survival. Rather than a group of individuals (the illuminati) winning out through elaborate conspiracy over other individuals, it seems to me more likely that the diminishing power of individuals is coming as a result of non- directed evolutionary improvement by corporations.

<comment><USER52> Absolutely. This is a significant point. People, being anthropomorphic, are looking for some Big Evil Person who is personally doing all this, when it's an epiphenomenon of the systems we accept/tolerate.

<comment><USER53> Is there any (succinct, easy-to-understand) research on the lifecycle/birth & death/power & influence of these entities? This seems a major point to be aware of, which is not taught anywhere in school/college.

<comment><USER51> What got me thinking about corporate evolution was Richard Dawkins, who applied concepts from evolutionary biology to non-biological spheres with "meme". You might consider his book "The Selfish Gene".

This is a popular line of thought (try googling "corporation evolutionary biology", which gets you to pages like [https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-biology- of-corporate-survival](https://hbr.org/2016/01/the-biology-of-corporate- survival) ), but it has a weakness: it's hard to be rigorous. In the field of evolutionary biology, experiments are hard to design and hypotheses are hard to falsify, so a lot of the writing is deeply infected by the author's prejudices.

I'm sure there's _something_ there, and I'm confident that whatever it is is more plausible than fragile conspiracy theories like the Illuminati. But _exactly_ how non-biological entities compete and evolve is hard to say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Stretched would be more accurate.

</comment><comment><USER55> Should have been entitled, why people on the coasts can't afford America.

</comment><comment> EZ-E Where did the money go?

</comment><comment><USER56> thats why we need anarcho-capitalism

</comment><comment><USER57> i would love to participate in this discussion. unfortunately i cannot, because although i do not have to complain about money, unfortunately my financial situation is not so amazing it would be smart to throw away money on a NYT subscription.

<comment><USER58> There is a rule in this site against complaining about pay walls.

<comment><USER57> my bad. i thought the rule was against pay walls itself. maybe something changed.

edit: cannot find any rule on this in the guidelines. perhaps you could give me a reference.

<comment><USER58> > ... please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> There is opportunity everywhere. The middle class is fading more from a lack of individual drive to succeed. My parent went from middle class to absolute broke. They lost their home and lived with their parent for several years while rebuilding what they lost. Now they own a better home and are doing very well. They are a one income family (my father works and has no college degrees) with 5 kids still living with them.

</comment><comment><USER60> Funny how the word "immigration" never appears in these articles. Any intellectually honest assessment of the waning American middle class needs to consider the overwhelming post 1965 demographic changes.

Regardless of your personal feelings on the matter, adding tens of millions of very poor people to a population over the course of decades is, as a mathematical certainty, going to reduce the median wealth of the population.

Then add to that dynamic effects such as increased demand for housing and other necessities, higher taxes to cover increased costs of health, education, welfare, and so on, and it's no wonder the fading middle class is getting squeezed.

<comment><USER61> [https://www.recode.net/2018/1/12/16883260/trump- immigration-...](https://www.recode.net/2018/1/12/16883260/trump-immigration- us-america-tech-companies-immigrants)

"Immigrants and their children have helped found 60 percent of the most highly valued tech companies in the U.S"

<comment><USER60> I was very careful not to make any value judgments or even prescriptions. I'm simply looking at facts and reasonable inferences from them. Some people will prefer to conclude that immigration is bad and should be reduced. Some people will prefer to conclude that immigration is great and should be increased. In the vast majority of cases people's preferences appear to align with their own perceived self interest. The people down-voting this post and my original one are assuredly members of the latter class.

Immigration isn't a binary issue. One can reasonably conclude that tens of millions of poor uneducated foreigners are bad for the US population median wealth distribution, but tens of thousands of educated entrepreneurial foreigners are good for it. One can also do so without succumbing to the puerile some's good more's better pseudo-reasoning that dominates the Overton approved discourse on the subject.

Also, supporting my original post, that massive influx of affluent foreigners has observably greatly increased the cost of living in the bay area. A person can make 6 figures and still be considered in poverty. This is clearly germane to any discussion of the middle class withering away.</comment></comment></comment>


What the Heck is an Architect? - <AUTHOR> http://padgeblog.com/2014/02/16/what-the-heck-is-an-architect/

<comment><USER2> Software architecture is more than having holistic knowledge of development technologies and methodologies, though that is important. Software architecture is concerned with reasoning about systems at the appropriate level of abstraction. The organization's culture, operations environment and individual project requirements guide you in determining what aspects of the system must be reasoned and what can be safely ignored.

Knuth called computer programming an "art". By that measure I sometimes think of software architecture as a "dark art"!</comment>


Show HN: CoinMall Alpha: A Crypto Marketplace for Digital Goods - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@coinmallio/announcing-coinmall-alpha-db6e7f4659a6 <comment><USER2> Let us know what you think :) We appreciate any feedback and are looking for interesting ideas to implement :) firstname.lastname@example.com</comment>


Show HN: Learn Rust building a toy Jira clone - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/build-your-own-jira-with-rust <comment><USER2> This is amazing! I'm hooked already. I'm going to tell people to use this to learn Rust. Great job guys!</comment>


Ask HN: Most affordable method to host a lot of files - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a file sharing site (more info here for those interested: http://blog.serve2.com)<p>I'm looking for an affordable, stable and scalable solution, where I can host a large amount of files with fast upload speeds for people downloading the files. What solution would you suggest? <comment><USER2> People are touting S3, but you pay twice -- storage and transfer. Using the most inexpensive options with S3, a 1 gigabyte file (with reduced redundancy) with 1 download per month would run you $0.21.

Even without the one download this would still cost you $0.093 just to keep the file!

Let's ramp up and assume you have 1TB of storage and 250GB / month of transfer. How much is that?

STORAGE: 1000 GB x $0.093 = $93.00 TRANSFER: 1000 GB x $0.120 = $120.00

TOTAL: $213.00

I should note the above does not include any servers which will actually run the websites.

Lets compare this to hosting your own (ie - dedicated):

I have a 1.5 TB RAID-I server with 1.8 TB transfer per month on a 100MB port on a month-to-month contract.

