The Great California Exodus - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304444604577340531861056966.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

<comment><USER2> Classic red herring piece. The author argues that the middle class struggle to live well in the most temperate parts of the state because property values are too expensive, then goes off on a tangent about wasteful Government spending that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem -- other than perhaps adding to the income tax burden, even though state income tax rates are 1/3rd of our Federal tax rates.

Property values aren't set by the Government; they're driven by -- surprise -- supply and demand. There's only so much land in the nicest parts of the state, and since the residents of those areas control zoning ordinances through their local governments, they have every incentive to restrict supply as much as they can to protect their own property values -- typically under the guise of "protecting neighborhoods" from those who would build more dense housing.

Proposition 13 (1978) was also a big win for incumbent homeowners. It forces property tax assessments to be based on the initial purchase price, regardless of the current actual value. This incents longtime residents to hold on to their homes, even if a smaller home (or a home otherwise more convenient to them) would better suit them in the present, because moving could result in significantly higher property taxes. This starves the housing market of liquidity and also restricts supply.

TL;DR: Property owners' selfishness, codified into State and local law, is the real cause of middle class misery in California.

<comment><USER3> _Property values aren't set by the Government; they're driven by -- surprise -- supply and demand._

This isn't really true in the case of California real estate, because the government restricts supply through height limitations. See Edward Glaeser's _The Triumph of the City_ and Matt Yglesias's _The Rent is Too Damn High_ for deeper discussions of the issue.

<comment><USER4> Who lobbied for those limitation and similar ones though? I'm guessing that's where he's going - the businesses that stand to lose is such high-density, supply increasing designs were built.

<comment><USER5> If only. In San Francisco, at least, the biggest anti-density lobby is the countless neighborhood associations that make it impossible to do anything that could conceivably alter any aspect of daily life.

<comment><USER6> I am from out of state and live in the bay area. While I am pretty liberal I do think that the author has a point with respect to the cost of living, and abundance of inherited wealth. The only people I know who are buying homes are inherited millionaires or friends that got lucky picking the right startup. That said, I also feel like I understand local governments and Californians position on the issue of maintaining this artificial market. Lets face it This is a beautiful state, and the local population is trying very hard to maintains the 1960's charm of the area. At times I feel like I'm choking to death in overpopulation and an artificial market, but I do appreciate the open spaces and parks. I don't want to look at high rises, I like the California coast.

Maybe its a good thing people are leaving, I want this state all to myself.

<comment><USER2> Who's to say you can't have both? Imagine suburban sprawl were discarded in favor of urban concentration -- there'd be much more open space left to enjoy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> having recently moved from Texas to Silicon Valley, and originally being from Europe, I must say that California is a beautiful place to live. But if I had kids I would strongly consider going back to Texas or some place else where I'd get proper housing for a fair price.

So I agree with at least part of this article. California is a suboptimal place for a young middle-class family.

<comment><USER8> Leaving out all politics, over the 10 years I've lived here about half of my friends who have had kids left the state.

Specifically because they could not afford owning a comfortable home here.

It's a very real phenomenon.

<comment><USER7> yup. The quality, size and price of housing here is so far the biggest shock to me. Basically Texas would give you a free 2000sqf house if you are a dual income household (just by saving the income tax and rent difference)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is interesting how California north vs south, SF vs LA, SV vs Hollywood, tech innovation vs media desperation, freedom vs net censorship. All of this in one state :)

</comment><comment><USER10> As often happens after the News Corp purchase, the Wall street journal is full of shit. Lets look at the California population shall we:

[http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&#...
Quite an exodus we have got here. In fact not only is California the most populous state by far, its population is rising steadily and showing absolutely no sign of slowing down.
The rest of the WSJ article is just the usual half-witted raving against regulation and environmental initiatives.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, except for the fact that the article is about migration and not population. Very quickly skimming for a relevant data point yields this piece from the Census Bureau:

<http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-8.pdf>

Net migration data from 1995 to 2000 for California:

Inmigration: 1,448,964. Outmigration: 2,202,500. Net migration: -755,536.

<comment><USER10> I am sure that they worded their statements in a way that is supported by selected statistics, but nevertheless, the article is highly misleading.

Note that it is titled "The Great California Exodus". Sorry but you cannot say that a state that is steadily gaining in population is suffering a great exodus.

Then they imply that this great exodus is evidence of some kind of dysfunction. Sorry but it is utterly normal for a state that is getting more populous and more crowded every year to have out migration.

So perhaps if taken in a very limited interpretation the statistics they made in the article are correct, but if you use that same limited interpretation those statistics do not support any of the later conclusions or, more accurately, ravings of the article. Thus, the article is still misleading, or basically lying with statistics.

<comment><USER11> Wait, are data important here or are they not? I thought you were saying the data were important a moment ago.

Just out of curiosity, would you say that a fictional state whose economy grows by $10B with exports of $5B and imports of $1B has a trade imbalance in favor of exports?

Sure you would, because in judging trade balance the relevant factors are imports and exports. You don't really care how much the economy grew in the same period.

Similarly, this article is discussing the migration status of California and attempting to explain the net outmigration with some conjecture. Countering by pointing out that the state's population has grown seems like an effort to shut down the argument by actively avoiding the data. It's not surprising that population growth by ever-increasing lifespans, birth, illegal immigration (NTTIAWWT), and other factors exceeds the shortfall caused by outmigration.

The way I see it, the article is attempting to explain the net outmigration with what are at least plausible conclusions, whether or not you agree with them. I'm interested in hearing your alternate explanation.

<comment><USER10> Net migration includes immigration (legal and illegal). So no they are not trying to explain net migration, as their data apparently excludes immigration (although one cannot say for sure, they are very vague and misleading about what the data says).

They have a very specific metric: "net migration to/from other states," and even for that I am not sure their data is correct.

Even if it is true, there is a much more logical explanation. Note that California is the most populous state in the nation, and is surrounded by many much less populous states. There is always a natural tendency for some people to go from populated areas to less populated areas. This is why America got settled in the first place for Pete's sake. Were the initial 13 colonies dysfunctional? No, but they got crowded and people started looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Naturally with higher population densities, real estate and certain other resources will be more expensive. Naturally, people that prefer to have more space will look for places where those things are cheaper. So there is a perfectly logical reason why 'some' people will tend to leave higher density states, not because they are dysfunctional but because they are higher density.

And since the WSJ statistics apparently include only 'some' people, than that is a much more logical explanation than assuming all kinds of dysfunctions.

<comment><USER11> The Census data I cited is net interstate migration. Review the last page of the PDF I linked. The title of Appendix Table A-1 from which I quoted is "Domestic Inmigration, Outmigration, and Net Migration: 1995 to 2000." It's simply the first link I found and as such it's not the same time period as the WSJ article's subject. But I figured it was a data point that at least superficially corroborated their admittedly-unknown underlying data. By that, I mean that it provided sufficient credibility to their discussion and confirmed it was a matter of migration and not population. From there, I considered their conclusions at least plausible.

You say, "There is always a natural tendency for some people to go from populated areas to less populated areas."

According to the 2007 data represented at the URL below (which I have not traced to its source, but I wouldn't be surprised if it too leverages Census data in some fashion), there does not seem to be much correlation between population and migration.

[http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/u-s-migration- flow...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2008/12/17/u-s-migration-flows/) (Warning: Flash required)

The greatest net outmigration is Alaska with a net migration of -60,000 and a population of 683,000. Meanwhile, many states with populations between 5M and 20M had net inmigration.

While it seems plausible that there could be a natural tendency to migrate from high population to low population; the reverse seems just as plausible. California had a relatively high population when it had net positive migration. Texas currently has a high population and a net positive migration.

It seems clear to me that more significant variables are at play than just a desire to switch density levels.

Are those causes dysfunctions? Maybe; I suppose it depends on what you consider dysfunctional. Another poster in this thread pointed out that California's Proposition 13 is a distorting influence. Is it dysfunctional? If you own property, you probably think Proposition 13 is a good thing. If you do not, you probably disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> First of all, California's economy is not going to be eclipsed by another state's any time soon. I know, the article doesn't explicitly talk GDP but hear me out...

