Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/dweekly/posts/10101729307500703 <comment><USER2> We are currently building applications for our shops in Africa (Rwanda, Kenya and Uganda) at my current company.

Kenya is not even the worst of all three, Uganda is really a disaster in terms of connectivity. In Uganda it's even difficult to get actual phone signal in most of the country. And you never have reliable Internet anyway, it works like half of the time even if you are in the few right places in the country. Building applications for this kind of environment has been quite challenging.

In a few shops in Uganda, the only way to get data back is by USB keys, so you have an actual truck going there with data to send to the shop and data to get back from the shop. We are building connectivity out of trucks and USB keys.

<comment><USER3> That sounds like a challenge! What line of business are you in that can survive that bad connectivity?

<comment><USER2> We are selling small solar panel kits in small towns on those three countries. The goal is to have a few lights in places where there is no electricity grid at all (it's a for-profit company, not charity). We handle pretty much everything ourselves there since there is not a lot of services pre-built to help you. The shops are selling the kits on payplan since it's quite expensive for the local purchase power. We are the equivalent of a car dealer locally to give a comparison. And the shops are running some software to handle all of that, so this is where my problems are starting ! :)

<comment><USER4> Sounds like you could branch out and offer these infrastructure services to other businesses, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 250ms to Facebook and that 'sucks', glad to see New Zealand's opinion on our internet connectivity is validated!

I routinely see 270-300ms pings to facebook. Anything on Amazon's CDN is at 150ms that as is CloudFlare. Akamai does have local nodes, as does Google but the lack of competition on the cable makes it slow.

Guess I should move to Kenya?

<comment><USER6> Same for Australia. (at least outside of state capitals) It's surprising how quickly you can get used to facts like github actually timing out on ssh connection...

I really hope that something like ppsp / swarm / ipfs gets integrated into browsers. I'm pretty sure almost every non-user-content file I download every day has been downloaded somewhere in my town. I shouldn't have to go all the way to the US to get it.

<comment><USER7> [https://mosh.mit.edu/](https://mosh.mit.edu/) may be of use to you as an alternative to ssh

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why CloudFlare is building out PoPs in Africa. Our goal is to be 10s of ms from people living there, not 100s, so that people who use CloudFlare for their sites provide a great experience in African countries.

We are already live in Johannesburg and there will be many more.

<comment><USER9> Your Johannesburg PoP is always crashing and gives lots of error messages. Very noticeable every few days with Reddit and HN [clearly shows Johannesburg as the PoP on the error message].

That being said the speed boost is very obvious :)

<comment><USER8> What sort of error messages are you seeing?

<comment><USER9> I would have to screenshot it to you when it shows up next and email/tweet it to you. Something along the lines of overloaded, took too long to respond and then the Cloudflare location shows up as Johannesburg.

When it's with HN it shows something like the twitter feed of @HNStatus pointing out the CloudFlare server as Johannesburg with a request id (I think).

When it's with reddit it shows the reddit mascot crushed up with his orange beady eyes over a pile of orange stuff. Scary stuff.

<comment><USER10> I can confirm this; I'm in Durban, South Africa. It says something about a gateway timeout and pops the HN error page with the twitter feed.

Next time it happens, will screenshot and send to cloudflare.

<comment><USER11> Lacking any further context i'm almost certain this isn't an issue with cloudflare, instead with the upstream web server.

I saw a cloudflare gateway timeout on HN within the last hour, and the twitter feed had a recent post excusing some technical issue.

<comment><USER9> These don't have the twitter feed excusing the issue, the last tweet was a days prior when it happened last. It's as if they only affect African users, the Johannesburg PoP is also used by Kenyan users.

At first, I wondered why the HN Feed never explained the downtime. Then it made sense, it must be cloudflare.

Given that CloudFlare is everywhere & on everyone's websites, it's a pain when it behaves this way affecting users all over a continent.

Uptime websites also report the site as up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is interesting! It makes me wonder if it could also explain why AJAX based google apps like Gmail totally don't work in Addis Abeba in neighboring Ethiopia, even on the speediest of hotel wifis (really, the download speed was not bad, except for the initial lag). And I mean _totally_ don't work ... gmail.com just gives a blank page, while the plain html version works.

I have been wondering if it could be something with limits of the number of multiple connections, or even requests, affecting the AJAX requests in the background, or some kind of unfortunate timeout limit in the javascript layer.

Not sure, but with this info, I'm of course thinking more about the lag.

Would be interesting with more details on how it affects typical AJAX apps!

</comment><comment><USER13> We have contemplated a POP in Kenya. We will get there. Johannesburg should be less than 200ms, so let me see if I can improve that... I would expect about 100ms.

<comment><USER14> JHB to Europe is generally round the 190ms mark. 170 if you're closer to the undersea cables. No way you're going to drop that to 100ms.

<comment><USER15> JHB is much further away from Europe than Kenya, though.

JHB means usually going to Cape Town first, then up the west coast of the continent, wheras Mombassa uses SeaCom, going around the east of the continent. That saves a lot of time from a pure distance perspective alone.

<comment><USER14> >JHB is much further away from Europe than Kenya, though.

Indeed. I was responding to a comment that was discussing JHB though.

SA traffic is split - some of it goes round east (Seacom), some west (SAT3). Ends up being roughly 200ms east or west.

Source: Got my interwebs over said cables for years

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My company provides mobile app content delivery for a bunch of apps. We use a mobile specific protocol (and backend smarts) that measures and records the latencies for each of these connections. Unfortunately, due to a lack of reasonably easy hosting or cloud solution in Africa, all African traffic is currently served out of Europe. As for sub-saharan countries, Nigeria Kenya and South Africa are the only countries where we see any significant traffic at all. And yes, the latencies are horrible, but if we look at our worldwide traffic, there are bad mobile connections everywhere (even in US and Europe) and we have specifically designed the protocol to minimize roundtrips and handle losses more cleverly than TCP, so we do ok under these conditions (though clearly not as well as we would if we had extensive server presence in the continent).

There is some slight chance that Amazon or Google might introduce compute cloud nodes in Africa... as soon as that happens, we'd love to extend our presence there. And if that's not forthcoming in the near future, we'll definitely explore other hosting options (as we've done in India for now).

<comment><USER17> What's the problem with Hetzner? [http://www.hetzner.co.za/](http://www.hetzner.co.za/)

<comment><USER16> Hmm... that's an intriguing possibility. I always thought of Hetzner as a Germany only hosting provider. Thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That is suprising to me.

I lived in Tanzania for a year, and while the internet connection there was not perfect by any stretch of immagination, I had way less ping than this (100 ms to London, where my company's servers are, 120-150 to Boston).

For reference, that is: aerial to my ISP two kilometers away, then fiber to Dar Es Salaam, then Seacom to Mombassa, then Seacom again to Marseille, then terrestrial fiber to London via the channel).

This smells a lot like contention on the seacom link (the big fiber optics carrier that goes up the east coast of Africa through the Suez canal and accross the mediterranean to Marseille). I would be interested to see a traceroute.

Most of the times ISPs in west Africa don't buy enough upstream traffic on undersea cables, creating contention. I can't blame them, it's expensive, but it's mostly an economic argument, not because the servers are too far away (also, most ISPs run pretty agressive caches of everything under the sun).

<comment><USER18> Are you sure that's round trip? It's at the extreme physical limit of being possible, as the distance to Boston, for example, is greater than 12k km as the crow flies, and the speed of light in fiber is about 70% that of light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Summary: Nairobi needs a datacenter, with Akamai and Cloudflare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, QUIC helps a lot.

<comment><USER20> Is QUIC protocol out of experimental phase?

<comment><USER21> It's only in Chrome and only supported by Google's web server. They are using it though. You can see the stats by going to chrome://net-internals/#quic

They are "working" to get it into Apache Traffic Server.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, its communicating over port 443. Apache Traffic Server would sure be a big step forward, if and when that happens.

