A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/a_really_good_a.html <comment><USER2> Remember, security against cracking is a combination of _password strength_ and _key derivation function strength_. Nothing will save you if your password is "password". Not much will save you if your password is hashed with MD5.

But scrypt can be over 100,000,000 time stronger than MD5 -- so if you're using scrypt you can afford to use a password which is 100,000,000 times weaker. "jdtwbv" hashed using scrypt is stronger than "H.*W8Jz&r3" hashed using MD5.

<comment><USER3> ""jdtwbv" hashed using scrypt is stronger than "H.*W8Jz&r3" hashed using MD5"

Is it? I'm not sure.

for the first one you're using lowercase letters (and digits, I'm giving you that 'free')

For the first one we have 36^6 For the second one (all printables) 100^9

Relation between them: ~ 459,393,658. If you're saying scrypt is 100M times better, in this case the second one is safer

And the relation is important but less as computers get faster. Option B may take 1Mi times as long as Option A but if Option A takes 1 microsecond, there goes your Option B as well

<comment><USER4> People have built _huge_ rainbow tables of MD5 hashes.

I don't really keep up with that game (like WoW, it seems like a fun game, but only if you are willing to put in a lot of your time), but I think the current limit is somewhere around 8 or 9 characters if you are pulling from all printables, meaning that "H.*W8Jz&r3" with MD5 is probably not breakable right now.

Take off two characters, or wait 3 years, and it probably will be.

<comment><USER5> My understanding, and I'm sure that someone else will correct me, is that with MD5 rainbow tables it's not so much that someone will get your password as they will get something that hashes to the same value. More than likely this will be your password, but sometimes not. The point is that it doesn't matter if your password is 25 characters long.. if there's a 5 character password that hashes to the same value they could log in with it.

<comment><USER4> While it's possible to make MD5 collisions, finding something that hashes to the same thing as a hash of my short password is essentially impossible.

In fact, collisions on short passwords are harder than collisions on long passwords. The space of all MD5 outputs is way bigger than the space of 12-character passwords.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple thing."

Steube misunderstands the xkcd comic [1]. There's a really good comment which explains it: "It could be argued that Randall's example of 4 words is too short -- and indeed, for some applications, it is. However for a typical dictionary size, and genuinely random selection, it is massively stronger than "typical" passwords and in fact easily adequte to defeat the above-mentioned attacks." [2]

Emphasis on "genuinely random selection."

[1] [https://xkcd.com/936/](https://xkcd.com/936/)

[2] [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/a_really_good_...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/a_really_good_a.html#c1483848)

<comment><USER7> What makes you think he misunderstands it? For the cracker it's not about entropy per se, it's a game to come up with algorithms that crack more passwords for less compute power. The XKCD comic got a lot of mindshare so it makes sense to target algorithms towards that type of password.

I think Schneier's suggestion of reducing it to the first letter of each word is vastly preferable because it packs the majority of entropy from random word selection into the least amount of typing.

<comment><USER8> The algorithm is not targeted against the type of password which the XKCD comic suggests. The algorithm is designed to exploit common human behavior, which is similar to the XKCD method but not identical. The significant difference is that human behavior in picking words is not random, while the XKCD method requires the word selection process to be truly random. The "iloveyousomuch" example by Steube is unlikely to be picked randomly.

salmonellaeater is right, Steube misunderstands the comic. The idea of the comic is to pick a small random selection of the 250,000 distinct words in a oxford dictionary, rather than 8 of the 95 letters from all ASCII printable characters. A selection of 3 words has then higher entropy than 8 random characters, because 250,000^3 is a bigger number than 95^8. The question then is, will 3 random words really be easier to remember than 8 ASCII printable characters?

The downside to the Schneier scheme, is that each is a common sentence (low entropy), with a chosen transformation algorithm added. Thus the quality of the password will depend on the number of transformation algorithms, and the quality of each one. If we are to use the one first described to create "tlpWENT2m", we get a password strength like:

Using strictly the first letter, would only do 2x linear increase in entropy over just searching for common sentences. Change any occurrence of common numbers substitutes for words adds (0-2x) entropy increase. Writing one of the words in all caps means 6x increase in entropy. Combined, tlpWENT2m is slightly less secure than "This little piggy went to market" \+ two [random number below 10] or a single letter at the end.

<comment><USER7> Where are you guys getting this? All I read was this:

> _Steube was able to crack "momof3g8kids" because he had "momof3g" in his 111 > million dict and "8kids" in a smaller dict._

> _" The combinator attack got it! It's cool," he said. Then referring to the > oft-cited xkcd comic, he added: "This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple > thing."_

It sounds to me like he's combining words randomly, not "exploiting common human behavior".

<comment><USER9> He found a password by 2 words randomly from two dictionaries of different sizes, so he only had m * n combinations to choose from, and his n is a lot smaller than m.

Whereas the xkcd approach is more like m * m * m * m.

In other words, exponentiation > multiplication.

<comment><USER8> Correct. What I meant with "exploiting common human behavior", is that the dictionaries the attacker used is built from list of old passwords found in previous attacks. Those dictionary will be order of magnitude smaller than a dictionary of the English language, but attackers know that people tend to pick passwords (or in this case, compilation of passwords) that someone else has already thought of before. Its a simple observed behavior that people in general tend to think alike, and simply do not think randomly even if individually, it "feels" random.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ' _Also included in the list: "all of the lights" (yes, spaces are allowed on many sites), "i hate hackers," "allineedislove," "ilovemySister31," "iloveyousomuch," "Philippians4:13," "Philippians4:6-7," and "qeadzcwrsfxv1331." "gonefishing1125" was another password Steube saw appear on his computer screen. Seconds after it was cracked, he noted, "You won't ever find it using brute force."_'

If you won't ever find "gonefishing1125" using brute force, how on earth did they find "qeadzcwrstxv1331"?

<comment><USER9> Have you looked at the keyboard pattern for qeadzcwrsfxv1331?

I imagine there are a whole bunch of these geometric patterns, and different combos of them are tried.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Passwords are broken and I really wish we would all move away from them. Persona is a nice idea with regards to privacy and control, but it's still a password that you need to remember, which can be cracked. Also, people generally don't use strong passwords.

What irks me is that every OS in use today has support for strong cryptography and browser vendors could easily integrate that. We would no longer register for a website, we would simply upload our "Online Identity" or whatever we called it. This of course is just an id_rsa.pub with maybe name and email in the comment. The remote site stores the public key and the browser authenticates using the private key, stored securely in the keychain.

This has the potential to be invisible to users, and thus used by default, and highly secure since the local keychain can generate incredibly strong keys, all behind the scenes.

<comment><USER12> And how do you access your identity from a device that isn't your own?

I'm 100% with you, it would be a major step forward - but it's too inflexible for Joe & Jane.

<comment><USER13> and also it kinda destroys the ubiquity of the service. you have to admit, the ability to access your account from any device anywhere is pretty cool (and very critical in some cases)

<comment><USER12> It certainly is a difficult sell to the average user. For most Internet Banking, it's already implemented, but try to get users to accept that when using Facebook or access to their mail.

In Denmark we have a public system called "NemID". It is a 2-factor authentication, which relies on a card with one-time codes, or eventually, a physical key-generator. It is used to anything related to Internet Banking or access to the public services on the internet, such as application for university, change in tax return, and the like. Unless you can incorporate such a system, which ensure that most uses already have the needed physical token, I not convinced you can pull it off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like schemes that have an explicit input of n random bits (or where you can at least have a good estimate on the entropy.) With the Schneier Scheme I can not be sure of the actual entropy of my password. Maybe my brain only generates a relatively small set of sentences which can be reverse-engineered from my comments on HN? :-)

A good algorithm would take n bits and map them uniquely to a set of strings that are easy to remember for a human. The apg utility does something like that.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why not force the user to have strong login credentials?

I'm creating an online system that will store users' sensitive financial data. When setting up an account, the user will have to choose a password as normal, but will also be given a passphrase of the form "correct horse battery staple" that _they must write down_. To log in, the user will need to enter (a) username; (b) password; and (c) passphrase.

It is effectively a poor man's two-factor authentication - the second factor being the piece of paper containing the passphrase. I think it strikes a good balance between security, convenience and cost.

What do others think of this approach?

<comment><USER16> Another issue with this is it breaks password managers, including the built-in browser password storage. While you might say that's a Good Thing for security, it's not something you could easily pull off as a startup.

Due to lock-in effects, people have to deal with all manner of usability hell from their bank, but the same logic doesn't apply to startups. Not that your idea is usability hell, but you probably don't want to make it any harder than it needs to be.

I think adding a few characters to the minimum password would be equally secure and more consistent with tooling, as well as a more familiar model for users.

Also, 2FA might be easier than you think using a service like Twilio. Or another way to do it would be to let the user connect via a service that does support 2FA (e.g. Google or Twitter;and maybe adding your own password if you want to harden that).

<comment><USER17> I recently added 2FA (OATH/Google Authenticator) support to Persowna[1], and it only took about two hours, 1:55 of which was spent on the UI. It's really not very hard.

[1] [https://www.persowna.net/](https://www.persowna.net/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People seem to forget this important fact - That hashes get leaked. Without a hash corresponding to a user account it's quite hard to break in to a given account with a moderately reasonable password, even if the hash can be 'broken' in milliseconds.

</comment><comment><USER19> One benefit of being a indian language speaker (or other language not in hackers dictionary) is we can easily choose reasonably secure passwords that are remember-able by simply using native language phrases (combined with numbers and mixed caps)

<comment><USER20> Assuming there aren't any Indians writing password-cracking software...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Ars article seemed totally irrelevant to me since it used MD5?

