Digital revolution has yet to fulfil its promise of productivity and better jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21621237-digital-revolution-has-yet-fulfil-its-promise-higher-productivity-and-better <comment><USER2> The article doesn't really examine productivity, it is examining wages.

To wit: industrial automation has grown 6% YOY since 2003[1]. Manufacturing is up worldwide and robotic integration is exploding, not to mention software automation.

The reality is that these increases are not labor productivity, but capital productivity. You also won't see these productivity numbers easily on a balance sheet because they currently take longer to find return on value when doing replacement work than scaling human labor. This is largely because it takes time to transition labor force into a new role within a company or out of the company altogether.

At the end of the day though, from a labor productivity perspective, there is no raison detre to pay workers more for doing less unless they are providing more value per time period.

While history has shown show that technology does not eliminate jobs, merely creates new ones, the pace at which this is occurring is increasing [2] and is arguably faster than workers can adapt.

This is also not to even mention where finance is putting investments, being far from what I would consider proportional with respect to consumer goods and industrial technology base.

In the end, there is every reason to believe that as capital takes more share of the work, there will be less work and thus less pay for labor. That is unless the market for labor, in places which are not yet ready for automation, grows in such a way that it can absorb transitioning workers and new entrants. I don't really see that happening without some major changes in the ethos of how we allocate "value" to labor and define "work."

[1][http://www.thefinancialist.com/automation-a-trend-thats- stic...](http://www.thefinancialist.com/automation-a-trend-thats-sticking/)

[2] [http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how- tec...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology- is-destroying-jobs/)

<comment><USER3> > The article doesn't really examine productivity, it is examining wages. To > wit: industrial automation has grown 6% YOY since 2003[1]. Manufacturing is > up worldwide and robotic integration is exploding, not to mention software > automation.

Which doesn't seem to have led to huge productivity gains on the order of 6% annually:

> Yet the timing does not seem to support Mr Gordon's argument. The big leap > in American economic growth took place between 1939 and 2000, when average > output per person grew at 2.7% a year. Both before and after that period the > rate was a lot lower: 1.5% from 1891 to 1939 and 0.9% from 2000 to 2013. And > the dramatic dip in productivity growth after 2000 seems to have coincided > with an apparent acceleration in technological advances as the web and > smartphones spread everywhere and machine intelligence and robotics made > rapid progress.

<comment><USER4> 6% industrial automation hasn't been resulting in 6% productivity gains because most work is not industrial.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. And so it is a little disingenuous to point to narrow gains in one area in a discussion of _broad_ gains, is it not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's because the baby boomers don't know how to use technology, and they're still holding positions they should have retired from 5 years ago. This has many widespread effects, one of which is the 'if it ain't broke, don't fix'. People are still using Windows XP in their day-to-day jobs for christ-sake.

The digital revolution hasn't happened because it's being held back by dinosaurs.

<comment><USER6> And the productivity difference between Windows XP and Windows 8 is...? 0.01%?

<comment><USER7> I bet is more than 10%; Windows XP comes with a lot of bad baggage.. such as IE7.

And anyway, the OS was an example, it just goes downhill from there.

<comment><USER8> Cut that 10% in half because known baggage will trump unknown valuable capabilities.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that we are talking about the kind of people that doesn't even know half the valuable capabilities of Windows XP.

<comment><USER8> True, but that won't change the fact that anything better but different from that old XP will throw most users so off they won't even care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The goal of technology is to eliminate labor, not to create the need for more of it. If everyone is fishing with their bare hands and catching just enough to feed themselves (edit: say one fish), then when nets are invented and people can catch 100 fish a day, 99% of the fishing industry jobs disappear. That's a wonderful thing. That means 99% of the population can devote themselves to less urgent priorities, like building shelters, making clothes, etc. Sure, those crackerjack fish catchers who could catch 2 or 3 fish a day have lost their jobs, and might become less affluent than they were...but the few losers in every industry when technology changes the employment structure are outweighed by the vast majority who benefit greatly. And lest this seem unfair, consider that if everyone's current job were obsolete, everyone would be astoundingly better off despite losing the comparative advantage they had built in their career.

The same thing has been happening since the first inventions. It's been one long history of job loss and rising standard of living, and no short term variance should obscure this fact.

The more jobs made obsolete, the better. People will simply shift to less important work, and increasingly people will simply work fewer hours, as technology makes the economy so productive that prices fall to such a degree that people can live on an hour of labor a week.

<comment><USER10> I liked your post.

The issue is that with modern technology,tech is not just replacing ONE job like fish catching.

Tech is replacing ALL jobs..... fish catching, clothes making, accounting, medicine, programming, etc.

Sufficiently advanced tech can replace just about ANY job. And do it better than a person can.

So the issue is where does everyone go?

And I don't think 7 billion people can all be inventors.

<comment><USER11> Actually, I think they can (also be entrepreneurs and artists) They just can't all be successful ones. However, due to the non-linearity of success, the winners would offset the losers, which is also why incubators like y combinator can make a profit.

So what it boils down to really is a social issue, where you have to find a way to ensure a fair treatment of the losers. Theoretically they were just as likely to be huge successes (I think this is especially true for artists) as those who actually turned out to be. If that wasn't true one could easily run a successful incubator on their own.

However, culturally, the idea of compensating the losers seems alien (and even outrageous in some places) as we used to live in a economy with a much more linear relationship between effort and return. I guess this is why ideas like 'basic income' have such a hard time being even discussed, although they would address the issue, maybe even solve it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You have to be blind not to see the tremendous productivity and lifestyle improve improvements wrought by technology.

\--sent from my handheld multi-gigaflop communication device/sensorium/access point to the sum of all human knowledge, which cost less than what most people in my country of residence make in a week and was not available to even the richest billionaires ten years ago.

<comment> bjelkeman-again My wife, who is a graphic designer and has moved to latest tech all the way from photo-typesetters, now does the work of: typesetter, typist (people used to re-type the copy), pasteup artist, courier, several people at the printer (making plates, printing, packing, labelling, sending), postman and post sorting. They distribute PDF files mostly, via email marketing and a web site. Stock photography workers that would send slides, and I am probably missing some roles in there.

This was indeed a productivity improvement, and a lifestyle improvement for her. But it is not clear that it was for all the others involved previously. It is correct that the expectations are higher than they used to be for the same amount of money paid (colour print, quality of design etc.), but I am not sure this makes up for the loss of jobs for those that aren't involved anymore.

I know some of these roles have moved on to do other things, but as far as I can see it seems like we have what they call a "jobb-less recovery" where technology provides efficiency and productivity improvements for the few, but leaves a lot of people behind.

Where I live, Sweden, people are well educated, the economy is doing well, and we have a substantial youth unemployment. I know it is a fairly complex problem as I have a hard time finding skilled developers for example, ie there are jobs to be had, but the courier and the guy working at the printer previously can probably not retrain to those jobs easily.

<comment><USER13> _This was indeed a productivity improvement, and a lifestyle improvement for her._

If that's the state of affairs, good for her. But talk to my previous boss, who recently elebrated his 80th birthday. He _knows_ the times when he would write a manuscript, hand it to his secretary, who would type a fair copy, and then it would go off to the publisher, where it would go to the typesetter (a union man), and then the plates would go to the printer (printing press operated by a union man, too).

A couple of years back he was invited to write a review, and he was _absolutely livid_ for several days. The publisher had requested _camera-ready copy_ ; they gave him formatting instructions, he had to deal with the minutiae, and what he handed in did not conform to specifications, so he had to do more formatting. At the end of the day, all the labour-saving devices did not save him time, although they certainly made Springer/Elsevier/Pergamon/whatnot plenty extra bucks. Some progress.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, the new way of doing that is actually just publishing in craiglist/facebook/sponsors/etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Consider welding. It is a blue collar job that can pay pretty well, if you are fast on piecework or have in demand skills like tig welding titanium. I employ two guys welding manually, and I also have a 7 axis Panasonic PA 102S welding cell.