<comment><USER21> Yeah all QUIC connections are on 443. Here's the most recent public talk from Google about QUIC, given at NANOG 64: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSNT88_gedw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSNT88_gedw)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> having spent a considerable amount of time in the Horn of Africa, the reason African internet connectivity "sucks" is mostly obvious: lack of local talent, substantially increased costs, graft/corruption, and minimal use of peering infrastructure (plenty of peering fabrics, little to no engagement or use)

while I certainly love the excitement this has generated, it's not as easy as "we'll PoP Kenya! We'll PoP Tanzania! We'll PoP all of Africa! 50ms for everyone!"

you would think a place like Djibout with five submarine cables and terrestrial routes into Ethiopia, Sudan, and others, would have a vibrant peering fabric or CDN nodes.

Level3 just put a CDN node in there, and Telecom Italia Sparkle has been there for a while. AFAIK the CDN node is completely under-utilized and Sparkle provides high cost MPLS services for private and governmental outfits; not as much general IP transit.

More work needs to be put in getting carriers to peer at existing points of presence, and costs have to be lowered any way they can.

</comment><comment><USER23> Taking one second to establish the connection doesn't really explain a 12 second load time. TCP takes a little bit to ramp up, but not 30 round trips.

Plus you have TCP preconnect as a lightweight way to avoid that initial delay.

<comment><USER24> It's that, along with local-loop congestion (and eventually packet loss). Then the retransmits begin.

At least that's my experience with anything cellular-network based.

<comment><USER23> But the article is talking about plentiful bandwidth over wires. Not a terrible cell link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is there a way to read this posting without having to log into Facebook?

<comment><USER26> Google cache?

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Sv7aOT...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Sv7aOTA2pjUJ:https://www.facebook.com/dweekly/posts/10101729307500703+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in&client=ubuntu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> _sub-Saharan_ * Africa

<comment><AUTHOR> (fixed, ty)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Type Nairobi in the search box, and you'll see that Akamai has a presence in Nairobi. By the way also in Kampala (Uganda) and Kigali (Rwanda): [http://wwwnui.akamai.com/gnet/globe/index.html](http://wwwnui.akamai.com/gnet/globe/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER29> instead of wires, even between citys the internet is transmitted by air. Im currently in southwest cameroon, and only means for access is over the air. At home, I use mobile network. But even in all the cyber cafes, offices, etc they use different over the air solutions. As far as I know, no one is wired directly to the network. And apparently even from this region, traffic goes to douala over the air, where it meets optical sea cable. Oh, and incoming connection is under monopoly. If it goes down, everyone go dark.

There are startups whose plan is to create local network coverin city for high bandwith content, without relaying to the outside connection as this is mostly bandwith limited. So called alternative network of catche servers and wifi, as often even watching youtube is pain depending on the time and location.

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://angani.co/blog/its-not-how-much-fibre-you-have- its-w...](https://angani.co/blog/its-not-how-much-fibre-you-have-its-what-you- do-with-it/) a response to this post, highlighting our experience over the years in Africa

</comment><comment><USER21> Bummer about all those IPv4 traceroutes. I'd like to see the output of IPv6 traceroutes or mtr output.

<comment><USER24> For .ZA, I've only really seen native IPv6 at jupiter.is and on the TEnet (NREN) network. My university campus doesn't even have native IPv6 available for servers I maintain.

From what I've seen running an HE tunnel through London, Youtube and Facebook make up the bulk of IPv6 traffic (as expected). At least those networks are the only thing routinely dedicating 10%+ of the total inbound traffic to IPv6 according to my home network flow analysis (I think it's about 18% IPv6 usage on a monthly basis).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> >Apple Company

Huh? I thought they're Apple, Inc.

</comment><comment><USER21> Elephant in the room here -> There's no money to be made there (yet)

<comment><USER32> The question then: Is there sufficient first-mover advantage that a far-minded company setting up a datacenter there _now_ could reap the benefits when there is money to be made?

<comment><USER33> I think this leaves out something critical: information infrastructure isn't merely something you deliver to a region to extract profits from it, but something that accelerates growth and helps build a civil society and flourishing middle class.

If I had a couple billion dollars to blow, I'd be spending it on that. Though, maybe that's why I don't have a couple billion to blow =)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hmmm, I live in India and I get ~280 ms ping to Facebook and 180 ms ping to Twitter. Seems mostly an issue of "not-living-in-the-US".

</comment><comment><USER34> Solution: let's replace the "Internet" with only 100 faster-loading websites that we (and the local governments) approve. Win-win, right?

<comment><USER35> I can't help but notice that the writer is only checking US-based websites. I'm sure that local alternatives actually hosted in-country are much faster. Why should users in Kenya care about loading some Silicon Valley dating app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Without debating whether or not it's a good thing, it's inarguable that a healthy portion of the apps that are popular worldwide (outside China) are run by companies headquartered in the US: Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google, Twitter, Instagram. And now Uber.

Given that each one of these has the vigorous majority of their users outside the US and most have substantial non-US infrastructure build, it gets a little strange to label them "US-based".

But I think it's fair to point out that if performance lags to the extreme it may open market opportunities for local competitors to differentiate themselves with speed. Local hosting options are limited, however, making things more challenging for indigenous entrepreneurs. I was amused and appalled to find that many "Kampala web hosting" companies are actually themselves hosted in Los Angeles.

So: not much is hosted in-country. Very little traffic terminates domestically outside caches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think Ethiopia is the worst!

</comment><comment><USER37> In one of Google's lobby there is a 3-D animation of a spinning globe, with spikes that appear wherever and whenever searches are performed, with the height of the spikes being proportional to the rate of query submissions.

The recruiter who showed me this was very proud of google's accomplishment and indeed it was impressive to see the spikes erupting from the east and west coast of the US, Europe, Japan and India.

But I watched quietly, sadly and solemnly South America and Africa. There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else.

Both continents are quite populous.

Among the reasons for the choices I've made in my life and my career the last few years is that I have come to regard the vast majority of the code I've written in my long career as a developer as being of no real lasting value to anyone.

Instead I wander around downtown and oldtown portland seeking out crazy people then finding some way to lift their spirits somehow. It can be a little frightening as I specialize on the particularly violent sort. Those are also the most cruelly isolated:

"LEAVE ME ALONE! LEAVE ME ALONE! WHY DON'T YOU LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE?"

The gent he was accusing had no clue.

"Hi! My name is Mike. What's yours?"

"Jerry! Pleased to meet you."

Does it have to be so hard?

My point is that those google search spikes would be erupting all over South America and Africa were someone to take responsibility to enable them.

I intend to contribute somehow, someday, in part by setting up some nameservers in cybercafes. There are actually lots of them, cybercafes are quite popular in the developing world.

<comment><USER38> I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure.

The issues which prevent those spikes you'd like to see on the maps at Google are education (primarily literacy, especially English literacy), access to devices, and culture. Access to devices is being solved by cheap smartphones becoming obtainable to some degree and constant improvements to data networks in African countries, but the other two have no easy solution.

EDIT: To maybe make it a bit easier - consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots. If you tried to tell him "hey, you could ask Google that question" the only reply you'd get would be "I don't really know about that".

I've had someone come to me to ask me to look up bus fares on the internet for them. They'd hand me a piece of paper with the URL for the bus companies tariff page. Not too interesting until that same person later pulled out his Windows Phone smartphone to make a phone call, and he had full internet access and a good mobile browser on that phone.

<comment><USER39> Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.

<comment><USER24> South African here.

There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop.

For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations.

While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented.

The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like.

TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).

<comment><USER40> I also live in South Africa.

Our mobile networks are in pretty good shape:

* Anyone can buy a prepaid SIM from any supermarket and access the Internet within 10 or 20 minutes. Last time I visited France, it took me 4 days to achieve a similar result.

* Mobile data is cheap when buying in bulk. I pay USD2 per gigabyte.

* LTE coverage is growing fast and RTT is good. For example my ping time to google.com is 30ms.

