Modern American elites have come to favour inconspicuous consumption - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21725751-new-book-looks-how-expenditure-has-changed-among-americas-affluent-modern-american <comment><USER3> Maybe I'm not the mainstream, but the more money I have, the less obligated I feel to use any of it.

Every car I've owned has been cheaper than the previous and honestly these days I'm mostly public transit. But at the same time, I've become many times richer between each car purchase.

I love the non connection and unpreciousness of my possessions - <USER2> profoundly and easily replaceable they are and how detached I am from them.

At the end what is wealth other than excess of liberty and freedom. An ability to purchase luxury without much concern for the cost is at its highest form when someone can also dismiss most of the luxury as frivolous and not purchase it at all.

<comment><USER4> _how profoundly and easily replaceable_

It is no great virtue to think that when you have wealth, but try living like that when you are poor and all of your meagre possessions were hard-earned.

Minimalism is an ostentatious luxury.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> It is no great virtue to think that when you have wealth, but try living like that when you are poor and all of your meagre possessions were hard- earned.

>> Minimalism is an ostentatious luxury.

Those are separate things. Minimalism would be the opposite of buying things that are easily replaceable. Surely you would buy things that don't need replaced often/can be repaired and are higher quality/more expensive.

Using plastic dishes, throwing them out after every meal, and buying new ones isn't minimalism. Spending money on 4 good quality ceramic plates which will last the next 10 years is.

<comment><USER5> > Spending money on 4 good quality ceramic plates which will last the next 10 > years is.

Are there bad quality ceramic plates? Mine costed $1-$3 each and they're great.

<comment><USER6> I think it's just a bad example. Unless you mishandle them these things never break and are basically free at the next good-will or fleamarket.

Maybe shoes are a better example? Though identifying good quality is a lot of work in itself and may signal status I guess.

<comment><USER7> Shoes: definitely. But it applies to other, seemingly mundane things. e.g. Cookware, Vacuum Cleaner, Furniture etc. The quality differential b/w a dyson and the cheap $20 vaccuuum is staggering; using a dyson is a pleasant experience while the $20 cheapo? Not so much.

Don't get me wrong. When I was a grad student, I bought the cheapest vacuum, cheapest shoes and clothes. But I did know that better quality things did exist, and didn't hesitate to purchase them when I could finally afford to.

<comment><USER8> Dyson vacuums have interesting industrial design, but in terms of function they don't even make the CR top ten[1], so yes, I expect they are better than some, but they are also more expensive than most.

1: [https://www.consumerreports.org/products/upright- vacuum/rati...](https://www.consumerreports.org/products/upright- vacuum/ratings-overview/)

<comment><USER7> Those reviews are paywalled, so I can't really see what criterion they are using to rate a product high/low. I agree though that Dyson's are pricey, but they last long and are a joy to use. Not saying there aren't other models that do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm something of an odd duck.

I don't really understand the desire that people have for status symbols and "keeping up with the Joneses" \- but what really confounds me is the decisions virtually everyone else in my life makes when it comes to money.

It's like this is the conversation happening in my head: "Look, we're friends. I know what you do for a living, so I can guesstimate within a not-orders-of- magnitude margin of error what kind of money you make. You clearly can't afford this car/house/gadget without going into debt, and this is a luxury purchase. What the f __* are you doing dude? ", but I obviously don't say this because it's none of my business.

Some of my friends (and even extended family) seem to have some very naive views about the nature of money and wealth, and this is the part that really makes me uneasy.

It seems that going into high levels of debt and living month-to-month is, at least where I am in the world, the universally and culturally accepted lifestyle strategy. I genuinely can't understand it at all. Is there something everyone else knows that I don't?

I'm fortunate I guess in that I have a STRONG preference that my friends/family don't know my personal finances or think I earn less than I do (I don't need our income differential making good friendships weird), so it suits me not to have showy toys and trinkets. I also get a lot more satisfaction knowing I'm making progress each month on a small but growing safety net for my kids rather than a shiny SUV in the driveway.

<comment><USER10> I've been thinking about this a lot recently too. So much of what we do in life is driven by its social signaling value. Our lists of likes, dislikes, purchases, hobbies, decisions, and more are all heavily influenced by the perceptions and judgements of the people around us.

Take the decision to buy that shiny SUV. People know that the age and quality of the car you drive is linked to your personality and financial success. If you buy yourself a Model X, 95% of people around you will perceive you differently: environmentally concerned, passionate early adopter, bad at ROI calculations. Driving a beater even though you could obviously afford more is another way of signaling your prudence and risk tolerance.

And why not? We are first and foremost social, tribal creatures. So I would say you're not an odd duck, there's just a different set of values you're trying to signal.

<comment><USER11> > So I would say you're not an odd duck, there's just a different set of > values you're trying to signal.

I agreed with most of your comment, but this sentence seems to imply that _all_ decisions are purely or at least primarily for the purpose of signaling values to others. I don't think this is true. Humans may be very social and tribal creatures, but I don't think that means it's impossible to make decisions without caring what other people think, like who reads the "signals" generated from e.g. the prudent purchase of a used Honda or whatever.

<comment><USER10> >like who reads the "signals" generated from e.g. the prudent purchase of a used Honda or whatever

These social signals form an entire nonverbal language and we are always speaking. Your used Honda is saying more than you realize. Making decisions without caring what other people think speaks volumes as well.

<comment><USER12> Just because everything you do generates a social signal, doesn't mean everything you do is strongly influenced by the desire to generate that social signal.

As a analogy, everything I do might generate some amount of sound. When I'm singing karaoke, the primary goal is to generate that sound. When I move my bookshelf by dragging it across the floor, the sound is incidental.

Likewise, I think it's perfectly possible for someone to actually to want to buy the Model X outside of signals it generates for the world, even though it generates a signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not rich but I make enough on a yearly basis that I can pay my rent, have a few hundred dollars worth of fun per month, and still tuck away enough money for the future that as long as things continue or don't become/stay terrible for longer than a year I should be able to maintain the lifestyle that I like. Of the disposable/fun things that my budget goes towards, none of the things in this article are things I find appealing.

Don't get me wrong, nice things are nice. Go figure. But I work in a mixed city with people from much higher and much lower than me on the economic latter. In my experience, owning a lot of nice things means that you're going to have a harder time befriending people who are significantly lower on the income latter. I don't expect this to be a problem for everyone, but for me and I suspect people like me, it's difficult because I just like going out and being social in meatspace. There's plenty I could do to overcome that when I meet new people, but I don't want to have to overcome walking in and looking like the rich guy. And I don't want to have to think about going to a concert at a bar in a poor neighborhood because I drove a nice car.

