About Nimrod's features - <AUTHOR> http://picheta.me/articles/2013/10/about-nimrods-features.html <comment><USER2> I love Nimrod. Go hang out in the #nimrod channel on Freenet sometime, the people there are friendly, awesome, and helpful.

I just wish I had a proper use for it so far! It's such a nice language to play with, but as my day-job stuff is mostly web-based I haven't had a chance to use it in production yet (that said, the Nimrod forum is coded in Nimrod itself, which is pretty cool!)

I highly suggest giving it a try.

</comment><comment><USER3> For evangelists of Nimrod: Take some time and write a page about it on Wikipedia. There doesn't seem to be one yet. [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concurrent_and_parallel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concurrent_and_parallel_programming_languages#Unsorted)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote one. It's in my sandbox [1]. The original article got deleted despite my attempts to keep it alive due to lack of notability [2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dom96/sandbox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dom96/sandbox)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_%28programming_language%...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_%28programming_language%29)

<comment><USER4> I dared to recreate it. May those uninformed deletionists come again.

So far the new/old page got one positive review.

<comment><USER5> I've removed it again, sorry; this is not the way to fix the problem. Mostly all you're going to do is stir up bad feeling (especially with that attitude) and end up getting the article title protected from recreation.

Unpleasant.

The Wikipedia community has agreed a set of rules for creating articles. In this case the community review noted that no independent sourcing covered this language. If a deleted article is recreated substantially the same, it is removed.

So, there are _correct_ options... (I appreciate from outside the community it is not always clear what they are - so a list!)

* Find those sorts of sources

* Ask for a review of the deletion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DRV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DRV)

* Work to clarify Wikipedia's specific notability rules for Software (here's a good place to start: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFTWARE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOFTWARE))

* Fork Wikipedia and write about programming languages (I'm a big proponent of this, but no one seems willing to make the effort).

I see no reason in time, and there is plenty of time, that Nimrod won't obtain the sort of coverage that merits coverage in a general encyclopaedia.

<comment><USER6> >I've removed it again, sorry; this is not the way to fix the problem. Mostly all you're going to do is stir up bad feeling (especially with that attitude) and end up getting the article title protected from recreation.

> Unpleasant

That's right, deleting it again is unpleasant and no way to fix the problem and is a good way to stir up bad feelings and screwing over the topic from ever having a decent page.

> The Wikipedia community has agreed a set of rules for creating articles. In > this case the community review noted that no independent sourcing covered > this language. If a deleted article is recreated substantially the same, it > is removed.

Independent sources do, the Deletionists, like yourself, just don't like them.

> I see no reason in time, and there is plenty of time, that Nimrod won't > obtain the sort of coverage that merits coverage in a general encyclopaedia.

What type of coverage is that? What type of coverage could a programming language get that would allow it to be part of Wikipedia? Even Go only has a single newsworthy citation, the rest of blogs and its own site.

> * Fork Wikipedia and write about programming languages (I'm a big proponent > of this, but no one seems willing to make the effort).

Because it's a stupid idea not to have at least basic information on wikipedia about these language. There are projects that aim to do that, e.g. [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code) so perhaps you should get off your high horse.

<comment><USER5> > Because it's a stupid idea not to have at least basic information on > wikipedia about these language.

Why? Why is it stupid? Why does Wikipedia _have_ to cover it?

This argument could be extended to everything. My company, that I work for, why couldn't I cover that using the couple of blogs about it and our own site?

Once you make this argument the scope of Wikipedia expands dramatically (remember, it is a founding principle that Wikipedia is _curated_ not an indiscriminate collection).

If you're arguing that the notability rules are problematic for programming languages and need to be revised, then I agree.

Simply recreating articles is not going to affect that, leading to inconsistent results and well meaning efforts to clean up content causing this sort of confrontation.

Don't just drop content over and over in the hope that it will stay, that's not a workable approach. And, yes, it is rude. Throwing out ad hominems because you didn't get your way is also not very nice. Engage in the community, bring together some solid guidelines, and _then_ create the content that meets those guidelines.

I've given you the starting base to bring those changes about - if you want to take that and go with it then please do make the effort.

If your position is that Wikipedia should cover everything, ever, then you're at odds with the Wikipedia community and should fork it (but I'd suggest you'll soon realise why those rules exist!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is all good and everything but: Who uses Nimrod? Who are the people behind Nimrod? Will they still be/stand behind Nimrod in 5-10 years from now?

I didn't know Nimrod has a Javascript backend. This makes it even more interesting. The multitude of backends and the presumably small size of the core developer group makes me wonder though how well they are tested.

<comment><USER8> The problem with D/Nimrod/Go/Rust is the kind of people who would use them have already invested heavily in coping with the pain of C++ and have solid tools. As languages the alternatives are only maybe 2X better than C++, which is almost entirely countered by the fact that you will hit compiler and library bugs that you wouldn't when using mature C++ components and tools. As soon as you waste a day writing your own library wrapper that you would have taken off the shelf in C++, the relative elegance of Nimrod becomes moot. It seems like the alternative languages need years more to build steam.

<comment><USER9> No tool in existence can make C++ memory-safe. If there were such a tool, then we wouldn't have had any reason to create Rust. But C++ is so fundamentally unsafe that making it safe requires a new language, as far as anyone can tell.

You do give up maturity and the ecosystem when using an alternative language, but there are some features that are critical for certain application domains that C++ can never have without massive incompatible changes.

<comment><USER10> but but but boost c++11 lambdas c++14

do you even program in cpp

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool stuff. I'm personally more interested in functional languages these days, but there's still a lot that imperative languages have to offer (duh).

As a huge fan of C, I nonetheless am not a huge fan of its syntax, outside of C itself. I'm glad that there are some who have realized that you can do efficient imperative systems programming in a language without curly braces :) Not that that alone is a reason to use the language, but all in all it seems very promising.

Between this, Go, Rust and D, there seems to be an excellent crop of new-breed imperative languages which are simultaneously emphasizing efficiency, safety, ease of use and productivity, to varying degrees. It would be great to see these languages mature into legitimate alternatives to C/C++.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Nimrod 's GC is perfect for real-time software like games. It uses a deferred reference counting algorithm which can have pause times as small as 1ms._

How does Nimrod deal with the multi-thread reference counting performance problem?

Languages like Java don't use ref count and CPython has a global lock because multiple threads accessing a ref count mutex kills performance.

<comment><USER13> Deferred reference counting (DRC) doesn't suffer from the multi-thread reference counting problem. CPython uses immediate reference counting--ref counts are adjusted live every time a reference is created or deleted. Deferred reference counting works differently. Generally, it doesn't adjust reference counts for pointers in the stack/registers at all. Instead, it pauses all threads and scans the stack/registers with all threads paused to find references, just like a tracing collector. For references from the heap, a deferred reference counting algorithm will use a write barrier that queues the reference count in a local buffer. The locally-buffered increments/decrements will be resolved during the global pause.

The difference between a DRC algorithm and a tracing algorithm is what needs to happen during the GC pause. A tracing collector has to trace all live objects (even a generational collector will trace all live objects eventually), in order to free any memory. A DRC collector just has to apply the deferred increments/decrements. Once those increments/decrements are applied, zero-count objects can be immediately deleted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks interesting, but I worry when I see that templating support. After years of doing ruby development, I've come to believe that runtime generation of code is evil 99% of the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nimrod's templates do not work at runtime, they work at compile-time.

<comment><USER14> Ah, I see. My apologies. Thanks for clearing that up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd still say the syntax is C-like, the same was I would argue python has a C like syntax. Braces, and semicolons are there for the parser not for people.

I'm curious to see how much traction this gets. Its certainly more appealing to me than rust, or even go. Hopefully usage of C libraries is pretty easy, since I feel like thats always the missing piece in a new language.

<comment><USER11> I think you mean semantics. Like nearly any imperative language, the code is structured as blocks of statements which are evaluated sequentially. This is semantics, and python and C are largely the same in this regard. However, syntactically, they are not the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Threading support? Nativive or green ?