STORAGE: 1.5TB RAID-I TRANSFER: 1.8TB

Total : $123.00 / month

It is a 8-core xeon with 4GB RAM -- I run a LAPP stack with 6 Cores dedicated to ffmpeg and image conversions. Waayyyy faster than cloud.

This is more of a hosting and infrastructure question. I recommend bringing this question to the community at webhostingtalk.com.

Yes, you will have to grow into these numbers, but that can happen pretty quickly.

<comment><USER3> Just curious, who are you hosting it with?

<comment><USER2> currently at 800hosting.com. I got a slightly better deal because of an error in their order system (now fixed). It's only been a month but not problems so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're building a file sharing site, aren't the logistics of _sharing files_ exactly what your core competency is supposed to be? Why would you outsource that?

</comment><comment><USER5> Your first blog post is an admission of copyright infringement... and it's a video of a guy that's probably going to be imprisoned for doing the same thing. Are you sure you want to get into this business?

</comment><comment><USER6> You may aslo take a look at Windows Azure Storage <https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/>

</comment><comment><USER7> for simplicity and reducing time to market, outsource it to S3 or an S3 API- compatible storage provider. you can always buy disk boxes down the road and slap an S3-like API in front of them.

in addition, you could use WebRTC to build a BitTorrent-like P2P distribution system that's native to the web, where your servers act as "seeds." this is to reduce your bandwidth costs for >1 clients downloading/streaming the same file.

</comment><comment><USER8> Out of interest you mentioned in that blog post that you received a DMCA notice for the video. Who was that notice from?

<comment><AUTHOR> TVWorks Limited

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like your idea, and the website! S3 is probably your best way to go.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why not use S3 with cloudfront.

<comment><USER11> Isn't S3 really expensive?

<comment><USER12> I suppose it depends on one's definition of expensive, but it is simple enough to see their pricing: <http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/></comment></comment></comment>


Eating my own dog food saved a major headache - <AUTHOR> https://wpstatus.com/2012/12/eating-my-own-dog-food-saved-a-major-headache/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear about anyone else who used their own product to save their ass :)</comment>


Sony offers hacker a job. Hacker turns them down because of geoHot - <AUTHOR> http://www.inquisitr.com/101239/sony-offers-hacker-a-job-hacker-turns-them-down-because-of-geohot/ <comment><USER2> This is the @koush referenced in the article. To repost what I said on reddit last week:

"To clear up any confusion, I was not offered a job, just an interview, which I declined out of principle. For those saying "I'm going to regret being principled", etc. Probably not. Android App sales have been more than good to me. Good, enterprising, devs should never find themselves short of opportunities."

I wasn't trying to "ride on the geohot wave to get 15 mins of fame". Without beating my drum too much, I've already achieved a moderate degree of it within the Android community. <http://twitter.com/#!/koush>

I had been tweeting about geohot's happenings for the past few months, and then I got that recruiter email. So I responded, and took a screenshot because the whole thing was a pretty ironic, and tweeted it. Then ~16000 followers made it go viral: <http://twitter.com/#!/koush/status/46345951819993088>

<comment><USER3> Koush.. I just wanted to thank you. 1) for not taking SCEA up on their offer, but more importantly, 2) for Clockwork Recovery. You are pretty much one of the only reasons we all have these great rooted Android phones. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _It's not very often that when someone is offered a plum job with a company like Sony that they turn it down_

Yeah, I get job offers like that a couple times a week. Guess what, I turn them down too. And it's not hard at all, because they are not offers of a plum job, they are an invitation to apply for a position.

<comment><USER5> ... and we usually do not take a screenshot of the email after replying "Thanks, but no thanks" by email either.

It is just a cheap-shot to ride on the geoHot wave to get 15 mins of fame.

<comment><USER6> I laughed at the 0 minutes in the screenshot. He wrote the email and was immediately so proud of his reply that he just _had_ to take a screen shot right away and send it to some bloggers. Great, thanks for contributing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not as if they offered him a concrete offer to create the next hot DRM component, just a generic offer for a generic software engineer role. If he would have gone down that path they would have had multiple interviews, mutual checking for possible team fits, etc... This is as generic as it gets, maybe one level above the generic LinkedIn message. Sure, it can result in a concrete offer down the road, but it's not as if a head hunter tried to get the hacker "by whatever fiscal means necessary".

This is like people "sticking it to the man" by yelling at the cable company representative - helps no one.

<comment><USER8> It's still unusual for a company the size of Sony to reach out to someone like that.

What's more is that it's now on Hacker News - so it's bigger news than Sony probably ever intended it to be.

<comment><USER9> No, it's not unusual at all. They employ people full time to do it! And it's not new either, before blogs recruiters contacted people who had a big presence on Usenet or mailing lists.

It is only unusual for someone to confuse it for an actual "job offer".

<comment><USER7> maybe it's a location thing... I have _some_ online presence and as you say, get tons of such offers here in Israel on LinkedIn/email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good. After the geohot disaster, I sold my PS3 and all the games I had, my vaio laptop, and my flatscreen TV. I refuse to patronize a company that abuses it's customers like that. Apple may have a reputation for disliking people who hack their products but they realized if they pursue legal action against them, they'd alienate the core base of developers they rely on for the Apps they make such a big deal about.

<comment><USER11> As someone that has been involved it in hacking apple products and making some pocket change from it in a past life, I hardly think apple has a reputation for disliking these people. If anything, apple looks at what people come up with 'off the ranch' and pulls it into their own stuff if they like it. Apple may have this 'reputation,' but it's purely because the press wants to have it painted this way. I'm no fanboy or anything, I've had a business crushed at their hands; as an engineer and a business guy, I find their decisions to be relatively rational and I was well aware of what was coming well before it was delivered.

People like to point to the guy on top as big and evil. Rightnow it's Apple, 12-15 years ago it was Microsoft. Tomorrow it could be Google.

<comment><USER12> But it certainly sounds like as if you are an Apple fanboy. Apple do hate hacking on their products, restrictions of using itunes for anything Apple is something I just can't bear with, along with restrictions like using OS/X for developing iphone/ipod apps.