Conclusion: Private ownership and free markets lead to good service and low cost. ESKOM proves that state ownership of companies and monopolies lead to bad service at high cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Northern China talks to Southern China through Japan, to the extent that they talk at all. All of China at first had one state telecom monopoly, but then some party official set his son up with Northern China. What was left of the state monopoly won't route to it.

My take on what to do about that is to set up servers in both north and south that have website mirrors, as well as a geographically-sensitive nameserver. I don't have a clue how to do the GeoDNS but surely it is a solved problem as big sites require it for load balancing.

<comment><USER21> China Telecom also has a separate AS dedicated to high party officials, VIP's, etc. It still goes through GFW, but it goes through a dedicated, higher performant GFW.

<comment><USER37> The US Government, at least at one time had something called FTS, for the federal telecommunications system. It was a private phone system for Uncle Sam.</comment></comment></comment>


Proposed Arizona law targets birthright citizenship - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70Q94G20110128 <comment><USER2> The Supreme Court has already considered this argument, in 1898's _United States v. Wong Kim Ark_ (Google will turn up good summaries and the full ruling if you're curious).

Spoiler alert: it didn't work that time, and there's no reason why it would work this time.

<comment><USER3> I can think of four reasons: Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Thomas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The irony of this, is that passing it would practically invalidate every United States citizen citizenship. Since, if you can't become a citizen by being born here, how would our parents have become citizens? Aside from those who gained citizenship through legal process--but what right would a non- citizen judge have to grant citizenship in the first place?

<comment><USER5> The debate is whether children of _non-citizen_ immigrants should be granted US citizenship just because they were born on American soil.

<comment><USER6> That's the polite way to say it.

Really it's about whether children of non-citizen _poor Mexican_ immigrants should be granted US citizenship.

If Arizona shared a border with Sweden and all the non-citizens having babies were hot blonde chicks, there would be no immigration debate.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, but it is an interesting question. Do any other countries automatically grant citizenship to children of non-citizens? And what if only one parent is a citizen?

<comment><USER6> _Do any other countries automatically grant citizenship to children of non- citizens?_

Almost every country in the Americas.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#Specific_national_legi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#Specific_national_legislation)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite motivational video? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRB6m4VdeJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRB6m4VdeJQ)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o)</comment>


In New York, Making Ends Meet on a 5-Cent Recycling Deposit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/26/nyregion/collecting-cans-collectors-nyc.html <comment><USER2> An undocumented but well known side effect of the combination of curbside recycling and bottle deposits is that once the cans and bottles are placed outdoors, homeless people cut the bags open to fish out the deposit containers.

This makes a tremendous mess, and the city recycling trucks often won't pick up the the bags once they have been shredded, and it creates litter up and down the street -- it probably costs 5x as much to clean up after the homeless as they get off of the bottle deposits, and this is after they've already performed the labor of separating the solid waste stream.

<comment><USER3> For this to happen, a couple things have to be in place:

1: Ordinary people have to find the deposit so small as to not be worthwhile, so they chuck the cans in with their normal recycling rather than returning them to claim the deposit.

2: The recycling has to go out in bags rather than bins or carts.

I'm in Michigan and even our 10¢ deposit, which was impressive in the 1970s, has ceased to be worthwhile for many people. We should've upped it to 25¢ a decade ago, and expanded it to include juice and other noncarbonated things, but I digress!

However, my city uses a big rolling bin for recycling, so there's no bag to slice open. If someone wanted to root through the bin, they could do so without making a mess.

(And if they decided to dump the bin on the street, after once occurrence I'd be sitting on the porch on trash night with a blunderbuss full o' rock- salt...)

<comment><USER4> I'm in Oregon and our deposit is 10¢ as well, we also have the big bins/carts. The homeless around here will pull everything out of our recycling bin a lot of the time to find cans. Most of the time they'll put it all back, but sometimes they wont, and I'll find my trash/recycling littered about the street.

It also has the effect that almost everyone in my area leaves their trash cans on the street, because if you put them somewhere near your house the homeless people will find it, and invite themselves up onto your property.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The 5 cent (or more) recycling deposit has always made sense to me as essentially a littering/co-mingling tax. Pay a little at purchase which funds the collection and proper disposal/recycling.

<comment><USER6> The article notes that the 5-cent deposit is hampering recycling rather than helping it.

The Natural Resources Defense Council noted that expanding the bottle deposit would "punch a hole in the economic model of curbside recycling." That's because recyclers "want the good stuff, we want the metal and the good plastics."

Whether a can is recycled by curbside pickup or by bringing it to a redemption center probably doesn't really matter environmentally. Curbside might have an advantage if they can more efficiently collect them (using less fuel and such). In this case, removing valuable recyclables like metal and good plastics from the curbside stream means making curbside recycling less valuable overall. It's transferring money from the city to the individuals collecting the cans.

I'm definitely not faulting the people collecting the cans. They're trying to make ends meet in a city that can be tough. However, for the environment, the bottle deposit doesn't seem to be a tax that helps out recycling - it's a tax that hurts recycling.

If the state expands the bottle deposit to include more bottles, it will remove more high-value recyclables from the curbside recycling stream. Those high-value recyclables subsidize the recycling of less valuable recyclables. That means that we lose the funding for a lot of our recycling.

It's ultimately a poor use of human time to just be moving things around. Rather than entering the curbside stream and getting recycled, people do a lot of more labor so that they...get recycled. The end result is the same, but there's more human labor used, more fuel used, more costs paid, etc. And it makes curbside recycling of other items less economical.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by recycling? Melting down the bottles to make "new" glass? That's extremely energy intensive, compared to just cleaning and refilling, which is what is done to deposit bottles (at least here in Germany)

<comment><USER8> That's not what's done when you deposit bottles in most automated "reverse- vending" machines in the US, it gets crushed/shredded then recycled off-site

That being said, this article shows the German version of that, and it looks identical:

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/has-germany- hi...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/has-germany-hit-the- jackpot-of-recycling-the-jurys-still-out)

The action described also seems identical the the US version:

>Almost all German supermarkets have sophisticated "reverse vending machines" that will weigh and scan your bottle to match against a list of acceptable shapes and sizes.

>If your bottle is not on the retailer's list, the machine spits the container back at you. If it matches, the bottle goes down a chute for either recycling or shredding, and the machine hands you a voucher with the added-up Pfand that you can then cash in at the till.

<comment><USER9> Well your second quote states that bottles are _either_ recycled _or_ not.

There are reusable and disposable plastic bottles. The disposable ones are of really thin plastic and crushed, yes. The reusable ones are put into crates and return to the factories so that they can be cleaned and refilled. You can actually look through the machine and see the stacks of crates in the room behind them.

Many glas bottles (e.g. for beer, water and more) are reusable, too. They're treated like reusable plastic bottles. Disposable glas does not have a deposit on it. You take those to a bottle bank (? containers on the street you throw them into), which is emptied once every two weeks (not too sure on the frequency).

Cans are the only type that is always crushed on return, afaik.

<comment><USER8> The article is stating the obvious, if you make it optional, manufacturers will try to get out of it. It looks like it's completely backfired...

<comment><USER9> I'm baffled as to what makes you think that. Here's a list of drinks and packages affected by the compulsory deposit: [https://dpg- pfandsystem.de/index.php/en/compulsory-deposit-f...](https://dpg- pfandsystem.de/index.php/en/compulsory-deposit-for-one-way-drinks- packaging/affected-drinks-and-beverages.html)

Here, have a random statistic - they talk about the decrease in percentage of beverages offered in reusable packaging: [https://de.statista.com/infografik/amp/8077/anteil-von- einwe...](https://de.statista.com/infografik/amp/8077/anteil-von-einweg-und- mehrweg-an-den-getraenkeverpackungen-in-deutschland/) It's apparently "only" 42% for reusables, compared to 56% for disposable ones. It's not perfect, but It's better than what pretty much everybody else in the world is doing.

