Why American Workers Pay Twice as Much in Taxes as Wealthy Investors - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-12/why-american-workers-pay-twice-as-much-in-taxes-as-wealthy-investors <comment><USER2> > Americans in the top 1 percent, and especially the top 0.1 percent, have > seen their wealth and income multiply in recent decades as the rest of the > country's share of the economic pie shrank. Since 2000, a recent study > found, the top 1 percent have made those gains almost entirely on income > from capital, especially corporate stock—not on labor income. One reason may > be the financial options of the wealthy: Business owners can lower their tax > bills by paying themselves in dividends rather than in salary, for example.

I've written a few times about how the different tax rates on income, vs dividends vs interest income vs capital gains, and even business vs personal tax rates all work together to ensure the 1% come out ahead of the average income earning individual.

I think I was 25 when I incorporated my first corporation, not because I was a startup founder, but to reduce my taxes. I'll bet if you look around at the most wealthy people you know, almost all will have their own corporation or two.

I mean, just the fact that people pay taxes and then expense out of after tax money and corporations pay expenses and then tax on whats left should be enough to illustrate how corporations keep the rich ahead of the salaried population.

It can get worse as corporations can change their tax year. This means if you are someone who gets a large bonus at the end of the calendar year you can shelter the tax on it for an entire year. So you can have someone who earns a $100,000 salary and gets a $500,000 bonus on December 31st. The bonus goes into the corporation and has a full year until November 30th before the tax is due. If you invest the bonus and earn 20% by next November you have earned enough money back to cover the corporate taxes due vs the salaried employee who pays the full 40ish% tax rate on the $500,000 bonus. Now, you'll have to eventually pay dividends to take the money out of the company but I think I've shown enough to prove just how far ahead the person with the corporation comes out ahead of the average person.

Until the tax law changes, smart people have corporations, the 99% don't.

<comment><USER3> They're currently trying to close a couple of those loopholes here in Canada, and it's surprising how much traction the complaints against the reforms are getting. The opponents are claiming that the reforms are going to devastate family doctors and family farms. The complaints are mostly bogus, but people don't understand tax law so are vulnerable to an emotional plea.

<comment><USER4> As someone who works at a startup and has interacted with many others, there is some merit to the claims. I agree that these loopholes should be closed and the tax system reformed, but I think we should be careful to do it in such a way that doesn't negatively affect e.g. companies like the one I work for, which went from three people to 70 and millions in revenue in just a few years.

Especially as Vancouver is trying to build its tech and entrepreneurial ecosystem, it's important to ensure that we aren't driving away or hindering small businesses to grow while also not letting huge corporations like TD, Telus, or Apple get the biggest benefits from the tax system the more money they have.

<comment><USER5> Since you pay taxes on profits and not revenue how would they impede growth? Money reinvested is tax free.

<comment><USER6> Money is reinvested tax free for a c corp. That is not always true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _You owe the IRS about $38,500 more, assuming each of us pays the maximum > with no special deductions._

This also assumes the investor has no interest income, which would be unlikely. For a younger person with a big nest egg, this wouldn't be a huge chunk of their assets. But as you age you'd want to shift into less-risky assets, like interest-bearing ones.

Also, investors would probably be diversified into real estate (which generates rental income, which is taxed as ordinary income). There are tricks that can be played in real estate, of course, but there's also lots of ordinary income tax paid.

> _I get to skip about $24,000 in payroll taxes that you and your employer > must fork over each year._

"Payroll taxes" includes social security, which the worker will collect until he/she dies. It is also payable to the worker's spouse in certain circumstances. But you only get to collect social security to the extent you paid into the system. So if there's an economic downturn, the worker will have social security to fall back on in old age, where the investor will not.

The general point remains, but this is a highly stylized example designed to emphasize (hyperbolize) the author's point.

<comment><USER8> _But you only get to collect social security to the extent you paid into the system_

Medicare and social security payout more in benefits than you paid in: [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/article/2013/feb/01/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/article/2013/feb/01/medicare-and-social-security-what-you-paid-what-yo/)

<comment><USER7> I was trying to avoid saying "you only get benefits if you paid in", which oversimplifies the situation. If someone paid in for decades, they'll get more SS than if they paid in for 2 years. Basically, I meant "to the extent" to mean that it scales with participation. Thanks for the link — interesting details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Because politicians sell progressive income taxes as a way to screw the rich, when it actually just screws the upper middle class, since the actual rich don't have jobs to tax the income from.

<comment><USER10> It's not the progressive tax structure that's the problem, it's the fact that cap gains are taxed at a much lower rate than other forms of income.

<comment><USER11> That's to encourage money to be invested and also to compensate for the risks.

<comment><USER12> If I had the money, I'd renovate my roof, get a solar roof with battery backup, etc. It's an investment just as much as in any business; why am I discriminated against as an individual?

<comment><USER10> That's a tax-neutral investment. You would pay for the equipment with after- tax dollars, and your returns would be in lower utility bills, which you pay with after-tax dollars. So, your returns are effectively tax-free!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Americans in the top 1 percent, and especially the top 0.1 percent, have seen their wealth and income multiply in recent decades as the rest of the country's share of the economic pie shrank. Since 2000, a recent study found, the top 1 percent have made those gains almost entirely on income from capital, especially corporate stock—not on labor income. One reason may be the financial options of the wealthy: Business owners can lower their tax bills by paying themselves in dividends rather than in salary, for example._

Yeah...look at Bitcoin, Bay Area real estate, tech stocks (Google, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Sales Force, etc.)...it would seem like 'assets' are kicking the asses of wages. People are getting rich buy & holding assets and with speculation than 'building and making things' (except for Tesla). And the low long-term capital gains taxes to boot just makes it all the sweeter.

Now obviously,doctors, coders, and lawyers can do very well too. To get to the stage where you can live off assets, you need income.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here is a question for any tax attorneys out there. Not sure how to find a clear answer to this question but these pages[1][2] seems to suggest that the capital gains tax rate is based on your "Taxable Income". This is shown further down the second page to be "really Regularly Taxed Income minus Adjustments, Deductions, and Exemptions". If your "Taxable Income" is less than 37,950 your long range capital gains tax is 0%.

This seems to me to mean that if you are say Larry Page or Sergey Page and set your salary to $1 (like the do), your main motivation for the low salary might not be to signal that, as a large shareholder, you are aligning your interest with shareholders and thus won't take a salary (this is what I thought the $1 salaries in the Valley were all about, but it always seemed a little silly to me). Maybe your main motivation is that you make all of your income in capital gains and if you have less than $37,950 in "Taxable Income", you pay %0 in capital gains. $1 in "Taxable income" with $1 billion in capital gains and pay $0 in tax. You could make a bit more with a salary of $37,949, but that is nothing compared to your capital gains, and then people would be pointed to exactly what was happening.

This would be a much bigger loophole than covered interest being taxed at the long term capital gains rate. Although, now that I think about it, the two loopholes would work together. Own a hedge fund, take $1 in salary, make $1 billion in carried interest, pay $0 in taxes.

I sure don't want to believe this is the way it works. Links to an IRS.gov web page example that shows otherwise would be greatly appreciated.

[1][http://www.moneychimp.com/features/capgain.htm](http://www.moneychimp.com/features/capgain.htm)

[2][http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm](http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm)

<comment><USER15> IANATA, but if you look at the qualified dividends and capital gains tax worksheet [0] on personal income tax form 1040 (that's the main tax form for individuals), you'll find that your capital gains tax rate is dependent on your income _including capital gains_.

For the purposes of your example, Larry and Sergei would pay no tax on the first 37,949 of capital gain income (thanks to the $1 salary), but regular capital gain rates on the next ~billion.

[0]: [https://apps.irs.gov/app/vita/content/globalmedia/capital_ga...](https://apps.irs.gov/app/vita/content/globalmedia/capital_gain_tax_worksheet_1040i.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Thanks. That makes sense. Didn't think a loophole that big would not be talked about more. On the other hand, it is interesting to know that you can have a capital gains income of ~75k as a married couple and pay no taxes, if you have no other income. Not a bad income for early retirement.

<comment><USER16> Here's an even more ambitious use of loopholes: "How to pay ZERO taxes in retirement with 6-figure expenses"

The poster "livesoft" is one of the consistently insightful and funny posters I know.

[https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=87471](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=87471)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The most famous economic boom in U.S. history, right after World War II, > occurred when the top rates on dividends were between 70 and 90 percent.

This seems very much like presenting correlation without any semblance of causation. Specifically, "right after World War II" is a pretty significant variable to ignore. The financial impact of the war being over (and massive amounts of resources being re-allocated) may well have been large enough to counteract any other variables.

<comment><USER18> But it's a really popular meme so who cares? It's not like Bloomberg is supposed to understand economics or something

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> One thing a middle class friend of mine does is the following:

1\. Buy house

2\. Rent out rooms

3\. Deduct all expenses that you'd have to pay anyway, utilities, internet, etc. as "business expenses".