      2010 California GDP per capita $51,914
      2010 Texas GDP per capita      $45,940

      2010 California GDP $1,936,400,000,000 (#1 in the nation, 13.34% of total US GDP)
      2010 Texas GDP      $1,207,432,000,000 (#2 in the nation,  7.95% of total US GDP)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP>

Although the exodus does signal a change, it's not going to affect California's economy as much as, say, Gov. Brown's policies. Perhaps the wsj author knows this? He might be attempting to bias Gov. Brown's policies with this posturing...

Secondly, I don't believe an exodus of the middle class means anything!

Take either the cynical view that they couldn't influence politics anyway.

Or take the generous view that they were happy with politics but couldn't afford to stay.

If the middle class gets up in arms about politics, you _hear_ about it. Admittedly, as a rule the middle class is pretty content. Choosing to move out-of-state is more about employment opportunities, life events, or even random whims before politics enters the equation (for the middle class; I wish I had a solid source to provide actual poll data on that).

Finally, rent prices in the Bay Area might be an important discussion to have. So, how about some concrete historical data, a google maps mashup, or even plain old advertising (i.e. come live in Atherton, our rent went down last year! Note: I don't actually live in Atherton, that's a joke.)

If your job is in Manhattan Beach, the same data for that area is probably available, but the LA and Bay Area housing economies are pretty much independent.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lost me at progressive apparatchiks and their cadres cramming the proletariat.

<comment><USER13> This thread has the highest downvoted:upvoted comment ratio I've seen on HackerNews.

<comment><USER14> That's what happens when you bring politics and/or religion into the discussion. It's only a short matter of time before this thread is godwinned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If this is true, then why does my rent keep going up?

<comment><USER16> Development restrictions leading to high rent is mentioned in the article. I don't know about the rest of the state, but I constantly hear this mentioned for San Francisco.

<comment><USER15> Development restrictions don't cause existing housing to disappear. If population were declining, there would be no need for new development.

<comment><USER17> Housing doesn't need to disappear. If we tried to move everyone in California closer to the center of its major cities, we'd see prices increase dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is 1000% true! California is a terrible, horrible, no good state and it is getting worse with the passing of every perfect day. Everybody run for Texas (of all God forsaken places) and nobody new come in please. It's waaaay too expensive here, it would melt your wallets to even think about it. Traffic! Earthquakes! Smog! Ooooh, and the liberals with their ideas and whatnot, tisk, tisk, tisk.

(Meanwhile, I'll keep enjoying my wonderful life here in CA.)

<comment><USER19> Or, "nobody lives there anymore, it's too crowded"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My Palo Alto rent is too high, so 4 million people in 20 years isn't enough.</comment>


If you're bored check out my new game Trickochet (and rate it for me!) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/533914

<comment><USER2> Nice work dude...the hidden blocks that fade in/out got a little annoying after a while (felt like a "fake" challenge that didn't quite fit the theme). But overall great mix of possibilities from some fairly simple elements. You've got a good sense for games.</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my photos to coloring pages startup - <AUTHOR>

ReallyColor.com officially launched about a month ago (end of Sep 2013) and is being bootstrapped by one of my partners and I. Our tech let's you convert your images into printable coloring book pages. Our primary target is parents (mostly moms) and people who are interested in turning themselves into sketches.
We are noticing a large amount of initial interest in the idea itself, and have seen some initial traction and traffic on our site, but our repeat visitors so far are barely over 10%. Our audience is also more international than expected. We have not built a mobile app yet, but that will be a project soon.
I would love feedback on:
1) Our membership pricing/offerings and what you think about how we tell the user about it.
2) Whether a monthly premium membership would be better than an annual one. Keep in mind our international audience.
3) Other revenue generating ideas (other than advertising).
4) The general user experience (both creating the free coloring page and as a free member).
5) How a mobile app could play into this given that the coloring pages are printable (via PDF's).
Any other thoughts and feedback are also welcome. Thank you! <comment><USER2> Talk to your customers. Ask the 10% who are repeat visitors why they came back. Ask the 90% who don't why they didn't come back. It could be that people visit for the novelty but don't find value in a recurring subscription. Maybe you have the wrong target market (maybe schools, daycare centers, or child- oriented businesses like Gymboree or Chuck E Cheese would be better targets). Also, printers suck...they waste paper and ink is expensive. I would try the mobile app, but let me color directly on the app (I snap a picture on the iPad, give it to my daughter, and let her fingerpaint on the screen, minus the messy cleanup). Then offer a service to have the result professionally printed on glossy paper, framed and shipped to me. There's a possible revenue stream.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! It makes sense. I appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When I first visited the homepage I felt overwhelmed with options. All those links up the top could probably go to the footer. The main CTA should be that "Get Started" button. Currently you've also got a sign up button which is a bit confusing. (I know that you've got a little note explaining that they don't have to sign up, but most people aren't going to read that.)

You really just want to show images of what it can do and get them to upload an email and grab their email address, then you can ask them to sign up after they've got their photo and you can also ask via email.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you and will try and see what we can do. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I regularly print coloring pages for my kids and the process is usually the same: 1) they name a character, 2) I search Google images, 3) we scroll through and pick 2-3 to print.

I asked them if they would want to use existing photos for coloring and they didn't express any interest. I think I know why -- people and places (i.e. most of the photos we have) are not as interesting to color as dragons, fairies, favorite show characters etc.

<comment><USER5> A thought to that might be to overlay dragons, fairies, etc... over the image from kids. (taken from a webcam?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Something to consider for sure...thank you!</comment></comment></comment>


The crux of the NSA story in one phrase: 'collect it all' - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/15/crux-nsa-collect-it-all <comment><USER3> What's being built is a mechanical god. It sees and remembers everything. Until recently it has mostly ignored the affairs of the average person, or at least operated in ways that have made observation of its activities difficult. But, with closer integration to the other parts of government, it has and will become more like a god who micromanages the affairs of its subjects by punishing their indiscretions. There is nothing to stop it from imposing its morality upon everyone.

<comment><USER4> And idols aren't of much use unless people are being sacrificed to it in some form or another.

<comment><USER5> Preferably visibly, with lots of blood, to keep the others in line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We're already seeing the effects of this surveillance program on internet behavior. Some people are switching to privacy conscious alternatives to services, but these changes in service allegiance are mostly unimportant and illusory. If blanket surveillance is allowed to continue it will effect the types of information we feel free to share and even who we choose to interact with; how we use the internet and how we perceive our personal freedoms. The internet will become a very boring and much less useful place unless something is done to address the total scope of the issue.

As I see it the scope of this thing is huge. It's an information arms race. The French say they have similar capabilities (this is probably a bluff but won't be for long). The Chinese probably already have the capabilities and their society is aligned with a social morality to support it. Governments have complained that the information being gathered includes trade secrets of use to commercial interests. Finally, from the perspective of individuals, it looks like something dreamt up by a paranoid totalitarian government to enforce population control. This is a proper shit-storm.

I'm not sure where this is going but I'm hoping for some kind of global blanket surveillance ban treaty. Something that applies to both governments and corporations and regulates how long data can be stored and used. I'm hoping for something totally unrealistic that completely averts the nightmare scenario.

<comment><USER4> > I'm hoping for some kind of global blanket surveillance ban treaty.

That would depend on trusting the people that are spying on us in the first place to adhere to the treaty. I'm hoping that talented coders will continue to produce possible defenses to the obvious infringements of our basic right to be left alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Collect it all now. Search* it later.

* Motivations for searching are subject to change.

<comment><USER8> There's a lot of scary stuff they can do. I'm sure I'm not devious enough to think of most of it.

If they have years worth of emails you wrote in your normal style to friends and colleagues, it may be hard to write anything of length anonymously without being recognized. They may have hundreds of hours of our voices recorded, and that may be fingerprintable too.

<comment><USER9> Every email you've sent, every chat, every site you visit, every bill you've paid, every product you've bought in store, every note you store, every post you create, every file you transfer, every place you physically go, every city you visit, every route you take, and maybe even every file stored on your computer or phone.

