Another Unsolicited HN Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.uxbeginner.com/hacker-news-uxui-redesign-process/ <comment><USER2> My main issue with HN is that the comments link is a pain on touch devices. This redesign seems to make that link even smaller. Much of the value of HN lies in the amazing comments, so I would prefer that link to get almost equal prominence to the actual article. I also don't understand how almost unreadably pale article titles make the page more usable.

To me this redesign is another case of making it prettier rather than more usable.

<comment><USER3> You could probably cook up a userscript that swaps the comments url and the article url, and changes the 'comments' link text to 'article'. (This also takes care of the opening sentence of many comments ('did you read the article?').

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like that you've been relatively conservative with the redesign and have clearly relied on established convention so that existing users can carry over their existing experience into the new UI.

I think it could use another fine-grained pass over each UI element to evaluate how important it might be to the user and whether the contrast/size/color/prominence of the element matches your expected prioritization.

For example, the numbers along the side are large and high-contrast, but are pretty trivial for people browsing articles (ordering is meaningful, but specific numbering isn't). On the other hand, commenting is a big part of HN, but is a very small and low-contrast part of the mockup, with no visual indication of how to access the comments.

I'd also have another pass at the color choices - white on orange and mid-gray on mid-gray can be pretty difficult to scan.

Great thinking on the filtering and top-level organization, though. There's some good stuff in there

</comment><comment><USER5> The article titles are way too light imo.

<comment><USER6> +1. LC;DR > [http://www.contrastrebellion.com/](http://www.contrastrebellion.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've dealt with more than a few designers handling solicited corporate website redesigns and one of the most critical issues I see back are "That looks really great, but where is our logo?" Yours looks like a fine example of a pretty design but you've trampled all over their brand in favour of your own palette and taste. Different Y, different spacing, different colours. You've designed something for a different company.

That #FFF-on-#F60 Y is their brand. It's what they have all over their offices, on their business cards, on their main website... Unless the client is looking to rebrand (for which I can see no reason), you need to use their existing trademarks. Branding is as important to the client as UX is to the user.

(And on a UX tack, there's a severe lack of contrast in various places. You appear to have faded out the most important text on the entire page (the content) with no explanation why. Telling me "Because I want it to fade in on mouseover" is a fireable offence.)

<comment><USER8> >Telling me "Because I want it to fade in on mouseover" is a fireable offence.

How about, *because it creates incentive to try out the highlight effect and subsequently click, until the novelty wears of, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> kudos to you and great job being brave and sharing your work. takes courage to be that vulnerable.

having said that, it's not working for me.

1\. the article list is now 100px or so lower on the page because the top bar is so large. the top bar is more readable and usable, but i can't remember the last time i clicked it, so i'd prefer to get to the articles more. 2\. the numbers for each article (1,2,3,4) are the most prominent element, followed by the upvote. the article title is demoted. 3\. the create account button is a tab. that doesn't seem right to me. 4\. the bottom orange footer now is a heavy-weight element that draws my eyes from the articles.

overall i feel like the articles ought to be the most important element and this takes away from the articles.

but, keep it up.

<comment><USER10> On point 1. I hope you appreciate your angle is pretty oldschool and would beg to strongly disagree. I have read a lot of HN commenters over the past few years commenting on similar designs/redesigns that seem to share your viewpoint and desire for 'information density' and not needing to scroll, but I do suspect your opinion is basically that of a nerdish minority that is going the way of the dinosaur.

Scrolling is cheap.

A fat top-bar is not a negative, because you can't read 20 article titles at once and scrolling costs you nothing. I'd love to see a study on this but I suspect the number of article headlines we can cope with in one 'scan'(?) and get something useful from is around 5-10 max? Twitter on my phone shows me about 5 tweets at a time. Does it feel like a bad user experience to me? Hell no.

>> 4\. the bottom orange footer now is a heavy-weight element that draws my eyes from the articles. [...] overall i feel like the articles ought to be the most important element and this takes away from the articles.

Sorry that is nonsense, we humans are not that easily distracted and know to look for content in the 'content area' between the header and footer area particularly when they're so clearly differentianted (content = white bit, header/footer = orange bit). My eyes go straight for the articles on every website with a coloured header/footer ever.

I have other issues with this redesign but namely that it still feels significantly inferior to the Georgify Chrome extension [1] that has been around for years now and just by virtue of good typography and minimal design is still kicking everyone of these redesign's respective asses.

That said good job and great post, it's definitely a big step up from the original and I love your header :)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi)

<comment><USER11> > I do suspect your opinion is basically that of a nerdish minority

I am sorry, but it appears you might have some confusion about the demographics and the target demographics. The name, for instance, might give you a promising hint, provided you do little digging about the word 'hacker'. At times it means something that it does not appear to mean.

<comment><USER10> Well of course, I didn't mean it quite that literally and am a bit sad to see I got downvoted but I guess I did make the point poorly (and mildy aggressively now I read it back).

I should probably just have linked to somewhere the argument has been made before [1].

I'm a nerd and I vastly prefer large type & generous amounts of whitespace over cramming lots of titles on one screen so it saddens me whenever I hear someone authoritatively state the 'information density' argument.

[1] [http://uxmyths.com/post/654047943/myth-people-dont- scroll](http://uxmyths.com/post/654047943/myth-people-dont-scroll)

<comment><USER9> you put an awful lot of words in my mouth. i didn't mention scrolling. re- read.

the top bar is too large vertically without enough value. readability improves a bit, but the sheer prominence takes away from the discoverability of the first article title.

i didn't mention type size or whitespace. i also like large type and generous amounts of whitespace.

i think you're just looking to argue for the sake of argument.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I'm not looking for an argument and I didn't mean to put words in your mouth. My original post was badly written and overly argumentative, I think I was in a bad mood and a couple of your points just set off my usual UX'y triggers, I apologise.

You're right that I made the leap from your dislike of the top nav/footer to a dislike of scrolling/desire for 'information density'. Those things are often associated but I was wrong to make that leap. Again, my bad.

I disagree with your points that the header and footer are distracting and detract from the articles, that's it and that's all my original post should have said.

<comment><USER9> no worries at all. we all get grumpy sometimes, myself definitely included. enjoy your weekend :)

<comment><USER10> Cool, same to you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Things being ugly doesn't mean bad design. There is no such thing as objectively good design because all designed objects live in a certain context. Hacker news is purposefully unattractive and the register forms are outdated because the site wants to attract a certain type of person. If you're perturbed by the visual design then the community would probably benefit from not having you since the entire focus of the site is on the discussion that ideas generate. In that vein, it's ridiculous that legibility was not a key focus of the redesign since the singular mode of interaction with the site is through text. Why is the text contrast so poor?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is one of the more pleasant unsolicited redesigns of HN, because it keeps a lot of the subtlety that makes HN an easy site to return to constantly: a prioritization of the headlines and a deemphasis on username and points (the position of a story is more than enough of an indicator of the story's current popularity). The bigger upvote arrows are nice, though I guess one could argue that ease-of-upvoting is not a priority.

My biggest complaint is the relatively massive header. I disagree that Search needs to be prioritized...in a news site, even the New York Times, I am hardly ever using the site search...if a news site is doing its primary job well (providing fresh links), then I almost never have the time or desire to search the archives. I'd say 50 to 80 percent of my search bar usage is mainly to complain about how many times a currently-trending story has been posted in the past. The search bar should stay at the bottom of the site, allowing the header to be a little more compact than it is in the OP's proposal.

<comment><USER14> I'd actually disagree on the search not needing to be prioritized point. I think search could actually be a very powerful feature of HN allowing for readers to gain a deeper insight into various topics. Imagine if someone was reading about Rust for the first time (hey, there's even a "Rust vs Go" kind of post on the front page right now!) and wanted to learn a bit more about it by seeing what people have said about it in the past on HN. Said user could easily see the search bar at the top of the page, and use the (hypothetically good) search engine to discover articles about lifetimes, green vs native threads, etc. with little effort. Doing so otherwise might involve spending a decent amount of time exercising Google-fu to find the same information.

Sure, the focus of HN is still on the new content that people want to see, but it could also be a place to learn more. Or even find old posts that maybe you didn't bookmark at the time, but suddenly want to see now.

EDIT: Apologies for the triple post (if anyone saw that). I tried to submit the post three times, and two of the times went to a HN error message. I deleted the other two posts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The hard part of redesigning HN is that we're all so used to the current HN. Changing anything major becomes confusing, defeating the purpose of the redesign.

The reason I like this one is because it doesn't break the structure or functionality, but by adjusting the size/prominence of elements it becomes slightly easier to use. I'm not in love with all of it, but it holds true to the core of HN, which is disregarded by most redesigns.

That being said, using HN as it is feels like I'm in a terminal window. Designers would be reluctant to admit this, but the very functional text-heavy interface is very "hacker-like," and I adore the lack of design.

<comment><USER16> I think this is so true. Not to mention that a lot of the hackers on the site loathe sites that require javascript and will often prevent any script from executing, so the login modal might be useless to a large percentage of the HN community. The current HN design is really awesome because it only uses the most primitive of elements. It's as if, like Austen said, there's no design at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My biggest gripe is that you can't collapse threads a la Reddit.

