The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income - <AUTHOR> http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income <comment><USER2> I consider myself a left-libertarian, and I strongly support a basic income. I'm also a supporter of some amount of public health care.

In _theory_ I support the elimination of taxation and a purely volitional society, but I recognize that such a thing is likely a very long way away. What we have now is not even close, and trying to shoehorn it into that vision prematurely will not work. That kind of moral futurism should not blind us to chances to radically improve human life here and now while working pragmatically within the bounds of the political realities we have.

One also must ask the question: given that the abolition of force and fraud is a moral long term goal, what sort of society would we want to build that would be likely to evolve in that direction? I don't think crony capitalism with fascist tendencies and no social safety net seems like what you'd want. Seems like that would be more likely to regress back to feudalism... which is exactly the historical path that we seem to be on. Regression to feudalism takes us further -- _much_ further -- from that goal.

Seems to me that the precursors to a volitional libertarian state are radical reductions in violence both within and between nations, a highly educated and healthy populace that is _capable_ of taking care of itself, and the abolition of caste systems (e.g. sexism, racism, classism, guild systems, etc.). A basic income is a step in that direction.

<comment><USER3> > Seems to me that the precursors to a volitional libertarian state are > radical reductions in violence both within and between nations, a highly > educated and healthy populace that is capable of taking care of itself, and > the abolition of caste systems (e.g. sexism, racism, classism, guild > systems, etc.). A basic income is a step in that direction.

Does the libertarian within you believe that the State will accomplish this goal, without worse repercussions? Why remove the state at all if you think it can engineer society for the better in this way?

<comment><USER2> If you remove the state from a violent, fraud-ridden, still very feudal system, you will simply unveil the underlying less centralized tyranny latent in that system.

There's also a massive blind spot in most conventional libertarian thought with regard to soft power and indirect coercion. Eliminating direct coercion but leaving caste systems in place only frees those who are rich or powerful enough to evade those caste systems. The rest are consigned to poverty and oppression through manipulation instead of force.

So yes, I do think the state can play some role _at this time in history_ at uplifting the human condition and empowering the general population in ways that could -- given a lot of time -- eventually lead to a future that is better and freer in multiple ways. Or it could not. The state can't be trusted, but I also don't think we can dispense with it (yet).

Simple reductio ad absurdium: imagine actually dispensing with the US Federal Government. Most US states in the interior would establish theocratic feudal totalitarianism along Christian Reconstructionist / Dominionist lines, and the coasts and anywhere resource-rich would probably be invaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is almost self refuting - objection (2) is killer.

Immigration is probably the most important issue of our time. If we have a BI, we can't have immigration in any form remotely resembling what we have today, let alone some ideal situation where we have drastically more immigration. It's as simple as that. The cost of a BI (and the welfare state in general, really) is that millions of people are stuck in Haiti, India, Afghanistan and other desperately poor locales.

[http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/whyimmigration.pdf](http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/pdfs/whyimmigration.pdf) [http://dipeco.uniroma3.it/public/WP%20163%20Liberati%202012....](http://dipeco.uniroma3.it/public/WP%20163%20Liberati%202012.pdf)

I'm not an open borders activist. Most of the countries I mentioned are desperately poor due primarily to the people living there - any immigration policy needs to turn Haitians and Sudanese into Americans rather than turning the US into Haiti. But at the same time we need to recognize the tremendous humanitarian benefits of immigration.

If we prevent a Haitian person from selling his full time labor to an American employer for $7.25/hour, we are cutting his income by 90% (Haiti has a GDP/capita of $1300, cost of living adjusted). I can't see any benefits from a BI that would remotely justify doing this to millions more people. In fact, near as I can tell, virtually any policy which requires further restricting immigration is almost certainly a nonstarter for this reason.

A much better policy is the Basic Job, which is like Basic Income but you need to work for it (see FDR's CCC, jobs are things like improving public parks, planting trees, etc). This also has no disincentive effects and you get some productive labor out of the people who choose to make use of it.

<comment><USER5> A lot of BI proposals pay the BI only to citizens. New immigrants aren't citizens; it takes many years to move from permanent resident status to become a citizen.

This would create an underclass of immigrants & refugees, and create incentives for voters & politicians to make getting citizenship even harder than it is today.

This is definitely not a good situation, but it is better than forcing people to stay in Haiti or Sudan.

<comment><USER4> This is a possibility - but so far the US tends to not do this very well. I don't have great data on the subject, but I've seen at least one study suggesting immigrants with children tend to be a net drain on the US.

[http://cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011](http://cis.org/immigrant-welfare- use-2011)

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to do what you propose, though I think a BJ is a better policy than BI regardless of immigration. But I'm not aware of any western society that actually manages to do it.

<comment><USER6> The linked article does not support your assertion that "immigrants with children tend to be a net drain". it simply says that the majority of this population uses at least one welfare program. it highlights low levels of education as the main driver of this, with the benefits usually going to the american-born children.

I suspect programs like Head Start and the school reduced/free lunch program account for a significant portion of the reported welfare use. Do you think that a poor immigrant family with working parents that uses these programs is a "net drain" on society?

<comment><USER4> The linked article estimates tax liability for immigrant families and shows this is less than welfare consumed. Like I said, not great data, but I don't have anything better. If you do I'd love to see it.

Given that Head Start doesn't even have any measurable benefits, I definitely think those consuming it are a drain (if they pay less in taxes than Head Start costs).

<comment><USER7> > In conclusion, children who were enrolled for 2 years had higher scores than > those who only stayed for a year, which shows that being enrolled in Head > Start for a longer duration benefited the children.[1]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Start_Program#Effectivenes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_Start_Program#Effectiveness)

<comment><USER4> Those effects were not present in the RCT. Even after reducing the p-value cutoff to 10% (rather than the standard 5%), only a few of the expected measures showed a statistically significant effect (some positive, some negative), and virtually nothing persisted as far as 1st grade.

[http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_su...](http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_summary_final.pdf)

(See also this comic if you want to point to a few blue and yellow cells in their charts. [http://xkcd.com/882/](http://xkcd.com/882/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the most even handed treatment of this topic I've read yet.

One topic not addressed (but important) is what we do when someone spends the entirety of their basic income and has nothing left for food or shelter. Do we just let them starve to death in the street? Or do we create a "secondary" safety net that prevents this? If so, don't we just end up with the same sort of inefficiencies and problems that plague our current system?

<comment><USER9> Here's a video in which Milton Friedman addresses this exact issue: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM)

He proposes dispensing the funds weekly. You can't starve yourself in a week and drinking fountains + free cups of water at restaurants ensure that you won't go thirsty. Exposure could be a problem in certain cities, but under the new system I'm sure low-cost housing would adjust to the needs of the tenants since there's a profit motive for doing so. You might have to bus to the edge of the city to get low-rent food and housing, but the option would be there (and administered by a competitive private market).

I like this idea more than "bread queues" because it forces recipients to take responsibility for their spending without using so much force that the damage it allows to happen is greater than the value of the sense of responsibility it aims to instill (which I believe to be the case in the present system). Also, it leverages the free market to optimize its administrative specifics. Massive influx of poor people due to economic downturn? More low-cost establishments get built/converted. Massive outflux of poor people due to economic upturn? Low-cost establishments get sold or converted into high-cost establishments. No need to wait for next year's appropriations bill.

<comment><USER6> I really like the implications UBI has for charity. because everyone has a minimum level of resources, charity's revenue can scale with the number of people they serve.