Edit: turns out the statistica link is not so random - it's based on data published by the federal environmental agency. More (in German) here: [https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/verbrauch- von-g...](https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/publikationen/verbrauch-von- getraenken-in-mehrweg-oekologisch-0)

<comment><USER8> If you're baffled you didn't read the article

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this is important. I also don't think having 5 cent recycling deposits make sense anymore where recycling is mandatory in nyc, there's no reason for a financial incentive. There's got to be a better way to create demand for labor for the people resorting to this, also to just provide services to them with tax money, as opposed to this industry that's created around taking already sorted recyclables and re-appropriating them. The whole thing seems really inhumane and it's funded by the existence of the deposit tax.

<comment><USER11> Well, I hate to break it to you, but your desire not to see human desperation and to remove the things that make it apparent, does not make it go away.

People do these jobs because there's a market for the items in question, and because they're poor. Taking away a deposit (which helps lubricate the return process of useful materials and gives people a reason to value them) for your conscience sake will not make the poverty go away.

Clearly people do throw away cans and bottles when it's not convenient, and these people who clearly don't have better opportunities in front of them, get some minimal (though unfortunate) employment which they choose to do.

Go work to eliminate poverty. Not the outward indicators of it.

<comment><USER12> Also, in terms of things that they could be doing, sorting trash is like one of the least bad things they could be doing.

Eliminate that and people would probably switch to something more unsavory and harmful to society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are two major policy failures on display here. The first is that there isn't enough housing in the city, and they're basically never going to build it. The second is that the city needs to get better waste management technology, instead of just leaving trash out on the streets to feed the rats.

<comment><USER14> Not sure if your "feed the rats" comment was intended to be cruel, or just careless...

<comment><USER15> They likely are referring to feeding actual literal rats. Rats get into trash left out by the street for pickup.

<comment><USER12> In fact, NYC stopped expansion of a composting program because rats were getting into the compost bins in buildings. [https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2018/oct/07/ick-rats-roa...](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2018/oct/07/ick-rats-roaches-rank-smells-dampen-nyc-composting-program)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fun fact: Poland Spring bottles can be returned for a 5-cent deposit, unless they have a thin red line on the label, in which case they are worthless to deposit collectors, and just end up in the trash. (The red line is an indicator that the bottle came from a 24-pack.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why don't they take a mail truck on Mother's day, fill it with bottles and bring it to Michigan? I heard it's 10 cents there.

<comment><USER18> There was a recent podcast episode on a related event :

"Episode 925: A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle : Planet Money : NPR"

[https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob-b...](https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739893511/episode-925-a-mob- boss-a-garbage-boat-and-why-we-recycle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have a great deal of sympathy for these people and it's a shame that the way zoning works it's difficult for there to be enough cheap housing built where people need it.

However, I have some questions for the NY Times:

1\. What does the fact that there are people paying $13,000/month rent have anything to do with the people collecting cans?

2\. They're stealing from the City, as you point out. Why isn't this wrong?

3\. How much tax-free money are they earning? Combined with the benefits they're receiving from Federal Government, City, and State with this untaxed revenue stream, what's their income? How much would a person who pays taxes have to earn to net the same amount?

<comment><USER20> The article quotes the commissioner of the sanitation department saying that collecting cans is decriminalized.

<comment><USER19> There's a difference between "decriminalized" and "legal". Certainly we shouldn't fill jail cells with recycling thieves, but we shouldn't deify them either.

And their income tax theft isn't legal or decriminalized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Everybody drinks soda misses the garbage can, so these people are making the bottle and can recycling market more efficient.

</comment><comment><USER22> The recycling deposit isn't a bounty. It's intended for the person using the goods. If they choose to forgo it by putting it in a bin, it shouldn't go to some random person digging in the bin, but should go to the waste department, which is expensive enough without people exploiting this incentive.

<comment><USER23> In San Francisco we have these old ladies who rummage though people's bins looking for redeemable containers. Most are "conscientious" enough to put the rest of the recyclables back in without leaving a mess on the sidewalk, but some are less caring and you wake up having to put things back in the bin. On the other hand I believe rubbish companies consider the practice theft and so they campaign against the practice.

<comment><USER24> I grew up in Connecticut where we always had redemption value on cans/bottles and so on. The rule was if you sold it you had to take it back. Taking back the cans and bottles was normal for me as a kid, it was how I got change for the vending machines in front of the store.

In CA (in the Bay Area) I am charged redemption value on cans and bottles. I put them in recycling, and guess what, the same truck that picks up my garbage also picks up my recycling... it is all going in the trash.

Recycling is broken, and we need to make more changes to make it effective.

<comment><USER25> In the Bay Area, you're probably being served by Recology. They have trucks with multiple compartments for recycling, composting, and trash, but they also have pretty advanced sorting capabilities at their sites: [https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource- re...](https://www.recology.com/environment-innovation/#resource-recovery)

I don't doubt that recycling needs to be improved in most places, but the San Francisco Bay Area system is among the better ones.

<comment><USER24> Ummm...

In two counties, the same single compartment truck is picking up both cans (trash+recycling) at the same stop. No amount of sorting is going to help fix that mess.

<comment><USER25> You'd be surprised. In the last city I lived in in Orange County, the waste system was deliberately designed to have a single residential container and full sorting done at the waste facility by a combination of people and machines. The claim was that it was actually more effective than curbside sorting because the professionals and automation knew how to process recyclables better than the average resident. I don't know if that is what Recology does in single-truck locations, but it seems likely.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Simple Structure Unites All Human Languages - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/this-simple-structure-unites-all-human-languages <comment><USER3> Steven Pinker's book 'The Language Instinct' talks about pretty much everything a layman would want to know about the basics of language, in layman's terms. It covers syntax, Chomskian grammars, prescriptive vs descriptive grammar, history and relations of languages, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, biological and evolutionary basis for languages, language acquisition in children, differences between human languages and animals' attempts (spoiler: Pinker doesn't give any credit to claims that animals learn language). Big plus of the book is that it uses Chomsky's theories extensively but explains them without need for specialized knowledge (it's explicitly mentioned how Chomsky is unreadable without linguistic training). All in all, much recommended. The book even works well as an audiobook.

Also: in preparation to diving in Kafka's books I learned about a peculiar feature of his style:

> _Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to the German > language which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire > page. Kafka 's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the > full stop—this being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is due to the > construction of subordinate clauses in German which require that the verb be > positioned at the end of the sentence._

>> _"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt." (original)_

> _"As Gregor Samsa one morning from restless dreams awoke, found he himself > in his bed into an enormous vermin transformed."_

There's a neat picture illustrating the difference in the order of the parse tree: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka_bibliography#Eng...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka_bibliography#English_translations)

<comment> matt-snider Thanks for the book recommendation and the link.

From the Wikipedia article:

> German also lacks an informal language register

Can someone provide more insight into what this refers to? There are definitely less formal or technical sounding word variants in German, and of course duzen/siezen to add another level of formality, so I'm not sure what this could refer to.

<comment><USER3> The other comment is not quite right, a 'language register' is not a dialect, even though apparently the whole classification is difficult and imprecise due to the nature of languages as a continuum. A 'language register' means a variant, choice of words, that are used in specific situations or settings: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_\(sociolinguistics\))

So, afaiu an 'informal register' would be something like brospeak or language spoken at home and among friends, contrasted to that spoken with strangers and at work. But I don't know what the situation is in German. With English and Russian, every generation and each subculture invents their own slang just to differentiate themselves―can't imagine how any country would avoid developing informal language, considering the existence of Oktoberfest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know that Chomsky knows about inflectional morphology and so I'm sure that his theory does try to account for it, but I was frustrated that all of the examples here were only about word order. The author said

> Word order is, of course, is far more complex than I've shown here. There > are languages with very free word order, and even within languages there are > many intriguing complexities. However, this idea, that Merge can both > combine bits of language, and reuse them, gives us a unified understanding > of how the grammar of human languages works.

But none of the examples in this simplified account even gestured at noun case, or at the prospect of expressing subject (or agent) with verb conjugation, or at feature agreement.