4\. Depreciate house

5\. Renovate the house and depreciate the new fixtures/additions/etc.

6\. Reappraise the house after a certain time and refinance.

7\. Take money out after refinancing and buy more property.

Go back to (1).

It's pretty much foolproof. The tough part is being an owner-occupied landlord for a bit to get to the point where (6) is worth while. You also have to be in a hot market.

<comment><USER20> when you sell those properties, you still have to pay all the taxes. Depreciating doesn't save you from having to pay tax, it just defers the tax liability to the future.

<comment><USER19> You have to pay depreciation recapture tax whether or not you actually depreciate your house[1]. Not depreciating a rental property is just stupid.

[0] [https://www.thebalance.com/depreciation- recapture-3192979](https://www.thebalance.com/depreciation-recapture-3192979) [1] Internal Revenue Code section 1250(b)(3)

<comment><USER20> I agree, I am just saying, depreciation is not a free pass, since when you sell, you have to pay the tax.

<comment><USER19> True, but you'd have to pay tax either way (e.g. don't have a rental and pay capital gains, though this is minimized if you're a first time homeowner), is what I'm saying. Though, the cool thing is that if your house is a rental (as opposed to residential) you can actually offset depreciation recapture by passive loss throughout the time the property was a rental. Often this completely negates the tax.

Man... _too_ many benefits are given to those who own property.

<comment><USER20> doesn't passive loss lower your tax basis? so, no, I don't think it negates the tax.

<comment><USER19> You're right, however in the original scenario proposed you'd sell your property and buy another one, enacting like kind exchange. So then you don't have to pay any taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The biggest lie is this nonsense about "double taxation," ie taxing money that's already been taxed is somehow unfair. So stupid.

Capital gains tax shouldn't exist. It should all be one income tax. You can carve out discounts or exemptions for things like sale of PPOR, sale of family business up to a certain point, if you want.

<comment><USER22> I don't see it that way. When you invest you risk the capital. You might get a return, you might not and therefore the taxation rules should reflect that. The situation as a worker is different. The only risk you take is that you might select a bad company.

<comment><USER23> "The only risk you take is that you might select a bad company." \- that's the same risk an investor takes no? Except the investor can diversify across many companies, while the employee can rely on only one. Yours seems like an argument for investors to pay a _higher_ rate than an employee, because they can diversify their risk.

Personally, I don't think taxes should be based on risk assessment.

<comment><USER22> If there was no capital gains tax it would almost certainly reduce investment in risky industries. For example, high tech.

<comment><USER24> The risks should be reflected in the possible return from the investment (pre- tax), and it is. This is most obvious with fixed-income investments (bonds) where the rate is directly derived from the perceived risks.

The justification also breaks down when you recognise that capital gains taxes are the same for investments in any sector: If it's supposed to reward risk- taking, why tax investments in retail or insurance stocks the same as early- stage venture capital?

<comment><USER22> It is recognized to some extent. Thats why interest has a different taxation rate than capital gains on stock investments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Taxing investors less is really not what the U.S. needs now," Saez said. "Instead, we should focus on trying to rebuild middle-class wealth" by encouraging families to save for retirement and pay down mortgages."

How do you encourage families to save for retirement? isn't a lower tax rate on investment income a way to do that?

<comment><USER25> FTA "There is little empirical evidence showing that taxing investors less stimulates savings and growth," said Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley.

<comment><USER20> Yes. But that's because there is so little data and so many confounding variables There is little empirical evidence for everything in macroeconomics, including for Saez's claims.

<comment><USER26> Wait, did you really just say, "I acknowledge there is no evidence" immediately followed by "there is no evidence for the absence of evidence"?

If I'm not missing something you though was implicit somehow, that is some pretty remarkable logic.

<comment><USER20> There is evidence, but it's relatively weak from statistical significance point of view. This is also true of Saez's claims, such as if only we get rid of lower taxation on capital, things will improve for the 99%. I am not aware of any evidence that would support this prediction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If your only income is qualified dividends you can make about $90,000/year and pay zero taxes.

<comment><USER28> If you're making $90k a year in qualified dividends, you're almost guaranteed to be pulling a good chunk of change in other forms of income as well.

<comment><USER29> My parents saved their whole lives and now make about $100,000 / year in qualified dividends - They pay about 6K in federal taxes with all that income.

My dad bought pcg_pe for $12 / share when they went into bankruptcy protection bc Enron/etc. When they came out of bankruptcy they had to back pay him all the missed dividends and now continue to pay $1.75/share/year. For his cost basis, its 15% return yearly. Not too shabby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> America has among the highest capital gains tax rate in the world, and if you live in California (which treats gains as regular income) the combination of ACA/NIIT, state, and long term capital gains I believe _is_ the highest in the world.

</comment><comment><USER31> The intention behind this tax regime was that long-term investing has positive external effects on the overall economy so should can be incentivized (which like all other social incentives in the US is done via tax incentives). In 2017 with a global glut of capital desperately looking for any kind of return, it's not clear if this incentive is necessary anymore.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would love a simple tax system but no politician in Washington wants, especially those on the left side of the aisle. the tax system is the largest source of political power that exists in the United States and likely everywhere in the world.

Politicians refuse to let you disarm them. Worse they are adept at convincing you they need more taxing power by playing you off each other, by preying on your jealously or creating it.

What is ignored about investment income taxing is that original income used to create the investment was taxed. Hence we are taxing it more than once and doing so forever. the alternative is they pull their investments/risks and put them into vehicles like bonds that government officials really want them in. don't think these articles come out of thin air, they are politically motivated to get you angry so you willingly give more power to the political class; they are the true one percent

</comment><comment><USER33> There's a startup idea in this. Help people convert to corp-to-corp with their employer. Get them set up with health insurance and the normal bennies. Take advantage of the preferable tax position.

</comment><comment><USER34> Any person or group that manages to avoid paying taxes should be celebrated. The solution to this "problem" should not be that the wealthy pay more taxes, but that nobody should have to pay taxes since it is blatant theft that funds incompetent and evil people. Nothing that the government does is good. All money that goes to the government is either wasted or spent in ways that make society objectively worse. All functions of government can be replaced and improved by a free market system.

<comment><USER35> Is this satire?

<comment><USER36> Whether or not this specific example is, I know people who legitimately believe this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I found this example interesting as a Canadian, as currently there's a big tax battle over people incorporating to avoid high marginal tax rates and take advantage of relatively low small business tax rates, plus income splitting (which normal employees don't have in Canada). In Canada the emergency room physician would be incorporated.

Personally I think a lot of the issue is coming from lowering small business tax rates while cranking marginal tax rates federally and provincially.

</comment><comment><USER38> Where this article "phailed" persuasion-wise was in its archtypes -- the hard- working, high-pressure ER surgeon v. trust-fund slacker baby. Really?

How about changing the dramatis personae a little -- say, make the wage-earner a VP of product development at a soon-to-be-purchased startup (straddling both wage-earning and investing, maybe) v. Warren Buffett?

</comment><comment><USER39> Legislators, the best investment money can buy.

It's amazing to witness the compound effects of interest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H long term changes in tax policy, particularly when the advantage becomes the new normal and is then the basis for further changes. How many people look at tax legislation based on how much better it is than 50 years ago?

</comment><comment><USER40> If capital gains taxes are raised, then someone who invests outside of a 401k or IRA gets double screwed.

<comment><USER41> Where does the double come from? Each dollar only gets taxed once... only the profit gets taxed when investing, not the principal, right?

<comment><USER40> If you make capital gains tax the same as income tax, then you're making the situation worse for people who invest their actual income over trust fund babies, not better.

It places another barrier on hard working people trying to move from middle to upper-middle or upper class status.

<comment><USER42> That doesn't explain how this person would have the same income taxed twice. Taxes are paid on gains, not the return of principal. Income would be taxed, and then the returns from the invested income would be taxed at a later date.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the arguments for low long term capital gains taxes is that investments carry higher risk and volatility than wages. Accumulated wages grow monotonically but investments are inherently volatile and there is always the risk of losing everything

<comment><USER43> I can diversify my investments, I cannot diversify the company I work for. For an individual being employed is pretty risky. I'm fairly confident that I have enough money to survive a recession without needing to take a hit on my investments (and I'm assuming the uber-wealthy are definitely in this situation). I'm not confident that I won't entirely lose my main source of new income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> How about the government spends a lot less money, thereby requiring far less tax to fund it?

Also, wealthy people are mobile, as are companies that don't have tangible assets. If you try to over-tax, they'll simply domicile everything elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER45> Capital does not need to follow an immigration process in order to move to a new country, beyond a known-fixed cost in customs duties, and typically not even then.

Labor can't run away as fast, so it's easier to tax more.

</comment><comment><USER46> We are the country where money >> labor. Lets be real.