<comment><USER7> ... I'll be watching you.

<comment><USER10> Heh - we had the same idea... I adapted the lyrics:

\---

\---

"Every Post You Make"

Every call you take

Every post you make

Every name you fake

Every pic you take

I'll be watching you

..

Every single way

Every word you say

Every game you play

Every stat you update

I'll be watching you

..

Why can't you see

You belong to me

How my server aches for every byte you create

..

Every pal you make

Every one you meet

Every like you fake

Every thing you read

I'll be watching you

..

Since you've leaked I been exposed to such disgrace

I search ALL posts just to track your face

I tap all lines so you can't escape

Secret courts won't stop this trace

I keep spyin' 'bama, 'bama please

..

Every pal you make

Every one you meet

Every like you fake

Every thing you read

I'll be watching you

..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I understand this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I'm not willing to give up the advantages surveillance gives us. There are people out there that very much want to cause regular citizens harm. Make all the comparisons you want between bathtub falls and terrorism, but the fact is that terror attacks cause market panic, meaning the damage they do is on the order of billions of dollars.

On a personal note, I knew people at the Boston marathon finish line, as I'm sure many of you did as well. My parents had friends in the World Trade Center. If we could stop that in the future, that is worth a small sacrifice in personal liberty. Again, this a personal opinion, one that many do not share.

To me, the key is creating adequate oversight to control this leviathan. We need a real court, with proper appointment procedures and adversarial process. We need restoration of legislative oversight. Most importantly, we need strong encryption on the systems that can only be unlocked with a court order.

In fact, this was the original design of Total Information Awareness. The privacy tech got gutted somewhere in development, but there's no reason we can't bring it back.

<comment><USER12> Maybe you have a point. Maybe it is possible to install enough internal and external controls for these surveillance programs to bring them back from the outer edges of ethical and moral propriety. Maybe.

There's still, however, the problem of the Fourth Amendment. To my High- School-Civics understanding of the US Government, these programs are patently unconstitutional.

If these programs are indeed essential to our security, if they are to become a permanent fixture of our civil society, then let the Constitution be amended to allow them. Otherwise, no amount of oversight by any (or all) of the branches of the government will be sufficient to legitimize any such programs.

<comment><USER11> There's two issues at play here that are legally distinct:

1\. Surveillance of United States Person (USPER) communication. 2\. Surveillance of non-USPER communications.

With regard to (2), the Fourth Amendment does not apply to foreign nationals. That's not very reassuring for those outside the United States, but it is a well established principle of Constitutional law.

With regard to (1), the FISA court has carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment, relying upon Skillman and its progeny. Now, that's a very shaky justification, and probably wouldn't hold up before SCOTUS.

So, at present they are within the bounds of the Fourth Amendment, under the FISA court's interpretation of the law. However, that foundation is not very solid. I agree that we need a data-mining amendment to the Constitution if we're going to continue with these behaviors.

<comment><USER12> _With regard to (1), the FISA court has carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment_

Power is not given to the courts to make new law. The legal contortions required to twist the intent and letter of the Fourth Amendment so that it agrees with NSA, without making new law would be obscene.

 _relying upon Skillman and its progeny_

Google wasn't helpful in locating a case/decision referred to as "Skillman". Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER11> "Power is not given to the courts to make new law. The legal contortions required to twist the intent and letter of the Fourth Amendment so that it agrees with NSA, without making new law would be obscene."

Unfortunately that's exactly what happened. When the government went to the FISA court and asked for approval to conduct broad monitoring, the FISA court ruled that such monitoring, so long as it was limited to metadata and used for certain purposes, was exempt from the Fourth Amendment under the "special needs" doctrine.

The case they relied upon was Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives Association, not Skillman as previously stated, which involved drug testing of Federal railway workers. There the court ruled that, given the overriding interest of protecting public safety, limited encroachments upon personal freedoms were not violative of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on "unreasonable" searches.

Basically, the FISA court is writing its own Fourth Amendment jurisprudence in secret, which can't be effectively challenged by surveillance targets as they lack standing in the courts to sue.

Here's a nice summary from the NYT: [http://http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret- court-...](http://http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly- broadens-powers-of-nsa.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What I am missing from Greenwald (or other journalists) is some serious analysis regarding what would happen, if NSA will really not be allowed to do "collect it all". I mean, whether it really isn't justifiable.

As an amateur, I am just thing aloud now: some "bad quys" are quite capable nowadays, and without collecting the whole haystack, you would be allowed to monitor someone only from some point in the future (after getting the court permission), and you couldn't "hear" the past conversations, if you didn't collect them. Moreover, if someone is very careful, it will be even difficult to discover that that person is suspicious and should be monitored in the first place.

Mind you, I am not defending the NSA strategy, I don't know if it is justifiable, I am just saying that Greenwald doesn't make any effort to let some opposing views to be presented. He just repeats the same arguments over and over again, but doesn't discuss what would happen in other scenarios (if NSA would be much less capable).

<comment><USER14> > Mind you, I am not defending the NSA strategy, I don't know if it is > justifiable, I am just saying that Greenwald doesn't make any effort to let > some opposing views to be presented.

Here's some fun statistics:

There are about 30,000 gun related deaths a year in the United States (19000 suicide, 11000 murders).

There are about another 30,000 vehicle related deaths a year in the United States.

There are about 3,000 people who died in the 9/11 attacks - the deadliest act of terrorism perpetrated against the United States.

Are you saying that we should use the massive spying apparatus - <USER2> invading cellphone calls and emails - to stop even one third of murders? How about stop one sixth of suicides before they happen?

Because that would save more Americans than stopping a 9/11 scale attack every year would do - which is more than the NSA is claimed to have done.

In reality, it would take 10 9/11 scale attacks on the US each and every year to rival the number of deaths caused by guns.

Do you support using the government spy apparatus to stop these gun deaths? If not, why support something that isn't appropriate for a /larger/ problem to solve a small one?

I think most Americans panicked when they felt attacked, and became total cowards - as did their leadership at the time.

The correct response to terrorism is simply to shrug it off and ignore it (or at least limit yourself to prudent measures) - the deaths, strictly speaking, are a statistical blip on the radar - but the damage you can do to your civil liberties and society at large can last decades and impact generations of an entire nation.

tl;dr: America got sucker punched, and just like a bitch, got all fearful and cowardly about how it acted. The NSA spying is a sign of that fear and cowardice (possibly being used to nefarious ends by people exploiting it).

<comment><USER15> Number of people identified as having been killed by NSA surveillance: 0.

So no big deal: We should just shrug it off, right?

Obviously we worry about more things in this society than body counts, like civil liberties and the liberty to live our lives out of the shadow of bombers.

<comment><USER14> > Obviously we worry about more things in this society than body counts, like > civil liberties and the liberty to live our lives out of the shadow of > bombers.

Yes, all it really takes to stop the terror of terrorism is to not play along by being scared of attacks.

It would take a 9/11 every month to cause as many deaths as gun violence... which we don't use the NSA approach to, because we realize that would massively destroy civil liberties.

If drastic measures aren't requires - if we can just shrug off as "freedom isn't free", "you need to let some bad things happen to ensure freedom", etc a 10x number of deaths - we're probably taking drastically the wrong approach by using the NSA style surveillance to battle terrorism.

This is literally us gutting out country on behalf of the terrorists - something they could never have hoped to achieve by force - because we're afraid and can't handle something dramatic happening now and then without loosing our heads.

That's childish and cowardly, as a society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My reading of history is that this has always been NSA's (and GCHQ's) desire.

See, for example, Project Shamrock ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Shamrock](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Shamrock)). From a SIGINT perspective you want to gather all the signals you can because you don't necessarily know which ones will be 'interesting'.

I'm very disappointed in Greenwald's handling of this story. He seems to be treading over the same ground over and over again without revealing anything particularly new.

<comment><USER8> > He seems to be treading over the same ground over and over again without > revealing anything particularly new.

He has to, to have any chance of what he's saying actually sticking. Do you follow his Twitter feed? People routinely accuse him of holding opinions exactly opposite to his actual ones, even though he's been writing about them and publishing in newspapers and books for years. There are a huge number of confused, ignorant noisemakers twisting everything.