Is there a straightforward way to understand why Chomsky thinks that this approach addresses those phenomena?

<comment><USER5> Many linguists believe the same set of principles act on sub-word units, a theory called Distributed Morphology or DM[0]

"'Syntactic Hierarchical Structure All the Way Down' entails that elements within syntax and within morphology enter into the same types of constituent structures (such as can be diagrammed through binary branching trees). DM is piece-based in the sense that the elements of both syntax and of morphology are understood as discrete instead of as (the results of) morphophonological processes."[1]

So a rather simplified way to think about it is that each word is a little mini-tree and Merge operations create a branching structure between its constituent parts. Each of those words is then part of the larger sentence- level tree. The important this is that Merge is acting on the units at both levels.

Similarly, Merge can act on structures that are the output of previous Merges, allowing you to have a verb, in a particular conjugation (it's sub-word structure), that selects for a particular type of supra-word structure (a tree) that's headed by a noun with some set of features, eg a particular case.

Another point that is kind of alluded to in the article is that you can create movement from one part of a tree to another with Merge. In previous theories of syntax, there always needed to be both something like Merge and a special "move" operation. But Merge simplifies things quite a bit in that regard.

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

[1] [https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/#how%20DM%20is%20diffe...](https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/dm/#how%20DM%20is%20different)

<comment><USER4> Whoa, that's amazing!

Can you explain a little more about how something like an agreement rule would be analyzed in this framework?

I suppose I didn't quite understand your "that selects for a particular type of super-word structure (a tree) that's headed by a noun with some set of features". Is this sort of akin to a type system in programming? Like the verb is only willing to bind with a subject noun phrase whose head has a particular feature?

<comment><USER5> In this framework, you can think about a morpheme as being a tuple of features. Like you said, it is sort of akin to a type system, where passing the wrong type to a function won't work. A morpheme will select for a feature or set of features from whatever its merged with, and won't merge with something it doesn't agree with.

I think using a language which doesn't care much about word order will be illustrative here, so let's use Latin:

puella vidit canem

The girl sees the dog

We can break this down into:

puell - a vid - et can - <USER2>

girl - NOM.S.FEM sees - S.3 dog - ACC.S.FEM

So 'puella' is the tuple of features [+NOM, +S, +FEM], 'videt' is [+PRES, +ACTIVE, +S, +3], etc.

Here, we want to do a Merge with 'puella' and 'videt': we say that 'puella' selects for the features +NOM, +3, +S (nominative, third person, and singular) in its verb, but doesn't care about the others. It can still agree with its verb if the verb is passive or in the past tense. But if a verb is conjugated in a way that violates the features it selects for (eg the verb is conjugated as first person plural), 'puella' won't merge with it.

As you said, a phrase level structure will have the features of its constituent parts bubble up to it. So once we've done the first Merge with 'puella' and 'videt', our structure is now selecting for a noun phrase that has the feature +ACC. Because 'canem' meets this requirement, we can get the final Merge necessary for our finished sentence.

{ { puella, videt }, canem }

Note that this account still works if we change the order of the sentence to any configuration, we just need to reorder the merges.

<comment><USER6> Yep, but, as soon as you exit very simple phrases subject/action/object, the approach may become complex to apply in practice, a couple (known) latin (tricky) examples (JFYI):

mala mala mala sunt bona

Soli soli soli

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately that's true, which is why linguistics is a field of study with its own journals, rather than something that can be summarized neatly in the space of an HN comment :P

This model really can account for quite complex language data though. For example, check out this account of auxiliary verbs in Basque: [https://www.academia.edu/3112898/A_Distributed_Morphology_An...](https://www.academia.edu/3112898/A_Distributed_Morphology_Analysis_of_Present_Tense_Auxiliaries_in_Zamudio_Basque)

Speaking to your examples: "mala mala mala sunt bona" isn't particularly difficult to analyze this way, you just need to realize that the "mala"s are different words (kind of like the famous English "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" sentence). If I remember the proverb correctly, it means "apples (mala) are good (sunt bona) for a painful jaw (mala mala)".

You need an analysis that allows adjectives to Merge with nouns iff they match case, gender and number, so that allows us to create a noun phrase "mala mala" in the instrumental ablative. Then you need a way to have the case, gender and number of subject bubble to the top of the phrase it will make with an auxiliary so that the adjective after the auxiliary is feature restricted to that case, gender and number. Once the elements of the auxiliary verb phrase have Merged, you get:

{{ mala, sunt }, bona }

Finally you have a rule that allows auxiliary verb phrases to Merge with noun phrases headed by an ablative. If you want the first "mala" to be the subject, then re-Merge it with the whole sentence so far, which in effect moves it to the top of the tree, leaving a trace in its original position.

I'm not sure what the second example means. My best guess is that it's the dative singular of 'sol', a matching masculine dative singular of 'solus' and a genitive singular of 'solum', so something like "for the only sun of the land". If that's correct, you need our previously used rule for Merging adjectives iff they match the noun in case, gender and number. Then you can add an additional rule that genitive nouns can be Merged with noun phrases (without any feature selection needing to take place) to form a new noun phrase.

Hopefully that shows that Merge and feature selection as mechanisms can be used outside of toy models, to actually account for real data.

<comment><USER6> Your translations/guesses are correct, "mala mala mala sunt bona" is afaik an invented phrase, not entirely unlike "I Vitelli dei romani sono belli" (which is bilingual Latin/Italian, meaning in italian "The calves of the Romans are beautiful" but meaning in latin "Go, Vitellio at the sound of the Roman war god") to trick/have some fun of Latin students, while "Soli soli soli" was a phrase sometimes inscribed on sundials.

Anyway, yes, the Merge and feature can work just fine outside of "toy models" the note was about about they soon becoming complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The merge theory is ugly and opportunistic. Chomskian linguistics began as an attempt at using formal-language machinery (context-free phrase grammars mostly) for describing natural languages. It kinda worked with some modifications in the form of Government & Binding theory, but Chomsky wanted it to be not only a decent formalism, but also a valid theory of language in the mind. Therefore, in the 1990s he said: wait, let's get rid of all the complex stuff (deep structure, surface structure, layers of derivation) and restate everything in terms of one and a half operations (merge and move; move is a kind of merge, therefore 1.5). It _looked_ like it greatly simplified the analysis of languages, but then it turned out that to actually build syntactic parse trees for even quite simple sentences and somehow explain grammatical case assignment, for instance, one needs to augment the basic system with all kinds of hideous bells and whistles (arbitrary "feature checking", literally dozens of "functional projections", weird sequences of merge & move operations, etc.). Contemporary research in computational syntax truly and firmly abandoned contemporary Chomskian linguistics (aka the minimalist program) and is much closer to more traditional types of formal syntax theorising such as HPSG, simply because minimalism is an incoherent unformalisable incomprehensible mess. The title of this article is just a hoax.

A good overview: [http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/255](http://langsci- press.org/catalog/book/255)

Edit: grammar

</comment><comment><USER8> > Other animals, even extremely intelligent close evolutionary relatives like > bonobos and chimpanzees, treat sequences of words as sequences, not as > hierarchies. The same is true for modern artificial intelligences based on > deep learning.

That's only true when you think about LSTMs, but stacked CNNs, tree-LSTMs, graph neural net pooling and attention layers can do hierarchical aggregation. Hierarchical representations have been at the centre of many papers. There's even hierarchical reinforcement learning for describing complex actions as composed of simpler actions.

And trees are not good enough to represent language. Graphs would fit better because some leaf nodes in the tree resolve or refer to nodes on other branches (e.g. when you say He referring to the word John present in another place in the same text).

[http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/search?q=hierarchical](http://www.arxiv- sanity.com/search?q=hierarchical)

</comment><comment><USER9> Kind of light, but it makes me think of the methodology I adopted for learning Japanese, which was to basically ignore the ordering of things. Don't get me wrong; I speak the words in the right order. It's just that I didn't _try_ to memorize the ordering of things while learning the language. Because, as I think the article points out, your brain is pretty good at figuring that out without trying.

