Opinions: It's time to give socialism a try - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-time-to-give-socialism-a-try/2018/03/06/c603a1b6-2164-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html <comment><USER2> The way Americans use the word socialism is very confusing. It's just a single word lacking details. Sometimes it's just pure ignorance.

>Capitalism is an ideology that is far more encompassing than it admits, and one that turns every relationship into a calculable exchange. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become commodities to be priced and sold. Alienation reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of the atomized individual.

What she is describing is markets, not capitalism. Markets and socialism are orthogonal concepts. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism)

The opposite of markets, price mechanism and incentives is turning everything into politics. Every relationship becomes politics. Bodies, time, energy, creativity, love — all become politics and power struggle. Political connectedness reigns. There is no room for sustained contemplation and little interest in public morality; everything collapses down to the level of special interests.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe it's time to learn from others' experience.</comment>


Groupon tumult turns up the pressure on Mason - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/15/us-groupon-pressure-idUSBRE87E00920120815 <comment><USER2> This is a Reuters release, but could it be that a story like this is planted by some interest group? This is something I've always wondered. Could someone with experience in public company politics shed some light on this?

<comment><USER3> Or maybe it's just what it looks like?

You don't need a conspiracy to question whether a first-time CEO is suitable for a multi-billion company.

Sometimes they are! In the software and technology world, particularly. But it's still worth asking.

Personally, that Mason is being pilloried and Zuckerberg praised is just a reflection of the current state of play of their companies. It might be that Mason is a wonderful CEO. But the forcing function for Groupon is that they have a model which cannot live up to the hype.</comment></comment>


Java to Scala converter - <AUTHOR> http://javatoscala.com <comment><USER2> This is just a simple front-end/demo. The real work is being done by a separate project at [https://github.com/mysema/scalagen](https://github.com/mysema/scalagen).

I kind of wished this site was written in Java and run through scalagen with the output being run as an additional meta-demonstration.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know scala so maybe I'm missing something, but does this just break with functions that start with a switch statement? eg.

            public static void main(String[] args) {
                switch (42) {}
                System.out.println("Hello World!");
            }

converts to

        def main(args: Array[String]) 42 match {
        }

dropping the println.

Edit: It also seems to be dropping autoincrement/decrement, and random other blocks of code I've looked at, so I guess it's still in a fairly early stage.

Definitely a cool project though :)

<comment><USER4> Yes. The problem with the switch is that in Scala, 'match' actually requires you to have at least one pattern matching rule.

The closest I'd wrote in Scala to your example is something like this:

        def main(args: Array[String]) = {
            42 match {case i: Any => None}
            println("Hello World!")
        }

Ideally, the switch (42) {} should be removed as it's not doing anything.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, maybe I minimized my example too eagerly.

        class HelloWorldApp {
            public static void main(String[] args) {
                switch (args.length) {
                  case 0:  System.out.println("No args!"); break;
                  case 1:  System.out.println("One arg!"); break;
                  default: System.out.println("Multiple args!"); break;
                }

                System.out.println("Hello World!");
            }
        }

This also seems to not emit the "Hello World" println.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also noticed this in IntelliJ when I went to copy some Java into a Scala project. As I began converting the Java code to Scala after the copy I was extremely confused when I found that the pasted code was already converted for me.

<comment><USER6> That being said, it doesn't work very well in many circumstances. I'm not sure if they're using Scalagen under the hood or their own home-baked stuff. It's impressive as-is, regardless of the issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Earnest question: who is the target audience here? If Java and Scala can be intermixed in the JVM, and the generated Scala code is not very idiomatic, then how would this be used?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a few examples:

1\. Someone still learning Scala syntax (and already knows Java)

2\. Let's say you already have an existing Scala code base and you want to try out some new Java library which has examples in Java but you want to use it in your Scala code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A Scala to Java converter would be needed more. Early adopters are disenchanted with Scala.

<comment><USER9> > _Early adopters are disenchanted with Scala._

Since everyone else seems to disagree, I'll explain why I agree:

\-- Scala advocates a completely different style of programming. You have to rethink how you code to match Scala's functional style. This is not a trivial thing if you have a bunch of Java developers you need to convert.

\-- I find the Scala documentation is less readable than Java's docs. They are cluttered with type conversion functions and unreadable operator overloads (the filtering helps a bit here, but it's extra work). Documentation is also split between the object/class/trait pages.

\-- There's a whole class of immutable data structures whose performance characteristics I need to learn, since I'm supposed to be using them.

\-- I'm not convinced that the overhead of copying immutable data doesn't outweigh the benefits of the ability to trivially parallelize the code.

\-- I'm not convinced that a project preferring only immutable data is easier to maintain.

\-- Programs seem to take longer to compile (sbt is especially slow).

Now that I think about it, Scala in relation to Java is a lot like C++ in relation to C. Scala sits on top of Java, so you need to know Java, and then you need to know all of Scala's features as well. However, (as someone who knows Java) I think C++ adds useful abstractions that are non-existant in C (templating, inheritance), whereas most of Scala's features are just syntactical changes of what already exists in Java.

<comment><USER10> _\-- I 'm not convinced that the overhead of copying immutable data doesn't outweigh the benefits of the ability to trivially parallelize the code._

Let me introduce you to my friend, Mister ConcurrentModificationException. He's a wily fellow-- he rarely pops up when you're doing local development, but he has this nasty habit of showing up in production whenever you start hitting a decent load. He's like Keyser Soze. You see him, then you try to debug the place he shows up, and _poof_ he's gone, back into the shadows from whence he came, only to reappear when you try to iterate over that singleton java.util.ArrayList once more.

Now, let me introduce you to my other friend, Miss scala.collection.immutable.List. She's a superheroine. You can run code using her on one thread, or ten threads, or ten thousand threads, she doesn't care, you're always going to get the same iterator back when you call List.foreach. For the very small price of a little bit of garbage (which Mister ParallelGC takes care of very readily), Miss immutable.List will return that filtered list the exact same way, every single time you run the filter method with those parameters you set. You can run code with her in development, staging, production, she's always ready to go, and you'll never run into Mister ConcurrentModificationException when you're dealing with Miss immutable.List.

 _\-- I 'm not convinced that a project_

What do you mean? All I read was "I'm not convinced that a project". Someone else must have come by and edited your post before I was able to read it.

<comment><USER9> _singleton java.util.ArrayList_

So...don't use data structures that are not thread-safe in threaded environments? Wrap it with Collections.synchronizedCollection. Or make copies, if you prefer.

 _For the very small price of a little bit of garbage..._

What small price? If I have millions of things stored in an immutable data structure, do I not have to copy the entire structure (or at least some portion of it) when I want to modify anything inside of it?

<comment><USER10> Ah, synchronizedCollection, the...

hang on...

wait a sec...

one more sec, someone's doing something...

now? no, not yet, wait...

how about... NOW! synchronizedCollection, the global lock for Java's mutable datatypes.

Here's the fundamental difference between Java and Scala: if I say, in Scala, val people = List[String]("quacker", "mark242") then _by default_ people is an immutable list. I don't have to do anything special. In Java, either I'm suddenly using the Guava libraries to get something similiar (but not the same), or I'm doing all kinds of funky dances around list iterators, or I'm using Arrays.copyOf, or what have you. In any case, you have all of this extraneous code, when _it isn 't necessary_.

Quick: give me a list comprehension method in Java that takes a list of Strings and returns that list, filtered, of Strings that are only five characters or longer. Make it null-safe and thread-safe. This isn't difficult-- you're thinking about 6-7 lines of Java code in your head, right? Null check, synchronized, new ArrayList, for(s in sList), that kind of thing, right?

In Scala, it's this. Some would argue you don't even need a separate method.

      def getFiveCharacters(s: List[String]) = s.filter(_.length >= 5)

_If I have millions of things stored in an immutable data structure, do I not have to copy the entire structure when I want to modify anything within?_

Dear god, man, what are you doing wrong in your Java code? This is the exact scenario where you _want_ an immutable list, otherwise you'll be running synchronized code and precisely one core of your CPU will be glowing red like lava, while your other CPU cores sit idle.

I just did this in the scala repl:

      (0 to 1000000).toList.par.filter(_ % 100 == 0)

What that does is grab all of the integers from 0 to 1,000,000, convert them to an immutable List, then filter that List (yes-- an iterator! with a filtered copy!) by only taking numbers divisible by 100. The whole thing takes a couple hundred ms in the repl (which is fantastic, since it's _compiling then executing the code_ ) and almost no memory overhead. For code that is absolutely thread safe. And the ".par" makes this run in parallel on all my CPU cores.

<comment><USER11> > Null check, synchronized, new ArrayList, for(s in sList), that kind of > thing, right?

> In Scala, it's this. Some would argue you don't even need a separate method.

It seems a bit unfair to force null checks on the Java code and then present a Scala alternative that throws NPE in two different places.

<comment><USER10> A good Scala programmer will never write the word null in their code. Ever. If I was overly concerned that the method was going to be called by Java code, I'd put this:

      Option(s).getOrElse(List[String]()).filter(str => Option(str).fold(false)(_.length > 5))

<comment><USER11> That should do it. I would probably go for

      def foo(s: List[String]): List[String] = s match { case l: List[String] => l.filter(_ match { case str: String => str.length > 5; case _ => false}); case _ => List[String]()}

It's a bit uglier, but I had to develop a habit of not spewing objects everywhere because of the constraints of the application I work on.