<comment><USER9> Native threads.

<comment><USER16> I looked it up. Nimrod has Erlang like actors, message passing and thread local GC. All with OS threads (not light weight threads like Erlang).

It is an intriguing combination.</comment></comment></comment>


What a tangled web we weave - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rogerkay/what-a-tangled-web-we-weave-3f1b1173303e <comment><AUTHOR> > between an iPod Touch and an iPhone — essentially an iPod Touch with a > cellular connection

Is this really the case? Is the BOM for these two so similar that the primary difference is the cellular RF-front end and DSP/etc for running the baseband stack?

> According to Qualcomm, Apple throttled Qualcomm's modem by not making use of > advanced features — specifically, 256-QAM and 4x4 MIMO — that increase data > rates by 33%. Despite this maneuver, which made Intel's modem look better, > the Qualcomm modem still outperformed the Intel part.

Does iphone 7 really suffer slower throughput when compared with other qualcomm-based phones?</comment>


Anyone Else Notice Login to Random User on Refresh of HN? - <AUTHOR>

Apparently HN was letting us play musical chairs with User Logins on every request. Anyone else notice? <comment><USER2> Yeah this happened to me, I created another post about it as well with some screenshots. So bizarre.

[http://i.imgur.com/27NyTmm.png](http://i.imgur.com/27NyTmm.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> Saw the same thing. Was logged in as 3 or 4 different users as I cleared browser each time and reloaded.</comment>


Ask HN: Add fallback font to HN stylesheet - <AUTHOR>

The new Ubuntu 10.10 has beautiful new fonts, but none of the Microsoft core web fonts. Since the HN stylesheet does only specify Verdana and no fallback, I'm currently looking at the website using an irksome serif font.
I've updated the HN CSS file to include the "serif" and "monospace" fallback fonts. Would you consider adding them?
http://dpaste.com/hold/256499/ <comment><USER2> check out the google webfonts <http://code.google.com/webfonts></comment>


The Way We Use Social Security Numbers Is Absurd - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-way-we-use-social-security-numbers-is-absurd/ <comment><USER2> I've gotten into so many arguments about how the first five digits of an SSN for nearly everyone born before 2011 (!), when they switched to a more pseudo- random algorithm, is reverse engineer-able and thus you should never, ever show the last four digits as that really is the only "secret" part of an SSN. This argument is a "fun" circular argument that typically goes "Well, but if we only show the first five, many families can't tell which social is whose because they all look so similar..." "Yes, because it was an algorithm! We should use something other than SSN to identify different people." "But how will people _know_ which SSN their account is connected to?" "Why is their SSN connected to the account at all?" "So they can identify their account!" /facepalm

<comment><USER3> I find it amusing that many places that will require "Strong" passwords with numbers, letters, and symbols, will use 9 digits as if it is secure, many even using just the last four!

<comment><USER4> This. There's nothing like setting up a rigid password policy to give the _appearance_ of security, then providing a secondary super weak password like ssn or easy to figure out security questions. For many sites its purely about appearance with little real thought given to protecting users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This strikes me as a pretty difficult problem, since it touches on personal privacy, information security, and identification all at once...

The simplest solution would be a disassociated ID card with a 2 or 3 factor identification (eye scan, fingerprint, etc.). Except this requires everyone to register and isn't going to gain widespread support in the U.S. for privacy reasons.

Info security just needs multiple factors, so require SSN and then an RSA-type second-factor to authenticate. This would make it about as secure as GMail, except for when you lose your PIN generator. I have backup codes for my GMail... How do we handle lost PINs when it's personal ID at stake?

Identification could be as simple as a personal e-mail address... Except we have all kinds of things tied to SSN as ID, including credit history, bank loans, etc. that require proof of _individual_ identity, not just "unique identification".

Is this a solved problem?

<comment><USER2> A lot of it comes down to the mapping problem between the messy real world and nice-ish structured things like relational databases.

Almost all of the "identifying" objects about a person (names, emails, even fingerprints can change over time/accidents) change with time and circumstance. That's hard to encode in a database or program against, so identity is a harder problem to solve than people would like it to be.

People like 1:1 mappings because it is easy to map and report, but those are rare in the real world. There is more than one John Smith. John Smith may have more than one email address (at the same time even).

Credit Reporting Agencies are essentially tasked with doing an ad hoc mapping of the vast fuzzy cloud of identifying statistics about a person to a 1:1 report ID. It should be no great shock to anyone that the Credit Reporting Agencies will get this wrong sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if its the Credit Reporting Agencies that should just hand out identification numbers (here's your Equifax Report #, use it apply for credit from here on out; we will no longer provide results without that specific ID #) and stop trying to corral data that will always be wild and untamable.

<comment><USER5> I like the idea that the unique identifier comes from the credit agency rather than the individual... Though this requires open disclosure of credit reporting data, which might not be a bad thing, all things considered...

How do they validate you, though? You give them the unique ID, but what's to keep you from reporting someone else's with a FICO score of 800 (top of the chart, for those outside the US).

<comment><USER2> In such a hypothetical world the main thing stopping you would be that in many cases you would need to provide three such identifiers (Equifax, TransUnion, Experian) to get a full credit report. Presumably that redundancy alone would actually help catch fraud in that world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMO, the idea anyone can resell dubious debt, use collections, or put something on a credit report is the real issue. If you first needed to say mail something to the address with the DMV then simply having random info becomes a lot less useful.

<comment><USER7> This.

I found it amazing that the article didn't mention the role that the credit agencies play in this. Almost all the time you are asked for your SSN, certainly in commercial transactions, it's so a credit check can be run. The credit agencies could solve this. They could even some it securely.

<comment><USER8> And they don't even need the number to run a credit check!

When some utility wanted the number to run a credit check I said I could not remember it. They ran the check anyway (using Name and Address), and read my social back to me!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As far as I know, the USA doesn't have identity cards. That's probably why the SSN is often used as an identifier there: it's the closest thing to a "unique identifier" they have. (Of course, treating it like a password is madness: as an identifier, it _should_ be _public_.)

<comment><USER2> A good majority of Americans have a state-issued driver's license (or equivalent for non-drivers) with a unique identifier on it. I am absolutely surprised we don't use these identifiers more often, especially given that unlike SSNs, driver's licenses in most states don't have "Please don't use for other identification purposes" written on them like SSN cards do.

Also yes, IDs are not passwords and should never be used for authentication purposes. This is never "two-factor", it is always a "wish it were two-factor" kludge.

<comment><USER2> Of course, the issue with driver's license numbers is they do change when people move. People like SSNs because they are handed out "at birth" and mostly don't change in a person's lifetime. [ _]

[_] I love the mostly clause here, because they can, in fact, change, and it's sad how much software and credit reporting breaks because of that in-built assumption that person will ever have one SSN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not issue each citizen, immigrant, business, legal entity, something like a RSA SecureID token with a associated public privet key pair?

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's amazing where they are asked for, too, and how easily people give them out. Get Comcast cable? They ask for SSN, but it's not a showstopper. I just told them I didn't have one, and that was that.

But a prepaid T-Mobile, recharging via CC over the phone? Asked for SSN and insisted. When I said I was Canadian, they insisted on the Canadian equivalent. Had to hang up and get another rep.

Why do Americans just go along with it and give their SSN out? Just say you don't have one. Canada does it right. Upon getting a SIN, the government is very clear that you are not obligated to give it out and that companies cannot refuse service if you do not provide it.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure whether it's the reason T-Mobile is asking for it, but a number of countries have added identification requirements for mobile-phone services, due to pressure from law-enforcement agencies, who don't like the possibility that people can buy anonymous "burner" phones & SIMs. In Denmark nowadays nobody will sell you a SIM without tying it to a national ID number. Bank accounts have similar requirements, to combat money laundering and tax avoidance.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, last year when traveling in Europe with a friend we had all sorts of trouble trying to get her a SIM card in Germany. They insisted they could only sell it if we provided the address of a German resident to tie the account to.

