The unbearable smugness of the press - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/commentary-the-unbearable-smugness-of-the-press-presidential-election-2016/ <comment><USER2> Insulting millions of people serves no other purpose than to point out your own superiority in some way. I can't fathom how much hubris is necessary to do that without feeling ashamed of yourself.

How can it be so hard to be nice to others? Everybody disagrees with everybody else on something. Everybody has false ideas about the truth. Do we toss a kid in a meatgrinder when it has a weird idea about society? No, we include it in our discussions because opinions change when they are challenged. But when they cross the age of 16, or is it 18?, then they suddenly become demons that we need to get rid of. The cancer of our society. Where do you draw the line?

If you honestly think that you have a moral superiority that gives you the right to tell people what to do just because they are stupid (or pick any other negative attribute), then know that there are a lot of people to whom you are literally stupid (they are more intelligent and know more than you). Would it be okay if they told you what to do? If they tried to silence you? Ignored your desperate calls for help, which they think are stupid and wrong?

<comment><USER3> This post-election narrative that liberals hate Trump out of elitist bigotry is killing me. People _hate_ Donald Trump because they're afraid they'll be deported, or their friends and family will be deported. This is very real and very personal for a lot of people, I think it's lame to tell them "calm down, why can't you be nice?" and other platitudes about uniting the country.

<comment><USER4> Ya, and let's not forget his "grab them in the kittens" remark. There is no way to explain that away, none! GWB, even though he stole the election, was much easier to accept than this guy.

We are merely afraid that Trump is as bad as he sounds, whatever the press said about him is irrelevant to that, and much more concrete than Hilary's abstract emails.

<comment><USER5> Seriously, there is no way to explain that remark?

Have you never talked shit off the record? Did you never ever laugh at a racist/classist/* - ist joke?

I agree that Trump will probably be bad, but thats because he clearly has no plan whatsoever.

Yet entire Clinton campaign was just shit slinging, manufactured outrage, meaningless pandering, name calling, avoiding burning issues, more shit slinging, more pandering

She could have gone out and ripped him to shreds should she have focussed on actual plans

Instead she just goes out and calls people deplorable everything-phobes because they dare to oppose PC nonsense. Wanting to deport illegal immigrants is not racist. Pretending that there are no problems with islam, where you've got Europe as a control environment (where they harbor and abet proper terrorists and obstruct law enforcement as hard as they can) is fucking crazy)

<comment><USER6> It's not manufactured outrage. Trump said he uses his power status to grope women without consent simply because he can. He bragged about walking in on teen constestants whilst they were nude. It wasn't him talking shit it was him bragging about doing said shit.

<comment><USER5> Was there any proof? Apart of him talking shit with some other brodudebros while being stupid enoug to keep the mic on...

<comment><USER6> Depends on what you consider proof. I mean, the man himself said that he gropes women because he can. He said this in a private conversation without any knowledge of being recorded. I have not reason not believe his claim. Maybe he was blustering but I don't believe it. He's claimed to walk in on beauty contestants while they are naked. He didn't mind when Howard Stern referred to his daughter as a "piece of ass". The totality of what we know about Donald Trump is such that it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to believe that he has never groped women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't understand how thick headed the mainstream media (MSM) seems to be in not getting it. This "upset" win of Trump (upset in the sense that it didn't play by the MSM's wishes) was not an isolated incident - it's happened in India (2014), it happened in UK (Brexit), and it has been repeated in the US.

The fundamental driver for all three instances has been the removal of all filters on social media. The problem was that for too long the MSM used their power to filter content to its readers/viewers, and the filter was tuned by a group that wanted to script reality in a form that they wished to see come to fruition, even if their stand was hypocritical.

So for example, you'd see a huge hue and cry in the MSM about how freedom of expression was being harmed because a right wing outfit threatened someone for speaking out against a majority religion, and yet, when someone spoke out against Islam, and Islamic groups placed a bounty on his head, the same MSM would just go silent. It is this blatant hypocrisy that finally got them.

And now, with social media, for the first time people have access to unfiltered news and can form their own opinions. And for better or worse, the hypocrisy of the MSM is glaringly obvious for people who have access to multiple viewpoints on an incident - not just a filtered viewpoint. With the hypocrisy bare, it's basically been a revolt against the established media.

And unless the established media takes it upon themselves to be more honest in whatever stand they take, this is going to repeat, because, people aren't fools you know.

<comment><USER8> Yes, there are biases in e.g. the NYT and Washington Post. However, in terms of objectivity, they are miles ahead of the "unfiltered news" on social media. The written press try to check their sources, and hedge their statements if they are not certain. I admit that they do sometimes filter some stories that go against their beliefs/interests. However, they have things like op-eds that often contain different perspectives.

If you look at the "unfiltered news" on social media, most of it starts from a tidbit of information and then twists it to fit whatever narrative they are trying to promote. On top of that, in the social media bubble, you literally never get exposed to contrasting opinions. As an example, a week ago Wikileaks leaked a mail about 'spirit cooking', and tweeted a misleading message. That got picked up by 'news' stories on social media and turned into some satanic ritual. It even got mentions on Fox News. If you were trying to figure out what 'spirit cooking' really was, in the first days the first few pages of google were only links to dubious websites reinforcing that it was some satanic ritual (with authoritative sounding names like usapoliticstoday.com). Only later did you get links to sites debunking the story. I very much doubt that the average reader of these stories ever even went to Google to check the background story. You say people aren't fools. I would say people are easily fooled.

Add to this active disinformation campaigns (alt-right 'news' websites, twitter bots, troll farms), a constant drip of easily twisted Wikileak emails and an FBI director putting his whole weight on the scale during the last week of the election, and you get this disastrous election result.

<comment><USER7> I'll repeat what I said in response to another comment:

I think you're underestimating the intelligence of people. We like to think that we're much better than the average Joe at separating the wheat from the chaff, but the truth is that the average Joe just isn't so bad at it either - or at least, isn't much worse than an editor sitting in _his_ echo chamber.

If I look at my twitter feed now, for example, I have a bunch of tweets criticizing a new decision of the government to withdraw high-denomination currencies (I'm from India), and for every such tweet there are others that are calling out the fallacies of the argument put forth. And vice versa.

Gives me all the viewpoints I need to form an opinion.