You're right that this is primarily a concern if the Scala dev wants to talk to Java. However, if the Scala dev does not want to talk to Java, perhaps a statically typed FP language with an HM type system would be a better fit.

<comment><USER12> I couldn't grok the original 1 liner, definitely not the second one and no way the last one. If there is a segment of programmers who grok and like it, cool. It still doesn't fix the performance problem of copying 1 million things before you can act on them because the copy would still have to happen on 1 core, or 1 core at a time, unless maybe the Scala compiler optimizes the code to divide the list among the cores available, if not though then immutability doesn't help performance during the copy.

<comment><USER11> You don't have to use immutable collections. If you want to use them, you should probably consider the cost of the operations you are using. Which particular operations are you worried about? Most updates to an immutable hash table or sorted map should copy only a small part of the collection, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a neat project. I have a giant codebase I'd like to try this on. Depending on the output, this might be the kick in the pants I need to get in to scala full time.

<comment><USER14> Scala that's been autoconverted from Java doesn't tend to be very idiomatic scala, and there's no way to convert back. I'd recommend writing bits of your code (particularly code that needs to convert between datastructures, or code where you need better control over effects) in scala first and see how you get on with it.

<comment><USER13> Yeah I looked in to the differences after I played with it a bit..generated code is never ideal in the first place though.

I wanted to see how close it was..but the mapping just isn't what I was quite looking for. There really is no silver bullet though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Intellij IDEA has had Java to Scala conversion built into it for a while (as well as Java to Kotlin, Jetbrain's new JVM Scala-like language). I'm not sure how Jetbrain's tool compares to the one in the link above, but the conversion result in Intellij varies by how complicated and dependent the code is on other packages/libraries. Converting an entire class file tends to work out much better than a single method.

I initially used it to convert some Android code in Java to Scala, but much of the time you have to end up rewriting that as well, since it's generally results in very non-idiomatic Scala code. Still useful for someone learning Scala though as others have pointed out.

The Scala plugin is free though and comes with the community edition of Intellij for anyone wanting to try it out. Basically you just copy/paste some Java code from the current project into a Scala file or right click on the Java file and select "convert."

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks great. Now if only Scala would play nice with Android, there would be no need to look back at java at all.

<comment><USER17> I made a few android apps with scala. What's not working for you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So now I am really wondering. What is the sub java parts of the JVM that need to be implemented to completely free Scala from the JVM ( i.e. what C interfaces are needed to allow scalc to compile to LLVM or comparable VM)

<comment><USER14> Why would you want to? The JVM is pretty awesome. There's already a scala implementation for .net, so it's got at least some level of VM independence, but the JVM is the primary target and I'd expect it to remain so.

As well as the VM there's the runtime library to consider. There was a project recently here that compiled scala to javascript to use on web pages, but unfortunately it needed a 16mb standard library.

<comment><USER19> > There's already a scala implementation for .net,

Scala.net was abandoned a while ago. It's close to impossible to get it to run because .Net's generics are reified.

<comment><USER20> I've heard this before in the context of why .NET tends to have less alternate language implementations on it than the JVM. I don't understand why though. Why do reified generics make it near impossible?

<comment><USER21> My understanding is that it gives you less flexibility in how your type system works. To a certain extant you are stuck with the C# type system no matter what the language is because it is baked in to the VM. I assume this doesn't apply as much to dynamic languages but still makes interoperability a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, this is awesome. Have you tried running it on a larger Java codebase?

<comment><AUTHOR> This online tool was created to convert shorter Java code samples but larger files also work (e.g. [https://github.com/sirthias/pegdown/blob/master/src/main/jav...](https://github.com/sirthias/pegdown/blob/master/src/main/java/org/pegdown/Parser.java))

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Now we just need a OOP -> FP converter ;)

<comment><USER24> Or just use both at what they are best at.

<comment><USER25> Unfortunately most people seem to think OO happens to be best at the things they're already used to using OO with for historical reason.

<comment><USER26> Unfortunately, many people seem to think FP is the hot new thing and OOP is already over; they ignore that OOP happens to be a great way to structure code that focuses on naturalism, while FP forces math-like structuring.

There is massive fad-like interest in FP right now, especially in academia.

<comment><USER24> And vice versa.

<comment><USER26> I don't see the vice versa in academia at all. Where is this OOP hype that you think exists? Even OOPSLA changed its name to SPLASH to de-emphasize objects.

<comment><USER24> You said _especially_ in academia. I just meant that OOP is fad-like, too.

<comment><USER26> FP is quite useful, the fad I'm referring to is "let's make everything immutable" and "let's just use functions to structure our code." This ignores what FP is good at and how it doesn't really compete with OOP in terms of problem space: OOP is basically modelling based on how we think and talk about things (kingdom of nouns), FP works great for more abstract math-based concepts (kingdom of verbs). Immutability solves one problem (consistency) that has other real solutions as well (dependency propagation).

There is still a lot of work to do on objects to not make them suck, just like there is still a lot of work to do with functions. My ax-to-grind revolves around work on objects being neglected in favor of a fixation on functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would love the opposite, a scala -> java converter.

</comment><comment><USER28> Cool, has anyone made something similar for Clojure?

<comment><USER29> Isn't the whole idea of clojure that it is built on JVM?

<comment><USER30> I'd say it's an somewhat important side point... But Clojure already cross- compiles to Javascript.

<comment><USER31> There have been a number of not-quite-successful attempts in the past to compile Scala to Javascript. The latest and most promising seems to be [https://github.com/lampepfl/scala-js](https://github.com/lampepfl/scala-js)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> enums are converted into code that does not compile.

<comment><USER32> I think you would have to check converted code for all the well documented interop issues: annotations, static members, checked exceptions etc. The Manning books "In Depth" and "In Action" cover these really well,</comment></comment>


A Haskell monad that produces Brainfuck programs - <AUTHOR> http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_brainfuck_monad/

<comment><USER2> A monadic generation of the grammar is interesting. It reminds me of the following submission to ICFP 2011; it was placed the 3rd place in the main contest.

[https://github.com/tanakh/ICFP2011](https://github.com/tanakh/ICFP2011)

</comment><comment><USER3> "+[>[-]+++++++++++++>[-]<[->+<]>[->[-]++++++++[-<<+>>]<]<.---.+++++++..+++.[-]++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.</comment><comment></comment><comment>.[-]+++++++++++++>[-]<[->+<]>[->[-]++++++++[-<<+>>]<]<.</comment><comment>-.++.++++++++.</comment><comment>.+++++++++++++.[-]++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.[-]+++++++++++++>[-]<[->+<]>[->[-]++++++++[-<<+>>]<]<++++++.</comment><comment>---.[-]+++++++++++++>[-]<[->+<]>[->[-]++++++++[-<<+>>]<]<+++++++++++++++.----.[-]+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.<]"

<comment><USER4> This is an infinite loop printing "hello, hacker news!", for the curious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brainfuck may be a bit of a silly use case, but we use similar approaches to e.g. manage database transaction boundaries in a safe way, while making higher-level functionality available.

<comment><USER6> that sounds interesting. Any blog explaining ?

<comment><USER5> Not that I'm aware of. I intend to write a post about it sooner or later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Capitalization is important here. Downcase that "B" and the article would need to enumerate all Haskell programs. ;)</comment>


Venice bans large cruise ships from historic centre - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49276730 <comment> Pete-Codes About 20 years too late but a good move.</comment>


Bitcoin for Rockstars - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/bitcoin-for-rockstars-ca8366802f9 <comment><USER2> The elephant in the Bitcoin room is that it simply cannot scale up to high TPS rates. If any kind of meaningful adoption actually happened, the network would keel over pretty quickly trying to globally broadcast all that data, and the blockchain would quickly balloon to unmanageable sizes.

I see a lot of these articles hailing Bitcoin as the answer to some monetary injustice or other, or as the fundamental underpinning of some revolutionary new product, but people totally ignore Bitcoin's technological limitations. Instead, the blockchain is talked about as if it's some magical box that is pretty much whatever the author needs it to be.

The amount of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community regarding this topic is baffling. The whole point of side chains was that even core devs realized that Bitcoin can not scale. Yet side chains were hailed by the community as some sort of fantastic innovation that is 'good for bitcoin'.

Maybe these people are just talking their book, I don't know, but next time you read an article about Bitcoin or blockchain tech just realize that VISA can handle 47.000 tps. Bitcoin currently is doing slightly more than 1.

Inb4 'merkle trees', 'invertible bloom filters', 'something something moore's law', 'corporate shill', 'freedom hater', 'the market will sort it out', 'side chains', etc.

</offtopic rant>

<comment><USER3> Firstly, Bitcoin does not _need_ to scale that much to be considered widely successful. Heck, Western Union[1] averages only 10 tps, which is only 10x what Bitcoin is doing today, so such a target is clearly within reach with a 2MB block size.

Secondly, Bitcoin _can_ actually scale by many orders of magnitudes, see the math and arguments there: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability) You need solid counterarguments to this page to convince us it can't possibly scale.

Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it cannot do ("nobody would want bitcoins", "the exchange rate will never reach $1/$10/$100", "it will crash and be forgotten after the Jun 2011/Mar 2013/Nov 2013 bubble", "the US govt will make it illegal", "big companies will never accept it", etc). So you need to sit back and start _thinking_ why is it that Bitcoin keeps growing and reaching milestone after milestone, instead of throwing one more empty statement "bitcoin can't do X" with zero reasoning behind.

[1] WU does ~250 million consumer transaction/year.

Edit: @inoop I misremembered and meant WU, not Paypal

<comment><USER4> _> Thirdly, Bitcoin has done 6 years in a row what critics have always said it cannot do_

The one thing that hasn't changed a great deal is accessibility to them. When buying, you are either subject to waiting periods, or have to conduct the transaction in cash in person. No one in their right mind will take credit cards or PayPal for them. I believe this is the major hurdle to adoption of crypto by the mainstream public. Writing tools to make BTC easy to work with is the easy part. Until they can be bought at Walmart or your local check cashing store, it's going to be a fairly rough road for new adoption.

<comment><USER5> On the, that's probably the thing that changed the most.

Firstly, 'conduct the transaction in cash in person'. That sounds pretty accessible to me. You have cash, you press a button on your phone which shows the nearest person selling it, you go there and buy it from them. Can it get any more simple than handing over money in return for an item, like buying a coffee?

But secondly, there are various companies right now that offer quick and easy purchase. Try Circle for example, you can instantly buy bitcoin there with a bank transfer, even though the transfer takes a day you get your bitcoin, and at 0% fees, too. If you compare that to just 3 years ago when your only option was shady and risky as hell, or hell, even a year ago, it's rapidly improving.

For example here in the Netherlands I could buy bitcoin between now and one minute from now, safely and legally and I'd receive my bitcoin right away, using just my phone and not leaving my seat or registering for any account. (Bitonic)

<comment><USER4> _> You have cash, you press a button on your phone which shows the nearest person selling it, you go there and buy it from them. Can it get any more simple than handing over money in return for an item, like buying a coffee?_

Can it be more simple? No. Will most people do it, with the shady reputation of Bitcoin and the people involved with it? No.

<comment><USER5> That's a different question from accessibility which I was answering.

As for will people do it? The popular ways to do this (localbitcoins, mycelium) have actually showed record amount of transactions lately, so more people do it than ever.

Does that mean everyone does? No, but that has more to do with the fact it's a nascent thing rather than a shady reputation or a lack of accessibility.

<comment><USER4> If the methods to obtain them quickly either cannot or will not be used by most people (as is the case here), then they are inaccessible to most people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, or send a copy to the Library of Congress.

Now the industry is whining that keeping track of who owns what is too hard. They dug their own hole. Let them deal with it. This is so typical of the music industry, which has been shooting itself in the foot since the invention of the tape recorder.

The article seems to be proposing some kind of a micropayment system, where every time someone buys a track of music, all the sub-payments to the various contributing parties get cranked out. That's not only too complicated, but the transaction volume would be huge. Bitcoin is not web-scale. The Bitcoin block chain is currently limited to about 7 TPS.

This idea comes back now and then. Ted Nelson's Xanadu had a micropayment system something like this. A bunch of fanatical libertarians tried to make it work. The free World Wide Web won out.

The amount of effort that the computer industry puts into keeping the music industry happy is excessive. Apple or Google could buy out the entire music industry for cash.

<comment><USER7> > Well, the music industry wanted copyright with "no formalities", and that's > in the TRIPS agreement. No more need to put a copyright notice on something, > or send a copy to the Library of Congress.

The US abolished the notice and deposit requirements via the Berne Implementation Act of 1988, almost a decade before TRIPS.

<comment><USER6> True, but then it went worldwide, and nobody kept records any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bitcoin does not solve this issue, a blockchain does. That's what the guys at Ethereum for example are trying to achieve: vanilla blockchain, build anything on top.

<comment><USER9> Counterparty could solve this, on Bitcoin's blockchain [1]:

> Counterparty works by storing extra data in regular Bitcoin transactions, > which makes every Counterparty transaction a Bitcoin transaction, albeit a > very small one. When Counterparty transactions are broadcast to the Bitcoin > network they are verified by Bitcoin miners and saved in the Bitcoin > blockchain to make a secure, verifiable record.

[1] [http://counterparty.io/](http://counterparty.io/)

<comment><USER8> Yes, and I should have mentioned it. The fun thing about XCP is that I can use it now, unlike Ethereum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If your sole goal is to store information in the blockchain, why not use Namecoin? It's almost as secure as Bitcoin, and specializes in storing small bits of data in it's blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER11> I believe that BitShares Music project is the most tangible effort in making this kind of platform happen.

[http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/](http://bitsharesmusicfoundation.org/) [http://peertracks.com](http://peertracks.com)

<comment><USER12> If anybody is interested, we're building the platform at Bitsapphire.com.

If you have any questions I can answer them here on HN.

<comment><USER11> Hey itnom, cob mentioned that tracking contributors to tracks (the credit part of this article) isn't apart of the MVP you guys are building. Would you consider leveraging reputation / on chain graph DB (key graph) to handle tracking this information in a future iteration?

I think this would make the blockchain much more useful for other 3rd parties to plug into and leverage said DB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> He's describing a network where payments are being distributed hierarchically and recursively to all the creators behind a work. What does that have to do with bitcoin? you could replace the payment method with another and it would all be the same.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra The problem here is, music gets produced at increased rates. You might have a huge database of all the music from yesterday, which would be less useful than you think if you'll not figure a way to make every musician put metadata for their newest creations there.

</comment><comment><USER14> This idea is revolutionary. It would piss all the right people off if it works and also ensure that all the right people get transparently compensated for what they do.

</comment><comment><USER15> songcoin is another interesting option where consumers get to transact and "invest" in artists or songs... "Songcoin Wants to Be Music's Alternative Currency" [http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and- mobil...](http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and- mobile/5915780/songcoin-wants-to-be-musics-alternative-currency)

[http://songcoin.org](http://songcoin.org)</comment>


Ask YC: Should I look for funding? - <AUTHOR> Hey all- I've always seen thoughtful responses for the "Ask YC" threads, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.
We've been working on RescueTime.com for about 8 months as a "side project" and have seen a LOT more traction/interest than we expected.  We've gotten over 5,000 private beta signups (anywhere from 5 to 60 new ones per day nowadays), a couple of glowing reviews from bloggers who've used our software, and (most importantly) emails from users who are excited/passionate about what we're doing.
We've got a long list of cool things we could do with RescueTime (many of them suggestions from our users) and I'm willing to make the full-time leap.  Having sold 2 companies in the past, I'm in the financial position to work on it without compensation (but NOT in the financial position to fund a team).  I have partners who are relatively risk averse (and are also very well-compensated for their day jobs).   I'm pretty sure we could come to some sort of terms if I wanted to kick it up a notch.
So...  Is this enough traction to justify looking for funding?  Is the productivity/lifestreaming space big enough to justify investment?  Should I try to find a rails hacker to dive in on this full time with me?  Or should I go find something else to tinker with and let RescueTime coast as a part-time "hobby" project?
(if anyone has any questions about monetization strategies, team, etc., feel free to ask) <comment><USER2> If you let it coast, it will never go anywhere great. Only you can determine if it is a big enough opportunity to be worth pursuing (I draw the line, and VC level investors tend to draw the line, at $100m/year potential...your line may be much lower or higher). I suspect time management can be a pretty big business--particularly if you take your strength in that one niche and then mix it up with related products six months or a year from now (what those related products are is up to you to determine...email-related time management products seems a good place to start groping around, since there is a large and growing population that uses email as their todo list, among other things).

If money will enable you to compete more effectively, then you should raise money. If you're this uncertain about the market size, and how big you think you can be in it, start with a small investment. $50k, $100k, along those lines can be raised pretty painlessly with a good demo and presentation. Your site looks awesome, so if enough of it works to pull together a great demo, then you can raise money. But, if development is what you want, you might want to bring in a co-founder...a great coder costs more than a small investment will buy, but equity in a great idea can buy great developers. You seem quite capable of holding up your end of the bargain, so you should have hackers knocking on your door...just pick the smartest of them, and run this idea up the flagpole. (You might still want to raise money, but not so much for development.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think your product is great and that you can make money now. I would suggest marketing it to companies and corporations since they have multiple computers and a desire to understand computer usage.

If you can get some funding I would suggest

1\. Create a CD-Rom that you can mail out, similar to the "Free AOL" cd-roms we all used to get. This will make your product tangable and into the hands of companies that are not tech saavy enough to search you out on the web but do want to track computer usage. (who wouldn't want it, I see this as something that any company would want if they knew about it).

2.Here is a mailing list program <http://www.completefinancialmarketing.com/-p-284.html> so you can reach all of these customers that would never find you otherwise. When I used to fix computers for a living, I meet all sorts of companies that spend a lot of money on IT and the company owners were really non-technical. You can't really reach these people with web marketing but you can directly and from my experiences they would be very open to this type of product.

