How Postcards Solved the Problem of Disappearing Rice - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/07/10/627355954/how-postcards-solved-the-problem-of-disappearing-rice <comment><USER2> In Uganda, only 20% of the money allocated to schools (the amount differed depending on the number of pupils they have) was actually ending up at the school. Over a few years, the problem was fixed by publicizing the amount for each school in newspapers, so parents could check with the school what they got and what the schools did with it. A few years later, 80% of the money actually reached the schools.

(An example taken from _Trial and Error_ by Tim Hardford)

</comment><comment><USER3> Should do the same thing for immigrants on various work visas, to make sure they are aware of what salaries and conditions they are entitled to.

<comment><USER4> There's some charities operating here in Europe that do just that, making sure the employees know their rights - which includes minimum wage, and not to have their passports taken from them.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately some groups (and governments) in Europe are now trying to criminalize providing information to immigrants.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a citation for this claim?

<comment><USER7> I believe the GP refers to Hungary's "Soros Law": [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/world/europe/hungary- stop...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/world/europe/hungary-stop-soros- law.html)

"Under the terms of a new law, helping migrants legalize their status in Hungary by distributing information about the asylum process or providing them with financial assistance could result in a 12-month jail term."

<comment><USER8> It's the "Stop Soros Law", not the "Soros Law".

Also you (accidentally?) Glossed over the part that it's targeting _illegal_ immigrants.

<comment><USER9> Laws like that tend to spill over into the legal migrant community. When someone asks for help, it now becomes your onus to verify their legal status lest you break the law, making people less likely to help out at all.

<comment><USER6> > Laws like that tend to spill over into the legal migrant community.

 _If_ / when that happens, OP would then be correct in his claim. Until then, he is incorrect.

<comment><USER6> Downvoting based on differences of opinion is fine, and in accordance with HN guidelines. Downvoting on matters of fact is something else entirely. I'd love to know how people justify this intellectual dishonesty in their minds, "the ends justify the means"?

Be careful of the precedent you are setting, normalizing fact-free judgement in society might someday turn on you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Dealing with corruption and misuse of public resources is hard in any country.

Finding an elegant yet financialy viable and low trade-off solution is not trivial and the article seems to be underselling the thoughts that went into that for comedic effect.

The sad part is it only improves the situation by 26%.

<comment><USER11> > The sad part is it only improves the situation by 26%.

That's pretty good though going from 50% to 63% with just a simple postcard is a huge reward for a tiny investment. That's before they did any other efforts like the common knowledge campaign talked about later in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is an interesting history but the best part is the web having a plain text option as alternative to the "I agree on you taking my info" button. Saying readers that other options are possible is a very good example of the "common knowledge" referred in the article.

<comment><USER13> It would be great if it worked, but it forgets the link to the article and redirects you to the home page in plain text instead which is completely useless...

<comment><USER14> Here is the article on the text-only site:

[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954)

<comment><USER15> I just realised how absolutely fine I would be to read articles in that manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is interesting. By making things more transparent, you have obvious and measurable positive effects. Here's my question. What happens when someone moves up a social class such that they're no longer in poverty? I suppose then that they're no longer eligible for the program. How do you administrate the program so that those people are no longer given rice?

I suppose then that the lists held by the distribution centers need to be regularly updated. But then when someone is on the margin (or perhaps for everyone above the poverty line), they can have incentive to say, "Look, here's my card, I'm eligible!" Then the distribution center says, "Nope, says here that you're not poor anymore." Those disputes would need to get resolved, and I can imagine that they can get bogged down in bureaucracy. Worse still, for cases on the margin, distribution centers may have ability to let corruption decide that recipients should be ineligible when they're eligible.

I think that the idea and results are great. I'm just curious how they deal with the cases on the margin. Or does resolution just wait until the next year's income taxes get filed and everyone gets reprocessed accordingly to check for status changes?

<comment><USER17> A much cheaper way is to _not care_. If someone wants their Us$0.50 of rice allotment just give it to them.

Universal basic rice.

<comment><USER18> No. "Free" has an odd effect on people.

For example they may think the item has less or no value ("Why are they just giving this to us? Are they trying to poison us?"), or think the item is unlimited.

The point isn't to recoup costs, but to make the recipients value the item.

<comment><USER19> If you are struggling enough to go through the effort to try and scam the government for a small portion of free rice then I think it's obvious they value the item. Not caring about the edge cases is almost certainly the correct choice here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the same Banerjee of "Poor Economics"[1] fame. Really fascinating work.

[1] [https://www.pooreconomics.com/](https://www.pooreconomics.com/)

</comment><comment><USER21> An informed citizenry is the bedrock of democracy?

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting solution.

Also interesting: there are people for whom a kilo of rice is meaningful. Holy f'ing hell, this world is imbalanced.

</comment><comment><USER23> Without reading, I first thought the postcards would be in the bags of rice, and then by going on which postcards were (or weren't) returned, they could see the areas where corruption was preventing people from getting their rice.

<comment><USER24> That was my initial guess as well, but I was a bit confused -- unless bags of rice were getting destroyed without being opened, it would be pretty easy for corrupt distributors to send back the ACK postcards anyway. This out-of-band checksum should be harder to compromise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Essentially, they started mailing a statement to recipients of public benefits, whereas previously they assumed that recipients knew what they were entitled to and duly received it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Text only no tracking version [https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=627355954)

</comment><comment><USER27> "Sigh. I guess now we have to cut the local Post Office in on the graft."

</comment><comment><USER28> Instead of mailing postcards, mail rice.

<comment><USER29> Logistics of such scale is not trivial and sending kilo of discounted rice can easily cost more than the rice themselves. I'm quite sure that the end-mile delivery was delegated to the village heads just for this reason.</comment></comment>


Waymo's Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/waymos-backseat-drivers-confidential-data-reveals-self-driving-taxi-hurdles?pu=hackernewsfuxi21&utm_medium=unlock&utm_source=hackernews <comment><USER3> That's useful info. I wonder where they had trouble with erratic steering. One Cruise video shows that where driving is alongside parked cars on a narrow street and the parking is irregular. The self driving vehicle is trying to stay in its half of the street unless absolutely necessary.

Waymo still has to use "safety drivers". So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". Which makes it useless. That's the big milestone to look for. When Waymo can get rid of the safety drivers, which they tried briefly last year, they're getting close to something useable.

Some products take a long time to bring to market. Xerography - first copy made in 1939, commercial success 1959. Although we're now 15 years after the DARPA Grand Challenge, so we're coming close to that 20 year wait.

Television - first broadcast, 1928, commercial success, around 1948. So 20 years agaon.

Roller bearings - Timken founded 1898, Timken bearings in 80% of US cars by the 1920s. 20 years again. (Although it took a really long time for them to convert railroads. First locomotive with roller bearings, 1923. In 1949, they were struggling to get railroads to put roller bearings on freight cars.[1] In 1991, roller bearings became mandatory for US inter-line interchange of freight cars.) Air brakes and automatic couplers only took 7 years, but that's because the U.S. Congress made railroads convert and standardize between 1893 and 1900.

What took a really long time, in post-1900 technology? (Before 1900, manufacturing infrastructure wasn't really ready for fast deployment.)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ)

<comment><USER4> > So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers".

A common saying around here is that we have two seasons: winter and (road) construction.

Construction zones have pretty much every obstacle to automated driving you can think of:

* painted lanes that don't correlate to the temporary lanes marked by cones

* lanes that don't correspond to pre-programmed maps / gps

* irregular and unpredictable vehicle and pedestrian entrances and exits (construction workers and trucks)

* Areas where traffic is reduced to a single lane for both directions, and must take turns coordinated by humans with signs at each end of the lane

* speed limits marked by temporary signs

* rough, temporary transitions between pavement and gravel

Unless we can somehow get every state to compel every road construction company and every autonomous vehicle maker to use a single communication protocol, implement it at every construction site (so autonomous cars are made aware of these dangers) it's not going to happen.

Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads.

It's conceivable that the coordinated effort could happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath (due to the sheer increase in cost to the government) nor will I trust that said protocol will have fail-proof security.

<comment><USER5> >Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads.

Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.

<comment><USER6> Correct.

It's amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when, statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at- least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in control is more important to us...

Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussion is, how we only focus on edge cases... when in reality every tool that we use (including the car we been driving) today are built for general use case and operate under mostly a control environment.

Rather if we think autonomous car as additional pair of eyes and hands when we need it most might serve us well in short run before the technology gets mature over next decade or two.

I'll be really happy and relaxed if my car can mostly (70-80%) drive it self to daily commute or next trip to LA; expecting it to be my chauffeur is bit too much, personally.

<comment><USER7> This is why I wonder why platooning technology is so much less hyped. Give me a platooning hardware kit to my current car, enough users after which I can join on my longer trips and literally more than 95% of my self driving car needs are covered. I really do not care if I need to drive a 10 minute stint on the city every now and then. And If I do, I can take a taxi. But getting my hands off the wheel and eyes off the road on the highway is what would have real utility to me.

<comment><USER8> Platooning kind of messes up highway traffic because people need to either cross a ton of lanes to get in and out of the platoon (if the platoon is on the left), or non-platoons can't get on/off (if the platoon is on the right). If everything was forced to platoon on highways it would work. But that's like 30-50 yrs later, _after_ the tech is introduced, barring some really radical legislation with huge popular and state support.

<comment><USER7> Not sure if it would be techically possible to have gaps in the platoon after every five cars, but at least it would be trivial to set max size of one platoon to something reasonable.

<comment><USER9> You honestly trust some random driver at the front to make your decisions?

<comment><USER7> Well, that sounds pretty much like flying commercial flights or traveling by bus. So I guess based on my travel history, answer must be yes.

<comment><USER9> When I fly, it's a trained pilot. Even for driving is stricter licensing for cdl.

<comment><USER7> And you think there would be no extra qualifications required for the platoon heads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience > inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn't disclose the information even > though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

Why would it riding on public roads matter when it's about what happens _inside_ a private vehicle during a high-value R&D experiment? They got permission from Arizona to run the tests and it will likely benefit Arizona's economy in return being the first to get the most training data.

<comment><USER11> That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

<comment><USER12> > It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

<comment><USER13> How is someone driving to work in their private vehicle public benefit? The roads are for driving on, nothing more, nothing less.

<comment><USER9> Not true, the roads are for the use and benefit of citizens.

<comment><USER14> How about tax-paying non-citizen residents, tourists etc?

<comment><USER15> They pay for their road use through gasoline and sales taxes.

<comment><USER16> And Waymo got a deal from Arizona that waived all sales tax and provided for unlimited free gas?! That's outrageous!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting analysis using comments/rider scores. 10% improvement over 6 months is actually pretty good, though. Even if that rate slows as trickier edge cases get handled, It still implies early 2020s for true driverless readiness in select locations. That's pretty much on track with overall predictions for the autonomous market.

<comment><USER18> 10 percentage points, 25% relative improvement (40% non-5 stars to 30%), seems quite good to me.

Although I wonder if seasonality is important here - obviously Phoenix isn't Minnesota but could driving conditions have been worse in Q1 compared to this summer, from the perspective of a self-driving car?

<comment><USER17> Definitely could be a factor. Other drivers might also be more used to seeing them on the road, which could have a positive impact in some way. I think the overall trend is probably pretty strong at that level of improvement, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Despite the complaints, this is fucking amazing. I remember just earlier this decade I was pissed off at a taxi company for saying a taxi will come in 20 minutes...maybe, dispatcher can't promise. Now we got Uber/lyft, and then...DRIVERLESS vehicles?? Always seemed like science fiction but the future is here...

The bitch of this business is the long tail of possible scenarios - <USER2> people have confidence you need to solve the long tail which is hard because not as much data / much less predictable. Sounds like from article though they are making headway!

</comment><comment><USER20> 10500 rides, 70% are rated 5 stars (perfect). 10% increase from last year.

<comment><USER21> 5 stars isn't perfect. 5 stars is "there's nothing so bad that I want to take the time to complain about it."

Waymo employees, who are encouraged to be especially tough, give reviews that are 47% negative. That's likely closer to the metric for perfect.

We don't get perfection from human drivers either, of course. Though part of the promise of Waymo is much better performance than humans, which it apparently isn't close to yet. And this data is for relatively common cases: for the long tail, one-in-a-million case, the conventional wisdom is that humans would do better.

<comment><USER5> If I were "encouraged to be especially tough", I can promise you that the taxis I ride in would get a much worse score than 47% negative.

<comment><USER22> For entirely different reasons, though. Your taxi driver is not going to randomly freak out because they mistook a bush for a pedestrian or didn't understand what traffic cones mean. The bad taxi driver is just going to drive too fast while talking on their cellphone.

<comment><USER23> > or didn't understand what traffic cones mean

You'd be surprised. I've had a taxi driver turn up train tracks before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a strange thing to have leaked. Not details how the tech works, but the database of customer ride reviews?

<comment><USER25> I imagine ride reviews are considerably less confidential than training data.

<comment><USER26> Yes, also a few hundreds of terabytes of data are much less convenient to upload and share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if they spread out to more areas - where there's more variety of driving conditions - if they could start rating difficulty well enough to estimate when they would be able to operate in each one.

So maybe they could start working in 2 years in sprawled suburbs in hot areas where you don't have many cyclists or pedestrians? Or is that Phoenix already and it's still too hard?

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder how many people are upset that the vehicles had to drop them off in a valid passenger load/unload zone as opposed to the usual Lyft / Uber tactic of parking in a no parking / no stopping zone, bike lane, crosswalk, etc because it's most convenient for the drivers and passengers (at the safety and expense of everyone else sharing the space)...

That quote at the end:

> I guess Lyft has me spoiled. I like getting dropped off in front of the > place im going too [sic] not just in the parking lot....

<comment><USER29> Cyclist here. In my experience, the majority of the time a driver stops or parks in the bike lane in an urban area in the US (e.g., I live in Austin), there's a legal parking/stopping spot within a reasonable walking distance, often within 50 to 100 feet. (If this isn't true where you live, consider the difference in the location. There are probably exceptions too. I'm told that legal parking isn't typically close in SF.)

Then again, my idea of "reasonable walking distance" seems longer than most people's. Having spoken to many drivers who have parked in the bike lane, I'm amazed by how negatively some have reacted to me recommending that they park as little as 50 feet away. In some cases the non-bike-lane spot is closer but the convenience of pulling to the side of the road rather than doing a more complicated maneuver seems irresistible.

If Waymo follows the law, good for them. Makes me more likely to be a customer of theirs in the future.

<comment><USER21> In the right light, this is a competitive advantage for Waymo. Prove that it's possible to have a ride hailing app that strictly follows municipal stopping/parking rules, and then encourage cities to start strictly enforcing those rules and ticketing offenders. Self-driving cars would presumably be better than humans at following those rules (at least, if we're imagining a world where self-driving cars work safely and consistently).

<comment><USER30> A somewhat ironic form of regular regulatory capture, in that it should have already been captive...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience > inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn't disclose the information even > though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

What's up with this statement? Should I be forced to publicize my phone calls just because I made them while driving on public roads? It's utterly bizarre that the author thinks he is entitled to see Waymo's data.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure if I agree with the writer's statement here, and I'm not sure the right outcome is for Waymo to share data, but I don't think your analogy works.

Your individual phone calls are made as part of your general participation as an individual in society. One of the largest companies in the world, which does its best to avoid paying taxes, is using public roads as a fundamental part of the infrastructure for a project to generate data.