I have one high volume product that we sell, that I calculated the labor cost per part to be about 6 cents if we ran the robot at normal speed for 40 hours per week. When that part was manually welded the labor cost per part was about 50 cents per part. Incidentally, the guys were happy when that part went automated, since doing a high volume part is boring, mind numbing work. (1)

In the case of this little part, because the labor cost went down, and as a factory owner I know the part is more precise and can be made in an easily calculable window (it yields 8 parts per minute now), then I was able to cut the retail price by 50% and sales tripled. We can now bid on jobs that would have overwhelmed our capacity before.

So who won? I made more money, the workers job got better because some drudgery was removed, the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program, the consumer pays less, and because the price was lower more consumers get to enjoy the product.

I am no economist, and I have no well researched and linked rebuttal to the article. In my little microcosm of the world everybody wanted the automation. Me, the guys, the customer. Everybody has won. Nobody involved would prefer to go back to the old way.

1\. personally I find it annoying when academics talk about labor vs automation. Some jobs suck to do (dull, dirty, dangerous), and often the worker is the happiest when it no longer has to be done by a human. The worker is usually pretty happy to have extra time to do that other thing they have been wanting to do for long time. Who on this forum misses setting up a blog the way you had to before Fantastico came along?

<comment><USER15> >the workers income went up because we have a profit sharing program

So in this case, labor won because they also have a stake in the capital.

Unfortunately, that's the exception rather than the rule.

<comment><USER14> I do not know the stats, but within my circle of friends that have businesses most of us have profit sharing plans of some sort. I try to share the profits as often as possible. We have had bonuses for weekly output for 10 years and now I am trying to change to more of a Nucor style pay system. See [http://www.nucor.com/story/prologue/](http://www.nucor.com/story/prologue/) . In comparison I have a friend who has a 401K profit sharing program and all the bonus goes to that. He has had a couple of guys retire (mechanics who serviced the trucks) and they had over $100,000 each in their retirement accounts. It was the only savings they had, beyond the value of their tools and 10 year old trucks.

I disagree with my friend a little - I want my people to see the efforts of their work immediately. So they get the bonus immediately, even if I don't get paid for 60 days. Someone should disrupt the setting up of 401K for small business, make it a 5 minute sign up. At this point I have not taken the time or effort to set one up for my team. That is in the plan for 2015.

Our business is in a war for talent, just like Silicon Valley, it is just that the stakes are smaller. My fastest welder easily puts out more than triple what my slowest welder (former) ever did. The robot is three times faster than the fast guy. So I need to find someone talented enough to program a 7-axis robot, as well as a talented enough welder to understand jigging, metal expansion, automated clamps, can make a nice appearing weld (much harder than you think, #weldporn), and this has not been easy. In fact it has not been possible, so I use an in-house fabricator for the jigs, and an outside consultant to program the robot ($75 an hour). In order to interst a person with that much talent (they always have MANY job options) I have to have a program that they can see how they can earn an outsize salary. This is the motivation to go Nucor.

Nucor pay is 66% team incentive and 33% salary. I am going to a $320 per week base, with a percentage of total weekly sales of all parts of the company (some people work on all products, some on half). Half of the net profit at the year end will be split, and we already have a health benefit for all employees full and part time. We also offer up to 12 weeks vacation a year, but nobody has gone over 4 weeks ever. I hope that my people who make $600 a week now will be earning $1000 a week next year. The way the pay is structured, if we can increase output without increasing head count then this will occur. We have invested in automation, and I am currently working on a way to use cheap Arduino/Beaglebone CNC on our manual equipment. Most of our competitors manufacture in low wage countries, while I would like to stay in the US.

Wages are low in Tucson and if I could offer blue collar jobs for $50K per year then I would have a thousand applicants for every job. My little company is no different than any other. There is lots of talk of the 10X developer on HN, but really I think the discussion should be more about 10X PEOPLE. I need the 10X people too. I have had 20+ people over the years work in my office for me and three of them were 10X people. I only have one like her now, with a 21 year old who looks promising as the other. These are the kind of people that you can throw a new hairy problem to with no explanation and they can get it done. The Valve Handbook would call them T shaped people. Paul Graham would call them relentlessly resourceful. To me they are the "I got this" people. I tell them the problem, the tell me that they got it, and I can go on to the next issue with faith that the problem will be resolved come hell or high water. These people are rare in every discipline and the difference they can make is transformative. Your world changes as soon as you hire them. When they leave, your business just seems to run less smooth. Talent matters in every business.

I also realized that I would not work at my place. There was no possibility of a large enough upside to be interesting to me. There is as an owner of course, but I did not have a defined clearly explained program for my people telling them how to get to a 6 figure payday. So that is on the agenda. To create a job that I would want to apply for in the sense of future upside in pay, personal growth or something. It seems a silly thing to have overlooked for 10 years but that is the way things happen in business.

Like I said, I don't know the stats. I don't know if I am an exception or fairly common in my thinking. It doesn't matter though, I am merely trying to solve the pain of finding good people. Share the upside and the talented ones want to work with you. Keep it to yourself and watch them leave to your competition or to become your competitor themselves and take your best staff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article is full of inaccuracies.

E.g They put a graph of Spain and salaries growing more than 10% in the real state bubble period.

What they don't add is the cost of living going up as well, specially renting a house or buying it, that went up 400% in lots of places.

Now those salaries have gone down to their previous level(the graph does not include the last two years), but house prices had been sustained as much as they could with interventions like creating "bad banks" so free market could not do his job. Real state prices had gone down probably 30%, far from pre bubble plus real inflation levels.

It does not matter if your salary goes up if inflation goes up higher.

Productivity has increased dramatically over time, but taxes, debt and overspending by the government has grown more.

About the top earners, this is what happens when you give free money to people in Wall Street. Stock goes up, and the percentage of wealth they have is enormous. But this is "paper money", and will last until stock goes down, and it will go down when interest rates go up, and this will happen soon, in one or two years.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wat? The premise has always been _fewer_ jobs. What our entrenched societal institutions end up doing with this change is a different matter.

</comment><comment><USER18> Let me count what is wrong with this article in brief.

1\. The title "Technology is not working" is true in general for "X is not working" if your are going cherry pick the only group for which it is not working. By that sort of logic nothing really works.

2\. The term productivity is not at all defined in the whole article. What we should care about is the productivity of the whole society and not some isolated group.

3\. Wage growth has nothing to do with productivity in general. For example wage rates going down could also mean more is being achieved with fewer humans of the same skill which basically is productivity improvement.

</comment><comment><USER19> Productivity, yes. Better jobs, no. Machines should think. People should work. Watch this Kiva Robotics training session:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWNuaPE4DTc)

That's how orders are picked at Amazon now. (Also Staples, Pets.com, and many others.) All the thinking and planning is done by computers. Humans just pick up items where the light pointer tells them to reach, and put them where another light tells them. There's no possibility of promotion. They don't program the robots. They don't fix the robots.

The company that makes the robots employs only a few hundred people.

The inventor of this system was involved with Webvan fifteen years ago. He saw that customers wanted instant delivery, but Webvan cost too much to run, because it had too many people. If they could get rid of the people, instant delivery would work. Now, that's been done.

</comment><comment><USER20> Isn't it really productivity OR jobs? A smaller number of productive workers can accomplish the same finite amount of "work" as a greater number of less- productive workers.

Welcome to the Industrial Revolution.