<comment><USER22> Microsoft Active Directory servers (used in big business and government all over the world) uses one round of MD4 (no salt). That's a 4, not a 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand the difference between "momof3g8kids" and "tlpWENT2m". Why would the latter be more secure?

<comment><USER24> Actually, it's hard for a 9-character password to beat a 12-character password even though the latter has a larger alphabet/key-space (unless I've completely blown the analysis below, which was done before coffee :).

The first has a key-space of 36^12 (36 possible characters in each of 12 positions), or about 4.7e18. The second has a key-space of 62^9 (62 upper/lower case letters and digits in each of 9 possible locations), or about 1.4e16.

If, in addition to adding the uppercase letters, you added the possibility of needing to test symbols, such as ~`.,/:;!@#$%^&*-=_+ (another 19 symbols), and changed the latter password to "tlpW#NT2m", then the searchable key-space for all 9-character passwords becomes 81^9, or about 1.5e17.

RE-EDIT: Sorry. I should have read the article first. I'm not sure why the latter would be more secure. Obviously "WENT" would be in a dictionary, so I'd think that "tlpWENT2m" would fall to a combinator attack very quickly, too.</comment></comment>


Who benefits when the price of insulin soars? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/who-benefits-when-the-price-of-insulin-soars <comment><USER2> Fully synthetic human insulin gets cheaper to make year by year, so the profit goes to the delivery tiers in various ways, with most of it going to the Pharma companies who operate as a price managing cartel - quite illegal in the USA. In other global areas the prices are far-far cheaper, such as third world area - whose people would die unmedicated if forced to pay US prices. The whole FDA approval/regulation process is responsible for this under the guise of safety coupled with IP 'protections' (these freshly issue IP protected variants [every few years] they keep the game going.</comment>


Git Large File Storage Is Written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/github/git-lfs

<comment><USER2> As OP is trying to highlight Go, What are the advantages of using Go for the Git LFS client ? I can only gather from the previous thread was that, one of the reason for going with Go so as to get a native executable ?[1]

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345137)

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's really important for the Git LFS project to us. Of the languages that we're comfortable with, it's the only one that met that requirement.

I feel like there have been a lot of blog posts and HN discussions about the merits and downsides to Go, and I don't really have anything new to add to that.

<comment><USER4> Speed also. Your hub client is way faster now that you moved from Ruby to Go. Doesn't mean Ruby was a bad choice, IMHO it helped you iterate faster on the initial product/prototype. I think both compiled and scripted solutions have their place in software development. What editor do you use at Github to write Go code?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Shouldn't there be a "client" in the title ?

<comment><USER5> FWIW the test server is also written in Go: [https://github.com/github/lfs- test-server](https://github.com/github/lfs-test-server)</comment></comment>


The Connoisseur of Number Sequences - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150806-neil-sloane-oeis-interview/

<comment><USER2> Neil's a fantastic human and great mathematician - I'll just post my same comment from the last time a story came up about him here:

Great to see this article about Neil, a warm and brilliant guy - I had the chance to meet him personally the last time the joint AMS meetings were in San Francisco.

When I submitted a simple integer sequence[1][2] to OEIS on _Thanksgiving Day_ a few years ago, he took time _that very day_ to respond and coach and educate me about some delightful related math.

[1] [https://oeis.org/A168521](https://oeis.org/A168521)

[2] [http://apps.keithflower.org/?p=322](http://apps.keithflower.org/?p=322)</comment>


Hey Silicon Valley – I Have a Gender Equality Solution for Ya - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/hey-silicon-valley-i-have-a-gender-equality-solution-for-ya-1783f448c389#.hnw72ipxc <comment><USER2> As a female studying Software Engineering at the moment I find articles like [http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-08/study- women-l...](http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-08/study-women-leave- stem-jobs-for-the-reasons-men-only-want-to) and [https://hbr.org/2016/08/why- do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...](https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many- women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field) resonate more with the issues I'm seeing. Although luckily I have not experienced sexual harassment or felt like I was given unequal opportunities on internships I do regularly feel out of place.

I don't think that bringing back the 1/4 of women who left to have families can be a solution in itself but if those 1/4 encourage the other 3/4 to stay through mentorship and improving the current culture then this could be a start to improvement.</comment>


Blue Apron Shares Hit New Low, as Anyone Can Do "Meal Kits," Even Walmart - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2018/03/05/blue-apron-shares-hit-new-low-as-anyone-can-do-meal-kits-even-walmart/ <comment><USER2> I really liked Blue Apron but there was so much trash left over! I really wish they would do better pre-planning with ingredients, like send a stick of butter and a jug of vinegar instead of a pat and a tiny bottle. There were so many bottles from week to week of the same stuff - vinegar, soy sauce, mirin, etc.. We ended up just using a lot of the techniques we learned from Blue Apron to prepare vegetables from CSA boxes.

It's a great idea for young people who would like to learn how to cook (or learn some new techniques/staples). I might get a few months subscription for a relative who just moved out on their own as a gift, for example.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I agree. So much waste, plus it doesn't really solve the problem we were trying to solve which is time. Preparing the meal is still time-consuming. It wasn't saving us much time at all. Add to that the guilt of having all the extra waste for what, so we don't have to stop at the grocery store on the way home? Not worth it. The meals were good though, and healthy.

<comment><USER2> It was good for us because we have a toddler/infant so going out to a restaurant is really difficult and we like variety without a whole lot of meal planning effort. Adding the blue apron techniques to our repertoire made it a lot easier to throw stuff together from our CSA box and have a pretty focused shopping list for the grocery store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without reading the article, this is exactly why I gave up on my last side- project.

The subscription box business is great for consumers, but nearly indefensible against competitors.

Dollar shave club was hugely successful because it was a first-mover. Now Gillette and others are offering direct subscription services.

There simply is no moat if you don't own the base materials in the package and can control for manufacturing costs.

<comment><USER5> I suppose that depends on what your goal is. If you're hoping to create a product segment that didn't previously exist, I think Blue Apron succeeded. If the goal is to make money, then I think the Blue Apron founders / investors were also able to cash out from an IPO when they saw the writing on the wall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using HelloFresh for a couple months. I don't think there is a business model here. Too much expense in shipping materials, and then a pain for the customer to dispose/recycle said materials. Vegetable quality is hit or miss. And the price is high. The convenience factor just barely, barely makes it worth while.

Having said that, the recipes are really great (I'm not a cook, but can follow a recipe). Wish they would just bundle their recipes into a book and sell that (strangely, I've not been able to find a 'complete meal' recipe book with a set of steps for each part of the meal sequenced together)

<comment><USER7> They do: [https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Apron-Cookbook-Essential- Lifetim...](https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Apron-Cookbook-Essential-Lifetime- ebook/dp/B01N16AS1T)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Completely indefensible from competitors with zero chance of a monopoly. Peter Thiel is tutting disapprovingly down in his antarctic survival mansion...

</comment><comment><USER9> Agreed this isn't much of a defensible business: if anything it feels like a stepping stone to the next phase: 100% on demand meal kits.

1\. I upload my meal plan for the next week or two, or select from pre- designed options.

2\. The grocer [1] picks and packages the ingredients into kits, one per meal.

3\. I pick them up and/or they are shipped to me. (or a bit of both if it's Amazon or Walmart)

Actually, that's just a stepping stone to a fully automated kitchen, but that's a separate thread for another day...

[1] I'm using this term loosely.

<comment><USER10> I think you're right that it is just a stepping stone, and it may work like that, but I also see another option.

With Amazon's Whole Foods acquisition and penchant for turning everything into scaleable infrastructure, I wouldn't be surprised to see an API for groceries released in the near future. Then every single recipe blog out there could simply have a button to "Buy this meal" and get it either delivered or assembled and ready for in-store pickup. It would be a game changer.

<comment><USER9> Totally agree, I'd group that in my #1 above.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, it's only been 18 years since Blue Mountain Arts being sold to Excite@Home for $780M.

If you recall, Blue Mountain Arts made 3/4 of a billion dollars in 1999 for it's "ecard" business, a business that literally anyone with a webserver can replicate in an afternoon.

It's too bad too, because Excite was my favorite "webportal/homepage" back then. And the dotcom bubble burst killed it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I feel like there's still a lot of potential for this type of a business to pivot/grow as they try to improve the unit economics in multiple ways.

It sounds like (based on the thread) a lot of people picked up Blue Apron as a starting point to cooking. So why not create an interesting skillset based/gamification of cooking product where you learn new skills all the time. I'm sure everyone can dice/cut/bake/fry/sautee etc in a few meals but there are probably other advanced techniques which you could subscribe to, to learn new/interesting techniques/recipes.

Also, you could have a community based thing where different people compete for skillset or you order blue apron for a party and cook together etc (larger quantities -- less wastage, better economics).

</comment><comment><USER13> I used to subscribe to Green Chef, but stopped mostly due to the time it takes to make the meals. Usually it took twice as long as it said on the recipes.

We now subscribe to Freshly. Meals are pre-made and in 3 minutes they are heated up. Perfect!

</comment><comment><USER14> Blue Apron needs to sell itself to a large supermarket chain. They can use the markets as a base of operation. Their business model is impossible to maintain. Marketing and delivery costs are killing them. I suspect a year from now we won't see them as an independent concern. They might even go out of business. Walmart will win this fight, no question.

<comment><USER15> What supermarket would buy them though? Their product is trivial to replicate. In fact, every supermarket I shop at already sells meal-kits.