<comment><USER4> I think you are overestimating the intelligence of people. Like anti-vaxers who believe vaccines give their kids autism. Where does that come from? Definitely not the mainstream media, they heard some rumors... I imagine this also applies to India where the rumors can get much crazier.

<comment><USER9> The number of people who actually believe that anti-vaccine nonsense is pretty small to be honest.

<comment><USER10> It's hard to know how many of these people believed that vaccines cause autism, but MMR vaccination rates dropped quite a bit in the UK.

[http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news- features/news/index.cfm/mmr-a...](http://www.sfam.org.uk/en/news- features/news/index.cfm/mmr-and-the-media)

>> In 1998−9, 88% of children had been immunized against measles, mumps and rubella. By 2003−4, coverage had fallen to 80% and to 61% in some London areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a guy who once described himself as "very liberal", I have to say that I'm ashamed at the lack of empathy and the sheer smugness of my liberal friends.

There is a disease in modern liberalism about wanting to appear smart, even about things people should have no clue about.

This "wink wink, look how smart I am!" posturing is seriously misplaced and seriously off-putting.

If you want to know why Trump won, you have to start by dismantling this smugness.

<comment><USER12> I mirror your stance in a way... and it is funny how this election has helped me grow as a person. I've rejected labels such as liberal or conservative and consider myself as someone who trys to overcome my natural tendency toward cognitive bias through reason and fact. Until I'm convinced that facts support reason I reserve the adoption of any belief and I always keep an open mind to new facts or stronger reasoning.

<comment><USER11> Personally, I've made a rule that for every two pieces of liberal media I consume on an issue, I should seek at least one argument against it from a conservative.

Online, the dangers of living in an echochamber are very real

<comment><USER12> I applaud and stand with you in your resolve to seek out views that challenge any narrative, liberal media or otherwise, before making your own judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As a European, this article on cracked.com (yes, cracked.com) gave me a lot of insight into why / how Trump won.

[http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no- on...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks- about/)

It's Brexit all over again. Will the politicians in my country (NL) learn to listen to 'the other half', before their campaigns start (next spring)? Probably not.

<comment><USER14> Trump won because people are sick of SJWs. He won because people are sick of being called racists when they're not. He won because his opponent was objectively worse. Any other democrat running against him would have probably led to different results, but the bickering between the children turned out in Trump's favor. It's ridiculous that either one ran. All we can do now is hope Trump does well. It really wouldn't be that hard to do "well"; we haven't had a good president for quite many years.

<comment><USER15> And here I thought Trump won because of record low voter turnouts.

Everyone has a theory.

<comment><USER16> For a little context, some rough voter totals going back to 2000 (in millions):

        2016: 126
        2012: 129
        2008: 131
        2004: 122
        2000: 105

While, certainly, there were less votes cast than the last two elections, it doesn't appear to be a record low.

Edit: Sources are Google for 2016 and Wikipedia for the rest.

<comment><USER17> Don't forget to factor in population growth (above 18 years of age) from 2000 to 2016. Is it enough of a factor to make 2016 the record low? I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was pretty smug about Trump supporters until I started to see a couple things on/after election night:

1\. Clinton underperformed Obama's numbers dramatically in the Rust belt. You can certainly still be a racist if you voted for Obama, but it doesn't necessarily follow that you're a racist if you voted for Trump. There seems to be strong evidence that a number of people in the Rust belt have voted for both men.

2\. 20% of exit polled Trump voters do not think he is qualified to be president.

This was a protest vote by many reasonable(ish) people who are telling the rest of us, "We're doing so poorly right now, it really doesn't matter to us if an incompetent narcissist is President."

I honestly don't know what to do next. I've never hated Republican voters, something I seem to be accused of doing by every underlying assumption in articles about division in our country. I suspect that many people are like me, I never hated the other side, but I lost respect for them long ago. I'm going to try to get it back somehow.

<comment><USER19> A lot of areas around me that went for Obama in the last 2 elections went Trump this time around. And a lot of the areas that went Hillary around here went a lot less heavily Hillary than they did Obama 4 & 8 years ago. This is in suburban New Jersey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I feel like this article is also missing the point. How about the unbearable self-flagellation of the press? I voted for Hillary, but goddamn was she an uninspiring candidate! She played not to lose, and that turned out to be a bad strategy. Donald Trump didn't get some surprisingly high number of votes, Hillary just managed to be even less inspiring than we thought. And now the tone has inevitably flipped to "what did we do wrong? Maybe it was our tone of voice?" Absurd and self-absorbed! Be as smug as you like, just don't be just smug! It's not wrong to reduce Trump's appeal to racism because it's smug, it's wrong because it's wrong. It's lazy thinking. There was a lot of positive and maybe even unfair disdain for trump. But that's not why he won the election. There was also a lot of positive and maybe even unfair hatred for hillary, but that's not why she lost. One candidate was able to harness anger (the way Bernie also did) and one candidate couldn't harness any positively motivating emotions. In fact, hillary was, if anything, the fear candidate. Fear of terrorists (guised as foreign policy experience) and fear of trump himself, fear of his racism and his misogyny. And the press fed those fears, and did little else. Be an smug, who cares. Just be smug for something.

</comment><comment><USER21> As a non-Trump supporter who's frightened that a loose cannon like him can have his finger on the big red nuclear button, I'm disappointed but not surprised that the mainstream media was smug.

Here's an example MSNBC video clip showing what the article is talking about: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zL- ip6GH4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zL-ip6GH4c)

At the 23 second mark in the video, you can see Brian Williams' body language struggling to contain his condescension for Mark Halperin's interpretation of the poll statistics that _could_ point to a Trump victory. Mark wasn't saying Trump will win or even has a good chance of winning. Mark was just saying there's a _possible path_ to winning. Even discussing what's _mathematically possible_ with plenty of hedging, disclaimers, caveats, and uncertainty -- is ridiculed by the mainstream press. Everyone who thinks like Brian was caught up in the same delusion. If they dismiss one of their own professional peers with a minority perspective, it shouldn't be a surprise they treat rural Americans with condescension. (It turned out that Mark was correct in that Trump's late surge would affect the battleground states and that Clinton would misjudge the continued support of previous Obama voters.)