Things like saving for my children, as the article discusses, make sense because they tie in with long term happiness imo. If I ever do have children it's not hard for me to imagine wanting to give them as much support as I can to ensure they succeed. I wouldn't want to see them struggle because of resources. But luxury goods don't affect me longterm happiness in the same way and often they feel to me as having a social opportunity cost. The difference in price between what I drive and a nice car could fund a lot of bar nights, concerts, parties at people's houses, etc. And that's just not a cost that's worth it from my perspective.

<comment><USER14> > and much lower than me on the economic latter.

I found this group of people after I joined my local boxing gym. It totally grounded me. It takes an extraordinary amount of discipline and hard work to be a professional boxer. And yet most professional boxers I know are at the very low end of the income ladder.

Their friendship is real and genuine and I really love that and try to support them in every which way I can...

<comment><USER15> Yep, have a hobby, especially an inexpensive one, and you can bond with people of all economic strata based on that.

Mine is board games. I already have a ton, so I don't need people to have their own. We can meet at a public space, like a food court, not spend a dime, and all have a great time. We don't really care what everyone's economic status is, just how we interact with each other while playing the games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16>
      Rather than frittering away that precious leisure time
      on frivolities, [today's rich] devote it to enriching
      experiences, like attending the opera, [...] The modern
      equivalent of Victorian worsted-stocking wearers are
      hipsters

Maybe it's different where I live to where the author does, but most operas I've seen have had a predominantly grey-haired audience, and management obviously worried about the future of their ageing audience.

Plaid shirts, bushy beards, tattoos, piercings, single-speed bicycles and people in their 20s have not been in evidence.

<comment><USER17> Royal Opera House always seems to have a good range of ages. Maybe it depends on the opera.

<comment><USER18> Interesting, I'm rather young and I can't imagine any of my friends wanting to see a play (unless it's provided free by the university's drama society or they have to attend), much less an orchestra performance, and much less an opera. I doubt they'd be able to decide to see one opera over another too :)

<comment><USER19> The specific cultural experiences have changed with a younger generation - hot-off-Broadway musicals, live concerts, music festivals, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >Chief among them is education for their children: the top 10% now allocate almost four times as much of their spending to school and university as they did in 1996, whereas for other groups the figure has hardly budged.

How much of this is driven by the heavy increase in postsecondary education costs, as well as a Masters degree being the new Bachelors degree for setting your child apart from the pack? (I know many parents who press their child to go for a Masters with this rather superficial reasoning)

<comment><USER21> It's more that, for people who have the money, the process of throwing serious money at education starts much earlier, and the amount of money is higher than ever. Go read about extremely-competitive pre-kindergarten programs with gigantic waiting lists for parents desperate to start their child on an Ivy League track as soon as possible. Follow up with top private schools, intense private tutoring, and parents who literally do things like buy a clinic or an orphanage somewhere in a developing country so their child can "work" there for a couple summers and write about the experience in their admissions application:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/sunday/to-get- to-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/14/opinion/sunday/to-get-to-harvard- go-to-haiti.html)

 _Richard Weissbourd, a child psychologist and Harvard lecturer who has studied the admissions process in the interest of reforming it, recalled speaking with wealthy parents who had bought an orphanage in Botswana so their children could have a project to write and talk about. He later became aware of other parents who had bought an AIDS clinic in a similarly poor country for the same reason._

<comment><USER22> Funny, everyone I know who is doing well never went to an Ivy League school. The most wealthy (net worth probably $100M) never went to college. I'd say wealth is built from grit, education, and frugality, not pedigree.

If anything, all the online, open courseware has shown me that the Ivy Leauge coursework is no different than that of most state universities. My kids will have a choice of two in-state schools. If they can get into an Ivy League, that's fine, but they must fund the difference.

<comment><USER23> It has very little to do with the coursework, and everything to do with the social bonds formed in Ivy League. However,

I will point out, being a person that did my undergrad at Boston University but took my preferred computer science classes at Harvard, the Ivy League actually teaches! Their professors take a personal interest in their students success. I originally took a Harvard assembly language class because it was not offered at B.U., and that one class opened my eyes to their vast difference between Ivy League and non. I went on to take the majority of my core classes at Harvard night and summer schools, as the same classes at B.U. were foreign grad students with bad accents lecturing to the board. The Harvard classes were exhilarating and exciting, with my head filled with possibilities after every class. And that was practically every class I took there. At ivy League, the professors are self actualizing on their students, and that is HUGE.

<comment><USER22> Maybe I'm jaded then. My professors were American and also cared about student learning. No grad students teaching courses, other than myself (just the lab section). I also have no social bonds to class mates; most were foreign and were only there to study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Between 1996 and 2014 the richest 1% fell further behind the national > average in the percentage of their spending dedicated to bling.

Do you count their home(s)? Conspicuous consumption also looks like:

\- having homes in particular neighborhoods

\- certain kinds of upgrades to the homes (elaborate pools, media rooms)

\- extra homes (Paris, Manhattan, in the mountains, on the beach)

<comment><USER25> Real estate is usually considered an investment, is it not?

<comment><USER26> Only if you buy it for value appreciation and/or income. If you buy a second home in an area that you like instead of one with high potential upside it's not an investment.

I would guess that few vacation homes are bought for the return they generate. If you want to invest in real estate, you'd rather buy homes in large cities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That makes me think about "luddite fallacy". The common understanding is that we can survive increasing productivity because people will always want more stuff.

However, the implicit assumption there is that once we get beyond satisfying basic needs the demand will be driven up by conspicuous consumption.

Yet, the logic of conspicuous consumption may as well work the other way round: Where being fat was seen as a sign on high social status once today it's a sign of low social status. One can signal status be consuming less rather than more.

<comment><USER28> _One can signal status be consuming less rather than more._

Being thin doesn't mean necessarily consuming less; see the millions spent on diet books, courses, coaches, etc.

<comment><USER29> Yes, it's not about eating less, and definitely not about spending less on food. It's about showing that you have the leisure to worry about such things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >The modern equivalent of Victorian worsted-stocking wearers are hipsters, who imitate the wealthy's penchant for farmers' markets and fair-trade lattes, even if they cannot afford a cruise to Antarctica.

As a life-long hipster I must object to this. Hipsterdom has nothing to do with wanting to appear well off financially. It is a combination of a longing for authenticity and wishing to separate oneself from the hoi polloi, but through sophistication and coolness. The proportions may vary from hipster to hipster but in no case is it an attempt to imitate the wealthy.

<comment><USER30> > Hipsterdom has nothing to do with wanting to appear well off financially

> through sophistication and coolness

In order for cool to exist, there must be un-cool, which is _everyone else_.

So you're completely right in that hipsters aren't trying to show that they're _richer_ than others. Just that they're _better_. In that sense, hipsters and the conspicuously wealthy are united.