A German-speaking friend helped us solve it (I still don't know exactly what he worked out with them), but it wasn't a pleasant experience. Especially since in France we literally just walked into an Orange shop, and I said, in my bad US-high-school French, "Nous voulons acheter une carte SIM", and they said "OK", quoted a price and that was that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >People affected by SSN-related tax fraud can apply for an IRS-issued IP PIN or identity protection PIN.

So I have to be a victim already to add security to my SSN? Why can't I just opt-in before I get my identity stolen?

<comment><USER5> Sadly, this is generally correct, per the application process here: [https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Get-An-Identity- Protection-P...](https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Get-An-Identity-Protection- PIN)

Citizens of Florida, Georgia, or DC can, though. Wonder how we expand this program...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You know what's really scary? Gmail is held up as the pinnacle of email security, but they let you reset your password by proving ownership of _just a phone number!_

So much for 2FA. So much for strong passwords. All I have to do is obtain your SSN, call up your cell phone provider and hijack your phone number, and initiate a password reset with Google. That gets me into your Gmail, which in turn gets me into all your other accounts.

Ridiculously easy. Google should be ashamed.

<comment><USER17> Even if you use google authenticator?

<comment><USER16> Yes -- having the "recovery phone number" lets you bypass their google auth two-factor. See more here:

[1] [https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/183723?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/183723?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have written a little bit about this topic[0], describing that ideally we'd have a much better system that relied on keypairs and cryptography rather than keeping a short, predictable number secret. I really really hope to see a movement towards better meatspace authentication in my lifetime, but I have a fear that SSNs are here for good.

[0] [http://ece.rocks/alex/2015/02/01/generated-at- birth.html](http://ece.rocks/alex/2015/02/01/generated-at-birth.html)

<comment><USER19> It's not generated at birth, but I and millions of other Portuguese citizens have state-issued smartcards with our own public keypair (and signed by their certificate).

Yet just last week to sign up for a mobile contract, I had to print a PDF, sign it and scan it. The adoption has been almost nil.

<comment><USER20> Where are the private keys stored? Are they kept only within the card, or are they generated externally and added to the card? I ask because it's difficult to belive that millions are generating and keeping safe a private key.

Of course the lack of adoption is another concern.

<comment><USER19> The card itself generates the key, and AFAIK there's no way to get a copy of it (except maybe by physically decapping the chip and reading its memory).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> American bureaucracies have a bizarre obsession with them. My school issued student IDs with unique numbers, which should have been the end of all such issues.

Unfortunately, they made a bizarre system where US students had their student ID be their SSN with a fixed prefix, and international students got a random number with other prefixes. They refused to give up on using SSN even when they knew it wouldn't work for a good portion of students.

Heaven forbid someone just add an SSN to student ID lookup table to the database.

<comment><USER8> > Heaven forbid someone just add an SSN to student ID lookup table to the > database.

Why does a school even need this number?

The only groups that need this number are financial institutions of all types (including employment and borrowing) and government agencies.

A school does not need it. If they lend you money then that department might, but no further.

What I do when places that don't need the number ask for it is pretend I don't remember it. So far I've not had any problems, they mange just fine without it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> As technologists, and as an industry, we are failing our customers by not having developed a credible alternative to SSNs. They're only used because literally everything else is an even worse fit for access control.

Let's not also forget that in year 2015, we still use _passwords_ as primary access control guards. That's technology that was invented shortly after the development of speech in humans, circa 100,000 BC.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Passwords, as we know them in the form of computer passwords, are of course much more recent, usually credited to Fernando J. Corbató for use in the Compatible Time-Sharing System in the early 60s. Their semantics are quite different from having to say "swordfish" to a guard behind a door.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with them. There are people who propose we generate key pairs for every newborn. It is, however, delusional to believe that the same governments which struggle with flat documentation will then turn around to properly do PKI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't remember the link to the article, but a few years back a researcher had published a paper on the security of SSNs.

It outlined how the first 3 numbers are kind of based on your location of application (like a 3 digit code for a county). next 2 are kind of related to your date of birth. The only hard part was the last 4 digits which are random but easy to get as thats the first thing most companies ask for.</comment>


Scientists make plastic from a sugar and carbon dioxide - <AUTHOR> http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/news/2017/06/12/scientists-make-plastic-from-sugar-and-carbon-dioxide <comment><USER3> Fun fact: cellulose (in wood) and chitin (in insect exoskeletons, fish scales, fungus cell-walls, etc.) are _also_ polymers of glucose-derived sugars. Both are biodegradable, although _humans_ can only digest the latter of the two.

Other fun fact: before the invention of entirely-synthetic plastics, we had _phenolic sheets_ : layers of plain cellulose _laminated together_ , originally using natural resin (tree sap), then later using synthetic resins, like Bakelite. These didn't have all the properties of synthetic plastics—you couldn't bend them, for example—but you could form them into shapes and introduce pigments, etc., while manufacturing. The earliest Printed Circuit Boards were Bakelite phenolic boards. (And even today, PCB insulator material is effectively a "synthetic phenolic board": it's _fibre-reinforced plastic_ , which uses plastic itself in place of resin—and various synthetic fibres in place of cellulose—to achieve the same properties phenolic sheets have.)

<comment><USER4> Another feature of Bakelite is that after 60 years or so it tends to smell strongly, closely mimicking the smell of vomit. Hopefully any new formulations fare better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > This new type of polycarbonate can be biodegraded back into carbon dioxide > and sugar using enzymes from soil bacteria

This sounds amazing, but reading about various awesome breakthroughs has made me a bit cynical since there always is some sort of catch.

Does anyone know any limitations to this method which would make it difficult to scale?

<comment><USER6> If there are any, they'd probably be discussed in the actual papers and not here. I don't know if the UK is better, but at least in the US, university press releases about this or that research paper are usually garbage.

Does anyone have access to the actual papers?

        Georgina L. Gregory, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn and Antoine Buchard
        "Polymers from sugars and CO2: ring-opening polymerisation and copolymerisation of cyclic carbonates derived from 2-deoxy-D-ribose"
        DOI: 10.1039/C7PY00236J Polymer Chemistry, 2017, 8, 2093-2104

        Georgina L. Gregory, Elizabeth M. Hierons, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn, Ram I. Sharma and Antoine Buchard
        "CO2-Driven stereochemical inversion of sugars to create thymidine-based polycarbonates by ring-opening polymerisation"
        DOI: 10.1039/C7PY00118E Polymer Chemistry, 2017, 8, 1714-1721

        Georgina L. Gregory, Liliana M. Jenisch, Bethan Charles, Gabriele Kociok-Köhn, and Antoine Buchard
        "Polymers from Sugars and CO2: Synthesis and Polymerization of a d-Mannose-Based Cyclic Carbonate"
        DOI: 10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492 Macromolecules, 2016, 49, 7165-7169

<comment><USER7> [https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00236J](https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00236J) [https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00118E](https://sci-hub.io/10.1039/C7PY00118E) [https://sci-hub.io/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492](https://sci- hub.io/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01492)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title of the article's pretty misleading. "sugar" means to most people either sucrose or glucose. Fructose, lactose, etc. could also qualify.

No, this uses a very obscure and expensive chemical called thymidine (most cost-effectively harvested from herring sperm, and primary precursor for anti- AIDS drug AZT). It may be "a sugar", but this article's playing fast and loose, akin to calling any pharmaceutical that ends with citrate or chloride "salt".

<comment><USER9> It also calls polycarbonate "scratch-resistant" when anybody who's worked with it knows it isn't. "Scratch-resistant coatings for phones, CDs and DVDs", really? CDs and DVDs are made of polycarbonate and they scratch easily.

<comment><USER10> Resistant is always a though word. The important, but hidden measurements are cost to produce, etc but relative to most other cheap, though, and clear materials...

CD's are actually very scratch resistant even though they often get lot's of small scratches.

<comment><USER11> > CD's are actually very scratch resistant even though they often get lot's of > small scratches.

This is a bit of an oxymoronic sentence. How can something be both scratch resistant, while accumulating a large number of scratches?