Maybe a better analogy is people who grow large amounts of marijuana in national parks? Yes, it's true that the growers are part of the public, and that the public owns the land, but...

I wouldn't have a problem with stuff like this if corporations were taxed at reasonable rates, and didn't participate so wholeheartedly in efforts to corrupt our democracy. Google donates to many truly vile, despicable politicians in order to shirk accountability, hamper regulation, and accomplish just this sort of de-facto subsidy and others like it.

<comment><USER33> How about UPS/FedEx? They certainly test new products on public roads and have no requirement to make public the resulting data.

<comment><USER32> As you can read above, I'm not arguing for the mandatory disclosure of data.

<comment><USER33> As you can read above, I wasn't implying you were. Merely pointing out another, perhaps better, analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, that's a bit of an overstatement.

We created nukes, landed on the moon, took sludge out of the ground and used it to power the world. We connected this world with wires and glass fibers to build a real-time global communication system that also gathered all of the world's information in a singular and immediately accessible place.

Building a self driving car is hard but really not as tough.

How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade).

<comment><USER36> My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course.

> How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the > federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a > year for a decade).

At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instead of developing self driving cars to adapt to human infrastructure. But I think that kind of cost is always going to be beyond what's acceptable.

I think the discussion is mostly pointless because of diminishing returns: if you can have "99.9% full self driving" for a tiny fraction of the cost, who would want to pay to go from 99.9% to 100%?

Initially human remote drivers will take care of the rest. And then there is a very slow commercial race towards using fewer humans that drives the very slow march to 99.9% and 99.99% self driving and so on. Driving the last second of the last edge case route is basically something that requires AGI (as long as we don't adapt infrastructure).

<comment><USER37> I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low- utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with the locations one would need remote drivers.

<comment><USER36> Luckily the hardest situations at least occur in cities and not on highways, and cities have good broadband. But yes, it's still "100%, but only here" a.k.a. not 100%

I think remote drivers will probably have to "rescue" cars without piloting them, usually just assessing a situation and overriding something (driving through an obstacle etc). A passenger (if there is one) could do the same. But sometimes actual remote driving would be required of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What's HN's stance on publishers posting links directly to HN?

To be clear, this isn't meant as a blast against The Information or ballmers_peak; they're transparent about their affiliation and that this is an article white listed for readers referred by Hacker News. It's also a totally appropriate article for HN.

That said, I kind of wish there was some in-line indicator of a motivated submission source. I guess a downside would be unethical publishers just laundering their submissions through ostensibly unaffiliated accounts, but I'd feel more comfortable knowing that we did have some kind of system here to encourage transparency.

<comment><USER38> As long as HN has effective vote ring detection, I don't see any issue with directly posting links.

The crowd helps us here and paternalistic rules can only prevent it from functioning correctly. If the post is good, it will move up. If not, it won't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> A week ago Lyft driver who drove like a maniac. Will he get a saucy exposé too?

<comment><USER22> If you're planning on cloning him millions of times and putting him behind the wheel of every car, then yes, he does deserve an exposé!

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> why autonomous cars get so much attention ? Why they are always on news , why they always trend. Apparently for a common man why we are excited when we should be skeptical and more careful. so anything other than excited.

But for some reason these driverless cars do get most attention.

</comment><comment><USER41> When are they going to just seal off an area so it's self-driving vehicles only, and test them there? In a 100% self driving environment, edge cases are probably much easier to reason about. And if the future is 100% self driving, they should probably get some training data from that environment anyway.

<comment><USER42> Waymo has quite a large autonomous-only test facility. [https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside- waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/) They also use it to populate simulations with realistic traffic models.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This might just be me, but it strikes me that the biggest problem self-driving cars has is that no-one actually needs them. Don't get me wrong, you try to sell me a car that has the (fully capable) feature I'd definitely want it. But need it? Well, you're not going to solve the problem of too many cars and the slow traffic that results with cars. It'd be hard to get special treatment for cars with a premium feature. Then there's the taxi model, where the aim of the game is to undercut people that Uber has already managed to push below minimum wage. I mean, there's a margin there, but is it really "Next Google" sized? Even with dedicated vehicles, that's a lot of hardware to maintain.

Now let's assume it's successful and sustainable. Let's say we also manage to get it to work for freight. What have we achieved? Well, we've put a couple more of the jobs available to low-skilled workers on the scrap heap. There will be consequences to doing that, but I doubt Waymo will be footing that bill.

<comment><USER44> There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US [0]. They are paid at least minimum wage. Alphabet has 148.299B revenue per year [1]. A conservative estimate of the revenue waymo could earn just by replacing truck drivers is 7.25 (minimum US minimum wage) * 40 (working hours per weeks) * 50 (working weeks per year) * 3.5 million = $50 billion a year.

I think once you expand past the US, and past trucks, this is definitely "Next Google sized".

[0] [https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust...](https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industry_Data.aspx)

[1] [https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue)

<comment><USER45> That's a pyrhhic victory though. You'd essentially convert trucking into retail, making a semi-skilled workforce as well as small entrepreneurial one into a just-in time near contract workforce with high barriers to entry to start businesses.</comment></comment></comment>


Why your age doesn't matter - <AUTHOR> http://shahedkhan.org/2011/06/why-your-age-doesnt-matter/

<comment><USER2> It might make me an asshole or shortsighted, but I wouldn't do business with anyone under 18 (except as an intern working on totally random stuff, or otherwise in an educational way) in the USA due to the legal issues -- a minor can't enter into binding contracts, and unless it is a really exceptional case, the risk and legal costs of trying to work around that exceed the contribution from the employee, at least for anything with IP law considerations, like almost all startups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it's almost a stereotypical issue, but from where I see it, I can sort of agree to what you pointed out, about the legal issues and what not, but considering the fact that not all teenagers are party-fanatics, drink alcohol.

Their is a good chunk of teens out there that put their mind and thoughts into what they like best, such as their hobbies. Some have dreams of being in the NFL, some dream to be doctors, etc.

My point here is that a lot of people in our society think that teens are worthless, they have to look outside of the box. In particular, entrepreneurs, and investors need to look out of the box, they have to see their background knowledge, what interests they have, almost like any other entrepreneur they invest in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Age totally affects knowledge. You can possibly be 16 years old and claim to have the breadth of technical and business knowledge as someone who is 35 and has been with multiple companies in multiple industries. That statement only proves the contrary. I'm not saying you can't be successful when you're young, but this is not some cultural stigma that exists for no reason.

</comment><comment><USER4> Somehow I have the feeling that in 10 years this guy will be complaining about inexperienced youngsters and how naive he was back then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somehow, I have the feeling that you're wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course it matters! It matters at either end in fact. You can certainly be too young, but even in this supposedly enlightened industry you can clearly be too old as well. And yes, there are pre-rolled bs phrases to make excuses with. I'm sorry young person, you can't sign a contract... Oh---you are much too old to be flexible... Thing to do is to ignore all of the above and just keep on truckin! Do the thing you love and ignore the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you, I love what I'm doing, which is owning my own start-up (launching soon), I've only been curious as why others look down at teenagers, their are many teens out there that are smarter than other start-up owners, without a doubt.

I don't want my age to interfere with my start-up, do you know what I'm saying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Age does matter, but it doesn't mean that you're incapable of running a business. There are plenty of examples of wunderkinds out there who can do the job much better than their elders in every realm of life.

But don't be foolish enough to believe that the experience you gather over the course of your life doesn't have a significant impact. It does!

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you also, but in terms of age, it doesn't have to matter.

Running a business can mean anything, but running a start-up backed by an investor, and valuated at $10M+ isn't heard of from entrepreneurs 19 and below.

I want society to think of the teenagers that have interests in what they like to do, can do it, but I don't want to have the feeling that people will watch the teenager and have an eye on them more than anyone older than 25. I hope you understand, what I'm trying to say here.</comment></comment>


SHOW HN: Customize Your List of Hobbyist Electronic Component Search Engines - <AUTHOR> https://www.partpal.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> The lock down has led me to work on this parts search for hobbyists. I've been planning it for a while but life has been getting in the way. Early days so it will get better!