<comment><USER29> >So you're completely right in that hipsters aren't trying to show that they're richer than others. Just that they're better. In that sense, hipsters and the conspicuously wealthy are united.

The author claimed that hipsters do what they do to mimic the wealthy, which is not true. The fact that they, as any human being, strive for some kind of status and exclusivity, is a different question altogether.

<comment><USER30> You're right that every person and every community values status to some extent or another. But in most communities, there is a core (often economic) activity or set of values that confers status that is not directly related to the status itself.

Being a good maintainer or creating useful projects gives you status in the open source community. Rendering or arguing sound, legally difficult decisions confers status if you're a judge. These communities are fundamentally _open_ : anyone who can do those things can join and raise their status in those communities.

On other hand, the conspicuously wealthy and hipsters tend towards the extreme end of the status-seeking, with a lot of emphasis on _exclusivity_. The source of the status is very closely aligned with the status itself.

The conspicuously rich country-club set make a little community for themselves just based on the fact that they can prove to each other how rich they are. And the defining trait of a hipster is being able to show how cool they are, which means that status itself is the key to entry in the community.

Please note that I'm not trying to beat up on you -- we need status-driven people in the world, else few would ever want to become a politician or a leader. But I do think that hipsters _as a community_ take status drive much further than most other groups, sometimes to comical effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I find it a bit odd, I think a better version is the elites have returned to how the elites used to always be, not how the celebrity elites are.

Explained, the tech industry created a lot of wealth that was had by people not used to having large amounts of money and they did what people usually do in that case; see lottery winners. Celebrity wealth is like the Hollywood stars type, flashy cars, clothes, and gadgets, that are all appearance oriented.

The long term wealthy or those having grown up in it always favored enriching activities, from sports to trips to the arts. You can see it in the philanthropic actions which are of completely different sort than those who demonstrate their wealth celebrity styles whose philanthropic tend to be similar; demonstrative and self congratulatory.

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting, but just a review of the book so not so actionable.

I liked this guide by the Financial Samurai [1] who advocates his readers avoid living a conspicuously rich lifestyle. It's been a few years since I read it, but a quick skim makes me think it's held up pretty well despite its paranoid tone.

[1] [http://www.financialsamurai.com/the-rise-of-stealth- wealth-g...](http://www.financialsamurai.com/the-rise-of-stealth-wealth-guide- to-staying-invisible-from-society-rage/)

<comment><USER22> Sounds similar to Dave Ramsey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I read this book the other day, and for the life of me I can't remember the name, and I wish I could. It's a fairly nasty but accurate book.

It's the difference between how the nouveaux rich and the bluebloods signal wealth.

For instance, if you're newly lower upper class, you like splurging on nice kitchens and laundry facilities - stainless steel/granite countertops and new appliances with all the bells and whistles. If you are truly wealthy and have been for generations, you tend to not give a shit about your kitchen or your laundry facilities - that sort of thing is just for menials, as you're not spending any time in the kitchen, and you wouldn't be entertaining your guests there - that's what the dining room and parlour are for.

One consequence of the Cultural Revolution in China is that none of the newly minted rich are truly bluebloods - wealth is only a few generations old. Hence the splurging on nice purses and nice cars. A truly wealthy person wouldn't be caught dead in the front seat of a Lamborghini - he owns the Bentley and pays for a driver to live with him so he doesn't have to bother with driving.

Like I said, it's a truly insightful and as a consequence a nasty book. If I can find the title I'll update this post.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't know if I qualify as an "elite", given that I'm "merely" in the 86th percentile of American households by income, but I take issue that the article equates things like fair-trade food, going on a nice vacation, seeing a show and going to a nice gym as status symbols.

I buy free-range/organic whatever because in some cases it's genuinely healthier/tastier (ex: grass-fed beef, uncured bacon, hormone-free chicken, legit Extra Virgin Olive Oil, etc), and the benefit to the animals/farmers is a bonus. I see shows because I enjoy them, I take nice vacations every once in a while because I enjoy them. I buy nice coffee because I use a french press and can taste the difference over Folgers. I go to a nice gym because I enjoy the jacob's ladder machine, the general cleanliness and high availability of equipment.

None of that is to show off to anyone. Sure I might bring it up in conversation if I think it's interesting and relevant, but it's hardly the "look at me and how awesome I think I am!" vibe that driving a Hummer, living in a Mansion or wearing $50 designer T-shirts is.

</comment><comment><USER35> Also: Everything from Last Psychiatrist on aspirationals e.g. [http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_f...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/11/luxury_branding_the_future_lea.html)

(TLP, you're dearly dearly missed)

</comment><comment><USER36> The only real privilege is to live away from those you don't want to deal with and have the ability to do and think what you want within reasonable limits (which may not apply to popular conception but law).

Aside from that the things that are good: fast cars (and place to drive them), private library, private environment that incorporates gym, pool and a computing infrastructure that allows latency-less research and investment + computing.

You can get that for about 400K a year household.</comment>


The Hacker Dictionary – Hacker terms, lingo, slang, and acronyms - <AUTHOR> http://www.hacker-dictionary.com/ <comment><USER2> Uhh, so why not link to the legitimate site for "The New Hackers Dictionary", a.k.a., "The Jargon File", at [http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/](http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/) ?</comment>


Show HN: wntd.in, a very simple social recruiting site - <AUTHOR> http://wntd.in/

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope that you will take the time to review my site wntd.in ( <http://wntd.in> ), a social recruiting site. I know there are others out there, but my goal was to make a really simple one. Users just post their jobs and profiles, and they automatically get broadcasted weekly to their friends on twitter.

I need your feedback telling me if I have achieved my goal or not.

And let me know what you think about the interface. I think the name of the site is really appropriate and catchy. Also, I will keep this basic functionality free and hope to build more premium features like detailed analytics.

If users think it is useful, I will add Facebook and LinkedIn integration as well.

Also, do you think a weekly broadcast is good or should I make it daily?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to review my site.

</comment><comment><USER2> Great idea, saves my time! Do not forget to switch on your scheduler to post jobs on twitter regularly

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. It posts once a week now.Do you think daily would be better?</comment></comment>


iOS Apps Tracking Exposed - <AUTHOR> I've installed a firewall on my iPhone. It has exposed all the crazy tracking done by apps, which of course normally happens under the hood.
To exemplify, two big offenders: Imgur and Dictionary.com
https://imgur.com/gallery/10yjM9m
https://imgur.com/gallery/yODTDeP <comment><USER2> Is this a jailbroken side-loaded app or is this available on the App Store?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, it's a jailbreak tweak.</comment></comment>


Redefining Work - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@EskoKilpi/redefining-work-447bff8a6547 <comment><USER2> People will disagree, but this is the sociological purpose of religion. Religious communities bring diverse people together, elevate the weakest, and promote societies that are competitive, but tempered by the empathy which comes from a shared identity.