</comment><comment><USER47> Can't we just have Sales tax only. People who buy more will pay more taxes. You can exempt certain items like food, education, healthcare. Why do we need complicated income tax model? In the Sales Tax Only model, wealthy investors can invest as much money as they like but they will only be taxed if they liquidate their stocks and buy a fancy car or a yacht. I am trying to understand why we need Income tax at all?

<comment><USER48> A sales-only tax (i.e. taxing consumption) means that the burden of taxation is disproportionally shifted towards the poor. A poor person consumes almost 100% of their income; a very poor person consumes more than 100% of their income (by going into debt), an upper-middle class person consumes much less than 100% of their income (they get savings, some investments, and big expenses like student loans and mortgage don't count for sales taxes), and a very wealthy person consumes just a small part of their total income, as _most_ of their spending is essentially buying control of means of production and control of other people, which is not consumption and _not_ affected by sales tax.

If all your spending is consumption, then all of that is taxable, and if much of your spending is to gain more income in the future (e.g. buying rent housing, or stock/control in companies) then that's tax-free - in essence it's a tax system that strongly facilitates a rich-get-richer, poor-stay-poor dynamic and increases inequality. And that's generally considered a bad thing for society.

<comment><USER49> A couple of random thoughts as a former WA state resident...

* WA omits groceries, prescriptions, and rent from sales tax. So many of the actual necessities in life are already not impacted.

* No personal income tax drastically simplifies and shrinks the tax bureaucracy. According to the Seattle Times, the city's goal of taxing high earners will cost "10 million to $13 million to set up, plus $5 million to $6 million per year to manage and enforce". That isn't counting the overhead costs on the citizens themselves. This is all money that could more productively flow elsewhere.

* There seems to be an assumption that income taxes will drastically reduce the sales tax. But from my memories of living in both CA and NY don't really bear that up. If anything, these states all have problems with spending too much... more tax revenue is like giving alcohol to an alcoholic and just makes the problem worse.

* Income taxes give politicians another tool for pandering to special interests. In NY, one of my exes got a fixed tax deduction for classroom supply expenses because she was a teacher. That's neat, but there was no such tax-payer candy for my own professional expenses. And back then her salary quite a bit higher than mine. Not fair.

* (bonus!) We often tax things that we wish to disincentivize, such as cigarettes. If you accept the premise of anthropogenic global warming, then perhaps we should drastically jack up sales tax instead to reduce consumption, keeping the omitted categories above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Ok, so how about we lower the tax the "american workers" (more like upper middle class) are paying? Get rid of progressive tax system maybe? Fix the situation where the "bottom 50%" aren't paying anything thus making them an easily manipulated group by promising higher taxation of the "evuhl 1%"?

</comment><comment><USER51> Makes my blood boil reading this, especially how poor republicans who have the most to gain through tax reform are consistently voting against their interest.

<comment><USER52> But poor republicans have often a religious obligation to vote republican.

So do you vote democrat to get more money and fail your religious obligtation? Or do you vote repblican to fulfill your religious obligation at the cost of some rich guys getting richer?

Not all people vote through an economic lens. Many othet lenses exist. Religion is just one of them. You could replace religion with gun rights. Or states rights. Same story.

I would guess for most people, no one party matches all their wants. So they need to prioritize.

<comment><USER53> This is why our two-party political system needs to change. It's proven inadequate to reflect the people in a nuanced enough way.

<comment><USER54> The problem is a strong multiparty system can get fringe elements in power.

We also, need to rank candidates: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ranking- candidate...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ranking-candidates- more-accurate/)

<comment><USER4> > The problem is a strong multiparty system can get fringe elements in power.

But as demonstrated, a two-party system can (will?) eventually lead to polarization, causing one of the only two options in the system to _become_ a fringe element, and unfortunately the only option the people have now are the democrats or a party of right-wing extremists who are anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-education, anti-science, and white supremacists, all while lying about anything they can to make people afraid of anything that will drive them to vote Republican.

In other words, a multi-party system might end up with fringe elements, but we've proven that the two-party system can not only do that but effectively force a huge number of people to vote for that fringe element.

<comment><USER55> I don't have time to go into the length I want, but this comment is a perfect example of the myopia that polarizes peoples opinions. Both parties are equally part of the problem, and the people on both sides who fail to see that are also, including comments like yours.

Please, don't try and turn this into a whataboutism and argue how much worse one party is, that's the trite and cliche response we always here that never addresses root causal issues.

Rant about your comment aside, after long deliberation this is why I support the unparty movement, the people could get enough third party people in to take away the majority from both parties. Congress (and the rest of gov) needs to be reminded they work for the people. Right now, both parties work for themselves and those that corrupt/black mail/threaten them.

<comment><USER53> > Both parties are equally part of the problem, and the people on both sides > who fail to see that are also, including comments like yours.

Be careful not to cause useless agurments. Both sides are at fault, of course, and it should be obvious that one side is currently more extreme than the other, just like the post above said. Such partisanship is a failure of the two-party political system that amplifies an us-vs-them mentality that people naturally get when under stress.

> this is why I support the unparty movement

I assume the unparty movement is a movement to completely remove parties, which wouldn't work in my opinion. It ignores the human tendency to form groups, and makes negotiations difficult if you don't have at least some centralization of power or method of organization. A multiparty system is a better balance IMO because it maintains natural human hierarchies while easing the adaptation of the government to changing demographics with different needs.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Is the CO2 of the Web [audio] - <AUTHOR> https://changelog.com/jsparty/80 <comment><USER2> He has some great points.

For 5 or so years I've been the guy who immediately started a SPA and I've turned 180 degrees. I now think SPAs are basically a cancer, with some exceptions where an app-like website is justified (Gmail, etc) or a hybrid app. SPAs introduce unnecessary complexity and bloat for the vast majority of use cases.

<comment><USER3> There is so much entertainment in SPA vs HTML and similarly Vim vs Visual Studio, static vs. dynamic types etc. debates. But to be boring (sorry!) it all comes down to the most approriate tool for the job. At work it's a SPA because it's an application delivered via the web. Delivering via not the web wouldn't work as well, and delivering it as not an application is a non starter.

My current side project is a HTML sprinkled with JS, turn off JS and you can use most of the site kind of thing. Why? Because ... well mainly SEO to be honest. But there you go ... reasons!

<comment><USER4> > _But to be boring (sorry!) it all comes down to the most approriate tool for > the job._

It does. But, depending on how you look at it, either most web companies absolutely suck at picking right tool for the job, or the job isn't really what you'd think it is.

Taking your typical plain webpage done as an SPA, you could either say (as I would) that the authors picked wrong tool for the job, introducing completely unnecessary complexity both on their end and customer end - or, you could tell that the job of that website isn't to be useful to and considerate of the visitor, but to be e.g. CV-fodder for web developers, a way for the team to show off their sophisticated infrastructure, or for the marketing to play their A/B testing shenanigans, or for the company to show off to the investors, etc.

Once you account for all the "parts of the job" that are orthogonal or even opposite to delivering value to users, suddenly a proliferation of frontend complexity makes perfect sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm working on a dashboard for a personal project. It involves a few dynamically populated dropdowns and a map with custom markers. In the past I might've used jQuery and maybe Backbone in more extreme cases. After looking into the "modern" options available I ended up writing the damn thing in jQuery. I did it in a few hours without having to involve Node, npm (or yarn), hundreds of dependencies (and associated security concerns) or "(com|trans)pilation)" of anything. The whole process reminded me again of why I went from fullstack to working exclusively on backends years ago.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity - did you chose jQuery because it's so ubiquitous or was it the better choice? There are frameworks like vue.js where you don't have to deal with node, yarn, explicit dependencies and transpilation, that offer virtual DOM and have very little overhead.

<comment><USER5> Better choice ultimately but I suspect the hype around "modern" everything these days would still lead a lot of people in that direction, even for simpler things like this. I did briefly look into Vue and didn't completely hate it. Although the docs (at least from my cursory glance) were suggesting you would need Node to get up and running with it. Good to know it doesn't need to be that complicated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know, on the one hand, JavaScript is without doubt neccessary for a lot of useful things on the web. OTOH, I always thought of JavaScript as a way to get a better declarative web long term, by experimenting with UI paradigms and trying things that eventually can become part of new declarative HTML UIs. But that feedback into HTML never happened, and it seems we're stuck with an incredibly poor language we're enslaving the next generation of both users and developers in. The worst part is IMHO where we attempt to shoehorn JavaScript into a "serious" language with ES6+ classes, modules, new syntaxes, type decorators and what not; all we've achieved with these inessential extensions is to make future browser implementer's life difficult.

I haven't listened to the audio, but all it takes to get rid of JavaScript- heavy pages (that only exist because young webdevs are being taught and drool about mostly JavaScript, React, and other overkill rather than web basics), we just need to step up the game and demand power-efficient webapps, or no webapps at all.