More hobbyist distributors and improving the stock data are the next targets.

Thank you for looking

</comment><comment> 4x5-Guy It looks interesting. But I couldn't make it work. I tried several part numbers in the search box, but got no response back. Pretty generic stuff, like 7404.

<comment><AUTHOR> A yes, sorry about that. I haven't changed the main page so it looks the same as the results. I'll fix that today and place the buttons in better view. You'll notice that when you enter 7404 links appear below the distributor/hobbyist names. They are country code for now so the user can select the region on each site.</comment></comment>


How to parse HTML - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/jeffrey_kegler/2011/11/how-to-parse-html.html

<comment><USER2> In the bad old days, parsing real-world HTML was a horrible task because every web-browser had a huge collection of undocumented corner-cases and hacks; some accidental, some the result of reverse-engineering other vendors' corner-cases and hacks. Most standalone HTML parsers could generate _some_ document tree from a given input file; whether or not it would match the one generated by an actual browser was another matter.

These days, however, we have the HTML5 parsing algorithm, reverse-engineered from various vendors' web browsers but actually documented and implementable (still horribly complicated, but that's legacy content for you). Not only is the HTML5 parsing algorithm designed to be compatible with legacy browsers, modern browsers are replacing their old parsing code with new HTML5-compatible implementations, so parsing should be even more consistent (I know Firefox has switched to an HTML5 parser, I think IE has made a bunch of noise about it too; I don't follow WebKit all that closely, but I'd be surprised if they haven't moved towards an HTML5 parser).

<comment><USER3> > I know Firefox has switched to an HTML5 parser

Yep, this was mainlined in Firefox 4 (with Gecko 2.0).

> I think IE has made a bunch of noise about it too

Support is being built, it's planned for IE10.

> I don't follow WebKit all that closely, but I'd be surprised if they haven't > moved towards an HTML5 parser

The HTML5 parsing algorithm has been in Webkit since the second half of 2010.

And you have not asked, but HTML5 parsing was officially released in Opera 11.6 last month.

<comment><USER4> > HTML5 parsing was officially released in Opera 11.6 last month.

I hope that's not related to the annoying freezes the community's been complaining about since that release...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now that html5 defines how to parse all html fragments there is really no reason not to use that algorithm.

<comment><USER6> You're assuming that web sites consist of compliant html; which is never the case.

<comment><USER3> The HTML5 parsing algorithm was designed to standardize parsing of real-world pages, including error recovery (for invalid and/or legacy markup), that's the whole bloody point of it.

Better, using an implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm means _you're parsing pages the same way browsers do_ : Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Chrome and Safari) and Presto (Opera) have all landed the HTML5 parsing algorithm, and Trident (IE) is in the process of getting it (the feature is planned for IE10's Trident 6.0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article should be called, "how to write a Marpa-based HTML parser", not "how to parse HTML". If you're a Perl programmer and want to parse HTML into an XML-style DOM, use XML::LibXML. If you can't handle the libxml2 dependency, use HTML::Parser.

</comment><comment><USER8> The fact that browsers accept defective html is the most evil thing that happened to the web. Any library that tries to parse "real world" html just contributes to that evil. I am astonished that we tolerate this and still call ourselves (software) engineers.

<comment><USER9> "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle>

<comment><USER8> <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1999945>

<comment><USER9> Good read, thanks for that. I agree with the conclusion: there is no one-size- fits-all rule for interoperability.

The way I see it, it's ultimately about tradeoffs. I can only imagine what things would be like today if web browsers implemented a strict parsing of HTML and refused to render invalid pages. One possibility is hindered adoption of HTML by the masses. Another is that two vendors would disagree about the HTML spec and cause pages to be browser-specific. (Turns out this happened anyway :-))

Is the HTML5 spec better in terms of interop and compatibility than the previous ones? <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/02/15/HTML5>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Since this seems to be aimed (among other things) towards input sanitization, here is a semi-relevant entry that might amuse someone.

<https://gist.github.com/1575452>

This is a sanitizing HTML "parser" done in roughly 100 lines of PHP code. It does tag and attribute whitelisting, checks for protocols to prevent XSS, deals with unclosed and unopened tags, and does some other things. The biggest issue is that it's not well-factored. However, its shortness is appealing, because I understand how it works. I would have hard time trusting a library with thousands of lines of code to do input validation.

</comment><comment><USER11> For you python users, the BeautifulSoup module has a prettify module which does the same thing.

<comment><USER3> Bleach[0] might be a better idea, it's based on html5lib

[0] <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bleach>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want to go serious about web crawling and/or web scraping (within legal boundaries of course), you want to use Node.js and appropriate modules (don't remember the exact names right now). This is because Node.js being based on the V8 JavaScript engine, can completely emulate a real web browser - it can load and parse the HTML, as well as JavaScript. And many sites won't load properly without JavaScript.

<comment><USER3> What you're saying makes no sense whatsoever, at any level of resolution.

Chrome's rendering engine, and the library used to deal with parsing HTML and building a DOM tree is Webkit's Webcore[0]. V8 and Webcore are not the same thing and V8 does not provide a DOM implementation (that's webcore's job) nor does it handle any HTML parsing (that's _also_ ) webcore's job.

V8 is a javascript VM. That's it. It does not "emulate a real web browser" (let alone completely), and nor does Node.

[0] <http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore?rev=64712>

<comment><USER12> That's why I said emulate. V8 (Node) with appropriate modules can emulate the browser - both parse the DOM, and then run scripts on that DOM. PHP/Perl/etc. can't do that. Java could do that with Rhino I assume, but I'd say V8 is much closer. I'm also not saying anything about emulating exactly Chrome. I wish I had time to dig up that module for Node now, but I don't (I don't remember the name).</comment></comment></comment>


The Dark Side of Zero Knowledge: Masking the initial setup in Zk-SNARK - <AUTHOR> https://blog.smartdec.net/the-dark-side-of-zero-knowledge-undetectable-backdoor-in-zk-snark-a9093ffe49bf <comment><USER2> Zcash knew the problem of backdoor-able initial setup, they understood that it can raise serious doubts on the trustworthiness of their system, they even named the initial key material for setup as "cryptographic toxic waste". As an attempt to bring confidence to the setup ceremony, Zcash used a multiparty setup of 6 people, and invited prominent developers of the cryptocurrency community to participate. The setup was performed at each person's own undisclosed geolocation, and coordinated online. The rough idea was, if at least one participant during the setup was honest, properly destructed the secret, and wasn't hacked, the setup will be secure.

The prominent Bitcoin developer, Peter Todd was invited to participate, too. You can read his entertaining blogpost about the setup procedure at here.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20161114214233/https://petertodd...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161114214233/https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk- desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony)

The funny and alarming story is, after he finished the setup, he became increasingly suspicious about the security of the procedures, especially casted doubts on some technical problems that prevented reproducible build (!!!) of the setup programs. And he later had withdrawn his blogpost and all the claims of security altogether. To me, it's alarming, in the end, we'll never get solid security guarantees.

<comment><USER3> > Zcash used a multiparty setup of 6 people

That's true of the original (Sprout) SNARK, but the newer (Sapling) SNARK used a much more scalable MPC ceremony, which they called Powers of Tau: [https://z.cash.foundation/blog/powers-of- tau/](https://z.cash.foundation/blog/powers-of-tau/)

There was a public call for participation at the time, so if you wanted to be sure that the ceremony was not corrupted, you could just participate yourself.

For backwards compatibility, the Sprout SNARK can still be used, so if the original ceremony was compromised, an attacker could still create coins "out of thin air". But converting a Sprout account to a Sapling account requires making the amount public, so if the number of coins converted exceeded the intended currency supply, that would be detected. Worst case scenario, a hard fork could be arranged to disable the Sprout SNARK.