<comment><USER3> [https://alexander.kirk.at/2011/12/06/new-feature-for-hn- coll...](https://alexander.kirk.at/2011/12/06/new-feature-for-hn-collapsible- threads/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The header buttons are too big for my taste. I prefer economy of screen space and that space should be going to articles, not buttons.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the suggestions. I consider this a user test, of sorts. The main changes I'm considering are:

\- article text readability (this bothered many people) \- header height \- colors: #FFF-on-#F60 (thanks Oliwarner)

ZEM also brings up a really interesting point about user-specific vs site-wide entries.

Aiming to do a redesign with your suggestions and do more user tests. Thanks again y'all!

</comment><comment><USER19> I like the modern look, but I actually think the UX suffers.

In your design, the focus is on the up vote arrow. I use HN for content discovery. So I think content is taking a second seat against up-voting in your design.

</comment><comment><USER20> the "frontpage" label was an excellent idea. however, the redesign didn't fix what i feel is the primary flaw with the top bar - user-specific and site-wide entries are not distinguished. i'd redesign it as

[ frontpage | new | show | ask | jobs || new comments || my threads | my submissions | submit ]

or maybe even move the "my" stuff to the right alongside the [ username (karma) | logout ] section.

</comment><comment><USER21> I _freely_ implemented it in HTML + CSS!

[http://francisco.io/demo/hn/](http://francisco.io/demo/hn/)

</comment><comment><USER22> _Heuristics basically means "best practices,"_

heuristic: (adjective) using experience to learn and improve

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not make a Stylish theme out of it? If you haven't already done so that is.

</comment><comment><USER24> How will this design look on a mobile device and other screen sizes?

</comment><comment><USER25> What would visited and upvoted links look like?</comment>


RubyDrop - A Ruby-based Dropbox clone that uses Git as a backend - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/meltingice/RubyDrop <comment><USER2> Sounds much like SparkeShare which also uses Git as a backend but is written in C#/Mono:

<http://sparkleshare.org>

<https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare>

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool first Ruby project, for sure, but "Dropbox clone" is a stretch. That phrase does help explain the idea in a nutshell, but this is essentially a script that polls at intervals and either pulls from the remote repository, or adds, commits, and pushes from the local one.

Incidentally, when I read the source I didn't notice any conflict handling, so you might want to be careful if you intend on using it for anything where conflicts are a possibility.

<comment><USER4> "polls at intervals and either pulls from the remote repository, or adds, commits, and pushes from the local one"

What does the dropbox client do that is significantly different from this? Does dropbox do block level replication or something?

NB I use dropbox and like it, but I do like the idea of the server component being completely open.

<comment><USER5> "What does the dropbox client do that is significantly different from this?"

Using inotify (linux). Polling doesn't scale.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm looking into inotify to see how I can implement that with Ruby. Would definitely be nicer than simply polling the directory.

<comment><USER7> Try rb-inotify (linux) and rb-fsevent (os x):

<https://github.com/nex3/rb-inotify>

<https://github.com/thibaudgg/rb-fsevent>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Calling this a dropbox clone is making the same mistake all those before dropbox did (and their competitors continue to make).

Dropbox wins because of its seamless it-just-works OS integration. File syncing is the easy part!

</comment><comment><USER9> May be it's too bold to call this project as Dropbox clone (is there native client for major OSes?)

But there is a market for open source filesharing application for sure.

<comment><USER10> Well, it's Ruby and Git, so technically yes.

<comment><USER11> Im not sure I would be that bold. Here is my take on it from reddit:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ebw1d/rubydrop_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ebw1d/rubydrop_a_rubybased_dropbox_clone_that_uses_git/c16xv97)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Syncing a couple of gig of material via git will take up lots of CPU & memory, including on the server, to deal with recompression & history, won't it?

<comment><USER6> I'm considering doing a Git/rsync hybrid, or something similar to avoid this problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For the server git configuration part, if you're wondering how, Gitosis might be helpful: [http://www.hackido.com/2010/01/installing-git-on-server- ubun...](http://www.hackido.com/2010/01/installing-git-on-server-ubuntu- or.html)

<comment><USER14> Gitosis is indeed pretty good, but I've recently found better and migrated to gitolite: <https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite>

The flexibility is pretty neat. Being able to do brach-based ACL in particular is killer for some environments and larger teams.

<comment><USER13> Whoa, that is neat! Thanks for sharing this with me.</comment></comment></comment>


The Tripartite Identity Pattern (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://habitatchronicles.com/2008/10/the-tripartite-identity-pattern/ <comment> phoe-krk This seems parallel to the discussion about "Let's talk about usernames" over at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16356397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16356397)

<comment><USER2> Yes, its also the second link mentioned in article

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 156 points, posted 10h ago and only 2 comments? 1st time I see a lack of discussion about a link on HN.

[https://screenshots.firefox.com/E6WSxBWmgXKtBUV3/news.ycombi...](https://screenshots.firefox.com/E6WSxBWmgXKtBUV3/news.ycombinator.com)</comment>


Forcing suspects to reveal phone passwords is unconstitutional, court says - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/forcing-suspects-to-reveal-phone-passwords-is-unconstitutional-court-says/ <comment><USER2> All we really need is a real passcode, and then a second special passcode that wipes the phone instantly if typed.

so, my normal code might be 123456, but if someone asks what my code is and I say 345678, then the phone does a data wipe that isn't obvious from the outside, and just deletes all credentials, cookies, history, documents, etc.

Is this workable?

<comment><USER3> Not a new idea. There has long been a meme going around that if you enter your ATM PIN backwards, it will let you access your bank account but silently calls the police to your location (AFAIK it's just an urban myth). False passwords have a much older history than that.

Investigators are going to take a very dim view of such events, and probably didn't get to the point of demanding access without having documented sensible reason to believe the evidence is there - and may very well have actionable proof that you destroyed evidence, which will not turn out in your favor.

<comment><USER4> My home security system has a "duress code" that will disable the alarm sound and silently alert the company. It's not the reverse of the normal one, it's a different one that can be set.

<comment><USER5> How likely are you to actually remember the code when you're under duress, though?

<comment><USER6> You could make it an easy one. Say your normal code is 5829. The panic code should be something like 1111. You'll never key it in accidentally, and people have codes like that, so it won't tip off an assailant.

<comment><USER7> the thing is, it's not the worst thing in the world if a bad person guesses it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The guy quoted at the end seems to think it's the passcode itself that would be incriminating, rather than the contents of the phone. Weird. I've seen a theory that compelling someone to disclose a password can be incriminating because it is the same as asking them to admit that they stored the data in the first place, and obviously there's a case to be made that compelling disclosure of the data on the phone could be self incriminating, but the idea that the password would be something like yesiinsidertraded4 is new to me.

Edit: I missed the part where he's a former federal prosecutor. Mystery solved.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any passwords that would be _embarrassing_ to you if they came out? Can you imagine someone that breaks the law might have an encryption password that was incriminating?

<comment><USER10> That's actually an interesting thought:

If my password is "iKilledColonelMustardWithACandlestick" \- and it's actually an incriminating fact, how does that factor into potentially self- incriminatory discovery?

<comment><USER11> This sounds too much like something Barry Zuckerkorn would come up with, so maybe not a good idea. [http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/Barry_Zuckerkorn](http://arresteddevelopment.wikia.com/wiki/Barry_Zuckerkorn)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This concerns me a little bit, actually.

I know there are folks here on HN who believe that they should have an absolute power to exclude the government at all times. I'm not one of them, though. Particularly in situations where law enforcement has obtained a lawful warrant, I think they should have a way to get that information. People do commit crimes, and the police do need to solve them.

One way to grant the police access is to somehow give them privileged access to the encryption. For me, this idea is dead on arrival. There is no way to grant privileged access to the police without dangerously weakening the encryption in general. I'm a believer that encryption, properly implemented without backdoors, creates a lot more good than bad.

So what does that leave? It leaves compelling the owner of the phone to unlock it. If the police get a warrant to search your house, you are legally required to unlock the door and let them in. It seems to me that a passcode on the phone serves exactly the same purpose.

So, my concern is that if compelling the phone owner to unlock is not an option, it will put a lot more pressure behind the idea of encryption backdoors, as the "only option" to give law enforcement the power they need to do their jobs.

<comment><USER13> Given that key escrow failed eventually, what is different today that would make backdoors possible?

<comment><USER14> There is no need for a back door. Phones are not encrypted once the user accesses them. The carriers can push and pull any files to or from the phone over the air. Some of them do not require a warrant. I was always told to never ask for one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any lawyers (or wanna be lawyers) want to chime in -- is your thumbprint protected in the same way? I can see how the 5th amendment prevents them from compelling you to reveal your passcode, but does it prevent them from grabbing your thumb and using TouchID to unlock your phone? (That, or, just using a thumbprint provided during booking or whatnot...)

