Additional Mac App Store apps caught stealing and uploading browser history - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/09/additional-mac-app-store-apps-caught-stealing-and-uploading-browser-history/ <comment><USER2> This is getting scary. I always had the impression that Trend Micro was a reputed, well-established security company. Why they would sacrifice that brand for a quick buck is beyond me.

Edit: I don't understand how Apple didn't catch this in their review process: the exfiltration is clearly visible using a disassembler, as shown in the original forum report[1].

[1]: [https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/217353-get-rid-of- open...](https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/217353-get-rid-of-open-any- files-rar-support/?tab=comments#comment-1195086)

<comment><USER3> Surveillance is where the money is. The appetite for data is insatiable, and since nobody wants to pay for anything there aren't many other business models.

<comment><USER4> Ironically, the Adware Doctor tool that was in the news a couple of days ago, stealing browser history, was $4.99.

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/apple- remo...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/apple-removes- adware-doctor-browsing-history)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And now lets think a moment about the fact that Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and thousands of smaller companies do pretty much the same thing. The only difference is that they collect it differently. Instead of offering to "clean your Mac" they offer components that developers can integrate into their websites and apps, for analytics, crash reporting, captchas, etc.

Privacy on our computers and phones is an empty promise, and we need to radically rethink the way our devices and browsers work if we want to change that. Legislation like the GDPR is one step, but we need to think about ways that make it impossible to collect all that data in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Users do not expect sandboxed apps to get this level of access to their systems, but it is important to note that when an open file dialog is opened by a sandboxed app, if you use it to open your home directory, the app can potentially get access to lots of private information including browsing history, iMessage conversations, e-mail messages and more."

The macOS sandbox isn't like other sandboxes I've used (JVM, ECMAscript, Tcl, etc). Even if the user hasn't extended it by explicitly selecting a file, and even if the app has no entitlements, there seem to be a lot of holes in it -- and they seem to be intentional. The Mac sandbox can be one piece of a security solution, but you should never count on it to protect you from untrusted applications.

Of course, if you choose your home directory in a file picker, all bets are off.

The matter of _user expectations_ is the main reason I wish Apple would revert the sandbox requirement for the Mac App Store. As a user, it really does seem like the sandbox should protect me from malicious code, just like Safari protects me from malicious JS, but it really doesn't. They want the MAS to seem safe, but it would be better for everyone if they made it clear you still need to trust the app.

<comment><USER7> > "Users do not expect sandboxed apps to get this level of access to their > systems, but it is important to note that when an open file dialog is opened > by a sandboxed app, if you use it to open your home directory, the app can > potentially get access to lots of private information including browsing > history, iMessage conversations, e-mail messages and more."

This access is going away in macOS Mojave, at least for the built-in system apps, for precisely this reason.

> The macOS sandbox isn't like other sandboxes I've used (JVM, ECMAscript, > Tcl, etc). Even if the user hasn't extended it by explicitly selecting a > file, and even if the app has no entitlements, there seem to be a lot of > holes in it -- and they seem to be intentional.

> Of course, if you choose your home directory in a file picker, all bets are > off.

What holes are you talking about? Keep in mind that the examples you mention and the macOS sandbox solve different problems and have different constraints. The ones you've mentioned are meant to execute untrusted code and keep it (almost) completely isolated from the rest of your system. But macOS apps must have much more access by definition.

> The matter of user expectations is the main reason I wish Apple would revert > the sandbox requirement for the Mac App Store. As a user, it really does > seem like the sandbox should protect me from malicious code, just like > Safari protects me from malicious JS, but it really doesn't.

Just curious: how do you feel about the iOS sandbox situation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmmm...I remember receiving _daily_ E-mail spam from "Trend Micro", it was absurd and I had to block it all. I used to think it might be faked but after seeing this I'm sure the original company was responsible for all the spam trash as well.

What I don't understand about review processes is that _scummy apps and companies are really not that hard to spot_. Maybe the really crafty ones are hard to see but I have to wonder how much time Apple really has to spend (sometimes just from descriptions _alone_ ) to question what an app is doing.

Meanwhile, I once got rejected because I didn't have a damned minimize button or something.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a huge lawsuit. Apple clearly states in the press and in advertising that the app store is the only way to get apps that are assured to be safe.

I can't imagine it'll take long before there are many and massive class action lawsuits over this incident. The legal bill will be massive.

I can't wait to see how many precedents get created over the total fallout from this event. Should be interesting.

<comment><USER10> Such comments are common after every "disaster". When Intel chip vulnerabilities due to aggressive caching were announced, the fixes reduced perf for those chips, and these same types of comments were made.

It never happens.

<comment><USER11> I can't see Apple getting seriously nailed, since they probably had no idea this was happening.

But beyond shutting the companies responsible for selling these applications down, there should be some criminal liability for the executives. Exfiltrating users' browser history without reasonable consent is a huge privacy violation.

I wonder if it falls under CFAA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've always enjoyed the Apple App Store because they generally do a decent job of code review of the apps, and most folks can feel generally safe when installing applications. But...I've been reading about the apps recently that have been stealing location data and selling it to third parties. Pretty scary.

Hopefully Apple will figure this all out before long-time users who have trusted them completely, start to trust them less.

I'm a fan of the walled-garden, but sometimes the cracks in the facade worry me a little.

</comment><comment><USER13> No doubt the EULA/privacy policy of these apps contains the requisite clause, but nonetheless they would all be considered spyware. Ostensibly they could say that recently visited URLs are submitted for better virus scanning...

It's unfortunate that the ongoing trend of opaqueness in computers is making it easier for things like this to happen. Years ago, blinking network and HDD lights/sound would have provided at least some sign of unusual activity.

</comment><comment><USER14> Once interviewed for a Trend Micro position and had the feeling that they were a well-reputed transnational company, didn't know that this kind of thing could have happened. I expect them to code review so this is something that must have been accepted?

<comment><USER15> I once interviewed for AVG and they were quite adamant that their mobile apps collect all the data they can get their hands on so that they can resell aggregated statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How is this not spyware, and why is this not illegal? Why aren't the makers of this software getting busted? If I would do this in a shell script on a machine of my employer I would be toast.

</comment><comment><USER17> Apple should integrate Little Snitch with MacOS :)

</comment><comment><USER18> Similar behavior is so widespread (browser extensions, mobile apps, and now desktop apps) that some legislative solution is required. Otherwise, the companies and individuals doing this will be limited with a light slap on the wrist like in this case.

<comment><USER19> I would think that this kind of data collection is already illegal, at least with installs in the EU. GDPR mandates that the collected data is either directly required to render the desired service or explicit and revokable consent must be given. Clearly neither is the case here.

<comment><USER18> GDPR works only in EU and I haven't heard of any companies being fined for similar activity.</comment></comment></comment>


Looking for life on other planets? Go deep - <AUTHOR> http://www.airspacemag.com/space/mars-caves-180959123/?no-ist <comment><USER2> My hunt for life isn't for bacteria in caves. I take it as written that that sort of life exists out there somewhere. Send the probes, but don't kill the dream of finding ewoks. I don't want to spend billions/trillions of dollars to find pond scum in a Mars cave. That's interesting, but not my dream. Spend the money on telescopes necessary to image exoplanets. Find the green/blue one with and O2-heavy atmosphere. I want the one with city lights on the dark side.

<comment><USER3> Finding any extraterrestrial life is much more interesting than finding any specific kind of ET life. Having an n > 1 for biology would be one of the most profound advancements in the history of science.

<comment><USER4> I agree. And I don't. Let me explain.

Discovering that our planet is not a _special snowflake_ would be one of the most inspirational experiences I can dream of.

Discovering intelligent life, end more so!

Discovering super-intelligent life - think of the possibilities!

Then nearly every sci-fi movie flashes before my eyes, and I wonder: would they be as amazed at our presence in the universe? Or a pest, dirtying up a rocky ball of perfectly harvestable resources they intend to process for their alien armada?

<comment><USER5> > _Discovering that our planet is not a special snowflake would be one of the > most inspirational experiences I can dream of_

To each their own. Finding unique pond scum on Mars would deeply horrify me.

If life independently emerged twice in one system then the paucity of intelligent life's cosmic signature means something happens between formation and broadcast with deafening regularity.

<comment><USER6> Not necessarily. It might merely reflect a too-narrow definition of _broadcast_ baked into current assumptions. Right now SETI is looking for its lost keys near a street lamp, because "that is where the light is". Not to fault that approach, but I would not make any larger inferences about their lack of success.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is actually one of the few scientific reasons to send a human to Mars. (Or at least, low Mars orbit.) Cave teleoperation with a seven-minute delay is completely infeasible, but teleoperation with a few-second delay would work much better.

You could deal with the wireless communication problem by having the robot be tethered - I think a human could figure out how to drive said robot, without snagging the cable. This could even be done from low Mars orbit, reducing mission cost, and the risk to human life.

<comment><USER8> As true as all of that may be, I don't think it's politically viable to send people to Mars orbit, without putting at least one of the mission crew's footprints in its regolith.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI I was just awarded a NASA postdoc and my project is to add ice-climbing capability to this robot (LEMUR).