<comment><USER8> Experienced engineers use react when it is needed for the enhanced ux. JavaScript is actually a decent programming language if you use the functional paradigm and read enough books and ship enough products to understand its strengths and weaknesses. It's even better with typescript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm building a web product.

The static pages are in static HTML, because of course they are.

But the product pages need to be interactive. To do that, I need to use JS, and an SPA framework (I use Vue) makes that easier and way less effort than (e.g.) JQuery.

I have one problem, though... the marketing folks want to be able to change the copy on the static pages, but they don't want to learn HTML. They're pushing for me to implement the static pages as a Wordpress site, with a list of pluging that they want, because that's what they're used to.

I don't think JS is the problem here...

<comment><USER10> It's fairly trivial to setup a simple text file with all the websites copy so that when the file is updated a script can automatically fire to rebuild the static pages and deploy it.

<comment><USER11> That doesn't answer the marketing folks' concerns in GP. They don't hate HTML because they prefer markdown or whatever; they want a WYSIWYG/drag-and-drop site builder because it's what they're used to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm tired of discussions concerning "Javascript" and "the web" where absolutely conclusions appear to be drawn. JS is a language, the web is a platform. Ofcourse overusage of JS results in annoying bloated websites, but when you want to build interactive applications that can easily be distributed to the entire world, the combination of JS + web is a virtue. The web isn't only for displaying static content, it's time to accept that.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I've never understood the yearning for effectively plain text html. I remember recently a submission that had a "brutalist" styleguide.

I wonder how much of this is a reaction to the complex and volatile nature of frontend patterns, in a psychological sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anybody catches the titular moment, drop the time index here, please.

<comment><USER15> around 20:45

<comment><USER16> Does this mean Svelte 3 is the Tesla of the web? No virtual DOM it's like it doesn't even use gas. XD

tl;dl around 20:45: They're comparing javascript and the tools you use for it to transportation modes. Saying things like Angular was the H2, React is the H3, vanilla javascript is riding a bike. They really are just saying don't over engineer things and use the right tools for the job.

Douglas Crockford's Javascript the Good Parts, is imo the best when it comes to getting a feel for what the right/wrong tools are. That book was a perspective changer for me. People like to get very passionate about frameworks and how Javascript _should_ be done. JS The Good Parts made me realize it's better to play the strengths of what's available to you here and now. To accept the tooling as it is with its pros and cons - exploit the strengths and minimize the impact of the cons.

<comment><USER2> > _JS The Good Parts made me realize it 's better to play the strengths of > what's available to you here and now._

So... use what?

<comment><USER17> Use your own experiences and your common sense to make good decisions yourself.

<comment><USER2> Of course I do, I was just wondering what you used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm wanting to enhance a server-rendered template with a bit of JavaScript to fetch data from the server and update the DOM.

I like that Vue can be "dropped in" to any HTML page, like jQuery, without completely taking over the frontend development process, but it still weighs in at 30k. Also, the Vue docs are primarily oriented towards a pre-processing SPA workflow.

Are there any light-weight libraries like Vue, around 2k-5k, that enhance static HTML with declarative DOM manipulation reactive data binding?

Is there a "plain JS" approach to declarative DOM manipulation?

<comment><USER19> lit-html lets you write declarative, reactive templates in plain JS, and is ~3.3k. Check it out here: [https://lit-html.polymer-project.org](https://lit- html.polymer-project.org)

<comment><USER20> That sayHello function declaration burns my eyes.

Why?

<comment><USER4> Because it's the first time you've seen JS lambdas, the "html`foo`" syntax, and/or JS string interpolation?

This function looks perfectly 100% normal to me, but that's probably I spent a whole workweek once almost entirely in ObservableHQ documents, where you'd use md`...`, html`...`, etc. all the time.

<comment><USER20> It's not the first time I see JS lambdas, or lambdas. I'm just not sure why

        let f = (a, b) => a + b

can be considered prettier (or clearer) than

        let f = function (a, b) { return a + b }

or (given the differences in runtime behavior)

        function f (a, b) { return a + b }

It saves typing for trivial functions, sure, but it's yet another syntax for the same thing.

<comment><USER21> I've come to like the arrow-function lambda syntax, but that's mostly because it is exactly what C# uses, and I write vastly more lambdas for LINQ and higher-order functions on the back-end than I do in JS.

The only downside is you've got to involve babel to transpile it down to the shitty old browser versions that we need to support, so you go from a simple reload to a webpack or grunt invocation that takes 30 seconds to a couple minutes, depending on how invasive the corporate anti-virus is feeling today.

<comment><USER19> Just don't compile during development. Only compile for testing on and differential serving to legacy browsers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think that VueJS is a great framework because it's very flexible. I love being able to build entire apps without a bundler and no build step. I hate bundling during development. It's so slow.

</comment><comment><USER23> So Javascript is the problem? Not the trackers, and ads but Javascript which is simply a programming language. May not be the best, but its not the worst either.

<comment><USER24> Javascript was a poorly thought out language designed in two weeks. It is a problem... so much so that features keep getting stacked on it because by now we are stuck with it.

It is such a mess that it is now mainstream to compile some metajs langauge to js.

Is it the worst language every created? Certainly not, but is it the worst language being actively developed and used? Yes. Is it poisoning the minds of young programmers with bad practices and a fear of concurrency? yes.

<comment><USER25> The first prototype was designed in 10 days. The language itself underwent several iterations and I think it's not fair to say that it was "designed in two weeks".

Other languages (and newer versions of JS) compile to ES5 so they can be run in JS engines supported by commonly used browsers. Not because JS itself "is such a mess". This allows one to roll out new language features to developers without having to wait for browsers to pick up a new standard (or language). Pretty much every language I am aware of adds new features and changes over time. Do you call them a mess also, because they make changes?

I think your comment is highly opinionated, not well supported by facts and sources, and IMO on the edge of being insulting to a lot of people.

<comment><USER24> Fair points, but the fact it has to be compiled negates almost all the benefits of a scripting language. Not to mention that using these tools is error prone (see leftpad).

TL;DR JS has become more of a target over time than a source which might be a hint that there is something deeply wrong with it. People wouldn't reinvent the wheel if it was round to begin with.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, it's so much of a problem and so badly designed that the whole web runs on it every day, enriching the lives of billions of people and providing them with access to valuable software.

You know, I guess that's why I come to think more and more that I have a real issue with the attitude of some of the more deeply technical folks: You completely neglect the success of this ecosystem and what it does for all of us, because of technical details that apparently do not matter a lot to end users.

Yes, for technical people having to deal with that ecosystem, it can introduce new quirks and issues. It's your job to deal with that and create value for customers.

Do something about it instead of ranting and whining.

<comment><USER24> Being forced to use electron-based apps hardly feels like an enriching experience (Microsoft removing the legacy QT based app for one without push- to-talk, Discord, Slack etc.)...

My final comment would be success of proliferation isn't always a result of quality. I am not saying it doesn't provide value - it is just a very poor programming language which, being popular, means people who learn professionally my get stuck in a minefield of dogma instead of focusing on sound principals.

[https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript- in-2...](https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript- in-2016-d3a717dd577f)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't get the sentiment about JS. Where all the hate is coming from? Maybe it's just confusion. People hate SPAs, but talking about web. IMO web and SPA are two different things. Maybe overuse of JS on web sites is problem, but A in SPA stands for "application". And applications written in JS are perfectly legit to me.

<comment><USER27> What is there not to get? Javascript in browser simply sucks as platform.

1) No memory limits (technically, there is a limit, but it is much bigger than, say, app heap limit on Android)

2) Background tabs can use setTimeout() to indefinitely run code long after user left them

3) Websites can start background processes (Service Workers) without user oversight. Users can't prohibit that or kill them via easily available means.

4) Applications are non-optimized by default, need massive CPU resources for JIT-compilation

5) Rendering a page with five sentences requires executing tons of said unoptimized code.

6) No permission system for majority of things. All important user controls have to come with browser add-ons.

7) Applications can update themselves anytime without user consent

8) Most web apps do not work offline

9) Everything is tied to proprietary web services with overarching surveillance and dodgy EULAs...

<comment><USER28> Every item in your list describes a problem with the way browsers are designed, with the way the web works, or with the standard practices and incentives of web development culture, and all of them would likely still exist were javascript replaced with any other language.

It's ironic that JS as a language is hated to the point of near derangement on HN while being the least relevant component of the problems people here have with the modern web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Relevant discussion titled "Why I'm still using jQuery" (27 May 2019, 237 comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20021289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20021289)

</comment><comment><USER30> So what's the view on using Gatsby for building content or ecommerce sites?

Better than using other static site generators sprinkled with JS?

I've not done any research yet, so curious to know what the HN community thinks.

</comment><comment><USER31> I urge you to use a well designed language like Elixir. And work with a well designed Framework like Phoenix. And then try to use Javascript for once. You'll see how fragile the language itself is, let alone its eco-system.