<comment><USER16> From what I've read in the past, it doesn't cover your thumbprint. [1]

Thumbprints are physical, so they don't get the same protections. It's kind of like having a physical key to a physical lock. It's not self-incrimination for law enforcement to take that key and use it in the lock.

Same with writing your passcode on a piece of paper. It's no longer a matter of self-incrimination if they find that and use it.

[1]: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/virginia-judge- po...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/virginia-judge-police-can- demand-a-suspect-unlock-a-phone-with-a-fingerprint/)

</comment></comment><comment> norea-armozel I'm glad they've narrowed the conditions to compel suspects of revealing passwords. It just seems that it was too wide open for just any minor hint of suspicion was enough (sans warrant) to do these fishing expeditions. If they got reasonable suspicion then they need to get a friggin' warrant. I just don't get why law enforcement is getting so sloppy these days.

<comment><USER17> I think it's the result of the easy-going attitude of such things in the past in the effort to appear tough on crime. When they were given such lenient rules of how they approached crimes and suspects. Rules that are now being slowly taken away from them, as unconstitutional, but are still trying to operate as if they are still there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I assume there is no difference between being forced to reveal a phone password and being forced to reveal a password to some other system such as a PC, encrypted container or website?

<comment><USER19> Here's a somewhat-related quote from patio11 that I often refer back to:

> Developers have a cultural quirk where they believe that, e.g., "file > sharing is not theft" / "manipulating a URL can't be a crime" / "laws about > disclosing protected information invariably contain a public policy > exception which comports to the temperament of the dev community" are > axiomatic and thereby create an internally consistent legal system which > fails to falsify those axioms but also fails to meaningfully resemble the > legal system we actually operate in.

> This results in developers sincerely believe things like "Your Bitcoins are > unprotected by the legal system because nobody can steal a number", which is > a proposition that is absurd to the legal system as "JavaScript is not a > programming language" is to a programmer.

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367312))

In other words, no. There is—and should be—nothing special about computers.

<comment><USER20> File sharing is _not_ theft, and there's unambiguous legal precedent to that effect. Really bad example. Stop conflating two laws that mean different things.

Nothing special about computers? Okay. "Persons, papers, and effects" no longer means emails, computer files, or anything other than physical, tangible documents that existed when that law was drafted. I really don't think that's the world you want to live in, or the argument you really want to be making.

The fact that the legal system thinks there's "nothing special about computers" is the cause of a great deal of difficulties that should not exist in a sane world. This is a world with new concepts that _did not exist_ when a lot of our laws were written, and it doesn't make much sense to presuppose that there is or even can be a 1:1 mapping between the tangible and the not, all of the time.

<comment><USER19> > Stop conflating two laws that mean different things.

Can you point out where I did?

<comment><USER20> You're being intentionally obtuse here since it's literally the first words of my post. You did quote someone else and pretty much endorsed it, but that quote contains a pernicious falsehood.

<comment><USER19> Pretty sure he is making a wider point about techie attitudes to the legal system, nothing actually specific about file sharing out of context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Forcing the suspect to input the password still looks legal, according to the last paragraph. They just can't force you to tell them the password.

</comment><comment><USER22> There's a more elegant solution: the government should be allowed to compel you to disclose your password if probable cause exists to search your device _but_ only subject to an evidentiary privilege that prevents your knowledge of the correct password from itself being admitted as evidence to prosecute you.

<comment><USER23> And what happens if you don't know the password or have forgotten it? I have old encrypted files and lost devices that have passwords I no longer remember.

<comment><USER24> That's what judges are for, right? They'll review the evidence and judge if you're likely to actually have forgotten the password, or are just saying so. If you're traveling with a phone or laptop that appears to have been in-use by you, and don't know the password to it, chances are you're not being truthful. Otherwise, you'd have a plausible alibi story (I just bought this phone off Craigslist; here see the email and the ad).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think this ruling marks the recognition that the information processing performed by the devices we carry has, in a legal sense, "merged" with the thoughts we carry in our heads, and are now worthy of the same fifth amendment protections.

I'm in favor, but for some reason this also makes me a little worried.

</comment><comment><USER26> If backdoors legislation is passed, would there be any economic effect? Personally, I wouldn't be interested in doing anything more than "basic" stuff with my phone and would not feel compelled to upgrade phones so soon.

As for computing devices, aside from proprietary systems like Windows and Macs, do we not have reliable options that allow us to use uncompromised encryption?

Whats to stop app developers for embedding encryption packages or would they be forced to use compromised solutions?

Can you stop a person from building a secure line over a compromised medium, if that is even doable?

<comment><USER27> This is the reason (along with probably constitutional issues) I'm not terribly concerned about most of this sort of talk [0]. It seems to me that it'd be a temporary problem, mostly with proprietary systems, that would be resolved in a few years. Sort of like the encryption export issues in the 90s, and the OpenSSH project being hosted in Canada.

[0] Ok, I'm not concerned about it actually happening. The part of it that bothers me is the otherwise seemingly-sane individuals who _agree_ with these backdoors. It's very difficult to discuss the issue with some of them because their interest in it is largely driven by emotions, specifically a desire for security and justice/revenge/control of criminal/terrorists/whatevers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why they should really need your password?. They can ask the telephone company for a saved copy of your incoming and outcoming calls in the last year so they have already (or can trace) the 90% of the interesting data in your phone.

This seems also protect the policy from the temptation of doing stupid things that could lead to future lawsuits against them (like leaking photos of you drunken in a party, of from your girlfriend naked brushing her teeth and so...)

</comment><comment><USER29> This seems reasonable. Anybody want to play internet lawyer to explain why you can't/shouldn't be compelled to unlock a fingerprint protected device?

<comment><USER30> The analogy I've often heard is that it's like a safe. Presented with the proper warrants, you can't refuse to open a safe on the basis of the 5th ammendment.

<comment><USER31> But what if the safe had documents in it which was written in a language that only you know? Is there any circumstances where you could be compelled to translate them?

<comment><USER32> Some bookkepers for crime organizations have from time to time used their own notation to keep the books. Typically, they have not been sophisticated enough to hide malfeasance, in addition, the shadiness of it is often enough evidence of wrongdoing, or at least leads to forensic accounting which reveals tax evasion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can someone comment on what level of court this decision was made at, and how final this decision is likely to be (i.e. how many more appeals are possible at this point)?

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm glad when the courts uphold the U.S. Constitution in a meaningful way. I have faith America will sort its shit out.

But we shouldn't have to rely on the law alone. We should be able to rely on technology to make it impossible to compel people to give up their most intimidate data. Computing devices have become an extension of the mind and no one on earth has a right to the contents of your mind.

</comment><comment><USER35> bet is not unconstitutional to force someone to give up pw of PC though? :/

<comment><USER36> From my limited understanding, the difference is the government having a reasonable level of certainty that the device in question contains the evidence they're looking for.

The analogy I would use is a locked closet full of file boxes. If the government is certain that the files relating to a specific crime are in the closet, then you can be compelled to assist them in opening your closet or face an obstruction of justice charge. However if the police suspect you of a crime and suspect that you're the type of person who would keep the evidence in your locked closet that is not enough compel you to open the closet so the police can check up on their hunch.

In this case, I read it as the men are suspected of insider trading and the government believes that they would have used their cell phones to communicate about the deal and the phones contain evidence of such. There is no actual evidence that the phones were used and so they're not obstructing the police in obtaining evidence the police know is there, but rather preventing the police from poking around to see if the evidence exists at all.

<comment><USER37> I find it odd that they aren't just able to get the data from the carriers. The only reason it'd be on the device but not the carrier/Facebook/Twitter/etc servers is if they encrypted the messages, but they would probably mention this if it were the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So is Stingray and what the TSA does to you at the airport but I guess we are never going to address that.

<comment><USER3> Here's hoping we're making progress toward ending TSA's fishing expedition. Given the concerns about mass murder being preventable via a security check, at least establishing that TSA's job is ONLY to watch for explosives et al, and may not act on discovery of other harmless (to the flight & passengers) contraband.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The police will stop forcing suspects and will start inducing cooperation.

</comment><comment><USER40> When Apple said they can't turn over data the FBI said that means adorable children will die. I wonder what they will have to say about this?</comment>


Extreme secrecy eroding support for Obama's trade pact - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/secrecy-eroding-support-for-trade-pact-critics-say-117581.html

<comment><USER2> One question I have had since I first heard about the TPP is: why the secrecy? The TPP is meant to be a trade agreement for multiple nations, if the end goal is to make it easy to do business with other countries, why are the details so scarce, why is nobody allowed to know of its contents? We are talking about an agreement a lot of members of congress do not know anything about, but representatives from companies like General Electric do.

We should be legitimately scared of how the TPP is being handled, how its terms are being negotiated and the stasian like control that Obama and the administration seems to have over who can view the agreement in progress as well as informing the public of its contents. The reason is obvious: if the public were to know what the terms of the TPP were, they would be outraged (and rightfully so). If a bill has the power to increase the cost of medicines, enforce broken patent system protections, change copyright laws and restrict your freedoms in the real world and online, don't the public have a right to know?

