Is Anyone Going to Get Rich Off of Email Newsletters? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/substack-revue-email-newsletter-startups-tinyletter/599557/ <comment><USER2> I read an a16z blog post on the thesis behind their investment in substack, which is the belief that there will be this big "passion" economy where millions of people will be able to make careers out of making podcasts, writing, etc. I don't really buy it.

These things are tools that lower the barrier of entry to creating but that alone doesn't generate mass demand for creators. You will see power laws apply just like it does in many situations, and there will be a handful of people who can pull six or seven figures in something like writing a paid email newsletter.

<comment><USER3> I'm a big big fan of the "1000 true fans" concept as applied here. It's not for everyone but.... who knows? If you are persistent and passionate...

[https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true- fans/](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/)

[https://seths.blog/2008/03/1000-true- fans/](https://seths.blog/2008/03/1000-true-fans/)

<comment><USER4> What if 1,000 true fans is already a power law? Doesn't seem a lot on a global scale, but yet, who can claim to have 1,000 true fans with a paid newsletter? For 1,000 true fans, you probably need 10,000 customers and be exposed to 100,000 people. Because 1% conversion rate to true fans seems about right.

Note: this isn't about strict numbers. 1,000 true fans paying 10 bucks a month might be enough. The same paying $2 a month? Doesn't pay the bills of a family.

I like the concept as well, because it seems a lot more approachable than trying to build a unicorn, but what if only the top 0,1% really get 1,000+ true fans? Still a power law.

<comment><USER5> > For 1,000 true fans, you probably need 10,000 customers and be exposed to > 100,000 people. Because 1% conversion rate to true fans seems about right.

The rule of thumb for email subscriber to paying customer is actually closer to 1% (compared to your 10%) which just means it's that much harder. I don't think there is a rule of thumb for "true fan" conversion, where it might be as high as 50% for something like Tesla and 1% for something like Comcast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There were a lot of people who could claim hipster cred on the TinyLetter boom, because they're talking mostly about when a community / use case decided to use email as a platform. Email was so obviously the most effective way to sell professionally-oriented content that when I started my newsletter in 2012 I was kicking myself that I had waited so long. The seedy side of Internet Marketing, and many less-seedy users, had been doing it since before the dot com bubble. And that was decades after people sold newsletter subscriptions _on paper._

Everything old is new again, sometimes.

<comment><USER7> > _Email was so obviously the most effective way to sell professionally- > oriented content that when I started my newsletter in 2012 I was kicking > myself that I had waited so long._

When's the last time you published to that newsletter?

<comment><USER6> A few years ago; two kids and one very demanding day job have been keeping me busy. Hoping to resurrect it at some point.

<comment><USER7> Definitely looking forward to it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm the guy that submitted this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423263) which might be what this post is in response to.

I have a paid newsletter, and I've started a community / education site dedicated to the model, as I couldn't find one when creating my own.

Let me just say this... people are going to get rich off of paid newsletters, full stop.

But like anything else, it's a many will play, few will win game.

There are examples of newsletters that have done well, and many examples of newsletters that have not.

In my opinion, given the choice between creating a blog and starting a paid newsletter, the choice is a pretty simple one.

Blogging is heavily saturated.

Google is downright hostile towards new, small publishers.

CPM rates are looking downright anemic.

The legal requirements behind affiliate offers are becoming complex, and sometimes confusing to understand.

On the newsletter side you have enhanced discovery, instant monetization with rates chosen by you, an implied audience that is "in theory" additive by nature, not just hit and bounce. Yes, you'll have churn, etc. but that is how I am viewing the value prop.

<comment><USER9> Isn't the main challenge to get people to sign up?

<comment><USER8> No, the main challenge is to produce fantastic content, over a long period of time. That changes the sign up equation substantially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Ben Thompson is doing well on his. If your newsletter provides high enough value then I believe you most certainly can

[https://stratechery.com/](https://stratechery.com/)

<comment><USER11> It is more than "just" a newsletter, but it is certainly hinged around it, and they are doing more than OK: \- [https://www.theinformation.com/](https://www.theinformation.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> AT first I thought this was serendipity, but now I'm starting to think it's a little more than a coincidence that this is the second time in as many days that the topic of paid newsletters has surfaces to the front page of HN (See my post history for some details)

Is there some sort of a push for this particular niche or something?

<comment><USER13> Some HN readers will see a new link posted that reminds them of a relevant link they are familiar with, so they add their own submission. Or they may get interested because of the first post and then seek out more info, ultimately sharing what they found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yes, companies that sell mass mailing services.

</comment><comment><USER15> Jeff Walker has been making money off email since 1996 and showing others how. His stuff is basically the foundation of all the spammy content we see today.

Search for "The Launch Book" and you'll find how to use email to sell.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty surprised this author didn't mention Jason Calacanis at all. He's been going on about this for awhile too.

</comment><comment><USER17> The problem with newsletters from a product perspective: They are not addictive.

<comment><USER18> Hi nightnight1, meet Matt Levine.

<comment><USER19> To go a little bit off topic. Is there any other newsletter that even comes close to Money Stuff for the tech industry and news in general? Yes the Techmeme one is informative for the tech industry and NextDraft is good for getting the news cycles. But both lack humid, irony and witty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So what newsletters out there are actually making money (besides Substack ones)?

<comment><USER21> Morningbrew will be the top example.

Forbes: "Morning Brew's native advertising revenue averages $200,000 a week thanks to more than 40 active clients, including Microsoft, JPMorgan and Allbirds."

<comment><USER22> Here's a nice writeup on Morning Brew's formula: [https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/reverse- en...](https://medium.com/marketing-and-entrepreneurship/reverse-engineered- how-morning-brews-newsletter-makes-200k-per-week-1cb91b847d58)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423263)

</comment><comment><USER24> As others have mentioned, not many are going to get "rich".

However, everyone will get rich.

Rich with information that may not be available online (like what certain people did on their YC application to get in...). Overtime I think this/Twitter will be a great platform for people who want to enrich themselves knowledge-wise rather than getting "clickbait" from random posts online.

</comment><comment><USER25> Every website I visit these days seems to have this newsletter modal timebomb that unexpectedly blows once I've read a few sentences or so. Like the quarter-screen cookie dialog, I've just become blind to them searching just long enough to find an "X" or "close" button. I wonder how many others are being conditioned in the same way?

At any rate, i think it's worth pointing out that you can always blog (and please support rss!). If the goal is to make money, maybe newsletters are one way to avoid grimy ads, but that said, how many newsletters are filled with ads and affiliate crap anyways?

I like the idea of getting emails for stuff I am consistently interested in. I just don't get the hype.

<comment><USER13> Honestly, if the page started with the newsletter signup box visible, I'd be more likely to consider signing up. But let me get 1-2 seconds into finding the start of the content that I'm looking for, and then pop up a newsletter (or any other) box over that, and I get annoyed. I'm VERY unlikely to sign up. Not never, but practically never will I sign up.

Pop up a chat window next, 1-2 second after I closed the newsletter box, and I'm even angrier.

Pop up a third thing and I'm out. Disruption is already bad enough in our modern world... but building systems specifically to disrupt is just garbage.

<comment><USER26> as always, it boils down to you being in the minority. This kind of thing has been a/b tested to death.

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

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm never going to pay for articles by the Atlantic, that's for sure.</comment>


Ask PG: HN Outage - <AUTHOR>

About 20 minutes ago HN was down for me and downforeveryoneorjustme.com.  I know it didn't last log but I'm just curious about what happened. <comment><USER2> I restarted it after changing some code. It takes about a minute to restart. I'm surprised you haven't seen this before, since HN gets restarted every couple days.

<comment><USER3> Why did you restart the server? I thought one of the points of arc was that it allowed you to change the code without restarting.

<comment><USER2> I do that for small changes and to test stuff, but when you're copying and pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the code in memory to diverge from the code on disk.

Plus there are certain things that happen at startup, and if you typed code into the repl that broke one of these, you wouldn't know.

<comment><USER4> > when you're copying and pasting code into the repl it would be easy for the > code in memory to diverge from the code on disk

Ah, I take it you're not a fan of the old Lisp/Smalltalk approach of image- oriented development, where tweaking the running system _is_ the canonical version of the code?