No, I'm not a JS hater, In fact I LOVE VueJS and I think you can do a lot of great things with it. For example, I built a completely offline cart system without any server backend using just VueJS. But then, between VueJS and something like LiveView, I find its infinitely easier and faster to develop on vanilla server-powered CRUD applications than SPA/JS only frontends with "serverless" backends.

With each year in web development, the complexity only seems to keep increasing to get something as simple as loading a web page fast or without refresh.

These days, I've started using LiveView and Turbolinks which basically means I have absolutely no necessity to touch Javascript at all and I can get everything done with the same language I write for my backend - Elixir. It's pretty amazing.

Much love to José and Chris.

<comment><USER32> Languages do not have to be "amazing" to be useful.

Also, being able to use the language directly in the browser is a pretty useful property.

<comment><USER31> It's really not genuine to label a language "useful" if it's the only option you've got.

<comment><USER28> Yes it is. Utility in a language doesn't only exist relative to other languages that target the same platform, a language can be useful on its own merits.

In the case of the web, the utility of javascript comes from being able to script the DOM and execute code in a browser. If there were other languages which could also do so (as was the original intent implied by the <script> tag,) those languages would also be at least as useful as javascript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> so, http is the methane(ch4) gas on the internet?

<comment><USER34> Then I guess the DOM is the radon of the internet, because most JS developers have no idea what it is or what its for and are scared to death to approach it without 3 layers of abstractions plus safety scissors.

dom - [https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/](https://dom.spec.whatwg.org/)

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


Does Ycombinator decline applicants based on programming language? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not exactly. It tells us what tribe the applicants are, but we don't accept or reject based just on tribe.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does Ycombinator decline/discriminate against applicants based on their choice of programming language? For example if a startup has their app written in C#/.Net, do they have an equal chance of being accepted into Ycombinator?

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> No. But it might help to have a good reason for using an inferior language.

There have been many PHP-based products, and a few Java products that I'm certain of. As someone else mentioned, it seems very likely that Xobni are using .Net since they're building desktop Windows software. Our products are in Perl. And Python and Ruby have a few adherents among YC'ers.

So, make sure you can defend your choice, and you'll be fine. Presumably you've thought a little about your language choice, so defending it shouldn't be hard.

The other YC'ers might make fun of you, though. It really is a pretty stinky language for web apps (and most apps these days ought to be web apps).

<comment><USER4> Perl, really? Just out of curiousity, what were your reasons? The close ties to shell scripting?

<comment><USER3> Several reasons:

The most compelling, and inarguable, being that our codebase is approaching ten years old (Webmin, with about 300k lines of code, is the core of our product). Ten years ago, Perl was the clear choice for web applications and system administration applications, so it was a double win. Several "competing" Open Source and proprietary products in other languages, including Python and PHP, have come and gone during that time, and we expect more to come and go in the future. Re-writes of a large codebase merely to follow language fashion are idiotic, and we're not idiots.

Jamie and I have frequently worked in other languages, with Python having been used heavily by both of us. I'm a bit of a language geek and so I spend a few days every month with something new (I'm playing with Haskell right now). We're not Perl-only developers, but in hindsight Perl has served Webmin very well, and it continues to do so. It has some very nice functional constructs that make the kinds of data processing we do simple and short...we make heavy use of map, grep, first class functions, etc. and it's possible to treat Perl arrays like Lisp lists, which can be very powerful. We'll both admit to liking Python syntax. We might even admit to liking it better than Perl, after we've had to dig into one of the older modules in Webmin and interpret some of the squiggles Jamie used back then. I definitely like Ruby syntax better.

But, although I've said that we aren't Perl-only developers, it is worth mentioning that Jamie (the primary developer on all of our products) is fantastically proficient with Perl. It's a language he's been working with full-time for his entire professional career, and it shows. He can produce, in hours, what I've witnessed other projects spend weeks or months creating badly.

Perl is extremely expressive, quite concise, is fast enough for almost everything we do, has great Unicode support, threads and concurrency that works, and an extremely mature and stable implementation. We can count on our software running on just about any recent or future version of Perl. This is not true of Python, Ruby, or PHP (with PHP being the most egregious example of backward-compatibility failure--I've done enough work in all three to know that Perl wins hands down in this area). Java is pretty stable, but would require a lot more code, and it isn't as widely available on Linux systems.

"close ties to shell scripting" doesn't really play much of a role, though the close ties to system administration does. Perl evolved out of system administration and text processing tasks, so it has a lot of great features for those tasks. As mentioned, Perl's grep is great for that kind of job, as are map, split, etc. It's nice to have iterators that already exist for the exact tasks we're doing. Sure, we could write our own in other languages (assuming they have the constructs needed to do it cleanly...so Python and Ruby, but probably not PHP), but we don't have to in Perl. I've worked on system administration tools in Python in the past, having modified yum, trac, Subversions post-commit mailer.py script, and Mailman for various custom tasks, and I generally come out the other side thinking, "I could have done that faster, and cleaner, in Perl". This reflects my own weakness in Python nearly as much as the strengths of Perl over Python, but I don't believe it is entirely my lack of proficiency. Perl just does some things better, and system administration is one of them.

I'm actually in the midst of choosing a language for new hosted applications, and so I'm thinking a lot about whether to stick with Perl or branch out some. We are no longer really tied to Perl--even with things that go out to customers--as Webmin has an XML-RPC interface, which can be used from any language with reasonable support for XML and sockets (pretty much all modern languages). But for hosted apps we're entirely free to choose. So, the UI portion of it will be implemented in PHP, to ease integration with our Joomla- based website...since I thoroughly dislike working in PHP, the other components of those apps will be in another language...probably Perl, but I'm toying with Erlang and Haskell. We'll see.

In short, saying "Perl, really?", kind of indicates a bias against Perl that is unjustified. Sure, many have trouble with the syntax. It can be intimidating. I've been working with it for years, and I generally can't write more than 10 lines without a syntax error! And, much Perl code in the wild is ugly...even some of Webmin's older code that we have to work with (and some of the newer code that I write that Jamie hasn't fixed yet!).

But, it's among the most powerful mainstream languages. Because the folks making decisions about Perl don't have Guido's or Matz' devotion to one particular development model, Perl gets everything--every cool idea in software development ever thought of has an implementation in Perl. You can code entirely in a functional style in Perl. You can do OO. You've got first class functions and closures. TMTOWTDI is a double edged sword, we can all agree, but if used wisely, it cuts through an awful lot of crap really fast. ;-)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for this. Sounds like you guys have some great reasons. Legacy's always a good answer, and productivity's a close second. I was mostly concerned with the web app frontend stuff with the "really?" tag. I didn't/don't really know your product well enough to know how much of it's in scripts and how much of it's officially part of the web app.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Searching For Sundar Pichai - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/searching-for-google-ceo-sundar-pichai-the-most-powerful-tec <comment><USER2> Interesting the CEO of Google can walk through CES undetected. What makes a business leader go from anonymous to celebrity? The press probably over- focuses on the celebrity types who probably only account for a fraction of important decisions in the tech world.

<comment><USER3> Many founders of relatively insignificant companies are more famous than many CEOs of significant companies. Founder is far more accreditive social capital wise than CEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that they're actively looking to reduce bandwidth usage. Hopefully it's the start of a trend.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Bavor, for example, keeps a running document of things he's learned from > Pichai. (It's three pages long. Sample entry: "Always choose quality. If you > have to delay things to ship a quality product, delay.")

I'm curious what other items are on the list.

<comment><USER6> Funny how this is pretty much the exact opposite of Zuck's "move fast and break things" mantra.

<comment><USER7> I think more so than the choice itself, what's important is that you design a system with integrity. If you want to go in the direction of quality, always choose quality and make decisions in favor of creating an organization geared towards quality. Whenever you go against the system you've created, the outcome will be poor because your system isn't built to handle it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Buzzfeed has really improved its content lately. If not for the tacky social media badges, I wouldn't have guessed it was BF.

<comment><USER9> Over the next five years, they'll use this sense of surprising quality to slide native or embedded or whatever they call it advertising right past your radar.

<comment><USER4> Okay? Then what? Do I read nothing? Pay $300+/year per site that I want to read?

I'm not sure what the "call to action" of your comment is - if the adver- article is interesting, more power to them.

<comment><USER10> > Pay $300+/year per site that I want to read?

If it's a site you really really like and you want to support them in a tangible way, then yes that's not necessarily a bad use for your money.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Artmaking API - <AUTHOR> https://theblackbox.ca/api <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, a few things have changed since the last time I posted this. I've removed the anonymity aspect of the project in an effort for transparency.

This project exists to create art objects in a pragmatic fashion. Rather then using algorithms to generate the artworks this "clips" sections of data and submits them to be interpreted by a artist. A program -> human bridge. Alternatively submit instructions and they will be evaluated as per your request.