</comment><comment><USER10> The article made me curious about lumenhancement. Seems to be about this 3D datasets of caves: [http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/NIAC_Caves/](http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/projects/NIAC_Caves/)</comment>


WebGL Deferred Irradiance Volumes - <AUTHOR> http://codeflow.org/entries/2012/aug/25/webgl-deferred-irradiance-volumes/ <comment><USER2> That was really fun to do, also quite mind bending :)</comment>


Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol <comment><USER2> I always wondered why it was in the requests source code.

[https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/9b95b4e7b4df1865b058161...](https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/9b95b4e7b4df1865b058161f1492989868614535/requests/status_codes.py#L75)

</comment><comment><USER3> I used to use a cheeky 418 for when I get a connection error, timeout, or SSL error to a remote HTTP server and need to log a HTTP response to the logging table. Nowadays though I stick to a -1 or a 0 since it's less confusing!</comment>


Bitcoin Fall Extends to 25% as Fears of Crackdown Linger - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/cryptocurrencies-resume-slide-as-bitcoin-tumbles-to-december-low <comment><USER2> The last time China explicitly banned Bitcoin, it dropped by around 45% to around $6000. It went on to $20K from there.

But what's different this time is that there are first time investors in millions who joined in the last 2 months. They didn't read the white paper, they didn't invest in technology, they invested for the monster returns. So I think there will be a more sell off this time before it rebounds back to $13K+ or may be the 1000th time is the charm and the bubble actually gets burst.

<comment><USER3> I love bitcoin and cryptocurrency as potential solutions to problems with gov- controlled currencies (I've used crypto to buy drugs, for example). But I'm still confused why people refer to purchasing currency as an "investment." Obviously the rates are going up now, but doesn't everyone expect them to just come back down? I don't convert my USD to Yen and call it an "investment."

<comment><USER4> Well, there is actual forex investing (speculating). For instance, the value of the USD versus the Argentine Peso (ARS) is something I track (my girlfriend lives there and long term I would consider moving there, current plan is for her to move here). The USD to ARS conversion is increasingly favorable for the USD, the buying power of ARS hasn't dropped significantly (in country) but the USD is worth more ARS now than 1.5 years ago (1USD:15ARS then versus 1USD:18ARS today). Someone who had currency in ARS at the time, and converted it to the USD, could see significant returns on that investment (assuming reasonable exchange fees). Almost 20% gains, that matches the US stock increases over this past year.

It is speculation, however, as you generally don't have the same sort of insight into currency movements as you will into stock movements and commodities in general. Someone watching the Brexit vote in summer 2016 would have made a decent return on ARS had they moved it to the USD before the vote and back after (changed from 1USD:13ARS to 1USD:15ARS practically overnight). But that is speculation and requires watching global and national scale events to predict.

<comment><USER5> I believe strongly that the word 'invest' should be used to distinguish one's activities from speculation, rather than be a superclass of it. Discourse is poisoned when people promote semantic overlap and create ambiguity, rather than using words to create meaningful distinctions.

Investing is what you do when you're not merely speculating on short-term returns, but are instead focused on long-term value creation. It is right to call it currency speculation, because instead of investing capital to create sustainable growth in something, you're just skimming the fluctuations using massive leverage.

<comment><USER6> Unless you are part of an IPO or are buying newly issued stock you are also speculating on stocks when you buy them.

Note: Not a finance person, just a personal opinion.

<comment><USER5> In practice, it may not be possible to neatly classify any particular financial decision as being purely investment or purely speculation. This only increases the need to have these words mean clearly different things so that we may use them to analyze the different aspects of the ambiguous world in which we find ourselves. Blurring the meaning of the words effectively robs people of the ability to reason about their circumstances, and it is no wonder that many people feel invested in creating such confusion.

<comment><USER7> The impossibility of separating the two concepts necessitates two different words for those concepts?

That's a contradiction.

<comment><USER5> The concepts are easy to separate: Investment is symbiotic, Speculation is parasitic. Having clear concepts is more important when the real-world examples are complicated.

<comment><USER7> How is speculation parasitic?

<comment><USER5> Speculators seek to extract alpha without regard to the overall health of the instrument. Shorting is just as good as going long, so far as you make a profit.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't mean they're parasitic. To show they're parasitic, you'd have to describe how they _hurt_ the company.

Regardless, what defines speculation is not parasitism, it's uncertainty. And there's uncertainty in any investment as well. That's why there's no clear line between the two.

<comment><USER5> I disagree. I have made a clear delineation in the semantic content of my definitions, while you continue to attempt to confuse the issue.

<comment><USER7> I mean, the definitions aren't yours to make. These words exist in the dictionary.

<comment><USER5> Writers of dictionaries are archaeologists of language. They do not prescribe the meaning of words like a programmer or mathematician. Their definitions are posterior to language. The definitions are in fact mine to make, provided they result in successful communication with people who have adopted similar definitions.

Go read my original post again. I am advocating against ambiguity in language, as this serves to obscure analysis. You are clearly happy to obliterate distinction, however, and have made no attempt at a positive argument why it is beneficial to discourse.

Language is a constant negotiation about the meaning of words, and I have made my position clear.

<comment><USER7> I'll bow out here, but I'll just point out that this is a great example of how one's adherence to their ideas makes rational conversation impossible.

We can only communicate to the extent that we agree on the definitions of words, so for you to invent your own definitions, which contradict how other people use the word, as codified in dictionaries, then there's zero hope of reaching shared understanding.

It would be absurd for me to claim that "the sky is brown", the later argue that I was right all along because I'm defining "brown" to be "blue".

<comment><USER5> I will simply point out that at every opportunity, I have been upfront about what definitions I am adopting and the distinctions I am attempting to make, while you have done nothing but dissemble and create ambiguity, without offering a positive program of your own. I will leave it up to other readers to make their own conclusions.

<comment><USER7> If I say "the sky is brown", am I being up front that I'm defining "brown" to be the color of the sky?

<comment><USER8> This comment thread has been one of the weirdest internet arguments on the semantics of a word that I've seen in a while.

<comment><USER9> only on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The whole Tethers thing scares me the most:

[https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/953398351889944576](https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/953398351889944576)

There's $5B worth.

<comment><USER11> Tether performs public service of "quantitative easing" :)

<comment><USER12> When the demand for USDT shrinks, will they also do quantative uneasing? As in buying back USDTs to the extend the value of one USDT cannot drop below $1? I do not think they will, because I do not think they can...

<comment><USER13> Essentially, this is what interest rates and the bond market is for.

<comment><USER12> Please explain. I think you are not aware of what USDT (Tether) is, but that's just my quick judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have been trying to figure out eventual equilibrium price of BitCoin and here is one approach:

Due to wealth inequality, we assume that majority of the crypto investment would be from ultra-rich. It might become quite normal for them to invest 1% of their wealth in crypto for uncorrelated diversification. In a way this is very similar to buying art which probably doesn't have much utility except among other wealthy people as socially agreed upon store of value. These folks have estimated wealth of $10T so that puts market cap contribution from them to $1T. Let's assume same amount comes from non-ultra-rich investors. So we can estimate btc market cap to $2T. This puts reasonable _eventual upper bound value_ of 1 btc to $95,000. This eventual value might never be reached however because all 21M coins never be mined, not all wealthy people might do this, and also other coins will fragment the market. May be 3/4 discount is reasonable at this point to accommodate these factors which might put the value to $25K at this point. This is obviously assuming no black swan events like countries making it illegal or some other virtual currency tech doesn't become popular.

<comment><USER15> That doesn't make any sense. Using this logic you could argue that basically _anything_ should have an eventual market cap of ~$1 trillion.

<comment><USER16> He's merely talking about upper bound. Which is probably true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Animal spirits

 _Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic.

Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_(Keynes)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_spirits_\(Keynes\))

<comment><USER11> or in other words the "exploration" part of the "exploration vs. exploitation"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is what happens when you have high correlation and low exchange liquidity . All it takes is 150 coins sold ($1.5 million) to make it fall 1000 points, and then the other exchanges and coins mirror this. If the major exchanges were consolidated there would be much less volatility. [http://https://greyenlightenment.com/why-bitcoin-is-so- volat...](http://https://greyenlightenment.com/why-bitcoin-is-so-volatile/)

<comment><USER19> Other exchanges will not mirror this--arbitrage will occur

<comment><USER20> > arbitrage will occur

It already is occurring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I cannot wait for video cards to flood the market and become reasonably priced again

<comment><USER22> That's because of ETH not BTC

<comment><USER21> If it becomes fully enforced and illegal in China, I assumed that is a lot of hardware that won't be used for mining any longer

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In January 2017, Bitcoin dropped from 1176$ to 755$ (35%). Today, it's still 10 times higher than last year.

<comment><USER24> Fun chart from Reddit today:

[https://i.redd.it/dnlduddb5ha01.jpg](https://i.redd.it/dnlduddb5ha01.jpg)

<comment><USER25> Yeah, nice use of log chart there.

<comment><USER24> It's difficult to graph that period of time and still capture the drawbacks without a log chart.

If someone misreads the chart as linear the current drop would be terrifying though, with no previous precedence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I bought $200 worth of bitcoin years ago that I cashed out at 7k when it was around 19k$. Now I'm thinking I should cash back in incase it rebounds strongly again. I guess I should be happy with my free money and not get greedy.