Is religion the answer to questions of inequality? Historically speaking, probably not on its own. However, it certainly informed most of the larger solutions we have today.

<comment><USER3> The one thing I'll disagree is with you calling it "purpose", rather than "function". One of the _functions_ of religion is indeed better community cooperation. However, the _purpose_ for which a particular religion was envisioned by its creator(s) is not necessarily the _function_ it came to fulfill for some part of its existence.

<comment><USER4> No religion was simply created from nothing nor has a single identified creator.

Arguing about the distinction between "purpose" and "function" of evolved features is a useless game of word semantics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article does a good job of shining some fresh ideas in the discussion. The most interesting part for me is this paragraph:

 _As losers are excluded from the game, they are not allowed to learn. The divide between winners and losers grows constantly. Losers multiply as winning behaviors are replicated in the smaller winners' circles and losing behaviors are replicated in the bigger losers' circles. This is why, in the end, the winners have to pay the price of winning in one way or another. The bigger the divide of inequality, the bigger the price that finally has to be paid. The winners end up having to take care of the losers. Before that two totally different cultures are formed in society, as is happening in many places today._

I believe the issue that needs to be tackled is not _income inequality_ but _access to resources inequality_ , resources being health, education and so on. As long as a part of society doesn't have reasonable access to those resources they'll never be able to contribute to a bigger wealth pie.

This is important because I do agree that some people prefer to take risks on their careers and that those should get a bigger reward. Not necessarily in terms of money, but IT IS OK if it is in terms of money. After all, entrepreneurs are driven by the desire to make an impact on society.

The next part of the article distills the idea that a good way to reduce inequality is to promote cooperation and relationships over individuals and companies racing for a single prize. It's a nice concept but difficult to translate into a series of real steps that we can take now.

Again, I think a less ideological first step is ensuring everyone in a society has reasonable access to resources, allowing them to make conscious decisions of how to drive their professional careers and have a minimum understanding of how those with political and economical relevance use their influence.

Naturally, achieving such a thing isn't easy as governments are corrupt and a big chunk of those with economical and political relevance _now_ don't way their "free" wealth pie to end (and those are not startup entrepreneurs). But to complement what Esko said, there is still a middle fragment of society (we here on HN for example) that has power to drive this change, especially with the advent of technology and means to easily talk about it.

<comment><USER6> What happens after we guarantee all access to learning resources and inequality persists? At what point will you accept the science that tells us how intelligence is mostly hereditary, immutable, and important?

The dream of stamping out inequality is built on the factually incorrect notion that we are all born with equal abilities. It's much easier to explain outcome differences as ability differences than to come up with increasingly unlikely forms of oppression.

As technology improves, low-IQ contributions become increasingly less valuable relative to machines, increasing inequality.

<comment><USER7> If anything science tends to point more to the fact that there isn't a single metric of intelligence that is somehow the most important. Maybe the most important factor isn't intelligence at all and is some combination of intelligence, communication and charisma? Even if there some set of human dominating factors, there's no guarantee that the order of the world in that moment would consistently value that factor without changing to another. There isn't even a guarantee that at the same point in time the same fitness tests are applied consistently - in one corner of the world one set of characteristics if favored, and and in another it's a different set. Heck, in the same city there's a huge variation...

In this environment the best we can to is provide somewhat consistent access to resources to encourage the development human ability in all its varied forms.

<comment><USER6> That's a nice fantasy --- oh, everyone's smart, just as different things. It just ain't true.

Science tells us that IQ is a general mental cognitive factor; tasks can be more or less heavily g-weighted, but intelligence is strongly correlated to all sorts of things, like mortality (inversely), lifetime income, accomplishment, marriage stability, and so on.

Try again.

<comment><USER8> Please stop using HN to beat the same ideological dead hobby-horses over and over again. It is not what this site is for.

Please also edit the incivility out of your comments. There's no need for a nasty swipe like "Try again."

<comment><USER6> > Please stop using HN to beat the same ideological dead hobby-horses over and > over again

Which specific facts are inappropriate to mention on HN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Esko Kilpi is my favourite author on Medium at the moment. His articles on the redefinition of work are very inspirational to me. And although cooperative interaction is above all a human action, I have high hopes that technologies like the blockchain can help to ease these interactions between humans. Or at least to make these interactions more transparent and insightful.

<comment> keithb- This article may be inspirational to you, but it's not very well written or well argued. Is the California gold rush really an example of "sudden discovery of underutilized resources"? And isn't the subject of that sentence actually the technological changes that inspired the "major changes in economic patterns"?

Okay, so zero-sum games and scarcity economics are based on the idea that resources/valuables are limited and I'm all in favor of agreeing that there is no end to resources, creativity, or human sympathy. And I would even be willing to take that a step further and say that, no matter what the problem, there will be people willing to devote their time to it.

But the crux is not available resource: the key is defining something as a problem. Are schools the problem, or poverty? Are broken windows the problem, or mandatory minimums? Take away the assumptions from this article, and you aren't left with much more than a half-reasoned book report. I would be much more inspired if the conclusion of this article was something like "nuanced solutions are the only option" rather than what was presented: "be excellent to each other".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In games that were paradoxically competitive and cooperative at the same time, losers would not be eliminated from the game, but would be invited to learn from the winners."

This is, in practice, what we already have.

Two companies in the same space, A and B, compete. Initially, both grow into their space. Eventually, one does better than the other, and B fails. B dies. What happens? A goes and hires the best parts of B, or acquires them, or many variations on that theme. Most of the remainder go find a job somewhere else, perhaps in an entirely different economic sector. The employees of B are not cast into the outer darkness never to compete again, to starve and die.

Capitalism competes at the level of _companies_ , and _companies_ live in a highly Darwinian live-or-die environment. But the people _making up_ those companies actually live on a different level.

Combine that with ensuring that your business environment makes it easy to start a new company, and the process continues. (Meaning that one of the key things to worry about is ensuring that we do not accidentally destroy that property.)

In fact that's the core brilliance of a limited liability company; _all_ societies and cultures, whether they like it or not, are Darwinian, because we live in a rather harsh Darwinian universe of limited knowledge and resources. Many other social structures have been developed to directly cover it up or deny it, and in the process, fail miserably. It can not be covered up or denied. Since it isn't even caused by a human process, it doesn't care if you vilify it, and it is not amenable to politicking. You can't shame Darwinian competition into not existing any more.

But you can _move_ it. You can move it into entities that are not human. You can move it into things that, when they die, mean a lot of people may _feel really bad_ , but then they by and large go get another job or perhaps retire or worst case live on the largesse of the social safety net that a capitalistic society is wealthy enough to provide, but they don't actually _die_. You can get the Darwinian benefits of competition increasing fitness, while not actually killing the components of the system. Removing the Darwinian benefits from the system...