<comment><USER21> We need more technology, not less; specifically: more robots. Robots designed to relentlessly shop for items online, and to sleeplessly hail ride-share cars. With enough such robots, all us people will find full time employment shipping products to those robots from our Amazon warehouses, and driving those robots around in our Uber cars.

<comment><USER14> You might like to read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This may sound oversimplified but I think people will have to become more creative and create their own jobs in the future (ie self employed entrepreneurs). Simply hoping to gain income from a job via the traditional route of applying to companies is becoming more difficult. I think the large growth in "startup culture" over the past 5 years is proof of this.

<comment><USER10> 90% of startups fail. These are well funded startups.

There has to be an actual need for a product in the market and need is not easy to predict.

Even the successful startups are succesful because of a little luck and being in the right place at the right time.

Luck is not the best financial planning strategy for feeding your children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I dont know, but i think software kind of replace, at least in part, people's labor;

Technology and productivity is against labor and wages; unless you are part of the very few people needed to create the machines or softwares; probably with the advance of AI, even taht can be replaced..

I wonder why people tought that keeping replacing people with robots, and creating profit fetichism on corporations could lead to something else?

This is the old Marx profecy going on; That only creative and talented type of labor could survive; anything out of this will probably be replaced by automatization

Technological society didnt come to save the majority of people's lifestyle, its comming to kill the rest of it;

Of course some new value, and blue oceans will come to the surface; but then the automatization and profit circle will rule again, until little to none people are needed

But than, who really want to pick up the phone, deliver the sandwiches, or do repetitive and low demanding jobs?

This is good, only that humanity need to adapt, have more knowledge and go for the creative types of labor

Problem is 7 billion people maybe would be too much for this , so i dont think is sustainable to everyone on earth to live like that.. and people with low levels of inteligence will have a hard time living in a society like this

</comment><comment><USER24> See also: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists- dil...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dilemma- whoever-becomes-president.html?pagewanted=all)

In particular the part about "efficiency innovations" vs "empowering innovations"

</comment><comment><USER25> It has. People just didn't realize the efficiency of online retailers would crush so many middlemen and individual brick and mortar stores (mom and pop shops and mail-order houses), as well as entire existing companies (Best Buy, etc)

<comment> Altay- E-commerce makes up ~6.40% of US retail sales. Its certainly shaken up the landscape, but 'crush' is overstating the case...

<comment><USER26> Its going to entirely depend on the segment, Wal-Mart gets 55% of revenue from groceries apparently (I took some time to look at what fraction of groceries would be of overall retail sales, but couldn't find it). So I think a reasonable assumption is that a large chunk of retail sales are groceries. Another large chunk is going to be automobiles, which in some metrics get excluded; which are another large part of retail sales.

If you keep chopping away big parts that aren't conducive to e-commerce; the 6.40% is going to be a pretty big percentage. Small specialty stores are probably hit especially hard, to the point of being crushed; going out of business and making the e-commerce players a larger percentage of the market and thus more efficient, driving even more e-commerce in a positive feedback loop.

<comment> Altay- If you want to see just how irrelevant E-Commerce is, just look at your neighborhood Apple Store. Their products are the sort that could easily be purchased online -- commodity technology products aimed at the supposedly tech savvy.

The only visible effect of e-commerce has been the thinning of margins. The ability to check prices online leveled the playing field between retailers and customers. This has brought us closer to a real market -- one where perfect information is available to all parties.

<comment> bjelkeman-again E-commerce has more or less killed my local bookstores, travel agents, music (CD) stores, music instrument stores, video rental, bank branches, tobacconist (selling magazines and newspapers) and post office. Not sure I would call that irrelevant.

<comment><USER9> And that's... _good_. Shops are only good to have in your town insofar as they let you buy stuff more easily and cheaply. As soon as they no longer served that purpose, the labor and real estate was being wasted. Now that those businesses have shut down, the real estate is available for more productive uses and the workers are free to do something that is more useful to society. Your locality is that much better off for it, especially the poorest people, since they can obtain goods and services more cheaply.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I disagree. My locality is not better off. The centre of my town now nearly consist of fashion and coffee shops. And people working there are not more useful to society. They are selling nothing I need. I'd like to actually be able to purchase things that I use locally. The local society looses skills and functions. No service on broken parts, no local knowledge, well, except for fashion knowledge and his to package a latte.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bluntly, I guess there are smart jobs and dumb jobs. The demand for smart jobs should be practically infinite - where now you have a doctor, a lawyer, a childminder and an accountant, in the future you might also have a geneticist, a landscape gardener, tutors, designers, trainers, dieticians, researchers, risk managers, handymen... There will probably also always be a need for dumb jobs, but perhaps the difference will be that they cannot be the backbone of an entire economy.

</comment><comment><USER28> The entire thing is bottlenecked. Automate the education system.

<comment><USER29> The article basically mentions this.

"That may be the wrong place to look for improvements in productivity. The service sector might be more promising. In higher education, for example, the development of online courses could yield a productivity bonanza, allowing one professor to do the work previously done by legions of lecturers. Once an online course has been developed, it can be offered to unlimited numbers of extra students at little extra cost."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Yes, let's blame the bad economy on technology. I mean, it couldn't have been Wall-street's fault or Washington's fault.

<comment><USER31> Wall Street was Wall Street and Washington was Washington in the 1990s and the 1950s when there were plenty of jobs. It's hard to blame the constant thing for problems that are different between then and now.

<comment><USER32> No, they were not.

Society was different, laws were different, both Wall Street and Washington did eat a much smaller share of the US GDP.

You can't even extent your observation to the rest of the world, because almost the entire world passed through the same transformation at about the same time.

<comment><USER31> Not really. 1950-1960 was thoroughly the modern world: [http://peakwatch.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452403c69e2017d40f40b...](http://peakwatch.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452403c69e2017d40f40bd2970c-800wi). Federal sending was 16-18% of GDP from 1952-1967. From 1995 to 2008 it was 18-22%. So a little smaller, but not "much" smaller. It spiked above that in 2008 because of the recession, but you can hardly blame federal spending that happened after the recession for having caused it.

<comment><USER33> But the financial industry as a percentage of GDP is much higher now than in the 1950-1960 era.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chaos Computer Club criticizes police action - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/hausdurchsuchungen-bei-netzaktivisten-chaos-computer-club-kritisiert-polizeivorgehen-a-1216463.html <comment><USER3> CCC reported this on their own website earlier today. [https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2018/hausdurchsuchungen-bei- ve...](https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2018/hausdurchsuchungen-bei- vereinsvorstanden-der-zwiebelfreunde-und-im-openlab-augsburg) (in english)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, we've moved most comments to the thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17456289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17456289).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Translation from deepl.com:

House searches of net activists

Chaos Computer Club criticizes police action

Police have searched club rooms and homes of net activists. Those affected are only witnesses, but documents and technology have been confiscated. This raises questions of proportionality.

By Maik Baumgärtner, Martin Knobbe and Vanessa Schlesier Evidence object from the OpenLab in Augsburg: object from the 3D printer intimate

At the instigation of the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office, the premises of the Dresdner Verein Zwiebelfreunde and the apartments of board members in Berlin, Dresden, Augsburg and Jena were searched on June 20. In addition to hard disks, mobile phones and computer technology, police officers also confiscated a number of documents such as donation receipts and membership lists from previous years. The Augsburg premises of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) were also searched.

The broad police action raises questions of proportionality. The Munich public prosecutor's office is looking for the authors of the blog "Augsburg for riot tourists", which called for violent protests against the AfD federal party conference last weekend. The anonymous blog operators published an e-mail address for contacting the US-American technology collective RiseUp.

The association Zwiebelfreunde has been collecting donations for the alternative and non-commercial provider for years, whose services for confidential communication are mainly used by social movements worldwide. This is obviously the only reason why the German investigators took such massive action against the association.