3\. If your program doesn't track multiple computers, that would be really key. I only looked at it briefly. Essentially you would need a master account that can see the stats from multiple accounts. Not really hard, you probably already have that.

</comment><comment><USER4> The test is how much you want to start a company, not how well something you wrote is doing. Someone who is smart and energetic and wants to start a company very much has a good chance of getting funded with zero lines of code.

<comment><USER5> >Someone who is smart and energetic and wants to start a company very much has a good chance of getting funded with zero lines of code.

I'm sorry, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I doubt the average smart and energetic person that posts on news.yc has a significant chance of getting funded with zero lines of code and no users. How would you recommend someone with zero code that passes the "start a company test" secure funding?

While I'm sure some people can raise money without any code, I think it would take a previous relationship with investors or another close connection to angels that invest in web services.

<comment><USER4> I'm talking about YC. Many of the groups we fund haven't written any code yet when they apply to YC.

But since we introduce startups to later stage investors, I guess I am also by transitivity talking about all investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a difficult road in some ways, but I would suggest finding one or more large customers for version 1.0 and springboarding off of the contract you get to develop for them.

For more details, I would further suggest reading the article at the end of the comment linked to below. If you're interested, I would also recommend listening to the talk mentioned in the reply here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19715>

</comment><comment><USER5> Webwright: your product looks great, I signed up using the email address rescuetime &$ kfischer (@ com, can you bump me up the list or post some invite codes here?

</comment><comment><USER7> I think you have a great idea if you can turn it into a good product. To tell you the fact, I even started work on this idea with a couple of cofounders but things didn't go to far because of commitment levels from them.

This is big business. Go for it full time. However, If you cannot find partners that do not believe in this, find someone else unless you feel they are really important for you to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER8> What do you need the money for?

Employees, Patents, Legal, Technology?

Marketing?

What sort of conversion rates do you expect with your user base? It looks like right now its a free service, and if 1% convert to paid buyers at 10-50$ a year, thats only a few thousand dollars a year. How big is you're expected market?

Are you planing on selling to the enterprise market? If so do you need cash for insurance, contract liability?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question-- Money would go to a development team (1 or 2 coders plus me). I'm a front end guy-- design, html, css, javascript, flash, and some light rails skills.

I'm not too concerned with marketing right now-- though that could chage. I'm a big fan of SEO and SMM (in fact, I just had a speaking engagement on that topic).

In terms of plans-- There are a few ways we could go. Freemium, enterprise/biz/groups functionality, etc. The data is also pretty valuable... If you've ever priced data from Comscore Media Metrix, you'll know that having good data on user behavior is pretty valuable... Of course, this is only valuable if the users are a reasonable cross-section of users. Then again, Alexa does pretty good business having a pretty non-representative sample...

If we go the enterprise route (I'm not eager to go there-- I'd prefer to focus on small/med biz if we create a biz offering), we'd certainly get insurance-- though the rates for professional liability insurance are laughable small when compared to other costs.

<comment><USER8> @webwright, i guess i do not yet understand what value you have in you're business yet. are you doing this to pay the bills, create a revolution, change the world, pay your future offspring's bills, or just to create something cool?

when i was thinking enterprise, i was not thinking watchdog, big brother, but maybe a personal productivity tool for personal use offered on the enterprise level. its your tool, you can do what you want with it. when i talked to a vc at defcon, she had said that usually you price it at 20$ per user annually for an enterprise micro-app like the ones that many of us YC'ers are/ could be developing. If you sell in volume you might even sell it like zimbra did to yahoo.

as a freemium, i do not think your business is as scalable. what do the yc investors think on here? i would guess if they are going to invest, they are going to use similar rules that someone like sequoia might, and they look for billion dollar companies. what is YC looking for?

have you thought about your exit strategy? are you in it for the long haul, or for a certain amount of wealth?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I was in your place I would finish building a functional and presentable product without funding. I would then go public and see what sort of growth rate I had. Maybe you can attract more bloggers to write about you.

Then, go looking around for angels who have experience selling a product like yours. Use them to fund your marketing. I imagine most of that money would go to a PR firm.

</comment><comment><USER10> Judging from the product tour on your website, I'd say get some funding and go after the enterprise market.

After reading your bio, I really wanted to meet you. If you're in the Bay Area and want to get lunch sometime, let me know.

</comment><comment><USER11> I found PG's essay on equity put things in some perspective for me in regards to funding. <http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html>

</comment><comment><USER12> I would find this useful, hopefully you will do a linux version soon. Best of luck,

</comment><comment><USER13> if you can, get traction first -- your valuation will be much higher; investors pay a lot for momentum.

and start building the team early -- it's unlikely you'll get funded as an individual.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great logo. Brilliant!

</comment><comment><USER15> yes, and can I please have an invite. I've been waiting for months</comment>


Boeing Laser Guns Truck for Iraq - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4274651.html <comment><USER2> If they figure out a way to attach one of these lasers to a shark I'll take three...

Once they get finished blowing things up there are bound to be tons of civilian uses for the kind of power supply that will most likely be required for these things. It's kind of disappointing that the article doesn't go into much detail.</comment>


NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (2008) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080008301.pdf <comment><USER2> Just a note: systems engineering at NASA has it's own internal definition that is closer to a management role than a technical one. Source: am NASA engineer.

<comment><USER3> The NASA definition the original one, I would think. How are people using "systems engineering" as a term elsewhere, that is incongruent with the NASA definition?

I mean, a "system" at the scale of a NASA project comprises operationalized learning across both machines and people (and supplier-contracts, and legal corporate entities.) With tolerances and maintenance plans and backups for the people-parts as well as the machine-parts of the system.

I don't know if I would describe the design of such a system as "management"; it's more akin to the sort of incentive-system creation that tax regulators or MMO game designers go through, but with a lot more rigor and data.

<comment><USER4> I think NASA's use of "systems engineering" is more or less in line with how everyone except the software industry uses "systems engineering". You'll sometimes (not always) see "systems engineering" in the software industry refer to operating systems, or operating system like stuff (for example, game engines, certain types of real time application, etc). You'll also see it called 'systems programming'. In that context, I can understand why the standard systems engineering role might be considered more 'managementish'.

In most large roles, systems engineers are at least one step removed from the majority of design. In many ways, he works on an abstraction layer of the design, but also provides abstraction layers to the other engineers he works with or DIRECTS.

<comment><USER5> I graduated from a "systems design engineering" program. In it, we had courses in human factors, mechanical engineering, electrical/computer engineering, graph theory, software development, and you could branch out from there as you wanted.

Unfortunately, people seem to think that it means I'm a software developer, in IT, or something along those lines. It's quite unfortunate as both my Master's and Ph.D. were more towards mechanical engineering.

<comment><USER6> Unless you're working in the Aerospace & Defense, Healthcare Device, or Automotive industries this will continue to be a problem for some time.

It's okay to use equivalent language when seeking out jobs. Try looking for "product design" or "product management" roles that emphasize technical competency.

Reach out to INCOSE and IISE professional organizations for help. Those organizations exist to represent your skill set to industry. Challenge them to improve recruiter and human resources recognition of the term "Systems Engineer".

<comment><USER5> I didn't know about INCOSE or IISE, so thanks. I've been a member of ASME since I was presenting at their conferences and submitting to their journals as a grad student given the material was focused on mechanical (and textile) engineering. I didn't look for any dedicated systems organizations.

Product Management is what most of our graduates end up doing, but they're usually doing it in software jobs. That said, we have a number of patent and IP lawyers come out of our program and a lot of people go into medicine or biomedical. The latter since we have a dedicated biomedical option as we have a number of faculty in that area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: MIT OpenCourseWare's 2005 Aircraft Systems Engineering is a lecture series with many of the Space Shuttle's various lead engineers.

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and- astronautics/16-8...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and- astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/video-lectures/)

<comment><USER8> I watched some of them and the people teaching are top notch. I only wish they showed the slides in the video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now that's waterfall design. Show that to your scrum master.

Really. This is a manual for waterfall design of large, complex, one-off or small-quantity systems. Bridges and buildings are designed this way. It's slow, but it works. Errors in the requirements are really expensive to fix.

<comment><USER10> Of course - it's just the nature of the medium. With software you can be be far more agile because you aren't making extremely expensive physical parts that take days to months to re-fabricate or modify every time you want to make a change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A great resource for systems engineering. I love this.

Source: am systems engineer for complex systems that can't go down and are heavily used by millions... but not as cool as NASA.

</comment><comment><USER12> It baffles me how starkly this contrasts with so much of software development in practice.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious what the context of the original post is. Is the OP just wanting to share the SE Handbook?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. The SE Handbook is about much larger, more complicated, more reliability- driven projects, than are often discussed here.</comment></comment>


Dropquest - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=659 <comment><USER2> If you haven't finished it before, here's the old thread about it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107523></comment>


Budget Puzzle: You Fix the US Budget - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html <comment><USER2> Of course no truly creative solutions are allowed in the puzzle. It really only serves to illustrate how impossible it is if you stay within the bounds of the current political climate. Not to mention it's a rather limited view of the problem not really taking into account the various feedback loops each option has when it feeds back into the economy and thus back into taxes collected.