<comment><USER27> Buy $200 again and you haven't lost anything :-)

<comment><USER28> Considering the profits he can buy $6,800 — not $200 — and be even.

<comment><USER29> Nope, because $6800 are actual money that he can lose now.

Just like you go to casino with $5 play all night up to $2 million, then lose all go back home and tell your wife you only lost $5 so it was not that bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Time to buy. Down from what price since January? Cryptocurrency is a long term play from a software and financial engineering vantage. It also continues to irritate the hell out of banks (bank accounts are being closed and restricted from exchange transfers, including coinbase) and general investors. It's not liquid enough yet, creates no need for middle men and Bitcoin itself is now being manipulated by futures contracts based on supply being increased artificially.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Yes, but what? Ripple's seen maybe the biggest loss, but it's not clear that part of its loss isn't due to decreasing confidence in the underlying, which is bad if you want to BTFD. Same can be said for many others.

Though if you look at todays charts e.g. in ETH, it's clear someone's probably made good money intraday buying dips.

<comment><USER31> Ripple will bounce back up (maybe not back up to $3 anytime soon, but I'm pretty sure it will go back up). A lot of people that got out are just trying to time the bottom as well as they can. I'm tempted to buy more myself. Part of me wants to wait to see if it drops more, part of me thinks I should just get in instead of trying to time the market and missing the opportunity.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Why so sure? It seems to have gone up based on the news that Japanese banks were getting involved, but then it turns out they likely won't use the actual coins, just the tech?

<comment><USER31> Just based on the general patterns and trends, and that it seems to be the favored coin of the banking world, at least so far. But I very well could be wrong. Someone can be very confident and very wrong.

But as a general rule I'm conservative with how much I put into these things, just a small amount each month. I can afford to be very confident and very wrong about Ripple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If the threat of regulation drops it 25%, that's not a very good store of value or medium of exchange.

<comment><USER18> Compared to some currencies, it is. Brazil Real has lost 80% of its value relative to the dollar since 2013. I think this is overdone considered the last time Korea threatened regulation it only fell 10%.

<comment><USER33> USD quoted in BRL achieved a minimum of around 1.96 BRL in 2013. Currently it is 3.23 BRL. So the Brazilian Real has lost 40% of its value relative to the dollar, not 80%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> BTC is still above 10K. Think about that for a while. I remember 500 like it was yesterday. This drop is nothing. Except for those poor idiots who took at loans to buy at 19K

<comment><USER35> honest question: do you believe there's a price point where it's /not/ stupid to go into debt to invest in cryptocurrencies?

<comment><USER36> Going into dept to speculate doesn't really seem like the best idea regardless of the price.

<comment><USER37> It surely does, depending on the interest rate and risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I see bitcoin ads all the time. Including a "Bitcoin IRA" (Individual Retirement Account) and "See what the experts say the next BitCoin is". Marketed at laypeople. They're definitely marketing the heck out it (they being brokers I guess), because its not really that easy to figure out.

<comment><USER39> I've been getting a lot of "This is the 'penny stock' of bitcoin!" ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> And as the Asia market of retail investors cashes out to spend money on their families for Lunar New Year.

</comment><comment><USER36> Looks like a typical January in crypto.

<comment><USER41> I'm glad to see someone mentioning this. This has happened the last four years straight, the Ides of January, followed by a massive bullish run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So let me get this straight. Gold can be compared to bitcoins in terms of scarcity and and store of value. But bitcoin itself is in practical term a proof of concept technology that is only useful when applied properly in another block chain. While gold actually has great uses. Can i say if you are investing in bitcoin, you are basically investing in equivalent a scarce physical paper with not a whole lot of use?

<comment><USER43> Comparing gold with Bitcoin is weird. People invest in gold because its values is very stable, obviously Bitcoin's isn't :-)

<comment><USER7> Gold is highly volatile.

<comment><USER12> Volatility only exists in comparison.

BTC and Gold in one graph: [http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/59975b50f1a85079738...](http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/59975b50f1a85079738b54e0/bitcoin- is-more-valuable-than-gold--but-nowhere-near-as-stable.jpg)

I'd say in this comparison gold is the stable option.

<comment><USER7> No, it doesn't. Volatility is defined in terms of an asset's past prices, not in terms of other assets.

<comment><USER12> Ok. I stand corrected. But what I meant to say is, that labeling something as "very volatile" only works in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It doesn't help that every news organization in the world is talking about bitcoin and even worse, some of these people are predicting $100,000 price tags. Who wouldn't want a 6x return from the peak?

<comment><USER44> $100,000? No, James Altucher is predicting $1 million / Bitcoin!!! [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/james-altucher-predicts- bitc...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/james-altucher-predicts-bitcoin-will- reach-1-million-by-2020.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Easy come.

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if this is a reverse P&D by the Chinese gov

</comment><comment><USER18> The last time South Korea hinted at banning it the price only fell to $13k . No one knows what is going to happen or when.

Just happy I sold some around $18-19k

<comment><USER47> The backlash was enormous tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I bought $15000 last year in Litecoin when it reached the 300s. Debating if I should sell off now and get out with at least half of my money. Looks like this crypto frenzy is coming to an end.

<comment><USER49> Buy high, sell low is not a sound investment strategy. Just hold and cash out when it gets back to 300 if you can't stomach the crypto world.

<comment><USER48> This was not investment, it was speculation. I doubt Litecoin will ever go back to the 300s at this point. The crypto bubble might be popping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wonder why Ripple isn't getting more coverage... I told my father to cash out last week. Ashamed he didn't as he would of made his win and could reinvest at $1.10 again.

</comment><comment><USER51> Still waiting for tulips to recover back to the January 1637 price.

<comment><USER52> Why not gold? It's doing fine. When do you expect that bubble will burst?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wonder if governments would take even more drastic measures if currency weakness was driving people into crypto. The US made owning gold illegal in the past.

<comment><USER7> Really? When?

<comment><USER54> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102)

<comment><USER55> This keeps coming back to HN. What the order ban is actually hoarding the gold. Since each dollar was backed by physical gold, people that hoard physical gold were limiting government with ability to move currency and relese it as soon as needed. Obviously taking us off gold standard fixed the problem (by making US an insolvent nation btw)

<comment><USER56> "Hoarding gold" was defined as having more than 6-ounces of gold (roughly $6500 in 2018 USD)

Which basically means gold was dead as an exchange medium after EO 6102. It was illegal to have more than $6500 (today's money) worth of gold / 5-ounces or so, so transactions would have to be way smaller than that!!

In 1930s money, 5-ounces of gold was just $100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Interested in what someone with deep Bitcoin experience thinks the bottom is this time, before it starts to rebound...and why.

Edit: Yes! Ggm's request below too.

<comment><USER58> this is a TA based idea, so please know I'm presenting it neutrally with full knowledge that TA is anathema to this crowd: volume profile at the various price points suggests somewhere in the 5k range. You can talk yourself into higher ones, lots of experienced people expect 8k, but to me the "clear" support is closer to 5k. Who knows, though; I don't claim to.

<comment><USER57> Appreciate it. Not betting on the situation, just morbidly curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The suicide prevention hotline is pinned to the top of cryptocurrency subreddits because the price of bitcoin is where it was at the beginning of last month. Think about that for a minute.

When we really have a bear market people are going to lose their minds.

<comment><USER60> Naive speculators are buying cryptocurrencies on their credit cards without understanding the volatility [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/bitcoin-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-11/bitcoin- buyers-turn-to-credit-cards-as-fomo-breeds-risk-taking)

<comment><USER61> > _Naive speculators_

The problem with this characterization is when enough people lose their shirts on leveraged crypto purchases, a problem of individual finances becomes one of collective policy. I'd be careful with dismissing the problem as one contained to the stupid.

There was a thread on the front page, earlier, where multiple commentators were equated the odds of a massive and permanent Bitcoin crash with that of a meteor impacting the earth [1]. Multiple people honestly could not imagine how Bitcoin could possibly become absolutely worthless. These are otherwise- reasonable people who, through a combination of misinformation and FOMO, got involved in something over their heads.

Korea may be at the point where a 50% sustained drawdown plunges a significant fraction of the population into hardship. That, in turn, could trigger a recession. In case it needs to be said, now is not a good time for the Seoul to plunge into a financial and political crisis.

I've gone from finding this Bitcoin fascinating, to being cautiously weary, to being outright dismissive, to becoming worried about systemic risks.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160346](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160346)

<comment><USER62> _I 'd be careful with dismissing the problem as one contained to the stupid._

The subtle genius of the truly stupid, is their unstoppable penchant for making their problems yours as well!

<comment><USER63> See also: the 2016 US election result and the aftermath that continues to this day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> When the media is at peak FUD, you know it's time to buy, just like when it's at peak hype, you know it's time to sell.

<comment><USER65> Wait for the "bitcoin is dead" articles ;) There's still room, anyway, it only retraced at 0.5 of 2017 rally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I always think there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins in existence ever. Ever. So what do you think is a fair price for that?

<comment><USER67> You know miners can just make one software update and change that right?

<comment><USER68> They'd be mining an altcoin because those blocks would be rejected by the network.