<comment><USER14> I shop at Ralphs which is part of the Kroger chain. They have a meal kit system in place but they're doing a really bad job at marketing it. It's there but there's little motivation from the store to sell it. If they could get the same marketing energy that Blue Apron has then it would be a big part of the store's revenue.

But you have a good point, it's a hard sell. I suspect they, Blue Apron, went public since they ran out of funding sources. I wish them luck. It's a hard business but maybe they can work things out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Market cap is now under 500M. Is there any point at which they become a value play, or are the unit economics too awful?

Edit: Typo dutifully noted and corrected!

<comment><USER17> For them to be a 'value play' wouldn't they need to have purchased a bunch of real assets, like farms etc?

Blue Apron stopped making sense for me when Uber Eats started delivering to my house. It's just too expensive.

For $9.00 per meal, and a family of 4, I can just get delivery from most of my favorite restaurants. (More Choice, Same Price, Tastes Better, Much Easier)

I guess Blue Apron is healthier than what I typically order, but I could choose to order healthy if I wanted to... which I usually don't.

<comment><USER18> It seems like the target market for meal kits would be people who want to learn to cook? (Without working too hard at it.) Delivery will get you tasty food but you don't learn anything.

<comment><USER19> I think it's for people who are too lazy for grocery shopping but not lazy enough to just order takeout. That's a tiny sliver on the laziness scale IMHO.

<comment><USER20> Not quite. The meals I prepare from Blue Apron are significantly healthier than most takeout options - we control the sodium entirely and the majority of the ingredients are fresh vegetables and proteins. Plus the variety week to week is staggering - I've been getting weekly Blue Apron for more than a year and never had a repeated recipe. I've learned about all sorts of new foods I had never even heard of before. I am absolutely too lazy to meal plan and go grocery shopping, but ordering takeout isn't even a comparison point for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I cancelled my Amazon Prime subscription and maybe you should too - <AUTHOR> http://phusuke.tumblr.com/post/69197300146/why-i-cancelled-my-amazon-prime-subscription-and-maybe

<comment><USER2> Majority of my Amazon order over the past several years as a Prime member have mostly been UPS. I rarely had a OnTrac order (maybe a handful of times) but every time they were a nightmare. It seems hit or miss but I rarely have an OnTrac delivery as it is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone care to share their experiences with OnTrac and amazon prime?</comment>


The Economics of a Commune in the Ozarks - <AUTHOR> https://www.eastwindblog.co/?p=1245 <comment><USER4> I've been thinking about some way to have a communal setup like this but on a much smaller scale, and with some of the group working remotely at tech industry programming salaries.

So you'd have 2-3 people working remotely in tech, bringing in 100k USD each (low estimate for full time, or maybe they don't want to work full time).

Another 4-6 people working in the commune and handling the cooking, maintenance, working the farm/garden, child care, etc.

And since it's a commune, the money earned by the remote workers is put into a common pool and used to buy all the food, medical insurance, health care, clothes, etc. The farm would probably provide all the meat and a lot of the vegetables, but you'd still need to buy a lot of other foods.

And hopefully, eventually the commune would figure out a successful business and the remote developers could eventually quit and work on the commune as well, if they wanted =)

Thoughts?

<comment><USER5> I'm working on a similar project. We acquired our first land in Panama ([http://Majagual.org](http://Majagual.org))

We also are planning an alt-school system in which instead of going to college, you and 100 other students boot up a cooperative eco-village that you own outright. You've got food, shelter and community handled with no loans and then you can focus on other projects, research, etc.

Imagine running this coop with automation and robotics. You could free up more time while increasing the lifestyle of the members.

And of course, I already co-own a $50MM cooperative grocery store with about 16,000 others in NYC (FoodCoop.com)

<comment><USER6> This is... interesting.

How do people get out there? Floatplane? Panama City looks like the nearest harbor and that's a _long_ boat trip.

What do you do for fresh water? Collect rainwater?

<comment><USER5> Depending on your budget you can get a helicopter ride for a few hundred dollars or you can hop on a fishing taxi from Chepo for $20. You can hire a full boat for 10 people and gear for $200 RT and that is about a 3-4 hour adventure through the gulf.

For many of us the remote nature of it is a _feature_ , no EMF (some of our crew is really into not being in range of cell or WiFi), plus the adventure to get there is a filter of sorts.

We bring water with us but yes, with 100" a year we are planning to set up rain water collection as well as exploring the possibility of a well in the lush jungle lowlands. There are some water fall areas as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> HN seems to like "full economic transparency" posts, so here's another take - the full economic transparency of a functioning live/work commune in the Ozarks. (Full disclosure: a friend's brother is the author of the post, but he doesn't know it's being posted here!)

<comment><USER7> This is really cool.

My own ideology is likely incompatible with this sort of living, but I fully support it!

I live about 90 minutes SW of East Wind. This truly is one of the most beautiful areas of the country, and a great place to live a rural life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to me that if you look at all the surviving communes in the U.S., they all have in common that they have a cottage industry- East Wind has peanut butter, Twin Oaks has tofu and hammocks, Acorn has a mail order heirloom seeds business. It seems like that's what was missing from all those failed communes from the 60's and 70's - you do have to have some kind of interaction with the outside economy, and something valuable to trade, even if it isn't the majority of the economic work the commune does. It's great that they're making this work!

<comment><USER9> The Farm in Tennessee as far as I know is a counter example. They definitely interact with the outside economy and have some specialties, but there isn't a centralized business they all contribute towards.

Another counter example (though not from the 70s) is Dancing Rabbit. It is 25 years old and doesn't have a centralized business, though people there often do cited difficulty finding work as a problem, and a leading reason to not stick around.

Also Earthhaven in NC has no central business and is 23 years old.

<comment><USER10> Usually, in the communities movement, "commune" is a term-of-art for "an income-sharing community". So, your list doesn't really reference surviving secular communes.

The Farm stopped being an income-sharing commune many decades ago. Now it's more like a co-housing community, with private ownership or control of most things.

Dancing Rabbit's founding income sharing group disbanded many years ago, but it's core mission wasn't about being income sharing, and the community continued just fine without having an income-sharing subcommunity.

Earthhaven was never income-sharing, to the best of my knowledge.

So I don't think any of these are really counter-examples; a business that new members can plug into (and a mechanism to exclude free-loaders, which The Farm didn't really have) are both really important for a long-term successful income-sharing commune.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the clarification, i missed that distinction at first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm sure an active lifestyle leads to less money spent on medical care, but the much larger reason would be the expected youth of their members. All the photos were of apparently younger healthy people. When they start getting older, medical issues will show up and the cost of medical care would skyrocket. Now it's pretty clear to me that in the us we should provide medical care as a basic human right for all citizens. Their annual cost of $686.82 per person is probably less than my monthly cost for a small family.

<comment><USER12> They're been running since the mid-70s; wonder what they do with the old people

<comment> King-Aaron They probably send them off to watch some lovely videos and hear some lovely music in a little room, before being turned into crackers.

<comment><USER13> Is that supposed to be funny?

<comment><USER14> It's a reference to the film 'Soylent Green'.

<comment><USER13> ok, sorry, I missed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like this commune is probably a bit of an outlier due to the large success of their nut butter business. I hope I'm wrong, but I am extremely doubtful that other communes have similar economics.

Without the profit from their nut butter, what would it look like?

Or does maintaining a nice commune basically require you to figure out some kind of profitable business? In that case, maybe it is fairly common because the ones that don't, don't last?

<comment><USER5> We run a $50MM / year cooperative grocery business in the heart of Brooklyn, NY we each work 3 hrs a month. 16,000 members.

Been running since the 60s and offers the cheapest and freshest food in NYC.

FoodCoop.com

<comment><USER15> That's not really anything like a commune. It's basically a grocery store you work at for discounts. I don't doubt it quite beneficial and nice, but really doesn't answer anything about the OPs question.

<comment><USER5> Park Slope Food Coop is a pretty involved organization and run democratically with a pretty intense culture.. but yes I agree that a commune is a couple orders of magnitude beyond PSFC.

There are similarities however and much to be learned. We even have a cash and labor fund to help others start cooperatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is an interesting read, but I question one bit: afaik the color of egg yolks is dependent on what hens eat, but there is no direct "eat well -> darker" link. Trivially, you can buy "extra yellow" eggs for the same price of standard eggs.

Anecdotally, my father kept free roaming chickens, with extra feed, and he always said maize is what makes eggs yellow (though we say "red" in Italian), compared to a "mixed seeds & beans" feed.

Maybe someone knows better.

<comment><USER17> The extra yellow egg yolks are from hens that got food with high carotene content. Also Marigolds are frequently mixed in with the food.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a key note here that the listed economic inputs and outputs neglect to major external dependencies:

1\. Externally developed, researched, and applied healthcare.

2\. Externally generated and supplied electricity, through what I presume is externally-supplied infrastructure.

They're not fully bootstrapping off of merely what they have present, though I won't fault them for it by any means. It's just something to keep in mind.

<comment><USER19> I don't see your point. They pay for healthcare and electricity just like any other consumer. They produce and sell to the market, and spend some of the proceeds on health care and electricity. This post illuminates what economic and life style benefits their communal living provides. There's no claim that they would live better totally unconnected from civilization.

<comment><USER20> The point is that it doesn't scale.

This community can only exist because it's a tiny minority surrounded by a much larger, depersonalized, "dirty" society which handles all the big problems for them. Problems including: National defense, international relations, technological research and infrastructure, advanced education, manufacture/import/transport of all kinds of exotic goods and medicines, law enforcement, care of the elderly.

It's easy to say it's a better way to live, until you realize that it can only exist because it's held up by all the people paying the costs of the "worse" way.