Even with all of that said though I like seeing these kinds of exercises brought to the public to raise their awareness of the issues. I really don't envy our gov't leadership trying to solve this problem. The sheer number of variables make it almost impossible to truly predict the result of any action.

<comment><USER3> I agree that it's too simplistic to ignore the chain reaction of side-effects those changes would have. I also agree regarding creative solutions, though how would you even begin to put a user-friendly interface on that?

That said, it was not difficult to find an acceptable solution. As I started, I thought the moral of the exercise was going to be how hard a problem this is. As it turned out, I had a solution less than 2/3 of the way into the list.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but given all the interests groups affected by the choices, could you get 2/3rds of the Senate to agree with your solution?

<comment><USER3> Maybe not. At the same time, they eventually aren't going to have a choice, and waiting only deepens the inevitable cuts. I don't subscribe to any of the Beck-type fear and paranoia, but I do believe our legislators are going to find their employer insolvent if they don't work together to get our finances in order.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best thing this widget does is clearly illustrate that there is no easy and painless solution, and that almost all the hot debating in political campaigns today is over the very small ticket items (earmarks, getting out of Iraq, etc).

The truly big ticket items are extremely unpopular among most voters: cuts in social security, Medicare, and huge tax increases on certain groups of people (the most influential folks). Also, a huge simplification is that we ignore the impact on the economy; one of the central arguments for keeping the tax cuts is that it supposedly creates more jobs, as does government workers and aid to states.

Very cool find, though. Maybe it should be a required exercise before each election season, just to discourage politicians from focusing on the less important topics.

One last eye-opener: this only helps plug up the year-to-year budget deficit. The actual national debt is $13.5 trillion, and should another recession hit us between now and 2030, we'll be in bigger trouble even if you managed to balance the budget in this "simulation."

<comment><USER6> I think that the best thing is that it shows it is possible! More interestingly, it does not even seem to require all out austerity measures. For example, if you choose "Cap Medicare growth" and "Reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000 by 2013" you are halfway there for 2030 with only those two choices.

Go on to choose "Eliminate Loopholes but keep taxes slightly higher", "Reduce Tax Break on Employer-provided Health Insurance", "Payroll tax: Subject some incomes above $106,000 to tax" and the 3 largest cut-military-spending options and you are done. Sure, these things aren't as side-effect-free as they sound, but it almost sounds feasible and does not require flour sacks and cat food.

<comment><USER7> You don't even have to raise the taxes - all you have to do is more eligibility for social security to 70 and that _alone_ will get you half way there, combined with ending the waste in Iraq/Afghanistan and that is all that is required.

<comment><USER8> I have some questions for you:

1\. What state decided the 2000 election?

2\. What state has a huge retiree population?

3\. What state, which was once a safe Republican state, was a swing state in 2004 and 2008 and will likely be a swing state in 2012?

Hint: the answer to all three is "Florida".

<comment><USER9> Raising the minimum age wouldn't hurt people who are already retired. But that wouldn't stop the AARP from mobilizing its entire membership against it, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Implicit in this "puzzle" is that the US budget should be balanced right now. It should not! Interest rates are EXTREMELY low right now, and due to high unemployment, investments by the government will give more bang for the buck than in a VERY long time. So what the situation tells us is that this would be a GREAT time for the government to start investing and spending money until private demand rises. We should spend now, and tax a little bit more in the future. That is what the markets are telling us.

Total spending in the economy = total savings in the economy. Consumers have overextended themselves and now have to save, to avoid a depression (when EVERYBODY saves at the same time and nothing gets done) the government (whom the market is clamoring to give money to) must spend.

It's simple, really. Why people have such a hard time understanding it is beyond me.

<comment><USER11> Imagine you were investing in a company (instead of a country) that was taking this course of action: already in debt, stagnant sales, and had just doubled down on their debt to try and get out of it. Would you invest in that company?

Same analogy applies to individual people. Imagine a friend of yours who has a bunch of debt, is having trouble earning enough money, and just took on a bunch more debt for some new ventures which he hopes will pay it all back.

Most people would tell their friend the prudent thing to do is spend less money for a bit, pay down your debt until you get back on your feet. Not open up some new credit cards.

This is probably why people have trouble understanding the "go into more debt to get out of debt" approach.

<comment><USER10> That is probably correct. The thing is, no amount of experience meeting a payroll helps you understand issues that are critically affected by the way things add up at a macro level. Businesses are open systems; the world economy is a closed system, with feedback effects that are crucial but play no role in ordinary business experience. In particular, an individual businessman, no matter how brilliant, never has to worry about the fact that total income equals total spending, so that if some people spend less, either someone else must spend more, or aggregate income must fall.

This is why we have a field called macroeconomics. Unfortunately, the hard-won insights of macroeconomics are being rejected right now in favor of visceral feelings. And we'll all pay the price.

<comment><USER11> I read the first paragraph and don't really understand your point. There are multiple countries competing in the world just as there are multiple companies. I'm not sure how it being open/closed makes any difference.

In any event, it's not really fair to claim all of macroeconomics is on your side here. Economists seem pretty divided on this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That wasn't too hard: <http://t.co/Ex8OHv7>

In short, return taxes to Clinton era levels. Cut defense spending massively. Cut some gov't contractors. Cap medicare growth. Eliminate tax loopholes. National sales tax, carbon tax, bank tax.

Results? 56% savings from tax increase, 44% savings from spending cuts. Gives us a pretty clear surplus that we could invest in education, _real_ healthcare improvements, infrastructure (trains), etc. With this plan, we could actually make the US #1 for many things in the world instead of just military spending.

It honestly wouldn't hurt me that much if my taxes overall went up by 10%. My income is probably low/average for the HN crowd.

<comment><USER13> I didn't think it was hard either, and although my solution differed from yours in a few particulars, the core remained the same, as you mention: defense cuts, and returning taxes to pre-Clinton levels. If you have those two things in place, the rest becomes a pretty simple Chinese menu to pick and choose from.

<comment><USER12> Right. From my perspective the Clinton-era 90's was pretty great economically. It wasn't a terribly climate that hurt companies. Nor did it stop people from investing heavily in companies or growing awesome companies.

Stock prices from 1992 to 2000 (approx numbers):

Microsoft: $2 to $58 Apple: $15 to $28 Cisco: $.50 to $50

Add in hundreds of companies going public, innovation moving faster than ever up to that point, thousands of jobs created. _Small businesses (startups) were not killed_ by higher taxes.

And I have no idea why our defense spending needs to be so high.

<comment><USER14> Wasn't there some sort of bubbly thingamajig in tech that ended right about at the end of Clinton? Those numbers sound bubbly.

 _disclaimer, I agree with you, Clinton was great, I'm just not sure the tech market is what to focus on_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So basically by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, cutting down on health care massively, and tax reform (loophole-elimination) and a slight increase of the tax rate for everyone, you can easily balance the budget.

I know each of these are controversial, but I find it interesting that there are lot of perhaps equally controversial things that aren't necessary. No need to cut government employees, salaries, contractors, etc. No need to reduce military research or benefits. No need to have any special taxes on the very wealthy. The only change needed to social security is to raise the age.

It's really almost all in health care.

<comment><USER7> You can do it with 0% tax increases too (the Laffer-curve suggest that you don't get a linear benefit from increasing taxes, so I tried to do it without).

You could properly do even better if you could withdraw all the troops from Europe and the middle-east, instead of leaving 30k in Afghanistan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It forgot one thing : historically all large deficits and sovereign debts have been solved by huge inflation.

However returning taxes rate to Clinton era levels + some more taxes (not much really) + a severe miltary spending cut would solve the deficit according to this game. That's the way I'd go, but I don't hold my breath :)

</comment><comment><USER17> I hate it when people buy into this 'government is a business' mentality and that it should have a 'balanced budget'. Government is not a business and people shouldn't expect to run it like one. The money spent on social services circulates within the US economy but corporate tax cuts get funneled to off shore accounts never to see the light of day within US borders. So what the politicians should be fixing are corporate finance rules and not social security, medicaid or some other social service.

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with all cutting suggestions in this article. \+ Much more:

1) Not just cut financial aid to the states by 5%, but cut it by 5% every year for 15 years in a row.

2) Cutting number troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30000 by 2013? Of course, but that's not enough. How about cutting the number to 20000 by the end of this year, to 10000 by the end of 2011, and finally to 5000 by the end of 2012.

3) Cap Medicare spending growth? Of course. However not in 2013, but right now. And not at budget growth + 1%, but at budget growth - 1%.

Etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sorry, I must be dumb.

Why exactly does the US want to cut the deficit when the unemployment rate is 9%, inflation is 1% and the federal interest rate is 0.25%?

(I do understand the problem that the cost of future health care may cause, but it seems to me that problem is structural rather than just financial, and it seems odd to try and tackle that problem when the economy is doing so badly)

</comment><comment><USER20> They don't give you enough options for cutting the defense budget. There is far more fat there which could be trimmed.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 I wish there was an easy way to export the choices I've made. I just turned 2015 into a surplus year!

<comment><USER3> Once you've "solved" it, click the Twitter sharing button (don't worry, it doesn't share anything immediately) and extract your solution's URL from the popup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I actually broke out a pencil and did this puzzle in the paper /BUT/ I can't find which page has the answer? Is it in the same section? Haven't checked by the crossword puzzle, yet

</comment><comment><USER22> Pretty cool, but it assumes that many options are independent when they may not be...