<comment><USER67> Yeah of course but what makes you think the other branch survives? No guarantees there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> All I can say is, finally.

</comment><comment><USER70> the real test comes when folks try to withdrawl their fiat...

<comment><USER71> Just browse [http://reddit.com/r/coinbase](http://reddit.com/r/coinbase) from the last few months, and you'll get a good idea of what's to come...

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Hope we don't see headlines like this one

Atlanta massacre: Broker shoots 12 dead as stock market falls (1999)

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/atlanta-massacre- broker-s...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/atlanta-massacre-broker- shoots-12-dead-as-stock-market-falls-1109415.html)

Atlanta Day Trader shooting 10 years later (2009) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3l8BuFsVk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3l8BuFsVk)

<comment><USER73> So don't republish them, as it encourages copycats.

<comment><USER72> > So don't republish them, as it encourages copycats.

I understand your point, but I think that remembering the past can serve as a warning.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

I was trading in 1999 and remember very well this story and many other similar that happened on the 00's and it's been guideline ever-since for me, to always evaluate your limits and check your sanity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I am amazed at the losses given the investment advice that I was given all of two days ago from a 'bitcoin bore'. I was told to invest all I could afford in various coins buying one coin so I could then buy the others. I would have lost 30% of my money in the last 24 hours on the coins needed for the other transactions, then in those hot coins I would have lost 45% in 24 hours on one and 44% in 24 hours on the other.

[https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/](https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/)

So said 'bitcoin bore' spent $500 on these coins and shared the advice, there was no warning that these things could depreciate in value given, just put what you can on these coins. So simple!

So from my point of anecdata, that is a wrap, we're toast here, this bubble is truly popping. Sure there will still be people playing musical chairs for a while but I think we are there in terms of the mania reaching the required level of craziness for some sanity to take over. Crypto is not the new cool when everyone knows someone that got scammed.

My friend who gave me the advice has not told me of the losses, that is part of the deception.

<comment><USER47> Welcome to investing?

<comment><USER75> Speculation. Investing is something different entirely, just like the lottery is different than owning a chunk of a business.

<comment><USER7> Eh, there's no hard line between the two.

<comment><USER75> No, but there are extremes that can be easily labeled as such and this one is clearly speculation, not investing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> The crypto market keeps going further down because every day there's hundreds of articles of "news" reports going with some some doomsday promoting theme. Just today some scientific report claiming bots were responsible for bitcoin's rise from $150-$1000, and now the media is taking advantage of everyone's fear of a rising China by claiming the PRC will start freezing bank accounts, etc.

Everyone is being played. If you've been paying attention to the news for the past two years know how easy it is to put out fake news articles. You know that fake news has been used to alter perceptions and maybe mess with elections. This is no different. Dropping false news reports to mess with market prices to cause market swings for profit is straight out of the textbook.

There is quite a lot money at play, and you'd be naive to think that all the random articles popping up on HN today are intended to do anything other than instill further panic and sell-offs. Do yourself and everyone a favor, start spreading awareness of the fake news about crypto! I kinda like this community and I would hate HN to lose to what is an egregious and coordinated effort to induce panic and destroy the crypto market.

<comment><USER77> > Everyone is being played.

How do we know that you're not also playing us, just from the opposite side?</comment></comment>


Undecimus: Unc0ver Jailbreak for iOS 11.0 – 12.1.2 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pwn20wndstuff/Undecimus <comment><USER2> My cydia doesn't work it always exit its self It doesn't even load</comment>


Ask HN: Has anyone managed to get a GDPR data export from any travel company? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Why do you ask?

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple of reasons.

One was that I tried to do it on an Indian site, Make my trip, and the email address for privacy they had on their site did not work. [This one has]([https://www.makemytrip.com/legal/privacy_policy.html](https://www.makemytrip.com/legal/privacy_policy.html)) email id listed as 'firstname.lastname@example.com' but the mail bounces when sent to this id. So, they complied in the name only, and wanted to see if others did as well.

second, I am curious as to what data these guys store on their customers. We saw the kind of data spotify stores, which has a lot of depth. If travel companies are storing a lot of data, this could give me another data point whether or not to use the sites in incognito mode (they dont function if you disable cookies).

Also, the more pertinent question is that if they have a lot of data and really rich user profiles, why have the OTA sites not evolved much in the last six seven years? (the new ones try to, but I think they rarely raise a big round in B2C unless they are doing something like Airbnb. Probably because of the consolidated market.)

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't be surprised if compliance is nil. I don't live in India, but have a name that is common in that part of the world (moreso Pakistan, to be honest) and a Gmail address that reflects that. My address gets signed up for different web services in India & Pakistan on nearly a daily basis. At least 50% of the time, the email address of the person signing up is not even verified, so the account is immediately enrolled and I start receiving all sorts of confidential information which is not intended for me (phone bills, travel receipts, banking information, etc). I have almost never had success contacting these companies to let them know they're sending this information to a random individual. They often do not have "unsubscribe" options and, as you mentioned, if they list a support address it often bounces or a human reply is never encountered. Obviously I'm generalizing here, but my impression of the standards in that region with respect to this stuff is pretty low compared to North America. There appears to be little or no pressure to comply.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can imagine that. Someone signed up on flipkart (indian ecom site) with my email and kept ordering stuff with Cash on Delivery. I tried telling them its not the right address, but they kept sending notifications/emails one after another, until one day, I clicked on the links, and did a forgot password option. Then I signed in, and changed the delivery address in my profile. No more emails.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I absolutely love java - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/817504 not <comment><USER2> I know it's fun to rag on Java, but this is a meaningless comparison. Java isn't a scripting language, and it wasn't ever intended to be one. It was never designed to solve quick little problems in a few lines, it was designed to deal with massive enterprise apps with complicated dependency trees over multiple architectures, and it does that job pretty damned well. Stop complaining that Java isn't Python/Ruby. It's like saying that x86 assembly is terrible because string concatenation takes so many loc.

Judging a language by standards it was never designed to meet is pointless. If you want to decide whether Java is a good language or not, see if it solves the problems it was designed to solve. I'd say it does. I may not like working in Java for small projects, but that doesn't make it a bad language.

<comment><USER3> I know it's fun to rag on Roman numerals, but they were never intended for totaling receipts. They were never designed for quick little sums, they were designed for engraving on massive long lasting objects like buildings and copyright notices on feature films, and they look pretty darned good there. Stop complaining that Roman numerals are not Arabic numerals. It's like saying counting on fingers is terrible because nobody has more than X them (That's 10 to you youngsters, or 0b1010 to you real smart alecks).

Judging a numeral by a standard it was never designed to meet is pointless. If you want to decide whether Roman numerals are a good number system or not, see if you can hammer them onto a building. I'd say you can. I may not like working with Roman numerals for grocery receipts, but that doesn't make them bad.

<comment><USER4> > They were never designed for quick little sums, they were designed for > engraving on massive long lasting objects like buildings and copyright > notices on feature films, and they look pretty darned good there. Stop > complaining that Roman numerals are not Arabic numerals.

Actually, Roman numerals were designed for counting the men in your army, whereas Arabic numerals were designed for mathematics. Comparing the two isn't a good argument against redthrowaway's point at all, because both are better at the task they were designed for.

<comment><USER5> ?!?!?!?!?!

Are you saying that Roman numerals are better for counting than Arabic numerals? I suppose you don't mean count (I, II, III, IIII, V...), but show the number of men in the army. I don't see any advantage in using Roman numerals.

Lets say we divide infantry in XXX maniples of CXX men each, supposing they are complete and you haven't lost people yet in battle. How is that better than 30 maniples of 120 men?

<comment><USER6> Actually, roman numerals are easier to sum than arabics. To sum two roman numerals you just write all the digits together and collapse them as much as possible. There is no carrying over of digits and such.

Otoh, arabic numerals are a lot easier to multiply/divide. Before the wide adoption of arabic numerals all but the most educated couldn't perform simple multiplication/division.

<comment><USER5> You may have a point, but I still find easier to do

             111
     948      948
     289  =>  289
     ---      ---
             1237

than

CMXLVIII plus CCLXXXIX => CMCCXLLXXXIXVIII => MCLLXXIXVIII => MCCXXXVII

but it may be that it's because what I'm used to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To be clear I <3 clojure, but I'm taking the bait just for fun:

1) The chunk of Java code shows a complete program - the others show function definitions 2) The Java is written purposely to be as verbose as possible 3) The Java sends it's output to stdout, unlike the others 4) The Java code is needlessly written using generics

Things the comparison ignores: 1) The Java code is more toolable than the others 2) The Java code will outperform most of the other examples once it has been subject to Hotspot

Here's a more fair comparison, at the function level to level the playing field (and only one import needed: java.util.*):

        List trollBait() {
            return new ArrayList(){{
                for (int i : new int[]{1, 2, 3, 4}) {
                    if (i % 2 == 0) add(i);
                }}};
        }

Here's why I absolutely do heart Java:

I just ran this 100,000 times in 6 milliseconds on a Core i7 920 (2.67 GHz). And I scanned it with Findbugs, and PMD, and a security vulnerability tool. And I refactored it in my IDE with crazy IntelliJ foo-jitsu. And it's more strongly typed. And it's runtime memory model is safer.