Looking back, a journalist could have assessed Mark's interpretation of the data in 2 ways:

#1) the poll data is a priori correct (there is no hidden Trump vote missed by pollsters) and therefore Mark sees something in the data because he's sympathetic to Trump

#2) Mark is open to the possibility of Trump winning and therefore can see something in the poll data and make (hedged) conclusions about it that all Trump opponents are blind to

It may seem like positions #1 and #2 are just rearranging the words but they are stating opposite cause & effect. They have profound differences in reality. Brian and the rest of msm interpreted any favorable Trump conclusions about the data as situation #1.

It's the same situation with taking Trump's chances seriously when he's characterized as "a clown" or "he insults women":

#1) Trump can't win _because_ he insults women.

#2) Trump can win _regardless_ of whether he insults women.

The mainstream media and elites focused on #1. The election results proved the _actual voters_ standing in line to choose Trump saw the reality as #2.

<comment><USER22> I think against Elizabeth Warren for example the anti-women sentiment would of had a greater effect on the outcome. Hillary Clinton's comments about Monica Lewinsky while first lady and her defence of Bill's actions makes this a bit of a pot kettle black situation. Somebody like Bernie can take the moral high ground on sexism and racism in a way that Hillary's record prevents her from doing so.

<comment><USER21> _> I think against Elizabeth Warren for example the anti-women sentiment would of had a greater effect on the outcome._

Sounds plausible but it's very hard to tell with a black swan candidate like Donald Trump. So many msm articles about Trump insulting blacks[1] and yet, he got _more_ of the black vote than Romney in 2012[2]. It's another glaring example of the disconnect between what narrative the msm feeds us and what actually happened at the voting booths.

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+insults+blacks](https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+insults+blacks)

[2][https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/11/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/11/11/trump-got-more-votes-from-people-of-color-than-romney-did- heres-the-data/)

<comment><USER23> ISTM black Americans are used to (I'm not saying "happy about") being insulted. They meet lots of admitted racists, but also lots of insincere infantilizing jackasses. Obama was neither of those things. The candidates this time around? One of each. Occasionally, one might prefer a different sort of insult...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> For someone looking from the outside, it seemed like 90%+ of the media were all on Clinton's payroll or had some kind of deal with her.

It was disgusting, and one of the reasons why I feared a Clinton presidency. So much of the media being unwilling to criticize her and try to destroy her opponents so easily and so intensely. This coupled with the fact that Clinton herself was paying trolls to make positive comments about her on the Internet to the point where they had full control of one of the largest subreddit's on Reddit (likely with Reddit admins' tacit approval, for the same reason Google and Twitter was banning anti-Hillary hashtags and auto-suggestions) reminded me too much of Putin's Russia (ironically enough) to be comfortable with it.

Also, NY Times was bad enough with this, I expected much more from them, but I'll never forgive or forget Washington Post's bias in this election. For a "general purpose" media entity, it was no better than Breitbart or such on the right.

And it goes without saying that CNN, and often MSNBC were even worse. Those two I've already forgotten about.

</comment><comment><USER25> It spread to the Canadian press (at least Quebec's) like wildfire. Everything I would hear in the media was unapologetically anti-Trump. It lead to a climate where people would just assume that Trump was crazy/racist/mysogenic/untrustworthy, and further confirm their smug idea that the US is full of rednecks. Most people went along with it, and would casually mention how disgusting Trump is, without being able to name one concrete argument for it. "Trump is bad" became an axiom. I'm sure it's been similar in many other countries (including the US).

<comment><USER26> I think that people assumed Trump was "crazy/racist/myogenic/untrustworthy" because there is ample evidence that he really was each and every one of those things. Most of the evidence is in court documents and on tape, completely verifiable. Don't mistake being a "contrarian" for just being wrong. The media reported the facts on Trump and they assumed that facts mattered, but they did not. Or they did but no one cared about the substance of those facts and what they say about what kind of president he might be.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps you're right. I might be overlooking these traits because I don't consider these things (except for trustworthiness) very important.

<comment><USER26> If you think trustworthiness is important then I would suggest that Trump's election should be particularly worrisome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is it.

There's a huge gap between the press corps today: Ivy League educated, NYC- bubble lifestyle and the rest of the country.

The bias is palpable.

And I don't like Trump.

<comment><USER28> I think it is funny/sad that almost every comment online or in person, I find myself feeling I need to add "and I don't like Trump" or equivalent qualifiers, for fear of negative bias in interpretation of any statement I make.]

What happened to where being able to state your opinion or make a logical argument has to to be qualified so you don't get assumed to be racist, or sexist or whatever. I am going to try and unlearn that behavior and assume the best about people until proven otherwise.

<comment><USER27> Ha, I agree.

But with politics, it's all biased.

I'm not 'in fear' of being called 'racist', but I think it's important to know I have no stake in the game. Political bias is a strong thing.

Because 'saying the media is biased' is a trope that you might find over in Trumpland. Even though the are biased about it, they are effectively correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes, the corporate press was smug, hubristic, and often hilariously wrong.

I think the best journalism came from people outside the normal news.

Here are three nontraditional journalists who did excellent work:

\--

Nate Silver did the best math.

His final election prediction is like a crash course in data science. Humble, thorough, quantifies uncertainty, acknowledges that errors may correlate. Explained in plain English and illustrated in a way that would make Edward Tufte proud. He lays out three scenarios (polling average accurate, 3-point error for Clinton, 3-point error for Trump). The latter describes in detail pretty much exactly what ended up happening.

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update- th...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-theres-a- wide-range-of-outcomes-and-most-of-them-come-up-clinton/)

\--

Chris Arnade got the best stories.

He's a former bond trader who now travels the country as a photojournalist, befriending and talking to all kinds of people, mostly working-class and poor.

Here's his best work, in my opinion: [https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/divided-by- meaning-1ab51075...](https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/divided-by- meaning-1ab510759ee7)

It was the first thing that really helped me understand Trump voters.

\--

Finally, Michael Moore nailed it.

Months ago, he wrote an essay called Why Trump Will Win, asking his liberal audience to campaign hard and not get complacent.

[http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/](http://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/)

It came true pretty much exactly as written.