If I "reduce military to pre-Iraq war size" and "reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to 30,000," can I really save the sum of $49 billion and $169 billion, or am I counting some reductions twice?

If I increase the medicare age to 70 and cap medicare growth, can I really save the sum of $104 billion and $562 billion?

Even assuming the revenues from taxes takes into account reduced economic activity / moving investments outside of the USA, etc., are there effects from combining them that would further reduce revenue?

</comment><comment><USER23> The solution I came up with is 80 percent raising taxes, 20 percent cutting costs. I guess I really am a lefty.

But, I didn't touch military budgets at all, except for cutting civilian overhead.

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/d...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits- graphic.html?choices=600ln5y7)

The biggest shock for me was how little 'cutting earmarks' actually accomplishes, at merely $14 billion. I'm shocked because of how much political hot air is exhaled on it.

</comment><comment><USER24> Law-makers aren't apt enough to invest resources of behalf of a "society". Law makers invest in activities consumers don't want, such as the War on Drugs/Terror/Reason, while Americans might rather have a War on Cancer. If politicians really knew what "society" wanted then they should visit HN and learn how to run a startup.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ok. Fixed it. So does Obama contact me?...

</comment><comment><USER26> If you look under the covers "fix" the US budget actually means "delay bankruptcy for another 3 or 4 decades."

<comment><USER27> I'm still waiting for Japan's default and that should have happened 20 years ago...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think my solution is fare and has only little pain. I think that the public would support it:

<http://t.co/2Gkg0xP>

Maybe there should be some sort of public voting on issues such as this to see what the majority thinks should be cut.

</comment><comment><USER29> I (<http://t.co/xvLvAuk>) ended up with 15% through taxes, 85% through spending cuts, but also cut more than was needed.

I wouldn't be opposed to letting the Bush tax cuts expire (maybe in 2012 for >$250k, and in 2014 for everyone) if it were necessary, but it would impair some economic activity. I also would go for a higher estate tax, except that high estate taxes encourage crazy tax avoidance strategies; dynastic wealth is a bad thing on its own, but maybe that could be addressed by encouraging people to donate >50% of their estates to charity on death. (If there weren't crazy tax avoidance strategies, a 95+% estate tax would be fine with me; there should be no deadweight losses, only accelerated consumption by dying people.)

Defense should be cut by 50-75% over the next 10 years, however, which would also go a long way to paying off the debt as well.

</comment><comment><USER30> This exercise shows a _projected_ budget deficit in 2015 of $418 billion.

Seems optimistic. The fiscal year 2010 budget deficit was $1.3 trillion, and the consensus estimate for the hole in fiscal 2011 is another $1.3 trillion...

</comment><comment><USER31> The only thing surprising is how easy a balanced budget would be. There are very few things on that list I'd object to.

Lets balance the budget and keep it that way, then we can let the national debt die a slow inflationary death.

</comment><comment><USER32> Weirdly omitted from the cut options:

Medicaid: $290 billion HUD Programs: $47.5 billion Unemployment: $106 billion Any part of the giant 'Other mandatory' block (~$600 billion) which makes up Food Stamps, WIC, Welfare, etc.

<comment><USER33> It's only allowing plausible options. Obviously you could go full-tilt libertarian and run the whole federal government on $100 billion a year, and you could even pay off the national debt by selling federal property (who wants to buy a stealth bomber? China? Larry Ellison?), but that will never happen. Most of the items on the list of options are at least conceivable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The problem with the Taxes section is it doesn't account for the unintended consequences of raising taxes.

Historically when taxes are raised, revenues tend to never get close to projections. Why you might ask? Well, because an increase in taxes usually leads to less investment (startups, expanding existing business, etc). In the extreme case an increase an taxes could even lead to companies moving to other locations to shelter themselves from the added tax burden. Something we are seeing happen in the US now, because of fear of increased taxes. Many large corporations are making structural changes and moving assets out of the country.

We need to cut spending and cut taxes. Reduce, simplify, eliminate.

<comment><USER35> _Historically when taxes are raised, revenues tend to never get close to projections._

That needs a citation (projections vs reality). I've never heard the claim you've made before. I suspect it is no different than the inaccuracy of projections on tax revenue from conservatives that cutting taxes to the wealthy will provide.

<comment><USER36> Laffer Curve is the more general concept. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_Curve>

<comment><USER35> The Laffer Curve also says that there is an optimal tax rate for which tax revenue will be maximized. It doesn't say that reducing taxes increases revenue, as this requires the tax rate to be sufficiently high that it is higher than the optimal tax rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why do they project it out to 2030? 2015 is somewhat reasonable, but 20 years from now is a _long_ time at the rate of progress the species is making.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wow, this has an utterly horrible interface. The way it bobs up and down as a I scroll is quite appalling. I'd rather have frames than this.

<comment><USER39> It doesn't "bob" for me in Chrome.

<comment><USER40> Nor here. Maybe a developer version of Chrome is responsible?

<comment><USER41> It's just because NYT is positioning the chart stupidly (but probably most- reliably, knowing browsers...).

It's absolute-positioned, and they're updating its 'top' when you scroll. WebKit has a fast enough JS engine that this sort of thing is seamless, but not every browser does / not on every computer.

edit: tried Firefox (4 beta), it's a handful of pixels off the top, and bobs. You'd think people would know about position: fixed by now.

<comment><USER40> I see - I incorrectly inferred from the parent that the browser used was Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> My solution: <http://t.co/g3D9scr>

</comment><comment><USER43> Why can't I choose to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for both those earning less than $250k and those earning more than $250k? And then, why can't I eliminate the Bush tax cuts and then choose the eliminate loopholes but keep taxes slightly higher option along with the eliminate Bush tax cuts option?

<comment><USER29> Eliminating cuts on those making less than 250k includes those above 250k as well, it is just badly presented. I don't think anyone has suggested eliminating cuts only for over 250k.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have to congratulate the New York Times on doing a relevant useful web app really well, with excellent implementation (allow people to save their choices, share it, etc.)</comment>


An Inside Look at the (Python) GIL Removal Patch of Lore - <AUTHOR> http://dabeaz.blogspot.com/2011/08/inside-look-at-gil-removal-patch-of.html

<comment><USER2> I think this patch could certainly do with revisiting:

1) reference counting used atomic operations on Windows but on Linux used a full pthread mutex; if that was necessarily back when the patch was written it's definitely not necessarily today.

2) Garbage collection could eliminate the reference counting problem entirely.

3) There's been a lot of work on immutable data structures that could address the dictionary locking issue.

I do wonder if this is really a deeper issue - programming isn't nearly so simple once you have multiple threads concurrently modifying your data structures and you have to start locking etc. A lot of the appeal of Python is that it's so simple, and I think threads and locks would greatly affect that.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, a mutex to protect refcounts? That's ridiculous. (If you want low- overhead locks, David Bacon's thin locks ([http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/thinlocks- publicati...](http://www.research.ibm.com/people/d/dfb/thinlocks- publications.html#Bacon98Thin)) is a good place to start.)

I also question the logical premise offered here that data structures must be thread-safe. It's not something guaranteed by most languages (eg. Java), so why should Python guarantee it?

<comment><USER4> Every Python object has a backing dictionary, so if any object has to be shared between threads in a threadsafe fashion, then dictionaries need to be threadsafe.

<comment><USER5> This is tricky because dictionaries need to call __hash__ which can run arbitrary Python code, so it's non-trivial to make the dictionary threadsafe.

<comment><USER6> It's perfectly possible and even reasonable to call __hash__ before acquiring lock on the dictionary (and cache keys' hashes for data in the dictionary).

On the other hand, when almost every object is backed by dictionary, the locking has to be very fast, which seems to me like almost unsolvable problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the idea of exploring other models. Shared data and threads is not the only approach to parallelism.

And, usually, when you are stuck solving a hard problem, it often pays to take a step back and make sure we are failing to solve a problem you should solve. The problem we want to solve is not how to get rid of the GIL, nor improve Python performance with threads but how to use Python more effectively on multi-core/thread architectures and gain performance from that.

This is not a problem only Python has. The machines I work on most of the time (a Core i5 laptop and an Atom netbook) rarely experience loads larger than 2. There are simply not enough threads to keep them busy.

That's not to say they never get slow - they do - but I'd like to emphasize that the limiting factor here is that we are not extracting parallelism from the software already written. We stand do gain a lot from that.</comment>


My robotic basketball hoop won't let you miss [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FycDx69px8U <comment><USER2> All videos on this channel are worth watching. Interestingly enough, this one and another of my favourite channels [1] are run by Formlabs employees. It seems like they have some excellent engineers working for them.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMf49SMPnhxdLormhEpfyfg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMf49SMPnhxdLormhEpfyfg)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the best self projects i've ever seen. I hope he is being mentoring somewhere to take advantage. This guy could be the next Jony Ive.

But why windows? Realtime OS needed badly.

<comment><USER4> He's using python for the Kinect image processing and balistics math so it's easy to implement in windows. If you move to a RTOS you lose these luxuries.

<comment><USER3> python available on linux or macos.