To see some of my recent works check out [https://theblackbox.ca/](https://theblackbox.ca/) and [https://www.instagram.com/blackbox.art/](https://www.instagram.com/blackbox.art/)</comment>


Announcing Trigger.io Reload - iterate fast on mobile, inspired by Clutch.io - <AUTHOR> http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/08/16/announcing-trigger-io-reload-iterate-fast-on-mobile/

<comment><USER2> Terrifying how quickly Trigger.io moves. This is already awesome, but I could see an A/B testing layout on top of this that _alone_ could be an amazing startup.

I expect that we'll see a lot of consolidation in the mobile tooling market as companies with well-designed base infrastructure are able to quickly dominate new niches and feature sets. If Trigger continues executing this well, I'll be happy to see the market consolidate around them.

<comment><USER3> The important point isn't so much how fast Trigger is moving, but how fast they let developers move. The html/css/js -> mobile app shift is letting build build things really fast. This A/B testing stuff is helping those developers that have built fast iterate quickly. It's pretty incredible what a team can do in a weekend these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> More the reason web will win over "mobile." "Mobile" to me is not a platform - it is a medium of consumption. The web is and always will be the platform in my mind.

This is great. If people can iterate on mobile like they can on the web, theres no telling how fast things can move.

</comment><comment><USER5> Excuse my ignorance, but if you're serving up app content through a webview pointing to your own server space, could you not just edit the html5 yourself and have the same effect as this service? is the benefit more to do with tight integration of the native iOS UI components..?

<comment><USER6> Hybrid apps serve the website locally, from the device, because if you didn't there would be a lot more data being sent over the wire, and your app would perform significantly worse. The only thing (well designed) hybrid apps generally use the internet for is querying apis, just like normal mobile apps do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is already pretty common in the AppStore. I remember AstroApe talking about it at a meetup over a year ago. Since you can't push a new version without a review process, they often have server side settings for any new feature or game setting. So, for example, if they push a game release and see it is too hard for players, they can dial down the difficulty without having to wait a week for the review process.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very timely! I found the article you reference [http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are- fail...](http://andrewchen.co/2012/08/15/mobile-app-startups-are-failing-like- its-1999/) very interesting yesterday - being able to push major changes to application UI at "web speed" is a better way to launch and iterate. Downloading your new toolkit now...

</comment><comment><USER9> A/B testing on Mobile apps is something I have been thinking about for a long time. However contrary to popular belief it is possible to push out changes to native Android apps. I have developed such a technology. I am taking it in another direction (app discoverability) but if someone is interested in using the tech for A/B testing please drop me a line (kenneth at appprevue.com)

To see the technology in action go to www.AppPrevue.com. There is a link to a technology demo in the Play store. It is a bit crude but it does show it is possible to run a native Android app without installing it. The same technology could be adapted to push out new versions of an app to do A/B testing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I remember talking to them very very recently and asking for this EXACT feature. If I'm using webviews and JavaScript I want to change things on the fly. One more reason to use trigger for my projects !

</comment><comment><USER6> I think most companies that are building hybrid apps have developed a similar internal system. Good work.

</comment><comment><USER11> @amirnathoo: Do i still get to keep my free plan? I registered during the free plan before this whole Reload.

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks amazing, but doesn't Apple explicitly ban this?</comment>


Building a Build System: Bazel Reaches Beta - <AUTHOR> http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/09/building-build-system-bazel-reaches-beta.html <comment><USER2> I looked into Bazel. I like it overall, but it makes a lot of assumptions about the layout of your projects. For example, the java_test rule looks for all classes under a java or javatests folder trying to figure out the package and full Java class name to feed into the JUnit runner. I understand this is a standard Maven layout, but we don't have a standard Maven layout (not using Maven). Instead of the java_test rule failing, it passes because no tests failed, but no tests were found either...

It figure this out, I had to patch Bazel with printlns where tries to find all the tests.

A coworker found a similar issue with assumptions around the project layout, but I can't remember what it was. Being that Bazel is was Alpha at the time, now Beta, I am not going to write it off yet. If nothing else, better documentation about assumed layouts would be great.

<comment><USER3> Bazel's opinionated nature is it's blessing and curse. If you follow it's rules (fairly simple, internally consistent, and well thought out), it's amazing, and you need think a lot less about "where does this file go?", etc. If you don't have all those rules in your head, or if you're inconsistent about them, it's a nightmare.

Thankfully, it's a nightmare that can be fixed, and it behooves you to do so: Bazel's simple artifacts and build speedups are well worth the time you spend converting to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Surprised to not see mention of golang. Does anyone know if that's because even at Google scale, the simple "go build" command suffices?

<comment><USER5> (Former Blaze engineer and current Go tool builder here.)

Blaze's support for building Go source code predates the existence of the 'go' tool and uses very different conventions for package naming, directory layout, testing, and project organization. As a result, most Google Go code cannot be built with 'go'. This can be a source of frustration at times.

<comment><USER6> Is "Blaze" something else or an autocorrect/typo of "Bazel" (topic of this post)?

<comment><USER7> Blaze is the internal name of Bazel in Google (I don't know if both projects are identical, or if Blaze was just the "inspiration" for Bazel)

<comment><USER8> They refer to distinct things but share a lot of their code. Blaze doesn't contain anything that you would find useful, you need our infrastructure for its other features to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Still no menu :) - Just kidding!

Kudos to the team! As someone who works at Google, I can only bow my head to the "bazel/blaze" team. After spending years with crude Makefiles, verbose .vcxproj/.sln files, and many other weird build systems I can say blaze works really good for me, and I hope to use for my pet projects outside.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yet another build system with built-in conventions about where everything should be. Of course, we now have Go and Rust, with different conventions and their own build systems, plus Github, which has its own preferred layout.

A wall chart with all the directory conventions would be useful.

</comment><comment> rough-sea how does this relate to chromium's gn project ([https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/gn- de...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!forum/gn-dev))

<comment><USER11> (Disclaimer: worked in this area, haven't in a few years, my facts are sketchy.)

Bazel is open-sourcing of the build system used to build the majority of code within Google. Chrome (in part because it targeted Windows) didn't use the standard build system and instead has had its own series of custom replacements. gn is the latest iteration on that. As other commenters have mentioned, Bazel expects your code to be organized in the way Google code is, while gn likely makes similar assumptions related to how Chrome is organized.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Snip.ly, the link shortener that drives conversion - <AUTHOR> http://snip.ly <comment><USER2> X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking)

I'm not seeing how encouraging end users to engage in behavior that sites specifically turn off for security reasons as a 'good idea' regardless of the marketing value..?

<comment><USER3> People see Airbnb as a good idea, this shouldn't be a surprise.

<comment><USER2> I'd be just as surprised if people posted AirBnb on a site for lawyers in NYC and the majority of lawyers thought it was a 'good idea'.

I fully expect the end users of this product to be oblivious to technical minutiae like clickjacking. I was just expecting a stronger reaction to the technical detail this relies on a tech-heavy start up site like Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a bit surprised at the amount of positive response. This impresses me as rather obnoxious, probably effective, but obnoxious. Something between the pop-over ad and the ever-present network TV promotional crawl brought to the masses.

<comment> rkuykendall-com I see your point, but I see it as providing context to the links. This is especially useful on Twitter where there is so little room for commentary.

The message is not showing up for no reason. You clicked a link from someone you follow, because you wanted to usually BECAUSE of how that content relates to them.

Sure, if you just change every link you send out to a link with an ad at the bottom that is bad. But I see no problem with adding context and commentary to a link someone is sharing on social media for that exact reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know what court precedents there are for a site owner O. suing companies C. that present altered versions of O's site to third parties T, without consent from O? Arguably C. is interfering in the relationship of O. to T., wrongfully appropriating O's content for profit, and possibly defaming O by making O. appear (to T.) to be associated with C.

If such actions are not legally ruled out, this service may invite them.

<comment><USER6> Are you trying to ask if this could be tortuous interference with a business relationship? Or if Snip.ly would be liable for libel/defamation of their users by SiteA whose page was Snip.ly'd?

The former, possibly depending on the ToS of the site and how creative your lawyers can be. The latter, probably not; see 17 U.S. Code § 512, aka Safe Harbor for online posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really like this as well. Sure it could be used for evil, but so can a zip tie if used for the wrong reasons.

Already thinking of a ton of ways this can be used. Don't love that you have to sign-up for this but I suppose it is necessary.

<comment><USER8> What are these "tons of ways" you're talking about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure about this. Mmm. My gut feeling is I wouldn't feel too cool about using it, and I'd _guess_ that if you gave news sites the chance to opt-in to being framed, not many would take Snip.ly up on it.

But I might be missing the full picture, and perhaps I'm just not the target audience.