As a thought experiment: Think of how much different our larger society could be if there was some sort of alien galactic society that handled those kinds of problems for us.

<comment><USER21> Dude, it's a profitable farm. The only main difference is how they allocate ownership and organise labour. Your criticism applies equally to all farms.

<comment><USER20> Not really profitable. It's largely a tax dodge actually. They avoid using money to artificially underreport their production and consumption. If they paid tax on the real values, would they still be profitable? Maybe, maybe not, but it would be a tougher situation.

My criticism is that it doesn't scale and they're freeloaders. And you can bet if enough people started dodging taxes like this, the IRS would be on the case. But it's small scale so they get away with it.

I don't think they're doing something morally wrong, to be clear. Just that it can't scale.

Other farms pay tax fully, and my criticism doesn't apply.

<comment><USER22> "Eating food you grew yourself" is a tax dodge? What about making your own improvements to your house? Cooking your own food? Doing your own laundry? You _could_ pay for any number of services, with the associated tax. So you're about as much of a tax dodge as these folks. But that's a radical expansion of the notion of taxable economic activity. The IRS trying to get that notion accepted as law would be practically unthinkable.

There was a time, for that matter, where most of the U.S. economy was agrarian. The world still worked. There were fewer government services, to be sure- but if most people are members of semi-self-sufficient communities, fewer services would be needed.

<comment><USER20> Growing food yourself is one thing. But that's not what we're talking about.

Eating food grown and prepared by other people in a community of 70+ people, in exchange for your labor in other areas, and paying no tax on any of it.... tax dodge.

How many people does it have to be, in your opinion, before it's a tax dodge?

<comment><USER23> I've given this one a lot of thought. Ordinarily, you're supposed to pay tax on the fair market value of goods and services received in return for your labor in barter transactions.

However, East Wind is incorporated as a 501(d) organization, which is what monasteries use. For more info on 501(d) orgs: [https://www.irs.gov/irm/part7/irm_07-025-023](https://www.irs.gov/irm/part7/irm_07-025-023)

I can't find anything specific, but I think that since they share their income and produce as a collective, they're only liable for taxes on their share of the income that the collective produces. Monks don't have to pay taxes on the value they get from the monastery vegetable garden.

Tax avoidance is a time-honored American tradition. This is one way to do so. It sounds like they've done their legal homework if they've managed to survive 30 years without IRS trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A few things I notice:

\+ Nobody making food is wearing gloves or hair nets (aside from the one guy making cheese). That's probably not a requirement, but given the amount of food being made and how bad even minor contamination would be, that surprises me.

\+ Any large food operation is going to require a lot of sanitation/cleanliness. They also mention they don't use "anything not natural". I wonder if that extends to bleach and commercial cleaners.

\+ $150 for a discretionary fund to cover cellphone and a car is nothing. That won't cover a single car breakdown.

\+ I wonder how well they will handle a serious medical cost. One person with an autoimmune disease will easily wipe out their cash on hand - as will a chainsaw accident.

It's an interesting thing to follow, but I'm happy to be merely an observer.

<comment><USER25> > Nobody making food is wearing gloves or hair nets (aside from the one guy > making cheese). That's probably not a requirement, but given the amount of > food being made and how bad even minor contamination would be, that > surprises me.

Do you wear gloves and a hair net when you cook your own food? I've been cooking my own food daily for over 10 years now, and I have yet to experience even a minor contamination. I don't see how bumping the amount of cooked food to feed ~70 people would change this.

<comment><USER24> The chance of salmonella in a dozen eggs is quite low. The chance of it in 300+ eggs is quite a bit more - even with impeccable personal cleanliness. Likewise, if I got a bit of salmonella in something I made, it would affect me and my wife - which would be unfortunate but, that's it.

If a commercial kitchen making food for 73 people gets an egg contaminated with salmonella and then spreads that to all the other dishes it's making... well, that's quite a different problem.

I also know that I wash my hands, and I sanitize every cooking surface in my kitchen daily (or more often). A kitchen with 6+ full time cooks and 70 some people helping themselves to snacks is liable to much more tracked in dirt, unwashed hands, and badly washed dishes.

One of the things I do is infuse alcohols, often in bulk for gifts. When I do this, my sanitation protocol actually changes - I pre-sanitize every vessel using bleach, and I often times do wear gloves if I'm touching anything directly.

Consider this: If you had a small cut on your hand, would you wear gloves before making yourself lunch? What if it was a stranger with a cough making your lunch, would you want them to wear gloves?

<comment><USER25> >The chance of salmonella in a dozen eggs is quite low. The chance of it in 300+ eggs is quite a bit more - even with impeccable personal cleanliness. Likewise, if I got a bit of salmonella in something I made, it would affect me and my wife - which would be unfortunate but, that's it.

Eggs are the only food that fits this narrative, and they are only (very rarely) dangerous if eaten raw. I would be more concerned about eating eggs from a holiday inn breakfast buffet.

>I also know that I wash my hands, and I sanitize every cooking surface in my kitchen daily (or more often).

I've never sanitized my cooking surface. I was taught to use vinegar as a cleaner and have never had issues (it's not a disinfectant). I haven't even had a cold in three years.

>One of the things I do is infuse alcohols, often in bulk for gifts. When I do this, my sanitation protocol actually changes - I pre-sanitize every vessel using bleach, and I often times do wear gloves if I'm touching anything directly.

A few of the things I do are brew beer, wine, kombucha, ferment vegetables, etc. I, too, used to use sanitize all of my bottles and containers. I then read The Art of Fermentation and realized that everything I was doing was moot. Lactic acid bacteria and yeasts do an excellent job of preservation, provided you give them a nurturing environment to thrive in.

>Consider this: If you had a small cut on your hand, would you wear gloves before making yourself lunch? What if it was a stranger with a cough making your lunch, would you want them to wear gloves?

The commune deserves more credit. People who abandon everything to live in a commune take personal interest in caring for one another. You're more likely to pick up something from a stranger with a cough at a restaurant, who didn't call in sick because they're still late on last month's phone bill, than someone at a commune - who could just ask another member to fill in. Keep in mind _this is how society was_ for a long time.

<comment><USER24> Eggs, chicken, pork, even flour can be contaminated - Chipotle (a popular US fast-ish food chain) had woes upon woes until they finally gave it and started pasteurizing their flour. Dairy and meat are more susceptible of course, but even dry ingredients can come with contamination problems.

Vinegar is a decent cleaner. I use it quite a bit myself, but it's not the best choice to clean up after raw meats and some other more aggressive bacteria. You may have a good immune system, and not run into any problems - good for you, I'm glad - but that is not going to be the case for any large group of people.

> Lactic acid bacteria and yeasts do an excellent job of preservation

Preservation is not sanitation. Yeast will feed off of many things and grow, but it won't typically attack germs or viruses. Those germs will however gladly feed off of the same food you're giving the yeast. This is why aggressively sanitizing any fermenting vessel is so important - you're creating the ideal environments for bacteria to grow and you want to make sure it's only your selected bacteria that are growing.

> Keep in mind this is how society was for a long time.

That is a myth and falsehood. The work week for the average person going back thousands of years was 60+ hours. There was no vacation or sick leave. Sure, if you had a small cottage industry you might be able to ask a family member to do extra work for a day so you can rest, but for most of history children were pressed into labor at ages 8 - 10.

> People who abandon everything to live in a commune take personal interest in > caring for one another

Then they should practice good sanitation and cleanliness. I'm not saying they shouldn't live in a commune, or that they're bad people - I'm saying they are not correctly practicing what we've learned in 10,000+ years of handling food stuffs for a community. If you care for your friend/neighbor/fellow commune- peer, then take a moment to wear gloves and a hair net so you don't get them sick.

<comment><USER25> >Vinegar is a decent cleaner. I use it quite a bit myself, but it's not the best choice to clean up after raw meats and some other more aggressive bacteria. You may have a good immune system, and not run into any problems - good for you, I'm glad - but that is not going to be the case for any large group of people.

Well, anything raw meats touch goes into the dishwasher. I didn't mean to construe the idea that I am re-using surfaces for raw meats.

>Preservation is not sanitation. Yeast will feed off of many things and grow, but it won't typically attack germs or viruses. Those germs will however gladly feed off of the same food you're giving the yeast. This is why aggressively sanitizing any fermenting vessel is so important - you're creating the ideal environments for bacteria to grow and you want to make sure it's only your selected bacteria that are growing.

Yeast don't preserve by attacking germs or viruses, they preserve by creating alcohol - just as LAB preserve by killing germs and viruses via ph. But yes, sanitation and preservation are different - I didn't mean to conflate them.

You don't necessarily need to bleach things to sanitize them. When we wash our hands with warm, soapy water, we aren't _killing_ bacteria, we are reducing the viscosity of our hand oils and wiping them off. The same can be said for most cooking materials/areas.

> vorpalhex 2 hours ago | parent | on: The Economics of a Commune in the > Ozarks

Eggs, chicken, pork, even flour can be contaminated - Chipotle (a popular US fast-ish food chain) had woes upon woes until they finally gave it and started pasteurizing their flour. Dairy and meat are more susceptible of course, but even dry ingredients can come with contamination problems. Vinegar is a decent cleaner. I use it quite a bit myself, but it's not the best choice to clean up after raw meats and some other more aggressive bacteria. You may have a good immune system, and not run into any problems - good for you, I'm glad - <USER2> that is not going to be the case for any large group of people.