One of his speeches was taken out of context and edited down into an unofficial grassroots Trump ad. It is the single best pitch for Trump that I have heard:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxDRqeuLNag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxDRqeuLNag)

MM really understands the disenfranchised. So many lessons.

</comment><comment><USER30> Since the beginning it was obvious the people would choose _change_ and it actually looked like they would choose _change for the better_ of you allowed them to (as the Bernie vs Trump polls showed).

But Democrat party decided the people knew nothing and they would just make them choose between what looked like _change for the worst_ or for _everything to continue the same_.

And well, people really preferred _change_ non the less.

Democrat party should now do some soul searching, stop blaming others for Trump election, and figure out how they allowed Hilary to manipulate so much the DNC in order to push Bernie aside.

<comment><USER31> > (as the Bernie vs Trump polls showed)

Those same polls also showed Clinton winning handily against Trump. You can't pick one side as proof of your argument when the other side has been proven wrong in reality.

<comment><USER30> No, that's incorrect. Those polls showed Clinton leading against Trump by 3 points, and Bernie leading against Trump by 10 points.

That's a huge diference.

<comment><USER31> Ok, I'll remove "handily" \- my point still stands that you can't point to polls saying X when they also say Y which has been proven wrong since.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Maybe it wasn't the press? Sure, they were completely one-sided, but look, the opponent won with 0 press by his side. So, why do we think that whatever the media said matters so much? Maybe the rhetoric of the democrats was wrong? Maybe every time hillary unconditionally pandered to minorities or women , a switch flipped inside the head of a voter?

Anyway, if you want to attribute something to the press it's their inability to doubt themselves. This actually begins in academia, where social sciences have switched from arguments to a war of punchlines. Skepticism is the foundation of science.

<comment><USER33> Whether they were on his side or not, they still printed every single thing he said, often in giant letters on the front page.

<comment><USER32> ... thinking that it would deter voters, because they could not fathom that someone might actually agree with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As a outside US person, this article is pretty much nailed it. Clearly explained what's going wrong with US media

<comment><USER35> This might not make Americans feel better but other countries have it even worse. Swedish media has been surreal during this election. You would think the US just elected the literal devil as president.

The Bonnier papers (the single company that totally dominates Swedish media) ran a story about how to talk to your children about Trump, instructing parents to tone down the apocalyptic comments in order not to scare the kids too much.

<comment><USER32> Most EU media seemed to have parroted CNN throughout the campaign. In a way, the continental europeans were more shocked tham americans. And they continue to do so, e.g. yesterday's guardian was literally a list of lamentations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I like how in an article written by a liberal acknowledging how condescending the media can be to conservatives, there is a propagation of the myth that in the Middle Ages people thought sickness and demonic possession were the same thing. In fact, the Middle Ages had physicians, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. Not as advanced as ours, but modern medicine didn't just spring up from nowhere.

See for example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Medieval_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hospitals#Medieval_Europe) \- there were hospitals, and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine_of_Western_E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_medicine_of_Western_Europe#Monasteries) \- medicine certainly involved prayer, but also involved experimenting with different materials to relieve physical symptoms.

</comment><comment><USER37> What an unbelievably refreshing and honest piece. I have to say it's pretty sad when Wikileaks is doing the job of the press, and the Press is doing the job of paid lobbyists. I'm pointing the statement both sides of the political debate, because it's happened to both.

</comment><comment><USER38> _It's a profound failure of empathy_

So "empathy" is the only thing keeping people from becoming complete shitstains?

Empathy is currently experiencing buzz as a positive value people like conspicuously talking about, but what happened to simple old standards?

I don't need to empathize with someone to treat them as human. Maybe this is one the kind of thing that makes people say "everyone should work in the service industry once in their lives" line, because you have to separate seething hatred from evaluating how to behave.

I would think that "not be an insufferable know better douche that considers some people beneath them and without redemption" is pretty obvious when your job is ostensibly informing the public.

<comment><USER17> In fairness, if your job is to inform the public, feeling that you "know better" is somewhere between a job requirement and an occupational hazard.

(Actually, the "sweet spot" is where you _actually_ know more, but don't _feel_ like you do.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The unbearable smugness continues with articles like these

<comment><USER32> How true. Someone should tell them to shut up, and start talking for the people, not _to_ the people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What I love is all the people complaining about "liberals" in such broad, stereotypical strokes - kind of ironic, no?

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSfS2u-SmoI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSfS2u-SmoI)

This basically sums it all up. The news anchor deserves a promotion for saving what little dignity they still have left.

</comment><comment><USER42> I am really enjoying pieces like this, of a dose of humility with self inspection in the wake of the Trump election. Call his election what you will, but if I see more humble news reporting, I'll call that at least some positive.

It's blowing my mind.

</comment><comment><USER43> The problem is that we allowed this election to be cast as a clash between Corporate America's superego and its id. The fact that Hillary Clinton came from a middle-class Midwestern background and that, while she's absolutely _terrible_ at optics, she's above-average for ethics and honesty among politicians... got missed. People went for raw id rather than what they perceived as the superego of a corrupt system.

I personally think that Hillary is far more liberal than she was given credit for. She's been turned into a cynical pragmatist by 20+ years of bitter experience in politics... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I think her heart was in the right place all along. She'd probably twist arms and threaten careers of people on both sides of the aisle to get a public option passed, and that's the kind of ballbuster the country needs. However, she's the sort of person who does very well in 1-on-1 interactions but fails with rooms and groups. She has grace but no charisma. She let her self be painted as a duplicitous Establishment hack.

The irony is that Clinton and Trump voters both voted on the premise of their candidate being radically different from what they'd seen. Clinton voters believed that she was a liberal working within the establishment who'd bring us single-payer healthcare. Trump voters (except for the small percentage who actually are "deplorables", meaning racists and sexists and xenophobes) believed that Trump's dog-whistle rhetoric was just cynical game-playing. It bothers me that people accused Clinton of being "two-faced", while supporting a candidate in whom the best-case scenario is that he doesn't believe half the shit he says.

We also have a country where people hate the perceived cultural elite that is occasionally condescending ("flyover country") more than they hate the socioeconomic elite that is actually ruining their lives and that needs, for the good of red and blue staters, to be overthrown. Numbers may explain that. There are more of us in the 4.99% for them to hate than in the 0.01% that something actually needs to be done about (although I doubt that Trump is the solution).