How are those who are even given the opportunity to view the bill (in limited circumstance) able to back the bill and make a decision on supporting it when the government is not letting anyone take a copy back and closely inspect its contents deeper? Could it be the Obama administration and the backers of the bill do not want anyone to see what it truly contains? Limiting how people view it and when is a great way to hide the corporately sponsored additions that are littered throughout the bill.

What we have here is nothing more than a corporate power grab. You know something is fundamentally broken when we have to rely on a site like WikiLeak's to keep the public updated as to what changes have been made to a monumentally massive trade agreement.

I hope this bill is killed or as a decent compromise, has the secrecy veil lifted and the real negotiations can be done in public in a more democratic and less North Korean style manner.</comment>


Perfection is a modern heresy - awinter-py https://abe-winter.github.io/heresy/2017/09/03/perfection.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is straight from the cowboy coder's mouth. This is Philistinism, plain and simple.

> "...deliver something, anything...", no need to make it good, "teams make > things better," anyway.

No, no, and no. If you want to scale a team you have to deliver quality code.

The cowboy coder spews out code, screams "see it works!", and then moves on to produce more diarrhea for "the team" behind him to clean up, "make better"...

When one realizes they do not yet have a skill (such as producing quality code), it is tempting to scream "quality/perfection is a heresy" because this is much, much easier to say than the labor it takes to develop the skill.

> It's hard to see more than a week out because anything that takes more than > a week to build involves R&D.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. MOST of what we do as practitioners (for those that have been doing it for at least some time) is NOT novel. Estimation is a skill. Estimates can be extremely accurate for those of us that have developed that skill.

It is much easier to say "estimation is worthless" when it is a skill that you have not yet developed. Because it is only developed through (often frustrating) practice.

Record the time it takes to do your work. Notice the patterns of problems that you face and how often they repeat themselves.

\---

Perfection per se has its hazards but in no way should that truth get us off the hook from developing ourselves and doing our work well.

This post is nothing but dangerous to the nascent programmer-practitioner as it attempts to lull them away from what is possible and the work it takes to get there.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. \-- Vince Lombardi

<comment><USER2> Some new programmers need the advice to spend longer improving their code before sharing it; some need the opposite advice.

Unfortunately, some people who dispense advice pick one of those "directions" and argue strongly for it, rather than trying to describe how to recognise when you've got the balance right.

<comment><USER3> An excellent essay exploring the implications of the point you made:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are- bravery...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery- debates/)

<comment><USER4> > way more libertarian than can possibly be healthy

How is such a condition even possible? This seems to be equivalent to describing, say, a libc, as "way more bug-free than can possibly be healthy".

EDIT: there is no way that someone could be combing through days-old posts just to downvote something within an hour of being posted. >:|

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe this works in the short term, but if your policy is always to "deliver something, anything", you'll find it harder and harder to deliver anything, and more and more bugs appearing when you do. You need to understand the meaning of the code to successfully change it. Code written following this "deliver anything" policy will tend to have unclear, inconsistent, or flat-out nonexistent meaning. Further changes written like this will keep eroding the meaning until you're left with a program that can only be understood in terms of what happens when you run it.

You can never be confident making changes to a program like this, because you don't have a coherent understanding of how each change will affect the system as a whole: all you know is how it will change the behavior when the system is run in a particular way. You don't have to be a perfectionist to understand this!

<comment><USER6> > Code written following this "deliver anything" policy will tend to have > unclear, inconsistent, or flat-out nonexistent meaning.

Funnily enough, "quick & dirty" code also often seems to ignore obvious easy solutions to any given problem and instead pursuits more cryptic/unmaintainable ones.

That's the thing that bothers me the most when I'm encountering that sort of thing: It isn't just "a bit ugly" \- more often than not it's hacked together using methods that merely _almost_ work when there's a perfectly viable option that has been there since the 70s. And - on top of that - it usually even _locks you in_ on those horrible decisions.

Example: You have to configure a piece of software. The configuration is highly critical and must be maintainable and synchronizable between systems.

There are tools that put their entire configuration in a database and sell it as a feature. To sum up:

\- You can't properly version said database

\- You can't _diff_ said database

\- You can't _grep_ said database

\- Reading the config takes ages if you can't use a different shoddy tool

\- Writing it manually is nigh on impossible

\- Errors get very obscure since you have to provide tables and IDs as references

...then why the hell aren't we just using text files for that? You could even insert the text verbatim into a table record and be better off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Trite and worthless. I've never yet seen a project that got perfect (or attempted to do so and ever shipped or delivered) and it is almost never a goal.

The tug of war is more often between putting unfinished things into production and some random deadline set by a person who knows nothing about the required amount of work to have a correct result. (Much less decent or maintainable.) Not negotiable or adjustable too.

Even the sc(r)um approach of cutting features has limitations. At some point the customer will just be unhappy.

<comment><USER8> It's just a blog post about what he has observed as a common problem with teams falling behind. I think it's a little much to call it worthless.

Excessive focus on unimportant details is a real problem. Everybody probably naturally focuses either too much on details or too little, and this person recently ran into some teams that focused on them too much, preferring to polish features the customer didn't care about rather than finishing the product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I went through my toolmaker apprenticeship a long time ago, the first rule that our master hammered into our brains was "Not as accurate as possible, but as accurate as required".

The tool didn't work any better if the accuracy was better than specified, so trying to make it better was considered a waste of time.

It helped that the required accuracy was usually part of the specification, while software quality is mostly a subjective thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think most of what he says is correct, but it doesn't seem to address the actual problem I run into. The problem I see with my group's projects is not that we're trying to make it perfect. That almost never happens. Instead, management wants us to "just get it done," and "stop wasting time planning," and we end up with something that doesn't work well and is hard to maintain. Where a few days of pre-planning would have pointed out some areas where we were likely to get stuck and given us enough foresight to think up a better (but not perfect) architecture that we could implement in the time allotted. It still wouldn't be perfect, but it would be good instead of bad, which is what we end up shipping usually.

<comment><USER11> What I've found is that those days of pre-planning can be hit or miss. Yes, you might uncover a design flaw or missed requirement that would have set you off in the wrong direction. However, a prototype implementation is much more likely to uncover those same flaws, and probably also a few that you never would have found without building a prototype. I've found the prototype approach leads to a far higher likelihood of success. I think the real challenge with it is getting management to understand what is a prototype and what is a finished product, the danger being that you ship the prototype.

Of course, this is all highly dependent of the nature of your work and length of development cycles. But if you're shipping in weeks, I'd wager you should be planning for hours at a time, not days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is one of those conversations that has been going on for decades (if not centuries or millennia). If your life involves making something in private, then putting it out there for other people to see/buy/whatever, every such project requires you to decide when its done and ready for the world.

Getting it out there sooner can be appealing if time is a factor. Spending extra time perfecting it is appealing if time is not a factor. It's just two poles between which you set a cutoff point, and in team efforts everyone will not only have different ideas about whether time or quality is more important, but they will have different perceptions about what it even means to be closer to one pole.

You're always compromising something in engineering, no matter which pole exerts a stronger pull on you. Putting a flawed product out early might kill the product; you should've put the development time cutoff point closer to the 'perfection' pole.

On the other hand, spending extra weeks or months or years polishing something that ends up not being not quite what anyone wanted is also bad, because if you had just gotten something out there sooner, you could've spent the same amount of time iterating on it in response to feedback. Lots of extra time spent on something often also translates into getting locked into technical choices that can be more difficult to back out of later if necessary. So there's definitely something to be said for putting a simpler and less- polished product out sooner to get feedback and test your initial assumptions vs. reality.

I think these conversations never cease in part because so many people who argue about this stuff are treating it as a binary choice. They're not picking a cutoff point between two poles, they're picking a pole and going all in on it. In reality, they see different sets of pros and cons and weight them differently and see risk differently. The solution is better communication between people so that there is at least a shared set of known pros and cons. People might still not agree, but they can at least have the same conversation when weighing compromises.

People who get into binary thinking patterns about situations which no one person fully grasps are being rational in their own way; they just don't understand that they are compromising something else. In my experience, people rarely see things in black and white once they understand how the opposing side views the situation. Both sides are rational, they just have disjoints areas of knowledge and thus priorities.

</comment><comment><USER13> > People talk about executive functioning like it's a general thing, but I'm > just as helpless as my nephew when digging into a new codebase or project. > Spending all your energy on details means having no attention left over to > plan. Each problem you solve becomes an all-consuming distraction.

This.

</comment><comment><USER14> Write an imperfect foundational library, and watch everything built on top of it crumble down at some point.

Perfection has its uses.

<comment><USER15> I don't think that's true. For example, it doesn't get much more foundational than glibc and that isn't perfect[1]. There's definitely a level of quality than needs to be reached, but that's some way short of perfection. Sometimes it's more useful to move forwards despite problems than to wait for them to be fixed.