... well, actually, it's not like we need to hypothesize about what happens. Have we not already witnessed entities that are so large that they internally function without effective competition and, hypothetically, nothing but "cooperation" inside them, transcending the "system"? Old-school IBM. Many governments. We do not associate these systems with producing paradisaical cornucopias of happiness and resources. We associate them with massive resource wastage, favoritism, law-breaking, and extensive internal infighting. "Cooperation" unconstrained by competition has a _concrete historical track record_ of ceasing to be "cooperation".

If you just "cooperate", you need a mechanism to remove those cooperatives that aren't working properly. People living under the shield of the current system and mistakenly diagnose what the system is actually shielding you from as being caused by the system will always find these methods distasteful. But they are necessary lest the whole system dissolve into useless, wasteful flab. As in biology, so in economic life.</comment>


Scientists baffled by mysterious columns of coloured light - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1117264/Beam-Scientists-left-baffled-mysterious-columns-coloured-light-appear-night-skies.html

<comment><USER2> Nice pictures - makes the post worthwhile. That is something I would like to see.

The headline and reporting is the usual tosh from the Daily Mail though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where by "baffled" we appear to mean "not baffled".

<comment><USER4> Agreed. Stupid catchy title for link bait, but the photography was in fact pretty good. Too bad they can't be honest in their presentation.

<comment><USER5> It's the Mail. Intellectual honesty is not their stock in trade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw this phenomenon in St. Paul, MN (USA) about 4 years ago one winter evening. Strikingly beautiful. Interestingly, I found very little information about it on the intertubes.

<comment><USER7> One of the most beautiful sights I've seen was a series of teal-purple flashes of light punctuating a powerful ice storm. I was told later that the lights were power transformers exploding all over town. This was in North Carolina in 1997.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. Obviously.

</comment><comment><USER9> How can you not link to apod: <http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090112.html>

And the forum that is discussing them: [http://bb.nightskylive.net/asterisk/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=...](http://bb.nightskylive.net/asterisk/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=15219)

</comment><comment><USER10> Aliens are trying to beam up street lights, again. Someone needs to talk to their power company.

</comment><comment><USER11> SHOCKING title... but gorgeous pictures.

</comment><comment><USER12> Incredible.</comment>


Ask HN: Sort by Popular on GlassDoor – Broken or Manipulated? - just-juan-post When I sort a company's reviews by Popular it seems manipulated.
There is a startup I know about.  On Glassdoor there is a negative review with over 20 "helpful" (aka likes).  It has way more "helpful" designations than any other review for the company.
The default sorting method, Popular, puts a different review at the top.  The review is a quick throwaway review from a salesman with no meat or substance.  It has 1x "helpful".
Can someone help me understand why Glassdoor's "popular" review sort is showing me a review that's clearly not the most popular?  It seems like the use a Yelp business model where you need to pay to get good, positive reviews at the top of the pile.
How does it work exactly? <comment><AUTHOR> Glassdoor is, of course, manipulated. It's revenue is three main sources:

1\. Job postings 2\. Job ads 3\. Corporate branding

You'll notice that 'accurate reviews' or 'helpful information for free users' is not on that list.

</comment><comment><USER2> > It seems like the use a Yelp business model where you need to pay to get > good, positive reviews at the top of the pile.

Is this not _exactly_ how Glassdoor works?</comment>


Ask HN: How precise are computer clocks? - <AUTHOR> If my computer wouldn't synchronize with a NTP server, how precise would its clock be? How much would its clock/time deviate, especially compared to a quartz or mechanical watch? <comment><USER2> Generally the RTC in a computer is not as accurate as a typical wall clock or wristwatch. Although the RTC usually uses the same type of crystal as a watch, the circuit is not usually calibrated (tuned) as part of the production and test process. I have seen drift rates of up to 5-10 minutes per month on systems that aren't using NTP.

</comment><comment><USER3> Because network-synchronized time clients are now nearly everywhere, the cost and accuracy of onboard computer clocks has declined over the past decade.

At the extreme, Raspberry Pis don't even have an integrated battery-sustained clock, and if the Pi has no network connection, it has no time at all.

> How much would its clock/time deviate, especially compared to a quartz or > mechanical watch?

In my experience, quite a lot. To see this for yourself, log two machines onto [http://arachnoid.com/NaturalResources/big_clock.html](http://arachnoid.com/NaturalResources/big_clock.html). On one machine, make a local copy of the page and disconnect from the Internet. See how quickly that machine deviates from correct time.</comment>


Do Not Read: Restricted collections in remarkable libraries - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/do-not-read <comment><USER2> Restricted collections are always amazing to browse. In the Bay Area, for example, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley is a fantastic resource for browsing extremely old and rare books. I believe it's open to the public but you have to register[0], and you have to specifically request the items from circulation.

Want to see a Mark Twain manuscript, or an original Dürer print? You will be able to "check" these items out in a time-box, and browse them on-site. It's amazing how available these resources can be, and not many non-academic researchers assume you can see these items with adequate permission.

Having been to many rare book conventions, I've seen the librarians from the Bancroft Library purchasing items often upwards of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The rare book world is very fascinating.

[0] [http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft- library/plan-...](http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/libraries/bancroft-library/plan- a-visit)

</comment><comment><USER3> There was something of a game to identify a volume that was in the Doheney library's restricted list at USC. It took a bit of social engineering and the knowledge of a title in order to get the librarian to even let you know if the volume was or was not part of the collection.

That said, libraries that take their archival mission seriously (as all good libraries do) will always have to restrict access to volumes that are at risk of damage or theft for moral, political, or value reasons.

<comment><USER4> For the sake of those of us that will likely never be in that part of the world would you like to say what the specific volume was?

<comment><USER5> When I worked in a college library in Seattle, we had a single book that was restricted so that the library patron had to read it* while supervised by a library employee: a out-of-print, full-color field guide from the 1970s to Pacific Northwest mushrooms.

*or, more commonly, photocopy specific pages.

<comment><USER6> Including psychedelic ones, I presume?

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing the reason for the restriction was the risk of people stealing it or razoring pages out - something that happens with some frequency with out of print art books.

It's even more of an issue with books which have images of obscure flora and fauna, at least with an art book if there's demand for a really good picture of a sculpture or painting you can pay someone to go take one, with pictures of rare mushrooms you'd have to go to huge lengths just to find them let alone get good pictures of intact specimens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Yale rare books library[0] is a beautiful, amazing building to walk around in. Most of the books are off-limits for fear of damaging them, I think. (This is what originally sprang to my mind when I read the title of this article.)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beinecke_Rare_Book_%26_Manuscr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beinecke_Rare_Book_%26_Manuscript_Library)

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember seeing a banned medical glossary with incorrect information, first good use of banning information I had ever seen.