</comment><comment><USER44> No mention of the lower turnout this year (even as the population continues to grow) or that most voters were actually #WithHer.

The media are suckers for the overton window, and this is calling for more of the same kid gloves that they used during the Bush/Cheney years. No, thanks.

<comment><USER45> > most voters were actually #WithHer.

No, they weren't. According to the latest results, Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote: that means that most voters _didn 't_ vote for her.

More voted for her than for Mr. Trump, but neither earned a plurality of the popular vote.

<comment><USER46> > neither earned a plurality

You mean a majority, no?

<comment><USER45> Yes, I'm an idiot.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bernie Sanders interest-rate cap could end credit-card rewards programs - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/guid/B3E7BB2E-733A-11E9-BFD5-1F1CC48B2404 <comment><USER2> Good. Credit card rewards are great for the few people who have enough self control to not get into debt, but terrible for everyone else. They drive people into a spiral of debt.

</comment><comment><USER3> For what it's worth, it took me a long time to raise money for my startup. Throughout that process, I relied heavily on my credit cards.

I don't believe this would have been possible without high interest rates. I took a calculated risk.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> More importantly it could end credit card access to subprime members. There already aren't a lot of cards to build (or rebuild) your credit.

It is possible that issuers would respond by replacing with secured cards but consumers hate those and introduces a lot more friction into process.

<comment><USER4> _There already aren't a lot of cards to build (or rebuild) your credit._

I never understood that. You'd think that creditworthiness means that you have a habit of paying your bills on time, and that your scheduled payments are in proportion to your income. Nothing more. But in America they insist that you have a credit card and have a history of paying that. It's a problem when you are a recent immigrant and seek to get a mortgage because you'd like to settle in a certain town. If the Sanders proposal does something about that craziness I'm all in favour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Credit card rewards create a very bad incentive because they push consumers to choose cards with high merchant fees, who then have to rise their prices and make everybody pay the bill.

Thus creating a race to the bottom with ever-increasing credit card fees.

<comment><USER6> This needs to be stated in more ways. Credit cards themselves encourage inflation (credit card fees, offset payments, lack of savings to pay for goods). And those same rewards programs are paid for with merchant fees, further encouraging price inflation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And that is bad because..?

Credit card reward programs exist to encourage spending on massively over market interest rates.

Also, capping the interest rate doesn't reduce the benefit to making encouraging people to spend and carry debt, so I doubt they'll go away.

<comment><USER8> >Also, capping the interest rate doesn't reduce the benefit to making encouraging people to spend and carry debt, so I doubt they'll go away.

That is exactly what it does. The benefit to people carrying debt _is_ the interest they pay. If you reduce the interest rate, you reduce that benifit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lots of speculation, mostly from owners of Web sites which profit off marketing credit cards. The article tries to claim that low-interest loans are BAD for consumers because they "generally set at a higher amount each month". Do they really expect any intelligent person to believe this shit?

<comment><USER4> _Do they really expect any intelligent person to believe this shit?_

The Fox News commentariat will swallow it wholesale, and they are more numerous.

<comment><USER10> Are they more numerous, though? I don't know, but recall that Dems did win the popular vote.

More vocal and likely to act in a coordinated effort? Unfortunately, probably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I live in a country where credit cards can't carry a balance. Everyone pays them off every month.

If you need a loan, you ask the bank.

In the absence of credit card interest rates, we pay yearly fees for cards depending on the rewards offered by each.

It's kind of the best of all worlds if you ask me.

<comment><USER12> What if you don't pay?

<comment><USER13> Seems simple. No credit, until you do.

<comment><USER12> But then you carry a balance

<comment><USER13> Not when the law says differently.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows 95 in your web browser via Emscripten and DOSBox - <AUTHOR> http://win95.ajf.me/

<comment><USER2> This has got to be one of the most impressive things I've ever seen. In fullscreen mode, it just brings the late 90's back.

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you liked it! I was the person who made it. Well, I installed Win95 on a disk image, packaged it and made a landing page. The real heroes are the Emscripten, DOSBox, Em-DOSBox and browser folks. Also MS obviously :)

<comment><USER2> Oh cool, thanks for making it!</comment></comment></comment>


One Year as a Developer Advocate - <AUTHOR> http://www.compoundtheory.com/one-year-as-a-developer-advocate/ <comment><USER2> Note: with an adblocker the font doesn't get loaded, that causes a Javascript error and the page remains empty. Nothing against the article or adblockers, I just wanted to let other readers know how to see the content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, that is good to know. I should fix that. Thanks for the heads up.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Cannoli – A compiler for a subset of Python written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joncatanio/cannoli <comment><AUTHOR> I recently finished the code for my thesis and wanted to share with you all :). The goal of the thesis was to evaluate language features of Python that were hypothesized to cause performance issues. Quantifying the cost of these features could be valuable to language designers moving forward. Some interesting results were observed when implementing compiler optimizations for Python. An average speedup of 51% was achieved across a number of benchmarks. The thesis paper is linked on the GitHub repo, I encourage you to read it!

This was also my first experience with Rust. The Rust community is absolutely fantastic and the documentation is great. I had very little trouble with the "learning curve hell" that I hear associated with the language. It was definitely a great choice for this work.

I also included PyPy in my validation section and "WOW". It blew both Cannoli and CPython out of the water in performance. The work they're doing is very interesting and it definitely showed on the benchmarks I worked with.

<comment><USER2> I still don't understand why Pypy hasn't been adopted by Google or Dropbox (the standard bearers of the Python ecosystem) as a forward looking investment. It is constantly underfunded ([https://pypy.org/py3donate.html](https://pypy.org/py3donate.html)) and given the potential for the work that's happening, I don't understand why these guys don't write cheques for a few hundred k.

<comment><USER3> I am hoping Facebook to fund PyPy given that Instagram runs on Python.

It seems Google and Dropbox are not interested. Google is working on Grumpy, Dropbox worked on Pyston.

<comment><USER4> It seems that Instagram is making tweaks here and there, as reported in this weeks LWN for example:

[https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/754163/a38214c50e7b3ece/](https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/754163/a38214c50e7b3ece/)

To be honest I barely use python, but when I read lwn, etc, I get the impression multiple people are tryign to solve multiple problems with python (from the GiL onwards).