<comment><USER11> To add to bonzoesc, who _likes_ their product getting hacked? It's a _business_ and they're trying to make money. The business plans on these high profile products with years of dev time are made years in advance. In technology, that's a lifetime, and in hardware doing pivots isn't trivial.

There's also very real concerns regarding hacking - i.e. you want to avoid getting the rep for being that company responsible (think Sidekick) for the Paris Hilton situation, where all of hollywood's A-list celebrities phone numbers get leaked onto the internet. You're trying to build a secure device.

The business motivations are obvious. Apple builds a good closed system. Google builds a janky open system. Both models work, neither is right or wrong, and both companys go to the bank.

And just to put things into perspective, there was no App Store when Apple launched the iphone. I'm pretty sure they never intended for there to be, but once they saw what people were coming up with 'off the ranch' it became fairly obvious to them to let developers develop on their platform. The reason I'm fairly certain Apple had no initial plans for this is simply because, on the version of the first public firmware (and _only_ the first one), everything ran as root user... that's just idiotic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's not really a job offer, but props to Koushik for standing up for his principles.

<comment><USER14> Exactly, this is a mistake made by almost everyone who has reported it! Large companies have their recruiters send emails like this out all the time.

<comment><USER15> I get emails like this occasionally. Not from Sony, but other large firms in the industry that I've been in for many years. It's all quite routine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> She probably read the email and thought: "Hacker? He's a hacker? We can't hire hackers! Good thing he told me straight away, he just saved us all a lot of time!"

 _We_ know what he means, but other people take the word hacker to mean something else.

If Sony came to this site and saw this article, they'd probably think the same thing too. If the email was sent to try and get them to change their ways, it probably won't have worked at all, since they might not even understand the meaning of the message.

<comment><USER17> No, but it makes a pretty good story for the media, which will probably result in lots of more negative PR for Sony, which in turn will be something that Sony would worry about.

<comment><USER18> Unfortunately, the rest of the world has the same issues understanding the term "hacker." I think this will just fall into obscurity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I worked with Koush last year at Kiha Software (an Android software startup in Seattle). Currently, he is working on his own one-person startup <http://www.deployfu.com/> which could be described as "Heroku for .NET (and other platforms)."

</comment><comment><USER20> I had similar experience long long time ago -- told the recruiter that I would not interview with Philip Morris and got back a blank stare. Nothing dramatic really came out of it, but it sure made me feel good.

PS. Oh, and Sony was not offering this gent a job, it was a simple "feeler". Google sends out these in droves, it does not mean they are sure job offers.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good on him, but surely there's a better source than this? Lack of any real information aside, this article was painful to read. A twitter link to the picture would have conveyed just as much information without the stumbling, awkward prose.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article "Sony's way on Hackers, Innovaters and Makers" from Make magazine blog (which is down now, but I'll link to the cache) is a good run down of the various ways, before and up to the geohot lawsuit, sony has been attacking hackers and experimenters: <http://bit.ly/dVmhC8>

<comment><USER23> Actual link is [http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/02/sonys-war-on- makers...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/02/sonys-war-on-makers- hackers-and-innovators.html)

<comment><USER22> ah yeah -- it just was down this morning, so linked to the cache. thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I work at SCEA, occasionally with Sarah on recruiting issues. Just want to put it out there that she's a genuinely nice person, and an ethical recruiter. Our internal recruiters reach out to folks like this every day. I guess she just got a bit unlucky on this one by running into someone looking for his 15 minutes.

Also, "reaching out" is a far cry from a "job offer"! You still need to be phone screened and extensively interviewed in-person before you have any sort of shot at an offer. Gotta make sure the candidate actually knows his or her stuff, and that they're not going to act like a complete asshole.

<comment><USER25> Well, how did Sony in your opinion acted when stopped me to play new games while keeping the possibility of running Linux in _my_ property? I can not find the word, but your "complete asshole" expression could work as an approximation also for that case.

<comment><USER24> With some work, I think I figured out what you are trying to ask. I have no comment on the OtherOS issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't understand how this gets 200+ points. Has a vast majority of people not received these blanket recruiter emails before?

</comment><comment><USER27> For those who say that this will never reach the ears of anyone that matter in Sony, it isn't their ears that matter. This has brought to light something that provides negative publicity to sony in the hacker community, and will make recruiting more difficult for them.

Basically, whether they know it or not, they are effectively being punished for their actions. The failure to recruit a few talented candidates that will read about this will harm their long term business success.

</comment><comment><USER28> Who does say there isn't solidarity among hackers? Is that a thing? I've always thought of my fellow hackers as a supportive group.

</comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps he should try to change the company from inside !

<comment><USER30> More likely the company would change _him_ from inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> A job was not offered. Title and OA are incorrect. An opening dialogue attempt was made by a recruiter.

georgecmu's comment is good too. Those sorts of emails from recruiters are closer to the random snail mail you get from credit card companies saying "Contratulations! You're pre-approved!" -- just fill out this form with all your PII and we might really approve you. Maybe. It's a little better filtered than that, but not too much.</comment>


Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/why_we_havent_met_any_aliens/

<comment><USER2> What of this possibility: Aliens and intelligent life-forms do exist at many levels of development, but no-one has discovered a way to travel the unimaginable distances of the universe. Even at near light speed travel, we can barely visit our own neighborhood in practical times.

<comment><USER3> Visiting stars in "practical" times is one thing. Colonizing a galaxy is another. The latter can be done through hops of just several light years in a matter of decades, using technology we can already envision. Laser sails and fusion drives let a civilization like ours colonize a galaxy in the space of a few million years. Fermi's paradox stands.

<comment><USER4> A million years ago, humanity's genome looked rather different. Is there any point in colonizing another galaxy with an alien species (i.e. ourselves, evolved)?

<comment><USER3> Is there ever any point in a world subject to the laws of Thermodynamics?

Is there a point to leaving the world intact for your grandchildren?

The problem with your question, is that the consequences are far off in the future. So the likelihood of affecting policy decisions is just about nil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What a silly thesis. I always find theories based on deep assumptions about extraterrestrial psychology bunk.