Good luck to Snip.ly, but for developers who would want to stop this kind of thing from happening on their own sites, OWASP has a clickjacking defense cheat sheet:

[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_S...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Clickjacking_Defense_Cheat_Sheet)

</comment><comment><USER10> How a user is supposed to know what site is behind the snip.ly URL? This is a phishing heaven.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm all for being creative in marketing... but this kinda seems like link bait spam. Interested in seeing if/how companies use it, but hoping it doesn't turn into ads for weightloss and sex enhancing pills.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really like it! You know one thing that's not great though?? I cannot get back to just snip.ly once I'm logged in! It keeps kicking me to the dashboard when I want to be on the homepage!

<comment><USER12> Also, I couldn't use Snip.ly on itself! But maybe that's on purpose :)

<comment><USER12> Last reply, but turns out that I did [http://snip.ly](http://snip.ly) and forgot the www! Amateur mistake :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is not good. Consumers will eventually recognize that snip.ly links offer annoying experiences and they would not click on them over time. Thus, your conversion might actually decrease.

</comment><comment><USER14> I, for one, welcome our new branded linking overlords.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am pretty sure, this service is not going to thrive, because people will never click snip.ly urls once they know what it is, and contains user-ad which hinders user-exprience on the linked article. Is this too hard to figure?

</comment><comment><USER16> Sniply is going to start stuffing their own ads in that bar eventually. It's a shrewd move by sniply to collect advertising revenue from traffic of other sites.

</comment><comment><USER17> Thanks. I can now use this instead of proxies to scrape Google </evil unintended use>

</comment><comment><USER18> Neat, but I would worry using it would annoy people. What's the ideal use case you imagine?

</comment><comment><USER19> Clearly can be good for advertisers, way to bypass having to buy an add inorder to advertise

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a really great idea although slightly evil. Could be quite useful though. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice work! The design is really clean and I really like the concept. Keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool idea. I saw betakit using this the other day.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like this idea.

Is it really free to use?

</comment><comment><USER24> That's really spammy and gross. You are what's wrong with the internet today.

<comment><USER14> Bill Hicks said it best, so I'll leave it to him: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Whenever HN "hivemind" thinks something is bad because they wouldn't personally use it, that's a good sign that it will be successful with consumers.</comment>


Show HN: Planning poker online – estimate tasks without influencing others - <AUTHOR> https://planningpokeronline.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I am super excited to share with you the project I've been working on since January!

Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, it is a simple cards game where teams can estimate the effort of tasks in software development.

The goal of the app is to allow remote teams to play it in a simple and funny way.

It is used by 1k daily users and we are getting the first premium subscriptions.

We want to keep improving it so any feedback is appreciated.

Tech stack (my favourite as it is super agile): \- React (CRA with typescript) \- Firebase \- Stripe

<comment><USER2> My issue with planning poker (and estimates in general) is that there is still a social pressure to push your estimates down as far as possible and ignore reality. I still think deadlines and limiting scope is the way to go.

<comment><USER3> How do you fix the deadline and scope without estimates?

Within my teams, estimating doesn't appear to have downward pressure. Team members appear to want to estimate correctly because they want to have a realistic and steady workload. Driving down estimates means their workload goes up (at least in the short term, until our average velocity adjusts).

<comment><USER4> Estimates for anything sufficiently complex are pure fantasy. They just serve to place an engineer in a bargaining conundrum and makes them implicitly decrease the scope for the 1000's+ decisions they will need to make during the course of implementation that they are not going to deliver the desired (also implicit) expectations. Its better to work from deadlines, then at least the engineer can try to hedge down the scope and deliver something they are comfortable with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool! How many votings are included in the free version? That would be interesting to know before we can test it in our team.

Sidenote: Planning poker is a registered trademark [1]. I hope you don't run into any legal issues.

[1] [http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=3473287&caseType=US_REGIST...](http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=3473287&caseType=US_REGISTRATION_NO&searchType=statusSearch)

<comment><AUTHOR> We still haven't a good defined limit, but it should be enough for most of the meetings.

Thanks for legal advertisment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thought this was about actual poker, took me a minute to get it.

Having the word Scrum and Agile on the homepage, explaining the problem and solution statement could help a lot.

<comment><USER7> I think selling teams on the idea of planning poker is out of scope for this project. It's my impression that most devs and product people are already familiar with it, but that's just my own anecdata.

For those who know what planning poker is, the landing page is very clear.

<comment><USER8> Yep, planning poker is something I'd expect most people to encounter within their first day of direct contact with Scrum.

More generally: Tech is absolutely rotten with jargon, most of which is assembled from pre-existing words that have different meanings in their original context. I don't think it does us much use to complain about this fact whenever we get tripped up by it. Nobody wants to have to always define the context of their jargon before using it in order to avoid confusion any more than they want to use XML Schema and qualify the names of their tags at all times. It would just be a horrible chore. It will be quicker and easier for everyone if we just learn these bits of jargon ad-hoc, and accept the occasional moments of mild confusion as part of the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have no idea what this is? What is an 'estimate' referring to, online poker? The image seems to make it look like a robot helps you estimate the amount you should bet when playing poker?

<comment><USER10> It's an estimation technique used in agile development.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Execution is nice but last weeks we found jira "agile poker" plugin that you can do estimations asynchronously. Other people don't see your estimations and you can do your estimations whenever you feel like it. Also all the stories and descriptions are visible in one place. So unfortunately this tool is not an improvement for me.

<comment><USER12> do you like the asynchronous nature?

for me, the most valuable part of planning poker is when we see one vote that's way out of line with the rest, and that person explains their thinking, and some important discussion can take place. with asynchronous voting, i would imagine you'd get a fair bit of "oh, yeah, to be honest i don't remember why i gave that one an XL".

to be honest, i don't even see the point of keeping votes anonymous. if there's enough judgement in the room that people are ashamed to honestly say how difficult a task would be for them, i think that's a larger problem.

<comment><USER3> _i don 't even see the point of keeping votes anonymous_

Judgement is potentially a problem.

But, beyond that, seeing votes could lead more timid team members to simply wait for the tech lead (or a boisterous team member) to vote and follow along.

<comment><USER12> oh, we do "put the card face down in front of you and we all turn them over at once".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice one, a few quick thoughts after playing for 2 mins tops (so take with some salt!):

1\. When all players in the game have voted, just turn the cards to show the results right away

2\. The tutorial moving around the screen was only ever so slightly annoying, wish it stayed in the one spot (or let me advance using arrow key on keyboard or something?) so I could just click through and read faster

3\. I assume the link we get given is persistent and never expires? We'd want to have it as part of a recurring slack call for example without having to generate a new one each week.

EDIT: 4. I didn't think to click my username arrow to see all the menu options (especially 'Go unlimited') you may want to consider making at least that a bit more prominent.

Nice work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for your feedback, it is well appreciated and we will think about it.

About point 3: yes, game urls are persistent and never expire but only in premium version, for free users games expire after a certain amount of votings. (Only game's creator needs to be premium)

Thanks for your time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is great. Clean landing page, easy to get started, simple and transparent pricing. Doesn't solve an enormous problem, but scratches an itch that's just annoying enough to justify the price.

I've shared it internally, excited to see if teams decide to use it. So far we've seen everything from spreadsheets to physical cards being used.

Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Very nice comment, I appreciate it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had no idea what this was about until I read your comment here that it was about scrum and work related. My first guess was that you would watch poker games and try to guess the outcome. I don't know if I'm just stupid (very very possible), otherwise my feedback would be to illustrate/explain/communicate more and better :)

<comment><USER15> Same here. I would advice the owner to change the way he markets this a little bit. Maybe mention the words Agile or Scrum at least.

<comment><USER5> Planning Poker is a well known term in the agile development / scrum world. If you don't do scrum, you're probably not in the target group.

<comment><USER16> I had been doing scrum in the last 10 years, poker and online sticks out so much that I didn't realised that it has to do anything with scrum before I clicked.

<comment><USER14> Same here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be nice if the results were anonymized so that people can voluntarily explain their high estimate. This is useful in highly politicized environments in which managers make fun of and pressure individual people for voting higher.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmmm, now and then I stumble over links that just won't work on Firefox, even with uBlock and uMatrix disabled. Here's one, I click "Start quick game", and all I get is black. Is this normal or an exception?

<comment><AUTHOR> are you using some kind of firewall? Some users are facing problems when using them

<comment><USER18> Really not anything beyond the mentioned plugins. On my old system, I could open the offending pages in Chromium and they'd usually work there. On my new one I have no second browser yet, because my distro is Ubuntu-based and I've purged the snap bs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://tools.wmflabs.org/hatjitsu](https://tools.wmflabs.org/hatjitsu) is a free alternative that highlights if there are any differences among revealed points.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from > 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

White page.

No, I won't allow localStorage just to see your homepage.

</comment><comment><USER21> Would you like this used by a construction company that were to renovate your house/apartment? Would it work for that?

</comment><comment><USER22> Really nicely built! I am definitely using this the next time I'm doing a sprint planning session. Thanks for sharing

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! I am glad you like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Did we hug it to death? Got an error:

> Could not reach Cloud Firestore backend. Backend didn't respond within 10 > seconds.