<comment><USER5> Yes and...? Neither Linux (normally) or MacOS an RTOS, what would he gain by switching to them?

<comment><USER6> In the case of Linux you could entirely eliminate almost everything else using CPU time such as window management in a way not really practical for Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another similar project by Mark Rober for darts: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTizZ_XcUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTizZ_XcUM)

<comment><USER8> He mentions it in the video at around the 1:53 mark.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "My head is never gonna be following a ballistic trajectory.. I hope not, at least" \- he should have inserted a second shot of his annoyed wife after that.

</comment><comment><USER10> This should be mandatory viewing for every high school class -- finally an answer to everyone asking "when will I ever need to use a quadratic equation in real life"

</comment><comment><USER11> This could have some practical use for trash cans so people can just throw away trash from across the room.

<comment><USER12> > The Smart Trash Can which moves autonomously to catch your trash picked up > an Excellence Award at this years Japan Media Arts Festival.

>12/2/2013 Japan Media Arts Festival

>Minoru Kurata

>Smart Trashbox

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEC0FVT8wek](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEC0FVT8wek)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNWd4FFYDv0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNWd4FFYDv0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653)

Put the robot backboard at one end and the curved one at the other end, hold some sort of tournament ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm impressed at how this guy's channel has taken off. The first version of this (a static backboard optimized to put as many shots into the hoop as possible) was posted here, and he had something like a few hundred subscribers and a few hundred views. That video now has 4M views and he has 82k subscribers. He deserves the subscribers, as the rest of his videos are great, but I'm curious as to which medium got the most viewers. HN? (Seems unlikely to me.) Reddit? Twitter? The Algorithm?

<comment><USER15> I saw his original post on Reddit in some "normie " subs (NBA?). His channel was quite new at the time. Lots of traffic probably boosted him in the algorithm.

It's great to see, too, because his content is awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a sweet project, but what's really awesome is how clearly he explains the whole thing, from hardware to software.

I'm also really impressed at the way that he uses the tablet to quickly and interactively generate diagrams in (mostly) real time while speaking. Sure, he could make a "cleaner" animation but doing it this way is just as effective and probably saves a ton of time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would have loved to take a look at the code. I had the same reaction when his previous baseboard project hit HN.

Leaving this other reference [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_manipulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_manipulator) Inverse kinematics of parallel manipulators for the general case can get really hairy

</comment><comment><USER18> A few weeks ago there was a similar project, only that it was more analog as in the guy 3d printed an oval shaped hoop, so at every-angle it would go in, not as techno as this one, but more cool if you ask me

<comment><USER19> same guy.

<comment><USER20> Even mentions and showcases the old one within the first few minutes of this video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Couldn't you start moving to roughly where it needs to be off the initial calculations and correct it over time to make the motion less violent?

</comment><comment><USER21> HN discussion of the previous version: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22898653)

</comment><comment><USER22> Very cool project! I am impressed by a how fast this was created too!

what a great workshop! And how did he get his hands on that CNC machine? Is it only for personal projects or also for freelancing?

<comment><USER23> "It was super cheap... it cost like $5 in sheet metal"

Not accounted for: industrial plasma cutter, welder, sheet metal bender, 3D printer, CNC mill to cut ball joints...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When he says something like "600 milliseconds is not a lot of time", what is the limiting factor? Is it the sampling rate of sensor input (video)?

<comment><USER25> Assuming it's the time from when he shoots to when it arrives at the backboard

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> wow. this is amazing. so much work

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if large amounts of spin will cause it to miss?

[edit]

At very end it says it doesn't account for spin.

<comment><USER28> Detecting spin on the ball would require much better (more, and more consistent through the flight path) lighting and camera resolution, or modified balls (with still better lighting, most likely) with markings that provide enough contrast to be able to calculate spin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This guy is smarter than me.

</comment><comment><USER30> Shaq could've used this! Awesome project!

<comment><USER31> ha, just for free throws. all his other shots were basically dunks (except that one lucky three-pointer). he was such a beast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really cool

</comment><comment><USER33> Ah, being young again and not having family, but spare time instead... Awesome project!

<comment><USER34> Same could be said for sickness, poverty, or well, any other forms of time drain. Somehow, someway, many make time to create awesomeness anyway. This makes it sound like a reason so you can resent the kids when they are grown up?

Take a look at Tech Ingredients. He involves his son in all his projects/videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/TechIngredients](https://www.youtube.com/user/TechIngredients)

I would say he's a better father than most _because_ of the fun experiments he does with his kids.

<comment><USER33> _Same could be said for sickness, poverty, or well, any other forms of time drain._

Of course but luckily the first two don't apply to me. And that any form of time drain leaves you with less time is kind of tautological.

 _Take a look at Tech Ingredients. He involves his son in all his projects /videos:_

That's good for him. But not everyone is the same. For instance, a father who has three children, say aged, 1, 2, and 3 years old should probably find it more difficult to involve all of them in his hobby projects.

I do agree, though, that as your kids get older and more and more independent, the amounts of free time you have start getting bigger again...</comment></comment></comment>


Four more carmakers join diesel emissions row - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/09/mercedes-honda-mazda-mitsubishi-diesel-emissions-row?CMP=twt_gu <comment><USER2> The issue appears to be, that lab testing does not emulate real-world driving conditions. So in the field, emissions are higher than in the lab.

These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they _do not_ have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue.

Its not clear this is any kind of problem. Reducing emissions in lab tests may very well result in car designs that have reduced road emissions. That was the hope when lab standards were introduced. Auto pollution in our cities has indeed gone down as (lab) emissions standards have been tightened over the years.

<comment><USER3> Sort of and sort of not right? So VW came right out and said "The difference is caused by defeat device code programmed into the computer." Great simple answer. None of these people have offered up a theory of why things are different. It _could_ be defeat devices, or it could be something else, they just don't know.

So step two of this process is figure out all the ways in which actual driving differs from lab testing. And when you've eliminated all other explanations, start looking for defeat devices or their equivalents.

I'm guessing one or more of these companies will end up admitting, after looking into it, that their car control software runs differently if it detects the car is being tested.

<comment><USER2> Maybe we have a different idea about what a 'defeat device' is. Its a physical piece of hardware. Not some code. So to find out if these other cars have it, you stick your head under that car and look.

<comment><USER4> What physical defeat device is VW using? (There isn't one)

<comment><USER2> Two temperature-sensing devices, according to the report.

<comment><USER4> Link to said report? Temperature sensors (EGT) are a normal part of cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember the December 2014 France plan of limiting or outright banning diesel cars.

[http://www.autoblog.com/2014/12/01/france-moves-to-ban- diese...](http://www.autoblog.com/2014/12/01/france-moves-to-ban-diesel/)

[https://www.carthrottle.com/post/no-diesel-cars-in-paris- by-...](https://www.carthrottle.com/post/no-diesel-cars-in-paris-by-2020-and- london-might-ban-them-too-why-the-world-now-seems-to-hate-diesels/)

This car makers reaction in June looks funny now

[https://europe.autonews.com/article/20150626/ANE/150629983/a...](https://europe.autonews.com/article/20150626/ANE/150629983/automakers- slam-french-decision-on-clean-diesels)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder what roads will be like in 20 years when batteries and motors reach peak efficiency and lowest cost of production.

I jog on the side of the road every day and I have to wonder what all these cars that cheat emissions are doing to my health and how I can't make the manufacturers pay for my future lung cancer.

<comment><USER7> Which country do you live in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am on a passenger seat something like 3 times a week, in france, for the same 15 min rides (about 5 different rides in a southern city), and each time there is at least one car who emits a very foul smoke, so foul we immediately roll windows. Most of the time those cars aren't even so old.

I highly suspect french automakers to cheat too.

There needs to be many more random exhaust controls, or at least much tighter annual or biannual checks. I can't even comprehend why it's not the case already.

It's not even a climate change problem, it's a health problem. I caught a cold already 2 times this year, which was followed by a chronic cough that lasted 3 week after the cold went away.

<comment><USER9> "It's not even a climate change problem, it's a health problem": NOx being extremely dangerous for humans doesn't make it less of a problem for global warming.

Nitrous Oxide (N2O) has a Global Warming Potential 265-298 times that of CO2 for a 100-year timescale. N2O emitted today remains in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, on average. [0]

[0] [http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.htm...](http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a feeling most carmakers have been fiddling with the emission software in order in pass smog. I feel it's just a matter of time and testing, and I don't think it will just be diesels. I looked into Ford's GT-350 and it's, I believe, the fasted stock vechicle Ford has ever produced. It passes smog with flying colors. Engineers claim is just good engineering. I hope that's the case.

I am for reasonable smog requirements. I know how hard I have to tune, and repair my 4 banger in order for it to pass every two years.

My biggest fear is the federal will tighten smog requirements to the point where most older vechicles won't pass. I am poor. I drive a 4 cylinder vechicle. My vechicles are always in tune. I consider myself a enviormentalist. I still hope I can afford to drive in the future? I know I will probally never be able to buy a new vechicle.

</comment><comment><USER11> The issue appears to be, that lab testing does not emulate real-world driving conditions. So in the field, emissions are higher than in the lab. These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue. I think too !