For example, a halfway house could collect BI funds on behalf of its residents. it uses these funds, plus monies from other sources like donations or grants, to provide in-kind aid (food, shelter, security, medical care). as a resident requires fewer services, you can progressively phase out the in- kind aid and pass the BI cash through directly.

obviously this would require oversight to ensure that the charity is a responsible steward of the residents BI. we do this with the foster care system already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a libertarian-socialist, I'd love for us to collectively and indiscriminately provide everyone with a fair and appropriate basic minimum income. The only problem with this policy is how you pay for it.

You can abolish all other forms of social assistance -but only if you can adequately justify the elimination of the bureaucratic government jobs associated with them. For an all inclusive basic income, no bureaucracy would be needed.

You could tax the wealthy heavily -in effect making the basic income a negative income tax policy. This also seems like a worthy policy worth investigating.

You could borrow the money by way of government securities. The only problem with this scheme however is that already you have people like myself, who are extremely skeptical of the long term health of the current world financial make-up of West versus Rest, which is already changing quickly.

Personally I dismiss all arguments regarding a basic income harming poor people in the form of "inflation". We're currently in a deflationary crisis according to the big banks, and the social and political benefits to these policy changes would make it extremely hard to simply get rid of due to "bubbles and pops" as we have that plenty as it is.

Can someone try to explain why something like this isn't possible? What if we increased taxes in the top most income bracket, abolished all forms of current social assistance, and took on more debt, hoping this can pay for itself (or to simply continue down the trajectory of more debt every year).

Can someone try to explain why something like this could be more simple than I'm guessing?

<comment><USER11> What is the justification for taxing the wealthy disproportionately to their income? Is it out of moral need, financial expedience, or economic efficiency?

If you wish to tax them out of moral need, you hold a normative belief which is unlikely to falter, so I will not challenge it.

There is no financial reason why a 'progressive' income tax is better than a flat tax, as the 'progressive' system encourages evasion, and makes it easier, as well as greatly increasing the scope of government, requiring regulation of marriage and more.

Economically, the 'progressive' income tax is completely unjustifiable, as the wealthy invest disproportionately in economic (and job) growth, while lower income people spend more on consumption goods.

Your idea of borrowing money by way of government securities is not a long term solution, because interest gradually becomes an increasingly large part of the budget. In the long term, interest will either gradually take over the entire government budget, or an interest rate increase will force the government to default; in either case, borrowing to finance regular spending will eventually fail as a policy.

The 'inflation argument' against welfare policies is flawed as you point out, because it has never been demonstrated that wage increases cause inflation (so called "demand-pull inflation"). Whether or not some type of government welfare program should exist is an interesting question, and your answer seems to presuppose that the counter-factual is that there would be no social assistance program at all, whereas I would think that private charities would do a better job than the government, while avoiding coercion. If you require a government welfare program, I agree with you that a negative income tax is probably the least harmful, as it does not encourage unemployment.

<comment><USER12> One argument I would make is a marginal utility one - the marginal utility of $ decreases dramatically at higher incomes, so even if you have a (comparatively) punishingly high tax rate on the rich, the amount that your tax is affecting their lives in real terms is lower due to the marginal utility of money at those incomes. I'm in the camp that it's reasonable to want at least some semblance of equality of outcome though, so this argument resonates with me in a way that it might not to someone who favors a more lassez-faire approach. This probably falls under your "moral need" umbrella.

I don't agree with your statement about a progressive income tax being economically unjustifiable, especially in the economy that we find ourselves in at the moment (and, if secular stagnation proponents like Larry Summers and Paul Krugman are right, may be the structural norm these days). The current economy is strongly demand constrained, with plenty of money available for investment (corporate profits and cash holdings at record highs), but inadequate consumer demand to justify investments. From this perspective, a progressive transfer of wealth down the income scale makes a lot of sense economically because the poor are much more likely to actually spend that money than the rich are. There's also not much good evidence that high end tax rates affect macroeconomic growth as much as people claim - just in the US we've had tax rates all over the map over the past 100 years, and there's not much correlation with economic growth. We certainly haven't seen any miracles of economic growth for the economy as a whole since 1980 with the long running supply side, deregulation, and low tax experiment. If taxing the rich really has such a strong effect on economic growth and job creation, it's hard to see that in the data...

Finally, interest on government debt only becomes a long-term problem if the rate is higher than the rate of growth. It's not clear to me that that has to be the case, but that's another discussion ;)

<comment><USER11> The marginal utility argument you make is fair, but my question would be: marginal utility to whom, and when? The poor person who receives a government payout does benefit immediately, but poor people would benefit in the long term if that money had been invested in a job (and wealth) creating venture. This seems to me a difficult trade-off, and not a clear argument for or against welfare; my criticism of your argument here is that you presuppose an unlikely counter-factual.

You say "the poor are much more likely to actually spend that money than the rich are", but there is no evidence for the idea that poor people are less likely to hoard wealth than the rich. Rich individuals allocate their wealth to longer-term investments, whereas poorer people spend their money on consumption goods; both of these allocation systems allow the money to circulate in the economy. The notable difference is that the long-term investments create jobs in the long term, in exchange for forgoing consumption in the short term.

<comment><USER12> You're making the assumption here that the only way that money can be invested in a "job (and wealth) creating venture" is for the rich to make long term investments. Furthermore, you're assuming that taxing the rich more would decrease their job creation efforts and thus lead to less economic growth.

I don't think that these are valid assumptions. You're basically making a "trickle down" argument (if the rich do better, their heroic efforts will create so much economic growth that everyone benefits), and I would argue that our economic experience since 1980 argues pretty convincingly against that. In fact, studies on this topic (see [http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42111.pdf](http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42111.pdf)) find virtually no correlation between top tax rates and overall economic growth, contrary to the belief of proponents of supply side macroeconomics.

I think the burden is really on you (or the supply side proponents) to demonstrate the truth of these long term economic growth claims, rather than just asserting them. In the absence of such proof, I would argue that concerns of economic equality and reduced suffering on the truly poor in our society far outweigh any of these nebulous assertions of promised future economic growth.

Finally, this doesn't have to be limited to a "welfare" vs. "investment" question. Government taking in money doesn't have to just give it out to people in welfare programs; it is perfectly capable of making investments too (infrastructure, basic scientific research, correcting market failures, etc.). There's no reason that a dollar invested by the government in infrastructure creates less growth than a dollar invested by a wealthy individual; in fact, given the propensity for wealthy individuals to park money in investments of questionable social value (see much of Wall Street's activities), I'd argue that the former is actually MORE beneficial to overall macroeconomic growth.

<comment><USER11> I was not talking about the disincentive effects of taxing income, (though I do believe they exist,) my reasoning was simpler, in that the rich cannot invest the money that the government took away from them.

This is why I made the comparison between what happens with the money if you have a progressive tax vs. flat tax.

<comment><USER12> But you're assuming here that "the rich" investing money is creating more growth (and you stated earlier, helping poor people more) than the government would.

I think that's a difficult statement to back up in the best of times, although it's certainly a difficult thing to prove either way (moving this question beyond the level of anecdotes is really hard). However, when we've got a persistent demand shortage like we have right now, it's much less of a tricky question because of the multiplier effects of consumer spending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with the whole premise of this analysis is that libertarianism is some kind of idealistic belief to appeal to the pillars.