The beginnings of social rather than biological evolution on earth are fantastically recent on a geological scale. 10,000 years, give or take. And it's only been in the last 100 that anything that we've had anything that would be detectable from space.

On the sorts of timescale that the universe functions on, we simply have a tiny, tiny sample of what a technological society looks like in the one instance that we are aware of. It's such a recent thing that we can scarcely predict what it will look like in 1000 years, much less 100,000 or 1,000,000 and even 100,000 years would be a small sample to start generalizing upon.

In other words, we have no idea what we're looking for when we're looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. The odds of finding another society that is _exactly_ in this first 100 year sliver we're at are vanishingly small.

<comment><USER6> In the middle of reading it I wanted to reply by saying that the framing in terms of extraterrestrials was just a device to get across the real warning of obsession with virtual realities, but then I got the end and the essay dissolved into incoherence.

I see no evidence that Christian and Muslim children are less prone to addiction. The high-minded Puritan work ethic attracts some, sure, but "the family values of the religious right" are in reality just a thinly-veiled excuse to be the mean, hateful, narcissistic, exclusive bastards they already are (why yes, I do have issues from my upbringing, thanks for asking, but it's still true).

In any case, the essay says that we haven't met aliens because they wiped themselves out in an evolutionary dead-end, but then the religious assholes' descendants (sorry, the super-duper-moral humans) will be the future of humanity meeting other such dipshits. Which is it?

In any case, to sum up, there's no there there. If you haven't read the article yet, it's really not worth it; if it's too late, I'm sorry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another possible explanation is that interstellar travel is impossible. Perhaps there's too much debris between star systems, and it's not possible to create materials strong enough to make a spaceship that can withstand a collision with the debris at the speeds required.

This doesn't quite explain the lack of communication signals. But if nobody can colonize the galaxy, then there would be less sources of signals.

BTW, the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox>) does a very good job of detailing all the possible explanations.

<comment><USER8> In a world where interstellar travel is impossible, civilizations can't strike out too far for resources; they must make do with what is nearby. So as they get more and more efficient with their energy usage they'll emit less and less. Compare our solar system with a dyson sphere the size of the solar system, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "So evolving intelligence seems likely, given a propitious _habitat..."_

I would argue the opposite. Human level intelligence isn't necessary for survival, so why should one assume that it's bound to be common when its not even the case on Earth now or in it's history? What percentage of life that has ever existed on earth could you consider to have an intelligence on par or better than ours? Obviously less that a hundredth of 1%. If evolution is the law of life, then I doubt that intelligent life in the universe is as common as is assumed

</comment><comment> rm-rf "Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says "Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce.""

It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society.

<comment><USER3> _It's not hard to imagine that happening - or more likely, the fraction of civilization that is capable of advancing society fails to reproduce, and the part that does reproduce isn't able to advance society._

Once we are able to create viable new societies, societies themselves can evolve out of this trap. We may need space colonization before this can happen, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's Sunday-morning, and this topic is near and dear to me ( [http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is_h.php) ) -- so time for a rant

It's interesting that we generally suppose either we'll achieve some super- greatness as a species or die out in some horrible cataclysm.

How species-centric.

As the author notes, a long, slow, fizzle into nothingness seems much more highly probable than some dramatic ending.

As an exercise, what do the democracies and the people in them spend their money on? Not space exploration. Not even war -- the last "real" earth-shaking war was well over 50 years ago. Lately it's all been bush wars. We spend more and more energy and money on _ourselves_. It's not the species, it's the comfort of each individual.

What do people value and celebrate? Adventure and discovery by moving out into the Solar System? Heck, there's already a serious movement among scientists to eliminate or seriously limit human exploration. You see, we could contaminate the places we visit.

I could continue with examples, but it's seemed obvious to me for many years that, as far as moving towards the conquest of space or self-destruction, we're doing a lot of plugging in, turning on, and patting ourselves on the back about it. But not a lot of exploration. Not only do we not live in a culture of risk-taking exploration, we actively view our presence in the universe as an evil and do all we can to avoid making any kind of permanent mark at all.

I fear over the long term we will succeed at this.

<comment><USER11> The other way to look at it is, technology is delivering into the hands of individuals the ability to do what only governments could do earlier. Thus you have Burt Rutan and other ragtag teams able to compete in the new space race to LEO and the moon.

Let the government take care of the weak and protect and preserve, that's what it's mainly for in a society, and leave the adventurism to the adventurous. Obama's steps seem consistent with this.

<comment><USER12> I couldn't agree more. This article was filled with the kind of fluffy juxtapose that says a lot by saying nothing at all about what's actually going on. We stand on the verge of the next great technological expansion of biology, information processing, energy, space exploration, and fundamental discoveries in physics. To assume we are anymore closer to a pinnacle now than we were 500 years ago is to be either complacent with what we've accomplished or too farsighted to see what is left to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In any system, there has to be a "first". The first bacterial spore, the first amoeba, the first star, the first planet.

Why is it so hard to think that we could be the first?

Also equally curious, why MUST they look different? Maybe they're already here and they look just like us.

<comment><USER14> Probability.

Drake's equation suggests there are millions of intelligent species in the universe (assume 1,000,000). Thus, the chances of us really being the first is only 1 in a million. Taking into account that the Earth was a relatively late bloomer (the universe was around for ~10 Billion years before there was any life on Earth ...) it becomes far less likely.

Similarly, the chances of evolution creating two identical 'solutions' to very different environments (or hell, even nearly identical environments) is practically nil. Even if you buy panspermia (which is perfectly reasonable ...), there were still billions of years of evolution between then and now, and we should be unrecognizable from something we 'branched' from ~4 billion years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was listening to a talk on The Singularity, and it occurred to me that that might be a good explanation of the Fermi Paradox. (Which is similar to the author's idea, but a bit different.) Basically, our minds are likely to "merge" with the Internet, allowing us to tap into the internet as our personal and cultural memory storage system. But we cannot extend Internet access into outer space, due to latency and the inability to make copies of the entire Internet locally. So the future "us" would be tied to the planet in order to have access to our memories, which would be very difficult for us to live without.