> Lactic acid bacteria and yeasts do an excellent job of preservation

Preservation is not sanitation. Yeast will feed off of many things and grow, but it won't typically attack germs or viruses. Those germs will however gladly feed off of the same food you're giving the yeast. This is why aggressively sanitizing any fermenting vessel is so important - you're creating the ideal environments for bacteria to grow and you want to make sure it's only your selected bacteria that are growing.

> Keep in mind this is how society was for a long time.

That is a myth and falsehood. The work week for the average person going back thousands of years was 60+ hours. There was no vacation or sick leave. Sure, if you had a small cottage industry you might be able to ask a family member to do extra work for a day so you can rest, but for most of history children were pressed into labor at ages 8 - 10.

That's fair, I shouldn't have claimed such a broad statement. It depends which society/time-period we're looking at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I have my occasional frustrations with tech or the world, this is exactly the sort of place I'd love to escape to! Though I'm probably getting a bit old for dropping out. :)

<comment><USER27> You could always join and keep a remote tech job. If you contribute ~30% of your post tax salary to the commune you are putting in more than the average member and get to enjoy the benefits while maintaining your resume and work history should you ever wish to leave. Seems like a win win for everyone.

<comment><USER10> Keeping a remote tech job is a thrilling prospect for income-sharing communities, because it can easily cover 20% or more of the whole community's budget.

But you can't join an income-sharing community and "contribute 30% of your post tax salary". That's not how it works. It's an income sharing community. Your income goes to the community, full stop.

Occasionally communities avert their eyes and don't pay too much attention to passive income from investments, letting that income compound without requiring it be contributed to the community. But even that tends to be a source of much tension.

Income-sharing is intense. It's a major commitment (while you're there; you're always free to leave).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are there any successful communes like this that are rational and science based? East Wind's focus on the naturalistic fallacy makes it quite unappealing.

<comment><USER29> I'm also a bit wary of communes in general. The line between a commune and a cult is basically non-existent. For an example of this, I'd highly recommend the Netflix documentary "Wild Wild Country", which explores a commune gone wrong.

<comment><USER30> "The line between a commune and a cult is basically non-existent."

I'd say this is a stretch. Communes can come in all shapes and sizes. Cults are generally centered around a charismatic leader and lack transparency. FEC communities have no central leader, hold land and property in common, and are income sharing.

<comment><USER31> Actually, the distinction between a cult and a commune is quite well established. Cults have these characteristics: 1) It has a living charismatic leader 2) You give them all your money 3) You are kept away from your old friends and family 4) You can't leave when you might like Communes (at least the FEC communes) do none of these things. For more insight into this see [https://funologist.org/2015/06/19/you-are-a-cult- right/](https://funologist.org/2015/06/19/you-are-a-cult-right/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> A pre-modern large extended family living together that had 3 or 4 generations, with 2-4 older adults, 4-8 younger adults, and however many children would likely have a similar division of labor and economics, albeit without the labor saving advances made in the last few hundred years.

</comment><comment><USER33> Highly recommend the documentary, "Commune," about a still-functioning commune in northern California.

[https://film.avclub.com/commune-1798202149](https://film.avclub.com/commune-1798202149)

</comment><comment><USER34> A nice read. Somehow I had a misconception that commune-dwellers might not be too invested in quantifying much at all.

I'm glad they can make this work for about a hundred or so folks. I wonder what the natural limit for this sort of arrangement is.

<comment><USER7> > I wonder what the natural limit for this sort of arrangement is.

For communal arrangements like this, I think the generally accepted value is around 200. See "Dunbar's Number": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)

<comment><USER35> There is no "generally accepted value" here. Its contentious to say there is a natural limit at all.

Dunbar's number also has nothing to do with this type of society. The American Amish community (150k population) is basically an anti-modern religious group which is run on a communal model. Many members of that society live all their lives without meeting each other. As another commenter mentioned, Mondragon in Spain has close to 75k members in its cooperative.

<comment><USER36> The Amish are split up into smaller communities and establish new settlements when density gets too high. The Wikipedia page itself mentions that the Anabaptist Hutterites limit themselves to 150 person groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Somehow, it makes me happy to read that people live this way.

</comment><comment><USER38> Only gripe is that their medical care surely can't be that good relying on natural "medicine". Though of course, they all qualify for medicaid

<comment><USER39> Yes, with a per capita expenditure of $700 it's safe to say they aren't covering any serious illness. "Our costs are low because we have a healthy lifestyle" \-- more like the costs are low because no one has any serious illness like cancer.

<comment><USER40> If you read their FAQ, they essentially cover up to $5k annually in expenses, and expenses beyond that debit from a larger community-organization catastrophic fund maintained for such purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> $630k a year in profit selling nut butter?

<comment><USER42> I was blown away by this! At $5 a jar, that's 10,500 units a year. Or roughly 350 a day. They must have a distribution deal with Whole Foods.

<comment><USER43> Two large natural food distributors, UNFI[0] and KeHE[1], carry their products[2] and so they're found in many natural food stores and co-ops around the country.

[0] [https://www.unfi.com/](https://www.unfi.com/) [1] [https://www.kehe.com/brands/](https://www.kehe.com/brands/)

[2] [https://eastwindnutbutters.com/buy.php](https://eastwindnutbutters.com/buy.php)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> As someone who is british, I do find the "commune" thing fascinating.

There was a movement in the late 1880s for "settlements" where those of a religious persuasion would raise money to open up a one stop community house (health, food, education etc etc)

However that has almost died out. (There are still missions in south london, but they are run for and by the African diaspora, rather than "the poor")

To see something similar to those settlements alive today is wonderful. I would be very interested to see what the social dynamic is there, how conflict and big decisions are handled.

There a few documentaries on "extreme" communes, but I suspect they are outliers, which is why the TV people were interested in them

</comment><comment><USER45> The math here doesn't seem to make much sense to me (ignoring your own labor costs and imputed rent), but i suppose it makes sense on a super simple cash basis.

The back of the envelope math would seem to imply that it costs $17k/person ($6.4k cash + $10.6k Labor (27hrs/week * 7.85/hr * 50 weeks)) PLUS Imputed Rent for their 1,200 acre property (and all the associated infrastructure which could easily be another few thousand dollars a person)

</comment><comment><USER46> I very much enjoyed living part of my childhood at Findhorn in Scotland, an intentional community with some aspects of a "commune" or collective - [https://www.ecovillagefindhorn.com/](https://www.ecovillagefindhorn.com/) and [https://www.findhorn.org/faq/](https://www.findhorn.org/faq/)

</comment><comment><USER47> If you're curious, you can see a map of somewhat similar communities here: [https://ecovillage.org/projects/map/](https://ecovillage.org/projects/map/)

I dislike the term ecovillage as it sounds a bit woo, but the general idea is the same. Contemplated moving to one a few months ago but they were having trouble with planning permission and reed bed wastewater systems.

</comment><comment><USER48> Those living in Portland can check out: [http://www.kailashecovillage.org/](http://www.kailashecovillage.org/) in SE Portland (near Reed College). I lived there a few years ago, definitely not the biggest and greatest, but if you want a taste of it I'd check it out and get in touch.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what their member churn is like. What's the avg time someone stays?

<comment><USER49> Would be interested in member churn data too! It's a big quality of life factor when your life is intimately tied to your working environment - something often forgotten when in comes to advocacy of community living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> In a hypothetical scenario where one of the members has a debilitating chronic illness that requires considerable expense, what would then happen?

<comment><USER51> There's not a lot of information available online about PEACH (Preservation of Equity Accessible for Community Health), but it's a system by which East Wind and other communities pay in for all their members $15/month, and they can access reimbursement for expensive health care events. There's a $5,000 deductible, after which PEACH covers the actual costs of an illness/injury/incident.

In the process of setting up PEACH (back in the 80s?), member communities (I think five at the time) paid in a lump sum to start it up. There's a system where a community can pull out their equity if necessary, although the last community to pull out (after their state expanded Medicaid) simply donated it to the general mission of the fund.

There's a protection built into PEACH for long-term illness. It covers 90% automatically during the first year (although the formal decision-making body can make this 100%, or even lower the deductible, if that seems necessary). This percentage decreases during the following years, dropping to 0% being automatically covered after 7 years. This is meant to incentivize communities to be internally self-sufficient -- PEACH is meant to protect communities from failing due to unexpected health care costs. The decision-making body (one representative from each community) can easily make any decisions at their whim that doesn't involve spending more than their annual operating budget. We do sometimes spend more than our annual budget because sometimes accidents come in threes or more. PEACH pays for helicopter evacuations, heart attacks, cancer, strokes, bad forestry accidents, complicated childbirth, etc.

The capital in PEACH is also lent to member communities in emergencies (e.g., after a major structure fire) and sometimes for investing in community land if it's deemed to be a safe investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Reminds me of the book "The Eden Express" \-- one bad medical situation can ruin a commune.

</comment><comment><USER53> A wonderful example of what libertarianism and whole small-government conservatism movement is about, and what government communism and socialism is the opposite of. This is a community of people that freely chose to live this way, ready to sustain themselves and to implement any economical or political structure inside of their community. I doubt that anything like that would be possible in heavily regulated european socialistic countries.

Truly beautiful what people are able to create on their own.