<comment><AUTHOR> now we're talking, this is a really good response! I almost agree with all of your points, except for the performance, and only in thoroughness: a benchmark will be nice.

And for clarity: the other ones aren't function definitions, they also build a new list, like your example. The examples are meant to be run in a REPL and that's why they don't send to stdout, although it will be just another function application in most cases (but your example works in beanshell, the stand-alone java quasi-REPL, so we're ok). I think all of them can be considered a full-program in those languages: as a stand-alone chunk of code that can be compiled/interpreted and will produce an executable output, that is. And, yes, the autoboxing was the only reason I chose generics, but I tried for it to be concise, given my limited knowledge of java; the max-verbose mode would have used a Runnable or something evil to simulate a higher order function.

<comment><USER7> Thanks... my experience with clojure on the JVM is it is in general slower than optimally tuned Java code. I really can't imagine that any of the other languages you listed would easily outperform the code I have here, but maybe since the use-case is a sweet spot for functional? The person who responded to me with the F# example reported a crazy low time, and I am wondering if they have a defect in the code. I think it is possible a true functional language could make some tweaks that Java can't (like realizing the function is idempotent and caching the response instead of recalculating it). Maybe that is why the F# example was so quick - either the way it times itself is defective, or perhaps the runtime memoizes the function.

My experience with all the languages in your sampler is that their runtime performance usually lags the Java on the JVM for general purpose programming. This is not an argument not to use them - I would prefer many of them in certain use cases. But if I want a managed runtime, and have some performance critical code that I am OK with being written in an imperative language, it is hard to beat the performance of simple Java on the JVM. There has been so much tuning to Hotspot over the last decade. That's been my experience anyways.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, and yes, I am a witness of how fast proper java is; and in extreme performance cases, I guess I'd turn to java before C++ ; maybe the f# also benefits from optimizations (like tail-call optimization) and the underlying VM? (though I don't know how performant the CLR is)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to love Java - love it for the tooling. IDEs are bloated but the integrated features they provide - like built in profiler(Netbeans), postmortem analysis tools (Eclipse MAT), the ease of debugging it provides - remote attach, JConsole type stuff where you can visualize loads of interesting stuff while the JVM is still executing your program, things like EProf that comes with HP JVMs - it can be turned on and off dynamically with low overhead and no changes required - the sort of data it gives makes it a piece of cake to figure out what is going wrong (it even tells you during the profile which exceptions were thrown and how many times!).

I make a living writing and supporting Enterprise Java apps and if it wasn't for these rich set of tools, my job would have been a nightmare. (Before flaming me saying if he wasn't writing code so badly in first place, he wouldn't need those tools - I also support code written by other people and writing complex, well performing code still remains notoriously hard.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Here's a C++ 0x version, using a lambda function:

      #include <iostream>
      #include <algorithm>

      int main(int argc, char** argv) {
        int src[] = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
        int* end = std::remove_if(src, src + sizeof(src) / sizeof(int),
            [](int i) -> bool { return i % 2 != 0; });
        for (int* p = src; p != end; ++p)
          std::cout << *p << " ";
        std::cout << std::endl;
      }

I wasn't sure about the lambda function syntax, but this compiles with g++ 4.5 (interestingly, even with the -Wall option, g++ doesn't warn about main not returning a value). Shows that even c++ can be shorter than java...

<comment><USER10> TL;DR

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Scala

      List(1, 2, 3, 4).filter(_ % 2 != 0)

And it's very easy to move to Scala from Java :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This can be a lot shorter using Google Guava [1]:

            Collections2.filter(
                    Lists.newArrayList(1, 2, 3, 4),
                    new Predicate<Integer>() {
                        public boolean apply(Integer i) {
                            return i % 2 == 0;
                        }
                    });

As I understand it, JDK 8 will support lambdas which will make it shorter still.

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/>

<comment><USER13> Or with <http://code.google.com/p/totallylazy/> (ignoring imports):

sequence(1,2,3,4).filter(even());

</comment></comment><comment><USER14>
      import static com.google.common.collect.Lists.*;
      import static com.google.common.collect.Collections2.*;
      import com.google.common.base.*;
      public class AdmittedlyNotMuchBetter {
          public static void main(String[] args) {
            System.err.println(filter(newArrayList(1,2,3,4),new  Predicate<Integer>() {
              public boolean apply(Integer input) {return input % 2 == 0;}
            }));
          }
      }

btw, how do you preserve source indentation in the comments? [edit: formatting, thanks]

<comment><USER15> Had the same problem.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> C#: var filtered = (new int[]{1,2,3,4}).Where<int>( i => i%2 != 0 );

<comment><USER17> This is what really shows the problem with Java.

<comment><USER18> And C#...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> \-- Haskell

filter even [1,2,3,4]

<comment><AUTHOR> this looks really nice, gotta learn me some haskell

<comment><USER3> You can. For free. Later this week in Mountain View. From some of the world's best and friendliest Haskell experts.

<[http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/w/page/32992961/Haskell- Hackathon...](http://wiki.hackerdojo.com/w/page/32992961/Haskell- Hackathon-2011>);

Newbies take special note of the Saturday session.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Screw that.

Others have already pointed out the Google Guava library. This version is almost all just standard Java, just using Guava to create the list of numbers.

      ArrayList<Integer> list =  com.google.common.collect.Lists.newArrayList(1,2,3,4);
      for (Iterator<Integer> it = list.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {if (it.next() % 2 == 0) {it.remove();}}
      System.out.println(list);

Also, Java does have REPL. It's called the Eclipse scrapbook view. I'm sure Netbeans has something similar (and that is part of one of the standard Java SDK downloads).

<comment><USER21> If you look close enough you can almost figure out what it's doing between all the line noise.

<comment><USER20>
      // create an array list with 4 integer elements
      ArrayList<Integer> list =  com.google.common.collect.Lists.newArrayList(1,2,3,4);

      // get an Iterator from the list, and use it to iterate though the list
      for (Iterator<Integer> it = list.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {
        // check if this element is even.
        // If we want the odd numbers, change to != 0
        if (it.next() % 2 == 0) {
          // remove it if it is even
          it.remove();
        }
      }

      // print the list
      System.out.println(list);

<comment><USER22> Not sure if you were being a smart ass, but it would be much more readable without any of the comments, and simply with the new lines.

<comment><USER20> I'm being a smartass. Kinda..

The commenter said they could _almost figure out what it's doing_. It's not clear from that that comment if it is just the formatting that was the problem (which I agree, isn't very readable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> \-- Groovy

      (1..4).findAll{!(it % 2)}

<comment><AUTHOR> pretty cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> You cheated. Do it without the fancy schmancy lists.

</comment><comment><USER25> Every time I see one of these ugly Java code examples, I always scratch my head because my code never looks like this.

Here is what these code examples are exploiting:

1\. Java isn't designed for scripting. All of my Java programs require many classes. I hardly have any main() methods because most things I write are classes invoked by other classes, e.g. in the case of a servlet being invoked by the web application server.

2\. It's rare in practice that I need to hard code the contents of data structures inside my own code. Normally they are loaded from data files.

3\. Import statements are automatically thrown in by the IDE and most people hardly even notice they're there and type nothing more than Alt-Enter any time there is an import line missing.

So really, what I really am typing in java is only:

      List<Integer> result = new ArrayList<Integer>();
      for(int i : source) if(i%=2) result.add(i);

Now that's not really all that complicated is it?

<comment><USER26> The point is that you have to write the for loop and if statement and concatenation for each different function you want to define. The better way is to use higher order functions, which Java lacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> JAVA

for (int i:new int[]{1,2,3,4}) System.out.print(i%2==0?i:"");

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe, clever! although we are building a new list in the other languages, we're never using it, so this is just as good in the immediate context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> D rocks as usual: filter!`a % 2 == 0`(iota(1, 5)) (no eager computation, no dynamic allocation)

</comment><comment><USER18> Or you can just use groovy and get the best of both worlds :) [1,2,3,4].findAll {it % 2 == 0}

</comment><comment><USER29> That's the problem of java developers, they dont use the bitwise operations:

if(e.intValue()%2 != 0) == >>> if((e.intValue()& 1) != 0)

<comment><USER30> There's no problem here. You can be pretty sure simple calculations like this (and multiplications with a power of 2 vs. shifting etc.) will run the same machine code in the end.

<comment><USER7> I think you are right in this case - I updated my example code above to use bitwise and it is running in the same amount of time. (100,000 iterations in about 6 milliseconds)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't know about the other lisp dialects, but the anonymous function is actually not needed in the Clojure version:

(filter even? [1 2 3 4])

<comment><USER32> Same for the others.

        (filter even? '(1 2 3 4))
        (remove-it-not 'evenp '(1 2 3 4))

<comment><USER33> I think you mean 'remove-IF-not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _coffeescript_

[1..4].filter (x) -> !(x%2)

</comment><comment><USER35> perl (because I feel like it):

grep { $_ % 2 == 0 } (1,2,3,4,5);

<comment><USER36> even shorter: grep { $_ % 2 == 0 } 1..5;

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I used this exact example a few months ago to compare Java and Ruby [1]. Funny how it keeps coming up.