<comment><USER10> what was the incorrect information?

Natural childbirth entailing a female orgasm?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The British Library has a complete collection of UK newspapers going back to the 19th century and beyond. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were a few tabloid newspapers that routinely included photos of topless women [1] as part of their value proposition. When this began, such pictures were legal if the woman in the picture over the age of 16, and sometimes, these newspapers used pictures of women that young. In 2003, the threshold age changed to 18 [2].

Restricted stacks are one thing, but having thousands of items scattered throughout your open stacks suddenly reclassified as child pornography, according to particular details that probably aren't even in your index, must be a librarian's nightmare.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_3)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_Offences_Act_2003)

<comment> Digit-Al OTOH I doubt you'd have to look too hard to find a group of teenage boys willing to go through every single page 3 and identify those that were described as being 16 or 17. You probably wouldn't even have to pay them :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> pff why does the image have to be 6.8MB, in PNG?</comment>


ReachNow Ending Service Today - <AUTHOR> https://reachnow.com/blog/reachnow-ending-service-today/ <comment><USER2> This is crazy. They're shutting down like - RIGHT NOW.

The email literally says "If you are in an active rental, do not fear. Please end your trip in the coverage area as normal when you are done."

This sucks. ReachNow/Car2Go was one of the big reasons my family was able to drop down from 2 cars to 1.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cached page: [http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2freachnow.com%...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2freachnow.com%2fblog%2freachnow- ending-service-today%2f&d=2826328804142&mkt=en-US&setlang=en- US&w=18EguUzacFT5sin957WSeBKuCYX_v3NX)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is incredibly abrupt. They pulled the plug with rentals still active!

What a bummer. I was disappointed when I learned about the merger of the ReachNow / Car2Go parent companies, because I predicted one of them would shut down the other and there would be fewer cars available and less competition.

This seems like a no-warning shutdown for a lot of folks. StreetCrowd ([https://www.streetcrowd.io](https://www.streetcrowd.io)) was a gig economy service that paid people in cash + ReachNow credit to move the cars into high- demand areas in Seattle. Their app had an outage notification today, seems they had no notice. And everyone who received ReachNow credit has no way to use it.</comment>


TechCrunch on the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://icrunch.rememberthisguy.com/

<comment><USER2> Or use Google Reader with TechCrunch as your only feed.</comment>


Rust-style resource management in OCaml - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02796 <comment><USER2> Tangentially related: has anyone been exploring ReasonML? I am enjoying it so far, but still hesitant because I'm not sure if its momentum (in the community with packages, etc) will sustain, and the interop into JS feels still somewhat clunky (though that is partly BuckleScript)

<comment><USER3> I have, and really enjoy it. My previous go-to for frontend was TypeScript, but it wore me down. I am ridiculously productive in ReasonML with proper ADTs, (exhaustive!) pattern matching, immutability and other niceties. The superb type inference is also great for prototyping, and I could go on and on. Rust for backend and ReasonML for frontend is making me very happy these days. I think the community will only keep growing. I feel like I'm an extra in the filming of Revenge Of The MLs, and it feels great.

<comment><USER2> Can you share more about how you're enjoying Rust alongside ReasonML? I don't have any experience with Rust but it sounds very conflicting.

<comment><USER3> Sure. I would say that Rust and ReasonML are very alike and very different at the same time, and I'll explain why I feel that. ReasonML's own docs give Rust a notable mention: "Close cousin of ours! Not garbage collected, focused on speed & safety."

They both

\- have powerful static type systems with good inference.

\- default to immutability, with optional mutability.

\- encourage functional constructs over procedural/imperative ones.

\- ADTs and exhaustive pattern matching with great ergonomics which can be used for everything from rigorous error management to unambiguous program state representation.

\- have escape hatches to write "I know what I'm doing and need more wiggle room"-code, but those are clearly visible for linting/auditing/testing, as opposed to languages that allow foot guns to invisibly permeate entire code bases because the language has no clearly discernible rigorous subset that one easily and naturally can keep to.

The list of features that make them alike can be made as long as your arm, and it's basically a laundry list of features that (once internalized in the developers mind) helps one build robust, correct, maintainable software. Sure, they're not carbon copies of each other but what it comes down to is enabling and encouraging the same semantic constructs.

So where are they not alike? I would say that the one constraint that the main differences result from is the fact that ReasonML's automatic memory management is a run-time solution (garbage collection) whereas Rusts is a compile-time solution (using static analysis), coupled with Rusts focus on raw performance. Everything else about the Rust language has (IMHO) been designed with the same sound underlying values as many other languages which encourage correctness. The differences that one notes when learning Rust are really mainly just the concessions that were necessary to make to achieve compile- time automatic memory management and raw performance.

Did that help? And as always, if I'm mistaken about anything, please correct me. I'm not a PLT person.

<comment><USER4> Are you planning on also looking at Rust on the front end?

<comment><USER3> Absolutely. I've been a Rust lurker (and later user/advocate) since ~2012/2013, I think, and the visible WASM support strides being taken right now coupled with my trust in the Rust community gives me great hope for Rust on the front end.

It remains to be seen to what extent and which problems it will be suitable for, but just as Rust despite the fears of some is (again, IMHO) turning out to be ergonomic enough to write all kinds of end user apps in (although some areas are still lacking, but give it time), so too I think it might surprise people with how widely applicable it may turn out to be on the front end.

And I'm hopeful and optimistic. I feel like we're seeing some tides turn with respect to how important software correctness/robustness really is perceived to be and -- importantly -- what we're prepared to pay for it. We're still a "young" industry compared to a lot of engineering disciplines, so it's not surprising that we're still maturing with periodic waves of change. Of course, many will disagree with the direction, but for me it can't come fast enough.

Sorry, I hadn't ranted in a while, and it _is_ Friday afternoon. =o)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> steve-chavez Haskell has also an ongoing implementation of linear types [https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc- proposals/pull/111](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/111).

Anyone know what are the major differences between these two implementations? Will linear types work better for OCaml than for Haskell?

</comment><comment> Ono-Sendai Why would you want to burden a GC'd functional language with the syntactical and semantic requirements of Rust's resource management?

<comment><USER5> Because Rust-style resource management is not only about performance, but also about correctness. And the ML crowd cares a lot about the latter - rightly so.

I'd kill for a language with ordinary ML types for _values_ (integers, strings, etc.), and substructural types for _objects_ (file handles, database connections, etc.).

<comment><USER6> Worth pointing out, the resource management strategy isn't even necessarily a net positive for performance. In typical GC'd languages you have a much richer design space for your memory system. You can move stuff around, you have flexibility as to when you do collection, you often have allocation as a built-in primitive, which means the compiler knows about it and can help optimize.