<comment><USER54> As someone who has spent time at East Wind and Acorn and taken the three week visitor program at Twin Oaks, I hardly know where to begin in disabusing you of the idea that these communities are libertarian. Very few members would self identify as such, and most abhor Hayak style libertarian prescriptions for society as a whole. Members have many motivations for joining but among the most common is wanting to equally share the fruits of their labor - <USER3> partially escape the exploitation of their fellow humans that unfettered unregulated capitalism inevitably produces, and which the US social safety net and graduated income taxes in particular only ameliorates inadequately. Twin Oaks publishes an Intentional Communities Directory [1] which has many listings for Europe (which may have more of an available land disadvantage). Twin Oaks has thrived since 1967 [2] and has a very large body of rules and procedures which is one of the ways they free themselves of problem individuals (other communities rely more on shunning which can be quite effective). Generally members are happy, exmembers are glad they lived there, and children are extremely well cared for. As to why there are few (but >0) second generation and lifelong members and as to how the communities coexist with the outside world - as many of them say about their relationship status "it's complicated".

1 [https://www.ic.org/directory/](https://www.ic.org/directory/) 2 [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks_Community,_Virgini...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Oaks_Community,_Virginia)

<comment><USER53> Your comment is exactly what I assumed and it doesn't contradict my comment in any way. Yes, these people possibly don't identify as libertarians, but their community is the exact reason why they actually should.

Libertarianism is about building a community that you like, in any possible way, without having to agree with anyone else about what is "exploitation" and all that ideological stuff. Libertarianism's goals is exactly aligned with what "hippie communists" (stereotype that I use here in good faith, to omit boring argument about strict ideological definitions) want, as long as they don't try to force their views on other people.

<comment><USER54> There is every likely and unlikely combination of political beliefs to be found in every population including commune members. But I will go out on a limb and try to speak for that population. Relatively few see the communal life as a viable prescription for society as a whole, and most believe that all political and economic systems involve painful tradeoffs. On the other hand most look with horror at purist libertarians rejecting as much enforced sharing in general society as possible. This philosophy is irreconcilable with the view of many, inside and outside of communes who strongly believe that having many kinds of sharing - enforced by a government - is necessary for any civilization worth living in, and eternal vigilance against all slippery slopes presented by governments and corporations is unavoidable (and is not simply avoided by letting free markets run amuck). Many of us are thoroughly familiar with your arguments and adamantly reject them as dangerous, simplistic and in effect evil thinking that we will resist with everything we have.

<comment><USER53> And yet, these arguments remain theoretical talk - while existence of these communities, where all sharing is implemented without government or threat of violence, only serves to confirm libertarianism.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you use a good RSS rewinder? - <AUTHOR>

I needed something that could replay blogs from the beginning. I thought of doing it quick and dirty, that is parse the HTML of the blogs I want to replay by hand.
But then I realized that there is a more general problem about blogs, podcasts, etc. to be solved; that is how do you make a machine understand the chronology of the posts, file them by categories, tags, etc.? The HTML structure is different for every blog, so I could build a general-purpose web service which would turn any blog into an xml file ready for consumption by a machine.
Right now I don't see good uses for it apart from RSS replay but let me know if you are interested/have ideas about this.
By the way I plan on implementing this using something similar to Opera's fast forward button and then walking up the posts. Shouldn't be too difficult. <comment><USER2> I had the same idea - you should do it! There are some fantastic blogs out there with amazing content that are totally overwhelming because you're coming at it after years of writing, so if you could rewind the RSS (great way of describing it by the way), that would be really fantastic.

Don't worry about tags so much, but you need the dates, because your user should be able to play back the RSS at a speed greater than the speed the posts were actually written (so that they have a hope of catching up one day).

If you need to do it from the html, you could use something like beautiful soup - it would be able to gather the date, I'm sure.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a feature I have been looking for in google reader for ages. It's especially useful for web-comics. I sure would use it if you made it.</comment>


Tracking the 25 Startups That Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://startupdispatch.com/startups/where-are-they-now-startups-launched-at-techcrunch-disrupt-2010/

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a little surprising to see almost half a dozen startups either close to deadpool, or still in beta. The companies still in Beta make me scratch my head: why did you spend the money and resources debuting at Disrupt if you weren't ready to deploy? I know Disrupt can be a great place to meet new investors, but you build companies for consumers, not investors.</comment>


Training Bert, ResNet, Mask R-CNN, and Transformer with 16 GPUs and NVSwitch - <AUTHOR> https://lambdalabs.com/blog/announcing-hyperplane-16/ <comment><USER2> Cost: ~$250k. For this price you can build 12 quad GPU or 6 eight GPU machines (RTX 6000). Would not scale quite as well for multi-node jobs, but 48 distributed GPUs are still a lot faster than 16 local GPUs for most scenarios. Not to mention flexibility and convenience 48 GPUs provide for larger research teams.</comment>


Ask HN: Hyper Conservative Dev Org - <AUTHOR> Currently I work for a company in the northwest. We were bought out a year ago. Surprisingly I've been happier since we were bought out. Having been bought out has given me the opportunity to wave a big hammer to move towards more common standards that software orgs use but I still find myself feeling like I'm taking a crazy pill when attempting to float ideas to the senior devs.
The place I work at is a SaaS. I'm going to try and describe tech and see if I can relate it to the levels of conservatism that we have at work culturally speaking. These levels of conservatism are championed by the founding devs.
Senior management is entrenched in their ways. After working at the company for a few months, I was entrusted with a project to help improve the development processes that were being used. In that timeframe I proposed seemingly common sense, community standard solutions. What happened next was that decision after decision was turned down for clever alternatives that were home grown. After a long time we had working solutions when instead we could have spent a percentage of the time using pre-built solutions. What's strange about this is that even sfter showing said solutions we still chose the other because of our belief system. For example take installing seemingly commmon <language dep x>  on a dev machine. That was a no go because we spoon feed our devs. Instead we decided to offload that elsewhere, which in turn created an even more complex and difficult to maintain solution. <comment><AUTHOR> Within that time we struggled to make a stable offering due to the "cool but unconventional" solutions that were offered by principal engineers vs my proposed solutions. Once we delivered said solution we dealt with the fallout of having to build your own solution: we had to maintain and document as well as update our dev training process. This of course took a lot of time and effort. In the end I ended up being given the go ahead to utilize the previously floated solutions I had proposed in order to reach stability. I ended up having to spend even more time undoing all the work I was told to do while moving to the more standard and easier to maintain solutions.

And yet I find myself fighting similar battles in my day to day. I just want to focus on what's right, instead of having to prove the seemingly obvious. But not having the recognition that we wasted so much time seems to bother me, because our company continues to make similar seemingly batshit types of discussions. I feel as though not having that recognition damages my ability to make arguments and be taken seriously to stop further bad decisions from being made. I don't like having reputation influence what ideas are adopted but this dev org definitely listens to the few instead of letting the best or most reasonable or commonly utilized ideas win.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's worse is that those key devs are stuck in their ways and it shows in how the technical culture has been stunted. We're stuck in the year 2006. They also don't have formal software development training (e.g. they don't know common design patterns, they believe that globals are a good idea, they think that front end load balancers are simpler and that hot swapping variables in the browser without having your customer refresh is a good idea) and they have a strong impact on how the rest of the org is able to progress. What's worse is that they're proud sbout these unconventional solutions and their surrounding practices. I feel like their lists of pros and cons in favor of their technical solutions are just thinly vieled arguments that cover up the true root cause for defending their ways; they're prideful about their work and don't want it to go away.

My spirit to continue to keep trying to make the dev org better has been crushed by constantly having to prove fundamentals of designing web applications. I want to help the org, but the sheer amount of effort to move the right stakeholders makes me want to look elsewhere. I love my craft and take pride in doing my best work, but now I just find myself wanting to work with a handful of devs that don't need me to explain how their ideas fly in the face of seemingly obvious and fundamental concepts surrounding software engineering and modern web apps. The only thing that keeps me going is a handful of devs thst whisper encouragement along with the high numbers of wtf/s from brand new hires that know whst the ass end of a web app is supposed ro look like. That signals to me that I'm on to something, but for the life of me the key stakeholders don't see it.

Alas, the pay is good and the benefits are pretty great too. I can't tell if this is the burnout talking but I feel like I would be willing to take a $30k pay cut to work in a similar environment with open minded and technically capable devs.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Roll your own dynamic DNS service with Amazon Route53 - <AUTHOR> http://willwarren.com/2014/07/03/roll-dynamic-dns-service-using-amazon-route53/

<comment><USER2> That was a nice read, and using bash was cute.

I setup a simple service which allows dynamic dyns to be configured via curl at [http://dhcp.io/](http://dhcp.io/) \- the source is available on github.

That too uses Route53 for the back-end, as does the git-based DNS host I setup at [https://dns-api.com/](https://dns-api.com/)</comment>


Supersymmetry in the time domain and its applications in optics - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14634-0 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://scitechdaily.com/temporal-supersymmetry- breakthrough...](https://scitechdaily.com/temporal-supersymmetry-breakthrough- paves-way-to-omnidirectional-invisible-materials/)</comment>


Show HN: Thanx – Loyalty made effortless - <AUTHOR> https://www.thanx.com/

<comment><USER2> New to this space to trying to work out exactly how this works...

1\. How are merchants charged for this? (e.g. flat fee or per points awarded or not at all)

2\. How exactly do merchants benefit from this? I am assuming it's not going to influence more customers to walk through the door, and therefore the value for merchants is in the data/insights. And, if so, what are the best examples of how that helps merchants increase revenues?

3\. Does Thanx collect and sell the data to third parties? (I'm just interested)

<comment><USER3> These are pretty much exactly the questions I wanted to ask.

<comment><USER4> I replied up above - happy to answer other questions that come up. Thanx for writing.</comment></comment></comment>


Acquisition Exit: it's not just Google & Yahoo - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> These deals do happen all the time, but you don't hear about most of them because they're not in the sexy ( _resisting urge to say bottom joke_ ) Web 2.0/social networking space.