<comment><USER4> The original Sprout SNARK has been disabled and replaced with a new implementation based on the powers of tao ceremony. You can still spend Sprout coins, but not with the old parameters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This discusses a weakness with all zero knowledge proofs which require a trusted setup.

Zero knowledge proofs which don't require a trusted setup include BCCCGP[1], Bullet Proofs[2], ZKBOO++[3], Ligero[4], Hyrax[5], ZK-STARKs[6], and Aurora[7].

[1][https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/263.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/263.pdf)

[2][https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf)

[3] [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/279.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/279.pdf)

[4] [https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p2087-amesA.pdf](https://acmccs.github.io/papers/p2087-amesA.pdf)

[5] [https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1132.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1132.pdf)

[6] [https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf)

[7] [https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/828.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/828.pdf)

To clear up confusion in the comments, the new ZCash release, sappling, used a trusted setup with 87 people up from the original six[8].

[8] [https://z.cash/blog/completion-of-the-sapling- mpc/](https://z.cash/blog/completion-of-the-sapling-mpc/)

</comment><comment><USER6> As the article states, but is a confusing in the title, this isn't a problem with all Zero Knowledge Protocols (ZKP) but is a problem with a specific ZKP, namely zk-Snarks.

You can do ZKPs without a trusted setup, they are less performant than zk- Snarks. It seems likely that in the next few years these performance problems will be overcome. Most people I've talked to in the field are very confident that protocols like zk-snarks can be done without trusted setup.

<comment><USER7> ZK-Starks already do this.

[https://medium.com/coinmonks/zk-starks-create-verifiable- tru...](https://medium.com/coinmonks/zk-starks-create-verifiable-trust-even- against-quantum-computers-dd9c6a2bb13d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It looks like there's nothing new here, making the title clickbait-y. One of the first things anyone learns about Zcash is that there was a trusted ceremony.

<comment><USER9> Wrong.

"One of the first things anyone learns about Zcash" is that at least one of the ceremony's participants must be trusted to have securely destroyed his toxic waste.

This article is about the fact that there could be a backdoor, whose absence can only be proven by revealing all participants' toxic waste.

You'll note that these two things are at odds with each other.

<comment><USER10> There is nothing new about this article. The article is pointing out that in addition to the trapdoors of the proving system, it's possible to subvert the arithmetic circuit used as well. The ceremonies used by Zcash have the property that the parameters are perfectly bound to the circuit.

Not sure why this isn't mentioned in the article.

> This article is about the fact that there could be a backdoor, whose absence > can only be proven by revealing all participants' toxic waste.

This is incorrect, as stated above. Instead of revealing their toxic waste, we reveal proofs-of-knowledge so we can use pairings to ensure the parameters encode the circuit correctly.

<comment><USER9> I stand corrected. Thank you for the clarification!

I still learned something "new" from the article, I was only aware of the ceremony issue that "everbody knows" of.

<comment><USER10> That's great! There are many issues with trusted setups that people aren't paying enough attention to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this apply to monero as well?

<comment><USER12> Monero's backdoor was the development team releasing a severely weakened version of the mining app during the phase where 25% of the supply was minted, along with a production curve that released 80% of the supply in less than half the time of Bitcoins minting production time.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/6fixnr/monero...](https://old.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/6fixnr/monero_mining_schedule/)

<comment><USER13> That was bytecoin, not Monero. Monero is a code fork of Bytecoin. Bytecoin is considered a scam. Monero was a fair launch with no backdoors.

<comment><USER14> > I woke up on May 28th, 2014 [one month after Monero launched], on vacation > with my family in the middle of the desert, to find a copy of my private > source code plastered across the bitcointalk message board. Announced as a > "new optimized version" of the Monero currency miner, it was > enthusiastically adopted by cryptocurrency miners across the world. And in > the process of doing so, my daily profit from the Monero Mining Project > dropped by over five thousand dollars per day.

...

> [Monero] was a fork of Bytecoin designed to not have the 80% premine. But > its initial developer either didn't know, didn't care, or wanted to profit > from the de-optimized hashing. That initial developer was pretty quickly > given the boot by the community, and in came an unrelated group of > developers who took it over---who were, as far as I can tell, completely > unaware of the deoptimization. So things sat there for a few weeks in the > same state as Bytecoin.

...

> This was a brilliantly designed proof-of-work function targeting the > strengths of modern CPUs -- native AES encryption and fast 64 bit > multipliers -- tuned to use a scratchpad exactly the size of the per-core L3 > cache on Intel CPUs (about 2MB) that someone then wrapped in such a thick > blanket of crap it was nearly unrecognizable until you started jumping in, > tearing it apart, and putting it back together again.

[https://da-data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-mone...](https://da- data.blogspot.com/2014/08/minting-money-with-monero-and-cpu.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't zero knowledge crypto relatively new? Seems like we're going through the normal decades long growing pains of any new type of crypto.

If so, how did other types of crypto in the early adoption years deal with these types of issues?</comment>


If the Point of Capitalism Is to Escape Capitalism, Then Why Capitalism? - <AUTHOR> https://eand.co/if-the-point-of-capitalism-is-to-escape-capitalism-then-whats-the-point-of-capitalism-bedd1b2447d <comment><USER3> Capitalism (especially the free market kind) has been most successful when it has been used as a pragmatic tool, instead of a dogmatic philosophy.

So basically, my answer to "Why Capitalism" is that "it works".

Capitalism cannot (rather, should not) provide you with a set of ideals or principles. Capitalism is a tool to achieve those set of ideals or principles, and should be used where appropriate in order to achieve those ideals and principles.

The ideals and principles have to come from elsewhere.

Elon Musk and Bezos believe in the principle of a backup planet, so they leverage capitalism to reach Mars. Bill Gates believes in book recommendations and charity, so he leverages it for that purpose. Someone who is closer to an employee believes in a building a good life for themselves and their family, and they use capitalism for that.

The article is like asking "What's the point of a hammer when once you've used it to hang a portrait you put it away?"

</comment><comment><USER4> The conflation of slavery with capitalism is too easy a target, so I'll address a highlight:

"what's striking about capitalism is that we're all trying to escape it — even most of the capitalists — because it makes us so miserable, mean, and foolish."

Philanthropy is not "escaping" capitalism. Going to mars is not "escaping" capitalism. Achieving financial independence is not "escaping" capitalism. These are all choices that are enabled via the autonomy that capitalism grants. Yes, some people are consumed solely by the pursuit of money, but capitalism is about _choice_ , not money.

Many choose to exercise their capitalism-granted autonomy by giving things to others. There is absolutely nothing contradictory about charity in a purely capitalistic system, and is in fact, given that charity by definition is voluntary, only possible sans coercion.

<comment><USER5> Charity makes sense in a capitalistic world, because some people get the "choice" of being poor in it.

<comment><USER6> in contrast to government-owns-the-means-of-production socialist systems, where nobody gets the choice to not be poor.

<comment><USER5> A worse system does not make another one better.

<comment><USER7> Does the lack of any better solution justify it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The premise is a really strange one to set up. I think he tries to motivate it somewhat later on in the article:

> You can see it in stark, comic terms. What are Bezos and Musk doing? Trying > to flee to Mars. What's Gates doing? Recommending you books to read, and > trying to save the world with charity. LOL — how ironic. These are different > forms of freedom from capitalism

I would argue, that especially in case of Musk and Bezos capitalism is serving it's purpose. Some of us think space exploration makes sense, others would rather buy a yacht, help the third world, or just put it in a bank.

Musk or Bezos are not 'fleeing', they are diverting their own resources and that of shareholders into the goal of reaching, and colonizing Mars.

Something a government might never bother with.

<comment><USER9> > Something a government might never bother with.