[1] [https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__ope...](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&no_redirect=1&order=Importance&product=glibc&query_format=specific)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing to consider is that different types of projects have different "thresholds " of "good enough." This is also highly dependent on the available competition to your product. At this point, unless there is some fantastic new application, anything intended for use by "ordinary consumers" better be nearly perfect to even have a chance.

I've observed with user interface design that there is often a stark threshold between "usable " and "unusable", and that it takes a perfectionist mindset to reach it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, while I don't think perfectionism is always a bad thing and releasing 'any old thing' as quickly as possible it's always a good idea, I definitely see where he's coming from. There's a balance you have to strike here between 'done quickly' and 'done perfectly', and pushing towards either end can doom your project.

I mean, look at Duke Nukem Forever. The game spent 15 years in development because the creators were never happy with it, constantly felt it needed to be better than the competition and always fretted about what engine might be the 'best possible choice' for the title.

That wasted millions of dollars, years of people's lives and all manner of resources for a game that would have been better released after three or four years with a couple of sequels down the line.

And lots of non game examples exist there too. I'm sure you can name amazing systems that took so in development due to 'doing everything properly no matter the cost' that their nimbler competitors ate them for lunch.

At the same time, you can also likely remember many examples where products got released without enough care and attention put into the coding site (or quality control in general) and it just slaughtered their reputation and long term popularity.

It's a fine line you have to wander, and one that can sink a product or service if you go too far off track.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm fairly certain the lunar landing required perhaps not perfection but pretty damn close planning.

Modern heresy is applying anecdotal solutions to situations as learnings for all problems.

<comment> awinter-py well, yes and no. The apollo program operated on a tick-tock schedule where they did progressively harder missions. I interpret this as a series of proof- of-concept deliverables which allowed the team to develop expertise.

Then later they could define & hit their tolerances for orbital mechanics, fuel budgets, system redundancy.

Same deal with faraday / maxwell / einstein. The experimenter (faraday) measured & applied new phenomena, then maxwell came up with general laws, then einstein figured out their implications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Good enough" is often very subjective.

</comment><comment><USER20> The merits of the advice aside, the foundation of his argument and the headline itself are wrong. What about Platonism? And the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis needs to die.

I guess this isn't meant to be a serious work of scholarship anyway, with footnotes like, "For the life of me I can't remember where I read this."

</comment><comment><USER21> There still needs to be a clear understanding of what 'done' is.

By my reading the old definition of 'perfect' is "fulfills the important criteria of being done".

For a boat that meant "didn't sink" (so done is like completed, while perfect is 'completed and useful').

</comment><comment><USER22> If everything is always changing, then the perfect happens only one moment in time and the next moment the perfect is gone. Secondly, you can only influence things to perfection and when they hit perfect, you got lucky. You cannot make it happen. With design, there must be some way to be objective to evaluate a design. If there is no objective, then how can you establish, know and recognize what is perfect?

A witty saying proves nothing -- Voltaire.</comment>


A Farewell Ahoy — Thanks For Everything, TechCrunch (Jason Kincaid leaving) - <AUTHOR> http://jasonkincaid.net/post/18195375464/a-farewell-ahoy-thanks-for-everything-techcrunch

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this here, I'm a big fan of Hacker News.

By the way, I'll have some free time (at least for the next few weeks), so if any HN folks have any questions related to PR, feel free to shoot me a note (email is in my profile).

<comment><USER3> I very much enjoyed TC Cribs. Best of luck to you in your future endeavors!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Remember people, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

<comment><USER5> OK. TechCrunch is not one of the absolute worst websites ever to grace the internet, its employees are not the dregs of our industry, and contemplating the opportunities available to those who worked on it definitely does not give me a god damn ulcer. Under no circumstances is the world a worse place in every single way for its existence.

<comment><USER4> Since there's no such thing as bad publicity, even (not) describing their problems benefits them.

<comment><USER6> You just created a game where noone can win</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Appropriate Intern Hiring for start up - <AUTHOR>

With a limited budget for our start up we contemplating hiring interns.  This would allow us to have free labor while also providing real world experience to perspective students.  What is appropriate for the kind of work to let them do?  What is appropriate where it benefits both parties and doesn't take advantage? <comment><USER2> I don't believe it's legal for a for-profit organization to hire interns in the US without paying them[1]. Obviously that might not apply in other countries.

Anyway, the work you give an intern would depend on the skills and maturity of the person in question. Some interns are going to be unreliable in some way.

When I was an intern I did everything a regular employee would have done, except front-line customer contact (my employer didn't want clients realizing the developer working their project was part-time).

[1] <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> In such an earl stage in a starup with extremely limited funding, it would be hard to consider our non existent product a for profit venture. I think there is a balance where both the intern and us could benefit. They get the experience, and a chance to prove themselves. If they proof themselves and the venture is successful they could later become full time. Does this sound feasible?

<comment><USER2> Depending on your embryonic product and where you are geographically, you might be able to find someone excellent. You up your chances if building your product helps someone build a portfolio (especially open source). Offering some equity would be good too, but you'd have to very carefully balance the amount of ownership versus the candidates skill.

My email is in my profile. Get in touch if you want to talk more. I might know someone who might be willing to donate some time, if the project is right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We are in the same situation. Though illegal I see many for-profit businesses advertising unpaid intern positions, and I am sure they get hundreds of replies, especially University students.

Between the difficulty in finding a job, and the fact that many students are completely supported by their parents - they can afford, and are eager to work for free in exchange for valuable experience/foot in the door/recommendations.</comment>


Watch 5 Hours of Airplane Takeoffs in 30 Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/airplane-balet-5-hours-of-takeoffs-in-30-seconds

<comment><USER2> The more interesting video was the crosswind landing one at the bottom of the page. Really incredible!

<comment><USER3> If you want to see some more, check out the world famous approach at Kai Tak (Hong Kong), now out of use.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtnL4KYVtDE>

<comment><USER4> The migration from Kai Tak to Chek Lap Kok is also a story of its own. All the staff and equipment were moved in a few hours from one to another while some of the planes scheduled to land on the new one were already mid-air.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft Research had a neat system that could automatically create these sort of time-compressed videos without overlapping interesting areas. The suggested use case was reviewing surveillance videos. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the demo they had.

</comment><comment><USER6> The rudder deflection on the cross-wind one is the most interesting. The landings is just a lot of ILS approaches so not much variance, although you can see the auto-pilot compensation on the LHR approaches, which is kind of cool.

Cross wind landings are fun once you get used to looking at the runway from the side window and getting tossed around in a Cessna like a kite.

<comment><USER7> _Cross wind landings are fun once you get used to looking at the runway from the side window and getting tossed around in a Cessna like a kite._

Happens in larger planes (as noted in other posts) as well. Flying into Colorado Springs is always an adventure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That photo is a photoshop; some planes wouldn't be able to take off at those angles.

<comment><USER9> I'm also suspicious of the video: won't planes on localizer approaches all be flying the runway centerline? I just don't see the opportunity for as much horizontal deviation as the video shows. (Though I guess the video is taken pretty far away from the airport since the landing gears aren't down. Maybe we're watching departures instead of "landings" as the video title suggests?)

<comment><USER10> Not really. Approach != landing. Those are visual conditions, most airplanes we landing on CAT I (or visual) precision system. By the time the airplanes were so low no auto pilot was on, actually.

Looks normal (I used to fly for a living)

<comment><USER9> I agree that approach != landing, but the title of the video is "landing".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome video. The little plane slowly following the mass of huge, fast planes makes me giggle.

</comment><comment><USER12> just read it in the news some minutes ago: <http://avherald.com/h?article=459fa8f6></comment>


China's plan to build the longest underwater tunnel on the planet - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/103187/china-plan-to-build-bohai-undersea-tunnel/

<comment><USER2> What's crazy about it? I resent that headline. Doing big things should be applauded. Good on them.

You want crazy? America binding itself hand and foot with its bullshit Chicago School economic idealogy, that's crazy. It is absolute frigging nonsense and will be the ruin of the country. Now watch everyone else eat its breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Note: This tunnel would "cost" china less than one month of the USA's "quantitative easing". For whatever "cost" means to a government that can print its own money. The hilarious thing is, the USA can't pump that money into infrastructure projects because of their stupid, stupid political aversion to a misunderstood fear of SOCIALISM! So they have to funnel everything through the banks. China doesn't give a shit, pumps money straight into infrastructure. At the end of the day, China has the infrastructure, the USA has what? Some banker's bonuses and another thousand foreclosed houses. So what were you saying about "crazy"?

<comment><USER3> First, "crazy" isn't automatically a negative term. It can even be seen as positive. Apple used the word in a ad campaign[1] early in Steve Job's[2] return.

As to the infrastructure, it really has nothing to do with some fear of socialism. It is very much the problem of cost s, regulatory hurdles, and (increasingly) lack of skilled workers to carry out the construction. Court costs are the biggest killer. Every group is going to bring a lawsuit in any big infrastructure project. China doesn't have to worry about that[3].

For all the talk, if high speed rail was $1 million per mile and we had no lawsuits, we would have the things all over the place.