(Apologies if one of your essays already covers your views on that; I don't remember it being mentioned, and a quick search didn't turn up anything.)

<comment><USER2> No, I've never liked that Smalltalkish idea of storing programs one function at a time. You lose information that way. I prefer to view programs as text. A text file is actually a very cool and underrated abstraction.

It's not hard to imagine someone reinventing it as an advanced version of the Smalltalk approach: add the ability to view multiple definitions in some predefined order, add control over indentation (no small thing), add the ability to intersperse comments between the definitions, and bingo, you've reinvented the text file.

<comment> s-phi-nl Cincom Smalltalk's Web Velocity seems to have something like what you describe. See <http://vimeo.com/groups/webvelocity/videos/6156626> at about 1:17</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What're the worst-designed things you've ever used? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "Self service" checkouts at grocery stores. I get the idea that the bagging area is also a scale, and that's supposed to keep customers honest. But it leads to so many darn problems, the devices aren't really "self service". And moreover, every time it malfunctions you're reminded by the store that _we don 't trust you_ which seems like a terrible way to treat good customers.

Still, I don't know if it's fair to pick on a technology that's so new. In a way, they're still learning, and they're following the advice that many in the design thinking movement would give: make a prototype, even if it's not perfect, and try it out with real customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Apple TV remote control has to be up there, because clearly it was designed for use in a lab rather than a darkened room.

</comment><comment><USER4> getting a travel card in stockholm subway/bus system. Absolute nightmare</comment>


Show HN: HackerNews reimagined without tables or center elements. - <AUTHOR> http://coderwall.com/p/-vqwfg <comment><USER2> (off-topic) What is wrong with Coderwall? They're worse than Google+ and the stupid "Join Google+" bar... If someone wants to join, they will. No need to rub it in their face. At least have the decency to show a close button...

 _In case it's not clear, I'm talking about the stupid, 105px tall black bar that asks you to "Join Coderwall" when you start to scroll_

<comment><USER3> Founder here...we have been experimenting on variations of a bar with the goal that someone that stumbles upon a pro tip like this one can discover more about Coderwall. I agree that it looks a little big, intentions were not to be obnoxious - we'll be fixing that.

<comment><USER4> While you're at it - on 13'' screen and 2 year old machine your site is absolutely unreadable and unusable. There is a little bit of text in the middle and vast swaths of space with strange blurred colors occupying most of my visible space. Then the black bar. Selecting text takes forever (some JS tricks? I dunno?).

Generally speaking I find arguments about usability from someone who can't present their own blog a little dubious.

<comment><USER5> if you're trying to help this guy tell him what your browser, os, and screen resolution are.

if you're trying to stifle those that would make contributions to this community then keep doing what you are doing.

<comment><USER4> it seriously does not matter. the pixel sizes are hardcoded so it'll look unreadable on any small screen, your particular OS does not matter. my resolution is 1440x900 if this helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We go through this every now and then. Hell, I even replicated the exact HN look, on a project that pg asked me to shut down a couple years ago, using a much simplified div/CSS structure.

Point is, it doesn't matter.

Yes, could HN be totally revamped? Sure, there are thousands of capable engineers in the community that could and have done it. Should it be? Meh.

Honestly, it just works. Its pretty stable. I read HN as much from my phone as a laptop. I've tried the various alternate UIs and iOS apps, but I always just come back to the site.

I'm probably not the only old-timer that feels this way, but there are plenty of alternative UIs for those that want them, and indeed they use them.

HN is a great lesson in the "don't fix it if it ain't broke" methodology of engineering. 2000+ year old Roman aqueducts are still used in some places in Europe. If somethings doing the job it was designed for, you don't have to upgrade the concrete just because you have newer cement.

<comment><USER7> I think the UI matters. HN is great but I feel the commenting system could be _greatly_ improved. Collapsable threads anyone? In general I wish HN would use a StackOverflow-like system (rep and votes on comments).

<comment><USER8> I give up on long threads. There's no way to know at a glance which comments I've already read which makes keeping up-to-date on a quick moving discussion so painful I just give up. A simple colour coding of replies would make it much easier to revisit a thread.

<comment><USER9> There's also no point posting on a thread after the comments start paginating, as maybe 10% of people will go to the second page to view it, and you'll get no replies, in my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> While you're at it, change the "static" up-vote triangle to this unicode character: ▲ <http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/25b2/index.htm> so it scales nice on high-dpi devices, or simply when you zoom-in in a desktop browser.

<comment><USER10> I don't feel like firing up my IE VM to test it myself, but are you certain that character is browser safe? I've run into a lot of issues with unicode glyphs not working on vanilla IE8 machines that didn't ship with fonts containing them.

<comment><USER11> Does anyone on HN use IE6/7/8? I'd guess that this is a more web savvy place than that.

<comment><USER12> Individual web savviness doesn't always come into it. There are those here who work within environments that mandate less than cutting edge browsers.

<comment><USER11> Chrome doesn't need admin rights to install for what it's worth. Although I have to say that if I was working for a company that mandated IE8 or lower as the solitary browser I'd be planning my exit. Maybe I'm just spoiled by working for a web agency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not just an argument of preference when programmers suggest not using tables for layout - it's about using a best practice and a standard instead of an old hack that is a habit many are lazy to break in an age when most browsers have excellent CSS support.

This is what a screen reader emulator tells me the front page of HN sounds like:

"Page has one hundred thirty links Hacker News dash Internet Explorer Table with one column and ninety-eight rows Table with three columns and one row Link Graphic slash yeighteen .gifLink Hacker NewsLink new vertical bar Link comments vertical bar Link ask vertical bar Link jobs vertical bar Link submitLink login Table end Table with three columns and ninety-two rows"

Of course, anyone actually using HN with a real screen reader will probably only get the links list from their reader, knowing how useless the supporting markup is (aside from the table layout, HN doesn't use meaningful heading tags).

There are many more reasons not to use tables for layout, but accessibility should be enough of a reason alone to stay away from layout tables.

</comment><comment><USER14> Instead of numbering the articles, you should put them in an OL instead of a UL, then you'll get automatic browser generated numbers and save a few more bytes.

<comment><USER15> That would only work on the front page though, wouldn't it? Once you click the "more" link it would just start from 1 again.

<comment><USER16> That could be fixed with:

<comment><USER15> Cool, learned something!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This comes up from time to time. From over a year and a half ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019950>

And from almost five years ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50159>

</comment><comment><USER18> Nitpick: what's up with the underlines to the right of the up-arrows? <http://i.imgur.com/PSPES.png> (OS X 10.7.4, Chrome 21.0.1180.57)

Bigger nitpick: I'd rather have a fix for functionality than for loading some extra data. The "next" page problem still occurs, and it would be nice to know when someone responds to a comment.

<comment> simba-hiiipower _"...and it would be nice to know when someone responds to a comment."_

<http://hnnotify.com/>

<comment><USER18> I mostly want other people to be aware of it - often times, I'll ask a question and never get a response. I don't know if that person is just ignoring me, or if they have no idea.

<comment> simba-hiiipower very true; clearly it would be best to have it actually integrated into the site itself. or, at the very least, throw-up a link to HN Notify on the profile/settings page..

<comment><USER12> There is the notifo option on the profile page, which I've been using successfully for some time.

It also doesn't address the 'mostly want other people to be aware of it' part though.

<comment><USER19> When i saw this i thought "Wow! This is something I wasn't aware of", grinning with delight. Then when i went to the profile page, hoping to see a simple opt-in/out via a checkbox. Instead I'm greeted with a mysterious text box with indication as to what I'm supposed enter.

I've assumed email address for now, let's see if I'm right!

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it is a little cryptic isn't it. I should have been less so with my comment. To get it working:

1\. Sign up for an account at <http://notifo.com>

2\. Download one or more of their client applications here: <http://notifo.com/mobile_apps> and enter your details

3\. Enter your notifo username in the box on your HN profile page.

I think the reason this facility exists here on HN is because Notifo is a Y Combinator company.