Maybe it seems slow to you, but there's been more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life, so I'm willing to give him and his collaborators time to triple-check everything before publishing so that the stories are absolutely unassailable.

I think Greenwald is exactly the right guy to be doing this. I hope my life and chance affords me the opportunity to help him someday, maybe one millionth as much as he's helping us.

<comment><USER17> What do you mean by "sticking"?

And what do you mean "more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life"? What year span are we talking about, here?

<comment><USER8> > What do you mean by "sticking"?

People understanding. Unless you follow Greenwald's Twitter feed or watch him interact with others in some other way, it's hard to imagine how many people misunderstand the most basic facts of these stories.

> What year span are we talking about, here?

Does it matter? I'm 34, but I think my statement would still make sense if I was twice that age. We're getting new stories with solid evidence of massive criminality by the US government weekly. I've never seen anything like it.

<comment><USER17> The WikiLeaks cables, I feel, are of more significance than the Snowden leaks, if only because the American people a) kind of had some idea that the government was spying on them already and b) the WikiLeaks cables contained _much_ more direct data. Snowden has given us some data, such as the slideshow on PRISM and the FISA court documents re: Verizon, but much of the outrage regarding the NSA's pervasiveness is about what they _could_ do with that data rather than what they _have_ done, as was/is with the WikiLeaks cables.

And I don't think this will _ever_ stick with the public, no matter how many times it's repeated. Like I said, people don't tend to care about the final step between the supposition that something's occurring "the government's watching your every communication" and actual evidence of such a thing occurring "we can show that the government has been watching your every communication". Once the assumption has saturated the American consciousness, it's not much of a news story when that assumption is "merely" proven to be true.

<comment><USER18> Previously, _serious_ belief (rather than a sneaking suspicion) that the feds collected everything was considered to be ... eccentric. Similar to claims that the government staged 9/11, or that we have alien bodies and hardware at Area 51. Court cases that reference this have been thrown out on the basis that "you can't prove that anything like that has happened to you".

Now, we have pretty concrete proof that that is NOT a silly belief to have, and that the government really does record everything it possibly can. Pretty much any nerd with sufficient understanding of the technology, and/or who has read very much in the cyberpunk literary genre, has probably always suspected this, but now we have proof.

I don't mean to belittle the Wikileaks cables: they showed that the US and our allies were often lying to locals. In this case, however, Snowden's leak shows that our government has been lying to US, about something that violates the literal founding principles of our country. I think that why so many people are considering this a Really Big Deal.

<comment><USER17> ECHELON[1] showed us precisely what you call a "conspiracy" theory to be provably true. If ECHELON is a conspiracy theory, then the Snowden leaks are a singular whisper in a backroom, relatively speaking. We've had that "concrete proof" (which the Snowden leaks are _not_ , by the way) for nearly fifteen years.

As for the US government lying to its people, we've known about _that_ too for at least 40 years [2]. According to one CBS article, lying politicians are one of the "three things most Americans take as an article of faith"[3]. It's simply _not_ a big deal. Take the Iraq war and WMDs as another example of the US government lying to its people.[4]

Hell, if you've watched The Newsroom's first season, you'd have seen a whole multi-episode story arc about an NSA whistleblower revealing extensive spying going on at a level thus far unprecedented. [5] Did Aaron Sorkin and the rest of The Newsroom writers have special information on PRISM, or is it just so ingrained in the American psyche that it was entirely predictable and fully plausible? Keep in mind this was MONTHS before Snowden.

Simply put, the Snowden leaks are a "no shit" for most people. The majority now believe he did the wrong thing, according to a recent poll[6]. Also worth noting in that same poll, "Forty-eight percent of respondents to the poll said that they support prosecuting Snowden for his actions, while 33 percent were opposed."

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)

[2] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/24/guar...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/24/guardian- guide-us-government-whistleblowers)

[3] [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57485776/lying- politicia...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57485776/lying-politicians- a-fact-of-life/)

[4] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq- fr...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-fresh-wmd- claims)

[5] [http://thenewsroom.wikia.com/wiki/Solomon_Hancock](http://thenewsroom.wikia.com/wiki/Solomon_Hancock)

[6] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/edward-snowden- poll...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/05/edward-snowden- poll_n_3542931.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a very large mega-trend to buck against. Look how much people (most of us included) willingly give up to Facebook, LinkedIn, our banks and credit card companies, etc....

<comment><USER12> The difference being that Facebook, _et al_ ask for the information. NSA is taking it by force and under the color of lawful authority.

<comment><USER19> Maybe lawful should be in quotes. :-)

<comment><USER12> I'm nothing if not deliberate in my choice of words and phrasing. :)

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_(law)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_\(law\))

<comment><USER19> Indeed - I learned something new today!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Evisceration. A good word for what is being done to all of us.

</comment><comment><USER21> "No Secrets, Anywhere"

<comment><USER22> More like: "All secrets, available in our records, for current/future use"

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "That is the definition of a ubiquitous surveillance state - and it's been > built in the dark, without the knowledge of the American people or people > around the world, even though it's aimed at them. How anyone could think > this should have all remained concealed - that it would have been better had > it just been left to fester and grow in the dark - is truly mystifying."

Maybe they didn't expect it to remain in secret forever - but just enough for them to spent trillions of dollars on it, and make hundreds of facilities all over the world, until it would be close to impossible to roll it all back, even if everything does become public.

You only need to look at the ever growing military industrial complex to know what I'm talking about. It used to be that wars kept the MIC expanding, but now it's become the other way around - MIC is lobbying for more wars, more militarization of the police internally and all over the world, just to keep themselves well fed.

They've almost finished the Utah data center, if it's not finished already. So what are they going to do now? Destroy it?

<comment><USER24> Probably they did not even think that PRISM/surveillance is a problem. If you look how the security establishment reacts, I think it is entirely possible that no one in their circles ever thought that total surveillance may be unjustified, when "we" do it to "keep America save."

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did this remind anyone else of the Pokemon theme song?

Gotta collect 'em aallllll!!!! (Your emails!)</comment>


Timely Dataflow in Fifteen Minutes [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOnPmVf4YWo <comment><USER2> This video is really cool. I've been following dataflow approaches for a while, including some of Frank McSherry's (usually enjoyable) articles. None of the comments mention [https://materialize.io](https://materialize.io) so I may as well (an open source commercial offering based off these concepts).

Watching this explanation I'm slightly curious whether things like materialize and noria are a bit limited in that this could be a paradigm for an actual functional reactive _programming language_ rather than specifically a "data" thing. It appears to have the structure of nested contexts (loops, scopes, etc) advocated by structured programming (ie "goto considered harmful"). It can reliably calculate an answer at each point in time for each state of input, concurrently and with parallelism. Even if there are multiple inputs with their own notion of time (not covered in the video). That's, like, the holy grail of PLT these days, isn't it? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> > ... an open source commercial offering ...

I just looked at their license[1] and it doesn't appear to be open source at the moment.

[https://github.com/MaterializeInc/materialize/blob/master/LI...](https://github.com/MaterializeInc/materialize/blob/master/LICENSE)

<comment><USER4> Yes, we consider ourselves an "open core" company. Timely and differential, the core compute engine, are fully open source projects, but the Materialize layer atop is licensed under the "Business Source License" (BSL).

We think the BSL strikes a good balance between giving back to the community—four years after every release, the code is automatically relicensed under Apache 2—and ensuring we can build a viable business. And you're free to use Materialize for any purpose in a non-distributed (i.e., single node) deployment without paying for an enterprise license.

<comment><USER3> Wasn't complaining against your model; just correcting the parent's usage of the terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a few relevant repositories here [https://github.com/TimelyDataflow](https://github.com/TimelyDataflow) including two rust implementations.

<comment><USER6> The readme for the Abomonation repo makes me laugh every time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In my opinion dataflow is the only true representation of computations. Unlike normal code, it represents dependencies and parallel computation perfectly. Because of this, it is also a great basis for a hardware implementation.