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

2) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syhEFKuX5yI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syhEFKuX5yI)

3) sometimes this hurts more than helps when problems arise in the project

<comment><USER4> > It is very much the problem of ...and (increasingly) lack of skilled workers > to carry out the construction.

I don't think a major construction project anywhere else in the world exclusively uses homegrown labour and technology. Are you implying that the US can't/won't hire german/dutch/japanese/chinese engineers for infrastructure projects?

When the whole world is your labour market, lack of skilled labour can't be an excuse.

<comment><USER3> Engineers do not build infrastructure projects. They design them and supervise. I am talking about the people who can actually do welding, plumbing, construction, etc.

Its not exactly easy to get foreign workers into the US to do vocational work. Projects around the oil fields in ND are delayed or cancelled because of a lack of workers. Heck, the oil companies are currently recruiting in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sigh, its sad to see the technology stuff getting side swiped in the comments by ideological rhetoric.

A 76 mile tunnel, under water, is an ambitious effort. Just like tunneling through a mountain in Switzerland [1] was an ambitious effort.

What these projects do is advance the knowledge we have of how to build tunnels (which since we don't do them all that often is very precious knowledge). The notion of having it be a covered trench tunnel like Boston's Big Dig is interesting although at the depths they are talking about it might be interesting to make a semi-floating tube type tunnel. Either way, taking on the challenge is intrinsically interesting to people who are amazed by very large infrastructure projects.

[1] [http://news.discovery.com/tech/worlds-largest-tunnel- drilled...](http://news.discovery.com/tech/worlds-largest-tunnel-drilled- under-swiss-alps.htm)

<comment><USER6> _Sigh, its sad to see the technology stuff getting side swiped in the comments by ideological rhetoric._

Seriously. I mean, I'm personally very glad to see NSA-gate, _& c_ getting discussed here, but the incessant sniping, relevant or not — hell, _informed_ or not — is really starting to sour my experience of HN.

<comment><USER2> I do hope you weren't talking about my comment. I would not like to think I was contributing to this perceived decline in HN standards.

I wrote what I did because I took a kind of offence at the assumptions baked into the article. I felt large parts of it were concerned with a kind of condescending, "tut-tut" economic opinion - look at what these crazy chinese are wasting their money on! And this opinion seemed to be rooted in what I consider to be a profoundly flawed economic theory, which I wanted to raise questions about.

I'm sorry I derailed the discussion about this interesting project, though. I've been through the Seikan tunnel a number of times and it's an absolute wonder of engineering (do you know there are 2 stations inside?). But I couldn't let the article's smug little swipes at those wacky Chinamen go unchallenged. Perhaps, for the good of the community, I (and everyone else) should have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A tunnel 76 mi long is "crazy"? Is this the first Chinese infrastructure project the writer has heard about?

108 Chinese Infrastructure Projects: [http://www.businessinsider.com/108-giant-chinese- infrastruct...](http://www.businessinsider.com/108-giant-chinese- infrastructure-projects-that-are-reshaping-the-world-2011-12?op=1)

There are a couple of projects at the end that are 10X the cost of this tunnel.

$200 Billion (5x the cost of this project) spent in 2012 on roads: [http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/world/2013/05/23/china- inf...](http://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/world/2013/05/23/china- infrastructure.fortune/2.html)

<comment><USER8> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel)

it's only 2x as long as the chunnel. this isn't mind-boggling stuff here, it's just that everyone hates china/chinese people and it generates a ton of traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One country invests $USD 42 Billion for infrastructure that will last decades, the other spends that much for a few months of an ill-defined war and spying on its own people.

Which one is the USA and which one is China? Depends which century you're talking about I guess.

</comment><comment><USER10> We'll see if this works as well as previous infrastructure projects in China.

"Liu Zhijun, China's ex-railway minister, sentenced to death for corruption"

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/liu-zhijun- sente...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/liu-zhijun-sentenced- death-corruption)

"China's Bridge Collapse: Infrastructure Boom Raises Safety Questions"

[http://world.time.com/2012/08/27/bridge-collapse-in-china- ra...](http://world.time.com/2012/08/27/bridge-collapse-in-china-raises- questions-about-safety-of-countrys-road-construction-boom/)

"China failed to heed rail safety warnings"

[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bbd56722-b78c-11e0-b95d-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bbd56722-b78c-11e0-b95d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Ys75lSrX)

"Grieving Chinese Parents Protest School Collapse"

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/asia/17china.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/asia/17china.html)

About the specific proposed project mentioned in the link kindly submitted here, other news reports

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/11/us-china-tunnel- id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/11/us-china-tunnel- idUSBRE96A0EK20130711)

mention

"China announced plans in 1994 to build the tunnel, at a cost of $10 billion, and set to be completed before 2010. But more than 20 years on, the project remains stuck in the planning stage, the website said, without elaborating."

<comment><USER11> Luckily the United States have no infrastructure problems.

<comment><USER12> tokenadult isn't saying the US is perfect. He knows China better than most. In China, these kinds of projects are riddled with corruption. They're practically _for_ theft primarily, and only secondarily for whatever their stated purpose is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Curious question. How does one get proper air flow in a tunnel that long?

<comment><USER14> A tube for each direction helps a bit, as cars or trains will push air around. That certainly won't be enough, though.

The Chunnel uses the service tunnel for ventilation ([http://www.brighthubengineering.com/structural- engineering/8...](http://www.brighthubengineering.com/structural- engineering/80592-effect-of-speeding-trains-and-pressure-changes-in-the- chunnel/)) Wikipedia also claims ventilation issues were an argument to build it as a train tunnel, rather than a car one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> These tunnel boring machines are one of humanities greatest achievements.

Look at their size: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hamburg.Trude.wmt.jpg](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hamburg.Trude.wmt.jpg)

It took 3 years for men and mules working 24 hours a day 6 days a week to dig a 2 mile tunnel out under Lake Michigan for Chicago's clean water in 1865. It was heralded as the 8th wonder of the world.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, this is a really interesting project. As someone who used to live next to the port in Dalian I'm really curious what the motivation of this project is.

The article mentions it'll generate $3.7b pa, but I assume a big chunk of that revenue will come at the expense of the local shipping route from Dalian to Yantai & Weihai.

From a logistical standpoint I'm scratching my head a little. There's not a huge amount of demand for a container to start in Dalian and finish in Yantai; so justifying a big time saving on that basis seems odd.

China does have a tendency to build a lot of stuff to bump up their GBP and production output to keep people employed and avoid civil unrest. Even so, I'd love to see this get built, but probably will still take the boat.

<comment><USER17> Well, I have no idea about what the true demand is for this project, but I random article I pulled up on this project claims that today the estimated traffic between the two cities is at least between 30-40k cars/day ([http://house.qingdaonews.com/content/2013-07/12/content_9853...](http://house.qingdaonews.com/content/2013-07/12/content_9853969.htm\])). Apparently, the current infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle this, so that some trucks will actually still choose to go the land route. Also, there is something called a train ferry transporting trains across the sea? I had no idea.

<comment><USER18> > _Also, there is something called a train ferry transporting trains across > the sea? I had no idea._

There are certainly such things, sometimes amazingly seamless, though I've only seen them for passenger trains. Freight trains do tend to present different tradeoffs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good to see China looking at the long term economic benefits from undertaking such projects.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've travelled (and lived!) quite a lot in Shandong province.

The area slightly west of Yantai, where the tunnel is apparently supposed to land (judging by the map in the article), is known as Penglai. This area was a small historic port near a promontary that used to be known in Chinese literature as where the eight immortals cross the ocean. This is apparently due to visual phenomena during certain weather conditions that make it appear as if there are magically appearing islands offshore. It's also claimed by some (perhaps local tourist authorities, only) to be where China's first totalitarian ruler, Qin Shi Huang, sent hundreds of young children out in to the ocean in search of his own immortality. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penglai_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penglai_City)

Unfortunately, what used to be a beautiful area (a hugely historic small fishing port, and lots of old architecture) was ... in the manner of so many historic potential tourist attractions across China ... completely flattened and then rebuilt as a "new" old town by the local authorities; complete with surrounding wall!

Some shots of the destruction: [http://pratyeka.org/penglai- destroyed/](http://pratyeka.org/penglai-destroyed/) .. I have shots from prior to the destruction, but not online. Basically it was a vibrant port with an ancient history.

Also nearby in Shandong province are some lesser known (and some relatively well known) attractions:

(1) the world soccer federation approved (great pictures of cafe-dining on a Swiss junket in the museum there!) original home of football (the Chinese invented everything, you know!), in _Linzi_.