(While I was using Java, I never even knew there was a need for higher-order functions.)

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1947723>

</comment><comment><USER37> Erlang

        [X || X <- [1,2,3,4], X rem 2 == 0]

<comment><USER38> umm is that supposed to show off Erlang? Maybe it's just me but for such a simple task that looks bad.

<comment><USER37> it was just for completeness, certainly not to show off, however list comprehensions are virtually identical to python and much more comprehensible than the line noise introduced in ruby list comprehensions.

the fact that this is called out twice as being "ugly" twice in comparison to the other examples auggests to me that erlang is called out as being ugly purely from hearsay as opposed to actually being ugly.

(I do think erlang can be ugly, I also think thats its biggest strength, but I dont think this example is ugly)

<comment><USER39> _erlang is called out as being ugly purely from hearsay_

I have no preconceptions about Erlang. I've never seen the opinion that Erlang is ugly, and your code above is the first Erlang I've ever seen. I also know nothing about Haskell, but I found the Haskell example to be the most elegant.

So, a more reasonable conclusion: The fact that two people found the code ugly suggests that it is ugly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What is Doug Cutting is saying these days about Java? He wrote Lucene, Hadoop and other awesome things in Java. I don't like Java much but I'd love to hear his side of the argument.

</comment><comment><USER40> Job security?

</comment><comment><USER15>
      public class filter {
        public static void main (String [] args) {
          System.out.println("2, 4");
         }
       }

FTFY, While it may be fun that show off with your favorite language, the Java version is intentionally complex.

Edit: In case you missed the point. This version is as absurd trying to be short as the other version is absurd trying to be long. Also, I can guarantee that an "Enterprise" version would be 200 lines long :-P

<comment><USER41> "Enterprise" developer at work here, folks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> PHP

      array_filter(array(1,2,3,4),function($v) { return !($v&1); });

</comment><comment><USER43> egrep:

      echo '1 2 3 4' | egrep -o '\<[0-9]*[02468]\>'

</comment><comment><USER44> Advice, drop the 1 and 3: just [2,4] - its cleaner.

</comment><comment><USER45> J solution anyone?

<comment><USER46>
      &1/^@4%2!#

Just a guess...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> F#

      [1..4]
      |> List.filter(fun x ->  (x % 2) = 0)

C#

      using System.Collections.Generic;
       public static class Foo {
        public static void Main(string[] args){
          Enumerable.Range(1,4).Where(x => (x % 2) == 0);
       }
      }

</comment><comment><USER47> No C#?

<comment><USER48> Enjoy - <https://gist.github.com/817556>

<comment><USER49> In fairness to the Java version, you should probably add all the additional stuff.

       using System.Linq;
       class Filter
       {
           static void Main()
           {
               var a = new []{1, 2, 3, 4}.Where(x=>x%2==0);
               System.Console.WriteLine(a);
           }
       }

It's unclear if printing is necessary or not, as the Java one does an explicit print, but the others don't.

<comment><USER50>
      using System.Linq;
      class F {
        static void Main() {
          new[] {1, 2, 3, 4}.Where( i => i % 2 > 0 ).ToList().ForEach(
            System.Console.WriteLine
          );
        }
      }

<comment><USER22> It's always irritated me that ForEach isn't available on IEnumerable<T></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


An Optimist's Reply to Ezra Klein - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/klein.html <comment><USER2> I somewhat agree with Graham: economic inequality is not intrinsically the problem and startups are not the problem.

The problem IMHO is rent and profiteering off taxpayer subsidies, both of which more or less force me to pay tribute to the rich.

I don't care one bit if someone else is _infinitely_ richer than me as long as I don't have to pay tribute to them or otherwise be lorded over by them. I would not care if (hypothetically) there were people alive today who were biologically immortal cognitively enhanced cyberpunk demigods with control of wealth flows in excess of present-day US GDP. In an abstract philosophical sense it seems likely that such sentient entities do in fact exist _somewhere_ in our vast universe and I don't see how this likelihood impacts me at all. There are also (statistically speaking) probably a minimum of several hundred million to a billion people smarter, healthier, and better looking than me.

What I do care about is being forced or at least heavily pressured/coerced into paying _tribute_ to those who are above me economically.

A prime example: housing costs are insane and this is partly a result of rich people from around the world parking their wealth in real estate and extracting rent in exchange for little to no investment in anything productive. In general, idle rent extraction is a social ill and should be taxed to hell and back. I would support cuts to capital gains, employment, and income taxes and large increases in taxes on property speculation (non-primary residences) and other non-productive rentier activity. (We might distinguish between productive capitalism and rentier capitalism, though it's hard to draw an absolute black-and-white distinction.)

Other examples of tribute include the many cases where public insurance is used to back-stop private losses while private gains remain private, such as the 2008 bank bailouts or the government paying in part for the cleanup of BP's gulf oil spill, and cases where taxpayer subsidized research and development is privatized for exclusively private gain (and patented!). How many huge companies have been built on the back of government-funded research? (The fact that so much wealth is built on the back of public research and public infrastructure is a common argument for progressive taxation.)

A huge reason I've lost my faith in libertarian politics is that the 2008 bailouts convinced me it's a scam. The rich advocate laissez faire until their wealth is on the line, at which point they become socialists. It's clear to me that for the poor and middle class to forego the use of government coercion is for them to engage in unilateral disarmament. I've heard today's economy described as a casino in which public funds are used to backstop the losses of the highest rollers, and that seems fairly accurate to me.

It's not transformed me into a conventional liberal though. Personally I don't think anyone on the present-day right or left has a clear path out of this. Both sides advocate things that would make the problem worse.

<comment><USER3> This is where things get complex. High rent isn't a natural state of nature—it's the result of building policies that prohibit housing. Austin Texas has roughly as many people as SF/Oak, but housing is plentiful and cheap, even close to the down town. Why? When the population increases, they build more housing.

<comment><USER2> Those policies are an example of the wealthy using the government as a tool to extract rent, hence my comment about unilateral disarmament.

While couched in liberal or eco-whatever rhetoric, make no mistake about it: SF's NIMBY policies are there so that urban property owners can extract rent and homeowners can profit off appreciation. NIMBYism of this sort is an example of regulatory capture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like PG is missing part of the point.

The problem isn't "wealth inequality". The problem is EXTREME wealth inequality. I'm not super rich (or even non-super rich), but I do well enough that I don't really suffer.

My mother, though, she's got a ton of debt, working a 35k/yr job without benefits, and no real retirement plan. Thanks to Obamacare she can buy insurance, but it has such a high deductible that it doesn't really do anything. She has no home, and can't even rent because most places refuse her if she has more then 5k in debt REGARDLESS of cosigner. And we know that she's so much better off than some others: She has food, isn't crippled by medical issues (yet), no one else to care for, and I'm providing a roof.

When you go from an extreme different between the top 1% and the bottom 10%, then have a few decades where that 1% has vast, rapid growth and the bottom 10% has things stay steady or get worse, THAT's your problem.

To say that wiping out inequality will stifle innovation...well, that's not really the discussion at hand. Wiping out EXTREME inequality shouldn't have that effect, because it didn't have that effect historically. The difference between the top and the bottom can still be quite pronounced. If/When we achieve that we will still have some people complaining that they can't get their kids the latest $1k/ea toy fad, but that's an entirely different problem I'm willing to tolerate.

PG goes on to say that financiers aren't the problem he's talking about...but that is the problem that many others are talking about. PG's original essay seemed quite defensive, and this one does too. He's trying to convince others that he's right, but not noticing that he seems to be talking about the impact of an entirely different discussion.

<comment><USER5> The problem you're describing is poverty, not inequality. How much money Larry Page or Bill Gates has doesn't make your mother's life any better or worse. Graham addresses this in the last paragraph:

"Decreasing poverty is not identical with decreasing economic inequality. Some measures for decreasing poverty could well increase economic inequality. For example, if you gave every child in America the same quality of education Bill Gates had, that would surely decrease poverty. [5] But you would then create a lot of new Bill Gateses as well. These kids wouldn't all stop short at middle class. The more ambitious ones would shoot right out the other side."

<comment><USER6> This is an argument PG uses, and one I keep seeing crop up in discussions about his post. It's malarkey! Wealth didn't just appear in Bill Gates bank account—it came from people less wealthy than him buying his company's products. It's indirect, but wealth accumulation at the top necessarily comes from those below them.

<comment><USER7> _wealth accumulation at the top necessarily comes from those below them_

That's the fixed pie fallacy [1], which is the biggest source of misapprehension in this whole debate.

In a healthy economy, entrepreneurs get rich when their customers get rich, in the form of an improved standard of living.

Apple, Microsoft, Google, Ford, Samsung, Southwest Airlines are all examples of companies that have become successful because they made the lives of ordinary (and in some cases, low-income) people vastly better through, respectively, affordable computers, software, knowledge, cars, phones/televisions and air travel.

In some cases, they enabled many more people to become financially richer too (eg, the many people who now make a very good living writing software).

And that's not to mention the flow on effects like medical discoveries made possible by the use of computers, and lower cost manufacturing parts and processes thanks to the automotive industry that benefit more niche industries.