This is wrong. Libertarianism is about pragmatism, and a basic income would simply drive up costs of all basic things needed to survive especially if any of those are scarce. This would likely hurt those just above that poverty barrier the most as they would no longer be able to afford basic shelter even though they are gainfully employed. Because of this, those people will find it better to move out to land no one cares about and just 'do nothing' as decreasing costs is the only way for them to live decently. These people will not provide value to society, resulting in net loss of value (read: happiness, whatever you want to call it) for all.

<comment><USER14> Your assertion that a basic income would drive up costs is wrong. What evidence do you have of that? If it's done without printing money, it will not cause inflation. There will be more demand for housing, but how much more? The homeless will now be able to get homes. So, how much demand is that? How much will that drive prices up? The great thing about universal income is that people decide how to spend it. And they will not all spend it on "basic items", and they will not all spend it on the same things.

<comment><USER15> > Your assertion that a basic income would drive up costs is wrong. What > evidence do you have of that? If it's done without printing money, it will > not cause inflation.

Redistributing income can be expected to cause market-specific price increases in goods that the people benefiting from the redistribution have a greater propensity to purchase than those from whom income is redistributed. (And decreases in other goods.)

Adopting Basic Income is pretty clearly going to affect a redistribution of income.

So, the increase in prices for basic goods conclusion is sound (the idea that this will end up _harming_ those just above the poverty line by giving them less purchasing power seems, however, far less sound.)

<comment><USER14> We can't make these conclusions until we precisely know how people will spend the money. It could go into paying off debt and savings. It could go into luxury items (which the poor love to buy). Also, proposals for basic income often involve curtailing other social programs, which would have an impact as well. A basic income could, for instance, supplant food stamps, thus potentially keeping food prices the same.

<comment><USER15> > We can't make these conclusions until we precisely know how people will > spend the money. It could go into paying off debt and savings.

Its not like marginal propensity to consume of people in different income levels is a completely opaque mystery about which we have no information.

<comment><USER14> But there are many other factors other than people's propensity to consume that you need to account for. And I'm not sure if this degree of raise in income practically changes marginal propensity to consume that much.

<comment><USER15> > But there are many other factors other than people's propensity to consume > that you need to account for.

Not to determine short-term demand effects of redistribution of income there isn't.

> And I'm not sure if this degree of raise in income practically changes > marginal propensity to consume that much.

Probably not, but since marginal propensity to consume is the amount of the next dollar of income that will go to consumption, that means that the consumption effects are fairly straightforward if you have an idea of marginal propensity to consume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is worth a read, especially for this point:

      However attractive libertarianism might be in theory,
      "Libertarianism…Starting Now!" has the ring of special
      pleading, especially when it comes from the mouths of people
      who have by and large emerged at the top of the bloody and
      murderous mess that is our collective history.

_Social justice libertarianism_? I was not expecting that. Very interesting. (the website is beautiful, too)

<comment><USER17> I think it's fair to call 'libertarian' a descriptor of political, economic, or philosophical ideas. There are many different types of libertarians who have occasionally conflicting positions. The only thing they share is a vaguely similar anti-state "flavor". I think it's about as precise as 'liberal' or 'conservative', which is to say it isn't precise at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Background: I consider myself a Voluntaryist or Anarcho-Capitalist libertarian, and I can't see how I could ever support anything that violates NIF[1][2].

\---

That was more interesting and enlightening than I expected, to be quite honest. My initial thought was that there would be no way to reconcile a "basic income" with the NIF principle, unless said basic income is paid entirely voluntarily. But the historical rectification argument strikes me, at first blush anyway, as having _some_ credence.

That said, I'm a long way from fully onboard with this as long as it's rooted in our present system of taxation which is fundamentally based on coercion / force, or threat of same.

[1]:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non- aggression_principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle)

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiation_of_force](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initiation_of_force)

</comment><comment><USER19> I want to point out that that there is no difference between a basic income and a negative income tax. Suppose you have a negative income tax rate of 30% up to $50,000, then an income tax rate of 30% thereafter. Compare this to having a $15,000 annual basic income and a flat 30% income tax rate starting from $0. They are the same thing using different words.

But the words matter, which is why I don't like calling it a negative income tax. Because if you call it that, people start asking questions like why should someone making up to $50,000 be getting the "subsidy"? And then people want to do something silly like make the negative income tax be something like 60% up to $25,000, then 0% to $50,000 and 30% thereafter, which is obviously very stupid if you stop to do the math on who gets screwed by that and what incentives to work it creates at the bottom: It's equivalent to a $15,000 basic income with the same tax brackets, and it makes no damn sense whatsoever for someone making $25,000/year to be paying a 60% marginal tax rate. But calling it "negative income tax" encourages people to think that way and expect high marginal rates on the poor to be Good when they are really quite Bad.

</comment><comment><USER20> If the _ethical_ case for redistribution rests on the view that (A) inequality is partly the consequence of injustices that need restitution and (B) some people _really_ need the money, and probably deserve it because of A, I can't see why that would leave you favouring a crassly simply form of redistribution like BI over another hypothetical form of welfare system which is better at focusing the redistribution on suffers of injustice and things people really need. That probably wouldn't be identical in design to the current US welfare system, but it wouldn't be difficult to argue that many of the features present in most actual welfare states are better at delivering A and B than a simple monthly transfer of a small amount of income to everybody.

Which leaves us with two main lines of argument against some more traditional form of welfare state. It's "paternalistic", but so are _employers_ when they impose conditions upon people that expect to receive money or expenses from them, and I so don't see anyone making the case that expecting minimum standards of behaviour from people in return for giving them money is _in general_ a bad thing. Secondly, it's expensive to administer, but potentially not as expensive and wasteful as the adverse consequences of an overly- generous basic income (or as deadly as an insufficient basic income). On the whole, better to have lots of subtly wrong things than one big politically- sensitive number that can make or break your economy.

Once you've conceded the case that centralised large-scale distribution is inherently justifiable and worthwhile, saying no to "big government" starts to look more like a slogan than an argument...

</comment><comment><USER21> Hold on now. While i am going to do my best to avoid a No True Scotsman here, i have never spoken to a self-described libertarian who supports in reparation or affirmative action.

This is not by chance either. The idea of fiscal freedoms comes at the cost of fiscal safety nets. Where you draw that line is a sliding scale of course, but i still fair to see how this article is speaking a libertarian mindset.

<comment><USER10> > Where you draw that line is a sliding scale of course

I disagree. As a libertarian-socialist, I think we can take care of ourselves while pursuing freedom in regards to economics.

In our current system, we judge people based on their employment, history, and need, and then select people to give benefits to. There are problems with this. Bureaucracy, favouritism, politicking, etc.

With a basic income, we can reduce spending by abolishing all social assistance, reduce the amount of government employees by firing the bureaucrats who used to deny/approve people for benefits, and simply guarantee everyone a minimum amount of support. This has the benefits of reducing bureaucracy, favouritism, and politicking.

<comment><USER21> > With a basic income, we can reduce spending by abolishing all social > assistance

I would love to see the numbers that show a no-questions-asked basic income would be cheaper than the present social assistance monies.

There are a lot of logistics here. How do we prove you did not already get your check? What about those without mailing addresses. Or ID's? Is the basic income adjusted for families of 1 vs 7?

This idea of a minimalist ruleset for financial assistance seems like it is great at first, but will inevitably just get more and more bloated (and costly) as you actually implement it.

<comment><USER10> > I would love to see the numbers that show a no-questions-asked basic income > would be cheaper than the present social assistance monies.

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

From the article: "She found that only new mothers and teenagers worked substantially less. Mothers with newborns stopped working because they wanted to stay at home longer with their babies, and teenagers worked less because they weren't under as much pressure to support their families".