Early morning search

Two weeks ago, shortly after 6 o'clock, the doorbell rang at the apartment door of the co-founder and board member of the Zwiebelfreunde, Moritz Bartl, in Augsburg. The investigators informed Bartl that they wanted to find out the identities of the initiators of the blog. According to Bartls, they took not only equipment and documents of the association, but also equipment and documents of his company as well as personal belongings of family members.

"Since then, normal work has been virtually impossible," says Bartl, who is not considered an accused person in the trial, but merely a witness - <USER2> everyone else searched. "I had to take a vacation. We are still trying to process what has happened."

"A call from the prosecution could have cleared all this up."

Bartl cannot explain the massive action of the police: "As experts in anonymization and encryption, we are regularly invited as speakers by police authorities. A call to the prosecution could have cleared all this up."

The onion friends were founded in 2011 and the association operates so-called Tor nodes, which serve to make the Tor network anonymous. Its members give lectures and workshops on data security, encryption and anonymization. They have also been working for years with NGOs such as Reporters Without Borders. The Dresden Institute for Data Protection, which advises companies and authorities, is a cooperation partner of the association.

Founder Bartl therefore suspects completely different motives of the authorities: "The extensive confiscations, also of documents of uninvolved projects, reinforce the impression that information about CCC Augsburg, our association and supporters should be collected here.

According to SPIEGEL information, only documents and data carriers no older than January 2018 should be confiscated. In fact, the documents confiscated date back to 2011 - which, according to those involved, was also evident to the officials.

"The search of witnesses is absolutely disproportionate."

Constanze Kurz, spokeswoman of the Chaos Computer Club, who has been working closely with the onion friends for years, sharply criticises the authorities' actions: "Searching witnesses is absolutely disproportionate, people are treated like criminals, and all they do is collect donations.

She emphasized that CCC data was also affected, since documents of the Executive Board were confiscated in Augsburg. "The case is a prime example of how excessive police action has a massive impact on people's lives and work," says Kurz.

At the request of the SPIEGEL, the responsible police did not want to comment. The Munich Public Prosecutor's Office announced that the persons affected by the search were not suspicious and that the evaluation of the confiscated computers and data carriers is continuing.

A scene during the search of the OpenLab project in Augsburg operated by Bartl seems curious: The officers found chemical formulas on a blackboard and various chemicals in the same room. They immediately took all those present, including Bartl, into custody and searched other rooms.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

<comment><USER6> Wow, great translation! I could only find one meaning-distorting error:

Translation: "This is obviously the only reason why the German investigators took such massive action against the association." (which reads very nearly like an editorial stance, not like dry newsprint, which is much more the actual tone of the German article)

The actual meaning is more along the lines of: "This seems to be the only reason why the German investigators took such massive action against the association." (but "seems" might be to weak, however, "obvious" is definitely too strong).

Word for word this translation of "obvious" is correct, but the meaning this turn of phrase takes in journalistic writing in German is slightly different: It's more along the lines of "this is so far we know now the only obvious explanation for this, we couldn't find out about any other reason".

It works as a sort of disclaimer, cautioning the reader that there could be as of yet unknown other factors involved, but at least those other factors aren't anything obvious.

(Slight meaning distorting error, but interpretable with context "A call to the prosecution" should be "A call of the prosecution". The difficulty is here that the German text could be interpreted both ways and in German it's the context that determines the meaning.)

Also, the last paragraph is missing:

In a very short time it became clear what the detainees had already explained on the spot, according to their own statements: The chemicals were standard accessories for 3D printing and etching of circuit boards. Also, an object from the 3D printer, in the form of a bomb, landed in a bag of evidence. The corresponding inscription lists the offence "causing an explosive explosion". The item can be seen in action here on YouTube.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

<comment><USER7> yes, "apparently" is a better fit than "obviously"

<comment><USER6> Ah, yeah, that's the best translation. Didn't think of that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Eltoo: A Simplified Update Mechanism for Lightning and Off-Chain Contracts - <AUTHOR> https://blockstream.com/2018/04/30/eltoo-next-lightning.html <comment><USER2> This is an interesting case study in why it's so hard to program on Bitcoin.

This proposal involves a small change to the payment channel incentive structure to make it so that a node submitting old state (in an attempt to cheat, or possibly by accident) is not punished.

However, this is be implemented by a series of hacks so convoluted that the hacks must be described in their own research paper. One of the most puzzling things about this type of blogging about bitcoin programming is that they never make much of a distinction between the hacks and the simple underlying concepts that the hacks implement.

For reference, here's a description of payment channels without any implementation details: [http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment- channels/](http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/)

</comment><comment><USER3> > One such multiparty off-chain contract is the channel factories presented by > Burchert et al. as a scalable way to fund any number of payment channels on > top of a single on-chain transaction and to rebalance or reallocate them > dynamically without ever touching the blockchain.

Is this their solution to "the routing problem" of Lightning?

> Before we can implement eltoo, we need a minor change to Bitcoin: the > introduction of the SIGHASH_NOINPUT flag for signatures.

Some argue it's "not bitcoin" to create a blockchain without signatures since the original whitepaper described a "Bitcoin" as a chain of digital signatures.

<comment><USER4> > Is this their solution to "the routing problem" of Lightning?

No. This is a mechanism for updating the balances in payment channels.

Participants in a payment channel lock up a shared balance in an on-chain 2-of-2 multisig output. They then exchange transactions off-chain that update the share of ownership of the funds locked by the on-chain output. When the participants want to close the channel they both sign a final update transaction and submit it to the blockchain.

Eltoo has a few nice UX advantages over the existing state update mechanism:

1\. No more "toxic waste". The existing mechanism is designed in such a way that if I submit an old update transaction to the blockchain (e.g. one where I had a larger share of funds than the current balance) the other participant in the channel can take all the money in the channel (including my share of the funds). While this provides security, there is also some risk, e.g. if my lightning node crashes and I have to restore from backup I may have outdated information and broadcasting that information to the chain would result in me losing money. As the security of eltoo is not based on punishment, this issue is resolved.

2\. No need to decide on fees ahead of time. The existing mechanism requires users to set the fees for the closing transaction at the time that they open the channel. As the fees required to submit a transaction to the blockchain are quite unpredictable, and payment channels are long lived, this can result in significant fee overpayment "just in case"

> Some argue it's "not bitcoin" to create a blockchain without signatures > since the original whitepaper described a "Bitcoin" as a chain of digital > signatures.

The transactions still have signatures, this flag just modified which parts of the transaction are signed. Bitcoin already has many such flags:

[https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#signature-hash- types](https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#signature-hash-types)</comment></comment>


How Technology Is Destroying Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs <comment><USER3> I can't help but wonder if the decoupling is a result of the money printing that Greenspan started around that same time (2000-2001ish) and that Bernanke has continued.

You're looking at replacing a $50k/year worker with a system that costs $1mm in NRE and negligible ongoing cost. If interest rates are at 8% you're a fool. With interest rates at 3% you're a genius.

[http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FEDFUNDS](http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FEDFUNDS)

<comment><USER4> It's the result of the Fed's policies.

They kicked us into two massive recessions in a mere 10 years, two stock market crashes, and one giant real estate crash, destroying trillions in wealth through malinvestment. If the Fed severely distorts the economy - <USER2> it has been doing frequently (currently 'printing' 6% of the entire economy) - it leads Jane to appraise her financial surroundings incorrectly, inevitably leading to disaster.

Try figuring out a way to get minimum wage to keep up with even just 3% to 4% real annual inflation over 40 years. Impossible.

Try figuring out how to get Americans to make sound financial decisions with 3.x% mortgage rates. Impossible.

Try figuring out which stocks to buy, when everything is going up courtesy of easy money policies. When will the party stop? Only Bernanke & Co. know. It's not earnings growth driving the stock market, it's pure PE expansion.