The most helpful thing I think you can do while studying language, other than placing yourself in real world scenarios where you use it, is to just read (or make up) example dialogues. Words by themselves aren't that helpful because they're often out of context. Sentences are better, but even they benefit from being embedded in a larger structure such as a dialogue or paragraph. I guess the point is, the more context, the better. Or, as the article would say, the more merging the better.

</comment><comment><USER10> Example from the article in Polish:

to drink wine = "pić wino"

I drink wine = "piję wino" or "ja piję wino" or "piję ja wino" or "wino piję ja" or "wino ja piję" or "ja wino piję"

boy caught fish = "chłopiec złapał rybę" or "rybę złapał chłopiec" or ...

There are many languages in which word order doesn't matter, it's the changes to the words that encode role of the word in the sentence, and you can divide the sentence into many alternative hierarchies (and certainly not all of them are strictly binary - some parts of the sentence are trinary or even more complicated, imposing binary structure on them is artifical and misleading).

I think this theory is very lacking in predictive power, says very little about supposed "universal" language and still isn't really universal as there are all sorts of exceptions.

Natural languages doesn't follow formal grammars strictly, especially not such a simplistic one.

</comment><comment><USER11> For those wanting these ideas described in a more mathematical "language" [0-1] are a good start. If you are interested in studying objects and how they compose, you are probably interested in category theory.

[0] [https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2018/02/linguistics_usi...](https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2018/02/linguistics_using_category_the.html) [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf)

[1] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Wow! Thanks a lot. This is a very fascinating application of category theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article only talks about the structure of writing in languages, which is a pretty different thing than "all human languages".

The definition of language is (according to Google), human communication.

For there to be communication, you need a recipient. Which means that mere written words have no meaning without someone reading and interpreting them.

You can analyze syntax and structure all you want, but meaning depends on people's interpretations, which are subjective and depend on multiple other factors.

For instance, if I'm angry, I'll read a text message or an email and interpret it in a completely different way than if I'm calm. The meaning I interpret will also depend on who sent me the message. Neither of these things are captured in the syntax of the messages.

<comment><USER14> That's a puzzling take. I see where you went with it, but I'm inclined to think of writing as already including the recipient. Such as when I write notes for myself. Often, I'm keen to do this in instances where I find a thought worthwhile but also quite subtle or nuanced and therefore forgettable. Sometimes, when I reread these notes quite a while later, I'm surprised at what was occurring to me at the time and happy, sad, amused, or even befuddled at what was going on in my head at that moment. My rereadings are also colored by the context shifts you mention. But in those instances where I didn't succeed in conveying my meaning in a way I can reconnect with later, I don't think I'd consider that note not language, but rather a use of language that failed. It's still language. Even if its communication value is less than desired, it's a message built with the same tools as the messages that do work and pass your communication test. The fact that the intended future reader is there in the mind of the writer makes me think of it as language even before it's read, if it ever is. Otherwise, what is a written message that isn't read? It exists, but as what? How would you characterize it?

<comment><USER13> Thank you for your very thoughtful and insightful reply.

> what is a written message that isn't read?

Imagine an ancient civilization that left written symbols, but the people are long gone, there's no one that knows how to interpret them anymore.

During the time the symbols were not being seen or interpreted by anyone, what would you call them?

But more important than that, is not that the symbols can't mean anything, rather that the meaning will be assigned by the reader when they read it (not just by the syntax of the symbols, which is what the article seemed to imply). And that meaning can be very very different than what the writer intended it to be.

What I'm basically saying is that meaning/interpretation of communication/messages is fluid/dynamic. It depends on the writer, the symbols, the reader and a lot of context. It is not fully contained or captured just by the symbols in which we express it.

Using your comment as an example, your "rereadings are also colored by the contexts shifts".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An interesting article on a possible counter-example: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the- interprete...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the- interpreter-2)

<comment><USER5> This is a widely cited counter-example, but I think most linguists think the case is closed regarding whether this is actually a counter-example to the Chomskyian program. Andrew Nevins and David Pesetsky have an extremely convincing rebuttal of Everett's claim.

[http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s07/myths/nevi...](http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s07/myths/nevinsEtAl07.pdf)

[https://www.academia.edu/3112859/Evidence_and_argumentation_...](https://www.academia.edu/3112859/Evidence_and_argumentation_A_reply_to_Everett_2009_)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't miss the best part, in Randy Morris' comment:

 _Question I the depth this analysis of. Paring rule variability or recursive process, or randomized association efficiency? Arbitrary hierarchy inherent world model categories captures actor, act, actee of. New Guinea highlands reference I languages of number large (day before yesterday), exploit possibilities almost all categorical where._

</comment><comment><USER17> Merge is cons!

<comment><USER5> This is exactly correct! And the head is equivalent to car, the complement is equivalent to cdr, and the specifier is equivalent to cddr.

<comment><USER18> But cons operates sequentially. I thought the point about merge is that it's not sequential?

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure what you mean about Merge being non-sequential. All Merge does is take two elements α and β, then return a binary branching structure with α as the head, like so:

{α, β}

Both α and β can be either some atomic unit, eg a word or a morpheme, or the previous output of Merge (a tree).

This is their first example as rendered as cons:

(cons I (cons drink wine))

As merge:

{ I, { drink, wine } }

As a tree:

 _Edit: I can 't get the tree to look even remotely correct in HN formatting, but you get the idea. It's in the article._

<comment><USER18> It's a thread running through the article that the big thing about merge is that it is hierarchical and not sequential. e.g., see the following passage from the article:

>> [Merge] applies to discrete units of language (words or their parts). It combines these, not sequentially, but hierarchically.

Or the paragraph at the start where human language abilities are contrasted to bonobos' and chimpanzees' and deep learning models' sequential processing; etc.

My knowledge of Lisp is rusty, but as far as I remember it cons is a list operator that joins the head to the tail of a list (like the "|" in Prolog). So it imposes an order - on a sequence. Apologies if I misremember this.

<comment><USER5> Ah I see what you mean. I think the author of that article is making the point that Merge is about creating trees, not appending words together in a more traditional sense. But S-expressions can be used to express trees, so when you're operating on trees notated as S-expressions, adding a parent node to two expressions looks like you're concatenating them.

The author is just trying to say that Merge is doing the same thing we're talking about cons doing to S-expressions to a tree and noting that it creates hierarchy. Eg a new Merge says I've created a new top-level node that is a parent for the two inputs. A second Merge says I've made the first input c-command both inputs of my first Merge and created a new top-level node.

<comment><USER18> But, if I don't misremember this also, cons creates an ordered pair, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you assume that all meanings can be represented by a parse tree, then the claim here is straightforward - "Merge" is a constructor for a binary tree node, and the claim is that Merge can construct any binary tree. I think the trickier question is whether parse trees really do capture everything about a sentence .. my guess is not.

<comment><USER20> Well, a binary tree with unordered children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> How was "Merge" proposed in the early 1990s? Hierarchical structures and compositional semantics predate that by decades.