In all these cases, the income captured by the entrepreneurs is a small fraction of the benefit they deliver to society.

This is not to say that there are no negative effects from the activities of these companies or the related income disparities (job losses, housing affordability, environmental harms, etc).

But this is the key point: attack the negative effects, not the generators of the innovations from which we all benefit.

[1] [https://mises.org/library/why-larry-summers- doesn%E2%80%99t-...](https://mises.org/library/why-larry-summers- doesn%E2%80%99t-understand-economic-inequality)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note to PG: when you're in a hole, stop digging.

I think the most disappointing thing for me about the first essay was the list of people who he thanked for pre-reading it -- were none of those people conversant enough with the discourse around income inequality that they couldn't spot the straw men, or were they just not willing to tell him to scrap it?

I mean, sometimes smart pundits go outside their wheelhouse and say clueless things. It happens to everyone eventually. (Heck, Tom Friedman has made a career out of it.) So the fact that he published this clued-out essay on income inequality didn't really perturb or disappoint me -- I was just like, "yeah he did that smart guy thing where he's stumbled into a conversation that he's not nearly as up on as he thinks he is and is going to tell us all How It Is."

But the fact that all of his pre-readers are equally clued-out is I think indicative of something larger and more disturbing about Silicon Valley groupthink.

<comment><USER5> Could you name specific things in Graham's essays that you think are straw men?

<comment><USER8> I guess I could, but it's been beat to death all over the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a little sad to see Paul's footnote 2, where he declares that "the numbers in the Forbes 400 are nonsense. But it will do ..."

Has Paul ever interacted with the Forbes Wealth team? My book research has overlapped their interests going back to the 1990s, and every time I've spoken with them, I've been impressed with how much work they put into trying to come up with the best possible approximations. Most of their numbers are pretty good -- and in some cases, their research trumps the public boasts that various rich people offer up on their own behalf.

If Paul had said Forbes's numbers were "imprecise," he could have made his point. But "nonsense" is a loaded word, and Paul has been around long enough to know that. If he wants to be taken seriously in this conversation, a better discernment/name-calling ratio would be nice.

<comment><USER8> My guess is that he probably knows actual, bona fide net worth numbers for some of the people on that list, and the Forbes numbers for those people that he knows about are way off.

<comment><USER9> That's totally possible for the founders of not-yet-public companies such as Dropbox and Airbnb, where the Y Combinator connection is highly relevant. You're right to add that to the conversation. At the same time, lots of other numbers for companies with public share prices and proxy-disclosed ownership data should be exquisitely accurate.

My issue was mostly with PG's presentation style, where he offers up data, dismisses it in a footnote, and then says it will do anyway. It's a weird way to make an argument. On an intricate issue like this, I appreciate exposition that is steadily nuanced, rather than battling self-made contradictions.

<comment><USER8> Even in the best-case scenarios, you have no way of knowing what those people have borrowed against those shares and/or what they've done with that leverage (maybe bought some illiquid assets that it's difficult to mark to market even if you knew what they were), so it's still impossible to compute a net worth. I'm sorry, but for all the efforts of the Forbes guys, I'm inclined to agree with PG -- the numbers are probably hot garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10>
      "But though the graph has the word "startups" on it, it is not a graph of the number of startups, but of all new businesses."

From what I have seen most of the world* that is not Silicon Valley, does define a startup as simply a new business. Yet whenever an SV person runs into someone understanding the term in the broad sense they don't go, "Sorry, I'm using the word in a more specialized way", they go "Sorry, you're using that word wrong". It seems to occur often enough that I feel like there must be a reason they feel the need to insist on it. Very similar to the word hacker in many ways.

* [http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start%E2%80%93up](http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/start%E2%80%93up) [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/start-up?q=startup)

<comment><USER11> This read to me as very disingenuous as well. Being able to dismiss a long- term decrease in new businesses by dismissing them as barbershops and whatnot (as if those kinds of small businesses don't matter) and then defining startups as "Whatever I need them to be today to make my point."

<comment><USER12> But that's not at all what he's doing. He's been consistently using that definition of startups for years, he's not just using it to make his point in this one article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _If we had a society with no poverty and perfect social mobility, and > economic inequality didn 't translate into social or political inequality, > would it be that bad if there was also great variation in wealth?_

That's saying that if money weren't, well, money, it wouldn't matter much if some people had a lot of it and others didn't have any.

But money is money; _that 's why they call it money_ [1]. Wealth inequality directly translates into social immobility, because the first thing rich people do is try to make sure their children stay that way, and there's only so much room at the top. Wealth inequality directly translates into political inequality, because why not? If you get to meet the President what are you going to talk about, but the political issues that directly concern you or your business?

Strict equality is impossible, of course. Some degree of inequality may in fact be desirable. But immense inequality tears society apart.

[1] Paraphrased from Heist, 2001. [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252503/quotes](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252503/quotes)

</comment><comment><USER14> PG could have saved us all some time if he led with #9 in his original post. Most of my family and friends are struggling to keep up with cost of living increases and these aren't considered poor people by government standards. If this trend of stagnant middle class wages continues long enough things will get ugly.

I am a supporter of redistributing wealth at the top for expanded education opportunities, which is why I do believe making the connection between income inequality and poverty is important. I don't understand why as a people we've accepted paying out of pocket for an education. We used to expect that public education provided everything you required to achieve a middle class lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've always wanted to hear a Swedish perspective on the Wallenberg family. Who apparently "In the 1990s indirectly controlled a third of Swedish GNP."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of PG's essays, his most recent ones in particular, my only quibble is the treatment of education as a silver bullet.

Offer Bill Gates style education to a cross-section of the poorest kids in the country and I don't think you'll get much in the way of improvement.

Inequality is as much a result of fragmenting families and the dissolution of social capital as it is new startups. When 80% of kids don't have a dad in the home, live in chaotic places, and face other setbacks, it'll take more than a high-end pedagogy to set things right. Raise taxes and spend more on education if you'd like, but first lets take a minute to see where that actually works.

</comment><comment><USER16> This conversation baffles me to some extent - it seems plain that discussing economic inequality is an extremely roundabout and convoluted way to discuss the economic status of the current decade. That particular phrase simply happened to resonate since occupy wall street and similar.

The issue of modern interest is rather one of economic mobility - how feasible is it for someone of lower income to increase their income. When we consider rent extraction by wealthy individuals or disparate allocation of resources by the government we're observing mechanisms that decrease the resources available to lower income individuals, thus inhibiting them from increasing their economic status.

No one would care about economic inequality in an economy with sufficient economic mobility to reach the upper echelons with plausible (though significant) effort - in fact, economic inequality of the degree that we observe would likely not be possible in such a society. Furthermore, I think philosophically if there's anything to be said for any of the American values most people would agree with the sentiment of the "American dream" \- that if you work hard you can better your own condition and that of your families.

Additionally, through this perspective Silicon Valley has a clear advantage over Wall Street - skills versus pedigree, bootstrapping versus degrees. I won't belabor that point, as I don't think it's particularly important.

Basically for reasons both of interpretability and of causality I think it's more appropriate to consider our economic state through the lens of economic mobility rather than economic inequality.

</comment><comment><USER17> Paul Graham's argument is entirely tautological.

1\. Startups are companies that try to grow quickly into billion dollar businesses.

2\. Founders have substantial equity in their startups.

3\. Therefore founders get really rich when their startup succeeds.

4\. More successful startups means more really rich people.

5\. More really rich people means more inequality.

6\. Therefore more startups means more inequality.

PG defines startups as companies that become large and make their founders rich. So yes, you then trivially get "more startups == more inequality". However, this loses sight of the fact that when the goal is to create a billion dollar company in a few years there is a huge incentive to game the system, and to produce all sorts of externalities.

Take AirBnB. They are effectively an unregulated hotel business. How can a bed and breakfast compete with an airbnb, when they have to face regulations and taxes? How do the neighbors like it when new people move in every couple of days and party all night long? Sacrifices have to made in the name of growth.

Another example is Uber or other sharing economy startups. Employees become independent contractors, who are always on the edge of being fired. Who have to pay for their own uniforms, cars and other equipment in order to do their jobs. It's pretty ruthless exploitation, but Uber is valued at $70 billion and it's super convenient for the customer, so we look the other way.

When it comes to software if you want to serve the most people you work with open protocols, you open source your software (so it can be inspected for quality and security), you make importing and exporting to competing products easy and fast and so on. If you want to make a billion dollar business you keep everything proprietary and you create a walled garden with tremendous lock in.

Just look at all the open source products that our startups are built on top of. Billions of dollars worth of free software. What do the contributors get? Nothing. (Not strictly true; they get angry bug reports, but you get my point). This is not the natural order of things, so we should question whether this is just.

There's a big difference between companies that provide a huge amount of value, and companies that can CAPTURE a huge amount of value. Startups have to be in the second category, and that has huge social implications worth thinking about. The founders necessarily play only a small role in the success of their business -- we all stand on the shoulders of giants after all -- so why should the founders be the ones who capture all the rewards?

<comment><USER5> "It's pretty ruthless exploitation"

If Uber drivers are being "exploited", why don't they quit? Because no one else would give them a better job, presumably. But that seems perverse to blame on Uber. All they're doing is giving drivers a better deal than they would otherwise get.