<comment><USER11> If you want to follow that thought through, the future us would probably like higher fidelity of their memories and recordings, approaching real life quality. The limiting factor in doing this is likely the energy consumption (and in many other ways as well). The cheapest energy source by far is the Sun, consequently we will need to build Dyson spheres, thus pushing us off the Earth. Once we are at that stage the only way to get more energy (to support further fidelity or population growth) will be the other stars and similar mass concentrations, which will eventually lead to colonization of the galaxy and beyond to galaxy clusters/super clusters. Even the light speed barrier can't prevent such a movement for too long.

A Singularity will likely only hasten the process (there will be nothing else to do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like a big leap to me to take the problems of our generation and extrapolate them to be a (literally) universal explanation for Fermi's Paradox. I have the same problem with the apocalyptic explanations. Just because humans have built enough nuclear weapons to destroy our civilization doesn't mean all other species in the universe would have the same inclination.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe other intelligent beings in the universe didn't learn how to live with out fossil fuels, they overloaded the carrying capacity of their planets, global warming destroyed their environments and intelligent people stopped having children? The result would be that their complex civilizations crashed.

I think we have more important stuff to invest our intellects in than space exploration. All our current technology depends almost exclusively on cheap energy derived from fossil fuels. Human actions are damaging the complex processes that maintain live.

If we don't fix this problems I still think hedonistic technology is a better investment than space exploration. Well at least for the average folk it's not like we can send every human in to space.

</comment><comment><USER17> I subscribe to the theory that our own bias as humans leads us to believe that human style intelligence is the pinacle of evolution throughout the universe. As one of the great old sci-fi writers said human intelligence has yet to be proven as a long term evolutionary advantage. It may be that less intelligent but more sustainable life is more typical. Look at the dolphins for example. They don't seem to have any interest in building radio transmitters or spaceships yet they are very intelligent. If this theory is true we can learn a major lesson: We have to become more sustainable creatures if we want to win the evolutionary contest over the long term.

<comment><USER18> I would of gone with dinosaurs as an example but the point still stands

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How about they just want to leave us alone ?

</comment><comment><USER20> <http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> The real reason, as others have noted-- advance societies discover nuclear fission and supercollider technology and destroy themselves.

<comment><USER3> The first mechanism you cite indicates you didn't read the article. The second is either tongue and cheek or indicates a big misunderstanding of science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, "So, where is everybody?"

And, shortly afterward, they stopped eating lunch with him.</comment>


40M answers worldwide to the "trolley problem" (MIT Technology Review) - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612341/a-global-ethics-study-aims-to-help-ai-solve-the-self-driving-trolley-problem/ <comment><USER2> If this is what your self-driving car asks itself when approaching a ZEBRA CROSSING, you've got bigger issues than just ethics.</comment>


Ask HN: How to verify a claim of ownership of a California LLC? - <AUTHOR> There is a California LLC, which according to Person A, was co-owned by Person A, B and C. Now Person A claimed that B and C faked her signature and occupied all her shares of the company.
I'm trying to verify her claim.
I went to https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/ and found the company's documents. But the most recent State of Information form does not have the name of Person A. And none of the company's other documents has the name of Person A.
According to the most recent form. B is the CEO, and C is the only manager/member.
I also found this site: https://www.corporationwiki.com/ , but according to it, this company was owned by Person B, and D. (D's name also doesn't appear on the official State of Information form.), but is now owned by Person C.
This result confuses me.
1. Can the state of information filling be a proof of company ownership?
2. Is "member" or "manager" equal to "owner" on the state of information form?
3. Is the "member/manager" list of the form trustworthy? How come there is another Person D, which doesn't appear on official forms, is considered as an owner of the company by the corporationwiki site?
Thanks, <comment><USER2> > I'm trying to verify her claim.

This is one of those times when you're going to want to hire a lawyer. She should have ample paperwork from the original filings, forgeries would have had to be witnessed, etc...

This here is lawyer and, probably, court territory.</comment>


Is there a script that will generate a mind map from an iOS project's code? - <AUTHOR>

Are there any similar tools that help a new hire learn a complex codebase? <comment><USER2> Probably nothing that would make a mind map, but ...

Doxygen may or may not work, it probably doesn't understand whatever language iOS uses (objc?). Also I think there are better solutions than doxygen these days.

But if you look at Doxygen then you'll know the kind of thing you're looking for. Note that you do not have to have marked up your code in order for doxygen to produce documentation for you.

Also I think doxygen, and probably whatever is better these days, can produce intermediate output which you could then easily process and produce a mind map on your own, if that's what you really want.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd envision this tool rendering larger files as larger bubbles on the screen, showing the @properties and delegate methods as lines between the bubbles, ect</comment>


Apple Stores Start Selling Devialet's $1,990 "Phantom" Implosion Speaker - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/apple-devialet-phantom/ <comment><AUTHOR> "Oddly, rather than demoing the speakers with Apple Music, they'll be connected to speakers running a special Devialet app filled with music that shows off the Phantom's high fidelity."

</comment><comment><USER2> Kind of weird to showcase a speaker like that with the iPhone, a device that cannot do better than CD quality by design (16bits/44khz).</comment>


Most U.S. Dairy Cows Are Descended From Just Two Bulls - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/17/770696476/most-u-s-dairy-cows-are-descended-from-just-2-bulls-thats-not-good <comment><USER2> This is large scale Matrix-like exploitation at its finest like only humans can do.

Copying the genes of a single animal hundreds of thousands of times, killing the males at birth, plugging the females to a milking machine, feed them corn and soy which is totally not their natural diet and injecting them with tons of antibiotics, hormones and god knows what else.

I wonder what could possibly go wrong? All completely unnecessary and with a tremendous environmental impact.

I hope that the 2020 updated new dietary guidelines will reflect the fact that dairy is completely optional for a healthy diet even for infants, and even not recommended for most non-caucasians as they are usually lactose intolerant.

<comment><USER3> I've never seen myself as a vegetarian, but increasingly as I get older I can't deal with the cognitive dissonance of eating meat and my feelings about individual animals.

I mean, my fiancee and I used to rescue shelter dogs, and I can't square that behavior of putting through chickens and cows through hell in factory farms.

I still eat meat, but I feel like I'm getting closer to not doing that every day.