If the proposition was Merge as a "universal" operation, then I'd say there is no evidence that our brains implement such an operation, and that it has a very shallow stack, which is domain dependent. That makes such an operation a meaningless abstraction, not suitable for explaining anything about human behavior whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER22> Open-ended recursion is not quite universal. Piraha lacks arbitrary causal embedding.</comment>


Show HN: Cinch – We make business transactions simpler - <AUTHOR> http://cinch.strikingly.com/

<comment><USER2> Cool! Might try this out :)

For me, personally, the 'powered by strikingly' was really distracting. Just my 2 cents. Maybe put it at the bottom of the page only?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We love to hear your views and feedback for improvements.</comment>


Review our idea: ip-address tracker for web-developers - <AUTHOR>

While working on some of our projects we've been struggling the problem of preventing spammers or trolls from posting. Unfortunately, captcha is not always a solution (like for example when you have a vote widget, you wouldn't want your users to enter captcha). Browser cookies are not effective, of course. So, you have to track ip-addresses and make sure one ip does not send, say, more than 10 requests to a particular action during 15 minutes. Of course the primitive implementation is a 10-minute session of unintellegent coding. But over time things get more sophisticated, especially when you need to add new rules, track browser user-agents and assign each ip a trustworthy level. So out of 10-minute boredom code it grew into something slightly bigger.
Now we've been thinking. Would anyone be interested, if we make a webservice out of it, a lot like ReCaptcha: with an API and, say, libs for some popular languages, so that anyone could collect, manipulate and validate ip-addresses in their web-project. It would work like this (the simplest case):
1. You send a check request with an ip_address of your user to our service using our API. 2. We check if this ip exists in our db, if no - we add it. 3. Check when was the last activity from it, then check the rules that you set up in our web-interface when you signed up. 4. Then send you back true/false answer based on the rules and on this ip's previously stored data. 5. Based on this simple answer your application decides what to do with the user (so, it would take a 1 line of code to set this thing up in your app).
The service would also provide warnings (email, probably sms) about blacklisted IPs and a web-interface to manage IPs.
What features would you pay for? Or would you at least use it for free? <comment><USER2> Honestly speaking, I think you might have a bit of a chicken and egg problem with getting started.

I like the idea of your app and it's something I could use, but since you're asking your customers to hard code stuff into their application at potentially experience-critical moments, any kind of failure on your part would be pretty disastrous.

This service is something I would use when it matures a little, it's not something I would hook my app into whilst you're just starting out. Venture backing or an established partner might help me convert sooner.

My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER3> It is a good idea but not new. Zed Shaw's Utu took a similar approach: <http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/ragel_state_charts.html> Yes, it is an article about Ragel but it details Utu. There is no trace around Internet about it.

About integrating it in my app, I would use it. Maybe it can be built in different way: publishing a feed with the "offending" IPs (PubSubHubbub?) and leaving the API for only reporting them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wouldn't it be trivial to poison your DB with false reports?

And it would be pretty much impossible for you to distinguish this from the reporter getting hammered for real.

This sort of attack wouldn't be likely ... unless and until your service became popular, at which point the payoff might be worth the trouble.</comment>


Germany's Ritter Sport wins square chocolate battle against Milka - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53510219 <comment><USER2> Yuck, even after living in Germany for a year I still hate Ritter squares.</comment>


Show HN: atom.watch – beautiful clock in the browser - <AUTHOR> http://atom.watch <comment><AUTHOR> Syncing is done with multiple time servers.

Still looking for time servers!

<comment><USER2> Perhaps using pool.ntp.org?

Please do make sure you're following the Rules of Engagement that should be outlined at www.pool.ntp.org.</comment></comment>


The History of Twitter's Rules - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-history-of-twitters-rules <comment><USER2> Any rules for not being down? Twitter is down today.</comment>


Puzzle Websites to Sharpen Your Programming Skills - <AUTHOR> http://sixrevisions.com/resources/10-puzzle-websites-to-sharpen-your-programming-skills/

<comment><USER2> The topcoder headline reminds me of Mythical Man-Month. __"What could you accomplish with a team of 222,375?" __Nothing?

<comment><USER3> Can 222,375 women deliver a child in 0.000040472 months?

<comment> a-priori Properly staggered and with a lead time of 9 months, yes, 222,375 women could deliver a child every 0.000040472 months on average. I'm sorry, was that not the question? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> and they dont mention uva.onlinejudge.org, the acm problem contests and such?

<comment><USER5> I like the uva onlinejudge, spoj is pretty good too: <http://www.spoj.pl/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The assumption here is that programming is about clever problem solving.

Whether this is so depends on the situation.

The challenge of inventing a new kind of app may be far greater than anything associated with its implementation.

Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to make their job more challenging.

<comment><USER7> > Btw, I think that some people want to use difficult languages at work to > make their job more challenging.

Like Java or C++? I'd rather stick with the easy stuff like Haskell, the problems at hand are challenging enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like to go through past puzzles from the Informatics Olympiad (<http://www.olympiad.org.uk/>) for a more theoretical less programmy type of challenge.

<comment><USER9> For algorithms training[1], the USA Computer Olympiad training program is also excellent: <http://train.usaco.org/usacogate>

[1] basically from scratch; it's suitable for smart highschoolers with some programming experience. That website has been responsible for more than a few IOI medals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another interesting site is Sphere online: <http://www.spoj.pl/>

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't like Facebook's puzzles some of them are impossible to solve without using C.

<comment><USER12> Can't you call C functions from pretty much any language worth it's salt nowadays? What are the problems that are intractable in other languages?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> i also like <http://codegolf.com></comment>


Show HN: Edit Text, See Relevant Images. ~200 Lines Of JavaSript - <AUTHOR>

I was experimenting with different term-extraction API's and I came up with this simple HTML5/CSS3/JS thing that shows you relevant images as you enter text.

  http://bupad.agen.si
 Basic scenario
- User enters text
- Terms are instantly extracted from content via Alchemy API
- Google Image search is used to find relevant images on Flickr
- Images are shown in the background
There are some minor perks like the fact that the image searches are rotating around the color wheel (Google let's you specify a desired color of the image), and content is also stored in LocalStorage.
The prototype has a "bug" (HTML5 ContentEditable isn't a good enough replacement for a WYSIWYG, only works in Chrome in Safari) and a few "missing features" (Enlarging images and so on).
Right now it's pretty much client-side, everything happens in JS (OOP Prototype and jQ for Cross-site JSON-P requests):

  http://bupad.agen.si/javascripts/application.js
 Reasons for posting:
I want to gauge the potential and get some feedback. I realize there are players like Zemanta in this field, but I'm pretty sure this could be applied to different use cases.
I am flat broke and late with rent. Will do UI design, Front-End (HTML/CSS/JS) or Server-Side (Rails) development for food & bills. Check my profile for references. If you have work to be done, you want to get in touch with me at firstname.lastname@example.com. You will save a fellow hacker and enjoy my eternal gratitude, as well as my premium services at a discount. <comment><AUTHOR> _Clickable:_

<http://bupad.agen.si>

<http://bupad.agen.si/javascripts/application.js></comment>


JPMorgan Pays for Shorting Madoff Without Telling Anyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-07/jpmorgan-pays-for-shorting-madoff-without-telling-anyone.html <comment><USER2> This is a very misleading article in my opinion. Investment banks provide investors access to risks which they want, in this case investors WANTED access to Madoff structured notes because Madoff had been outperforming, therefore JPM had a find a way to hedge themselves to reduce their risk. After investing a tremendous amount in madoff, JPM probably realized that they could hedge easier by going long the general market on roughly a 1.1 to 1 ratio I would imagine or the structured desk wanted to use their short to hedge another long position they couldn't get out of while retaining some idiosyncratic risk that Madoff was in fact a fraud (this type of tail hedge is very valuable on the st btw). When assessing risks of this size, I am glad that JPM seemed to be asking all the right questions about Madoff (which no one else, not even the SEC, was asking), it is funny JPM is being penalized for this.

Creating a similar idiosyncratic risk could be to sell a gold ETF and own physical gold, paying maybe 30 bps a year for a real outperformance during a) hyperinflation if real gold is needed or b) some gold bars at the ETF turn out to be fake/not there (some have been found to be tungsten) c) another unforseen event. These options are hard to create and very valuable to a huge investment bank such as JPM which is generally very long the mkt in general and actually allows them to make more loans.

Also, most benefiting from rising prices in madoff claims are distressed hedgefunds and investment banks btw. They own probably 90% of the claims now, 'vicitms" selling at roughly 20 cents on the dollar. Anyone really pointing the finger at JPM is very naive about the whole system.

<comment><USER3> ... Did you miss the part about JPM also being Madoff's bank? They sold investments run by their own client (who would not allow due diligence!) to other clients while finding evidence that there was no way the returns could be genuine. Instead of following the law in this situation they ended up trying to make money off the phony securities before they were publicly discovered to be fraudulent.