The scratches a CD accumulates won't typically affect the ability to read from them, but that's due to the focal length of the reader, not the material.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc#Integrity)

<comment><USER10> Resistance _is not_ immunity.

Bullet proof glass for example gets damaged by bullets. The trade off is always in how much damage and how quickly. CD's will easily survive with even moderate levels of care.

What people forget is the covering is really designed to protect the _data layer_ not the surface. And in that context the clear plastic is actually better protection than the backside.

<comment><USER11> > What people forget is the covering is really designed to protect the data > layer not the surface.

Right. But that this started explicitly about calling the _polycarbonate_ \-- that clear layer -- as scratch resistant. And this is just flat out wrong:

"Polycarbonate is a durable material. Although it has high impact-resistance, it has low scratch-resistance."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#Properties_and_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate#Properties_and_processing)

I agree that it serves its purpose of protecting the data layer of the CD. But again, CDs and their readers were designed in a way that typical surface scratches and other imperfections would not inhibit reading. And so polycarbonate was an acceptable choice. The same approach applies to eye glass lenses; a scratch on a lens is typically not in focus and therefore has little to no effect on vision.

So, TL;DR: Polycarbonate the material is not scratch resistant. CDs are scratch resistant, but that is due to their optical design and _in spite of_ the polycarbonate.

<comment><USER10> I don't directly disagree with what your saying, my point is there is more than one type of scratch resistance. Because not all scratches are created equal. If you look at say :[https://omnexus.specialchem.com/polymer- properties/propertie...](https://omnexus.specialchem.com/polymer- properties/properties/hardness-shore-d)

You find it's good relative to other plastics at preventing penetration which is also why it's good at preventing _deep_ scratches. So, yes if you want a crystal clear optical element then it's not scratch resistant and look for something high on the Mos scale. But, if you want a coating that protects from deeper scratches it's quite good. In that context it's good material to protect CD's from scratches that matter.

Which again is why I find the word resistance tricky because it's always resistant in some context.

<comment><USER11> Ah, I understand your point now. Thanks for clarifying for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read the headline and though "just what we need more plastic". I was pleasantly surprised to see that its biodegradable

<comment><USER13> The question is, under what degradation conditions (time, bacteria, etc), and what other threat vector does the material bring to animal life.

<comment><USER12> True, but biodegradable is still better than not.

<comment><USER14> Well no. Plastic biogrades at a snail's pace. Timescales differ on type of plastic. Plastic bags apparently take 20 years to biodegrade, for instance. PVC pipes are used in plumbing because biodegradation is extremely slow - <USER2> that it doesn't ever happen.

<comment><USER12> I wasn't aware that plastic bags / pipes biodegraded at all, hence my position.

<comment><USER11> I think plastics are one of those things where, dumped into a random place, they probably won't be biodegraded. However, for any given plastic, there is probably some organism in existence which will eat it under some or all conditions. So the usage of "biodegradable" maybe depends on which viewpoint you are interested in.

For example, here's the wiki on polyethylene, which seems like the typical plastic for "plastic bags" from a store:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene#Biodegrading_plas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene#Biodegrading_plastics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like this could also be really useful for future manufacturing industries on the surface of Mars or in the atmosphere of Venus. Polycarbonate also seems to have some resistance to sulfuric acid, which would be particularly useful in the Venusian atmosphere.

</comment><comment><USER16> After extracting the sugar, many sugarcane mills burn the biomass (bagasse) for energy. So, they already have a free supply of CO2.

edit: Never mind, they are talking about another type of sugar.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any details available on the processes involved?</comment>


Show HN: Bosslog – The Note App for Managers - <AUTHOR> https://bosslog.app <comment><USER2> I'm a sucker for landing pages that are actually live product demos. Very well done.

The search function is also excellent. (minor issue: on iPhone, after clicking a search result, sometimes the keyboard overlaps the result)

Also, the name, while corny, makes me feel really important :)

Edit: So I just tried to sign in, and it looks like I need a Google account :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jake! Oh no! I'll consider adding more auth options in the future :womp-womp:</comment></comment>


How Professional Hackers Understand Protected Code While Performing Attack Tasks [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4bd1/2a9823b55d29a0d75c9ea9c8cd08b6fdca3e.pdf <comment><USER2> It seems to me that the input data for the study is "just" the final report from the hackers to the customer. The academic researchers (who are presumbably nowhere near the level of expertise of the hackers) then annotate and categorize the conceptual tasks behind each word and sentences in the report.

It seems to me that a lot of bias on the input data, based on the annotators knowledge. They try to account for this by using multiple (n=7) annotators, but I doubt if that is enough.

Two questions come to my mind:

1) What level of detail do the final reports contain? I have procured and read a few pen testing reports myself, and the level of technical detail seemed too low to infer the hour-by-hour activities of the hackers in any meaningful way. Would be nice if the paper explained what those reports actually contained

2) I wonder what it would take to get the hackers themselves to keep a diary/journal of the hour by hour activities. That would remove a lot of noise from the input data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their technique is pretty interesting (open coding).

There is a level in abstraction below (more real) that is greatly helpful in breaking DRM and finding other weird bits of code. Running code in an instrumented qemu for example. It is much more accessible and productive for me over SMT solver tooling.

Generally their attack tree is very nice, but they sweep a lot under the rug in their dynamic analysis section. This is a short paper though, so no fault there. Their tree is a concise outline for anyone looking to methodically RE any black box thing, not just DRM and protection schemes.</comment>


The truth about young people's pay? It's up, significantly, over a generation - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/10/truth-young-peoples-pay-significantly-generation/ <comment><USER2> Yes, of course, "The Spectator" home of the Bullingdon Eton clique to peddle their elitist propaganda against the working classes. I shalln't be wasting my time with that drivel.</comment>


Polish software house pays most of November salaries in Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://blog.elpassion.com/el-passion-pays-november-salaries-bitcoin/

<comment><USER2> How do you do the accountancy in Bitcoin? Like a commodity? Can you show numbers to the Tax office in weird currencies?</comment>


Hollywood and the Internet: There will be blood - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10733002&subjectID=526352&fsrc=nwl

<comment><USER2> One disappointing thing from the article is that they state that Hollywood loses billions a year to piracy - as if it were an established fact. Sure, there's billions of dollars worth of content traded via piracy, but it's debatable how many of those dollars were lost to Hollywood.

Otherwise I have to say this article is one more example of why I love The Economist. You'd never see a publication from, say, a Time Warner company chiding Hollywood for being stupid. I started reading The Economist in the 90's because it was the only news outlet that didn't have weekly in-depth coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial or Monica Lewinsky. I've never looked back.

<comment> daniel-cussen To say that Hollywood loses billions of dollars a year is not only true, but a gross understatement. The figure is actually about 1,000,026,000,000,000 (one quadrillion, twenty-six billion).

The reason is that, a few months ago, my six-year-old cousin filmed a skit in drama class and planned on selling it to my parents, who told her they were interested in buying it. My Dad once told her he had a bajillion dollars, so she figured a quadrillion would be a drop in the bucket. Unfortunately, before the transaction was completed, my cousin's unknowing mother found the DVD and sent a copy to us, causing my cousin a quadrillion dollars in lost revenue.

When she found out, she cried. I had to give her a lolly-pop to console her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article misses the entire point. Why aren't people watching TV, going to the movies, or buying DVDs as much? Because they are on the internet doing other things. This is a seismic shift they cannot change. They should embrace it not by putting the same old fare on a new medium, but by getting into new web-based businesses.

Faster horses couldn't have stopped the advent of the automobile. And people don't want the one-way communication of movies on the internet any more than they want it from the big screen.

<comment><USER4> While I understand the point you are making, I think you are underestimating the value and appeal of Hollywood's traditional offerings. Just look at the amount of movies and TV shows shared using bittorrent.

Humans really really like stories. This has been true for literally thousands of years. Dramatic storytelling and sport have been the prime form of entertainment in all human societies since the dawn of time. Think of storytelling shamans, greek drama, elizabethean theatre, hollywood blockbusters. I don't think the demand for this "one-way communication" will be going away anytime soon.