<comment><USER4> I'm a similar, but opposite boat. Instead of feeling like I am closer to going vegetarian, I feel myself closer to becoming a hunter. I don't like my meat coming from poor factory farm practices, and think it would be great if I could source most of my meat though hunting, and then supplement it with meat and eggs from local farms. BTW factory farming isn't just isolated to animals, there are lots of issues with large-scale factory farming crops too.

<comment><USER2> Actually, most crops (80% of the world crops) are for feeding animals.

Shooting the animals yourself is not a very practical solution, or scalable. Sure you could do it for yourself and your family at great expense of your time and even some personal risk, but what about the rest of your city and country?

That would surely not scale, there is just not enough wild game to hunt, it can only be done at certain times of the year., etc.

<comment><USER5> I consider it to be practical, enjoyable, and yes non-scalable. But I would also consider the world going vegetarian as not realistic, and just like some people go vegetarian to reduce their carbon footprint, I'm going to hunt to reduce mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One aspect the article does not fully address is why so many dairy farmers are using artificial insemination instead of bulls. Partly it's slightly enhanced milk production, but a bigger reason is the availability of sexed semen, allowing farmers to breed roughly 95% heifer calves instead of 50%. This is a big deal for a dairy farm's finances because a cow is much more valuable than a steer.

[https://www.agweb.com/article/how-it-works-sex-sorted- semen-...](https://www.agweb.com/article/how-it-works-sex-sorted-semen-NAA- university-news-release)

[https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0601-sexed-semen- econo...](https://www.beefmagazine.com/genetics/0601-sexed-semen-economic- sense)

It's also a somewhat controversial practice.

[https://hoards.com/blog-24477-sexed-semen-an-asset-or-a- prob...](https://hoards.com/blog-24477-sexed-semen-an-asset-or-a-problem.html)

<comment><USER7> Ha. The number 1 reason AI is popular with dairy farmers? Dairy bulls are more dangerous than you can imagine. Holstein bulls, especially, have a bad, bad, attitude. 2000 pounds of territorial nastiness. Unrepentant killers. Plus, you are working with the cows twice a day, so it is easy to tell when they are in heat.

Contrast with the Aberdeen Angus beef cattle that my father bred. Beef bulls are, for whatever reason, fairly mellow. I would walk through the bull lot regularly. Now, I would always keep an eye on the bulls, and calculate how fast I could run to the fence and jump over, but I never received worse than the evil eye and a snorting hoof-stamp. A Holstein would have crushed me 3 times over by then. Also, beef cows generally are left to their own devices out in the pasture, so tracking when they are in heat is challenging making AI much less practical.

<comment><USER6> That's a good point. I'd also say that Holstein cows are pretty scary; a cow can flip from "this human is fine" to "I'm going to protect my calf by trampling this human to death" with barely any warning.

Factors like floor material also matter. On wet concrete, work boots have decent traction but bull hooves don't, so a bull with a nose ring is a little bit less of a threat. On dirt or dry manure, though, watch out.

<comment><USER8> > "I'm going to protect my calf by trampling this human to death"

Knowing what we do to their calves, I can't say I blame them. They have every reason to try and protect their calves from us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like the kind of thing a functioning USDA would come in and help fix. The could subsidize losses of farmers who choose genetically diverse semen and then get cows that underproduce compared to average.

It's like the perfect case of encouraging something that isn't profitable for the common good.

<comment><USER10> You'd first have to convince them that this is a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is real scary. One genetic flaw exploited by say a virus could wipe out the entire dairy industry.

<comment><USER12> Wait till you find out that all the world's cash crops are essentially genetic clones of each other. We're literally one superbug away from global famine.

<comment><USER13> I doubt its that dire. There are a lot of things currently that can destroy crops but they are mostly prevented from spreading by border controls on things like fruit not being able to cross over.

<comment><USER14> You're correct. Rice and corn are almost tied as staple crops. Wheat, potatoes and bananas trail those two relatively closely. There may be little genetic diversity inside any particular staple food, but there are nevertheless several unrelated staple foods that feed the world.

If blight were to wipe out one or two, things would get bad but I'm confident we'd pull through as a species.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All US Dairy Cows are descended from the original two cows, and all humans from the first humans, and on, and on.

It is interesting how selective breeding has played a part in several industries though. This example sounds a little appalling to my mind, but I'm a fan of horse racing and all thoroughbreds have to trace their lineage to one of three horses or they're not considered thoroughbred and I'm fine with that.

What is it that makes some examples unnerving, and some acceptable?

<comment><USER16> That's not true, because species are evolved, not created discretely.

Mitochondrial Adam and Eve are not mates.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Jallikattu protest on 2017 relating to bull breeding in Tamilnadu, India.

Selected Excerpt from Wikipedia Below

Jallikattu is cited as one of the last available ways to promote and preserve the native livestock because the other uses of native breeds such as ploughing, breeding via mating and milk is on decline due to advancement in mechanization by tractors, improvement in artificial insemination and hybrid Jersey cows respectively. Karthikeyan Siva Senaapathy, a native breed activist, has said in an interview with the BBC that "[Tamil Nadu] had over one million Kangayam bulls in 1990. The population has fallen to 15,000 now." Minor protests were initiated by cattle rights activists and farmers such as Karthikeya Sivasenapathy who has appeared multiple times on the STAR Vijay talk show Neeya Naana. Music videos, such as "Takkaru Takkaru" by Hiphop Tamizha, and on Facebook videos to talk about jallikattu and its benefits inspired the protestors. Sivasenapathy has claimed that the indigenous cattle bulls are critically endangered in Tamil Nadu and banning jallikattu will have the adverse effect of wiping them out completely. According to Sivasenapthy and other pro-jallikattu activists, jallikattu is not just a sport that is deeply entrenched in Tamil culture, but it has also inadvertently served as a scientific method of breeding cattle.[clarification needed] This view is held among a majority of jallikattu supporters. The protest is aimed at revival of the native humped bull, called the zebu. The Tamil Nadu breed of zebu is unique to India and has several advantages compared to European varieties of cattle such as the Holstein cow. The native breeds are rich in the A2 variety of beta casein protein which aides easy digestion whereas milk from European Bos taurus contain the A1 variant of the beta casein protein which is related to allergies and some serious health conditions.The Holstein breeds found their way into India as a result of Operation Flood of late 1960's through cross breeding to increase the low milk yield of native breeds. As the Jersey cow can yield nine times the quantity of milk as a zebu in the same period, there is concern among protesters that without jallikattu providing an economic incentive for the breeding of zebu, the breed will become endangered and eventually extinct.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_pro- jallikattu_protests](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_pro- jallikattu_protests)

</comment><comment><USER18> I knew the agriculture industry was at risk due to monocultures (e.g. the banana) but I didn't know the dairy industry was too! There's a trade off between resiliency and performance/standardization.