<comment> simba-hiiipower thanks for the info; was always wondering what exactly that box was for..

unfortunately, given that i have a Windows Phone and they only seem to have completed an iPhone app, this doesn't cut it for me personally (and i'm assuming for many others on Android as well). also, it seems they've closed down, so no hopes for further support coming anytime soon, if ever: <http://blog.notifo.com/notifo>

and i get that it was a YC Company and hence it probably made sense to feature them there (as it really could have added value to the site if widely adopted) but, as it's gone, i really think the optimal solution would be to replace it with something like HN Notify which is platform agnostic (just need an email).

<comment><USER12> That is sad news (and I somehow missed this until now). I thought it was a good little service, I have been using it for a personal project too.

Indeed, something like HN notify would seem to be the go for me now also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams >> but the browser will render it faster because it has less to do

Is that strictly true? My thinking is that you may be able to express something in less notation, but the browser may have to calculate more to render it (such additional reflows or CSS lookups). Just saying. Reality is that it probably will be faster.

But I like the point that table-less designs do save on bandwidth and maintainability.

</comment><comment><USER20> You should replace the
|
 with li:after { content: " | "; }

<comment><AUTHOR> Does that work on older browsers? (Meaning IE8 and above)

<comment><USER21> I used to do this with a right-border, not sure if that's a best practice these days or not. You could do something similar in between the date/link/comment sections underneath a given link as well (since it logically is a list).

<comment><USER22> right-border prevents users from copying the "|" character, which always seemed like the correct behavior to me.

<comment><USER23> I think generated content (i.e. created by using the :after pseudo-element) also is not selectable or copyable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't load at all on two of the browsers I use. Yes, no doubt you'll say "Well, upgrade to a better browser!" but I can't upgrade on those platforms.

So you're advocating making the site genuinely unusable for me.

<comment><USER25> Isn't the problem with JSBin (or CoderWall)?

His updated version of Hacker News isn't really that complex or incompatible with older browsers.

<comment><USER24> Coderwall loads, although it looks completely dreadful. Then I clicked on <http://jsbin.com/ewufof/3/edit> and that doesn't load. I get the very attractive spinning graphic, and that's all she wrote.

It would be nice to see if the HN alternative worked.

<comment><USER26> You might want to try <http://jsbin.com/ewufof/21> so you get the actual page and not the JS Bin edit interface.

<comment><USER24> Thank you!

Now when I get some time a little later I can have a look at the source and see what's going on.

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The problem I have with HN style by default is:

1) It is hard to tell what has changed recently (new comments, votes, changes in ranking)

2) The information is kind of crammed together and not lined up.

3) I hit refresh every few minutes

Am not a a designer, so had my son who has an eye for it help out on styling: <http://hn4d.com/>

<comment><USER28> Just a heads-up, the `font-weight:700` on anchor tags causes some issues (Firefox 17, Win 7)

Your site: <http://imgur.com/ZYObO> Without the font-weight rule: <http://imgur.com/qfEaz>

<comment><USER27> Thank you - reported to the design team :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not to nitpick, but - <http://imgur.com/6xgeK>

<comment><USER30> Hardly a nitpick. What are those things next to all the links on the bottom. I get them iceweasel 14 too...

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a nice idea, but your css is horribly inefficient (using `.nav ul.actions li a` as a selector for example). I'm also a bit of a convert to <http://smacss.com/> \- make your html/css a bit more declarative rather than relying on nested selectors to apply rules.

<comment><USER32> Agreed, the CSS is really inefficient, for every anchor tag, the browser has to traverse the DOM up to the root element 6 times (not including the hover rules) ... It's a shame that so many developers don't know this (it's not very intuitive though).

<comment><USER33> CSS optimization should be the last thing a developer does, if at all. Most of the time, it's not worth it.

As a general rule, just be as concise as possible. `.nav ul.actions li a` could be turned into `.actions a` as long as it's alright for the .action anchor tags _not_ in the .nav element to have the same style. But if you use .actions elsewhere and want the .actions list to look different in .nav, _that's fine_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _> The point I'm trying to make is that using
 elements for layout is bad and you should feel bad for using them. If you tried modifying something in original HN it would take a long time._

If you made the same point but removed the "should feel bad" bit, the point would be even better.

<comment><USER35> Just in case you aren't aware, "is bad and you should feel bad" is a meme from Futurama, so the author was probably just trying to be funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I use Georgify (Chrome Extension) makes things a lot better, I've actually forgotten what HN is like without it (yuck!) [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfeh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi)

<comment><USER37> Or if you like dark themes; <http://userstyles.org/styles/71155>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Hacker News should have an API.

<comment><USER39> There is one! <http://www.hnsearch.com/api>

<comment><USER40> _HNSearch data is about ~15min behind HN._

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/hnsearch/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/hnsearch/wjBFEr5TvcY%5B1-25%5D)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> As another example, I wrote a HN clone the 'right' way: <https://bitorama.com>. It even supports right-to-left!

</comment><comment><USER42> Probably get down voted. But this makes it bearable for me at least. _No Firefox Allowed Club_

<http://userstyles.org/styles/70289/hacker-news-w-gsu> AND [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmke...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe)

</comment><comment><USER43> This is the right time for nReduce to start a news aggregator site, with the latest bells and whistles, and start competing with HN in quality content.

Show the latest startups they're incubating, the best advice from their investors, that would be the best place to follow up on what's going on over there.

One last thing, add a little red envelope to the header and you win my upvote.

<comment><USER43> My shot at a HN redesign:

<http://georgenava.appspot.com/demo/hn/index.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I agree with removing tables for layout, but I think it's OK to use them for the posts.

Maybe an unordered list would work even better.

The point is, tables are good for what they are made for: tabular data.

We don't have to cheat anymore, CSS and HTML have had moved forward a lot.

Changing HN wouldn't be too much work and would help keep it with the times.

</comment><comment><USER45> Tables are easier to code for a functional programmer. That's why.

</comment><comment><USER46> The main things I dislike about HN:

* Comments are allowed to get too wide for easy reading.

* OP text color is too uncontrasted from the background.

Other than that, I don't see a reason why it needs a revamp.

<comment><USER47> > * OP text color is too uncontrasted from the background.

IIRC this was intentional - the low contrast was meant to make people keep their message to the point instead of posting screeds of text in "self posts". If you want to say something meaningful you should host it off-site, if you want to discuss something with the community you should follow up in the comment thread.

I don't have strong feelings either way, though I do tend to select the text for better contrast when it gets long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Anybody care to comment on whether this is intended to be ironic? It replaces a clear, concise table layout with a somewhat more verbose CSS version for seemingly no reason.

Had the author attacked the threaded comment page (which might actually benefit from using nested lists) rather than the tabular submissions page, I might be less confused.

As it stands though, I find I'm confronted with the least convincing attack on tables I've seen in a while (and I tend to put myself in the "CSS over tables" camp normally).

<comment><USER49> > It replaces a clear, concise table layout with a somewhat more verbose CSS > version for seemingly no reason.

That's interesting that you claim it is more verbose. The author measured the before-and-after and came up with these numbers:

> Since he (and so many others) are all about the numbers, how's this for a > number:

> Original HN website: 26087 characters long.

> My rewrite: 3587 characters long.

> That is some massive savings. This will not only be lighter down the wire, > but the browser will render it faster because it has less to do.

Where is your evidence that the table layout is clear and concise, and where is your evidence that using CSS makes it more verbose? It looks exactly opposite to me.

<comment><USER50> Was that 3587 characters for the three items displayed on the coderwall version, as opposed to the 30 items on the HN page?

<comment><USER49> I sure hope not, that would be pretty misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I made some tweaks: <http://jsbin.com/ewufof/366/edit>

</comment><comment><USER52> Bravo!

The infinite reasons for _not_ doing this:

1) PG has much more important things to do.

2) It would break every other hack ever done based on HN.

3) Recurs back to 1.

</comment><comment><USER53> Alignment problems on opera/android 2.3

</comment><comment><USER54> If I were making changes to HN it would be to add a "Nuke From Orbit" button to posts.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm reading hackernews on links right now. It works. This new version doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER56> Love the search function.

</comment><comment><USER57> I don't have to turn on Javascript to read HN. Why should I have to with this?

Hell, I had to turn on Javascript just to not see a wall of text on coderwall. Honestly, HTML and CSS for layout people.

<comment><USER2> What are you talking about? His "mockup" (<http://jsbin.com/ewufof/3/edit> or <http://jsbin.com/ewufof/3> (full-screen)) has no JavaScript.