(2) the ancient capital of _Qingzhou_ , the site of the 1996 discovery of the largest hoard of Buddhist statuary of the entire 20th century, some Buddhist carved mountain grottoes, and some of the oldest mosques in the country; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingzhou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingzhou) [MY PICK]

(3) the historical (Tang Dynasty; ~1000 years ago) route of Ennin ( _Yuanren_ ), a Japanese Buddhist monk who travelled by ship to China in search of Buddhist lore, recorded his direct observations in colloquial Chinese (perhaps to sharpen his language), and has since become one of the most important sources on the average person's lot during what is commonly considered to be China's apex era; the Tang. Interested hackers can can follow a previous retracing of his steps that I helped to facilitate: [http://pratyeka.org/ennin/](http://pratyeka.org/ennin/)

(4) the waters of _Zhang Bogo_ , a Korean Chinese pirate captain who grew to significant fame operating off the east of the peninsula at about the same time; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jang_Bogo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jang_Bogo)

(5) _Taishan_ , one of the most sacred mountains of China; particularly used by ancient emperors; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan)

(6) _Qufu_ , the home of Confucius (unversally hated by travellers for its strange, endemic hassle; but some nice sculptures in the temple and massive outdoor family mausoleum) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qufu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qufu)

(7) The Grand Canal that linked historic northern and southern China, primarily for supporting the north with the year-round agricultural produce of the south; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_%28China%29)

(8) _Dezhou_ , an otherwise uninteresting little town on the Grand Canal which was the final resting place for a Philippino muslim Sultan who came to visit the Chinese emperor and is sometimes thought to have been poisoned by the Chinese state .. possibly in retribution for not showing enough deferential respect for the emperor .. on his homeward journey; his flunkies decided to settle to protect the tomb and take local wives; thus many locals are partly descended from Phillipinos! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezhou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezhou)

(9) The former German treaty port of Qingdao, with some nice architecture and China's most famous beer; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingdao](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qingdao)

(10) The former British treaty port of Weihai, where well to do Shanghai residents took their summer holidays; this featured prominently in later wars; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weihai)

(11) Much of China's wine production. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong#Wine_industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandong#Wine_industry)

(12) The site of Fa Xian's landing in 412. Fa Xian was one of the most important of the few well recorded pilgrims in early Chinese history who went to India in search of Buddhist scriptures; thus paving the way for Buddhism's further expansion (including to Japan and Korea). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faxian)

All in all, an interesting part of China. Though largely destroyed by industrial development these days, it hides some fascinating history for the motivated.

</comment><comment><USER21> whether it will be a underwater tunnel or a bridge or a combination is still in planning stage, definitely it has lower priority than another tunnel which connect Hainan province and the mainland, so this bohaiwan one will never come into true before 2020.</comment>


On the Insecurity of Whitelists and the Future of Content Security Policy - <AUTHOR> https://research.google.com/pubs/pub45542.html <comment><USER2> I just read the paper. Good data, great analysis; there will be lessons learned from this. Some quick thoughts:

\- Header fatigue. For many people, CSP is 'yet another damn header' [1][2][3] we have to add to our websites. Although it's supposed to require careful thought and be tailored to the need of the particular resource being loaded, the typical programming model of the web separates payloads from headers, and therefore _proper_ use of CSP needs a hook in your HTTP-server that calculates the correct header based off of a bunch of rules you set ahead of time and the URL (and maybe payload) of the resource. This integration typically isn't nicely present in HTTP-servers or web frameworks, so people hardcode headers and move on. (Maybe try a meta http-equiv instead??)

\- The nonce approach proposed for CSP is essentially CSRF tokens all over again. I get _why_ it works, but it's ridiculous that the server has to quasi- cryptographically pass tokens around inside the HTML that a third-party wouldn't have... the weakness of the protocol itself is showing; there has to be a better way to communicate cross-domain resource trust.

\- Completely unrealistic thought experiment: block ALL cross-domain requests in a browser. Only allow <a> tags. Everything else has to be hosted on the same domain and proxied over. The incentives re-align; all the responsibility and blame will fall squarely on website operators to get their sites right.

[1] [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Secure_Headers_Project...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Secure_Headers_Project#tab=Headers)

[2] [https://securityheaders.io/](https://securityheaders.io/)

[3] [https://observatory.mozilla.org/](https://observatory.mozilla.org/)

<comment><USER3> Option #3.

Really? I can't use a CDN for my images?

<comment><USER4> The CDN could be on a subdomain.

<comment><USER3> Now you just have to ask what privileged relationship makes sense between kittens.tumblr.com and praise-cthulhu.tumblr.com that doesn't make sense for the rest of the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another submission was marked as "dupe" of this one. Since it has comments in it, I will link to it from here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12472671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12472671)</comment>


Show HN: untumbld - an index of the unindexed tumblrs - <AUTHOR> http://untumbld.com/

<comment><USER2> Nothing seems to load for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, apparently digital ocean isn't very good. site went down and i can't get back into it. lesson learned.

edit: should be back up now

edit2: nevermind, digital ocean acknowledged that there's an outage in their SF location. definitely dead now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> why is <script> outside of </body></comment>


A deep dive into Uranus jokes - <AUTHOR> https://electricliterature.com/a-deep-dive-into-uranus-jokes-c492f970d1f0?fbclid=IwAR0iSYlel9dsQChZbgfu43rhoGHurn6mTtRmq_CTK9MZ7C_Z_r7At0Z4u-Y <comment><USER2> In Futurama, astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all. Its new name: Urectum.

<comment><USER3> Oh, that's Good News!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Physicists and astronomers by and large pronounce it something like "urunus", with the accent on the first syllable. In addition to avoiding jokes, it feels more formal to me, probably because I've mostly heard it primarily in academic settings.

</comment><comment><USER5> Now this is a subject I can really get behind!

</comment><comment><USER6> The title of this is oddly apropos.

<comment><USER7> It's clearly deliberate.

<comment><USER8> On the nose, in a manner of speaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why wasn't it called Caelus in the first place? Was something else using that name?</comment>


My competitor made my app promo video for free - <AUTHOR> http://plumshell.com/2013/12/17/my-competitor-made-my-app-promo-video-for-free/

<comment><USER2> I thought you had to have a paid account to put up commercial videos like this on Vimeo ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Reflects well on the people who made the video and no doubt that will help them launch something new. Win/win sort of situation given the market failure of the competitor application.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice way to say "happy new year" :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Genial!</comment>


The U.S. economy is killing off the middle class - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/26/business/economy/middle-class-shrinks-further-as-more-fall-out-instead-of-climbing-up.html <comment><USER2> I have a theory that the classification of working class, middle class and upper class will disappear as we go through the 21 century. They will be replaced with two types of job:

1\. Jobs were you design things (code, graphics, marketing campaigns, franchise models, sales scripts, hedged trades, screenplays, new business models, retail store layouts, art, fashion etc) 2\. Jobs were you follow basic instructions (flipping burgers, voice-over artists, uber drivers, sales, retail manager, factory line worker, tax accountants etc)

The first category is a subset of the current middle class, but it's much smaller.

Everyone in the second category is in for a rough ride. They will be constantly competing with machines, algorithms and millions of other people who can all follow the same manual that they have. Even jobs like sales where you'd think there has to be a human involved will be gradually eroded. Human intuition will increasingly be replaced by scoring algorithms and CRM reports. Their persistence in following up with people will be replaced by lifecycle emails, tracking algorithms and chatbots. And ever more transactions will be pushed online anyway.

I also believe that we're at the point of saturating our hierarchy of needs. Some people will try to monetise things like love, acceptance and respect of others (I can already buy a Facebook girlfriend on Fiverr). But I think this will be largely un-monetisable. Meaning we're in for mass unemployment. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, so long as we drop the stigma. People can be kept warm, dry, well fed and entertained with games and box sets, with relatively little cost.

<comment><USER3> Tradespeople don't really design things, but neither do they just follow basic instructions.

<comment><USER4> Tradespeople are (economically speaking) substitute goods for buying a new good factory made. You can hire a guy to repair your washer or buy a new one.

In the future it will be even cheaper to buy new so there will be less need for repairing or custom work. As for the rest - well computers can drive, why shouldn't they be able to help your wiring your house? Or why shouldn't a single electrician (probably in India) be able to help 10 non-electricians with HoloLens wire a house?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually the exact same thing is happening in Europe. A lot of formerly well paying middle income jobs is being automated and rationalized, whereas a lot of new low level income jobs and lot less high level income jobs are being created.

Where good education formerly could save you and your family a good living, it now has to be an excellent education, where even both persons in an household have to work, to make ends meet. or in lower income jobs, in the case of Germany, people have to work two or three jobs, or depend on substitutions from the state.

It is economically speaking rational, to automate the bulk of the (middle income) jobs, as there lie the most potential savings. So without regulation this trend will continue (it will on the other hand continue even with regulation, I believe).

Sadly, I have no idea, what can be done about that.

<comment><USER6> The big difference is that in much of Western Europe, the combination of social security, healthcare, pensions, social housing, eduction costs, public transport etcetera means you don't rapidly fall out of the middle class even if you lose your job.

As a result, there's much less talk about the "decline of the middle class" in Europe. There has been no dramatic change.

<comment><USER7> Thus the greater likelihood of violent revolution, or violent suppression thereof in the United States.

Given what happened with Occupy the suppression part is well under way.

The head of the NYPD said he needed to be able to deploy a 150 strong unit with machine guns to deal with protests yesterday.