<comment><USER8> Graphs are good for seeing dependencies and ordering, but not great for branching and looping.

<comment><USER9> Although in conventional languages with control flow, we're more used to how they're done, both branching and looping can be done straightforwardly in dataflow without introducing any non-dataflow constructs - just graphs with vertices connected by edges.

Branching: [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Conditional.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Conditional.html)

Looping: [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Iteration.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Iteration.html)

Emit and collect: [http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Macros.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/Macros.html)

These show the basic idea. There are many other examples throughout the tutorials ([http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/TOC.html](http://www.fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/TOC.html)).

BTW, in case anyone's wondering why there have been no recent updates to the pages on my visual dataflow language, it's because the many improvements I've been making, particularly big changes to the type system, have required a lot more work than I expected. I haven't abandoned work on it, but it will still be some time before it's ready for release.

<comment><USER8> Those show that it's possible, not necessarily that it's a good interface to make those parts of programs. Houdini's shader language has had branching done in a data flow graph for a long time. Touch designer has a kind of looping construct too. You might want to take a look at these domain specific interfaces if you are doing your own graph, they are well done.

Fundamentally though, the density of text expressions exceeds a data flow graph by a huge margin. If what is being done isn't fundamentally a directed acyclic graph, visualizing it with a graph becomes more difficult to absorb than the expressions as text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I looked at the data flow paradigm a couple of years ago. Back then I thought that the difference to just a "ordinary" functions is not that big, and for performance (which is important for my data work), you do not want to deviate from the traditional way too much.

Anyone felt the same or can provide a real-world problem, where data flow is actually working better that other solutions?

<comment><USER6> There's this: [https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria](https://github.com/mit- pdos/noria)

It's like a cache, except it keeps itself in sync with the database automatically and generates "materialised views" using data-flows based on the queries that get asked of it and will automatically generate new ones if someone makes a query it doesn't already have a data flow for. Parts of data flows can also be shared across views.

The paper linked in the github goes into detail about the performance gains, but it easily outperforms straight database calls and caching setups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So many talented teachers out there. I'm glad you shared this video. This guy deserves more views to his videos

<comment><USER6> His papers are fascinating as well. The COST paper especially changed how I thought about a lot of problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somehow the 'Hello World' example reminds me of

      $ printf 'Hello World' | awk '{print $2}' | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | wc -w | cat

Just kidding ;-)</comment>


Islamic State: Giant library of group's online propaganda discovered - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54011034 <comment><USER2> Douglas Adams on the Internet in 1999:

 _" Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day."_

<comment><USER3> Probably because the decentralization, reach, and scale make it materially different where the potential harms can be so much greater. That IS was able to recruit and inspire people across the world through their distribution of propaganda is a prime example of this.

<comment><USER4> I mean, the IRA was able to do the same with the telephone and the M4 and lasted much longer than ISIS

<comment><USER2> I agree, but I don't think this is an example.

For one thing, the IRA used the M1. The M4 runs east-west. (joke). More to the point, revolutionary republicanism and the IRA existed for a pretty long time. A lot of those who joined the (P)IRA in the 70s were grandchildren of "old IRA" members. True also for many of the international (mostly US) supporters. They communicated in person.

<comment><USER3> And notice how regional that is, stemming from a history/land divisions that again were regional. Imagine if people were bombing for the IRA world-wide... that is materially different.

<comment><USER4> Ironically the weapons and funding for the IRA came from international sources, much like how ISIS obtains funding and fighters from international sources. And the IRA did this without the use of the internet in 1970. Two principle sources were the USA and Basque country. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Army_arms_importation#:~:text=In%201969%20the%20IRA%20received,receives%20weapons%20from%20Basque%20ETA).

The IRA didn't target global targets, it's true. The IRA didn't blow up mosques in Syria. But the reason for this is that terrorists attack those who are in power, and the large majority of that flows back to Western Europe and USA. There are no muslim terrorists trying to get popular from murdering school children in Belarus, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Alternative link with more details: [https://www.wired.co.uk/article/isis- digital-backup](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/isis-digital-backup)

They are just using Nextcloud:

 _Rather than a data closet in Luxembourg, Isis uses a piece of software called Nextcloud. Developed by a German company and with its roots firmly in the open-source movement, Nextcloud is freely available for anyone to download and use, allowing its users to synchronise files across a group in a way that avoids any centralised hosting or control._

<comment><USER6> Nextcloud is awesome and indeed in use by quite a few companies in Germany at least.

ISIS uses it because it is safer. Wouldn't necessarily use that example as an argument though.

Some people also used OneDrive since many already had Office licenses, but it is just hilariously slow and your data would be a lot less safe from access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Obviously, HN is a pretty friendly place for decentralized software. But as advocates, how do you defend it to people who don't understand the benefits?

If I'm pitching Matrix as an alternative to Slack, and someone brings up the fact that ISIS used one of them... what's the response? Decentralized software is _scary_ to someone fearful of shadowy groups. How do you successfully advocate for software that can be used by _anyone_ , even the worst people out there?

<comment><USER8> Those people are a lost cause. Its the same as how do you refute a saying "there's nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide". You can tell your facts and statistics, but at the end of the day it means nothing as their understanding is based on beliefs and ideals.

<comment><USER9> I don't think that's a very fair argument. It makes sense to weigh up the legitimate uses of a technology vs. the illegitimate uses and see if the cost is worth the benefit, and if you are unfamiliar with a certain technology then it might not be obvious what the legitimate use cases are. To me it makes sense to take the time and explain the good things you can do with it and why that's worth a few people being able to abuse the technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This Europol report gives some history of IS using decentralised tech.

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications- documents/islamic...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/publications- documents/islamic-state-group%E2%80%99s-experiments-decentralised-web)

It mentions RocketChat, ZeroNet and Riot in use from about 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone can explain this?

>"The attraction for jihadists of these platforms is that the developers of these decentralised platforms have no way of acting against content that is stored on user-operated servers or content that's shared across a dispersed network of users, " BBC Monitoring senior jihadi specialist Mina Al-Lami said.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like the people producing and distributing this media are using self hosted and decentralised social network platforms. The people making these platforms release them for free for anyone to use as the like, so they can't stop jihadists. It doesn't say what they're using, but I doubt it is federated with any non-extremist networks.

It's basically an article confused by the fact that most people have been hypnotized into forgetting that anyone can run any software they like on a computer and network it to another computer, without some platform having control over what they do.

<comment><USER12> > release them for free for anyone to use as the like, so they can't stop > jihadists

"Lads, lads, the license says Jihadists can't use this?" "Oh, nuts, ok, onto the next one, Malcolm."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What information is there on deradicalisation[1]? Would it be possible to create an an antijihadi rabbit hole[2]?

From a /newest thread, I've found:

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1053.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1053.html)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all- you...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you-need-is- love/302351/)

but surely there are better resources?

(The indirect approach taken in the latter article agrees with Linebarger[3] on counterpropaganda:

> "Enemy propaganda should, in well conducted operations, be taken into > account only when it becomes an asset. That is, the enemy need only be > heeded when he tells a whopping lie, or comes forth with a piece of > hyprocrisy so offensive to his own people that it needs little improvement > to be adapted for counterpropaganda. Most enemy themes are beyond reach, > especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made > the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic > necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories > about each other's way of thinking or of life. Refutation is a joy; it is > delightful to talk back. But the best propaganda is only incidentally > counterpropaganda.")

[1] it is my hope that after US D's and R's learn to converse with each other, they will apply the same techniques to converse with, say, french interlocutors, or even optimistically, other others.

[2] "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over- compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

[3] [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag...](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_48)

</comment><comment><USER14> At least someone is archiving it!

Here's a Syrian Civil War archive (230GB of content)

[https://twitter.com/Rebel44CZ/status/1298223195926016000](https://twitter.com/Rebel44CZ/status/1298223195926016000)

Others are at least archiving some of it.

</comment><comment><USER15> What, no link so we can read it?

You can still read Dabiq.[1] That was ISIL's magazine, in English. It's worth reading, but not taking too seriously.