<comment><USER57> I have to allow jsbin to see anything more than some spinning image. No, I don't allow javascript to see text.

<comment><USER58> His mockup is hosted on a javascript-based sketchbook platform (which is nominally intended for sharing/developing javascript snippets), despite the fact that there's no javascript in his mockup.

<comment><USER59> Shoulda used Codepen.io ;-0

<comment><USER60> <http://codepen.io/anon/pen/zhIiA> (<http://codepen.io/anon/full/zhIiA>)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pictures from research base in Antartica - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/a/ijX9Q <comment><AUTHOR> A fellow HN member posted these and thought others might enjoy them. Fascinating pictures!</comment>


Memristor Minds - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.600-memristor-minds-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence.html

<comment><USER2> The explanation of the inductive thought process behind the conclusion that such a device 'should' exist is fascinating.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty much what Maxwell was said to have done.

Trying to create taxonomies is often worthwhile. You find patterns, holes and other interesting things when you succeed and learn more about what you don't know when you fail.

<comment><USER2> True. For some reason, this way of thinking just isn't natural to me. It proves to be a great problem solving approach when it is applied though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last year's news, but still has to sink in. Read it, but beware exaggerations like "electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation", which would set quite a few physicists and engineers spinning in their graves.

What Leon Chua rightly noted, and described, was a missing fourth _passive_ electrical (not _electronic_ ) two-terminal component. The difference is that _electronic_ is usually associated with so-called _active_ devices. Those have three or more terminals (e.g. vacuum valves or semiconductor transistors), and the third terminal controls the electron flow between the others.

Given enough active devices, you can mock up practically anything. For example, with capacitors and transistors (and a power supply), you can make an imitation inductor - with a limited range, but good enough for an integrated circuit when the real thing was hard to build.

The great novelty with memristors is finding a real physical basis to provide the desired behavior in a simple, manufacturable two-terminal device.

P.S. The A.I./neural-network angle seems to originate with the device's creator (Stan Williams). With all due respect, I doubt that it will have all that much impact from that side.

</comment><comment><USER5> Improvements in hardware are a necessary condition for AI. They are not sufficient. The other necessary conditions are algorithms (correct and efficient). The latter is much much more difficult. That is the biggest bottleneck in AI not hardware.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow. This whole article is intensely fascinating.

It never ceases to amaze me how we can be so certain that we have the best of something (Neural networks) for a particular job (simulating neural activity) and then something completely different comes along and blows it away (Memristors).

These are the sorts of things that give me hope for our future...

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice. I particularly appreciate the concise explanation of why the memristor was clearly a "missing" component (see paragraphs 5-7).

</comment><comment><USER8> Anything new over the last year article?

</comment><comment><USER9> I think I missed something. What is the mechanism that causes the slime/memristor to keep changing states after the external stimulus is removed? I thought the memristor just remembers a voltage. After you remove the external voltage then wouldn't the voltage across the memristor just remember the state it was in when the last external voltage was applied? Likewise for the slime and air.

<comment><USER10> The memristor doesn't keep changing states. Where did you see that?

More technical: [http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/01/logic- circuits-...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/01/logic-circuits- that-program-themselves-memristors-in-action.ars)

<comment><USER9> Ah. I misread the NewScientist article. It wasn't clear to me that in the experiment to mimic the slime they, in fact, modeled the slime with a circuit that _included_ a memristor and not with just a memristor. The paper the article cites also made things much clearer: <http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/0810.4179></comment></comment></comment>


Milton Friedman: Is Capitalism Humane? (1977) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27Tf8RN3uiM <comment><USER2> "Where do you have the greatest degree in equality?" The answer to that looks very different in 2020 than it did in 1970.

"Look at the wage rate between the foreman and the worker in Iussia" \- I have, a foreman in the US today makes twice the hourly rate of the worker and that's before benefits packages and other compensations low level hourly workers do not get. So it can be more than double.

In fact, the OECD's own data the US is now has a wider inequality gap than Russia.

[https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income- inequality.htm](https://data.oecd.org/inequality/income-inequality.htm)

Only in economics could someone be so provably wrong yet considered a luminary...

<comment><USER3> The talk was given in 1977 when at the time Russia was socialist. This is no more the case. A better comparison can be made today with say Venezuela.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone looking for a challenging read should consider Milton Friedman's book "Capitalism and Freedom". It's short, but very dense. He covers topics like a negative income tax (which you've heard of) and ideas you've probably never considered (like school vouchers, elimination of occupational licensure, and elimination of tariffs).

The downside is, if you find his arguments convincing, it will leave you feeling even more angry about the current role of government in society.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Capitalism prevents concentrations of power" was a pretty wild take even for 1977! Here in 2020, it's _arrantly ludicrous._

<comment><USER3> The concentration of power, in this case, refers to political power not market(economic) power. If you think about it carefully, economic power often is very weak and vulnerable as they often derive them from consumers which means they can only maintain it by giving consumers what they want. People like Bezos, Bill Gates are far less powerful than say, Putin, Erdogan, Xi, etc.

As an example, how far did Bloomberg's billions take him in the democratic nomination?

<comment><USER5> In what way does capitalism act to prevent concentration of _political_ power, then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At about 8 minutes he starts talking about looking at the outcomes of the different systems. Specifically he brings up incarceration rates and inequality. It's interesting how poorly the United States currently stacks up on those measures compared to democratic socialist countries.

<comment><USER3> 45% of incarcerations in the US are due to the drug war [1].

[https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...](https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offenses.jsp)

<comment><USER7> Which greatly benefits the private prison–industrial complex, which can lobby in favor of such war, and increase its profit.

<comment><USER3> So the solution is to abolish capitalism right? Assuming you're right with your "lobbying" claim, how can you solve this by increasing government involvement in the economy? won't it be the same corrupt politicians who would be more empowered to pass laws to benefit their cronies?

Criminal justice reform or simply decriminalizing drug use will eliminate this problem entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main argument for Capitalism is choice and competition. Any argument of freedom without choice to me is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not sure laissez faire capitalism if there is such a thing has proven it doesn't consolidate into monopolies or cartels. Especially when it comes to distribution, communication and software(with bundling).

<comment><USER9> Can you give an example of a monopoly that has been brought about and maintained by capitalism - i.e. not maintained by organized crime or the power of the government, but by the principles of free market capitalism alone?

<comment><USER10> Got any examples of capitalism that aren't maintained by a government?

[EDIT] OK that was a bit glib. My point is things are a lot more complicated than "capitalism does this, government does that" and the two are essentially inseparable. Further this entire thread is full of "markets = capitalism" which is missing the mark—tendencies toward free market policies are a defining feature of capitalism, but free markets _per se_ aren't identical to capitalism.

<comment><USER11> Good point, and we need to recognize that every so-called free market still relies on governments to enforce the rules (to enforce contracts, to issue currency, to protect against fraud, etc). If governments disappeared tomorrow, we would not have a free market utopia spring up in it's place. Instead we'd have a no-rules situation where the powerful could take advantage of the weak. Some other system, potentially worse than what we already have, would fill the power vacuum.

<comment><USER9> Well I agree that governments can do some beneficial things. But there's a few problems with what you're saying here (and I hope I'm not taking you too literally): firstly, all the rules you list can be handled with alternatives. Secondly, the fact that the sudden disappearance of government would not lead to a utopia doesn't mean that governments are fundamentally needed (although they might be). As an analogy: if crude oil disappeared tomorrow, we would not have a renewable energy utopia - we'd have a disaster. Does that mean that there's no alternative to crude oil? Of course not. Finally, a "situation where the powerful could take advantage of the weak" is really just the situation that we have now, and must always have. It's really a tautology.

<comment><USER11> I apologize for not being clear enough, and I think I misread your intentions. There are people on HN who believe the government could be abolished tomorrow and replaced with private services, including a private military force, and that this would make everyone more free, since the invisible hand of the market would do the job of protecting the rights of the ordinary people. I mistook you for one of those people.

Governments aren't fundamentally needed per se to create a free market. But rules are needed. And whatever system we have to enforce those rules would resemble a defacto government. How that governments power is distributed, who's interests it represents, and how far it goes in regulating the market may vary.