<comment><USER19> Tbh, this is a little statistical misnomer. There's a high probability that over half of us is a direct descendent of a single Roman citizen, and I remember a report that a significant proportion of Asian population can trace through one of lines to Genghis Khan.

This is simply because you have 2 parents, 4 grandparents and 8 ggp and so on. Eventually this exponential growth lead to a size greater than the world population. 30 generation would mean more than 1 billion ancestors, and a lot of that would intersect, while the chance of having a certain individual be part of your ancestry greatly increases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This guy who said "don't stop drinking milk because some random person on the internet said so". Dude, really need to get with common sense. Research can and is skewed everyday. You want research? Go to the factory farms where these animals suffer and die each day so you can have your milk and yogurt and whey protein trash. Don't rely on someone to spoon feed you. This is corporate manipulation at Amazon scale. Get with the program, cows milk is for calves, not humans.

<comment><USER21> I have gone to those farms. Cows die nearly everyday because there are 3000 of them on the farm and their lifespan is 5-7 years, so the numbers work out that way (in the wild it would be less). Otherwise they live in clean barns that are not too hot, have plenty of food and otherwise have an easy life. Boring perhaps, but it isn't cruel despite what you might be manipulated into thinking.

<comment><USER8> Cows absolutely do not have a lifespan of 5-7 years. Wild cattle easily live 20+ years; same for cared for domesticated species. I've been to these farms to, and I've personally cared for animals that have escaped. For many of them it really is a horrific life. Please don't accuse others of having been manipulated into their beliefs, especially when your claims on the subject are so inaccurate.

<comment><USER21> They can live 20+ years. However they typically will not: the wild is a harsh place, 5-7 years is an accurate mode.

You are trying to let your bias manipulate others yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What _really_ caught me off-guard in the _I didn 't see that coming_ sort of way was that someone named their Bull " _Round Oak Rag Apple Elevation_ " \-- that strikes me as an oddly long and specific name. Everything else is, perhaps, bothersome, but not terribly " _surprise!_ ".

<comment><USER23> From his Wikipedia page:

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

It seems like Elevation was one of his dad's names, and Round Oak was part of his mom's name.

<comment><USER24> Bulls have wikipedia pages now? Ok, this is the thing I'm most surprised about out of all of this.

Maybe I'm just annoyed that there's a bull who's more famous than me, and that he got that famous by being a lot more reproductively successful than me.

<comment><USER25> My cat had a web page in 1996. So old it isn't in the archive :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> as you go back in time, the tree of ancestors shrinks, so ultimately all cows in the world are descended from 2 cows, are they not?

<comment><USER27> It's not that simple. If you look back far enough, "cows" are descended from perhaps multiple species of "not really cows, yet". And the same is true for all of those species.

So you never get back to two of any one species.

<comment><USER28> Well, there is this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The newest South Park episode talked about this. An irony of Incredible Meat mixed it.

<comment><USER30> Have absolutely been loving this show for the past few years now. I think it's far more entertaining today than when it started even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> That's nothing. _All_ dairy cows have descended from one bull. That's how evolution (and its artificial counterpart, selective breeding) works.

</comment><comment><USER32> Imagine if the header said "Most Humans Are Descended From Just Two Apes"

</comment><comment><USER33> That reminds me of the "Adam & Eve" story.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is this the same for pigs and possible related to African swine flu difficulties?

</comment><comment><USER35> echo Hacker News | sed s/Hacker/Speciation/

Not that I mind, quite enjoying these articles.

</comment><comment><USER36> I find it ironic that in an article about how most of this segment of species is a child of 2 bulls, the main scientist is named "Chad"

<comment><USER37> I don't get it?

<comment><USER38> not sure what michannne means but typically being referred to as "A Chad"... is not a nice thing.

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chad](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Chad)

<comment><USER39> It's not that definition. Chad is the memey name of the archetype of the good looking buff guy who pick and sleep with girls really easily (before dumping them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> How do two bulls have a daughter? Did they adopt, or use a surrogate?

<comment><USER41> The two bulls didn't have a child together; it's more like the family trees go up (through n generations) up to one of two award-winning males.

This is like saying 1 in X men are descended from Genghis Khan...

<comment><USER42> What about the Avengers, though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm starting to hear these types of things so much that I'm becoming skeptical

<comment><USER44> Why? Most of this seems to be documented, no reason to be skeptical if you can just trace back the lineages...

<comment><USER43> It's like when we had to adjust all the carbon datings because techniques changed. I just don't trust everyone always coming from a handfull of people. You'd expect to see it happen in both directions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This basically means that US beef industry is 1 disease away from being obliterated. Genetic diversity is still a requirement for the survival of a species.

<comment><USER46> For beef they don't use milk cows (dairy cows) they use beef cattle such as angus and herford. Also there are other dairy cows like guernsey, jersey, etc.

<comment><USER47> That isn't strictly true (not in the UK anyway). I was out for a beer tonight and serendipitously bumped into the secretary for the Aberdeen Angus Cattle Society[0] and proceeded to have a discussion about the Society, cattle, beef production etc.

You'd (and I was) be surprised to know that Aberdeen Angus sires impregnate dairy cattle for offspring that end up as prime steak. And this isn't just for burgers, it's for premium supermarket cuts such as fillets.