Try keeping the savings rate up, when your dollar loses value every day that you attempt to hold onto it. So you spend it today when it has maximum purchasing power. Wait 10 years and it'll lose half of its purchasing power. The Fed spurs an anti-savings culture through inflation. Ever since Nixon unlocked the dollar from the gold standard, the savings rate has been in a death spiral, to the point where now America has an extreme negative savings rate when all debt is accounted for (and nearly everything priced in dollars has soared in price since 1971; from health care to education to commodities to stocks to housing, meanwhile the real standard of living is lower than it was 50 years ago).

At a time when America is creating more oil than nearly any other time in its history, oil prices are at $106+. See this USA today story from just a decade ago by comparison:

[http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2003-...](http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2003-12-31-oil- prices-2003_x.htm)

"Instability in oil producing nations like Iraq, Venezuela and Nigeria helped boost U.S. crude oil prices to an average of $31 a barrel in 2003, the highest yearly average in more than 20 years, energy experts said Wednesday."

Global commodities are of course priced in dollars primarily. As the Fed debases the dollar, the input cost of goods soars.

The Fed's policies affect every single aspect of the US and global economy. Their policies are extreme by any US historical measure, and the consequences are guaranteed to be extreme accordingly.

<comment><USER5> Your post is full of assertions, but empty of evidence. I disagree with almost every hyberbolic point you make:

-There is NOT consensus that the Fed's creation of money caused the last two crashes. In fact, market monetarists argue the last recession was exacerbated by how LITTLE the Fed did. [http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?page_id=3443](http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?page_id=3443)

-Inflation is not 3%-4%. It has been very low since 2008. [http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=2008&ye...](http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=2008&year2=2013)

-Stock market gains have not been due to pure PE expansion. This is demonstrably untrue. [http://www.multpl.com/](http://www.multpl.com/)

-Inflation does not, by itself, hurt savings rates. A world with 1% inflation and 1% interest should be identical to a world with 2% inflation and 2% interest (this is not strictly true, but the simple toy model is a good thought experiment to see where your reasoning fails.)

-American oil production has almost NO impact on global prices. In fact, causation works the other way around. High oil prices make more American oil fields profitable, and drives production. (Even OPEC has very little market power. Saudi Arabia arguably has the most market power.)

-The Fed was more aggressive than the central banks of most countries in the last recession (compare to BoE or ECB or whoever). The USA has recovered better than most other countries with passive central banks. There's not consensus, but many economists believe there is a causal connection. Your theory does not fit these data.

<comment><USER3> I think the argument goes like this:

1\. There's a crash (cause unspecified)

2\. The Fed creates money to smooth things out

3\. This new money eventually gets things going, but it comes at a price: the way it gets things going isn't sustainable

4\. Once people (traders/investors/general public) realize it is/was unsustainable, they begin to unwind everything

5\. This unwinding is a new crash (cause specified)

6\. The Fed creates money to smooth things out

7\. Rinse and repeat

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Brynjolfsson and McAfee are not Luddites.

No, but you try to force that argument by calling your article "How Technology Is _Destroying_ Jobs". I don't see any citation in the article doing the same. They just matter-of-factly state what is happening and it's the author of the article trying to somehow convert that into a Luddite case.

I find it fascinating how this kind of sentiment is often uttered by Americans. Other western countries have long accepted the fact that we should better put the rewards of technological progress into a social system that at least takes care of the people who cannot anymore contribute to the workforce. In the US, the delusion of full employment for everyone as part of the fight against evil socialism seems strong as ever. I suppose it works as a good scare.

<comment><USER7> One can think that technology destroys jobs, but still not be a Luddite because they support the change that technology brings.

An example would be people who are looking forward to the technological singularity which will make all work obsolete, and usher in a utopia.

<comment><USER6> No, I think "destroy" carries a clearly negative connotation.

The people cited in the article talk about jobs becoming obsolete. The author talks about jobs being destroyed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't that the idea? At least in one sense, technology must destroy jobs, or at least it should. In theory, it frees us from drudgery and allows us to go on to do more productive tasks. In practice it isn't always so easy to find employment those who are displaced by machinery.

<comment><USER9> "allows us to go on to do more productive tasks" The idea only works as long as there are sufficient number of jobs in "more productive tasks". If jobs are destroyed but there is no place to deploy the resources gained by the productivity increase, then there is not much value, and there are many negative side effects.

<comment><USER10> That's true as long as people need jobs in order to have a decent life. Eventually, the productivity gains from technology should produce enough gain to allow for a guaranteed basic income [1] sufficient to allow displaced workers to effectively retire if they wish. You'll only need to find a job if you want more than the GBI can provide.

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

<comment><USER11> Question is, at what point do you implement that? Any politician who stands up and says "We have given up on lowering unemployment, time to pay everyone to stay at home" is not going to be popular until the problem is of such a magnitude that you cannot ignore it.

Even in such a situation, what incentive besides purely humanitarian does an individual with a job have to sacrifice income for those who do not?

Currently you can justify subsidising a non productive person in the hopes that they will be productive later. What happens if that is highly unlikely and instead they devote their time to breeding more people who will also likely become unproductive and require subsidy?

<comment><USER12> We know that intrinisically motivated people will aspire to do, even if there isn't a need for them too. If we provide for both the intrinsic and extrinsic, we effectively cover 100% of motivated individuals. By making it easy for those with passion to act on it we do all of society a favor. As for the non- productive members of society, it's not a huge issue because they don't need to be productive to live. This means that your right to live is unconditional. Excuse my corniness, but after all, why should there be conditions on your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

<comment><USER11> What about the jobs that still need doing but people are not generally highly intrinsically motivated to do relative to other things they _could_ be doing if they had free choice?

For example if you gave software developers a bunch of cash and told them to work on whatever they wanted, how many would go and build video games or invent esoteric programming languages (fun but not important) vs how many would want to build (or worse maintain) a system for the administration of taxes (less fun but very important). Hell, how many would even develop software at all vs just take up some other activity of even less value.

Therefor the best way to motivate these people is to extrinsic motivate them with money. However what happens if most of that money is taken as taxation and spent on people who sit around and do whatever they want all day? Do they still have the same incentive to do the boring but necessary jobs?

<comment><USER10> > What about the jobs that still need doing but people are not generally > highly intrinsically motivated to do relative to other things they could be > doing if they had free choice?

There will be luxuries some people want that are beyond the reach of those who live just on the guaranteed basic income. Those people will do the jobs that have not yet been replaced by technology to earn the extra money they need.

For instance, some people might want more living space. Some might want fancier cars than those people on the GBI can afford. Some might fancy a boat. Some might want a high end home entertainment system. Some might like expensive food and drink.

<comment><USER11> If you want to earn money to have these luxuries , why pay to those who don't give you anything in return (nor have the potential to)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No. Mechanical farm equipment arguably replaced way more jobs than any modern technological movement. And just look at the human potential it unlocked.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure you read the article. What timescale are you making your assertions from, and what numbers are we talking about?

<comment><USER14> Have you read the article? The article actually says:

>In 1900, 41 percent of Americans worked in agriculture; by 2000, it was only 2 percent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mechanical farm equipment existed before 1900, and I also don't know whether the gp is referring to the US, globally, or what. That's why I'm asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Obviously technology creates more jobs than it destroys over time, because the nations who have developed the most technologies tend to have the lowest unemployment rates.

<comment><USER16> Technology in one country can most definitely affect employment rates in another. One example from history is when the Industrial Revolution in England destroyed a large textile cottage industry in India.

<comment><USER17> This seems to be the flaw in the data cited:

"By 2011, a significant gap appears between the two lines, showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation"

It seems the data set is US jobs only. In our new flat world, how many jobs did US-based companies create in other countries that previously were created in the US?