<comment><USER5> ...but the willingness to pay for it might. That's why we have sequel overload - rather than risk a new movie, they just copy one that people have always shown willingness to pay for (Shrek, Pirates, etc)

<comment><USER4> yeah, the willingness to pay is dropping. Its already disappeared for music (but itunes is changing that).

Figuring out what the audience will like exactly is a different (and difficult) problem. I'm sure there were a lot of greek tragedies that flopped.

If movies don't make money, they can't be made. So people don't get to watch them for free off the pirate bay. Hollywood needs to find ways to charge for and deliver content in a way that people are willing to pay for and consume. What they don't need is to go off and start trying to find crazy ways of making money on the internet. At that point they are no longer satisfying a basic human need, and there already are a million people working on "monetizing" the web.

<comment><USER3> For the past 100 years you had a choice. For one way communication, radio, TV, movies. For two way communication, telephone. (I'm not even counting the books and letters for centuries before that.)

For the first time in human history, we have a medium that offers audio, video, text, and 2 way communication with (almost) anyone else in the world. People seem to like it. Any wonder they're abandoning everything else in droves to use it?

<comment><USER4> I don't think the mode of delivery changes the passive nature of the activity. A movie downloaded and watched from the pirate bay is no more 'two-way' than one seen in a movie theatre. I read your original comment to mean that because people can do many interesting things on the internet, they will give up traditional 'one-way' things like movies and tv shows. My argument was that there is a basic human need for listening to stories that will not go away. So it makes sense for movie makers to figure out how to best fulfill this need on the internet.

As I pointed out, one of the biggest uses people are putting this amazing new two-way medium to, is obtaining loads and loads of one-way material.

<comment><USER3> "basic human need for listening to stories that will not go away"

Absolutely. I just suspect that now that we have more options, we'll spend a little more of our time doing and a little less receiving. I have noticed that this is true for many people. It is, alas, not so true for many others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keep making shitty movies like 2 Fast 2 Furious, Deuce Bigalo: Male Jigalo, etc. and it doesn't matter how you distribute or sell it.</comment>


Want to see Twitter + iTunes in action? Here it is - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/twitter/status/2856041305866240 <comment><AUTHOR> Really excited about this, looking forward to seeing what other applications are integrated in the future. Recommending new artists and people to follow based on my music taste would be great too.</comment>


The Anatomy of Web Components - <AUTHOR> https://itnext.io/the-anatomy-of-web-components-d6afedb81b37 <comment><USER2> The cool thing about edge switching to chromium engine is the compatibility table here: [https://www.webcomponents.org/?source=post_page</comment><comment></comment><comment>-...](https://www.webcomponents.org/?source=post_page</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---)

Should turn solid green.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have long been a supporter of Web Components over non-native libraries. Recently I tried to put together a native only site with them and it was a lot of fun. It's not without it's quirks or concerns, but for a smaller, non SPA site I would pick it over React or others just to cut out the tooling chain and node ecosystem cruft. It would save me some headspace at the very least.

<comment><USER4> I worked with early Polymer versions for about a year on a pilot project and loved the technology and implementation. Conceptually, I think its superior to lots of the alternatives. Fact of the matter is that the javascript/nodejs (e.g. React) hordes shouted down a really fine set of ideas. its a sad loss, IMO.

<comment><USER4> Shocker: [https://micro-frontends.org/](https://micro-frontends.org/)

<comment><USER3> That article seems to confuse project management issues with architecture I think. Who in their sane mind would recommend using three different frontend frameworks living in one codebase? Who inevitably wraps it all together, Team Mop Bucket? What would the build pipeline look like and who maintains and fixes that?

Monoliths still work if managed correctly. You can even organise code to get similar isolation as a microservice but still in the same codebase and tooling. If you find yourself looking into "micro services but it's frontend components" then I think you need to look at hiring a technical lead who can see a bigger picture architecture for everyone to work in.

One of the benefits of consistent tooling and frameworks is knowledge sharing and mastering your tools as a company. If everyone is using different tools then you have created fragile knowledge silos throughout your company and you don't get that hive mind mastery of the tools, where there is always someone who knows what the right approach is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow the one webcomponents blog that doesn't mention Polymer or Lit.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not being familiar with "Web Components" (vs. web components), could an expert chime in with thoughts on why they don't appear to be catching on? That is, why are frameworks like React and Vue not leveraging this native browser capability?

<comment><USER7> Because there's essentially nothing to leverage. The one thing that they promise (interoperability between frameworks) is both not true in my experience and not compelling enough to warrant the massive amount of complexity required to work around their shortcomings. If you want nightmares go read Polymer or Oracle JET's source code, both are WC based frameworks, both had to go to extreme lengths to offer a semi-reasonable end user API.

They solve the wrong problem the wrong way. The creator of Ember recently tweeted about this: [https://twitter.com/tomdale/status/1153309794226147330](https://twitter.com/tomdale/status/1153309794226147330)

<comment><USER8> > The one thing that they promise (interoperability between frameworks) is > both not true

Who is promising that? Web components are just a set of APIs in the browser. All they can really do is make the same promise of all the other browser APIs, which is _availability_.

<comment><USER7> > Who is promising that?

This was very much the narrative back when WCs were first announced / released. If that's no longer a focus then what is their selling point now?

<comment><USER9> Web Components are a very good solution if you're YouTube or Twitter and you want to let people embed your content while providing your own styling/behavior for it. It's basically a lower-overhead version of <iframe> that can set its own dimensions.

Web Components are probably also a good solution if you're a news site that serves 90% static text but occasionally wants to embed an interactive chart or something. It's basically a slightly more standardized, isolated version of the `<div id="chart"></div> <script>$("#chart").makeInteractive()</script>`-style code that sites like that normally use.

They might also work if you're trying to build a library of standard components (like "toggle switch" or "stepper control") to be used in apps written with a variety of different UI frameworks. Although this depends on good "cross-framework" support which hasn't really materialized yet.

Web Components might not be the best solution if you want to render your entire site in client-side JavaScript, SPA-style. But on the whole, there aren't many websites that want to do that—remember, 30% of the Internet is WordPress blogs!—and there are even fewer where it's actually a good idea.

<comment><USER10> You _could_ use WCs for that stuff, but WCs aren't best for those purposes.

1) YouTube/Twitter widget: Use an iframe, because WCs don't render at all with JS disabled.

2) Interactive chart: You don't need WCs for this case; they make nothing easier and many things harder. Just use DOM APIs directly if your requirements lightweight, or use a popular framework if you need more support.

3) Standard library: That's the interop problem they're talking about up thread. That's literally the only thing WCs are good for, and even then, the fact that they don't render at all with JS disabled means that they're never going to be better/faster than rendering UI server side.

<comment><USER9> I think web components fall back to regular elements if JavaScript doesn't run. So <twitter-tweet>Cats are the best!</twitter-tweet> and <button is="very-fancy-material-design-button">Click here!</button> would still show up for JS-disabled users, they just wouldn't have the extra JavaScript functionality.

<comment><USER7> In practice this would be

        <twitter-tweet id="424242424242"></twitter-tweet>

What you're saying is true only for the simplest of components.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They should have made a way for simple web-components to declared and defined without any Javascript. Simple static HTML.</comment>


Ask HN: A possible Delicious Alternative? - <AUTHOR> http://www.favilous.com With Delicious closing down we thought we would recommend our bookmarking site - Favilous. We promise never to sell to Yahoo so there will be no chance of us closing down!
We had been working on a major revamp of the site and it just so happened Delicious made their announcement (or didn't make their announcement!) when we were about to press the launch button.
What do we offer? Bookmark quickly and effectively for free.
Attractive site with users having the ability to customise backgrounds and arrange bookmarks in categories.
Save articles for viewing later - so now you can bookmark and view sites later, a combination we do not think exists.
Users can see what sites are hot and what sites are popular.
Social - Follow people who bookmark things of interest.
Bookmark things on the fly with a click of a button and it saves it to your inbox for viewing later.
View what the community is bookmarking - this page is of great value as it offers descriptions of the sites that are being bookmarked.
Import bookmarks from various sources including delicious.
Background We are a 2 man startup from the UK. We are bootstrapped.
We have thousands of links already bookmarked from thousands of different users.
We would love to know what you think and what feedback you may have so that we can improve the service for new and existing users.
thanks! <comment><USER2> With Delicious closing down we thought we would recommend our bookmarking site - Favilous. We promise never to sell to Yahoo so there will be no chance of us closing down! We had been working on a major revamp of the site and it just so happened Delicious made their announcement (or didn't make their announcement!) when we were about to press the launch button.