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting to notice that nobody cares about particles, even it's widely known how dangerous those are. [http://oehha.ca.gov/public_info/facts/dieselfacts.html](http://oehha.ca.gov/public_info/facts/dieselfacts.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Two different things:

Volkswagen (VW) cheated with its motor software and have a very high NOx emission and use a cheaper less useful catalyst in real world scenario.

Others have a higher NOx emission in real world scenario: Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat, Volvo and Jeep, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Mazda and Mitsubishi

</comment><comment><USER14> Actually, I am surprised that agencies like EPA don't test diesel emissions in real road condition from the very beginning. Now the question is: whether VW's diesel engine is the only case, or it applies to all types engines from all manufactures in general...

<comment><USER15> Part of the purpose of the test is for a consumer to be able to compare models. If the test isn't repeatable, it can't perform that job.

Same goes for regulatory testing. It's kind of hard to judge people against a measuring stick if the stick keeps changing size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So what were the five models that matched the lab test?? I notice that BMW was not mentioned as one of the offenders.

</comment><comment><USER17> How do you emit 20x Nox and get away with it without some kind of cheat device?

<comment><USER18> You teach to test. Or in this case, you code exactly to the spec.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, the Money-Market system does bring out the worst in people.

<comment><USER20> > Wow, the Money-Market system does bring out the worst in people.

Yeah man, I don't know what's worse, commercial paper or t-bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I hope all this attention on emissions and cheating helps to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

<comment><USER22> The transition would be easier if there were any available at a decent price.

<comment><USER9> The transition would be very quick if fossil fuels were taxed according to their damage on health and climate change.

EVs would become comparatively cheap in a just few years, and their price would also come down very fast as the production of battery packs increased massively. The technology is already here, we just have to manufacture these cars and set up the charging network (already much cheaper than the fuel station infrastructure).

<comment><USER23> 67% of US electricity is generated by fossil fuels, so for most people the price of electricity would skyrocket too.

Nuclear power accounts for 19%; those in a nuclear power plant's coverage zone would see EVs being cheaper than gasoline-powered cars, unless you factored in the nuclear waste storage problem. Those near powerful rivers can benefit from the 7% of electricity from hydropower dams.

Wind and solar together are less than 5% of US electricity generation and basically irrelevant as a source of power for our transportation needs.

EVs are not a panacea; cities are. Demolish the suburbs, build vertically, live within walking distance of things, and you won't need so much energy.

<comment><USER9> You could invest all the revenue from fossil fuel taxes in renewable energy so that everybody benefits from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When does someone bring up the fact that the government's creation of too aggressive emissions targets is a problem? Massive, risk averse corporations are taking massive risks to achieve "compliance"... Maybe the bar has been set too high?

<comment><USER25> There's some truth to this - the race in the auto industry, as I understand it, has been to increase power and efficiency while decreasing emissions.

Unfortunately, you start running headfirst into the laws of physics.

Power, fuel economy, low emissions. Pick any two.

<comment><USER26> Currently, there is way too much emphasis on power. Who really needs 200 hp for a family car?

<comment><USER27> Apparently the consumers do. Its a popular signalling thing to say, but not relevant to car purchasers decision making process. That's one problem to be worked on.

Perhaps the overall net environmental situation would be in total better if X% of the testing budget were reassigned to propaganda to convince people that 100 hp cars are superior to 200 hp cars.

Another option is in my grandpa's day MASSIVE cheating happened with horsepower specs; it was like how air compressors and vacuum cleaners are marketed today. Cutting back on regulation in that area would likely result in cheaper 100 HP engines being sold as 200 HP engines (at the price of 200 HP engines of course) yet the environmental impact would obviously be only 100 HP.

A final option is nobody wants to acknowledge the management failure that naturally results from evaluating to a simple numerical metric for too long. All you eventually get is awesome numbers and everything else produced turns to garbage. One solution would be to dramatically change the metric faster than corruption can spread. In a distributed world, how about we wire up 1 in 1000 vehicles and track the unholy heck out of them and multiple the results by 1000 and grade on that criteria? Obviously in the long run we'll just corrupt the selection and manufacture process for those 1 in 1000 cars. But for awhile it'll work better. Once that system is powned, maybe switch the metrics back?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Not even the Hong Kong protests can get past Chinese censors [video] - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1647908/not-even-the-hong-kong-protests-can-get-past-chinese-censors/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if we're about to see another big wave of emigration from Hong Kong, like the one that occurred in the decade before Britain handed over HK to Chinese control. Anyone who grew up in the 80's/90's in commonwealth countries like Canada probably remembers seeing a lot of new faces from HK in school pretty much every year.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a whole other level, but there is something somewhat similar going on with news in general in most countries, including the US.

People get their information from certain streams. It might be reddit, or Hacker News, or certain subreddits on reddit. Or it could be WhatsApp or Fox News. Or in some cases RSS feeds. Or some particular website.

But news streams tend to be attached to certain groups and certain worldviews. And its not the same level as Chinese censorship, but when there is user moderation support, the groups do automatically censor things that contradict their worldviews.

From what I can see, just about everyone is living in their own alternate reality that has been tailored to their particular political slant.

Here is an example: [https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/19/asia/viral-photo-hong- kon...](https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/19/asia/viral-photo-hong-kong- protests-trnd/index.html)

Some people who were promoting the protests were tweeting a doctored photo that made the protests look larger than they were.

Again, that's a completely different level from totally censoring information.

Well, I guess I will go ahead and say something that may get the comment buried. There are certain "conspiracy theories" that I believe that are automatically censored from being visible on YouTube or other information streams for the US.

So I think that it is correct to be concerned about how far China is gone, but at the same time I don't think people realize that other countries are not always impervious to this type of thing. And part of it has to do with just a ubiquitous protection of worldviews. Which unfortunately are often dictated in a top-down fashion to some degree. So I think its a worse problem than people realize.

Or for example with HN and reddit, if you say something that too many people disagree with, it becomes hidden. So for example my recent comment which I thought was the most important one I had made recently:

"-4 points by ilaksh 1 day ago | parent [-] | on: Facebook Cryptocurrency Plan Faces Opposition in F...

They are going to get the regulators in their pocket and play ball with them. They will filter all transactions requested and provide a convenient place for governments to go for information or control.

Its a way for companies to capitalize on the cryptocurrency hype, without, ultimately, acting like a real cryptocurrency. Its going to be a giant bank that has government law enforcement and intelligence agencies as its clients and patrons.

This is sponsored by Visa and others. They are co-opting "cryptocurrency" for their own purposes. The goal is for this to become mainstream before real cryptocurrencies and take over before they can really get going for mainstream payments.

I filed a bug report. [https://github.com/libra/libra/issues/41](https://github.com/libra/libra/issues/41) "

This comment is not seen by people unless they click the plus button, and its unlikely they will do so.

Censorship and alternate realities are a core function of even Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> Impervious? This event received extreme coverage from western media as opposed to the protests in France, which have been equally violent and have been going on for months.

We live in the same kind of bubble as the Chinese.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't say it is the same kind of bubble. Not all bubbles are created equal. The bubble North Koreans live in vs the one we do are not equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just shows how 'great' China is...

<comment><USER7> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Especially not flamebait.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've noticed a recent uptick in news promoting the cruelty of China toward its citizens.

I struggle to figure out how much is true, and how much is an alternate reality created by _my_ government. (I'm in the USA, and anger towards China definitely benefits the Republican Party / Trump administration.)

<comment><USER9> This is silly. As a US citizen with the internet, you have easy access to foreign press as well. Just go look at that and see how much of an alternate reality we're not in regarding this topic.

<comment><USER8> On a side note, I did some more digging, and:

The Agnelli family is the largest shareholder in the Economist. The Rothschilds are second largest.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Group#Ownership](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Group#Ownership)

Also, as of 2015:

> Pearson's move to sell most of its stake to Exor, the investment company run > by the Agnellis, upholds a tradition of dynastic ownership of media assets. > Rupert Murdoch owns News UK, which publishes the Sun and the Times, the > Barclay brothers own the Telegraph, and the Rothermere family controls the > Daily Mail titles. Overseas, the Sulzberger family owns the New York Times, > the Springers control huge chunks of German media and the Bonnier family > owns a large publishing portfolio in Sweden. Newspapers have long been the > playthings of wealthy media barons who are seduced by the access and > influence they bring.

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/15/economist- beco...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/aug/15/economist-becomes-a- family-affair-agnellis)

Just because press is foreign doesn't mean it's objective or independent of politics. News is a business, and just like any business, the owners make decisions based on their beliefs.

<comment><USER9> Definitely true, but also besides the point. The comment in question was suggesting government control/influence, not familial dynastic influence.

Also just because much press internationally is political doesn't mean they share the same political perspectives. They are often at odds with each other by region.

Further, the type of media controlled this way no longer has a monopoly in information. Thanks to the internet, there are many smaller and diverse organizations with perspectives now as easily accessible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is nothing but click bait. Three paragraphs about how searching for Hong Kong in china doesn't return any meaningful results. Pretty much just standard censorship, and nothing about creating an "alternate reality." Also interesting that the OP only seems to post negative stories about China.

<comment><USER9> I thought this too but there is an embedded video on the page and I guess maybe that is what's being linked to.</comment></comment>