To me that sounds like more adults would work, while those who have other obligations (childbearing) or goals (study, creative, startups) can focus on that.

I'm not saying it would be cheaper, but providing a guaranteed minimum to all adults, would remove the need for the other programs, saving THAT money. It would not pay for it completely. Removing the government jobs that oversee most of the selection and verification (fact checking if the person is pursuing offers) could be eliminated. This could also save money. Again not enough, but enough to help sigificantly.

> There are a lot of logistics here.

Absolutely. We need to take risks for rewards though, and there must be a way to test this without hurting the whole economy, but we need to all agree to take that risk before we work on the next step.

> How do we prove you did not already get your check?

Great question. My guess would be you only provide one per person per period. Any duplications would be search for via software, then again by a human. Any proven duplication will be deducted. Rinse and repeat, minimal bureaucracy. The government always pays me/requires me to pay them every year, but even though its not perfect, it works for the most part.

> Is the basic income adjusted for families of 1 vs 7?

In my mind it would be a set amount per adult. The argument that we need to provide more for larger families creates odd and sad circumstances of child farms and generational welfare homes. People need to start becoming responsible for their families. We'd still have child services. Besides, this shouldn't be comfortable for a single mother living alone who isn't working. These people can get family or charity to help them, not taxes. It SHOULD be comfortable for a single mother working 15 hours a week though, which would help a lot of people out there.

> This idea of a minimalist ruleset for financial assistance seems like it is > great at first, but will inevitably just get more and more bloated (and > costly) as you actually implement it.

Well, you could argue are current system will only get more bloated and costly as well (which is has). A major reform is necessary eventually, and this is an innovative and modern potential solution we should SERIOUSLY investigate past talking and move towards researching through small implementations.

<comment><USER22> As a side note, lest anyone be confused by confusing namings, "Mincome" is indeed a "Basic Income" program, which is distinct from "Minimum Income" programs (which work differently, and which I don't support).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Next week, a communist case for the private ownership of the means of production.

<comment><USER24> i.e. China's economic system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone analyzed the impact on monetary policy and macroeconomics?

The Fed has a dual mandate of low inflation and maximal employment, and as a result, is currently printing money indefinitely. The ECB only has a mandate of low inflation, and has had an excellent track record. However, the Eurozone is currently having an unemployment crisis. The BI (potentially with abolition of the minimum wage) would then mitigate the impacts of unemployment. With basic income, couldn't the Fed become more like the ECB, and drop the employment mandate? Then, we could potentially greatly curtail our money printing.

Also, what are the effects on macroeconomics? Couldn't BI attenuate the boom- bust cycle? Deflation would even be constructive: the real value of the BI is increased without raising the nominal value. The Fed can then take its time, during recession, in deciding when to start the printing presses again.</comment>


Have Aliens Found Us? (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/have-aliens-found-us-a-harvard-astronomer-on-the-mysterious-interstellar-object-oumuamua <comment><USER2> Discussion from the original submission about 1 year ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923591](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923591).

<comment><USER3> Lots related: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Oumuamua%20points%3E30&sort=byDate&type=story)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place"

It's from outside our solar system in origin, so I'd say we are not 100% in predicting what to expect, more so when we still can't get weather forecasts 100% right and get unexpected weather events.

Having gone thru the other `interpretations of observations`, I'd probably not of been as quick to lean down that path of aliens. Indeed, whilst it is unusual, comparing it to the known and as such, objects originating in our solar system will see conflicts like orbit, speed, direction, shape and composition. I'd also say it's strange shape would play more a factor in the variance of how light is reflected back and be more logical an explanation of its variance from the `norm`.

Besides, for all we know, `aliens` may view a lifeform like us in the same way we view bacteria. So the question would be, if Aliens found us - would they care.

But is this an alien probe - I'm sure many would love it to be so, but as it stands, feels a bit too reaching from what I read. [EDIT type o's]

<comment><USER5> I feel like there has to be a razor stating something like "It's more likely that our expectations were wrong due to a lack of initial knowledge, rather than the explanation being aliens."

Because it seems like time and time again someone proposes aliens when in reality it's just some phenomenon or variable we hadn't observed yet.

<comment><USER6> It sounds a lot like God of the gaps [1], only with aliens instead of God.

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

<comment><USER7> God and aliens have a lot in common. People usually interpret the "beings" you "meet" on DMT as one or the other. Almost as if they're two sides of one coin: our mind's tendency to gravitate toward an anthropomorphic explanation for unexplained phenomena and stimuli.

<comment><USER8> Aliens are a lot more likely to exist than gods, thats not to say that they've ever found us. That in itself is fairly unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Photovoltaic voltage threshold reached. Coming out of hibernation...

Awakened in intercept of star S001932422345. 4 rocky planets identified. 200 moons identified.

Carbon-based life detected on planet 3: 5.6e14 kg of biomass, 1e17 Watts of energy flux, Development Stage 2.

Voltage has dropped below threshold. Resuming hibernation...

<comment><USER10> Don't forget "Mostly harmless."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like we've been probed when you look at this hyperbolic trajectory:

[https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA22357_JPL-20180...](https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA22357_JPL-20180620-ASTRDSf-0007-Interstellar%20Asteroid%20animation-720p.mp4)

<comment><USER12> How can they predict the trajectory when the shape and material of the object is unknown?

<comment><USER13> The trajectory of an object in space really only depends on the (external) gravitational field applied to it.

<comment><USER14> No, it also depends on effects like the pressure from the solar wind and outgassing. Outgassing is caused by water on the side facing the sun evaporating, emitting a gentle pressure away from the sun. If the object is rotating, the force pushes at an angle to the sun because the outgassing rate lags insolation due to the surface water's thermal mass (ie, each point on the surface continues to evaporate for a while after its apparent sunset.)

The effects aren't significant for planets, but they are for asteroids. It seemed more significant for Oumuamua than most, suggesting a high surface area to volume ratio.

<comment><USER13> I thought outgassing and solar wind was only really relevant when applied for a long time over many periods of an orbit? Would it have a significant impact on a one-time hyperbolic trajectory like this one?

<comment><USER15> In fact, one of the things proposed in the article is that the object is a light sail being accelerated by the sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I want to believe, but just looking at the numbers make the aliens theory seem kind of ridiculous to me. At its current velocity, Oumuamua would have taken something like 45000! years to reach us from just the nearest star. Engineering a generations-ship or even just a drone and not improving on the speed of the craft just does not make sense to me. I suppose the craft could have slowed down before we noticed it, but then why only slow it down its current velocity if it could have stayed in the system and collected more data? Of the theories I've heard so far, only debris from a craft seems to make sense, but then the debris would have to be incredibly old for it to have just wandered into our system on accident.

<comment><USER17> Another theory I have heard is it's like bouy in the ocean. It sits still relative to the galactic motion of the stars and observes stars whose paths it drifts into. The theory is backed up a little by the fact that it is relatively still with respect to the universe at large.

<comment><USER16> Unfortunately this is not a likely explanation either. If you take a look at the wiki, it states that the intercept with our solar system is likely the only close encounter the asteroid has likely ever had. Space is just too vast for chance encounters to occur all that often: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Indications_of_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Indications_of_origin)

<comment><USER18> If that's true, that would have been some very interesting matter to capture and investigate. It could represent conditions of a time and part of the universe much different than our own.

I really wish we had infrastructure built up in space to be more capable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me or does the interviewer come across as weirdly adversarial in this piece?