Also (in the UK anyway), most beef that is labelled as Aberdeen Angus only need to be 50% Angus (i.e. be sired from an AA bull)...check the small print on the packaging. It's actually rarer (pardon the pun) to see 100% Angus steaks on the shelves (say as cuts of fillets or sirloin) because their muscle structure is somewhat less appealing to consumers.

Anyway, he's still in the village at the moment and can ask any questions anyone has tomorrow.

[0]: [https://www.aberdeen-angus.co.uk/](https://www.aberdeen-angus.co.uk/)

<comment><USER48> I was in Spain recently (in the Picos de Europa) and had probably the best steak I've ever had - from an Asturian Mountain beastie - we had seen (and heard) a lot of them walking in the Picos:

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

<comment><USER47> _checks to see if Aden Films[0] has tried one of these_ ...but sadly not yet.

What cut did you have?

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu9g5OmzcCpcJnmSYyHnIVw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu9g5OmzcCpcJnmSYyHnIVw/videos)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Renting vs. Owning Your Own Home - A Summary of Your Options - <AUTHOR> http://filthyrichmind.com/2012/03/renting-vs-owning-your-home/

<comment><USER2> I have lived in three countries and traveled extensively.

I would comment that England has one of the most difficult housing dilemmas of all the first world countries (a close second to Switzerland/Germany).

The affordability of housing has moved more of my mates overseas than any other issue. If you are tired of the lies, look abroad.</comment>


Show HN: What do you think of my pet project? - <AUTHOR>

I submitted this before ( http://instamapsearch.com ) for critique about 4 months ago and had some mixed reactions, mostly negative. So I worked hard during my days off and applied the criticisms that I think would improve this web app. So what do you think 'bout it guys? Just want to hear from you. <comment><USER2> When I search my neighborhood and use "food," the results just don't make sense. It seems its pulling in the closest things (geographically) that are related to food.

Wouldn't people be more interested in seeing top rated results? I would, at least. So maybe a filter to search by location, price, rating, etc

</comment><comment><USER3> just don't know why i'd use this over yelp ?</comment>


Apple prevents Galaxy sales in EU - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14470253

<comment><USER2> Bad headline from the BBC: only Galaxy Tab 10.1 sales are prevented.</comment>


Stripe adds OAuth support: Stripe Connect - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-connect <comment><USER2> I'm loving the features that Stripe are throwing out (and I'm not even a customer <insert obligatory call to come to Ireland>).

I imagine there's huge scope for using OAuth to open up the data for hosted metrics, dashboards or other analysis tools. That, in turn, should open up the market for such tools. I foresee a nice little ecosystem around Stripe. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER3> Do this guys ever sleep? Nice to see they are doing great nice things. It will be perfect when it will come to UK! (SOON RIGHT?)

<comment><USER4> It's almost like they have a team of developers, each working on different features!

Seriously, can't wait till this expands worldwide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are the security risks with this? Doesn't this open users up to giving payment access to people who aren't qualified to handle access tokens?

</comment><comment><USER6> omg I love these guys.

</comment><comment><USER7> Outstanding.</comment>


EFF's new database reveals what tech local police are using to spy on you - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/effs-new-database-shows-you-what-tech-local-police-are-using-to-spy-on-you/ <comment><USER2> Link to EFF page: [https://atlasofsurveillance.org/](https://atlasofsurveillance.org/)

Link to previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824845](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824845)

<comment><USER3> Why is this not the OP link?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here, I missed the earlier discussion. Didn't realize this was duplicate. The news article has link to the actual portal along with some extra information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I posted this in the previous HN convo but reposting:

And this is just state surveillance. There's a guy who's building a private surveillance network in San Francisco, with the buy in of the District Attorney and local police departments, and a goal of complete surveillance of city streets.

[https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.c...](https://www- nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera- surveillance-san-francisco.amp.html)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera- surveilla...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera-surveillance- san-francisco.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Body worn cameras are listed as spying devices? Does that make sense?

<comment><USER6> If they are constantly recording, uploading, and being used for facial recognition I think it does.

<comment><USER5> Not sure what version they got. I think the public is on the upper side here, losing a bit of privacy and gaining more transparency. Results differ between countries:

[https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/body-worn-cameras- what-e...](https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/body-worn-cameras-what- evidence-tells-us)

<comment><USER7> Body cameras are still a form of surveillance even if you agree with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be great if there was a call to action button on each entry on the map. Who do I call to complain about the license plate readers (or whatever)?

</comment><comment><USER9> Any plans to go international? I see there is a collaborate page: [https://supporters.eff.org/collaborate-atlas- surveillance](https://supporters.eff.org/collaborate-atlas-surveillance)</comment>


How to teach AI to summarise news articles; a new dataset for auto summarisation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/curation-corporation/teaching-an-ai-to-abstract-a-new-dataset-for-abstractive-auto-summarisation-5227f546caa8 <comment><USER2> there is no downloadable dataset?

<comment><AUTHOR> The direct link to the dataset is here: [https://curation-datasets.s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/curatio...](https://curation-datasets.s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/curation-corpus-base.csv)

[https://github.com/curationcorp/curation- corpus](https://github.com/curationcorp/curation-corpus) instructions on how to use it with examples for BERTExtAbs and BART. Sorry for the confusion!</comment></comment>


Migrating my blog to https was the biggest mistake financially - <AUTHOR> http://www.liberiangeek.net/2015/09/migrating-my-blog-to-https-was-the-biggest-mistake-financially/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thats an older blog entry, but with the recent "Google will shame non SSL sites" it might be useful to consider his experience.

Also a worthwile read: [https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10528?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10528?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER2> I saw a slight drop in adsense earnings too but nowhere near the percentage cited here.

The search result benefit is slight but once a critical mass of sites have made the switch I think Google will start turning the dial up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like always with adsense it will depend on your typical user and thereby on the advertisers. Advertisers targeting more sophisticated users will rather provide SSL enabled ads than advertiser targeting the "get rich quick" audience for example.</comment></comment>


Show HN: platypus.js - load JS&CSS with one request - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/janhancic/platypus.js

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I've made this simple hack and I thought I'd share.

Some more details: <http://hancic.info/load-javascript-and-css-with-one- request>

Demos: <http://janhancic.github.com/platypus.js/></comment>