Not sure the US middle class has been destroyed, more that it has moved to other countries.

<comment><USER18> Well, yeah. We've been helping develop the middle classes in china, india, and other such south east asian, central american, and african countries for a couple to a few decades now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I should hope so. Jobs aren't a goal. Jobs blow.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if these shifts disproportionately affect the less intelligent. By definition, half the population is below average. If the jobs being destroyed are low skill, and they are replaced with jobs in math/science/tech, people with learning disabilities may not be able to get a job at all in the future.

</comment><comment><USER21> Whatever the merits of socialism vs. capitalism in the past, doesn't this sort of progress portend an eventual move toward the former? And is this necessarily a bad thing - when machines do more of the work, shouldn't humans be at leisure - or free to pursue formerly "frivolous" careers in arts, literature, sport, etc. while being supported by a strong social safety net?

<comment><USER22> well, no, socialism is a system where a central authority decides the allocation of resources. The guiding philosophy is "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" \- and what constitutes "ability" and what constitutes "need" become very important questions, and whoever gets to make those decisions wields incredible power.

Free-marketism, by contrast, exerts no moral judgement on the needs (or wants) of individuals nor who can provide by what ability, and lets the individuals work those parameters out in a decentralized fashion. If one wants to pursue "frivolous" careers, that's fine, so long as the needs that require the effort of other people (materiel, supply, whatever) can be met through free enterprise.

Capitalism is a different beast altogether, where "the accumulation of capital" is in and of itself considered a moral virtue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano is a very interesting read on just this, albeit fictional and taken to the extreme, but it has some interesting insights.

</comment><comment><USER24> No, there are unlimited amounts of jobs, technology frees people to do jobs that previously weren't done. Read Armen Alchian.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does it always has to be the same in all cases?

The results of technology advancement are various and complicated. It's not all white and black.

</comment><comment><USER26> It doesn't destroy jobs, it obviates the ones it replaces (and sometimes creates new ones). Which is a good thing, right? It makes it so that no one has to do those jobs to receive the same productivity. Thus freeing up our time for either leisure or something else productive.

Also it should be noted that technology is a double edged sword and can also make things worse. An example: a big farming corporation decides to improve profits by using new chemicals to preserve their food longer. Of course this may seem like a productive decision on paper, but it could actually be unproductive to society as a whole if the chemical has subtle but negative side effects that take a bigger toll.

<comment><USER27> Unfortunately a lack of jobs that people are being paid for also creates a wealth disparity. You can't buy food if you don't have a job

We need a stronger social safety net because there's just not going to be enough wealth-producing activity for humans to do that we will all be able to live on that alone.

If you're right we are headed towards a society where we are collectively resting on the backs of the robots who are there to do our most mundane chores. If the robots produce enough economic output then, assuming our society restructures itself to distribute that economic output proportionally, we should be able to arrange it so that we lift everyone out of poverty.

Or maybe the robots will decide they no longer need us and that will be that. It could go either way, really.

<comment><USER26> The problem you are talking about arises from the result of competition in the markets. If someone has a cheaper production because of better technology, then the market as a whole will use their business (as the buyer has the freedom to choose who they buy from). This is fair, consensual, and it makes sense to help society gain more value as a whole. Limiting this in any way (as many regulations unfortunately do) is a restriction of people's free choice and thus an aggressive and unethical act. But of course the negative part comes in when the person who used to work in that market has now lost their job and thus their income. Well that is like crying about the slow gazelle who got eaten by the cheetah. It's nature and unfortunately you can't artificially make everybody win, or nature would push back.

Some solutions include higher taxes to make an assured living wage. This is possible today but not if everyone keeps raising the standard of what a "living" wage is. If we could produce a guaranteed living wage, we could get rid of minimum wage and thus give people a ladder to compete in markets they otherwise wouldn't be able to get experience/train in. This would be because you could literally work for free, so the company could only see a benefit to hiring you (rather than being stymied by minimum wage).

The wealth disparity is normal, look at any statistical data like humans and you will see outliers. Thus you will see people with ideas that are a million times more productive than others. Don't worry, if someone else gains wealth and you didn't lose, it does indirectly benefit you. Don't be jealous bro.

<comment><USER27> Not being jealous just wondering how people who don't own or make robots will be able to make a living wage off of their labor in the coming decades. There's just not going to be enough work for them to do once we have unlimited, skilled, cheap robots.

the only solution i see without massive inequality is one where we can distribute wealth. it's not jealousy. it will be a technological utopia if executed correctly - nobody will have to work, we all get to do whatever we want all day.

there will always be inequality, but if we live in a just society it will be one where the least well off person is still reasonably well off. a guaranteed living wage might do that - and that's exactly what i'm talking about, actually. but there might be enough breathing room in the future to give _more_ than a living wage.

obviously it's a little pie in the sky at this point, but in 10 years it won't seem so much.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Async-std: an async port of the Rust standard library - <AUTHOR> https://async.rs/blog/announcing-async-std/# <comment><USER2> I must be dumb, because every time I dive into async/await, I feel like I reach an epiphany about how it works, and how to use it. Then a week later I read about it again and totally lost all understanding.

What do I gain if I have code like this [0], which has a bunch of `.await?` in sequence?

I know .await != join_thread(), but doesn't execution of the current scope of code halt while it waits for the future we are `.await`-ing to complete?

I know this allows the executor to go poll other futures. But if we haven't explicitly spawned more futures concurrently, via something like task::spawn() or thread::spawn(), then there's nothing else the cpu can possible do in our process?

[0] [https://github.com/async-rs/async- std/blob/master/examples/t...](https://github.com/async-rs/async- std/blob/master/examples/tcp-client.rs)

<comment><USER3> async/await are coroutines and continuations (bear with me).

Here is synchronous code:

        result = server.getStuff()
        print(result)

Here is synchronous code, that tries to be asynchronous:

        server.getStuff(lambda result: print(result))

Once server.getStuff returns, the callback passed to it is called with the result.

Here is the same code with async/await:

        result = await server.getStuff()
        print(result)

Internally, the compiler rewrites it to (roughly) the second form. That's called a continuation.

That's pretty much it.

A more involved example.

Synchronous code:

        result = server.getStuff()
        second = server.getMoreStuff(result+1)
        print(result)

Synchronous code that tries to be asynchronous:

        server.getStuff(
            lambda result: server.getMoreStuff(
              result+1,
              lambda result2: print(result2)
        ))

A lot of JS code used to look like this hideous monstrosity.

Async/await version:

        result = await server.getStuff()
        second = await server.getMoreStuff(result+1)
        print(result)

Remember again, that it is basically transformed by the compiler into the second form.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Helpful. My question is, in this example:

        result = await server.getStuff()
        second = await server.getMoreStuff(result+1)
        print(result)

`await getStuff()` MUST terminate before `await getMoreStuff() ` begins. So this chunk alone is analagous to synchronous code, unless we're in the middle of a spawned task, and there are other spawned tasks in the executor that can be picked up.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the idea is that the thread that is executing this piece of code can "steal" other work when it is awaiting on either of those methods.

Frankly, in the case of sequential flow like the above, I would rather write

      result = server.getStuff()
      second = server.getMoreStuff(result+1)
      print(result)

and have the runtime _automatically_ perform work-stealing for me. No need for awaits. They just litter the code. This is what Go does.

<comment><USER5> In Go you need to manually tell the runtime to spawn a goroutine with the `go` keyword, which also «litter» the code…

<comment><USER6> Except in practice, go keyword is used much more coarsly and sparingly because you can group all the block of function calls under one big go call. With async, every single function has to be flagged as beeing asynchronous and be called differently ( although maybe some modern languages have a way to group all the await calls ?)