<comment><USER20> I think it may do the subject (the interviewee) a service to take a skeptical approach as the interviewer in a situation where many readers will bring a lot of skepticism. If the interviewer seems _too_ friendly, many readers will dismiss the responses and not listen as carefully as they might otherwise. It seems like a justifiable approach to me here.

<comment><USER21> If the scientist was wrong, he was wrong for reasons that were more subtle and complicated than the objections the author thought of. A better option would be to have organized a debate between two scientists who were both already experts. There's also a difference between skepticism and unfriendliness: the author came across as unfriendly, while a scientist who could not be so easily knocked back might have been able to keep it to skepticism.

<comment><USER22> >If the scientist was wrong, he was wrong for reasons that were more subtle and complicated than the objections the author thought of.

oh you mean like aliens not existing and the guy getting really excited over a space rock?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Having read _The Three Body Problem_ , I am no longer nearly so excited for our first encounter with an alien civilization...

<comment><USER24> I just re-read Rendezvous with Rama yesterday while sick with a cold. Then this story came back up on HN today. What a weird coincidental world.

<comment><USER25> Oumuamua visits HN several times a month, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is a strange object but when you call it scout/messenger aren't you already very biased?

Voyager 1 is sending data we could never predict so how unlikely is it that this is the first object that will give us new info about space?

I understand we must be open for every option but to me it is more likely that we are learning new laws of space than that we are found by aliens.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Fitzsimmons, A., Snodgrass, C., Rozitis, B. et al. Spectroscopy and thermal modelling of the first interstellar object 1I/2017 U1 'Oumuamua. Nat Astron 2, 133–137 (2018)"

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0361-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0361-4)

"Here, we report spectroscopic characterization of 'Oumuamua, finding it to be variable with time but similar to organically rich surfaces found in the outer Solar System. We show that this is consistent with predictions of an insulating mantle produced by long-term cosmic ray exposure4"

Which means that it can be concluded that:

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/08/alie...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/08/aliens- is-not-a-scientific-explanation-for-interstellar-asteroid-%CA%BBoumuamua/)

"The spectral signature of the object, its color, reflectivity, and other properties are consistent with a natural, rather than intelligent alien, origin."

But it's really fun to imagine "alien" possibilities and all the arguments that could support that; Loeb's page with his related papers:

[https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Oumuamua.html](https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Oumuamua.html)

The object is already out of our reach and we should just be ready to make more observations of the next objects with such trajectories (that one was really the first in our history!), and make even more precise measurements in the future. If "aliens" in this specific case would help to have more money being redirected to scientific astronomical investigations than now, then maybe it can be OK to talk about these "possible alien" aspects too.

What's still wrong is to mix these tiny possibilities with most of the "commercial" uses of "aliens" which actually sell really unscientific and really stupid stuff, like "Ancient Aliens" and similar.

</comment><comment><USER27> If it was a probe, it seems to be a very poorly planned mission. It just swung through our system without appearing to do anything. Comparing to probe missions that us earthlings have sent out, they orbited interesting objects as mission objectives. They also transmitted data back to us making them useful. We've observed enough exoplanets that we should be able to plan a better mission than just a random flyby of the star, shouldn't we? Then again, maybe that's how Voyager I & II will appear to another society viewing them after they randomly travel through another system looooong after they were useful. Perhaps they'll collect enough space dust/debris to build up a rock like surface on them so they will appear Oumuamua like when meandering through some system we've never considered.

<comment><USER28> > If it was a probe, it seems to be a very poorly planned mission. It just > swung through our system without appearing to do anything.

Maybe a poorly planned mission in terms of our technological constraints i.e. we need a longer time to gather meaningful data when we send out probes. Maybe their technology is so advanced that they need only a flyby to analyze our planet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> So, realistically, if we land in a planet with life on it, we're going to figure out whether we're going to eat it, and our criteria will be that it is not more intelligent than something only marginally less capable than us (higher primates, crows, dolphins, elephants, cephalopods, etc) so if they have found us, it's really very likely they're going to rank us on a scale of edibility, without much concern to how superior we think we are to other forms of food.

<comment><USER30> Why would they eat us rather than say enslave us or farm us for resources.

<comment><USER31> Actually, eating us makes significantly more sense. Any alien civilization with the capability to travel interstellar distances is unlikely to have any particular need of our terrestrial resources (including labor) when there's plenty of raw material orbiting any given star including our own that's much less trouble to get at.

However one can envision "alien meat", having required light-years of travel (and corresponding years of time) to acquire, as a status-signaling delicacy. Hell, it might even be technically illegal, which is why it's so small scale.

<comment><USER32> Slavery isn't all chattel -- we exploit people for various sorts of entertainment as well: performance, gladiatorial combat, sexual pleasure...

And we're not just meat. Our world hosts a variety of biological life, and they might just be spice traders in search of exotic flavors without regard for other intelligent life forms

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Meanwhile, in Brazil...

"Operation Saucer - UFO military encounters in the Brazilian jungle" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0)

The Brazilian military has begun declassifying documents.

</comment><comment><USER34> "If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them,"

I think we'd learn a lot if they aren't also.

</comment><comment><USER35> This article is like last-decade-old.

Joke aside, Is there anything new about this?

</comment><comment><USER36> Total layman here, but I recall reading somewhere that black holes may "shoot" matter back out into space. If that's correct, would that be a possible explanation?

</comment><comment><USER37> Needs a [2019]; this article is almost a year old.

</comment><comment><USER38> Yes, aliens have found us and found us wanting. Perhaps they'll try again in a few millennia...

<comment><USER27> Are you suggesting giving us that much time to evolve into something better, or waiting for us to ultimately wipe ourselves out so they don't have to when they move in?

<comment><USER31> It would be trivial to wipe us out. Any civilization capable of travelling interstellar distances is obviously significantly more technologically advanced than we are, yet even at our level we have to be careful not to accidentally wipe ourselves out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/02/colorado-drones- myster...](https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/02/colorado-drones-mystery- jared-polis/?utm_medium=social&utm_content=tw- denverpost&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow)

</comment><comment><USER40> Yes or no?

<comment><USER41> Yes. We don't have the means to know so. Just like fish in the ocean don't know we exist, but we know they exist.

<comment><USER42> This can't be answered with any conviction. By that logic, we can be apply this infinitely many times: from the aliens perspective, they are also not aware of other aliens that know about their existence

<comment><USER43> It's aliens all the way up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> (2019)

</comment><comment><USER45> This is from a year ago, and seems to follow Betteridge's law.

</comment><comment><USER46> There is far more interesting evidence of potential advanced intelligence in our system, such as the Nimitz encounter [0].

The New York Post put together a great video highlighting "The Phenomenon." If Oumuamua is indeed an interstellar probe, it would seem to have come from a civilization far less advanced than whatever seems to have been observed by various militaries and analyzed by this New York Post special [1].

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

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ)

Edit: I don't mean to shake up anyone's fragile worldview. Comment instead of downvote; it's a fascinating subject to debate.

<comment><USER47> > it was noticed that the object had now dropped from 28,000 feet to near sea > level in less than a second.

Surely something accelerating to Mach 25 in atmosphere in less than a second would have made a hell of a sound.

<comment><USER48> In all seriousness it sounds like a shadow projected onto a stratus cloud. It's somewhat non-intuitive to people that shadows do not grow in size with distance in the air. A 747 casts a 747 sized shadow onto clouds since the sun is so far away its light rays are all effectively parallel.