Instead, they tend to happen in more boring (but profitable) areas like accounting or security software.

This site (a boutique broker specializing in software acquisitions) has a list of recent M&A; deals along those lines: <http://corumgroup.com/CorumTransactions.asp>

</comment><comment><USER3> question: do companies have dedicated teams to go out and find small companies to eat, or it more or less a random process?

<comment><USER4> My guess its the latter. I can't imagine big companies acquiring for the sake of it without doing some serious research.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Google and Yahoo are most startups' exit strategies, according to conventional wisdom. And now we've seen a few articles about how Google and Yahoo really aren't acquiring very many companies.

 _But Google and Yahoo are hardly the only companies that buy companies._

How about Amazon? Amazon buys companies, and is probably going to buy a lot more. Ebay. News Corp (Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and wants to buy more). VeriSign. Cisco (it acquires small companies all the time!).

And it's not just the big boys. You don't necessarily need a serial acquirer -- for instant, stock site TheStreet bought out startup StockPickr. Private- but-successful startup Six Apart (Type Pad, Moveable Type, for those of you who've been asleep) bought out LiveJournal.

This post isn't just a retort to the "better find another exit strategy" meme.

 _What other companies do acquisitions?_ I suspect I've barely scratched the surface here.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget IAC (InterActiveCorp), they have been behind many acquisitions in the past several years.

Notably: Insider Pages, Expedia, CollegeHumor, Ask.com, Hotwire, LendingTree and many others</comment></comment>


Lyrics-finder: fetch a song's lyrics without any API key - alias-rahil https://github.com/alias-rahil/lyrics-finder <comment><AUTHOR> Since it uses google [1] without api key, it won't scale. Google will quickly block you with a captcha after a burst of requests.

[1] [https://github.com/alias-rahil/lyrics- finder/blob/master/src...](https://github.com/alias-rahil/lyrics- finder/blob/master/src/index.js#L7)

<comment><USER2> I run a YouTube streaming server which theoretically will be blocked by Google after a burst of requests. I've found the very best way to avoid the problem is to have zero users.

After submitting to Show HN and looking at my own server log I can say definitively that mentioning a project on HN doesn't attract any users. All I see are spiders following links as idiot bloggers repost content from HN. Techbros apparently consider HN to be some kind of social shrine to the marketing industry that is big tech.

Judging by the number of comments here I would guess Lyrics-finder isn't in danger of being blocked by Google.</comment></comment>


X is broken - <AUTHOR> http://jsbit.ch/post/32667257037/x-is-broken

<comment><USER2> (Your title is broken: I assumed "X" referred to the X Window System)

<comment><USER3> I totally did too... I was a bit disappointed because I expected a nice article and not some random guy complaining about people trying to do something.

<comment><AUTHOR>
        'Some random guy complaining about people trying to do something.'

You have just written my epitaph.

In all seriousness, you're right. I should write more contributory posts in the future. I wrote that in a foul mood this morning and should've left it in the text editor.</comment></comment></comment>


Intellectual Property - Worthless To A Startup, Priceless To A Big Dumb Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.infochachkie.com/ip/

<comment><USER2> Agreed - Intellectual Property is usually overvalued by larger companies. However, it still makes sense for startups to protect their IP, without basing their success on the novelty of their IP.

Nice article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ip is extremely important in numerous markets including biotechnology, clean tech, fashion, publishing, and many others.</comment>


No more `grunt watch` – faster builds with the Broccoli asset pipeline - <AUTHOR> http://www.solitr.com/blog/2014/02/broccoli-first-release/index.html

<comment><USER2> This is slightly related and I don't want to sound like I'm trying steal its thunder, because this looks really cool. I work on the asset pipeline that comes with the Dart SDK. It has many of the same principles as these.

Any transformation step can read in many input files and produce many output files. The built-in dev server tracks the entire asset dependency graph and only rebuilds the assets that are dirtied by a source file changing.

We have a plug-in system, and it's built on top of the same package management system that the SDK uses, so you can get transformer plug-ins as easily as you can get any other dependency.

We still have a lot of work to do to fully flesh things out, but it already does a lot, including supporting complex scenarios like transformers whose own code is the output of a previous transformer.

More here: [https://www.dartlang.org/tools/pub/assets-and- transformers.h...](https://www.dartlang.org/tools/pub/assets-and- transformers.html)

<comment><USER3> Why can't Dart reuse (or provide) a tool that also works for things other than Dart?

Why does every language need to have its own everything unique to itself?

<comment><USER2> This is a great question. There are two main reasons:

1\. The asset build system is built on top of a bunch of policies and conventions specific to our language's package manager. The build system needs to be able to locate plug-ins somehow, and it's hard to define that "somehow" without some kind of assumptions for how dependencies are located and organized.

2\. Like other platforms, we want to minimize external dependencies. If we reuse grunt, then every user has to have node and npm installed. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, and many users do already, but we'd like to avoid _forcing_ that dependency.

3\. Since the build system is plug-in based, we need a way for the build tool and plug-ins to communicate with each other. We want that API to be simple so that it's easy to create plug-ins. Since they're sending entire assets through that communication channel, we need it to be efficient too. It's hard to do that in a language-agnostic way.

4\. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute to the build system and various build plug-ins. Since we already assume users know Dart, then when those components are also written in Dart, it increases the chances that they are able to pitch in and help.

I don't like walled gardens or feeling like we're reinventing the wheel (though I'll note that before this announcement, I wasn't aware of many other build systems that were as many-to-many based as ours), but there is value in having things be internally consistent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Broccoli is a new build tool. It's comparable to the Rails asset pipeline in scope, though it runs on Node and is backend-agnostic._

This first line is a little disingenuous. Technically, it's not backend- agnostic, since it depends on Node being installed on the backend (in the same way that Sprockets [1] depends on Ruby). The Rails asset pipeline is a framework-specific integration of Sprockets. In much the same way, you could more closely integrate Broccoli with Rails if you wanted and call it a new Rails asset pipeline.

The project itself looks great, just the first line was confusing since they started the docs off by comparing apples to oranges.

A better comparison would probably be, "It's comparable to Sprockets (which powers the Rails asset pipeline), but runs on Node instead of Ruby."

[1] [https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets](https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets)

<comment><USER4> Someone commented below (but their comment is dead, so I can't respond directly):

 _The Rails asset pipeline requires a JS runtime, so Broccoli doesn 't have any more dependencies than asset pipeline in my mind._

Technically they're right that the Rails asset pipeline does require a JS runtime by default. But it's important to note that the Rails asset pipeline doesn't strictly require the JS runtime; it's only required for the coffee- script gem, which happens to be included by default for new Rails apps. If you're not using coffee-script for any of your assets, then no, it doesn't require a JS runtime.

<comment><USER5> But isn't Broccoli more of a frontend build tool? The primary motivation seems to be to speed up frontend development in terms of the save-file-build-wait- view-in-browser loop? I don't know much (anything) about the Rails asset pipeline, but isn't it used by the actual backend framework? As far as I can tell Broccoli is used to compile assets before the frontend files get anywhere near a backend ... so in this way its backend agnostic.

<comment><USER6> Sprockets _is_ a frontend build tool. It works basically the same way.

The main difference between sprockets and grunt / lineman / broccoli, is that sprockets do not watch files. It's a web application that compile your assets on the fly[0][1] when you need them.

So it's lazy, and blocking. Meaning that you do not have to guess if your assets have been recompiled yet. Your browser just ask for them, and get them as soon as they are ready.

[0] In development mode of course [1] In fact it cache the output, but whatever.

<comment><USER4> Bingo. But keep in mind that Sprockets doesn't have to be used just as a Rack server to compile on the fly, it can also be used to precompile to static files. In fact, you could then combine it with something like the watcher gem, and you now have automatic precompiling whenever you save your source files. In fact, there's the guard-sprockets gem which does all this for you [1].

[1] [https://github.com/pferdefleisch/guard- sprockets](https://github.com/pferdefleisch/guard-sprockets)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not often I see tools announced with such a thoroughly researched article. Great stuff!

I guess the problem these build tools are facing is the amount that people have invested in Grunt. There are just /so/ many grunt tasks at this point.

<comment><USER8> I've also been playing around with gulp, and whilst still in the 'trying to use it like grunt' kind of mindset, I have seen some merit in using these stream based build tools.

Have to wonder why this all requires new build tools to achieve though.

It's obviously technically possible (npm shows grunt-gulp which does exactly what you'd think), so is the grunt architecture so firmly rooted in files that streams could not be leveraged, or is it something that will come in time?

Personally managed to get a nigh on perfect build process using grunt-watch, so no rush to move away.

Nice to see build tools still moving forward though.

<comment><USER9> grunt takes an almost entirely declarative approach, which becomes really hard to reconcile with situations that the order of execution really matters. because you are basically trying to map a flat(ish) array of commands onto a tree-like structure to trick the grunt internals to work the way you need them to.

You can either do this explicitly (by setting up aliased), or implicitly (by all the temporary file watch jiggery and pokery).

It's unlikely that I will start any new projects with grunt, even though I know it a lot better than gulp right now.

<comment><USER10> ya, grunt tends to suffer from an massive explosion of complexity

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having used literally ever alternative, Broccoli has been a joy to use so far, can wait to port all my projects to it.

It manages complexity really well. I have thrown many known failure scenarios at it, and it handled them all without a hitch.

<comment><USER11> As the author mentions, the real insight seems to be to switch from the file- based unit to the tree-based unit. This means asset building can be made more intelligent.

Now, I wonder if the same approach can be taken in gulp using vinyl-fs? Otherwise, I wonder if it might be worth plugging this tool as a specialized asset pipeline into existing grunt/gulp files.