The end result is that good GC-based memory systems tend to perform better than malloc/free style APIs (with the call to free() possibly being implicit). to get good performance in C/C++/Rust, the programmer needs to be concientious about allocation. You have more control, but also more responsibility. In OCaml, allocation is bumping a pointer -- go nuts.

<comment><USER7> > The end result is that good GC-based memory systems tend to perform better > than malloc/free style APIs

Citation needed.

GCs promise wonders, and yet in practice they are going to eat your memory, trash caches, and slow everything down. Performance benefits are typical "in some applications, in some use cases, etc." not "tend to"

<comment><USER8> > Citation needed.

Oh come on: this is a well-known property of garbage collectors and should have been covered in an entry-level CS class. Did you even try to find this before pulling out the "citation needed" trope? Hacker News needs an auto- responses to any comment that has that phrase in it with "have you tried Google yet?" :/.

With just ten seconds of Google searching (so surely less time than it likely took you to type your "citation needed") I was able to find a meta-reference (a Stack Overflow answer with links to papers looking at this result). The results were "similar or up to 4% faster" and "much faster with lots of ram".

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/755878/any-hard-data- on-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/755878/any-hard-data-on-gc-vs- explicit-memory-management-performance)

(At least one of those links is dead, but it is to the same paper that thesz linked to in a sibling to this comment... a comment which provided a citation and which someone downvoted, because people care more about opinion than actually finding citations. I upvoted his comment back to being rendered in black text :/.)

What is so strange about this being controversial is that it is truly an _obvious_ result: a real heap allocation is really really slow, and a copying collector never has to allocate anything (it just bumps a pointer). So only when you have memory pressure does it eventually prune objects, and until then it runs lightning fast: faster than the malloc/free code could possibly dream of.

The advantage of affine types (as in Rust) isn't actually that it is avoiding GC: it is that it makes it possible to avoid _allocation itself_ by making it safe to allocate things on the stack (where you get the speed of bumping a pointer again instead of the painfully slow malloc). That is the kind of analysis that is often attempted by languages like Java ("escape analysis"), but is only available in limited circumstances.

<comment><USER7> > Oh come on: this is a well-known property of garbage collectors and should > have been covered in an entry-level CS class.

There's plenty of BS tought in academia. In CS that would include love for modeling tools (I had classes about IBM Rational tools, bleh), OOP and other forms of sophisticated complexity. The practicioners tend to dislike GCs, but again it's not a good argument.

> a real heap allocation is really really slow

There is nothing preventing a heap allocation to be almost as fast, at the cost of memory fragmentation/overutilization and/or slower deallocation.

And that's where the whole tradeoff is. Memory allocation has to track data explicitily, GC tracks data implicitly. Typically this tradeoff is expressed in a memory over-consmpation of GC to amortize the GC deallocation slowness. And it's all dandy on paper, because the argument is "oh, just take more memory and you're fast again". Which is not such an easy thing to do. Such memory could be used as a IO caches or to run other processes. And over and over companies rewrite their memory-hogging GC-ing services into explicit- memory allocation languages and they run faster and what's more important, utilize less memory and thus make the whole system faster. They can run on much smaller VM instances etc.

So the whole "GC is as fast or even faster" is dubious in general sense, IMO. And most of the papers trying to prove it is of form "in this specific circumstances GC _can_ run the same or even outperform mangaged memory lanagues".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html <comment><USER2> For quite some time it was common for workstations to have a bare-bones OS installed on their small hard drives, but for /usr to be mounted via NFS to a large server with a large disk. This also, for a long time, justified the split.

<comment><USER3> See [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/DisklessUnixAn...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/DisklessUnixAndUsr) and the comment by Greg A. Woods.

<comment><USER4> In that article, he discusses mounting the machine-specific /etc (and the base root fs implied thereby) via NFS. I recall playing with the design for a small group of diskless of linux worstations (which I never actually built, because there was nothing I actually needed it for, it was just a fun idea). My design didn't mount root via NFS, but rather, each machine was supposed to be entirely stateless, booting from the network with PXE, getting a minimal rootFS and kernel from tftp, and then mounting /usr and /home via NFS.

I don't recall if these boxen were then supposed to act as X-terminals, with only GUI display happening locally, and all execution happening on another box on the network, or if that was its own hey-wouldn't-it-be-cool-to-build-this- useless-but-nifty-thing-I-don't-need kind of project.

<comment><USER5> I did an academic clustering project at one point with Cluster Knoppix, which booted over TFTP much like this. Shared data for the calculations was mounted with a script via NFS, and everything else was memory resident/stateless via PXE boot of a Live image.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tangentially related, one of my favorite FreeBSD manual pages: hier(7)

[https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hier(7)](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?hier\(7\))

<comment><USER7> See also mtree(8):

> _The default action, if not overridden by command line options, is to > compare the file hierarchy rooted in the current directory against a > specification read from the standard input. Messages are written to the > standard output for any files whose characteristics do not match the > specification, or which are missing from either the file hierarchy or the > specification._

* [https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?mtree](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?mtree)

It can also be used to create a hierarchy:

* [https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/tree/master/etc/mtree](https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/tree/master/etc/mtree)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Recent Debian and Ubuntu systems symlink (by default, possibly with exceptions) /bin, /sbin, and /lib* to their counterparts in /usr. Older systems may be able to perform the merge by installing the "usrmerge" package.

I believe Arch takes it further and combines /bin and /sbin (and /usr/sbin) by symlinking them to /usr/bin.

<comment><USER9> Do you know in which Ubuntu version this showed up? I just tested on my Ubuntu 16.04 (I know, I know) and they are not symlinked.

<comment><USER8> I believe Ubuntu started being usrmerged-by-default in 19.04 (Disco Dingo), although the release notes do not mention it.

On 16.04 you can usrmerge your system by installing the usrmerge package:

[https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/usrmerge](https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/usrmerge)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > I'm still waiting for /opt/local to show up...

Wait no more, MacPorts installs to this by default.

<comment><USER11> I wonder what the next step is then. /local? /usr/opt?

<comment><USER12> RedHat actually has /var/opt and /etc/opt which, while odd, makes some sense since /opt is a free-form /usr and still needs variable space and configs.

<comment><USER13> and which preserves the functional separations between the hier elements and doesn't require changing any backup procedures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Effort to clean it up: UsrMove

[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove)

</comment><comment><USER15> And this has led to de facto standards, like '#!/bin/sh' is a 'standard' shell shebang, but not POSIX; if you want your script to be portable, you have to use '#!/usr/bin/env sh'. _env_ is forever in '/usr/bin' probably because it first came about after new tools started moving to '/usr'. And I don't think _env_ 's file path is even in POSIX, it's just a de facto standard.