Suppose your father got cancer, and you decided to sell your grand piano to get some money for treatment. All the other buyers offer $1,000 for the piano, and then I come and offer $1,500. $1,500 isn't enough to pay for cancer treatment, of course, but it'd be crazy to say I was "exploiting" you - I'm giving you a better deal than anyone else would. The problem is the cancer, not the piano buyers, and certainly not me.

<comment><USER17> A typical reason they don't just quit is that they need a new car to work for Uber in the first place, which they can get using their xchange program[1] that gives them a large monthly obligation[2]. They can get this even when they don't qualify for a regular car lease because they have bad credit/no income.

So they have to work many hours just to get to the 0 point after which they start to earn money for themselves. If they quit they're stuck with the lease, which they cannot afford to pay and makes no sense for them to have with any other low paying job. So the lease serves as lock in -- bondage -- of the worker to Uber, even though they're technically not employees. I think being indebted to your employer in this way is barbaric.

Disclaimer: I heard this, haven't verified it myself.

[1] [https://get.uber.com/cl/xchange/](https://get.uber.com/cl/xchange/)

[2] Lease cost. Taxes. Fuel. Insurance.

<comment><USER5> The page you linked says drivers aren't locked into the lease, which would indeed be bad.

"Flexible leases from Xchange Leasing, LLC are 36 months with the flexibility to return the vehicle after 30 days with a two week notice and a $250 disposition fee."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting that the comparison of the Gini coefficient between Sweden and the United States wasn't mentioned as one of Ezra's errors. Since, as far as I can tell, PG is talking about wealth disparity, generally, in his original article, and only mentions income inequality when talking about the "pie fallacy".

Most of the money the founders and early employees of a startup end up making would never be considered income (right?) and therefor not skew the Gini coefficient?

Anyway, seems like an error to me, if I am wrong, please help me understand what error _I_ am making.

</comment><comment><USER19> re: "He says I think modest changes to the tax code will derail technical progress. But I don't think that. Larry Page's Google stock is worth billions of dollars. It would take way more than modest changes in the tax code to change that fact."

Oddly, this might be construed as an argument in favor of (or at least not against) more progressive tax rates: in the end, it's not going to stop people from getting rich.

<comment><USER20> agreed - i'd doubt that PG is vehemently against progressive tax rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > the public conversation about economic inequality is way too sloppy, and > that we should focus not on crude statistical measures like economic > inequality but on the specific underlying components

This is a ridiculous thing to day. For one thing there is no public conversation about income inequality. The press is owned by corporations, whose majority ownership is billionaires. Even this forum is owned by Y Combinator, a corporation which owns shares of companies who have collectively raised billions of dollars.

I mean, elected political parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon have television channels like Al-Manar. When someone like Javed Iqbal in the US sets up receiver satellite cards so Americans can watch this channel - he was sent to prison for over six years. That's the "public conversation" in the USA.

There have been somewhat open channels of public discussion on the Internet like Usenet. Which is why the US government and last-mile monopolies got together to work to crush Usenet a few years ago, which for the most part worked in severely harming it.

Then it's also in the interest of the idle class heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those of us who work to try to muddle the conversation. The idle class is who has been working to take the "focus" _off_ "specific underlying components". It's farcical that the people working to confuse the issue then go on to complain how it seems so unfocused.

It's pretty simple - any created wealth is created through work. Heirs who do not work can then only live by expropriating surplus labor time from those of us who do work. It's as simple as that. It's been happening for 10,000 years, whether it's called slavery, or serfdom, or modern wage slavery. It's all the same thing. Among we who do all the work and create all the wealth has been awareness of the 1% parasites who feed off of our labor.

If the focus of the issue is confused, it's because the offending group wants it to be confused - the people who own the press, who jail the Javed Iqbal's who allow different views from elected parliamentary parties, who crush public forums like Usenet etc.

<comment><USER5> "I mean, elected political parties like Hezbollah in Lebanon have television channels like Al-Manar. When someone like Javed Iqbal in the US sets up receiver satellite cards so Americans can watch this channel - he was sent to prison for over six years. That's the "public conversation" in the USA."

Iqbal was imprisoned because he entered into a business relationship with Hezbollah, a terrorist organization, not because of the content of the broadcast. From the New York Times:

"But Judge Richard M. Berman of United States District Court rejected that view last year, ruling that the prosecution was based not on the content of speech but on conduct — allegations that the men provided material support to a foreign terrorist group.

In court on Tuesday, Mr. Iqbal admitted that his company, HDTV Ltd., received money for providing television services to Al Manar — "the beacon" in Arabic — which the United States Treasury Department has designated a global terrorist entity." [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/nyregion/24plea.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/24/nyregion/24plea.html)

Terrorist attacks by Hezbollah: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Alleged_suicide_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hezbollah#Alleged_suicide_and_terror_attacks)

<comment><USER22> > "Hezbollah, a terrorist organization"

Hezbollah is more than just a terrorist organisation...

[http://www.irinnews.org/report/26242/lebanon-the-many- hands-...](http://www.irinnews.org/report/26242/lebanon-the-many-hands-and- faces-of-hezbollah)

"Hezbollah not only has armed and political wings – it also boasts an extensive social development programme. The group currently operates at least four hospitals, 12 clinics, 12 schools and two agricultural centres that provide farmers with technical assistance and training. It also has an environmental department and an extensive social assistance programme. Medical care is also cheaper than in most of the country's private hospitals and free for Hezbollah members.

Most of these institutions are located in the country's more marginalised areas, such as Beirut's southern suburbs, in South Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley. "We have special sections all over the country that provide financial and food assistance to the poor," said Hezbollah spokesman Hussein Nabulsi. "We also run an emergency fund for instant care in case of immediate hospitalisation.""

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm glad Paul Graham is being honest about startups' role in wealth and income inequality. Ezra Klein says there are good (Silicon Valley) and bad (Wall Street) rich people regarding income and wealth inequality. However if you're using the gross measure of income and wealth inequality, rich people all contribute the same way, in proportion to their wealth and income. Paul Graham is correct to focus on finer-grain factors, which are implicit in Ezra Klein's good-bad dichotomy but which he misses by going after inequality rather than a concept of justice, whether that justice be just deserts or equity.

<comment><USER4> Finance provides the value of liquidity - ensuring that those that need money have the opportunity to connect with those that have money to invest.

Startups provide the value of coming up with new quality of life options for society.

Given that financiers have stopped adding real value and instead have introduced new risks, I don't see the two groups as contributing the same way. Thousands of startups that try and fail are still more valuable to society than people creating artificial opportunities to make the rich richer and society to bail out failures.

<comment><USER23> Then critique finance based upon some theory of justice, rather than using statistics like wealth and income inequality that obscure how the money was made. I'm not claiming the two industries are morally equivalent. I am claiming they are equivalent in their contributions to wealth and income inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On points 2 and 6: Ezra is defining a start-up differently here, not wrongly, but differently. I'm curious to know what exactly constitutes a start-up to PG. Was the first In-N-Out burger a start-up? If not, why? In-N-Out is a case example, but just because a business is small and then happens to stay small or grow big with all the stock still in the family does not mean it is not a startup to many people, possibly including the bean counters that track these things. What does PG define as a startup in these essays?

</comment><comment><USER25> His "Bill Gates education" analogy doesn't really make sense to me. I think he is saying that it would create a bunch of super rich people but I don't think you get Bill Gates by education alone (IIRC Outliers supports that). The major of people would probably join the middle class (and not "stop short", the middle class is a great place to be compared to poverty) and lessen income inequality, even if one or two became billionaires.

<comment><USER20> he clarifies it in a footnote, [http://paulgraham.com/klein.html#f5n](http://paulgraham.com/klein.html#f5n)

<comment><USER25> He's saying it would help poverty (I think?). I think it would help income inequality as well, not hurt it as he suggests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I said it another thread so I'll say it here. Inequality isn't not fundamentally bad. It's a second or third order derivative of something that is bad.

Bringing in more refugees will increase inequality. Refugees are actually good for the economy. Therefore inequality is not strictly bad.

As Ezra said, only certain things are bad. He called out finance. We should focus on the root causes. Inequality is a too far removed at best and a red herring at worst.

</comment><comment><USER27> Aren't startups creating wealth?[http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

I can't say the same about the financial system where banks were bailed out with public money or big companies "legal" tax evasion etc, this is the inequality people complain and Ezra was pointing out.

</comment><comment><USER28> So Klein's argument is the most thoughtful, and it's all wrong! wow...

</comment><comment><USER29> anyone else feeling like PG is constructing increasingly obtuse arguments that can all be boiled down to "I'm terrified of paying more taxes than I presently do."</comment>


Falling water as a clock display (Osaka) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gusJeslMbLc

<comment><USER2> Was watching as it displayed the exact correct time. What kind of black magic is this?! Hahaha. Very cool widget.</comment>


Sass Ruby's Clever CSS - <AUTHOR> http://sass-lang.com/

<comment><USER2> If you are using sass, you might as well use <http://compass-style.org/> Awesome piece of software that brings together sass/scss and css frameworks (blueprint, 960). It also has a built-in list of commonly used mixins.</comment>