Kids in school should be exposed to extremist propaganda from all sides. Start with the extremist propaganda of another era, say the 1920s - the Industrial Workers of the World, the German-American Bund, the Communist Party of the USA, Technocracy, America First (the Lindburgh version, not the Trump version), etc. This is a survival skill today.

[1] [http://www.ieproject.org/projects/dabiq1.pdf](http://www.ieproject.org/projects/dabiq1.pdf)

<comment><USER16> It's a shame really. Reminds me of how whenever there is a right-wing terrorist attack/mass murder everyone, including tech companies, try to hide manifestos and other media as much as possible.

What happened to the truth setting us free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, how can I peruse said library?</comment>


Newspeak language - b-man http://newspeaklanguage.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> This guy gave an excellent interview on Software Engineering radio a few weeks ago. [http://www.se- radio.net/podcast/2009-07/episode-140-newspeak...](http://www.se- radio.net/podcast/2009-07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-types-gilad- bracha)

</comment><comment><USER2> Gilad Bracha (from my worm's-eye view) is doing some of the most interesting work in languages today.

He's reworking the Smalltalk language, essentially adding capabilities (no access to anything you're not explicitly granted), and doing mind-blowing UI work (with other people), the Hopscotch framework.

See [http://langnetsymposium.com/2009/talks/08-GiladBracha- Hopsco...](http://langnetsymposium.com/2009/talks/08-GiladBracha- Hopscotch.html) .

</comment><comment><USER3> The irony? No doubleplus operator ("++").</comment>


Derrida vs. the rationalists - <AUTHOR> https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5143/derrida-vs-the-rationalists <comment><USER2> Pain ...

Studied analytical Phil at Undergrad and struggled with what's well captured in this joke:

"To do maths you need pen, paper and a wastebasket. For philosophy, the pen and paper are enough."

There's just so much noise, even in it's supposedly distilled analytical form. The stuff worth a damn e.g ontology, possible world semantics, epistemological logic, etc quickly finds its way out into another field.

It's there, the value is there, it's just all that damned noise is too.

<comment><USER3> Noise is just music that hasn't yet been understood, codified and eventually commodified.

(I'm joking, but not entirely)

<comment><USER4> Noise is a sub-genere of music. (I'm serious, but not entirely)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Derrida's famously difficult thought is often dismissed as "post-modern" > nonsense. Is there more to it than might first appear?

TL;DR: No.

Well-written article, though. Unfortunately for the author, Derrida's philosophy is fundamentally self-defeating, so arguing for its value is an extremely expensive exercise in fighting against the nature of our universe.

So, 30 Rock is my go-to philosophical rebuttal for such displays of mind- numbing struggle: "Life finds a way. Did you learn NOTHING from Jurassic Park?"

<comment><USER6> To expand a bit: How do we know what Derrida thought? Well, he wrote several papers, and he gave several talks. But if Derrida's view is correct, we can't be sure that we actually understood what _he_ meant, either.

Worse, if Derrida _really_ believed what he said, why write a paper or give a talk anyway? It's not like his readers or hearers were going to understand him, so why bother? (That is, Derrida, by writing the papers and giving the talks, demonstrates that on some level he doesn't believe his own position.)

<comment><USER7> The rationalists say that a major purpose of language is to communicate facts about the world.

The postmodernists say: "What are 'facts'? What is 'world'?"

So with facts gone and the real world gone, that leaves only one purpose for language, for saying anything at all: to get others to do what you want them to do. (This is a simplification of Wittgenstein's "language-games" of the form of e.g., the Builders' Game.)

I've always maintained that Derridean postmodernism is, in actuality, a form of long-form trolling whose main purpose was to provoke traditional philosophers by baffling them or getting them to fruitlessly debate the propositions. In this it's sort of a language-game: Derrida produced words, and the philosophers reacted in just the way he intended them to when he wrote the words. Whether it was for his own amusement, to show those stiff-necked rationalists that they're not immune to cognitive or deductive traps, or whatever -- who knows? But the interesting bit is that trolling survives as a valid intention for Derrida to produce the philosophy he did, whether or not he took his own propositions seriously (though if he did, he would have to consider whether the academics he was trolling existed just in his own head).

<comment><USER8> > So with facts gone and the real world gone, that leaves only one purpose for > language, for saying anything at all: to get others to do what you want them > to do.

And now we have a regime in the United States that has downright weaponized this posture.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. It's distressing how this tactic can be (and is) employed by all sorts of unhinged extremists, from radical postmodernists to Trump and his cronies.

Being an obscurantist is apparently a great strategy if you want to fool and exploit people. Would that it weren't so damn effective. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The only good thing about post-modernism is the fact that it illustrates the vacuous nature of academic philosophy. If the field had anything worthwhile in it, it would have built up some kind of institutional immune response to that kind of bullshit. And no, I don't mean an endless stream of convoluted rebuttals. I mean post-modernism just wouldn't enter any sensible conversation in the first place.

I find it amusing that fsmoud scientists from Feynman to Dawkins often jab at philosohers in their works, probably thanks to post-modernism.

<comment><USER10> You realize that most academic philosophers in the US and other English- speaking countries share your attitude toward post-modernism, right? TFA even points out the divide. You must have gone to a program with a "traditional" philosophy department, perhaps in Europe?

Most university philosophy departments in the US focus on logic, analytic philosophy, philosophy of science, cognitive science, etc, etc. I can't even think of a single philosopher at my university's department who would have done anything but chuckle at post-modernism. In fact, it was a philosophy prof who told me about the book "Fashionable Nonsense".

From the article:

"Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein. Founded on the notion of conceptual clarity, analytic philosophy (in its crudest form) regards philosophy as a branch of the sciences, often subservient to the natural sciences, or at best continuous with them. It proposes that through the logical analysis of philosophical propositions, the basic questions of existence can be clarified, and possibly solved."

So why would you generalize all philosophers into the bucket of post- modernism? Many of the founders of modern analytic philosophy were mathematicians: Russell, Frege, Whitehead, Peirce, etc.

<comment><USER11> The mathematician Michael Harris wrote a very good even-handed review of Fashionable Nonsense.

He finds possible value in the philosophy that it mocks, and points out the general crudeness of the authors' attitude and approach. I think his review is well worth reading.

[https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~michael.harris/Iknow.pdf](https://webusers.imj- prg.fr/~michael.harris/Iknow.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Oh dear God, I read only 1/4 of the review and I feel like I've lost several IQ points. Yes, perhaps they were crude, but unlike Dr. Harris, I find no value in the philosophy mocked by Fashionable Nonsense. Even reading _about_ that kind of postmodern philosophical claptrap is pretty devoid of value (which is probably why I never managed to read all of Fashionable Nonsense).

But yes, he's a mathematician, I agree.

<comment><USER11> Harris has, I think, a really good prose style and a refreshing "all's grist to my mill" attitude to the topic.

Sorry for the damage to your IQ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it."

Many identities, lifes, careers, organizations have been built around the assumption that objective and absolute knowledge is possible, truth can be defined, reality must have a solid core at its foundation. We're talking countless man-centuries of emotional, intellectual and social investment.

No one wants to shake the branch they're sitting on. And yet, the way I see it if someone claims to be engaged in science or philosophy, that is precisely what they must do, rather than summarily discard anything they have been conditioned to consider ridiculous.

Between "we don't know anything about anything, might as well drop the whole science thing" and "we know with absolute certainty that <something>" there is this huge grey area, where we seem to know enough about what seems to be reality that we can often predict it, shape it to our liking and build cool things.

To me, the most interesting question of this whole postmodernism vs scientific inquiry/analytic philosophy debate is why so many are so incredibly uncomfortable in that area (where, one might argue, life actually happens), that they must either, with an almost religious zeal, insist on having found absolute truth (despite no evidence having ever been produced to that effect and, allowing for the existence of objective reality, tons of evidence of having been wrong in the past) or altogether deny the obvious usefulness of the scientific method.

It seems that more often than not we can only engage with reality while pretending that we can know, understand and control it with absolute certainty and if/when disavowed of that illusion, are ready to immediately fall into some form of nihilism, denying any objective approach to anything.