Without someone enforcing rules to keep monopolies in check, I think those monopolies would become defacto governments. And they wouldn't be democratic. This is what I mean (but did not carefully express) when I said that some government intervention in the markets are needed to prevent the powerful from take advantage of the weak. (And it can go the other way too... governments tilting the scale in favor of existing powerful interests.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The trick with Milton Friedman is to find the one ludicrous assumption his whole analysis hangs on.

<comment><USER9> Which is?

<comment><USER13> I haven't watched this particular lecture, but I watched (part of) a rather popular series of lectures, and he had such gems as "colonial empires spent more money in the colonies than they got in return", or "the wheel was never invented in Africa until Europeans arrived", which are such ludicrous, patently false statements that you're even at a loss as how to react.

<comment><USER14> Do you have a source for the first claim? Adam smith himself writes about how it is more expensive for the British to provide military defense for Colonial America than what they get from the trade rights.

<comment><USER15> Well, presumably that was why they didn't put up as much of a fight when the American states wanted freedom. Compare with what happened in the other colonies. It is silly to think they would have continued a multi-century high- effort enterprise at a continuing operating loss.

EDIT: _multi-century_. Yes, governments sometimes do stupid things (on shorter timescales), but it's also a great opportunity for each new government/generation to pin the folly on the old, and do better.

<comment><USER16> Not everything is about economics.

It is often argued that the gulag in the USSR was never a net gain economically. You could conclude one of two things from that:

1\. The Soviets were dumb or

2\. The Soviets had other reasons for maintaining an expansive network of prisons

I would go with 2 and I'd also argue that the colonial powers had other reasons for maintaining colonies.

<comment><USER13> ?

How is that remotely comparable? The main purpose of the gulag system is plain enough: punishment, control, and only secondarily, slave/forced labour for economic gain.

The colonial system is precisely the opposite: the main purpose is to extract value, through extraction, trade, industry, etc, from the colonies to the mainland.

<comment><USER16> It's "remotely comparable" because it has been argued that the Soviet economy only worked as well as it did due to slave labor, i.e. that the gulag existed primarily for "slave/forced labour for economic gain". And people make similar arguments about the colonial powers.

> The colonial system is precisely the opposite: the main purpose is to > extract value, through extraction, trade, industry, etc, from the colonies > to the mainland.

That's your opinion; I don't think it's true. I think the point of colonialism is an attempt to guarantee the nation state's survival. Churchill:

> We shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this > island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire > beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the > struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and > might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

I don't pretend to know whether or not colonies were a net-benefit economically. But, either way, I don't think economic arguments provided the fundamental justification for colonialism. I think the colony exists for the same reason the family, the polis, the nation state, and the empire exist, which is a desire for immortality or, if you prefer, an attempt to prevent the achievements of men from being obliterated by time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Betteridge's law of headlines applies here

</comment><comment><USER18> Without watching a 45 minute video, I assume the argument is something like:

> whatever system most effectively leverages comparative advantage / generates > the most wealth / most efficiently allocates resources is that which is most > humane, because it has the possibility to lift the most people from poverty, > from inhumane conditions.

It is, of course, up to societies to regulate the allocation of those resources to maximize the realization of that possibility.

<comment><USER19> If you agree that capitalism makes for the most efficient allocation of resources, there is no need to regulate that allocation.

<comment><USER17> The real question is towards what end those resources are being efficiently allocated. Capitalism is an incredibly efficient system for accumulating resources with a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of everyone else. This is precisely why late stage capitalist societies inevitably turn into oligarchies.

<comment><USER19> Free markets are NOT a zero sum game.

If I buy an iPhone from Apple for $1000, you'd think they "accumulated resources at my expense", but I got something -- an iPhone.

That iPhone is worth for me more than $1000, otherwise I'd keep the $1000.

For Apple, it's worth less, otherwise it would raise the price or go bankrupt.

Both parties are better off.

What people call "late stage Capitalism" is not Capitalism at all -- it is Cronyism. It is the private sector buying favors from the government. Capitalism prevents that by definition.

True capitalism may as well make people very rich, and although I've not verified it, I am willing to concede that it widens the wealth gap. However, poor people in capitalist countries are far richer than they would have been without it.

Why would you care about the gap? Care about how you are doing.

<comment><USER17> Of course markets are a zero sum game. The reality is that capital owners accumulate majority of the resources in the country. Then they use these resources to manipulate laws, fund political campaigns, and news organizations for their own benefit. Average American cannot afford an unexpected $400 expense [1], while 3 richest people own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country [2]. Thinking that this isn't a zero sum game takes a lot of naivete.

Under capitalism the government is nothing more than a management committee for the rich because the rich have millions of times more political influence than a regular citizen. Here's what a long term Cambridge study [3] found about the effects of capitalism in America:

>What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of "populistic" democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

This mythical true capitalism you speak of has never been observed in practice because it's at odds with basic human nature. Capitalism favors psychopathic behavior because those who are willing to be ruthless, to step over others, cheat, lie, and steal will out-compete those who do not. Likewise, the idea that poor people in capitalist countries are far richer than they would be without it is a complete and utter fantasy. [4]

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many- americans-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans- cant-handle-a-400-unexpected-expense.html)

[2] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-richest- americans-hold-more-wealth-than-bottom-50-of-country-study- finds/#1a9eb78a3cf8)

[3] [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- poli...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on- politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups- and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/core-reader)

[4] [https://sci- hub.tw//https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10....](https://sci- hub.tw//https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2190/AD12-7RYT-XVAR-3R2U)

<comment><USER19> I have demonstrated precisely how it is not zero sum, using the iPhone example.

> Under capitalism the government is nothing more than a management committee > for the rich...

You are mixing definitions here. Capitalism means private ownership, and what you've described there is government control. The US has Cronyism, not Capitalism. Your argument for it being mythic also mises the mark. Cheating, lying and stealing are illegal under Capitalism.

The 4th citation is completely false, as it considers non-capitalist countries capitalist. In that list, half the countries are "Mostly Unfree" or "Repressed" according to the Index of Economic Freedom[0].

If you actually look at capitalist countries, that paper supports that so- called "fantasy", as the countries mentioned as "High-income" are "Free" or "Mostly free". Irony at its best.

[0] [https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking](https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking)

<comment><USER17> >I have demonstrated precisely how it is not zero sum, using the iPhone example.

My claim is that capitalism accumulates wealth with a small percentage of the population who then end up running the country as an oligarchy. Your iPhone example does not in any way contradict that.

>You are mixing definitions here. Capitalism means private ownership, and what you've described there is government control.

No, I've described how capitalists subvert the government to the interests of the rich oligarchy produced via the system of capitalism.

>Your argument for it being mythic also mises the mark. Cheating, lying and stealing are illegal under Capitalism.

That's the whole point, cheating, lying, and stealing are all effective means of being competitive under capitalism. Since making profit is the sole metric for success, these behaviors are inherently encouraged by the system.

>The 4th citation is completely false, as it considers non-capitalist countries capitalist.

False, the study clearly explains its methodology and the definition for capitalist countries.

>In that list, half the countries are "Mostly Unfree" or "Repressed" according to the Index of Economic Freedom[0].

The discussion is whether capitalism improves quality of life, and the study clearly shows that it's false across the board.

Meanwhile, I fundamentally disagree with your definition of freedom. A system that forces people to sell vast majority of their lives simply in order to survive is a form of slavery. It takes an incredibly dim mind to primarily conceive of freedom in terms of consumerism.

<comment><USER19> > My claim is that capitalism accumulates wealth with a small percentage of > the population who then end up running the country as an oligarchy. Your > iPhone example does not in any way contradict that.

Please do not change the subject, we were discussing zero sum game.

> No, I've described how capitalism subverts the government to the interests > of the rich oligarchy produced via the system of capitalism.

Capitalism requires a separation of economy and state. What you're describing is Cronyism:

> Cronyism is the practice of partiality in awarding jobs and other advantages > to friends or trusted colleagues, especially in politics and between > politicians and supportive organizations.[0]

If capitalism is polluted with cronyism, you get Crony Capitalism:

> Crony capitalism is an economic system in which businesses thrive not as a > result of risk, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus > between a business class and the political class.[1]

> That's the whole point, cheating, lying, and stealing are all effective > means of being competitive under capitalism. Since making profit is the sole > metric for success, these behaviors are inherently encouraged by the system.