</comment><comment><USER24> There was just a kickstarter for actual playing cards. Cool idea making everything online.

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

Downloadable: [https://github.com/spelinbedrijf/ultimateplanningpoker](https://github.com/spelinbedrijf/ultimateplanningpoker)

</comment><comment><USER25> I like the clean interface but We've been using something quite similar: www.scrum-poker.org

</comment><comment><USER26> Congrats. You need Jira integration.

</comment><comment><USER27> Congratulations on launching!

</comment><comment><USER28> Nicely done</comment>


Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11472.html <comment><USER3> I confess I haven't read the entire article, but from the abstract I was wondering, why 143 kilometers (they answer this: distance to satellites), and why those two islands (except to maybe show off that they were teleporting in the lap of luxury)? I'm guessing it's because there is no physical link between the two, so it will reduce skeptics' abilities to say "this is a hoax, there is a cable connecting the two stations."

<comment><USER4> But quantum teleporting does require a link between the two points. From the Wikipedia article:

        The prerequisites for quantum teleportation are a qubit
        that is to be teleported, a conventional communication
        channel capable of transmitting two classical bits (...)

There is no teleporting in the classical meaning of the word, just communication between two locations to make a remote qubit match the (unknown) state of the local one. That state is 'teleported'.

<comment><USER5> _There is no teleporting in the classical meaning of the word_

So isn't it dishonest to call it teleportation? Even if all the scientists working in this area are calling it that?

<comment><USER6> No? How on earth is it dishonest to use the technical term for the thing? It doesn't seem any more dishonest than calling the constituent parts of matter "atoms" even though they can actually be split.

<comment><USER5> The discovery that atoms are not atomic (could be split) came after the term was coined.

On the other hand, in this case, a bunch of people decided to call something "teleportation" when it isn't teleportation.

<comment><USER6> AFAIK, it _is_ teleportation -- something is going from one place to another without having to move through the space between them -- but it just isn't what you think of when you think of "teleportation".

<comment><USER7> If it is moving from A to B via some physical continuous medium, then it is not teleporting.

<comment><USER8> (Note: my full qualifications are an on-going Coursera course on quantum computing that covers quantum teleportation lightly. FWIW, I recommend the course.)

In vague terms, the process of quantum teleportation is the following:

* You have a qubit that you want to transmit to a friend and that you don't know anything about.

* create an entangled pair of qubits (such as photons) and separate them. Keep one yourself and give another to your friend.

* Now you have two qubits; one entangled with your friends and one that you want to transmit.

* Send your two bits through a quantum circuit (the main part being a 'controlled NOT gate').

* Your bit is now entangled with the bit that is entangled with your friends bit.

* Measure each of your bits, hence 'collapsing' them. Each measurement gives you a classical bit.

* Transmit your two classical bits to your friend over any classical connection.

* Your friend then performs an operation on his or her qubit depending on what you send him or her.

* Your friend's qubit is now in the state that your original qubit was in. Your original qubit is now in a different state.

Call it teleporation if you want; it's not that unlike some sci-fi teleportation constructs of 'beaming' things places.

Why bother with this?

* It lets you send qubits to distant places that you have only classical channels to (and previously close enough contact share two entangled qubits).

* It allows more error-resistant computations: if your qubit is difficult to construct and you wish to perform a difficult operation on it, you can actually have your friend perform the difficult operation on his or her bit - _prior_ to teleportation - and, if it succeeds, you can then proceed with the teleportation. If it doesn't succeed, your friend may try again on another entangled qubit without messing up your difficult-to-prepare qubit. After a success and teleportation, you get the same result (up to a commutator which is usually relatively small and risk-free) as performing the difficult operation on the difficult-to-prepare qubit, but with less risk of messing it up.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, this is a pretty helpful summary.

Can you clairify the second reasons to "bother" with it? I mean, if it's difficult for me to perform the operation, it's presumably equally difficult for my "friend" to do it (and subsequently "teleport" the result to me), so why not just do it myself?

<comment><USER9> In addition to the transportation benefit, it can be used for computation. The example given in the Coursera course was to suppose that we have a qubit (quantum bit) Y on which we wish to perform some unreliable computation. If it fails, then Y's state is lost. Further suppose that Y is costly (e.g. time consuming) to re-create.

Instead, we can create a pair of entangled qubits (which is easy to do - <USER2> a single quantum gate), as one would when teleporting a qubit. We then apply the computation to one of these qubits, and try again with a new pair of qubits if it fails.

Once we have successfully applied the computation, we can teleport our "expensive" qubit Y using this entangled pair. The result is that we now have Y with the computation applied, but there is no risk of losing Y's state.

The details are rather more tricky (only certain computations can be used, some require a correction after teleportation etc.), but this basis can (and has) be built on to develop, for example, fault tolerant quantum computing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The full article is also available on Arxiv.org: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.3909v1.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER11> Could someone translate the abstract into English?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is another article that tries putting in English.

[http://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/physicists- quantum...](http://www.zmescience.com/science/physics/physicists-quantum- photons-08092012/)

<comment><USER12> The author fails to understand the basics of Quantum Teleportation. Think of it this way: Alice has 2 boxes with the same _unknown_ bit, and sends one of those boxes to Bob. When Alice opens her box she can see the value and Bob can see it too. Something like that.

Very good for cryptography (think untamperable shared secret keys) and for some cases of parallel computing.

Superluminal (FTL) communication would break Special Theory of Relativity. If anybody achieves that it would be an instant Nobel and front page on every newspaper on the planet. Even a mistake like the FTL neutrinos fiasco earlier this year.

Tech journalists tend to skim the abstracts and hype it to sell more clicks/ads.

<comment><USER13> I'm trying to think of a physical analogy to better understand this: Image you (Alice) have a randomly shuffled (say, by god) deck of cards. You cut the deck in half and distribute one half to Bob and keep the other half (such that by knowing one half, you would know the other). Until either of you look at your respective half-deck, the distribution of cards is in a superposition of all possible distributions (a la Schrodinger's cat). Where the analogy breaks down (thereby illustration what's special about Quantum Teleportation), is that as soon as Alice flips her cards, Bob's cards flip as well (and visa versa). Thus by the time the cards got to Bob, Bob would be able to detect that someone else could have read the cards and thus the information may have been compromised. (This is kind of how I remember quantum cryptography to work, actually).

Does this analogy make sense? My physics background is pretty weak...

<comment><USER14> This is really just an illustration of quantum cryptography, rather than quantum teleportation. Quantum cryptography is a method of exploiting quantum effects to create a channel that can be used to transmit classical information in a manner that cannot be eavesdropped.

Quantum teleportation is kind of the opposite. It uses a classical information channel in order to transmit -quantum information-, which can't actually be represented clasically. It is actually moving the superposition itself from one place to another. The term "teleportation" is used because the "no cloning" rule (quantum information cannot be "copied") means that the information is no longer in the original location.

This is mostly useful in quantum computers, because in order to actually _process_ information it's pretty important to be able to get it from one piece of the machine to another, and until the recent teleportation breakthroughs building quantum computers that could handle more than a couple "qubits" was pretty much not doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it incorrect to say that, with quantum teleportation - while faster than light travel of _matter_ is impossible, faster than light travel of _information_ is possible provided that you have previously shipped the endpoints of the link?

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation>

First paragraph.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, the key sentence here is

> However, it does not _immediately_ transmit classical information.

As I understand it, once you distribute an EPR pair, you can transmit one qubit of quantum information which thereby destroys the pair. Provided you can encode your classical information into quantum information, the amortized rate of classical information communication cannot be faster than light because you need to first distribute the EPR pairs (which you cannot do at FTL), but the _instantaneous_ rate of classical information communication could be faster than light.

The biggest assumption here is that you can encode/decode classical information to/from quantum information at a rate (if at all) faster than it would take for matter to travel over the potentially infinite distance between the EPR pair. Some googling reveals that this is possible via means such as time-bin encoding. (Edit: time-bin is only for photons, which I don't know if you can entangle, but it still appears that you might be able to encode classical information in electron spin)

What am I missing?

Edit - alecco's other answer in this thread make it much more clear what is going on. Thanks again.

<comment><USER15> It sounds like you already figured this out, but you can't encode classical information into the system in such a way that would allow for FTL transfer of information. Depending on what you are specifically thinking of as "encoding", there will be an equivalent reason why it won't work; often because you collapse the wave function of your local quantum pair-element when you transfer energy into it, which is a form of observation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485347>

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it extremely intriguing that although we do not fully understand the fundamentals of the quantum world we are able to exploit it.

</comment><comment><USER18> "... whose location is unknown ..."

Wait. Is this the dawn of truly anonymous communication, with no means of tracing the origin or target by wiretap?

</comment><comment><USER19> Beam me up, Scotty! (I couldn't resist...)</comment>