Another fun fact is that _execve()_ (which executes shebangs) only allows a single argument to the shebang program. Meaning if you use '#!/usr/bin/env sh', you can't specify arguments to 'sh' in the shebang. In any case, the name of the file being executed is appended as an additional argument at the end of the shebang.

<comment><USER16> There's some debate about this if I recall correctly from the last deep dive I did about the pros and cons of it.

If I am writing a script that needs to be _that_ portable, then I'll use #!/usr/bin/env sh but otherwise /bin/sh will work in all the cases I need it to.

Since bash's path might vary more, I might consider calling env to locate it then more often.

<comment><USER17> If you're writing a script that needs to be _that_ portable, you're doomed anyway and you might even find the autoconf manual's "Limitations of Shell Builtins" section useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The PDP-11 became super influential because it was the first machine that had seemingly unbound performance for its price, compared to any computer from the 60s or 50s. This gave programmers the freedom "write to their hearts content," leading to the innovations of Unix and the C programming language. Compare it to how modern web developers write entirely in the application domain, giving no regard to operating system or machine constraints. I'm proposing that the PDP-11 gave a similar feeling to programmers who had been restricted before, to a programming process that today seems as streamlined as carving hieroglyphics with a pickaxe.

Eventually though the new programs started pushing up against the limits of the PDP-11. I propose that virtually anything that seems like magic in Unix or C, from filesystem organization to page sizes, traces its origin directly back to the PDP-11.

We are still living in the world of microcomputers, no matter how far we may seem to have ventured away.

<comment><USER19> Wasn't UNIX originally hacked together in assembly language on an already- obsolete PDP-7 that was sitting around unused?

And according to Dennis M. Ritchie, the B language that preceded C was also first implemented on the PDP-7, whose auto-increment memory cells "probably" inspired Ken Thompson to create B's ++ and -- operators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great story, I love these! Personally I always thought that the difference between `bin` and `sbin` was that `sbin` contained binaries with _Superuser_ privileges (hence the `s` at the beginning).

<comment><USER21> The s is for "statically linked". Binaries that run early enough in the boot process that /usr/lib might not be there yet.

<comment><USER22> Sources I find claim "system binaries":

[http://www.linfo.org/sbin.html](http://www.linfo.org/sbin.html)

<comment><USER23> Yes.

My system does it like this.

        /bin - static linked basic user commands
        /sbin - static linked system commands (incl. important daemons)
        /usr/bin - dynamic linked user commands
        /usr/sbin - dynamic linked system commands and system daemons
        /usr/local/bin - user commands installed via package
        /usr/local/sbin - system commands installed via package

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g IIRC, they got rid of all this in Plan 9. /bin was where binaries go. /usr was for user data. There were also /proc, /net, and probably /tmp?

<comment><USER24> This Plan 9 nostalgia weirds me out. It never happened! It was vaporware all along!

It's like having fond memories of Hillary Clinton's inauguration speech.

<comment><USER25> I installed Plan 9 once back in the 90's. It certainly exists, it just never reached mass levels of acceptance.

<comment> blaser-waffle I installed it in the mid-2000s to be cool.

I'd say it's closer to the DMC DeLorean: short production run, works but has short comings, more of a meme than an actual commodity.

It's not vaporware though, they definitely delivered something that works. It's just that there wasn't a good reason to use it compared to other options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11647304)

2015: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554134)

2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3519952)

(Links for the curious. Reposts are ok after a year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html))

</comment><comment><USER27> I am sure that one of the original aims of the Linux Standard Base Project[1] was to fix and simplify the default file system hierarchy, but researching it now, it seems that they've backed away from doing anything drastic.

\---

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

</comment><comment><USER28> The confusing and nonsensical (not immediately obvious by typing ls and reading) folder structure in unix/linux/etc has always been one of my biggest complaints with it as an operating system.

I consider it to be a warning about the importance of refactoring and renaming things sooner rather than later, because the longer that something sticks around, the more dependencies it develops and the harder it is to change.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does the terminal work in Unix? Well, in 1869... [https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/](https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/)

</comment><comment><USER30> In my life we will probably never have a man on the moon and never replace POSIX.

</comment><comment><USER31> minor nit - initrd/initramfs don't really precede linux

</comment><comment><USER32> What is with the insistence of (in-paragraph) hard line breaks on documents still?

I put this page into Firefox's reader mode and I get lines breaking all over the place as it's now got a mix of soft and hard line breaks.

Should presentation of line length not be up to the client?

<comment><USER33> It it a <pre> formatted section from an old usenet post with 80 char line length... often on usenet posts were specially formatted with whitespace chars. Usenet display tools almost always use PRE and preserve that using monospace fonts to preserve the full possibilities of the information transfer.

<comment><USER34> It's from a mailing list, not Usenet.</comment></comment></comment>


In defence of swap: common misconceptions - <AUTHOR> https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html <comment><USER2> Very nice piece.

"Swap is primarily a mechanism for equality of reclamation, not for emergency 'extra memory'. Swap is not what makes your application slow – your lack of physical memory is what makes your application slow."</comment>


The case of the unbootable Mac mini - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/145418/2010/01/unbootablemini.html?lsrc=rss_main

<comment><USER2> Add or remove RAM (basically change the amount) clear NV memory three times (you'll hear the dong 3 times) and that will clear the OpenFirmware password... at least on older PPC Mac Minis.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice. The PC boot sequence may not be as beautiful as the Mac's, but at least you get a clear error message when something goes wrong.

(My machine's motherboard even has a little display on it that displays diagnostic codes for things like "couldn't set CPU multiplier" and so on. This makes it really easy to debug the flaky hardware that all non-mainframe computers are built from. Easier than a flashing question mark, anyway.)

<comment><USER4> You can hold down a key when you turn a Mac on to have it switch from the default "pretty" screen to a normal wall-of-text booting screen. The problem for the author was that he'd locked himself out of these options when enabling some security feature previously.

<comment><USER3> Right, but when you don't know the BIOS password on a PC, it says: "Enter supervisor password". If his Mac had said this, there would never have been any doubt in his mind as to what was going on.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but in general it's not as bad as your post suggests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's one I'm going to file away.

</comment><comment><USER6> He forgot the 4th conclusion item:

if you have a mac, don't waste time on 'security' options. it will just piss you off and still not be any more secure.

<comment><USER7> I would be inclined to downmod this, but instead I have to agree with the sentiment of 'fences not walls' when it comes to security, since too much security can be a bad thing. Mr. Frakes is being kind enough to give us a glimpse of forehead-slapping. If anything, the REAL 4th conclusion: write down the stuff you do that involves _locking you out of your machine_

<comment><USER6> the point is that even if he had had NO trouble himself, anyone wanting to get his data was just one search on the intrawebs away of find a really easy way of getting it.

so easy that he even managed to find by accident!</comment></comment></comment>