What do we offer?

Bookmark quickly and effectively for free.

Attractive site with users having the ability to customise backgrounds and arrange bookmarks in categories.

Save articles for viewing later - so now you can bookmark and view sites later, a combination we do not think exists.

Users can see what sites are hot and what sites are popular.

Social - Follow people who bookmark things of interest.

Bookmark things on the fly with a click of a button and it saves it to your inbox for viewing later.

View what the community is bookmarking - this page is of great value as it offers descriptions of the sites that are being bookmarked.

Import bookmarks from various sources including delicious.

Background We are a 2 man startup from the UK. We are bootstrapped. We have thousands of links already bookmarked from thousands of different users.

We would love to know what you think and what feedback you may have so that we can improve the service for new and existing users.

thanks!

<comment><USER3> "We promise never to sell to Yahoo so there will be no chance of us closing down!" -> that's incorrect logic.

<comment><USER2> It was only meant to be a light hearted joke. However if you want a serious reply - Yahoo bought Delicious and then a few years later they decide they want to possibly close down Delicious thus panicking users everywhere. We are focused on our userbase and would not want to put our site, which some of our users rely on, in any danger of closing and thereby forcing users to lose their bookmarks.

<comment><USER3> To be honest, that sounds a little naive. If you were to become really big, would you not sell? Or just not to Yahoo? Things can change a lot in a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting site. I signed up with a test account, but I can't get the "Create a new bookmark" link to work.

The background is very dark and I almost couldn't see the search field because it's only one shade lighter. I couldn't figure out how to change my backdrop. I clicked a new color, but couldn't figure out how to save it.

I currently use Pinboard.in and so far think it was worth the $7.XX I spent to sign up. How do you differ from them? How will you fight spam links?

How do we know if you will never close down? Maybe you won't sell to Yahoo! but what about someone else?

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the feedback - we will look at the bug you mention now.

To change your backdrop there is an option 'change your backdrop' under 'create a new bookmark' - we can make that stand out more. You can then use some of our sample ones or upload your own - once clicked or uploaded it saves it automatically.

The first way we differ is that we are free, I appreciate people may be willing to pay for their service but for now we are free and all users who sign up now will not have to pay. Secondly is that I guess we are a bookmarking site aimed at more creative types. Pinboard is a great site functionailty wise and speed wise but you could argue it lacks in appearance. We hope that we offer a lot of the functionality Pinboard do but also you can bookmark in a nice looking site.

We have modertators who will look to fight spam and if we eventually add a fee for the service this should also prevent it.

I should rephrase - we will do everything in our power to ensure we won't close down.

Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using <http://historio.us> for a few weeks now and have been impressed. Now, I've not looked at other services, but I think its great that I don't have a desktop filled with shortcuts that I will never use. Indeed, it's really helped me a few times when I know what was on a site, but not what the site was called - a quick search and I find it. It makes life easier and the free version will handle up to around 300 bookmarks I think. I did pay for the full version and was a bit disappointed that the 'tagging' was handled after the bookmarking (so I never use it) but its a good service.

</comment><comment><USER6> Delicious is not being closed down, this should be old news by now: [http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20101217/tc_pcworld/yahoower...](http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20101217/tc_pcworld/yahoowerenotshuttingdowndelicious)

So there is no need to jump ship, unless you want to of course.

<comment><USER2> Yes I should edit my comment - it is not closing down but favilous remains an alternative, we hope a credible one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I never got the whole bookmarking craze. Why is this useful? Google has every link on the web and you can easily search for things. It always seemed easier just go to google and search again then try to bookmark, tag and use another search to find a link you may never use again.

<comment><USER8> I often forget sites that I have previously visited (sometimes years) before as such I tend to bookmark as much as possible things that I will find interesting or useful at some point in the future.

<comment><USER9> use this: <http://historio.us>

<comment><USER8> Nice - thanks - i'll take a look

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wrote my own Delicious alternative: <http://1r7.net> :)

I'm working on OAuth integration with Yahoo for import, some nifty display stuff, and device-aware CSS for clean browsing on your phone or ipad or whatnot. It's a fun project.

</comment><comment><USER11> Suggestion: use OpenID for authentication. I'm going to test the site anyway, but I'm really not looking forward to the prospect of creating yet another account on yet another site.</comment>


How many samples do you need to take to know how big a set is? - <AUTHOR> http://www.askamathematician.com/2016/12/q-how-many-samples-do-you-need-to-take-to-know-how-big-a-set-is/ <comment><AUTHOR> Techniques like this were used in WWII to estimate the number of tanks the Germans had, given only limited information about the serial numbers of some.

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


Building a "multiplayer" HTML5 game is easy. Right? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whiteoctober.co.uk/blog/2012/08/03/a-multiplayer-platform-game-built-with-html5-pubnub-and-twitter/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for showing how quick and easy it is to use PubNub! Are goal is to democratize the ability for developers to add real-time capabilities while providing top notch support!

Love this part "It totally ticks all the boxes, the api is as simple as 'send message' and 'listen for message'. And it's fast…super fast."!

</comment><comment><USER3> That's so cool, great example of what you can do with PubNub!

</comment><comment><USER4> Deluxe. Login with twitter to play.</comment>


The Problem with Meritocracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/05/the-decline-of-middle-america-and-the-problem-of-meritocracy/ <comment><USER2> The solution offered is offensive, amounting to randomly allocating power and privilege amongst a given population rather than allowing the best and brightest make their case through personal excellence.

All this supposedly so those that are incapable of succeeding in a meritocracy are not sentenced to the terrible fate of believing themselves worthy of their low station. I don't want to imagine a person so wretched they would prefer to ruin the world rather than understand their position in it as below average. I can think of little more depressing.

Feudalism died for a reason, let's not bring it back.

<comment><USER3> Imagine the state the world would be in if someone had put into practice his proposed "solution" back in, say, 1500.

People who succeed do not just benefit themselves, they often benefit many others, including future generations. And people are motivated to succeed by desiring the rewards that come with success such as wealth, fame, etc. Without such incentives, success and progress suffer. Art, architecture, literature, music, and poetry suffers. The study and practice of medicine, physics, and chemistry suffers. Innovation in industry suffers. Free enterprise suffers. Everyone's quality of life is reduced because the automobile was never invented, penicillin was never discovered, radio was never discovered, the electric light bulb was never invented, the refrigerator was never invented, etc, etc, etc.

Should we discourage the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the John Carmacks, the Sergey Brins, the JK Rowlings, and the Steve Jacksons of the world because there are so many other folks who are perfectly content to spend their lives working at the Try N Save and watching 5 hours of TV a night and some of those folks find their lives dissatisfying in comparison? Quiet down! You're being unruly! You're making everyone else look bad with your success! Here, come slum with us, it'll make everyone happier in the end, honest.

Time and time again history has shown that unfettered individual liberty maximizes progress, both for individuals and for society as a whole. There will always be inequality and tragedy, that's the nature of life. Trying to pretend that we can make everyone identically equal and erase everything that makes people different from one another is a distopian vision, very Borg-like and anti-humane.

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised to see such a high number of points for this canned mad-libs response unworthy of the thoughtfulness of the original article. You fail to acknowledge issues raised in the article and narrowly argue the solution in the most trivial and trite way.