One thing that does happen to shadows is they get blurred at the edges (an aircraft won't completely cover the sun at a distance). An aircraft will tend to cast a vaguely "T" shaped shadow at a distance that's roughly the size of the aircraft. I can see a "t" shaped object in these images.

Here's a video of a test flight of the Vahana aircraft. [https://youtu.be/S-5JeapSsbE?t=188](https://youtu.be/S-5JeapSsbE?t=188)

See the mysterious "t" shaped shadow it's casting? It moves erratically and doesn't match intuition of a shadow since shadows from the sun don't work the same way as indoors due to the parallel rays. You get these same shadows projected onto clouds as well.

The real kicker is that in these videos they both show and report that the shadow rotates when the aircraft turns! Like guys what the fuck do you think it is? Haha oh dear.

<comment><USER46> These were IR videos, and the whole area was restricted airspace.

<comment><USER48> Yes and all light casts shadows IR included. Take a look at any video of a plane casting a shadow onto clouds. eg. [https://youtu.be/Vr_kYmUaykw?t=7](https://youtu.be/Vr_kYmUaykw?t=7)

Notice the similarities? The halo and the matching of the recording planes movements which are explicitly mentioned in this.

<comment><USER46> Yes but the IR locked onto a higher temperature source, not cooler. My understanding is that a shadow would be cooler.

Other remaining factors include that:

\- Primary radars on both fighters in the initial pass were being jammed

\- Passive radars on the Nimitz were what directed the planes to this spot initially

\- It was approximately 9:30-10 PST, so any shadow from <40k feet would be coming from restricted airspace

\- Multiple visual contacts from multiple angles, including from slightly below/ to the side

This one is pretty difficult to explain in conventional terms, unless you think it's all a hoax. Pretty fascinating stuff, huh?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Zeitgeist 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?zg=full <comment><USER2> What a shitty user experience. What changed at google? They used to have these rather simple, useful, UIs.

<comment><USER3> Designers and product managers have taken the reigns from the engineers.

Recall that Google at one time never had TV advertisements. Now you can't turn the damn thing on without seeing one.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. After all, it's pretty much how Apple made its historic unprecedented profits: more designers than engineers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You seriously mean to tell me that the most popular search on Google for 2013 is 'Paul Walker' followed by 'iPhone 5s'? What? Surely 'Weather' would be higher. I simply don't know what I'm looking at here.

<comment><USER6> It's actually "Top 100 [Trending] Searches." They could have been more clear about that.

[http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013](http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013)

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's trending searches, not most popular ones. By the way, non- engineers/non-analytical people usually have trouble differentiating the two. I can't recall how many meetings with product/business people that I have to explain the concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scrolling is backwards on my Mac. I'm using the default ("natural") scrolling, where swiping up scrolls down, but this page is set to scroll down with a swipe down.

Probably has to do with the fact that they're rendering the images in a canvas element rather than plain old HTML.

It's also broken on iPads. You can't see the bottom nav in portrait and the site is slightly too large for the viewport when viewed in landscape.

<comment><USER9> I think it might be intentional. I don't use natural scrolling and it's broken for me as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would prefer a .txt file list over this, I can't even tell the order without individual clicks.

<comment><USER11> [http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts#date=2013](http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts#date=2013). Not a text file but, a much better format than the op.

Edit: Apparently this is linked in the bottom left corner of the page... totally missed it. What an effective site design.

<comment><USER12> And it still fucking breaks scroll.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Google Zeitgeist 2013: black box.

The video doesn't load for me on Firefox. It is probably just a bug and will be fixed but it coincidentally prints the correct picture of Google's current stance on browser compatibility. Anyone else thinks that the silent conversion tactics are slowly becoming more obvious?

<comment><USER14> Flashblock catches it for me in FF25, the video is actually

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv-sY_z8MNs](https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv- sY_z8MNs)

Perhaps you don't have Flash installed, you lucky thing.

<comment><USER13> Flash is installed, no blocking add-ons were used. For that matter, I have disabled all other add-ons, that could be interfering and still get the same result.

It could be a flash (64 bit) issue. Also, that's not the video that would show for me, because of localization (Germany). Despite my preference for the English language and google.com over google.de, Google tries to show me this video instead: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hVwx13k1QM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hVwx13k1QM) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> what a horrible, horrible browsing experience on desktop. this is a complete new kind of swipeware/pseudo-metro crap...

<comment><USER16> yeah, it's very non-Google somehow..

<comment><USER17> Or maybe the new Google. Or the same Google we always had.

<comment><USER18> You're saying it's a 0 or a 1?

<comment><USER17> It's definitely a 13 74/9ths

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Did I miss something or is 2013 already over?

Also, didn't find any mention of NSA or Snowden. Sadly, I wasn't surprised.

<comment><USER13> Snowden is #97 for me. I suspect that the results are localized (Germany for me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Edward Snowden not in top 100.

Goes to show my assumption that he would be says that I'm subject to a large degree of bias.

<comment><USER21> While I read almost every HN post I saw about Snowden, I don't think I searched his name at all. In fact, I can't remember searching anything news related this year. I'm sure I have, but its really not necessary anymore. I wonder if others are starting to get into similar patterns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm usually quite impressed by Google's Zeitgeist videos, this one was disappointing however. It's short (a minute shorter than 2012 and 2011), doesn't include many of the important events of the year, and is rather uninspiring. What happened?

</comment><comment><USER23> Breaks the back button :-(

<comment><USER5> It's a hideous UI, all I want is a text list of top searches for the year, and to be able to filter by category.

Stealing my touch scroll isn't that nice either. I struggled to read beyond the fold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This UI reminds me of Encarta 98.

</comment><comment><USER25> nice. Black dead rectangle in the center of bluish background. No interaction anywhere. Firefox. If it doesn't work in FF, it doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER26> Requires login? Why?

<comment><USER27> I think it's just a default Google thing. Basically, it notices you're logged in but you haven't entered your password for a while, so it prompts you to login again.

Instead, I just clicked 'Log out and log in as a different user', closed the tab, and clicked the link again on HN, and it worked just fine.

So in short, it doesn't require you to be logged in, unless you are, at which point you have to log in again.

Bizarre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Chrome on Windows 7 bug report: back button doesn't work, mouse wheel doesn't work (scrolls at infinitesimal speed), touch-screen style controls which don't work well with a mouse (click&drag, besides not being intuitive with a mouse, is also broken because it navigates to the selected item on mouse button release)

</comment><comment><USER29> The first few times i visited this , i was looking for a way to access more content then quit half way round. I tried scrolling down , it didn't work . I had to click a link on the left corner of my screen which wasn't even that visible to me. Affordance = 0.

</comment><comment><USER30> There must be something wrong with this list when Edward Snowden is at #97 and Paul Walker is #2.

To make this more clear: Snowden was the top Google search for many days, perhaps as long as the incident of Paul Walkers death until now.

</comment><comment><USER31> That wasn't a patch on the 2012 Zeitgeist that Google put together: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_MUB8adEQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_MUB8adEQ)

</comment><comment><USER32> "When you finally get at that's point of acceptance, there is nothing more beautiful"

Showing a woman with a scarf...

Come on google, just go already.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm on chrome and it was super clunky. Skipped a ton on scroll.