It seems like a hard problem, given the dynamic nature of the language and the unwillingness to break the C API.

<comment><USER2> thanks for linking to that!

> _Thomas Wouters asked if he had looked at PyPy. Shapiro said the company > had, but there was only a modest bump in performance for its workload. He > was not the one who did the work, however. Wouters noted that PyPy is more > than "Python with a JIT" because it has its own data model as well._

This is interesting. How much was a "modest bump" in performance ? And why was the bump in performance not a reason for adoption ? Does Pypy break a lot of stuff ?

Oh and this

> _Some of what Shapiro presented did not sit well with Guido van Rossum, who > loudly objected to Shapiro 's tone, which was condescending, he said. Van > Rossum thought that Shapiro did not really mean to be condescending, but > that was how he came across and it was not appreciated. The presentation > made it sound like Shapiro and his colleagues were the first to think about > these issues and to recognize the inefficiencies, but that is not the case. > Shapiro was momentarily flustered by the outburst and its vehemence, but got > back on track fairly quickly._

> _Shapiro 's overall point was that he felt Python sacrificed its performance > for flexibility and generality, but the dynamic features are typically not > used heavily in performance-sensitive production workloads. So he believes > it makes sense to optimize for the common case at the expense of the less- > common cases. But Shapiro may not be aware that the Python core developers > have often preferred simpler, more understandable code that is easier to > read and follow, over more complex algorithms and data structures in the > interpreter. Some performance may well have been sacrificed for > readability._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't a really important question, but why the name Cannoli? I feel like you missed an opportunity here to call it "PycRust". (c standing for "compiled to" of course)

<comment><USER6> I think I read this as "Pike Rust" about 5 times before I got the joke. I guess it's time for that 2PM coffee.

<comment><USER7> Took me a minute too. "pie crust".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice work Jon! The cannoli logo is great!

Spun up a quick dashboard of the project here: [https://chart.ly/github- dashboard/joncatanio/cannoli](https://chart.ly/github- dashboard/joncatanio/cannoli)

Not tons of revelations there, but cool to see your longest streak was 7 days straight committing to the repo. Also cool to know this is part of your thesis.

What are your plans after Cal Poly?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very cool! Thanks for doing that :)!

I'm actually moving out to NYC this July to work for Major League Baseball. The Advanced Media division (MLBAM). I'll be doing some software engineering there, mainly API work for various apps, I'm very excited about it!

I'll have to work on compilers in my free time haha, I really enjoyed the work I did on this thesis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome! I definitely recommend reading through Jon's thesis (link on GitHub). It's well written and very readable even if you know nothing of Rust or compilers.

</comment><comment><USER10> How was your experience using Rust as a target language (instead of C)? I understand that Rust has lots of features for when you want to write code by hand but do those also help when you are working with generated code? Or does the borrow checker get in the way all the time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! The "Compiling Python" section of my thesis is pretty much an explanation of how I had to translate elements of Python into Rust _because of_ the borrow checker. There were a couple tricks (like using closures for functions) to getting around compile-time borrow checking. Some situations required the use of Rc & RefCell to provide multiple references to mutable data, this defers borrow checking to run time. So yes, the borrow checker got in the way. But I didn't have to write a garbage collector because the automatic memory management was handled via Rust's ownership rules (the caveat here is with cyclical references which would need to be tracked, this work was omitted for time).

It does complicate the generated code, I don't know if Rust is the greatest intermediate representation. But I do think it was a better choice than C. Debugging the generated code was so great because of the detail that the Rust compiler displays for warnings/errors.

I'd be interested in seeing how a Python interpreter written in Rust would compare to CPython, this would probably make use of more Rust optimizations (than trying to generate code).

<comment><USER10> Ah, I hadn't realized that Cannoli is also using Rust-style memory management. In that case compiling to Rust would certainly help a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting project... Why python, out of curiosity?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've used Python quite a bit for various projects. For a compilers class I wrote a compiler in Python and had a blast. So I spoke with that advisor and decided I wanted to get a Master's and he had suggested a project that analyses Python. The main question concerned which dynamic features of a language cause performance issues. Python just happened to have a lot of the features that we hypothesized caused slowdowns so we chose it. Plus we were both familiar with the language so that was a draw.

The same analysis could be done on JS or Ruby, it would be cool to see if a similar compiler would yield the same performance results for restricting features in JS/Ruby. It would also validate this work nicely as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The name of the thesis this repo is a part of

> Leave the Features: Take the Cannoli - Jonathan Catanio

That's pretty good

</comment><comment><USER13> Leave the features - take the cannoli.

Made me laugh out loud.

</comment><comment><USER14> Skimmed it. They spent a lot of time flushing printing to the screen</comment>


Brownies delivered to your door, every month - <AUTHOR> http://joeallen.pro/brownies/

<comment><USER2> I clicked on this to see if they were being shipped from Colorado.</comment>


Numerical-Analysis-Examples - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ergenekonyigit/Numerical-Analysis-Examples <comment><USER2> Note the GPL license. Nothing wrong with that but if you copy one of these into a code base you're developing, GPL applies to the whole "derived work". If you're sufficiently cautious about legal matters it may be be best to avoid looking at this code at all if you plan to implement any of these techniques in a non-GPL project.

<comment><AUTHOR> I changed license.

<comment><USER2> Excellent!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is that based on a common book on numerical analysis?

Because one thing I'd miss in the examples would be a few lines of comments - if they're meant to be illustrative of a book that's ok, but learning the other way (looking at source code, structure and comments) is also a good way for many people to understand. If you're well read in source code, you can read it to understand the math better.

<comment><USER4> Check out "Analysis of Numerical Methods" by Isaacson and Keller. It's a nice book, and cheap, too.

<comment><USER3> Thanks - what I meant was whether the chapter-like structure of the examples follows one particular book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In terms of education this makes sense. You can read the code of common numerical algorithms, written for clarity rather than speed, and learn how they works. Not very comprehensive yet, but it can get there. Also, contributing to this repo is a good way to learn.

That said, for actually getting the job done, you would probably use a library like numpy instead of a library like this, as it is more powerful, both in terms of execution speed and speed of development.

</comment><comment><USER6> This has to be one of the easiest open source projects you can contribute to if you are looking to do so.