What I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with using an analytic/scientific approach to make good things happen and generally have a good time while at the same time not being quite as trigger happy with the "pseudoscience", "ridiculous" and "impossible" labels when something doesn't fit our ideas of how the world is supposed to be.

Let's not forget there was a time when one could get locked up for suggesting the earth was orbiting the sun.

</comment><comment> d--b Come on, as technologists, hn readers cant seriously favor structuralism over post modern thinking.

To put it in CS terms: structuralists would think that general AI would be obtained by coding expert systems. Structuralists were the ones who believed the semantic web would work. That as engineers, we could write a structure, a schema, a program, that would underlie all things and ideas in the universe.

This of course has been quite a failure. The bottom up approach to AI, which appeared with neural networks, is deeply postmodern. It assumes that all experience is relative and that human intelligence grasps with reality in a reflexive way. reacting to stimuli rather than building a unique model of the world that would fit all situations.

You may say that post modern philosophy is written in a hard way, but it cant be denied that there are a lot of people here who are postmodern without knowing it!

<comment><USER13> That's about as vacuous as saying that neural networks require every constituent to work in harmony with each other and thus show the value of Confucian ideology over Platonic pursuit of objective truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not really just Derrida, is it?

I find the most powerful anecdote of the whole bunch is that of Wittgenstein. The article mentions him -- _Outside France, the dominant philosophical school was analytic philosophy. A broad church, its foundations had initially been articulated by, among others, Bertrand Russell, GE Moore and the early works of Wittgenstein._ \-- but just mentioning "the early works" offhand is misleading, since it goes a lot deeper than that.

Wittgenstein wasn't just "a part of the church". After the Tractatus, he was hailed by many of them, especially among the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle that most closely resemble "skeptics" and techie-technocrats today, as their Jesus. And with Philosophical Investigations, later on, he criticized the climax of his earlier work, and became an apostate of sorts.

Everyone with a passing interest in this topic should check out Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, "Duty of Genius". It's very well told.

<comment><USER15> And Monk wrote that biography at the age of 26. I've wasted my life.

<comment><USER16> It was in my early 20s that I was most active with philosophy. Let's not forget that many (most?) philosophers first lived their lives and then wrote about it in their end years. I'm betting my story will be similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Postmodernists deny the reality of shared, objective truths, then try to begin a dialogue requiring what's just been denied.

<comment><USER6> Worse: Presenting _their view_ as the shared, objective truth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the short answer to deconstruction is that meaning comes from the regularities of the human body and the world in which it lives. However, contrary to much (but certainly not all) Western philosophy, this meaning cannot be fully described in a single set of precise concepts.

I think the key to understanding deconstruction is that is is what the French left became when it lost its faith in the Communist movement, but still wanted to maintain a hope in bringing about a radical new world that would overcome all the problems of the modern liberal industrial era.

</comment><comment><USER19> The early internet was a Derridian playground.

There was, literally, nothing beyond the text at 9600 baud. Identity and purpose and intention of content generators were permanently undecipherable in those days. You could only take things as they were presented to maintain sanity and causality.</comment>


Alphabet Announces Second Quarter 2019 Results [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q2_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf <comment><USER2> Revenue is up 19%.

Net income up >300%.

Most of the revenue and profit from ads.

Stepping back for a minute, political polarization has be increasing for about the length of time that Google has been in business. I'm not claiming Google is the cause, but rather that Google's tenure is a proxy for an acceleration in political polarization. [1]

Polarization enables outrage. Think Antifa vs. Proud Boys. Pelosi vs. Omar. AOC vs. ICE. Outrage reduces the amount of critical thought people put into the information they see and use to draw or reinforce conclusions they have about other groups, in particular, their polar opposites.

Outrage drives clicks, shares, likes and retweets. Clicks, shares, likes and retweets drive views, views drive ads, ads drive revenue.

Now, toss neural nets into the cycle. Neural nets do in fact learn and improve as feedback loops transpire.

Why wouldn't we expect these systems to learn that among other things, information that increases polarization results in the desired goal of increasing revenue, absent of any deliberate intervention by human beings?

[1] [https://www.allsides.com/blog/political-polarization- america...](https://www.allsides.com/blog/political-polarization-america-two- fascinating-charts)

<comment><USER3> > Why wouldn't we expect these systems to learn that among other things, > information that increases polarization results in the desired goal of > increasing revenue, absent of any deliberate intervention by human beings?

This is all well and good, but revenue is not an input to most machine learning algorithms at Google. First off, there is a pretty serious firewall between search and ads, so any organic results will be completely oblivious to revenue. Search systems literally do not have access to that kind of information. Even within ads, the concept makes sense only if you don't think about it too much. The big money-maker ads are when someone is trying to buy something. Ads around viral content are just not something that people can pay much for, because the margins in the news business are very thin.

Now if you want to make an article that the _media_ has learned that spectacle and outrage drive clicks, I am _here_ for it. (But this has always been true. Yellow journalism was a thing more than a century ago.) And I guess you can make an argument that Google facilitates this by pointing you to the media, and by participating in the feedback loop. But I don't think Google revenue is as causally linked to outrage as you seem to believe. After all, correlation usually doesn't indicate causation.

<comment><USER4> I might be wrong but I was definitely told by a YouTube rep that videos that makes more revenue get promoted more on the platform. It's not the only signal, but it is a signal.

<comment><USER5> My thought is that there's a correlation between attention and a viewer's willingness to spend money that can be seen without directly looking at revenue. For instance, letting a music playlist run would look a lot different than watching a video I'm actively paying attention to. Or a detailed discussion on credit card churning would probably be more niche than a clip from SNL. But former would probably have a more engaged audience and be more willing to act on an advertisement for a credit card. So if you're optimizing for user engagement, you'll probably increase profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >On July 24, 2019, the Board of Directors of Alphabet authorized the company to repurchase up to an additional $25.0 billion of its Class C capital stock

The reason the stock is up so much. They're going to stop blowing money on stuff they aren't good at.

<comment><USER7> EDIT: Apologies, I was incorrect in this assumption

We need to solve this by requiring all repurchases to be with post tax money.

<comment><USER8> It is post tax money. Only difference from a dividend is avoidance of double taxation by shareholders as value goes up.

<comment><USER9> Just to be perfectly precise, dividends are usually taxed as income, but an increased valuation as a result of a buyback would only be taxed as capital gains when the shares are sold.

If there weren't a separate capital gains rate, then the only difference would be the tax would be collected when the shares were sold rather than when the dividend was issued.

However, if you had the intention of reinvesting your dividend, then you would buy new stock with post-income-tax dollars, whereas a buyback would increase the value of your stock holdings without using your own post-tax money.

<comment><USER10> > Just to be perfectly precise, dividends are usually taxed as income

Who is usually getting unqualified dividends? Qualified dividends are taxed as capital gains.

<comment><USER9> Good point. I got the two flipped in my head, but I think the rest of the comment applies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Incredible that Google has been able to sustain almost 20% revenue growth for so long - much longer than most people expected.

For the past 6 or 7 years people have been predicting that Google's growth would soon slow because:

(a) The number of ads on a search result page had reached saturation point

(b) The percentage of people using the internet in rich countries had reached saturation point

Although real, these effects have proved to be outweighed by other, less limited factors of growth; in particular Google's ability improve the quality of match between advertiser and user. Even now I think there is significant room for Google to improve this matching - eg. when I put an iPad Pro in my online shopping basket at apple.com but don't buy it, why don't I then see iPad ads on YouTube? When I give Tesla $1,000 to reserve but not buy a Model 3, why don't I then see Model 3 ads reading The New York Times? Apple and Tesla are leaving money on the table, and when they wake up Google will make even more money.

<comment><USER12> With your example, why would Tesla advertise to you _after_ you have already converted on a purchase?

In fact, Tesla can use your email address on a negative audience list when advertising on display networks that hit publishers like NYT. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla was doing this to optimize their ad spend.

For purchases where you _are_ retargeted, that's because when you buy something, you're a magnitude more likely to purchase it again (i.e. as a gift, have a backup/travel one, etc.). Goods like automobiles are an exception here, unless you're in the business of buying multiple cars in the same month.