Except for the part where you spend jail time for fraud or theft.

> False, the study clearly explains its methodology and the definition for > capitalist countries.

> The discussion is whether capitalism improves quality of life, and the study > clearly shows that it's false across the board.

Look, the point here is not terminology. If you think Ghana is capitalist (as the paper claims), I can see why you won't like that system. Please consider, for the sake of this discussion, my definition of capitalism.

> Meanwhile, I fundamentally disagree with your definition of freedom. A > system that forces people to sell vast majority of their lives simply in > order to survive is a form of slavery. It takes an incredibly dim mind to > primarily conceive of freedom in terms of consumerism.

That's the beauty of Capitalism. You're free. If you don't like the way of life, you go with people who think the same way, and you build yourselves a _voluntary_ communist heaven. No one will stop you, as in capitalism, all the state does is protect you from violence (which I guess is a role we agree on).

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

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

<comment><USER17> >Please do not change the subject, we were discussing zero sum game.

I'm not changing the subject. My claim is that it's a zero sum game of resource accumulation. We're now at the point where over half the resources in the world have been accumulated with a handful of individuals. Capitalism is the engine that allowed this to happen.

>Capitalism requires a separation of economy and state. What you're describing is Cronyism:

Cronyism is a necessary result of capitalism. People who have capital will always be able to influence the state, there is no way to separate the two. Capitalists are able to buy media, fund political campaigns, bribe politicians, and so on. This is why capitalist countries necessarily turn into oligarchies.

>Except for the part where you spend jail time for fraud or theft.

Rich people in Western countries practically never go to jail for fraud and theft. The most egregious example was the 2008 global economic collapse where millions of people lost all their savings and none of the people responsible were punished. What's more, the institutions and people responsible got massive bailouts at the expense of tax payers.

>That's the beauty of Capitalism. You're free.

Vast majority of people under capitalism have to spend large portions of their lives working just to live. This idea that you can just go and do whatever you like is a total fantasy because the only people who have the means to do that are those who were lucky enough to be born rich. The rest of the population has to spend their lives subsidizing the lifestyle of these birth lottery winners. Any regular person needs to work for at least 40 hours a week just to live, this is majority of their week taken away from them. It's utter absurdity to claim that they're free to build themselves anything in the little free time they have remaining.

You appear to have an incredibly infantile understanding of the relationship between capitalism and society.

<comment><USER19> > I'm not changing the subject. My claim is that it's a zero sum game of > resource accumulation. We're now at the point where over half the resources > in the world have been accumulated with a handful of individuals. Capitalism > is the engine that allowed this to happen.

And here you just changed the subject. You again talk about the wealth gap. The wealth gap and zero sum game are not the same subject.

> Cronyism is a necessary result of capitalism. People who have capital will > always be able to influence the state, there is no way to separate the two. > Capitalists are able to buy media, fund political campaigns, bribe > politicians, and so on. This is why capitalist countries necessarily turn > into oligarchies.

But buying the state has nothing to do with capitalism -- it has to do with the existence of a state, and the existence of rich people. Rich people exist in every system we ever had in history, so unless you suggest we do something other than a state, all that is left is to strengthen our protection of capitalism with a better constitution.

> Rich people in Western countries practically never go to jail for fraud and > theft.

Source please. But if true, is probably the fault of cronyism.

> The most egregious example was the 2008 global economic collapse where > millions of people lost all their savings and none of the people responsible > were punished. What's more, the institutions and people responsible got > massive bailouts at the expense of tax payers.

That is the fault of government going hand the hand with the private sector. Without the government, the crisis couldn't have been that big. In short, the government had (1) very very low interest rates and (2) encouraged risky home buying (3) practically insured bad mortgages. Do you think a bank would loan to someone who can't pay back? Only if the government is there to the rescue.

There's a reason many Austrian economists predicted that crisis to amazingly fine detail.

Now, you may reply "they did it because rich people bought them". Maybe, but that's Cronyism, not Capitalism.

> Vast majority of people under capitalism have to spend large portions of > their lives working just to live. This idea that you can just go and do > whatever you like is a total fantasy because the only people who have the > means to do that are those who were lucky enough to be born rich. The rest > of the population has to spend their lives subsidizing the lifestyle of > these birth lottery winners. Any regular person needs to work for at least > 40 hours a week just to live, this is majority of their week taken away from > them. It's utter absurdity to claim that they're free to build themselves > anything in the little free time they have remaining.

I get what you're saying, but if you think there's a better way, a truly capitalist system doesn't stop you from implementing it inside of capitalism. So if you want that communist heaven, capitalism saves you the need for revolution, or the need to go find a large-enough desert island. You just build the commie heaven inside the capitalist land.

> You appear to have an incredibly infantile understanding of the relationship > between capitalism and society.

That's bold, coming from the guy claiming Ghana is capitalist.

Either way, it seems like we are in agreement that Capitalism is not the problem, Cronyism is. The disagreement is if the end of all Capitalist systems is Cronyism. I think Cronyism is independent of Capitalism. All it needs is a state (=monopoly on force) and rich people. Just look at every country we had in history, capitalist or not, they all had a ruling class. The solution to that is to have the constitution limit the power of government even more. That way, when rich people will come to buy favors, there will be none for the politicians to sell.

<comment><USER17> >And here you just changed the subject. You again talk about the wealth gap. The wealth gap and zero sum game are not the same subject.

It's the same subject, the wealth gap is precisely what's being discussed here. This is my original comment:

>The real question is towards what end those resources are being efficiently allocated. Capitalism is an incredibly efficient system for accumulating resources with a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of everyone else. This is precisely why late stage capitalist societies inevitably turn into oligarchies.

If anything, you're the one who keeps trying to change the discussion from the original topic.

>But buying the state has nothing to do with capitalism -- it has to do with the existence of a state, and the existence of rich people. Rich people exist in every system we ever had in history, so unless you suggest we do something other than a state, all that is left is to strengthen our protection of capitalism with a better constitution.

In practice, some systems are much more unequal than others. For example, people like Gates or Bezos simply didn't exist in USSR, there was no generational wealth, and the highest gap in pay was around 10x. Saying that there is no difference between that and what happens in capitalist countries is simply false equivalence.

>Source please. But if true, is probably the fault of cronyism.

And cronyism is a direct byproduct of capitalism and inequality.

And here's a breakdown of prison population by wealth in US. The prisons are predominantly filled with poor people, and you'll be hard pressed to find a CEO going to prison for any crime. Just recently Boeing killed two plane loads full of people due to criminal negligence, nobody's going to jail for that. The CEO got a golden parachute instead. [https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html)

>That is the fault of government going hand the hand with the private sector. Without the government, the crisis couldn't have been that big. In short, the government had (1) very very low interest rates and (2) encouraged risky home buying (3) practically insured bad mortgages. Do you think a bank would loan to someone who can't pay back? Only if the government is there to the rescue.

And why is the government going hand in hand with the private sector? It's as if, and bear with me here, the private sector bought the government with all that wealth capitalists have accumulated. It amazes me to no end that you're unable to make this connection.

>Now, you may reply "they did it because rich people bought them". Maybe, but that's Cronyism, not Capitalism.

Capitalism is the engine that creates a system of cronyism because it allows wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few. Again, this is not a complex concept that a fully grown adult should be struggling with.

>I get what you're saying, but if you think there's a better way, a truly capitalist system doesn't stop you from implementing it inside of capitalism. So if you want that communist heaven, capitalism saves you the need for revolution, or the need to go find a large-enough desert island. You just build the commie heaven inside the capitalist land.

Capitalism was the cause of the revolutions since it's been around. Meanwhile, you might want to read up on what USA does to communist and socialist countries around the world. Go read some history of South Asia, and Latin America for starters. No single socialist regime has been left unmolested in the past century.

>Either way, it seems like we are in agreement that Capitalism is not the problem, Cronyism is.

No, I'm saying that capitalism is a mechanism that allows wealth to be accumulated with a small percentage of the population, and these people end up running the country as an oligarchy as is the case with US, and other Western regimes right now. I don't think any system that allows large scale inequality is compatible with democracy.