Maybe because colonizing Mars is a massive waste of resources that could be better spent fixing the planet we already live on? Or do you think the solution to scarcity is to have billionaires play with their space toys?

<comment><USER10> Point taken. However, I do like the idea of creating a second option, while trying to fix the old version. And I think we are doing just that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So this is what you write if you have zero understanding about the subject you are about to write?

The author gleefully mixes things together that have no connection and asserts that capitalism is a social system, when it's merely an economic and more importantly resource management system. Capitalism can't fix things that are outside of it's scope, and this is where most leftist intellectuals fail in their critique, capitalism can't fix abortion rights or same-sex marriage, because they are not economic or resource problems, they are social ones that will have to be addressed with a social system not an economic one. Capitalism might tell you how much resources it takes to do these things, but it can't take a stand on any of these things, because it has no connection to the issue.

Managing resources will always be handled by the system that is most optimized and efficient in a natural world, capitalism, as opposed to feudalism is more efficient in allocating resources, feudalism also had a social component where it differed from capitalism since it has no social dimension. What comes to tribalism, that is just purely a social system with nothing to do with economy and resource management.

Good luck to the author on his quest to mix things up and try to figure a solution to something that doesn't match reality.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are a lot of other good points here. People bang on capitalism because it's easy -- and trendy.

One thing that most conversations miss is that capitalism isn't some optional thing you pick up and do like yoga.

Wiki defines capitalism as "an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit."

So what does "own" mean? How about "production" We can substitute in stuff that mostly works for us, but it falls apart. And it falls apart when try to remove capitalism.

Let's transfer everything to the state, all ownership. What happens? Money becomes useless and people hoard political capital. You gain a bunch of political support and you can build a new factory. You give out your political support to others so that they can "invest" it in other things.

You start collecting coins, or stamps. Suddenly you're trading your stamps with another guy for his political support for getting a new stoplight.

Capitalism isn't going anywhere. You can't kill it. The only thing you can do is acknowledge it and try to learn how to live with it. It will exist no matter what kind of social or government structure you want to implement. Always has, always will.

This is an important point because people who study capitalism are studying _the way things are_ , ie existing systems. People who study other systems are studying _the way things might be_. Whatever the other system, there's always capitalism in there.

I'm not making a value judgment one way or another. Simply pointing out that there are two entirely different kinds of knowledge being discussed.

<comment><USER13> "You start collecting coins, or stamps. Suddenly you're trading your stamps with another guy for his political support for getting a new stoplight."

If there is no ownership there is no concept of 'your collection' or trading for that matter. There are stamps on a shelf in a room in a house you currently locate yourself. As there is no concept of ownership, there is no concept of stealing. The other guy can just 'take' your stamps. As they don't belong to you.

I do agree that capitalism is not something optional. But that is because the fundamental traits of ownership are ingrained in our culture and biology as people. We evolved to where we are now because of this. We didn't decide on capitalism. It is more an explanation and reasoning about our current society. Other societal structures like ant colonies or 'primitive' humans might be different. But you don't see them because they are not part of the global economy bubble and frankly they don't see us or care about the system we use to govern ourselves. They just live.

<comment><USER12> You own your opinions and decisions, right? Can those be removed from you? Your influence in the community?

You're correct on the stamps issue. I broadened the scope a bit just to drive the point home in a reasonable amount of text. If you own no physical objects, you can't accumulate or barter them.

But that doesn't mean you don't own anything. Or that scarcity goes anywhere. Or that you and other people can't pool/coordinate these non-tangible things you control to create and influence real, live, physical things. It's just easier to reason about when it's stamps. That's all. The beauty of money was that it allowed all of that pooling and coordination to happen in the abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is China the counterpoint?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18084970](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18084970)

</comment><comment><USER15> what's more, as was pointed-out on a recent episode of the EconTalk podcast, although our society as a whole is capitalist, internally almost all corporations are run as communist dictatorships

<comment><USER16> Heh,that's kind of funny. Though, the methods of enforcement don't translate well outside a company. A company either ostracizes you or kills you off, depending how you want to translate 'firing' outside of a company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The point of capitalism is freedom -- not from capitalism, but freedom - period.

In a capitalist society you are, in general, free to do whatever you want. If what you're doing is something that society deems sufficiently valuable then you tend to be able to make a living doing just that, even if it's something nobody would have ever thought to have made a living doing before. Imagine you hate capitalism. If enough people agree with you you're free to make a living writing and talking all about the evils of capitalism, selling your books, articles, Che t-shirts, and so on. Imagine you think communism is the best economic system. In a capitalist society you're free to buy up thousands of acres of land, invite some people onto your land, and then try to start your communist utopia.

By contrast in other economic systems, what you can or can't do tends to be decided by outside forces and the government in particular. No government is ever going to pay you to speak negatively of their system of governance. And the notion of buying thousands of acres of land to start a capitalist utopia would just be nonsensical in e.g. a communistic society. Your freedom is greatly restricted, and society is directed not by the people within that society but by an elite few -- you end up with the same problems as capitalism, but with none of the benefits. And this reality is almost certainly why all social economic systems seem to converge towards authoritarianism and failure to produce. People _want_ to be the masters of their own destiny. Capitalism isn't perfect there, but it's certainly far better than any alternative.

<comment><USER18> Please don't conflate capitalism with libertarianism. Only makes a discussion more confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So much talk about Capitalism, about the good old days (capitalism in the US is a very pre-1980's thing) or the current state of capitalism and where it's going -- when what we actually experience and take part in today is Corporatism. I don't see a million articles about rampant corporatism... or even a handful... but this thought that capitalism is around and is how we as a nation live our lives is everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER20> "what's striking about capitalism is that we're all trying to escape it — even most of the capitalists — because it makes us so miserable, mean, and foolish."

No, capitalism makes us happy, nice, and smart. More importantly, capitalism makes us rich.

It's really easy to hate on capitalism because everything that's wrong in your life can be reasonably explained away with "if we didn't have capitalism this wouldn't be a problem." But the fact us, most of the things that capitalism does for you (the average reader of HN who most likely lives in a capitalist country) are invisible. You don't realize how much capitalism is responsible for everything in your life that _isn 't_ making you miserable. Things like:

\- Affordable food from all over the world available in all varieties in all seasons, fresh and uncontaminated by toxins or spoilage \- Abundant, cheap energy that lowers the cost of everything from raising children to acquiring knowledge to healthcare (not to mention travel and leisure) \- Access to aspirin, toothbrushes, toilet paper, shaving cream, dental floss, tissues, towels, soap, and thousands of other daily necessities that allow us to live more hygienic and healthier lives \- Higher level education (which would not be possible without a basic level of societal comfort) which unlocks advances in science, mathematics, medicine, economics and other areas that improve the human condition \- Riches and wealth available to a wider net of people that have ever had it before, in a way that doesn't deprive or prevent more people from acquiring more wealth...this has of course downstream effects like reducing crime and increasing camaraderie and mutual respect (you gain more from trading with a rival than fighting with them and trying to take their resources)

Take away capitalism and what do you get? Well, you can easily visit Cuba or Venezuela right now to find out. You get:

\- Kids with no shoes \- Crumbling infrastructure \- 'Free' healthcare with no aspirin \- Violent revolution or suppression of revolutionary activity \- A population of greedy individuals and families doing everything they can to protect their own resources and take others' (this isn't an indictment of these people, this is exactly what humans need to do when their livelihood is threatened) \- People with no education because they're spending all their time scrambling to survive

If you want people who are _really_ "miserable, mean, and foolish", take away capitalism and that's exactly what you'll get.

</comment><comment><USER21> The point of capitalism isnt to escape it, it is instead an idealogy that has at its core the private ownership of capital - the means of production - <USER2> such production is rewarded by profit.

Nearly all countries today embrace it.