<comment><USER5> That's funny how gophers can at the same time defend the «explicitness» of the if-based error handling, and be annoyed to have syntactic annotations for the yield points for coroutines (because that's exactly what `await` is, versus the yield points silently added by the go compiler everywhere so the runtime can perform its scheduling).

<comment><USER6> not sure who you're refering to.. i certainly don't like many aspects of the go language. goroutines and the "go" keyword isn't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This remind me of the blog post "What Color is Your Function?"[0], they had to create a different library that is the same as the standard library but with async functions.

I thought Rust had other, better ways to create non-blocking code so I don't understand why to use async instead.

[0] [https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color- is-...](https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-your- function/)

<comment><USER8> None of the 5 points in that article about callbacks in 2015 node.js apply to async in Rust. The Rust people spent years agonizing over their version of async and applied a lot of lessons learned from implementations in other languages.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676641)

It's trivial to turn async into sync in Rust. You can use ".poll", "executor::block_on", et cetera.

Turning sync into async is harder in any language. Even Go with it's easy threading. That's a good argument to make async the default in libraries in Rust, but since async isn't stable yet, that would have been hard to do 5 years ago.

<comment><USER9> > that would have been hard to do 5 years ago.

Five years ago Rust still had green threads. Literally every standard library I/O function was async, and the awaits were always written for you with no effort.

Its literally taken five years to get back to an alpha thats not as good, and we'll still have to wait for a new ecosystem to built on top of it. I know not everyone writes socket servers and so forcing the old model on everyone probably doesn't make sense long-term, but I still have to shake my head at comments like this.

[https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/230](https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/230)

<comment><USER10> > Its literally taken five years to get back to an alpha thats not as good

The new I/O system is better in several ways. First, as you acknowledged, not everyone writes servers that need high scalability. M:N has no benefit for those users, and it severely complicates FFI. Second, async is faster than M:N because it compiles to a state machine: you don't have a bunch of big stacks around.

<comment><USER9> Yes, its better in several ways, but its also worse in several ways. It will take another five years to build a robust ecosystem for servers, and you'll still have to be careful not to import the wrong library or std module and accidentally block your scheduler. Plus the extra noise of .await? everywhere.

I'm not saying it was the wrong decision five years ago, but it definitely was a _choice_ and there could have been a different one. I was responding to someone who said async wasn't an option five years ago.

<comment><USER10> M:N was slower than 1:1 in Rust. That's why it was removed. The problems you cite are problems of async/await, but they can be addressed by just using 1:1 threads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> lachlan-sneff There is further discussion about this library on the rust subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/cr85pp/announcing_asy...](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/cr85pp/announcing_asyncstd_beta_an_async_port_of_the/)

</comment><comment><USER11> It looks great.

But it's odd that they do not cite Tokio. I know this isn't an academic paper, but come on have some professional curtesy and discuss the contributions made in prior art.

<comment><USER12> Apologies if I'm misunderstanding things here, I'm just now getting back into Rust after a couple of years of not using it. Did Tokio really inspire this library that much?

<comment> rough-sea Absolutely. The whole std::future interface has been borne out of years of careful attempts to actually make these abstractions work in real life. async- std didn't come from a vacuum. It's a incremental improvement on tokio that benefits from being able to greenfield on top of the newly changed and standardized future trait.

Carl Lerche and the rest of the Tokio contributors deserve a citation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In case anyone else was curious how you create nonblocking file I/O, it appears to use threads.

I am curious if the number of threads is unbounded, or if they have a bounded set but accept deadlocks, or if there is a third option other than those two that I am unaware of.

<comment><USER14> io_uring grew support for buffered IO in recent kernels, so we should have widespread support for this in userspace circa 2025

<comment><USER15> Except that io_uring is threads running in kernel.

There is no true async I/O on most (if not all) current platforms - it's all threads, either in user space or in kernel space. Sometimes even deliberately, for example polling disk will give better latency compared to waiting for IRQ.

<comment><USER14> AFAIK Windows handles truly asynchronous buffered IO in some circumstances, but I feel once you're past the point of managing the abstraction or caring about its internal details, it doesn't really matter if there is a tiny chunk of dedicated stack in the kernel, that's a problem for the OS

<comment><USER16> IOCP uses a pool of quasi-kernel threads (i.e. schedulable entity with a contiguous stack for storing state) with polling, very much like how io_uring and other incarnations of AIO in the Linux kernel work; and for that matter it's not unlike how purely user space AIO implementations work. The benefit of IOCP and io_uring is there's one less buffer copying operation. The biggest benefit of IOCP, really, is that it's a blackbox that you can depend on, and one that everybody is expected to depend upon. So it can be whatever you want it to be ;)

<comment><USER17> > OCP uses a pool of quasi-kernel threads

Is there any further documentation for it? I would have expected there doesn't need to be a real stack. Only state-machines for all the IO entities (like sockets) which get advanced whenever an outside event (e.g. interrupt) happens and which then signal the IO completion towards userspace. Didn't expect that it's necessary to keep stacks around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The documentation is great, and the API documentation includes examples for many functions. This is really appreciable. Thank you for that!

<comment><USER19> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How does this relate to Tokio [0]? Why should I choose this new library instead?

[0] [https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio](https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio)

<comment><USER21> If all you needed from tokio was tokio::net, then async-std could work as a replacement for raw TCP stuff. If you needed the higher-level stuff from tokio like codecs then you'd not have those.

Also, anything from the tokio ecosystem like hyper would not work with async- std.

Edit: I originally had a first paragraph which was wrong. I mistakenly thought std::net::TcpListener is supposed to impl Read / Write.

<comment><USER19> > async-std has the equivalent of std::net::TcpListener, however it does not > appear to actually impl AsyncRead / AsyncWrite. So as of now you can't do > anything with it. TcpStream does impl them, at least.

It does implement AsyncRead and Write, because anything with `Read` and `Write` implements it: [https://docs.rs/async- std/0.99.3/async_std/io/trait.Read.htm...](https://docs.rs/async- std/0.99.3/async_std/io/trait.Read.html#implementors) (that's sadly a little backwards by rustdoc)

The problem is that tokio has their _own_ versions of the AsyncRead and Write traits.

Hyper can best be used with `async_std` through `surf`: [https://github.com/rustasync/surf](https://github.com/rustasync/surf)

<comment><USER21> >It does implement AsyncRead and Write, because anything with `Read` and `Write` implements it: [https://docs.rs/async- std/0.99.3/async_std/io/trait.Read.htm...](https://docs.rs/async- std/0.99.3/async_std/io/trait.Read.html#implementors) (that's sadly a little backwards by rustdoc)

>impl<T: AsyncRead + Unpin + ?Sized> Read for T {

That's saying that anything that impls futures::AsyncRead impls async_std::io::Read. async_std::net::TcpListener does not impl AsyncRead. (Compare with TcpStream and File which do.)

>Hyper can best be used with `async_std` through `surf`: [https://github.com/rustasync/surf](https://github.com/rustasync/surf)

Sure. You also don't _need_ surf since you can directly use futures's compat executor wrapper around tokio's. The point is that you can't use stuff like hyper without the tokio executor being involved.

<comment><USER19> I'm being dumb, too I misread my owns library API :(. In any case, it's 2:30am here, I'll just had to bed :D.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anything Rust gets the post to number 1 spot. What makes Rust special that other programming languages don't enjoy ?

<comment><USER23> Rust is very ambitious and unusually successful at reaching its ambitions. It's efficient like C/C++, but safer. It's modern like Go, but more expressive and open to metaprogramming. It's often as readable as a scripting language, but doesn't depend on garbage collection. It's a young rising star originating from a great company.