</comment><comment><USER34> All I'm seeing is a blue screen. Macbook, using Chrome.</comment>


RIAA Wants to Uncover the 'Music Mafia' Pirates - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-wants-to-uncover-the-music-mafia-pirates-180726/ <comment><USER2> Artist's depiction of the RIAA discovering the Music Mafia:

[https://i.kym- cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/023/397/C-658...](https://i.kym- cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/023/397/C-658VsXoAo3ovC.jpg)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is how I _want_ music to be sold. Actual money goes to the artists this way instead of it trickling down through middlemen like Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Portfolio sites - <AUTHOR>

Hey Guys, Question:
In light of the new professions that expanded in recent years (coders, graphic design) few sites now provide a platform for professionals to create a portfolio (github, dribbble)
What are the platforms that exist today that allow Web Content/Promotions writers, SEO & project managers to share their portfolio?
How would you go about creating these platforms? <comment><USER2> If you're wanting to build a portfolio for yourself, Wordpress is the most common option.

If you're asking about a platforms for project managers (like Dribbble et al), I'd say that probably the reason why such a platform doesn't exist, is because project management isn't really a visual discipline in the way that design or even development may be. Most just tend to use their own website, giving them the flexibility to share their thought-process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried dunked.com already? You should try that.

I'm currently in a team of 3 persons building a competitor for creating easy portfolios/cv's, but with main focus on the german market.</comment>


FundersClub (YC S12) helps Soldsie recruit Chief Scientist - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/09/value-add-of-crowdfunding-fundersclub-soldsie/

<comment><USER2> Nice one, FundersClub.

Good to see the benefits FC brings to their startup clients extending beyond just capital sourcing.

There's also a great quote from the TechCrunch author, affirming FC's investment model and clarifying doubts he had just 3 months ago : "I raised questions about whether FundersClub was operating illegally as an unregistered broker-dealer, but after speaking with its legal team, I'm convinced it's in the clear."</comment>


LD_PRELOAD: The Hero We Need and Deserve - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/ld_preload/ <comment><USER3> Awesome post! `LD_PRELOAD` is a powerful tool for program instrumentation.

It's worth noting, though, that using `LD_PRELOAD` to intercept syscalls doesn't actually intercept the syscalls themselves -- it intercepts the (g)libc _wrappers_ for those calls. As such, an `LD_PRELOAD`ed function for `open(3)` may actually end up wrapping `openat(2)`. This can produce annoying- to-debug situations where one function in the target program calls a wrapped libc function and another doesn't, leaving us to dig through `strace` for who used `exit(2)` vs. `exit_group(2)` or `fork(2)` vs. `clone(2)` vs. `vfork(2)`.

Similarly, there are myriad cases where `LD_PRELOAD` won't work: statically linked binaries aren't affected, and any program that uses `syscall(3)` or the `asm` compiler intrinsic to make direct syscalls will happily do so without any indication at the loader level. If these are cases that matter to you (and they might not be!), check out this recent blog post I did on intercepting _all_ system calls from within a kernel module[1].

[1]: [https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/01/17/how-to-write-a- rootk...](https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/01/17/how-to-write-a-rootkit- without-really-trying/)

<comment><USER4> There's another way to intercept syscalls without going as far as a kernel module, using debugging API ptrace. There's a pretty neat article about how to implement custom syscalls using ptrace: [https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/06/23/](https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/06/23/)

<comment><USER5> I've been looking for a while for a way to capture all file opens and network ops to profile unknown production workloads similar to proc. explorer on Windows, which I believe is implemented using ETW. Unfortunately strace seems to be out of the question purely because of the performance impact. Is the performance impact due to strace or ptrace itself?

<comment><USER3> It's ptrace itself: every traced syscall requires at least one (but usually 3-4) ptrace(2) calls, plus scattered wait(2)/waitpid(2) calls depending on the operation.

If you want to capture events like file opens and network traffic, I'd take a look at eBPF or the Linux Audit Framework.

<comment><USER6> I recommend bpftrace as an entry point to working with bpf

[https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace](https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace)

<comment><USER5> This is really cool. Unfortunately the 4.x kernel requirement wouldn't work for the majority of my work since RHEL is still on 3 :|

<comment><USER7> If you have RHEL 7.6 or later, you have bpf

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> LD_PRELOAD is a fantastic tool.

At a previous job, we wanted binary reproducibility - that is to say, building the same source code again should result in the same binary. The problem was, a lot of programs embed the build or configuration date, and filesystems (e.g. squashfs) have timestamps too.

Rather than patch a million different packages and create problems, we put together an LD_PRELOAD which overrode the result of time(). Eventually we faked the build user and host too.

End result: near perfect reproducibility with no source changes.

I've also used it for reasons similar to the GM Onstar example in the article -- adding an "interposer" library to log what's going on.

I've pulled similar stunts with pydbg on a Windows XP virtual machine -- sniffing the traffic between applications and driver DLLs (even going as far as sticking a logger on the ASPI DLLs). That and the manufacturer's debug info got me enough information to write a new Linux driver for a long-unsupported SCSI device which only ever had Win9x/XP drivers.

<comment><USER9> Thank you! I may yet figure out the protocol of my APS film scanner.

<comment><USER8> Well if I could figure out the protocol of the Polaroid Digital Palette (specifically the HR-6000 but the ProPalette and CI-5000S use the same SCSI protocol)...

Look for any debug data you can turn on in the driver and correlate that against whatever you see going to the scanner. Try to save timestamps if you can, then merge the two logs.

I was a little surprised that while Polaroid had stripped the DLL symbols, they'd left a "PrintInternalState()" debug function which completely gave away the majority of the DP_STATE structure fields.

After that, I reverse-engineered and reimplemented the DLL (it's a small DLL), swapped the ASPI side for Linux and wrote a tool that loaded a PNG file and spat the pixels at the reimplemented library.

And then someone sent me a copy of the Palette Developer's Kit...

(Incidentally I'd really love to get hold of a copy of the "GENTEST" calibration tool, which was apparently included on the Service disk and the ID-4000 ID Card System disks)

<comment><USER9> Wow, do you use these for anything?

I shoot 135 film and some medium format, I have tried Super 8 and would love to start shooting 16mm film - but having a film recorder and actually use it something?!

:-D What can you do, what would you do?

If I was filthy rich I'd project 35mm movies in my living room. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll share my story. I used to work at a popular Linux website hosting control panel company. Back in the early 2000's "frontpage extensions" were a thing that people used to upload their websites.

Unfortunately, frontpage extensions required files to exist in people Linux home directories, and people would often mess them up or delete them. People would need their frontpage extension files "reset" to fix the problem. Fortunately, Microsoft provided a Linux binary to reset a users frontpage extension files.

Unfortunately, it required root access to run. Also unfortunately, I discovered that a user could set up symlinks in their home directory to trick the binary into overwriting files like /etc/passwd.

We ended up actually releasing a code change that would overwrite getuid with LD_PRELOAD so that the Microsoft binary would think it was running as root, just to prevent it from being a security hazard.

<comment><USER11> So, it didn't need root, but insisted on it? A MS binary no less.

<comment><USER12> It was very much in keeping of the Microsoft of the era. Not out of maliciousness. Just a general lack of interest or knowledge of any non-Windows platform, but a recognition that if Frontpage was going to be as dominant as they wanted, they at least needed to vaguely support it.

Think the worst case of "Well it works on my machine"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a well-known libfaketime library, that can forge the current system time.

[https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime](https://github.com/wolfcw/libfaketime)

Here's my friend's LD_PRELOAD hack, it pushes the idea further: hooking gettimeofday() to make a program to think that the time goes faster or slower. Useful for testing.