[http://nypost.com/2015/01/30/nypd-to-launch-a-beefed-up- coun...](http://nypost.com/2015/01/30/nypd-to-launch-a-beefed-up- counterterrorism-squad/)

<comment><USER8> 350.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is hyperbole. Yes, there has been some movement low 31-34, middle 45-43, high 25-22, since 2000. But also consider that 2000 was at the height of a bubble where people were artifically wealthy. I wouldn't call a couple of percentage points "killing the middle class".

Also, consider the labor participation rate. At a 36 year low. Less people are working. [http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000](http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000)

Without getting into the whole political argument about whether people should be paid by the government when they do not work, or to the extent robots or cold hearted business barons are killing jobs - or - whether these people can't work or _choose not to_ because they can get by on govt. dole (or working friends/family) - less people working will mean less income.

The survival of middle income families is a very real concern, but I don't find the click bait headlines and exaggeration of what's happening particularly helpful. We have too many areas in American life where instead of taking a sober look at the problem, we stir people up by appealing to their base fears and create narratives to scare people.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've taken a liking to James Altucher's post on LinkedIn where he also explained why the middle class is dying:

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140407131300-5858595-10-rea...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140407131300-5858595-10-reasons- you-have-to-quit-your-job-in-2014)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is happening in Asia also. A question arise as to why we work and how fast should we work? In the absence of technology, many things (e.g: ability to write this comment) are not possible. But technology is subsuming many activities where people earn just sufficient amount for the peaceful life of their families without bothering about loss of jobs or what position his country stands in the GDP/productivity rankings ...etc.

Economic press has created a race among leaderships of nations on who is developed(advanced) i.e. praiseworthy and who is not and many organizations started preaching ways to improve productivity as if productivity only is the ultimate goal of human life. Political leaders cannot dare to advocate alternatives because that is suicidal for them, their countries ...etc.

I think, technology's effect on human life is like inverted bathtub curve i.e. technology advancement to certain level is beneficial to society but beyond that we enter region where costs/losses outweigh benefits if we consider entire society. No doubt, there will be winners any time but as a whole society loses and inequality may rise causing law and order issues and impacting even winners indirectly. In that sense, technology is like level of water in river and beyond certain level, it is not good for humanity.

World is highly decentralized and innovators or cultures who tasted success in innovation won't agree that progress in certain technologies need to be stopped or efforts need to be directed towards other required activities. So technology progress always happen and jobs also gets destroyed as collateral damage.

<comment><USER12> Political leaders cannot advocate alternatives like a guaranteed income for everyone, only so long as the people fail to demand such measures.

The history of technology is a long progression of jobs that we don't have to do anymore, freeing us up to both achieve more complicated tasks, and to require fewer hours of human energy to achieve a certain level of pleasant life for everyone.

McDonalds cook, taxi driver, self driver, brick layer, so many jobs today are just on the edge of being unnecessary, and that is a great thing. Those people would be much happier, and society as a whole much safer, if we just gave all these people the money they need to live, and simply ask that they contribute a little civic participation (talk to some old people, supervise children, etc).

<comment><USER13> > Those people would be much happier, and society as a whole much safer, if we > just gave all these people the money they need to live, and simply ask...

The money they need to live? So... from cradle to grave "these people" should simply be given all the food, clothing, shelter, education, entertainment, transportation, etc. that they need and no need to earn any of it?

I assume the plan is to confiscate the money from the other people, the ones that worked for about a century investing their money into developing the technology, processes, and software to bring that level of AI into the world. Pour money into the bottom, it's spent through the system, confiscate it at the top, rinse, repeat?

This doesn't work because it turns out if you can't actually keep the money you earn, you tend not to bother earning it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see these articles a lot. They often present similar data and confirm the very long term trend. Without exception, none of the articles ever mention that humans without jobs forever, will simply die out. Humans without means to sustain themselves will simply die out. That is all. It could be different but it is not. This is where we are. And it is natural. Our parents and their parents died before us as we rose to power. Sure dying out and dying of old age aren't necessarily the same but passing your genetic code on is passing your genetic code on whether it is through a machine or a human. Humans are still much better at reproducing our code than machines but not for long. When this line is crossed the discussion will not be about dying middle classes but about massive human population loss through famine and wars. It's inevitable because no one simply gives their power away without dying. This applies to your parents. And their parents. Get ready to die and don't be a wimp about it. Your parents weren't. And neither were their parents.

</comment><comment><USER15> Gosh, if only we had some context instead of trying to push a populist narrative. Oh wait.

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q83NyGTLock/UekhmnoX4tI/AAAAAAAABc...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-q83NyGTLock/UekhmnoX4tI/AAAAAAAABc8/2DTpx4H9Rug/s1600/family+incomes.jpg)

<comment><USER13> This is a similar chart which reads quite differently...

[http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous...](http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/household- income.html?household-incomes-growth-real-annotated.gif)

Also, I think you would be better linking here, which has several versions with differnt groupings (per @r00fus' point) as well as the full discussion behind it:

[http://www.aei.org/publication/census-data-on-income- distrib...](http://www.aei.org/publication/census-data-on-income-distribution- reveal-evidence-of-rising-income-levels-for-a-rising-share-of-american- households/)

It's interesing data, but also missing the last 5 years which are crucial as this is a recent phenomenon. The 3rd chart in the series I think best shows what economists are calling the "lost decade" where we stopped making real progress in upward mobility. Add another 5 years onto those series and I think you would see we are going backwards now.

Edit: Shouldn't the top graph in my link be the same as your link? Now I'm doubting these graphs are even 'correct' (methodology aside)

<comment><USER16> The difference between the graphs are that the one linked by jusmus88 is illustrating the distribution of incomes of "families", whereas all three in the article you linked are for the distribution of incomes of "households". These are two different ways of analysing the issue that give different answers, and the differences are discussed in the article.

edit: Just to be clear, I'm not making any positive or negative statements about the article, I just wanted to help you work out what it was you had missed, and I think what I described is it.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for pointing that out! I had saved both images to my phone and flipped back and forth between them to try to understand, and all I could see changing was the data! But you are absolutely correct it's "Families" in one and "Households" in the other. Very interesting distinction...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The telling point in this article is just glanced upon - that those who stayed in middle class are covered by Medicare or welfare. That a free health care system helps buffer people against sudden shocks - and without it the hollowing out is worse.

<comment><USER13> Medicare, and dozens of other welfare programs raise the marginal tax rate in some parts of the curve up to 95% for the middle class. Since earning the money is not free, and you keep virtually none of it, working more you end up with less.

Increasing the payouts for earning less, not surprisingly, erodes the middle class. Either you are determined enough to work more to earn less and maybe in a few years come out on the other side of the chasm, or you work less and immediately benefit from it.

Check out Figure 1 (page 6) in this CBO report, and note it's worse now than when this was written;

[http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/...](http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-15-2012-MarginalTaxRates.pdf)

It's amazing how little value you actually gain from the first $60k of earnings! If you prefer a more newsy analysis;

[http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21585010-america...](http://www.economist.com/news/united- states/21585010-americas-welfare-state-not-working-nearly-well-it-should- taxing-hard-up-americans#)

<comment><USER18> The US spends a huge portion of its GDP on health care - more than anywhere else:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_%28PPP%29_per_capita)

But this sounds like politics, so ... article flagged.

<comment><USER19> The US even spends more tax money as a percentage of GDP on healthcare than Britain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, takeaway:

-Most jobs are computer-solvable, given enough time and resources.

-From a cost-benefit standpoint, people have strong incentives for automating higher-paying jobs than lower.

-People automating work and people allocating funds to automate said work will reap rewards.

-We as a whole really need to think about a world where a majority of people don't work and figure out how society works and maintains stability given those constraints. (Basic income, etc.)

-For those who haven't settled on what they want yet, they should prolly find work in something that's hard to solve by a robot (that also hopefully provides meaning and sustenance).

</comment><comment><USER21> So, uh, looking at those charts.... good? When you see low, middle, and high it's pretty clear that most of those loses are moving up to the high class. In fact the high class has grown by as much as the middle class shrunk and then some!

The issue doesn't seem to be that people are falling out of the middle class. The real issue looks like, to me, that we're successfully graduating people from middle to high but not from low to middle. The low class has shrunk a teeny bit but is basically flat.

If instead low shrunk, middle stayed flat, and high grew that's be pretty great. It'd mean everyone is moving up.

At least that's whatmy interpretation is. What do y'all think?

<comment><USER22> From the article: "Until 2000, the reason was primarily because more Americans moved up the income ladder. But since then, the reason has shifted: There is a greater share of households on the lower rungs of the economic ladder."

The graphs are 1967-2014. If you look closely you can see that the "high" group goes up until 2000, but not after. That is the point they are trying to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Once again, time to suggest Thomas Pikettys "Capital in the 21st century" as highly astute commentary on this.

</comment><comment><USER24> Any free links to the content ?

<comment><USER13> Google search for the title and click through.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> source: Brent Staples [https://twitter.com/BrentNYT/status/559796286569062400](https://twitter.com/BrentNYT/status/559796286569062400)</comment>