I think it important to not conflate it with the issues it can encourage if uncontrolled: greed, inequality, the abuse of labor, natural resources and the environment, unsafe products and working conditions, and the unavailability of essential services and goods where unprofitable.

</comment><comment><USER22> IMHO the premise is wrong. The capitalist isn't trying to gain freedom from capitalism, but from market.

<comment><USER23> I'd rather say that (for at least some of) the capitalists' the goal is control/dominate the market not escape it.

Anyway, the whole article is full of wrong/weird premises, ie. talking to Alexa = talking to capitalism; mission to Mars = escape from the capitalism, not apotheosis of it etc.

<comment><USER22> I said escape because at least I personally understand the target to be to free myself from any influence the market has on me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Capitalism is not a system of ideas, nor is it a system that anyone chooses. It is not designed, voted on, decreed, or managed. It has no governing authority, no standards organization. It has no dogma, creed, commandments, or constitution.

Capitalism is the natural order of things within human societies above a certain size and complexity level. It's more like a force of nature than anything else. To establish any system _other_ than capitalism takes great effort.

What we can do is regulate it. It might be impossible to prevent corruption entirely in government. But to criticize capitalism in its contemporary manifestation is to criticize blatant regulatory capture, corruption, and demagoguery. Those phenomena are themselves manifestations of capitalism, and it is telling that they arise in capitalist and non-capitalist societies alike.

We need to develop new and better systems for keeping people honest and for keeping institutions fair. Without this development, human nature, not the distribution of capital ownership, remains the greatest threat to humanity.

Since I've been downvoted, I might as well clarify: this article exemplifies what I'm talking about!

First the author writes:

 _What is [the slave owner] really after? He's trying to earn is freedom from labour — not having to do work, hence the slaves. He's also trying to win freedom from exploitation — he holds the whip, but is above the moral law. And from control, punishment, hierarchy — he has no boss to answer to._

That's perfectly reasonable! Note that capitalism has nothing to do with this. People have always sought this. It might as well be part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

But then they try to summarize themselves:

"Even the capitalist is really just trying win back his freedom from capitalism"

I guess that's true in this particular case, because for this particular capitalist the cause of their non-freedom is capitalism. But is it true in general? Absolutely not! Freedom from exploitation and the desire for control are universal human desires that extend beyond any particular economic system.

Once the false equivalence is broken, the article kinda stops making sense.

<comment><USER24> This got me to thinking about the minimum things need for capitalism.

0\. some agreement to not use violence to take value

1\. some way to Exchange Value

2\. ways to Store Value

3\. ways to Lend Value

<comment><USER18> Is lending a necessary condition, or a corollary?

<comment><USER24> true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hold up. I think everyone is getting caught up on the idea of "freedom". Capitalism does not grant you any shred of personal freedom from the bottom of the chain to the tippy-top. The higher you get, the less personal freedom you have. Financial freedom, yea, but not Enlightenment era freedom. Being a titan in business has to be a fucking nightmare. Your responsibilities are astronomical. Everyone wants to slit your throat for your crown at the top. Back stabbers. Gold diggers. Cheats. Con artists. And just trying to be relevant and competitive. Oh, and phone calls. I can imagine anyone in the top 100 of forbes, that actually runs a business, does not get a decent night sleep most nights.

And I'm a capitalist myself. I'm happy with being a moderate fish in a small pond. Because more than this, fuck it, I'm going to go live in the woods and grow a beard that can be used as an axe to chop trees. But that means I'm a little tad-pole when I do that. That, I'm not really willing to go back to.

You're trying to be the biggest fish in the pond, in the biggest pond you can find. Biggest gorilla. Fiercest lion. Whatever your analogy. You get the point. Sure, folks tap-out and cash out, then become poets, sail around the world, tell people how they should live their lives, etc. Not that I blame them. The burnout being on their level...

Bit of a rant. Might as well follow it up with a bit more ranting.

I'm tired of people, like the dude in the article, "Well, Marx said...". Who the fuck cares? Let's face a fact of the matter. His ideas of how an economy should function never worked. Soviet Union? Venezuela? China abandoned it with Nixon's blessing. It's been tested time and time again on different sides of the planet. His ideas of how social structures should work has consistently resulted in strangling police states and high levels of corruption. NKVD? Stasi? China in general? Anyone sucking the sickle of communism isn't exactly going to win a humanitarian or economic award anytime soon. What's the practical definition of stupid? Seriously, wtf. Sure, communism may work in small doses, like I've heard that some <30 people communes have happy people in them. But the same is said about people who got suckered into cults too.

Why are people still stuck on a guy who was proven wrong many times? Not just a little wrong. But people have been slaughtered or starved to death in his teaching. In the millions. And yes, other teachings have done the same. I'm positive someone is going to say with avocado on their breath, "Yea, you just described religion too". Great. Stalin is now above Ghandi and Borlaug because of your religion comment. Assholes, of all shapes, colors and sizes, get thrown into the same shithole. Regardless who else is in their too.

I'm angry...

Phone typing, so probably typos and I don't feel like rereading this. Take as you will. Go find 2 cents in a parking lot somewhere.

</comment><comment><USER26> The point of capitalism is to consolidate power around capital rather than a monarch, political party, government, nation or voting group. It's why capitalism can work in a democracy (US), communism (China) or monarchy (british empire). The point of capitalism isn't to escape it. Social or corporate advancement isn't capitalism. It's just everyday life. No more than a peasant in the soviet union progressing up the state ladder is communism. Capitalism is about who really runs things and who gets to have real power. In monarchy, it's obviously the king or queen. In communism, it's the politburo. In a military dictatorship, it's the general. In capitalism, it's the capital ( or those who control it ).

</comment><comment><USER27> If the point of strawmans is to escape strawmans, then why strawmans?

</comment><comment><USER28> Capitalism is not a choice.

Given the nature of the human mind and the material state of the world, the equilibrium state of human economies is capitalism.

To see what I mean, consider any complex system. There will be certain patterns and processes that naturally unfold in that system, while other patterns and processes do not manifest without external energy. The reason is because the former states are closer to the equilibrium state of the system while the latter are comparatively farther away.

Capitalism is like an equilibrium state, and all attempts to control capitalism require external energy. What is a concrete example of this?

Regulation has a tendency to be repealed if the public or government loses sight of why the regulation was passed in the first place. On the other hand, companies usually want regulations repealed by default. This tension between opposing forces must resolve itself, and it does in favor of companies because not only are they constantly applying pressure against regulations, but the public is often allured by the fact that many regulations lower potential levels of economic growth. Therefore it's more likely than not that regulations be repealed in the long run.

<comment><USER29> This seems like a ridiculous assertion considering that humanity predates capitalism by about a hundred thousand years and civilization predates capitalism by about five thousand years.

<comment><USER28> "Given the nature of the human mind and the material state of the world"

The material state of the world my friend.</comment></comment></comment>


Apply HN: RRR Channel-Based Anonymous Social App for Believers - <AUTHOR> The purpose is to provide a specific platform/media for believers to restore, recover, rebuild and socialize duration their up/down times, or when they arrive at a new place.
Users register their basic profiles with voluntary confessions, locations, interests. Users can join public or private channels. Channels are created around topics like prayers, worship, singles, family, marriage, autopsy, debt, therapy, locations, etc. Privileged users can created their own channels. Users can post text/image/voice/video in channels. Users can chat with text/voice/video.
The basic service is free. The business model is membership fee for seminars, professional services and therapies, adds-on services, and donation. Revenue is for sustaining continued app operation. <comment><USER2> It´s always tricky to mix faith and business. I´m assuming Christian.

</comment><comment><USER3> Believers in...what?

<comment><USER4> Self sacrifice?</comment></comment>


Sweden will vote against the copyright deal/article 13 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/senficon/status/1115620746951262209 <comment><USER2> The title of the article is not properly translated. "Sverige vill ändra" actually means "Swedens wants to change", not "will change". Also, "Sweden", in this case is the "EU committee" of the Swedish parliament. The committee wants the government to vote no. The matter isn't final yet I guess.