<comment><USER2> If they really though there was fraud, why wouldnt they have taken a huge short position and reported to the SEC, accelerating the winddown process. This is what saba did with the JPM whale trades, they took a huge CDS position and reported the "whale", making 100mm+.

They didnt do this because a) they didnt know about the fraud, or b) didnt want to hurt their clients.

Everyone likes to point the finger at someone else, but if you were buying madoff structured notes /investing in madoff and knew nothing about the fund and did no research, it is your fault if you lost money.

<comment><USER4> _If they really though there was fraud,_

The issue at hand (and for which JPMorgan was fined) wasn't whether they definitively knew, or "thought" there was a fraud or not. It was for specific violations of the Bank Secrecy Act: failing to report suspicious activity, and failing to create specific controls against money laundering.

All of the recent press articles are really quite clear about this. You may not agree with the SEC's findings of JPM's culpability in these charges; you may not be even particularly fond of the Bank Secrecy Act, for that matter. But you might want to do a little bit of research into what JPM was, you know, _actually prosecuted for_ before engaging in engaging in naked speculation about how what JPM may have "thought" about Madoff's activities based on the extent to which one particular unit may have been shorting his positions.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone else think it's kinda crazy that banks are required by law to act like policemen? Seems like that's the government's job.

<comment><USER6> Everyone is required to act like police to some extent. If someone comes into your sporting goods store looking to buy a baseball bat to attack his neighbor, you're required not to sell it to him (and in some jurisdictions, you're required to call the police).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice summary of the situation. This is the takeaway for me:

"If you think of JPMorgan's businesses as operating more or less independently, but occasionally making each other money by cross-selling, then this mess makes more sense. A London investment bank that considered and rejected a derivative-linked investment in Madoff would have no obligations to report its suspicions to U.S. regulators. A boring custody bank that ran Madoff's checking accounts but had no derivatives traders to get suspicious about him also probably wouldn't be in trouble for missing the Madoff red flags. Combine the two businesses and the same behavior gets you in trouble."

Also, quite refreshing to read an article by someone who apparently has some experience with Wall Street. On a related note: I've been really happy with Bloomberg's coverage recently, of Wall Street specifically and the business world generally. Especially now what WSJ has decided to go full-on partisan.

<comment><USER8> _Also, quite refreshing to read an article by someone who apparently has some experience with Wall Street._

According to his bio he worked in investment banking at Goldman and was an M&A lawyer before that. When I first found his column I went through and read a bunch of them. They're all all pretty good. If you like that sort of financial journalism from the perspective of former practitioners, another good one is Matthew C Klein who I guess used to work at Bridgewater Associates. If you want to kill the rest of your afternoon:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/view/bios/matthew-s- levine/](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/bios/matthew-s-levine/)

[http://dealbreaker.com/author/mlevine/](http://dealbreaker.com/author/mlevine/)

[http://www.bloomberg.com/view/bios/matthew- klein/](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/bios/matthew-klein/)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link to Klein!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That dimon is still being targeted astounds me. This is an example of why even those in power should not be the nail that sticks out. In case you're wondering why dimon, why JP Morgan it all traces back to this [1] event.

1\. in 2008/2009, can't find it on Google bc why have a date search anymore. Jamie Dimon was called before the finance committee to explain the financial meltdown. He allegedly stormed out after representatives asked him truly epically stupid questions, and told one of his aides, "Don't ever put me in front of those fucking morons again". There is no reason other than visibility and a personal grudge that this is targeted at JPMorgan v. the other banks.

<comment><USER10> Congress shouldn't have that much influence over the SEC. I always assumed it was because Dimon is the only CEO able to admit he's not infallable. I also think JPM is ahead of the curve on action against them. Again, they'll admit mistakes and take the fines. The rest of the street is denying everything but I believe they'll eventually be targetted as well.

<comment><USER9> I think you're framing the situation incorrectly. Wall Street is at a state of regulatory capture. Sorry I'm not an SEC apologist, but from what I've seen they walk a fine line between incompetence and brilliance. Everyone on Wall Street makes 'mistakes', and that's because individuals make decisions but there are more rules/laws/best practices than an individual can know. When everyone is operating under prosecutorial discretion, the law disappears, and it's cheaper to cut in, see regulatory capture, your oversight than it is to attempt compliance. Though the litigation industry on wall street might have a bone to pick here. The problem for Dimon is that capture is industry wide, not by an individual or company, as in the case of GE or the big three.

Lets take a real example. Bad things happened in 2008. Congress has to come in and 'clean up'. But Congress is a second order proxy for Wall Street, so clean up means they have to figure out a way to look good to their 'voters' while not putting any of their 'donors' in jail. This is harder than it seems. They tried for a few years to do nothing, because it was 'confusing' and 'complex', people weren't buying it. There was seriously bad mojo for congress, that could possibly threaten a reset on regulation for the entire financial industry. So they needed to find a scapegoat. A few congressmen were pissed at having their hands tied, and Dimon is probably the most visibly brilliant guy on wall street, and he had pissed people off, so he was chosen to be thinned from the heard.

What surprises me is that they haven't stopped. this is probably due to dimon's success, if he had been a little less competent in the intervening years, my bet is he would be less under the gun now. Still this is a valuable lesson to all of us paying attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What percent of their profit was that and how few months will it take for them to make it up?

I think society would happily trade that for actual prison time for a bunch of execs who knew exactly what was going on.

<comment><USER12> Did you read the full article? I was expecting some evil screwing of their customers and putting themselves massively short on Madoff and them to have got off lightly but actually (based solely on this Bloomberg article) got the impression that the punishment was harsh.

From the TFA they were long but in the process of unwinding their position (albeit slightly faster than they helped their customers to do) and they filed the report of suspicions in London but not in the US (by oversight). The other problem seems to have been that the chinese wall between the speculators and the account managers was respected.

<comment><USER13> They were obligated to unwind their customers. They were obligated to report the crimes to UK authorities. I'm not impressed by the fact that there are aspects of this where they actually didn't break any laws, and it isn't a compelling defense for why they shouldn't be fined for the parts where they did.

<comment><USER12> I'm not saying that some punishment may have been appropriate but 1.7Bn plus damages on top seems plenty based on my understanding from the article rather than that they got off lightly as suggested by the post I was responding to.

The relevance of the report in the UK is that it suggests not reporting to the US was oversight rather than a decision to take commercial advantage of the knowledge rather than bring in the authorities (unless they were counting on the UK authorities being useless).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> JPMorgan "Pays" but barely. $1.7 billion is nothing out of $100 billion in annual revenue and $2.5 trillion in assets.

<comment><USER15> Did you read the article? The basically got fined for not doing the SEC's job.

<comment><USER16> With the know your customer laws [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer) it's increasingly the bank's responsibility to do the job of regulators. This is not new. It might be dumb, but it's how the system works(or doesn't work) right now.

<comment><USER10> KYC is about not doing business with terrorists or other undesirables. Madoff was not one of those. He was running a ponzi scheme but was otherwise an upstanding citizen. No bank would have any reason not to do business with him due to KYC due diligence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting read but my knowledge of what I am going to call "advanced banking" kind of leaves me wanting to do some sidebar research.

Can anyone suggest any accessible literature for learning the more complex areas of banking/finance?

<comment><USER18> The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals by Alex Kuznetsov is what I generally recommend developers entering investment banking to read.

(despite "Quantitative Professionals" being in the title it's not math heavy, although you need to be able to think technically - should be fine if your developer)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's pretty clear, and has been pretty clear for years now, that JPM is not only too big to fail, but too big to manage.

In short, JPM needs to be broken up. Most everyone will benefit--JPM managers, line workers, JPM customers, and shareholders, and the worldwide financial system. The only who does not benefit from a break-up is Jamie Dimon whose primary goal is to manage the largest bank around.</comment>