I would like to find a way to combine the best of the technological brilliance and economic powerhouse that meritocracy and social mobility have provided, while also looking for a less disconnected, community-focused and psychologically healthier nation. Any discussions that help pinpoint problems in our current system, and propose solutions, are welcome to me. I do not agree with the author's proposed solution, but I do agree that there are problems inherent in the extreme selfishness and greed in our society that we have not adequately addressed.

<comment><USER5> I think part of the question is what you mean by _less disconnected, community-focused and psychologically healthier nation._ and specifically how you define connected and community focused. Most people who use those phrases are talking about their geographic area, but that means little to me.

The community of SQL Server DBAs I participate in is important to me, but that includes members both physically close and around the world. My church group matters to me, and that one is somewhat centered around my general geographic area, but it has people from all over the city. My coworkers are very important in my life, but none of them live anywhere near me (I live in the South part of Las Vegas, work in the North, most of my coworkers live relatively close to the office.)

The people who live in my neighborhood do not play a significant part in my life. They are thankfully all very nice people, and I wish them the best and say "Hello" when I meet them while walking my dog, but I have very little in common and little reason to interact with them. If you mean this group by connected and community focused, then why would we want that?

<comment><USER6> Because you have self selected yourself into a mono-culture of people very much like yourself. You have no reason, no incentive, to understand and empathize with people different from you. The essay makes that point with respect to the rich and poor kids in the Breakfast Club, who were at least in the same school, vs. the modern high school in the O.C., where everyone is uniformly spoiled and out of touch with other people's reality.

This leads to the increasing political polarization we see today. A relative handful of people taking society's spoils for itself and isolating themselves from the rest of society. If unchecked, do you think this will end well? The end effect is something like the Feudalism rightly decried elsewhere in this thread.

<comment><USER5> I don't know why this was downvoted, I disagree with you, but this does show reasoning.

I do not think I am in a mono-culture though. I am rather focused on few subsets that share some interests with me. That interest is what makes them important to me, but within those communities of importance I am exposed to a variety of viewpoints outside that particular interest.

I do not think that this leads to political polarization. Now, if the only "interest communities" were by political party this may be true, but for someone with non-political party "interest communities" you are likely to be exposed to a wide variety of politicals views. I have both major parties and some independents in my workplace for instance.

 _A relative handful of people taking society's spoils for itself and isolating themselves from the rest of society._

This is a non-sequitor from your other points. Greater political polarization does not imply a greater divide between rich or poor.

As for how it ends, that depends on how people get their wealth. If they get it by creating new wealth and innovation, then yes it will end well. Yes, there will then be enormous division between the wealthy and the poor, but the wealthy will become wealthy precisely by improving the world for everyone, including the poorest. Also in such a society the poor have at least a chance to become wealthy (perhaps not a statistically good one, but a genuince chance).

If they become wealthy through taking of taxes, wealth redistribution, or outright theft, then the end will be predictably horrible.

One place to look for a well thought out reasoning of this is <http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html> .

<comment><USER4> _If they become wealthy through taking of taxes, wealth redistribution, or outright theft, then the end will be predictably horrible._

There is trouble in rhetoric like this. You have asserted an equivalence class of taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft, which are three different things. Taxes are the dues you pay to the society in which you live. In a democratic society, you get _one_ vote in how those dues are spent, and a voice to convince others that your way is right. Of course, money talks, and this process can be corrupted in innumerable ways.

Wealth redistribution happens on a large scale through a pattern of market forces, governmental intervention, and other economic and psychological factors. The last forty years have seen a massive wealth redistribution in the U.S., and it's not in favor of the lower 80%. For many reasons, the ethics of which are fervently debated, this wealth redistribution has been one-way.

Theft is a crime involving the unlawful taking of physical goods.

By asserting this equivalence class, you have already partaken in massive rhetorical fraud which is harming our ability to engage in reasonable debate.

<comment><USER5> You are misinterpreting my intent. Perhaps I was not clear, though I thought I was.

What I was saying is that if someone becomes rich through any of those means than it is almost certainly immoral (note the almost) and that it will most likely lead to problems in society. (Again, note I am talking about people beocming rich this way. Using wealth redistribution to say gauruntee a certain minimum income is a much more complicated situation. Having The government step in and take vast amounts of wealth from some people in order to hand it to one or two people specifically to make them rich is almost certainly going to lead to ruin.)

Taxes are necessary. Not good, but necessary, and I have no hesitation paying a reasonable amount of taxes to provide for necessary functions of government. But, if people are being taxed specifically to make some noble rich then it is both immoral and will lead to problems for society.

Wealth redistribution for the purpose of making some wealthy is tantamount to theft, just government authorized. There are some examples of this that have been in the news lately from Afghanistan were public lands are simply handed over to friends of high government officials either completely free or for a pittance.

To summarize and be completly clear: In the context of being done specifically to make a person or small priveleged group wealthy, taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft are effectively the same. This was a pattern that is mostly seen in ancient feudalisms or some modern third world countries. In the case of being done in an attempt to legitimately improve society then taxes, wealth redistribution, and theft are three very different things.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Semi-bizarre ruminations about why kids from the midwestern U.S. leave home when they grow up and don't come back. As someone who did just that many years ago, I can sum it up in a much shorter way: _because there is nothing going on there_.

Maybe I could have succeeded at the local meat packing plant, or in my local 4H club, or at the smokestack plant down the road but I doubt that I or anyone else would want to be told, as we look out at the world of possibilities, that someone had decreed that this is what we were stuck with for our life's opportunities.

A kind of reverse snobbery atypical for the midwest (where people are generally as friendly and easy-going as one might imagine). Very strange.

<comment><USER8> You raise in passing a very good point to consider when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for a given person?

It's all very well and good to promote "equality" uber alles, but that means that you're going up to a talented person and telling them that they will not be allowed to shine, or that there is no point as there will be no reward for it. Or to open another potential firestorm, when we talk about getting more women into computing that may very well manifest for a particular person as basically saying to her "Look, I know you _think_ you want to study biology, but you _really_ want to study computer science." (At the point where women are the majority of college students, I think there's a certain arrogance involved in telling this mass of women what it is they want to study.)

Basically what I'm getting at is that the micro can't be separated from the macro. If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you _can't_ end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result. If you want a perfectly egalitarian society, you _can't_ tell children they can be whatever they want because egalitarianism will do a lot of choosing for them. (Or perhaps rather you _can_ tell them that, but you will be _lying_.) And that's just one example. A lot of other "things everyone believes" about the macro and the micro can't be reconciled, and trying to force it won't make things any better.

 _You can't have it all_. Ever.

<comment><USER9> >If you want to tell your children they can be anything they want, you can't end up with a perfectly egalitarian society as a result.

Perhaps an easier solution than the author's don't-let-anyone-excel would be to de-stigmatize lower-talent positions. Tell your children they can be whatever they want, and then let them follow whatever they're good at. Even if it's plumbing or retail. Fundamentally, I don't think meritocracy is incompatible with mass happiness. (More technically, I believe there exists some value system in which pursuit of excellence is encouraged without associating a sense of shame to "lower" professions.)

> when someone proposes grand social engineering plans: What does it mean for > a given person?

We have to be very careful here to view imbalances as potential indicators of underlying problems, and find and treat those problems rather than the symptoms. To use your example, we have to determine whether systematic pressures are keeping women from choosing CS, and correct those pressures, rather than adding new pressures _to_ choose CS. This point gets made frequently around here, but the mistake is made often enough that it bears repeating: adding different counter-pressures that fix the statistics may mask the problem, but often also exacerbate the underlying issues.

<comment><USER10> Yes. Let me make it personal. Why have I not invented cold fusion, written an operating system, or cured cancer? Answer: because I'm not smart enough.

OK, I don't want to be too defeatist - I should try my best to do what I can. But I realize I have limits, and that I am more able than some and less able than others.

Does that make me unhappy? No. And if it did, I think the fault would be mine. Like everyone else, I try to look on the bright side of things. Nobody is perfectly happy, and studies show that beyond the point where you have enough not to worry all the time, more money doesn't make you happier.