<comment><USER12> I have been working on replacing the whole production build pipeline as well. And since Grunt isn't a thing you can ignore these days I created a simple grunt wrapper that collapses the entire 200+ lines of config down to two config options: [https://github.com/Munter/grunt- reduce](https://github.com/Munter/grunt-reduce)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure what the pros are against Brunch. The author states:

> Brunch also tries to do partial rebuilding rather than caching; see section > "Caching, Not Partial Rebuilding"

But the end of that section seems to imply that it's still something that needs to be implemented per-plugin:

> Plugins that map files n:1, like Sass, need to be more careful about > invalidating their caches, so they need to provide custom caching logic.

I'm excited to see what comes of it, but still prefer the idea of simply running `npm install (sass|jade|less|stylus|coffee-script)-brunch --save`

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm happy to see this reach beta version, it's a great step in the right direction. Grunt is too generic as a tool and we've all seen Gruntfiles reach enormous lengths, to a point when it's really hard to figure out what is processing what.

One thing that has room for improvement though is the syntax, which in my opinion doesn't reveal the intention behind some methods and is a bit too coupled with the implementation. What does `makeTree('lib')` mean? If it's taking a folder and its files then why not rename it to something like `broccoli.requireFolder('lib')`? Also another thing that might improve usability would be chaining compilers instead of calling them directly with the tree as parameter.

These are just minor things anyway, I'm sure the library will improve over time. Congrats joliss, great fan of your work!

</comment><comment><USER15> I want to note that this headline is a wonderfully hilarious if read without js-programmer context.

<comment><USER16> Broccoli, the laxative your JS needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would like to request renaming brocollifile.js to brocolli.js. I believe brocollifile.js is too long for a standard build file name. Gruntfile.js always bothered me. Compare it to pom.xml, build.xml, package.json and it feels out of place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I named it after the `Makefile` pattern, since it contains a build definition. We have `Rakefile`, `Cakefile`, `Gruntfile.js`, etc.

<comment><USER18> How about "Brocfile.js"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This looks like a solid project.

I want to mention mincer[1], which I have used in the past for compiling assets, and it has been an entirely painless process. Definitely take a look at it as an alternative, which has been around longer and has seen assistance from the folks behind sprockets[2] (according to the README) for creating a similar API.

1\. [https://github.com/nodeca/mincer](https://github.com/nodeca/mincer) 2\. [https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets](https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets)

</comment><comment><USER20> There are at least 5 separate build tools referenced in these comments.

Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment><comment><USER21> The fun part is when your non-technical coworkers ask what you're reading so intently and you read something like this to them with no context: "Run broccoli serve to watch the source files and continuously serve the build output on localhost. Broccoli is optimized to make broccoli serve as fast as possible, so you should never experience rebuild pauses."

</comment><comment><USER22> What's the difference between a build tool and a task runner?

<comment><USER23> Tasks are a more general concept; one of the many possible tasks you could program would be to build your project.

<comment><USER24> Other possible tasks including initializing the database (for a new developer), regenerating some artificat that isn't normally regenerated during the build, and launching a local web server running the project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can someone please build a Grunt GUI that I can drag-and-drop project folder to, to watch multiple folders?

Prepros is the closest software out there now, but it's not extensible like Grunt.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is this a beta build system like tup? Sounds like it. I ask because I've recently begun work on the same.

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone know of any resources for writing plugins?

<comment><USER28> Read the source for the ones there. The ES6 module plugin is the most involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yet ANOTHER build tool. I've started placing bets on when repositories will flip to NEW-HOTNESS-BUILD-TOOL at the cost of actual product development time.

Engineers will constantly run toward shiny baubles at the expense of everything else.</comment>


Sunsetting Intros: A post-mortem on shutting down a product we just launched - <AUTHOR> https://baremetrics.com/blog/sunsetting-intros <comment><USER2> So they tried to charge investors and startups $500/mo for a social network where they could meet each other. Not surprised that _no one_ was willing to pay.</comment>


How an Immigrant from Bangladesh Became America's Master Builder - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2016/02/09/fazlur-khan-americas-master-builder/ <comment><USER2> > No building style better represented America's industriousness, monomaniacal > greed, disregard of tradition, and eagerness to attempt feats that more > established cultures considered obscene. And while those indelicate traits > prompted Americans to develop the skyscraper, it was our openness and > multiculturalism that brought us our greatest skyscraper builder: a > Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant named Fazlur Rahman Khan.

What an offensive article. Highlight the characteristic ("Muslim immigrant") that have nothing to do with why Khan is famous, while ragging on what was his life's work. There is a great, possibly apocryphal, story about Khan. He was in Bangladesh and someone asked him "why don't you come back here now that you're successful?" He replied: "I build skyscrapers for a living, what am I going to do here?"

That aside, taking the Chicago architecture tour and visiting the Sears Tower is a quasi-religious experience for an engineer. This guy built a skyscraper that was the tallest in the world for more than two decades. He practiced architecture in a city where people just did stuff like that: reverse the course of a river, raise all of downtown a couple of stories, build skyscrapers with floating foundations in soft soil, hang a building from a truss because they only bought the air rights over some rail tracks, etc. You leave with the overwhelming sense that these are people who built a high- density skyscraper city in a midwestern state with cheap land as far as the eye can see just because they could.

<comment><USER3> Uh the article seems pretty effusive in its praise for tall buildings. It also had two words about his faith and 2500 about his engineering abilities. It's fine if you didn't read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "He eventually convinced the owner to leave the braces in place by using an engineer's most powerful rhetorical device: purposefully indecipherable technical jargon intended to confuse the other party into submission. Khan got his way, and the top tier diagonals were built."

I love it.

<comment><USER5> Why is that something to be proud of? If that works for a good idea, it would work for a scummy, fly-by-night idea too. And in my hell, there's a special place for deliberately obscure their own field.

<comment><USER6> I'm not entirely sure he approves of it but its comedic nonetheless and certainly happens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >No building style better represented America's industriousness, monomaniacal greed, disregard of tradition, and eagerness to attempt feats that more established cultures considered obscene. And while those indelicate traits prompted Americans to develop the skyscraper...

The article is good, but that tainted my view. Cheap edginess is intellectually lazy, not to mention those "cultural traits" have nothing to do with why the first very tall buildings were in the US.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Wframeshen wind pushes up against the side of a building, the structure will > have a tendency to bend. In order to resist this bending, the building must > have a certain rigidity or it would flop over like an Italian soccer player.

Randomly... shots fired

</comment><comment><USER9> The single biggest reason why America has been such a great nation, comes down to its openness and its willingness to embrace change.

If these two values are hampered in any way, then America's decline is inevitable.

<comment><USER10> > The single biggest reason why America has been such a great nation, comes > down to its openness and its willingness to embrace change.

Like that one time they abolished slavery peacefully instead of fighting a bloody civil war.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And they say immigrants have no value...

<comment><USER12> Legal immigrants

<comment><USER13> An immigrant's value has no relationship to their legal status.

<comment><USER14> On average the ones without proper docs are lower educated and obviously take bottom tier jobs.

Legal immigrants tend to be college/uni educated and are able to enter higher paying jobs and some contribute to R&D. Many countries have some EDU requirements or some monetary requirements for fast track legal immigration. It's not unusual.

Now, back when the while world was mostly physical labor, things were different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh, man, the comments section on that article is a dog's breakfast.</comment>


Wait, So How Much of the Ocean Is Actually Fished? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/wait-so-how-much-of-the-ocean-is-fished-again/569782/?single_page=true <comment><USER2>
      Indeed, in just the past few months, researchers have used
      that data to [...] identify supply chains where vessels
      offload catches to each other at sea, and to show that the
      creation of marine protected areas can lead to a wave of
      pre-emptive overfishing.

How long until some fishermen begin to claim a right to privacy? I don't mean that flippantly. Logically speaking, it's a stretch to go from a personal right of privacy as the EU is slowly enshrining to one that protects the economic activity of commercial actors. But as a practical and political matter I don't think it's insurmountable. In America we're experts at reframing these rights issues in a way that benefits corporations. Europe might not be immune to these pressures, simply behind the curve.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> >One prominent study said 55 percent, its critics say 4 percent, and they both used the same data.

TL;DR - The first study (55% fished) divided the ocean in 160,000 squares (each 3,100 square kilometers) with 55% containing fishing activity in 2016.

The second study divided the ocean into much smaller squares (123 square kilometers)and found only 4% had fishing activity in 2016.

<comment><USER3> Oh, well, if we're dividing the ocean, then I divide the ocean into 1 square (each one ocean) with 100% fishing activity in 2018.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dharmarelief.org – to help the medical supply shortage I built this - <AUTHOR> https://dharmarelief.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are calling all traditions of Buddhism to come together to make a difference.

Compassionate action lies at the heart of Buddhist practice. As you know, healthcare workers are the front-line fighters against the COVID-19 pandemic. With the critical shortage of medical supplies in hospitals nationwide, and the time lag before the US manufacturers can meet the demands of this shortage, we encourage all Buddhists to come together in an effort to generate the resources to help our healthcare workers. This is the first concrete step for all Buddhists to make a difference.

I met Guo Gu (Jimmy Yu, PhD) at a retreat in December. We had a 'karmic connection' and he reached out to me a week ago to design a logo, build the site, be the technical lead and creative director. I worked all weekend to design a brand and build the site. A week ago the domain was purchased and on Tuesday the site went live. Our initial goal was $100k, we met that within 36 hours of going live. We raised it to $500k and are already halfway there!</comment>