Meanwhile, limiting the power of the government achieves the complete opposite of what you're proposing. A democratic government answers to its citizens, while private interests only answer to their owners. Wealth inequality is the root cause for the corruption of the government, and that's what needs to be eliminated to have actual democracy and representation of the people by the government.

<comment><USER19> >The real question is towards what end those resources are being efficiently allocated. Capitalism is an incredibly efficient system for accumulating resources with a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of everyone else. This is precisely why late stage capitalist societies inevitably turn into oligarchies.

"at the expense of everyone else" implies a zero-sum game. Wealth gap, however, can widen even in a positive-sum game. As demonstrated by my iPhone example. I can also create a simplified game that does this. Every turn, player A gets 10 points, and player B gets 1 point. Gap widens, yet all gain.

> In practice, some systems are much more unequal than others. For example, > people like Gates or Bezos simply didn't exist in USSR, there was no > generational wealth, and the highest gap in pay was around 10x. Saying that > there is no difference between that and what happens in capitalist countries > is simply false equivalence.

This may be true if only currency was measured, but wealth is measured with assets and services as well (expenses), and in the USSR there was a ruling class, and those close to it, and they enjoyed much better lives than the common man in the USSR. They had better goods, better services, and they, yes, enjoyed Cronyism. Communism is a very poor example, as there is literally a ruling class the controls other people's lives, which is something I gathered you want to avoid.

> And cronyism is a direct byproduct of capitalism and inequality.

> And here's a breakdown of prison population by wealth in US. The prisons are > predominantly filled with poor people, and you'll be hard pressed to find a > CEO going to prison for any crime. Just recently Boeing killed two plane > loads full of people due to criminal negligence, nobody's going to jail for > that. The CEO got a golden parachute instead. > [https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html)

> And why is the government going hand in hand with the private sector? It's > as if, and bear with me here, the private sector bought the government with > all that wealth capitalists have accumulated. It amazes me to no end that > you're unable to make this connection.

> Capitalism is the engine that creates a system of cronyism because it allows > wealth to accumulate in the hands of the few. Again, this is not a complex > concept that a fully grown adult should be struggling with.

All of these talk about either (1) Cronyism is bad or (2) Capitalism inevitably leads to Cronyism. (1) is something I agree with. (2) You've yet to demonstrate that is _unique_ to capitalism. Can you give me an example of a single country where there isn't a ruling class that enjoys better quality of life and government favors?

> Capitalism was the cause of the revolutions since it's been around. > Meanwhile, you might want to read up on what USA does to communist and > socialist countries around the world. Go read some history of South Asia, > and Latin America for starters. No single socialist regime has been left > unmolested in the past century.

That is _Cronyism_. Could you stop giving the Cronyisnt aspects of the US as examples of Capitalism? Capitalism calls for __Non __-aggression, and uses an Army in self-defense only.

> No, I'm saying that capitalism is a mechanism that allows wealth to be > accumulated with a small percentage of the population, and these people end > up running the country as an oligarchy as is the case with US, and other > Western regimes right now. I don't think any system that allows large scale > inequality is compatible with democracy.

> Meanwhile, limiting the power of the government achieves the complete > opposite of what you're proposing. A democratic government answers to its > citizens, while private interests only answer to their owners. Wealth > inequality is the root cause for the corruption of the government, and > that's what needs to be eliminated to have actual democracy and > representation of the people by the government.

Well, we look differently at the role of government. To me, government isn't some tool to force other people. I don't care if it's the few rich forcing the majority middle class, or if it's the majority middle class forcing a rich minority. I am against forcing (using or threatening the use of physical force) other people.

This eliminates the "path to Cronyism" you described. When some rich people (not every rich person is bad) will go and ask for artificially low interest rates or for favoring regulation that limits competition, the government will be limited and could not give it to them.

Again -- if you believe some Communist or Socialist heaven is better suited to supply everyone's needs, no one is stopping you from building such a thing, as Capitalism lets you live as you wish. If it's as good as you say, most citizens will probably join you anyway. I'm not sure how democratic it'll be, but as long as it's voluntary, enjoy yourselves.

<comment><USER17> >Wealth gap, however, can widen even in a positive-sum game. As demonstrated by my iPhone example. I can also create a simplified game that does this. Every turn, player A gets 10 points, and player B gets 1 point. Gap widens, yet all gain.

That's not what's happening in practice however. Your iphone example is frankly nonsense because the discussion is about wealth accumulation. And wealth is being accumulated with a small percentage of the population at the expense of everyone else. Average American has less savings than they did in the past decades, and they're forced to work more. Rich accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest.

Millennial in US have only 3% of the wealth while a handful of people own more wealth than the rest of the country. Thinking this isn't a zero sum game is height of stupidity.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-have-just-3-of- us-w...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-have-just-3-of-us-wealth- boomers-at-their-age-had-21/)

>This may be true if only currency was measured, but wealth is measured with assets and services as well (expenses), and in the USSR there was a ruling class, and those close to it, and they enjoyed much better lives than the common man in the USSR.

I lived in USSR, and that's completely false, and shows that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. First, there was no ruling class the way you have in capitalist societies because there was no generational wealth. The party consisted of regular people, and many of party leaders, like Khrushchev, came from villages. This was possible because social services like healthcare and education were evenly distributed. This is what meritocracy actually looks like. Second, the gap in quality of life was much smaller than it is in the west, and politicians and administrators were not the highest earners.

>All of these talk about either (1) Cronyism is bad or (2) Capitalism inevitably leads to Cronyism. (1) is something I agree with. (2) You've yet to demonstrate that is _unique_ to capitalism. Can you give me an example of a single country where there isn't a ruling class that enjoys better quality of life and government favors?

I don't have to demonstrate that this is something that's unique to capitalism. I only have to demonstrate that capitalism facilitates this problem. The fact that other systems aren't perfect is completely irrelevant to the question. Furthermore, you're making a false equivalence once again here. And your previous comment clearly shows that you're also deeply ignorant regarding how USSR actually functioned.

However, even if you were right that other systems failed to address the problem that is not defense of capitalism. It just means that we need to continue experimenting and trying new things.

>That is Cronyism. Could you stop giving the Cronyisnt aspects of the US as examples of Capitalism? Capitalism calls for Non-aggression, and uses an Army in self-defense only.

Cronyism is byproduct of capitalism. I'm not sure how many times I have to repeat this. The who are inseparable, and I've already explained why numerous times. If you still aren't able to wrap your head around this, I don't think there's anything else I can tell you here.

>Well, we look differently at the role of government. To me, government isn't some tool to force other people.

It appears that you don't understand what a democratic government is then.

>I don't care if it's the few rich forcing the majority middle class, or if it's the majority middle class forcing a rich minority. I am against forcing (using or threatening the use of physical force) other people.

And in your Mad Max world without government who prevents rich people from forcing poor people to do what they want again?

>This eliminates the "path to Cronyism" you described. When some rich people (not every rich person is bad) will go and ask for artificially low interest rates or for favoring regulation that limits competition, the government will be limited and could not give it to them.

It obviously does not. If you don't have a government that's answerable to the people, then all you're left with is Darwinism where strong abuse and exploit the weak.

>Again -- if you believe some Communist or Socialist heaven is better suited to supply everyone's needs, no one is stopping you from building such a thing, as Capitalism lets you live as you wish. If it's as good as you say, most citizens will probably join you anyway. I'm not sure how democratic it'll be, but as long as it's voluntary, enjoy yourselves.

Again, I've already explained that US has in fact been actively waging wars against every socialist and communist country out there. US currently forces sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, it's done countless coups and regime changes in Latin America, it has installed brutal dictators like Pinochet, and killed millions of people to stomp out communism and socialism. You are deeply ignorant of history and geopolitics making your arguments naive and infantile.

<comment><USER19> You say my iPhone example is nonsense yet you speak about wealth accumulation in a way that supports my example.

You ignore other countries falling the exact same faults as you say Capitalism

You seem to support a democracy where a majority could vote to oppress a minority

You blame me for suggesting a world "without government" which is extreme intellectual dishonesty, especially when I mention limited _government_.

Then you, once again, point at the problems with the US that are Cronyism, not Capitalism.