We don't need to stop telling people 'you should try to excel.' But it would be good to add 'in whatever makes you happy.' If you love cars, be a great mechanic, not a sullen one who wishes he was an executive. And if you want to be a scientist but don't have what it takes, well, learning to be happy in something else is part of life. We all have to deal with that sort of thing.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...](http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html)

Stick with it...(especially in the middle and towards the end)

I'm still very much trying to digest the contents of this article rather than regurgitating the usual flippant answers.

Not everyone can get a job in at their local Google datacenter, even if they train for 2 years. (There was an amazing NPR story recently to this effect.) And while I have moved multiple times, and across two hemispheres to get to Silicon Valley (and yet still can't call myself local to _anywhere_ ) I feel some obligation to satiate something I which appears as burgeoning _task_ vacuum in rural America.

That is, there is a tremendous amount of idle "Turking" power going to waste in the heartlands - lifetimes of mechanical acuity being thrown away on television rather than say another Wikipedia/Github for rapid-prototyped goods .

<comment><USER12> Mr Rowe was pretty much right on. There is a certain class-ism that seems go along with manual labor. I have heard people call plumbers and carpenters "unskilled labor". That is so much crud, it is unbelievable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Shorter version of the article: Meritocracy, when it even works, makes the winners smug and the losers depressed. Economic gains do not equal what we lose in community. We should discourage some necessary conditions for meritocracy (e.g. mobility) to promote traditional symptoms of community/culture (e.g. immobility).

I don't agree with the article, but I enjoyed the cognitive dissonance. I think economic gains more than make up for whatever we've lost, and society is adapting to preserve the things that really matter in new ways. But even accepting that personal accountability negatively affects happiness, it seems easier to try reshape attitudes about personal value, rather than restructure society to make everyone feel included.

<comment><USER13> It's easy to prove as well - meritocratic societies seem to have survived and won over communal societies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It occurs to me that one of the effects of meritocratic mobility is that school systems in less-desirable places get caught in a downward spiral. Public schools in Kansas, for example, get the bulk of their revenue from Kansas taxpayers. But if someone rises through the Kansas school system, does extremely well, and ends up with a high-paying job in New York, that person's taxes will be going to support public schools in New York, not Kansas.

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, I never thought about things from this perspective before. Quite a lot of things I find weird about American culture -- in particular the politics here -- make a lot more sense viewed through this lens.

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions, but I do find the various points raised to be really thought provoking.

<comment><USER10> I thought it was interesting too. I would sum it up as "local culture and equality are important, and are being destroyed by an ideal of individual aspiration. Current policies push us toward the latter; they should be made neutral or to favor the former."

An interesting point. It's true that our scholarship system tends to pull talent from small towns to large ones, and maybe that has negative implications. But to actively discourage people from their ambition seems wrong. Let THEM decide whether local culture, traditional community, etc, are valuable to them.

Another point: is a government-enforced local culture as good as a naturally developed one? Can you ever regain the attitude "that's the way life is around here, just like in great-grandpa's day" by making policies? Or will you just have festering resentment by those with stunted talent? To me, this is part of the inherent flaw of communism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Long but worth the read, because insightful, well researched and written. It questions a value that can be so deeply rooted in our paradigms that i got a bit of a "shock" myself. I love to read something so refreshing. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_Revolution>

</comment><comment><USER17> Bogus. Lowest unemployment is in "flyover" country: <http://www.bls.gov/web/laummtrk.htm>

These parts of the country have been booming for 10(20?)+ years.

Yes, the parts of the country he visited (especially the Black Hills) are full of the same crappy towns that have always been there. The Black Hills region, although naturally beautiful, is covered by a blight of ramshackle old buildings and trailer homes. And so it has been for some time.

<comment><USER17> Rapid City, which is in the Black Hills Region of South Dakota is #10 lowest unemployment in the Nation. It's also the nastiest part of the state with gangs, crime, etc. I'm making no judgments, etc, just giving you some info.

However, It is IMHO no worse than the outskirts of Philadelphia which I visited for the first time as a high schooler. I won an essay contest and was sent to Valley Forge. I couldn't believe what a sh*thole Philadelphia was and the surrounding area. People sleeping on the streets inside the city. People sitting on rocking chairs on the porch of old ramshackle cabins outside the city.

Again, what do you make of that? People are the same all over. I'm really tired of this "people who live in X are Y" crap. Whether it's America vs China vs Europe or Red State vs Blue State. It's mostly bunk generated by our own biases.

<comment><USER18> As a Rapid City native, I am surprised to hear this. I have not lived there in about 5 years, but I grew up there and my parents and brother still live there.

Sure, there are people on "tough times" but I can't believe that it's the "nastiest part of the state."

Of course, these are just my personal observations. I lived on the "good side" of town and my father (who owns a construction company) did fairly well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I see these situations as people being forced to confront the trade-offs between Equality and Freedom. The prevailing sense in America is that Freedom is the most important value, and that Equality is pretty important too. However, attaining Equality often involves infringing on Freedom and vice- versa. Maximizing economic freedom is one of the core principles of America, which has resulted in amazing wealth and technology, but also means that Equality is inevitably de-emphasized - we have to accept that.

The OP thinks that this is a problem, and that Americans should become more local. However, he fails to realize that America is made up of people who were fed up with staying local. That is why they packed up their bags, left their jobs, friends and family and traveled far to come live here. Why would their offspring be any different?

<comment><USER20> I think you'll find that pretty much all of us are decended from people who were fed up staying local. Otherwise we'd all still be in Kenya.

<comment><USER19> touche

<comment><USER20> Interesting fact that I learned from Time Team recently: the UK has apparently had 7 completely separate waves of human habitation, with the population being completely wiped out by Ice Ages in between.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The author of this has clearly never worked in the UK civil service where promotion is not based on merit but according to arcane rules of how long you have worked there and what you "deserve".

What you end up is a slow lumbering mess. Unable to achieve much (except maintain the status quo - which in fairness seems to be the purpose of the civil service), the cost of doing anything tends to be immense and people spend more time worrying about whose fault it is going to be than making things happen.

<comment><USER20> The civil service _is_ a meritocracy - they just don't use sane metrics for what merit is.

<comment><USER21> Well yes - one metric might be characterised as "how well you are able to work in the civil service".

Something I have to say I was pitifully bad at

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That Vonnegut short story is the first thing that comes to mind for the author's solution:

<http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html>

</comment><comment><USER23> When the premise is that flyover country is rotting because all the really smart people leave and never come back? I'm bailing out of the article.

If anything, I believe high-speed internet will give rise to a new agrarian society based on technology workers.

<comment><USER24> I wish it were so, but I do not think it will be for some time. First, even if the technical means for remote work exist (and the means have existed for some time), inertia delays their adoption. Second, even if business switches to remote work, people will still move to business centers for a while, again by inertia. These two delays are considerable enough that I think it is more likely for us to see another paradigm switch than current trends coming to completion.

Near futureshock: change so fast we barely have time to comprehend current developments until the next shift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Currently, the lowest rates of unemployment are in flyover country. The Dakotas, Wyoming, Oklahoma...

</comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr: When judged on their merit stupid people get upset. However if wealth and status are allocated randomly every loser has an excuses in randomness of luck. Author believes the latter is a better world.

</comment><comment><USER26> The book 'The Big Test' explains the rise of intelligence testing and the origin of the word 'meritocracy'. Prior to intelligence testing, college admittance was very influenced by whether your father had gone to that college. The hierarchy was determined by the status of your school and the senior society you were a member of. The senior George Bush he uses as an example - a Yale man and member of Skull and Bones. He mentions another remarkable fact - until around 1910 or so, 90% of corporate CEOs were Episcopalian. A very interesting book.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not sure at all why this article is this particular forum (neither Hacking nor News is contained). It's socialist proselytism, laced with logical fallacies, pseudo-intellectualism, and bizarre non-sequiturs regarding societies vs. organizations.

It probably works on 16-22 year-olds.

<comment><USER27> Oh - sorry, comrades, to offend the 'collective'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Who is John Galt?</comment>