<comment><USER3> The responsible minister Morgan Johansson has said that the government will abide by the parliaments decision:

"We have an order that we should anchor decisions in the Riksdag, now that the Riksdag has changed its attitude, the government will of course have to follow it."

[https://translate.google.com/translate?client=ubuntu&client=...](https://translate.google.com/translate?client=ubuntu&client=tw- ob&channel=fs&oe=utf-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Ffemtejuli.se%2F2019%2F04%2F08%2Fregeringen- ar-pa-vag-att-backa-om-upphovsrattsdirektivet%2F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Swedish article linked in the tweet concludes that the Swedish vote makes absolutely no difference, and the only thing that can change the result is Germany changing its mind.

<comment><USER5> Does Germany have a disproportionate amount of control over the EU? Or are you saying the support is already split and Germany is the deciding factor in this case? Or both?

<comment><USER6> It is not really about certain countries having more control than others. Germany has the largest population in the EU, and since MEPs apportionment is proportional to population, 99 out of 785 MEPs are German. It's a matter of demographics.

<comment><USER7> MEPs are not directly proportional to population, but degressively so, where the smallest countries have more and the largest countries have less representation than they would on a purely proportional basis. But this is about Sweden's vote in the Council, where each country casts a vote as a country, but that vote is weighted by that country's population.

<comment><USER5> So, if I'm understanding this right, it's in Germany and Sweden's own political interests to significantly increase their populations?

<comment><USER8> And then split into multiple smaller countries in order to get better vote per capita ratios.

Of course, an expert conspiracy theorist will note that the more or less culturally and linguistically homogeneous group of about twenty million people living in the north of Europe are already split into a vote-buffing four countries ...

<comment><USER9> > linguistically homogeneous group

I beg to differ. Finnish is as far removed from Swedish and Danish as Hungarian. Italian is probably closer to either than each other. Swedish and Danish are (at least on reading level) mutually intelligible.

<comment><USER10> There are about 20 million speakers of Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Swedish (including native Swedish-speakers in Finland). If we added the Finnish-speaking population to the mix we'd end up with a population of over 25 million -- not 20.

That being said, I'd say Finns are quite close to the other Nordic countries culturally, even though there is a clear language barrier.

For those who don't know what this is about, Finnish and Sami aren't Indo- European languages like the other Nordic languages are, while Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are closely related and somewhat mutually intelligible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good, more countries should have opposed this corrupt censorship bill.

<comment><USER12> Europe was pretty torn and I got the impression that votes were "for" by default and "against" where there was an ongoing public debate. If true, I hope that was more due to politicians misunderstanding the consequences due to technical obstacles rather than lobbyism...

The arguments in favor have also been strange, even from institutions like the Swedish EU Commision! They argued that this directive was no big deal because social networks already employ AI assisted filters to respect copyrights. Yeah, but those are also known to be heavy handed, and depend on huge training sets. It completely disregards small businesses and startups with no resources to deal with this.

<comment><USER13> People seem too simply not know what goes on in the EU. And even if they do they feel powerless about it in smaller countries. I'm in an ex-Soviet country and some of the older people I've talked to about it have said that they think they have as much of a say in the EU as they did in the Soviet Union. (Which is none.)

<comment><USER14> The point of democracy is that individuals, or even small groups of individuals have almost no say in governance.

So, yes, you are supposed to attach yourself to larger umbrella movements, to get your opinions heard. It's by design.

One other small difference between the EU, and the USSR, is that T-54 tanks don't start rolling in, when your country decides to hold a little regime change... Or even a general strike.

<comment><USER15> >One other small difference between the EU, and the USSR, is that T-54 tanks don't start rolling in, when your country decides to hold a little regime change... Or even a general strike.

T-54 are quite outdated, so you're right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought the vote already happened? How can they change it?

<comment><USER17> It only passed in the parliament, hasn't passed the council yet (bicameral legislature like in the US and many other countries).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Femanuelkarlsten.se%2F04%2Fsverige- vill-andra-sin-rost-om-artikel-13-har-ar-satten-det-kan-falla-direktivet)

Sweden wants to change its vote on "Article 13" — here are the ways it can trap the directive

</comment><comment><USER19> twitter is being evil with the back button now? click on the link, then click on one of the tweet replies.. then try going back to HN, twitter won't have that!

<comment><USER20> Use the native back button (if on Android) instead of Twitter's back button. It's been like that since a long time.

<comment><USER21> Chrome 73 on Windows 10, the site is definitely hijacking the browser's back button. Spamming it works, but a single press is not enough to get away from Twitter.

Worth investigating whether this is due to a redirect, or whether it's due to misusing the history API. Either way, it feels very user-hostile.

<comment> radford-neal Can anyone explain why browsers allow this?

Surely it's not technically hard to make "back" actually go back. Is there some downside to letting users control their own screen that I'm not aware of?

<comment><USER22> I imagine that Twitter is abusing the HTML5 history API. It's a Web specification. It can be useful when used right, but any scriptable functionality is open for abuse.

<comment> radford-neal I'm not up on HTML5 APIs. But I do know that it is entirely possible for a browser to have a button labelled "back" that goes back. Always.

Why don't they have it? Fear that something horrible will happen on some web page that relies on the user not exiting the page without control going throw their code? But such a web page is broken in any case, since the user might simply lose their internet connection...

<comment><USER23> Consider a single-page web app - what does "back" mean in that context? Only the app really knows, the browser doesn't have enough knowledge about its logical UI flow to figure that out. Hence why the history API was introduced, so that app can change parts of the page, and then manually record that change in the browser history in a way that allows for it to be reverted.

In practice, it was a problem ever since AJAX first became a thing - with the symptom usually being that "back" _didn 't_ do what the users expected, e.g. navigated away from the website, rather than back to the previous page state on that website. Hence why it's one of the earlier HTML5 additions. It's been around for 9 years now, and heavily used all around.

<comment> radford-neal I think users want a "back" button that goes back to where they were before they visited this web page. The browser knows how to do this. It doesn't need to know anything about the app running on that web page.

If the app on that web page wants a button that undoes some state change on that web page, they can create one of their own. It seems like a bad idea to confuse these two very different actions. I don't think it's beyond the capacity of users to understand the distinction if it were actually made consistently.

<comment><USER23> Most pages these days are like web apps in that they do partial refreshes rather than navigating to a completely new page (with most of the same markup) as you click around. From user's perspective, this _looks_ like a new page, and logically it is. They don't care about how it is actually achieved.

For example, on GitHub, when you're browsing some source repo, and you open a folder there, do you expect the Back button to go to the previous folder, or to leave GitHub altogether?

<comment> radford-neal Well, I"m arguing that combining two functions in one button is a bad idea. I expect there to be a button to leave github altogether, and a different button to move back within github.

<comment><USER23> Browsers have never worked that way, though. If GitHub was written back in late 90s, say, every time you clicked on a folder in the file tree, you'd get a page refresh with a new URL - and then the Back button would just go back to the previous URL.

Now, they do the refresh by fetching data from a web service and updating the DOM. But the URLs still change - as they should, since you are accessing different resources as you browse - and so the history tracks it accordingly.

The only time when we had something like you describe was in early Ajax days, when DOM updates were already done, but before the history API, and before the hacks that preceded it were devised. In those days, any website that did it would behave exactly as you described - the Back button in the browser would navigate off the website, even if you were clicking around it for the past hours. And then the website offered its own Back button implemented in HTML, that would navigate within it. Users _hated_ it, because it broke all established conventions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Decap of a cell phone SIM card - <AUTHOR> https://electronupdate.blogspot.com/2016/10/decap-of-cell-phone-sim-card.html <comment><USER2> How come this is already off the front page? This is an insaaanely cool video.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_BfjEF513k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_BfjEF513k)</comment>