<comment><USER11> Sorry I wasn't clear - I haven't committed to purchasing a Model 3, I've simply given a deposit to reserve my place in the queue when they start shipping to Australia in August. I'm still not sure whether to pull the trigger now - I'll probably wait until better self-drive features become available, or may even decide not to purchase it and instead ask for my deposit back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find it interesting that income more than tripled compared to the previous year's quarter, but their effective tax rate dropped from 24 percent to 18.

<comment><USER14> Why is that interesting? Corp tax rates are flat, not progressive and there was a significant change last year.

<comment><USER15> Progressive corporate taxes seem like a good idea to discourage companies from growing too big.

<comment><USER16> Why would we want that? Does anyone want to discourage companies from growing?

<comment><USER17> I don't get this.

Who thinks "I made $61 after tax profit on the last $100 of profits but I will only make $59 profit on the next $100 so I'm gonna chooAe to not make that $59 after tax money.

This is a genuine question. Is there any research or evidence that shows that increasing taxes on profits (which is what corporate taxes are) reduces pre tax profits in the US (I'm restricting to the US because it's possible other places have had more ridiculous njmbwrs, even leading to greater than 100% taxes). This isn't a rhetorical question.

The same applies to progressive income tax, but I know someone who actually did choose to forego additional income but it waS someone who didn't understand progressive taxes and thought the headline figure apuwd to their entire income instead of the marginal income.

I'm assuming reasonably sized companies aren't that stupid.

<comment><USER18> I tend to agree with you.

To play devil's advocate, assume you are Google or Apple. You have (quite literally) 100 Billion dollars in cash equivalent securities sitting around. You could do what amazon does and reinvest those into the business, but there is risk, and decreasing returns on that. Alternatively, you could just invest that money (in which case its not profit, so taxed differently, I believe), or you could pay your employees more.

Those second two are, in the long run, potentially worse for investors. Is that good or bad? Unclear. Is that even how the calculus works? Unclear. Is this line of reasoning obviously wrong? No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its kind of funny how they just added a European Commission fines row on their income statement.

<comment><USER20> I can't help but think that EU situation has helped Google. A flood of new regulation just keeps entrenching them by killing off any potential upstarts that could compete in Europe.

<comment><USER21> Isn't this the argument free-marketers have always made? The people who said GDPR would stifle competition? It will be a long time before the outcome of these choices are obvious.

<comment><USER22> And they wouldn't be wrong about that.

Note that the 2 main arguments and counter arguments: it helps protect people's information vs it increases the barrier of entry are NOT exclusive. Both can be valid at the same time and I believe that in many regulations they are both valid. That's how life works, a chain of compromises.

<comment><USER23> What are some examples of GDPR increasing barriers to entry?

<comment><USER24> Trivial example but the nekochan community for SGI retrocomputing shut down because of it. It's particularly hard for small business or unprofitable things done for fun/sport/public benefit.

<comment><USER25> I've seen many people shut down their side projects citing gdpr. Without fail it's always people who haven't really researched the impact gdpr has on them and they didn't really want to keep the project going anyways so it's more of an excuse to shut it down without facing backlash.

<comment><USER24> It seems like you are contorting the blame to "well you should just do more work!" Bureaucratic regulations have costs in implementation, enforcement and non-compliance. Those costs are naturally easy for corporations to absorb because they can hire people to do it full time or whatever the case may be. Maybe several hours or $1000 for a lawyer or whatever to review some regulation are a bridge too far for someone already devoting time and dealing with whatever negatives the side project is coupled with like less free time, negative users/customers/competition, and other opportunity cost.

So yes, taking on new and unknown (to the creator) legal liability from some regulation is a great reason to shut down a side project.

<comment><USER26> If you're a hobby project or small business that's already not collecting customers' personal information, then what hard work do you have to do to comply with GDPR?

<comment><USER21> An IP address counts as personal data, so that means you can't use any PaaS without having a privacy policy and vetting your platform's policy (which requires legal skills), just because they might keep the logs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Paid Click revenue up, revenue per click down. Does this indicate we are seeing more ads? More quantity, less quality? Hmmm...

<comment><USER28> There's many factors at play here, but note that the majority of Internet subscriber growth is in developing countries.

As the spending power of the average Internet user decreases, then CPC/CPM naturally falls with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> 107K employees

</comment><comment><USER30> Is that $5B fine deductable from taxes?

<comment><USER31> That would make a $500 million dollar difference so in the end, it doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER32> I love it. Everyone's claiming a $5 billion fine is insignificant, so there's no room to argue the tax savings from writing it off is meaningful.

<comment><USER31> I think it's true though. In part it's because the fine is small but the bigger part is their tax rate is absurdly low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One day SWE3's are going to be taking home 7 figs in their first year.

</comment><comment><USER34> What proportion of their revenues comes from ads?

</comment><comment><USER35> Do they publish Google Fiber results?

</comment><comment><USER36> Here is the most interesting sentence: "Prior period results excluding the effect of the European Commission (EC) fine of $5.1 billion have been included to facilitate comparison to current quarter performance".

<comment><USER37> Honestly, the trippiest thing to me, is that European Commission fines being marked as an ordinary expense line (and likely one that will be used more in the future), they really are making it clear that violating the law and paying the fines for doing so is really just part of ordinary business to them. And obviously, the fines clearly aren't punitive enough to encourage them to revise this behavior.

<comment><USER38> This is literally textbook how-to-do business, if the fines are smaller than what you earn from doing it, you keep doing it because it's profitable.

It's why Facebook's $5bn FTC fine is laughable too. You need to fine them an amount relative to their market capitalization to really make 'em feel it, probably around 10%. I'd go as far to say, one would need fine them in the $50-$100bn range to really stop them from doing something (same for any of the $500bn+ companies).

If it's profitable to be shitheads, they're are going to account for it, and be shitheads.

<comment><USER39> FB's net profit for Q2 was $1.6bn. Close to a year's profits were wiped out from this fine, which is roughly 1% of Switzerland's GDP. I don't see how this is laughable.

A fine of 10% of market cap is close to the company's gross revenue. This is equivalent to a government owning the company. This "smells" like communism mentality.

<comment><USER38> How is fining them an amount large enough to deter their behavior communism? Full stop, how?

What you're saying is that fines large enough to actually affect the company, to make their shareholders realize a loss of (monetary) value as a result of bad management, is communism?

That to me is simply insane, and I'd highly encourage you to go take some upper division economics courses before rattling off what is and isn't communism.

<comment><USER39> It's quite simple:

1\. FB's market cap is $573bn. 10% is $57.3bn. 2019 Q2 profits were $1.6bn.

2\. By your standards, it is perfectly fine for a government [entity] to tell a private company: "If you don't do exactly as I ask, I will get all your profits for roughly the next decade." That, according to you, would be teaching FB "good behavior." To quote you, it will "really make 'em feel it".

3\. Communism is a system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single -- often authoritarian -- party holds power.

Maybe you should rethink your views.

<comment><USER37> I mean, I think the parent's position is generous, considering what I think many others would agree would be fair: That a company that has wronged a country's citizens as deeply as the Facebooks and Googles of the world have should simply be terminated, executives jailed, and assets seized and either auctioned or redistributed. For companies built on societal harm, they should have to fight for their lives to remain in business.

If we want these sorts of businesses/behaviors to stop cropping up, we need to make societal harm a huge risk factor for investors.

<comment><USER39> Sure. Some may even find your stance too sympathetic. There are countries where, today, executives would be jailed or executed for the harm they've brought upon their users. Such insane views are the norm for other countries, but not for a democratic country like the US. What was FB's crime again, that deserves for it to be wiped off the face of the planet ?

Of course it is perfectly fine and within your rights to believe and say that the world would be better off without FB (and Google no less!) but you must understand by now that your opinion is that of a tiny minority.

To answer in good faith however: I do agree with the spirit of what you are saying. Companies should be held accountable and fines are probably a good tool to achieve that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Other Bets operating loss: ($989) [million]

Almost a Billion dollars per quarter!? Put them out of shareholders' misery, already!</comment>