Each contribution is small and modular, so you don't have to learn several thousand lines of code.

The "real world" knowledge you have to learn is pretty specific and easy to convert into code (compared to, say, legal opinions or object recognition).

<comment><USER7> But that is for good reason -- it seems to exist mainly for pedagogical reasons. It is more like contributing to a textbook. Contributing to the "real world" software (NumPY, OpenBLAS, etc) which is optimized and battle-hardened is tougher exactly for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey, I did a lot of these while I was learning Haskell

[https://github.com/Marcus-Rosti/numerical-methods](https://github.com/Marcus- Rosti/numerical-methods)</comment>


NeuroSAT: Learning a SAT Solver from Single-Bit Supervision - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03685 <comment><USER2> Wow, that's kinda interesting. I somehow cannot get rid of the feeling of having a really nice hammer and then treating everything as a nail. There are other uses of deep/machine learning that could help SAT solvers.

For example, one could try to better guess the learnt clauses to keep/throw away or to restart when the search space is deemed non-interesting through prediction models built using machine learning. See (my) blogpost here: [https://www.msoos.org/2018/01/predicting-clause- usefulness/](https://www.msoos.org/2018/01/predicting-clause-usefulness/) (sorry, self-promotion, but relevant)

Let's not forget the work that could be done on auto-configuring SAT solvers, tuning their configuration to the instance, as per the competition at: [http://aclib.net/cssc2014/](http://aclib.net/cssc2014/)

Another piece of work in this domain are portifolio solvers, which pick the best-fitting SAT solver from a list of potentials, after having guessed the best one given the instance profile, e.g. priss at [http://tools.computational- logic.org/content/riss.php](http://tools.computational- logic.org/content/riss.php)

I think there are some interesting low-hanging fruits in there somewhere, using regular SAT solvers and machine/deep learning, exploiting domain- specific information and know-how.

<comment><USER3> I have not been too impressed with fancier SAT solvers. I'm currently drafting a blog post where I compare Minisat, Picosat, Cryptominisat, Lingeling and Glucose. (Those were all that I could easily get running on Linux. Open to more suggestions.)

The venerable Minisat was (for the most part) the fastest in my simple use case. What I did notice though was that the "smarter" solvers were more consistent. A poorly written CNF might take 50x longer than it should (when compared to N-1 and N+1 instances). Minisat (but moreso Picosat) would occasionally hit an edge case or something and slow way down. Fancier solvers produced a nice clean line on the graphs, without anomalous 50x spikes.

<comment><USER2> For smaller problems, the fancier solvers are actually worse than MiniSat/Picosat. That's because of the overhead of creating and maintaining datastructures and the fancy preprocessing. The larger, more complex solvers are meant to have a better chance to solve more complex problems and will use hybrid strategies to make sure they don't accidentally go down into some rabbit hole. So I would expect them to have better consistency.

Note that winning in the competition, until 2017, meant you solved the most instances, each with a ~5000s timeout. So if you solved every single one within 4999s you won, you were the best... This obviously encouraged incredibly long startup times that are gained back over the overall 5000s timeout. It clearly does not mimic normal use-cases.

<comment><USER3> Thanks. That makes sense. Most of my stuff has (at most) a few million clauses and usually takes between 1-600 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a second I was wondering whether test prep for American college-bound high schoolers had entered an amazing AI-fueled arms race. Then I realized this was actually about the Boolean satisfiability problem.</comment>


Shedding Light on Dark Bandwidth - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/09/14/shedding-light-dark-bandwidth/ <comment><USER2> _As ARM Research architect, Jonathan Beard describes it, the way systems work now is a lot like ordering a tiny watch battery online and having it delivered in a box that could fit something an order of magnitude larger and with a lot of unnecessary packaging around it to account for the extra space_

Seems that's how most stuff we order online IS delivered. I can see the point, but maybe "unnecessary" is more a matter of perspective?

<comment><USER3> Well, we're up against limits of nature now. We can't go smaller; CPUs won't get much faster automatically. They'll only get wider and use existing space more efficiently.

<comment> rusty-pl Exactly. Architects are a bit like that kid that took all the easy classes, got all A's and just now realized they had to work in the real world. Things are going to likely change rapidly in micro architecture and architecture over the next ten years, far more than in the past thirty. Frequency scaling and node shrinkage killed the art. I can't wait to see more from this guy, the paper referenced on another comment seems to be vey close to what is described by Beard in this position piece. I wonder what else he has going on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be quite interesting if we ended up with a query language that treats our memory as a remote device the same way we have query languages for our databases.

<comment><USER5> This might be interesting for you then: [http://www.jonathanbeard.io/pdf/b17a.pdf](http://www.jonathanbeard.io/pdf/b17a.pdf)

<comment><USER6> > The key technology presented in this paper is the Sparse Data Reduction > Engine (SPDRE)

It's a shame you missed the opportunity to call this a Sparse Data Engine (SpaDE) - you would then get nice terminology about shovelling data around. On the other hand, the work around cache invalidation looks solid, and one out of two ain't bad :).

As you note in the paper, a key difference between SPDRE and things like Impulse is that SPDRE works in batch, whereas Impulse is on-demand. That means a higher up-front cost for setting up a reorganisation, but a lower cost for accessing it. Do we know how that advantages and disadvantages the two approaches in different domains?

I can imagine that for classic HPC stuff like working on matrices, batch is better. You have a matrix of structures, and you're going to access some particular field in every one of them, potentially several times. So, all of the work done during reorganisation is useful.

On the other hand, i can imagine that for searchy tasks, as in databases, access might be much sparser and harder to predict. I might have an graph of data that i want to find a path through; i expect to only touch a tiny number of the nodes in the graph, but i don't know which ones upfront. Reorganising the relevant data out of all the nodes would be a huge amount of wasted work.

The programmer interface to both approaches seems like it could be pretty similar: define a reorganisation that should exist somewhere in memory, wait for a signal that that it is ready, access it, tear it down. Does that open the door to hybrid approaches which combine on-line calculation with speculative bulk work? That would limit the interface to a lowest common denominator way to specify reorganisations; would that sacrifice too much power?

<comment><USER5> It'll be called SPiDRE (pronounced spider) at MEMSYS. Name coined by a colleague, I can't take credit.