Living in the USSR is nothing more than an anecdote, the same way Mainland Chinese claim wrongs about China, probably without even knowing[0].

I'm sorry, but this is the point where I leave this discussion, as it seems to go nowhere. I suggest you read a little about the quality of life in the 1950s in the US, before Cronyism caught up to it, and compare it to the quality of life in the USSR at the time.

[0]: Warning, difficult to watch. [https://youtu.be/rbHxeOQA1Mc?t=933](https://youtu.be/rbHxeOQA1Mc?t=933)

<comment><USER17> >You say my iPhone example is nonsense yet you speak about wealth accumulation in a way that supports my example.

The concrete numbers do not support your example. You just keep repeating nonsense over and over, but it's still nonsense. 3 richest people own more wealth than bottom 50% of the population, while millenials own 3% of the overall wealth. If you don't understand that there's a vertical wealth transfer happening to the capital owner class, then I really don't know what else to tell you.

>You ignore other countries falling the exact same faults as you say Capitalism

Regardless of what faults other systems have, it's clear that capitalism causes the problems I've outlined. The discussion is about capitalism and its impact on society.

>You seem to support a democracy where a majority could vote to oppress a minority

That's literally how democracy works, people vote and then we enact policies that are in the interest of the majority. Sounds like you're promoting authoritarianism here.

>You blame me for suggesting a world "without government" which is extreme intellectual dishonesty, especially when I mention limited _government_.

I'm not blaming you, I'm pointing out the absurdity of your argument.

>Then you, once again, point at the problems with the US that are Cronyism, not Capitalism.

Once again I'll repeat that cronyism is a byproduct of capitalism. I've explained this to you repeatedly, yet you keep on ignoring that and pretending that these things are separate. Now that's what I call intellectual dishonesty.

>Living in the USSR is nothing more than an anecdote, the same way Mainland Chinese claim wrongs about China, probably without even knowing[0].

Again, you ignore the concrete points I made about how USSR function. You're intellectually dishonest.

>I'm sorry, but this is the point where I leave this discussion, as it seems to go nowhere.

And here I thought I'd never see the end of your drivel. Meanwhile, you might want to watch some footage from Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. US killed over half a million people in Iraq alone buddy.

<comment><USER20> If you own the device where you read HN on: Would you say it is worth the money you paid for it? Why/ why not?

<comment><USER17> It's worth the money I paid for because I use it to do things I'm interested in doing. However, if you're planning to argue that such a device would not exist without capitalism, then I'm going to disagree with you.

<comment><USER20> No, I'm going to argue that you gained more through possessing the device than by having the money you spent. Unless your stance is that only money is wealth.

<comment><USER17> Since money can be exchanged for goods and services, having more money directly translates into having more options to pursue your interests. If I had a bit more money, I could get an even better device, or if I was a billionaire I could pursue interests like making rockets, or any other fancy.

So, my stance is that money directly translates into increased opportunity in a capitalist society. Meanwhile, the relationship between capital owners and works is asymmetric where the capital owner keeps majority of the profit from the value that the workers create.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Rotten Tomatoes may have radically skewed the Oscars' Best Picture race - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17068324/oscars-2018-best-picture-academy-awards-voting-changes-rotten-tomatoes-oscarssowhite <comment><USER2> Some large fraction of the academy haven't seen the movies. Winning over that fraction is massively important. Marketing has been one way, not mentioned in the article. They literally pay to advertise to advance Oscar winning prospects. If you haven't seen the movie but need to vote on it then following the prevailing zeitgeist is a pretty common technique, rotten tomatoes strongly influences that zeitgeist, probably more strongly than the advertising and pr campaigns.

The real problem is most members voting clearly haven't seen the films and aren't voting their own opinion. If you can call anything of this utterly fatuous nature a problem at all. It's impossible to be cynical enough about Hollywood...

<comment><USER3> Most Academy members actually have seen all or most of the nominees. The Academy isn't as big as people think it is. It's not all of Hollywood; membership is only approximately 7000 people. The Academy holds free screenings in LA and New York in December, January, and February for Academy members and their guests. Some studios also send out DVDs or provide rebates for digital streaming.

The biggest problem WRT voting is actually Academy members forgetting to send their ballots in on time, which they addressed this year by switching to online voting.

Source: A number of good friends are Academy members and I have been to several of these screenings.

<comment><USER4> > Some studios also send out DVDs

in packages filled with bribes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I stopped using that site after realizing I barely ever agree with them.

<comment><USER6> For myself, I try not to watch trailers for something I want to see in the theatre and don't read reviews until after. AV Club has smart film and tv people but the site is unreadable now. Vox and RogerEbert are good, plus I subscribed to some blogs. I don't necessarily want to get agree with the critics I'm reading -- being challenged in your thinking is part of the game of art, right?

What's worth having, if you actually care enough, are people that you consider smart media interpreters on deck if you need some help navigating how you feel about something after.

As to RT, Metacritic, etc. that seems mainly beneficial for those with little time to actually decide. And if you have kids, you're probably going to end up seeing a fair bit of dross anyway.

<comment><USER5> Over the years, I watch less and less trailers, or only watch the first 10 seconds to get an idea of what the movie is about, but todays trailers come with a pre-trailer clip which already reviews too much. There's room for a business/website that talks about movies without giving anything away.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, teasers are about the best I'll do for the same reasons.

Most good reviewers don't go into plot too much or spoiler-y. The ethos at RogerEbert.com is to help people make informed decision. Same for those sites targeted to parents.

The trailers are all marketing, to hit people over the head over and over again. Not to mention commercial tie-ins that ruin things (looking at you Black Panther Lexus commercial during the Olympics). It's funny that advertising costs have actually increased for movies in this era of pretty much free buzz via social media platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what movies of this last year would have won under the old voting regime? Personally, the Oscars agree with my taste more than ever.

</comment><comment><USER8> Causation vs Correlation.

My own belief is that the majority of those who rate films online tend to be of a younger demographic. As members of the Academy themselves get younger, it's not completely outside the realms of possibility that the two tastes become more aligned.

<comment><USER9> Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator of published reviews for a given film. While they do expose an "audience score", that's not what people are talking about when they say something has e.g. a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes. It's the percent of e.g. well-known newspaper, internet, and broadcast film critics who react positively to a given film.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real surprise here is that there is anyone left who thinks that RT scores aren't basically paid marketing for whatever film is in question, and are real organic reviews.

Especially with the recent virtue signaling olympics that movie critics have been going through to evaluate movies on anything but their actual quality.

<comment><USER9> > Especially with the recent virtue signaling olympics that movie critics have > been going through to evaluate movies on anything but their actual quality.

What the christ does this mean?

<comment><USER11> Virtue signalling seems to a popular term among the alt-right. I would assume that this is a thinly-veiled reference to Black Panther.

<comment><USER12> It been popular for 10 years or so, not just with the alt right. I like using it when pointing out soulless corporatism and hypocrisy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it seems to be another term for disingenuous but much more buzzy and maybe more political?

From the Wikipedia page:

Examples of behavior described as virtue signalling include changing Facebook profile pictures to support a cause, participation in the Ice Bucket Challenge, offering thoughts and prayers after a tragedy, celebrity speeches during award shows, politicians pandering to constituents on ideological issues

\-- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CVE-2012-5664: Ruby on Rails: find_by_* SQL Injection - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889649

<comment><USER2> This looks to be specific to the AuthLogic gem for authentication. I've been doing Rails development for 7 years and I have yet to see AuthLogic in the wild. Devise is by far the most widely implemented auth system for a Rails app.

So, to see this you must:

       1. Have a Rails App
       2. Be using AuthLogic for logins
       3. Have let someone access your app's secret key.

This still is a bad bug, but the instances of this bug being used in an attack are going to be very few.

<comment><USER3> Although devise is by far the most popular, by looking at rubygems[1] it seems AuthLogic still is fairly widely used.

[1] <http://rubygems.org/gems/authlogic></comment></comment>


Uncommon model for pricing, pay-as-you-use - <AUTHOR> http://behindtheclock.timmyontime.com/post/117999832/an-uncommon-model-for-pricing-pay-as-you-use

<comment><AUTHOR> I would also like to have your comments on the pay-as-you-go model for that kind of service.</comment>