<comment><USER24> > It's often as readable as a scripting language IMO only if you're using > doing simple things the standard library provides utilities for. i haven't > found it to be very readable once code grows in complexity, but i'm also not > very experienced.

<comment><USER23> I agree that libraries have a major impact on the perceived readability of a programming language. As an example, it used to be quite messy to issue HTTP requests from Python, but then the Requests library appeared, and suddenly it became much easier to write readable client libraries. Rust code will become more readable as its libraries mature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does it balance tasks across CPU cores?

The thing I like in Go is that I don't have to worry about that, it's all automatic.

<comment><USER19> It does the scheduling for you. That's why all Futures put onto task through `async_std::task` must be `Send`. That's Rust parlance for "can be safely migrated between threads".

It's not Go, but we know what people like about Go. <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great library, well done. In case anyone was wondering this is not a [no_std] crate even though it can be used as a replacement for std library calls. I guess it (obviously) can't be since it interfaces with the operating system so much.

<comment><USER19> Project member here.

It exports stdlib types (like io::Error) where appropriate so that libraries working with these can stay compatible, so `no_std` is not really an option.

The underlying library (async-task) is essentially core + liballoc, just no one made the effort to spell that out, yet.

<comment><USER26> Would there be any benefit to making a `no_std` option? I can't think of a situation you would want async std and have including std be a problem.

<comment><USER9> The benefit would be you would be making it impossible to wreck your scheduler by calling sync I/O functions in an async task.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't rely on that. Next step, someone binds to a blocking database driver and you are back at square 1 again. This is definitely not rigorous.

I would love to see a lint for known-blocking constructs in async contexts, though: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust- clippy/issues/4377](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/4377)

Also, having explicit imports and types that name collide helps there for once.

<comment><USER9> How would you have a blocking database library that doesn't use the standard library?

<comment><USER19> Any code in Rust is free to bind to FFI and sockets can be gained through `libc`.

<comment><USER9> I didn't literally mean "How is that possible?"

I meant: is that a real thing? Is there a database binding out on crates.io that uses no_std ?

<comment><USER10> SQLite is C code and any Rust usage of it will not play nicely with M:N. This is just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> very cool! Now we need a dpdk equivalent to really blow away expectations people have of what is fast</comment>


Show HN: New App For Music, Movie, and App Discovery - <AUTHOR>

So I'm this guy:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2318859
That was great. Then this happened:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2463593
Honestly, I was kind of expecting that sooner or later. So I hunkered down and produced the next generation of "Killer Apps", a new app called "Eureka," which also allows you to find music and movies:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eureka-music-movies-apps/id448766791?mt=8
It is semi-beta, and I would very much appreciate feedback from the HN community. Please keep it constructive, but don't pull any punches!
Thanks, Joe <comment><USER2> Wow, you have a real story before launching Eureka.

I can't really judge the app itself cause i don't have an iPhone, but from a UI perspective- it looks below par. Maybe its time you get a designer on your team? Which is where i might be of assistance...

Are you still running this alone?

<comment><USER3> You should put your portfolio link in your user page. I found a link by viewing your comments, but that'll get hidden if you post more. Looks like nice work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The interface felt a bit jerky to me (on an iPhone 3GS) when swiping from one piece of content to the next.

It's also hard to tell where the edges of controls are because there are no lines to separate them. Album song lists are an example of this. In trying to swipe from one album to the next I end up scrolling the song list by accident. If there isn't enough room on screen maybe separate the content details from the screenshot/album cover screen.

I did like the stumble upon content concept of your app though. It might be good to have a filter for people who are interested only in finding apps or songs but not the other.

Good luck on your new app and keep improving it! Jason Fuerstenberg

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! In fact there is a filter (the far left tab), but perhaps that needs to be made more obvious, or there should be a better introduction in the app.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, I didn't notice the filter. If/when you update the app I'll be glad to usability test it again. Just let me know! (email@example.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The icon is pretty nice. Reminds me of the Front Room screen or whatever it is on the Mac. Glad you fired that other joker who did your icons.

I had problems (probably not you) installing it directly from the phone. I got the usual "Terms and Conditions have changed!" but when I clicked agree it gave me a weird session timeout error and dropped me back to the app store.</comment>


Is cancer a mitochondrial disease? - <AUTHOR> https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2017/10/01/is-cancer-a-mitochondrial-disease/ <comment><USER2> This piece opens strong, wanders in the darkness, then has a strong conclusion:

> Damaged mitochondria can also cause cancer even when their DNA is intact, > and Seyfried (after Warburg) makes a strong case that mitochondrial damage > is the root cause of cancer. Inflammation is probably the single worst > source of mitochondrial damage. Do we need one more reason to minimize > inflammation?

<comment><USER3> How does damaged mitochondria cause cells to divide uncontrollably?

Also wouldn't this idea suggest we should see cancer in cells with the most mitochondria? Muscles?

<comment><USER2> When the mitochondria are fermenting sugar instead of burning it, the cells don't have enough ATP to fully repair themselves.

<comment><USER3> So the mitochondria damage the cells nuclear DNA which then makes the cell divide uncontrollably?

But the experiment mentioned in the article doesn't support that? They took the damaged nuclear DNA and couldn't get a normal cell to go cancerous with it.

So I'm wondering if somehow the mitochondria is actually affecting the cells behavior and division?

<comment><USER2> Not really an expert in these matters, I'm just somewhat familiar with the theory presented in the linked article. I don't feel capable of responding to your specific questions with anything more than speculations, so I apologize for not replying more fully.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple Files For "iTunes Live" Trademark - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/09/apple-files-for-itunes-live-trademark/

<comment><USER2> "Live" is that the best they could do, copying Microsoft ?</comment>


Ask HN: How much to spend on side project, and when? - <AUTHOR> Hi there,
I have been working on my side projects in spare time.  The project is up and running, but doesn't generate any revenue (yet), and I don't think it would generate enough to quit my current job.  But still I like it - it is something I created (as sole developer) and it is something good and useful, but not too complicated.  Also, it helped me in picking up new skills that were directly useful to current job. But as I keep tweaking things here and there, I haven't spent much on marketing or getting it further polished etc.  All I am spending is my time and basic hosting cost.
Sometimes I think I should fund my project more, but sometimes I think it is not yet there.
My question to other HN members working on side projects:  How much do you spend monthly?  When did you switch from doing everything internally to outsourcing part of it, or marketing?  What's that trigger or tipping point?
Thanks <comment><USER2> You need a real, honest-to-goodness launch to get enough feedback and traffic to tell you anything. If you just made it and no one's visiting, then (depending on who your target market is) find someone who can submit it to Product Hunt, and post it here under Show HN. That may take some money to make a presentable, launchable thing (esp. with a brand, a domain, a landing page design, etc.), but it shouldn't run you that much, and if you have taste and patience, you can do it all yourself.

If it's still not making any money after that launch, and you have sufficient feedback to change it to a point where it could, do that. If the feedback isn't promising at all, I'd kill it. But you need to get this thing in front of people who would pay for it first. Do that however you possibly can, and be creative. Those first 100 users aren't easy to get.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.</comment></comment>


Edward Snowden: we may never spot space aliens thanks to encryption - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/19/edward-snowden-aliens-encryption-neil-degrasse-tyson-podcast <comment><USER2> Unless the aliens have a quantum computer, in which case they'd have no trouble decrypting the messages.</comment>


Why Rio diving pool turned GREEN is finally revealed as games bosses come clean - <AUTHOR> http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/other-sports/rio-olympics-diving-pool-turned-8630651 <comment><USER2> On the one hand, it's disappointing to see how this is all going down, it's a bit of a shame for Rio...

On the other, considering the litigious nature of the IOC and just how overtly controlling they are over the cities they come into, I don't mind seeing them get a bit of a black eye.</comment>