Thanks for reading! You'll have to wait for the presentation and follow-on papers for some of those answers :). If you read the Dark Bandwidth paper, there are some solutions mentioned there and in the presentation ([http://www.jonathanbeard.io/slides/beard_hcpm2017.pdf](http://www.jonathanbeard.io/slides/beard_hcpm2017.pdf)) that could apply to what you suggest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've always wondered about such schemes. The references at the end are welcomed.</comment>


Discovery that quasars don't show time dilation mystifies astronomers - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news190027752.html

<comment><USER2> There's a little discussion at <http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2666411> where someone going by the name "Vanadium 50", apparently a moderator there, says:

"You're seeing some bad, bad reporting here. [...] I don't have access to the latest Hawkins paper, but what he does not do is look at a particular feature (e.g. a SN light curve) and show it does not appear more slowly in distant QSO's, but he lumps together all optical variations, does a Fourier transform and shows that the ensemble appears independent of distance. This is a much more complicated measurement, and it is much more difficult to interpret easily. [...] Any sort of one line conclusion like "QSOs don't exhibit time dilation" is oversimplistic."

This, plus my impression that every time I've seen a PhysOrg link on HN it's been sensationalized at best, inclines me to wait for more detailed information from more obviously-reliable sources before jumping to any conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER2> Earlier brief article by the same author: <http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/553/2/L97/fulltext> . I don't know what's new in his latest; it seems to be qualitatively similar.</comment>


How Bitcoin's Blockchain Could Power an Alternate Internet - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/how-bitcoins-blockchain-could-power-an-alternate-internet-bb501855af67 <comment><USER2> If they really mean the internet, I just dont see how the bitcoin blockchain can exist without the Internet. It's not a way to transmit information without IP (or an equivalent protocol)

If they mean the Web, well, there already is something working that solve the same problems, it's call Freenet and near to no one use it (at least "normal" people. Cryptoanarchists and techies don't count)

The biggest problem with the blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node need a full copy of it. Storing data in it mean duplicating it for every node, and it has enormous costs. Try storing 1GB of data (for example, a movie) in it...

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin works right without "the internet" or even an IP network, you can sneaker net around the Blockchain, if you like.

But indeed, Bitcoin-- and the technology in it-- doesn't generally solve the hard problems the web presents (just like the prior distributed system technology before Bitcoin didn't solve Bitcoin's issues). There is a lot of seriously misplaced hype in this space.

A bit of pedantry on your last comment: "The biggest problem with the blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node need a full copy of it" \-- this isn't true. Please see section 7 of the original Bitcoin whitepaper "Reclaiming disk space".

It's still not a suitable mechanism to store arbitrary data, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I personally feel DNSSEC and DANE are just a grave misplacement of trust, and hope something similar to Namecoin is pivotal in what comes after DNS. I'd rather this was the legacy of Bitcoin than a mildly interesting poke at the Fed where you don't even get the privacy afforded to you by a credit card transaction over TLS... oh dang, sorry, my jaded cynicism slipped in again.

</comment><comment><USER5> The blockchain is to the web as the web is to television and radio. It's an infrastructural component and any time we have new infrastructure we redistribute our resources to gain the most benefit but we never replace old infrastructure we just change our utilization of it. The blockchain is ideal for directories and metadata; data that _needs_ to be public, immutable, and verifiable. Anything that does not directly benefit from the features of the blockchain _should_ be handled by other protocols such as torrent or web or other.

</comment><comment><USER6> A good part-overview and part-prediction on the blockchain.

The author however has a rather dismissive tone when he says that __" The blockchain literature is packed with graduate dissertations from the Rube Goldberg school of systems design" __. Perhaps I misread the tone, but IMO, the most important achievements come exactly when such dots are connected together.

That said, there's not a single mention of one of the most important issues in the adoption of the blockchain today - what are the things that prevent the creation of a high throughput blockchain where each individual transaction completes much faster, in order to realistically scale to the kind of workloads that the author's uses cases are likely to throw at it?

<comment><USER7> [https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second- bloc...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/)

<comment><USER8> Ethereum is a scam. Its author received millions of USD in funding, and after a year the only things he has delivered are blog posts that are mostly just PoS propaganda. PoS is a flawed concept, but its proponents dismiss all criticism by saying "we added all these patches and unnecessary complexity and fixed it! Look, no one has hacked it yet!".

<comment><USER9> As someone using the ethereum alpha software regularly, I have to disagree- They have produced a lot of great code so far, and it seems likely now that ethereum will be live and in operation in early March (though admittedly it'll still have some shortcomings at that point)

As for PoS vs PoW, yes PoS gives you less objectivity on "truth" in block determination- If you define "flawed" as anything less objective than "PoW" then it would certainly meet your definition. The question is how many people feel the way you do on this matter, and what impact this will have on the success of ethereum as a product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A proof of work based system does not scale. One needs something else to make this ideas viable.

<comment><USER9> Well, certainly "Proof of stake" has been getting more popular in the cryptocurrency community... this system has a lot less overhead than PoW, though it's still controversial for technical reasons that are hard to describe in a brief comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't bitcoin already owned by a mining pool (ownership defined as an entity that can express 51% of the mining power)? Why is anyone even playing with this system anymore - the growth of the blockchain is controllable by a single entity! Isn't preventing that the whole point?!

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/bitcoin-pool- ghash-i...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/bitcoin-pool-ghash-io- commits-to-40-hashrate-limit-after-its-51-breach/)

When a protocol depends on the "Evil Bit" being set to 0 to function correctly, that protocol is _broken_.

</comment><comment><USER12> GUYS GUYS I GOT IT

HACKER NEWS, BUT __ON THE BLOCKCHAIN __

ALL I NEED IS VC AND SOME DEVS

</comment><comment><USER13> The Bitcoin blockchain provides a tamper-resistant ledger to which anyone can add, but no one can delete. That's useful for a narrow range of use cases, but not revolutionary.

Bitcoin itself is in a screaming dive right now, at $215 and dropping. $214.77. $213.41. ...

<comment><USER13> Bitcoin bottomed at $152. Back up to the low $180s now. No idea what happened. Bitcoin is roughly back to before the China bubble now.</comment></comment>