[https://github.com/m13253/clockslow](https://github.com/m13253/clockslow)

<comment><USER14> >Useful for testing.

And as a speed hack for Quake 2!

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that hack was a great insight!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've implemented some sort of "poor man's Docker" using LD_PRELOAD, back then in 2011 when Docker wasn't a thing. It works by overriding getaddrinfo (IIRC) and capturing name lookups of "localhost", which are then answered by an IP address that's taken from an env variable. The intended use is the parallelization of automated testing of a distributed system: by creating lots of loopback devices with individual IPs and assigning those to test processes (via the LD_PRELOAD hack), I could suddenly test as many instances of the software system next to each other as I wanted, on the same machine (the test machine is some beefy dual-socket server with lots of CPU cores and RAM). Each instance (which consists of clients and several processes that provide server services, thus they're by default configured to bind themselves to specific ports on localhost, as it is common for dev and test purposes) would then be able to route its traffic over its own loopback device, and I was spared of having to somehow untangle the server ports of all the different services just in order to be able to parallelize them on a single machine and of the configuration hell that would have come with this. It helped that processes by default inherit the env variables from their parents that spawned them - <USER2> made it a lot easier to propagate the preload path and the env variable containing the loopback IP to use. I just had to provide it to the top-most process, basically.

Today, one would use Docker for this exact purpose, putting each test run into its own container (or even multiple containers). But since the LD_PRELOAD hack worked so well, the project in which I implemented the above is still using it (although they're eyeing a switch to Docker, in part because it also makes it easier to separate non-IP-related resources such as files on the filesystem, but mostly because knowledge about Docker is more widespread than about such ancient tech as LD_PRELOAD and how to hack into name resolution of the OS).

</comment><comment><USER17> Here's my ldpreload hack: rerouting /dev/rand to dev/urand -- because I disagree with gpg's fears on entropy. Now it's as fast as generating a private key with ssh-keygen or openssl:

[https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/dev_random_fix](https://github.com/matthewaveryusa/dev_random_fix)

<comment><USER18> I am curious. How do you know if this is secure or not? Is there any publication or article available for this slightly time-saving but potentially dangerous choice?

<comment><USER13> 1\. The official man page.

The /dev/random interface is considered a legacy interface, and /dev/urandom is preferred and sufficient in all use cases, with the exception of applications which require randomness during early boot time; for these applications, getrandom(2) must be used instead, because it will block until the entropy pool is initialized.

2\. [https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/](https://www.2uo.de/myths-about- urandom/)

<comment><USER19> Not that I disagree with you, but which are the official man pages for /dev/urandom? It's my recollection that the advice therein varies from OS to OS.

<comment><USER13> This page is part of release 4.16 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at [https://www.kernel.org/doc/man- pages/](https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/).

And only Linux has /dev/urandom.

<comment><USER20> BSDs (incl. macOS) have /dev/urandom, but it's the same thing as /dev/random. Both don't ever block after they've been filled initially at boot time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One useful tool for the toolbox, to be used _very_ carefully, after thinking about the consequences:

libeatmydata: [https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata](https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata)

It disables fsync, o_sync etc, making them no-ops, essentially making the programs writes unsafe. Very dangerous. But very useful when you're trying to bulk load data in to a MySQL database, say as preparation of a new slave (followed by manual sync commands, and very careful checksumming of tables before trusting what happened)

<comment><USER21> Useful for running tests against a throwaway MySQL database too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've been using LD_PRELOAD for fun and profit for a long, long time. Its simplicity is due to the simplicity of the C ABI. Its power is due to dynamic linking.

C is one programming language. C w/ ELF semantics and powerful link-editors and run-time linker-loaders is a rather different and much more powerful language.

I won't be sad to see Rust replace C, except for this: LD_PRELOAD is a fantastic code-injection tool for C that is so dependent on the C ABI being simple that I'm afraid we'll lose it completely.

<comment><USER23> Doesn't rust use the C ABI under the covers?

<comment><USER19> You can easily write and call functions that abide the C ABI in Rust, but the set of types permitted in those signatures is much smaller (only #[repr(C)]-compatible types) than in ordinary Rust functions. The Rust ABI is more complicated and won't be stabilized anytime soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Holy crap, was that article annoying to read! The author should really cut back on meme image macros.

<comment><USER25> This is Jess' personality - check out her Twitter account. I don't mind it, but I've followed her for a while so I'm used to it. Honestly I find it to be a refreshing break from typical the typically stiff writing I see. She's smart and doesn't need to hide behind stodgy writing in order to make herself seem smarter.

<comment><USER24> I don't really mind it on twitter, as twitter is anything but serious, and you can't really have any coherent text there.

But such elements in a regular article simply harm its coherence and readability for anyone that does not spend much of their time in (rather noisy and immature, IMHO) communities which feature "meme image macros" heavily.

(Bonus negative points if some of the images are animated. That makes me think that the author actively hates the readers.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'll also join in and share my projects using LD_PRELOAD. These also work on macOS through its equivalent DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES.

[https://github.com/d99kris/stackusage](https://github.com/d99kris/stackusage) measures thread stack usage by intercepting calls to pthread_create and filling the thread stack with a dummy data pattern. It also registers a callback routine to be called upon thread termination.

[https://github.com/d99kris/heapusage](https://github.com/d99kris/heapusage) intercepts calls to malloc/free/etc detecting heap memory leaks and providing simple stats on heap usage.

[https://github.com/d99kris/cpuusage](https://github.com/d99kris/cpuusage) can intercept calls to POSIX functions (incl. syscall wrappers) and provide profiling details on the time spent in each call.

</comment><comment><USER27> I recently gave a small talk about this and listed the applications I had for it in the past few years:

\- Test low memory environment

\- Add memory tracking

\- Ignore double frees (fix broken programs)

\- Cache allocations / lookaside lists

\- Trace all file operations

\- Seamlessly open compressed files with fopen()

\- Speed up time() as program sees it

\- Offset time() to bypass evaluation periods

\- Alternative PRNG

\- Intercept/reroute network sockets

\- Trace various API calls (useful when debugging graphics APIs)

\- Force parameters to some API calls

\- Set a custom resolution not supported by program

\- Switch between HW and SW cursor rendering

\- Framelimiting and FPS reporting

\- Replace a library with a different one through a compat layer

\- Frame buffer postprocessing (e.g. reshade.me)

\- Overlays (e.g. steam)

E: format

</comment><comment><USER28> For a Windows equivalent:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/Detours/wiki](https://github.com/Microsoft/Detours/wiki)

It's a bit more unwieldy to use, because it doesn't just replace all matching symbols (it's not how symbol lookup works for DLLs in Win32) - the injected DLL has to be written specifically with Detours in mind, and has to explicitly override what it needs to override. But in the end, you can do all the same stuff with it.

<comment><USER29> _the injected DLL has to be written specifically with Detours in mind_

Does it? I've _almost_ (ie: haven't :P) used Detours but [https://github.com/Microsoft/Detours/wiki/OverviewIntercepti...](https://github.com/Microsoft/Detours/wiki/OverviewInterception) reads like it can rewrite standard function prologues.

<comment><USER28> I didn't phrase that unambiguously -"injected DLL" in this case means "the DLL with new code that is injected", not "the DLL that the code is being injected into". With LD_PRELOAD, all you need to override a symbol is an .so that exports one with the same name. With Detours, you need to write additional code that actually registers the override as replacing such-and-such function from such-and-such DLL. But yes, the code you're overriding doesn't need to know about any of that.

<comment><USER29> Ah, I get it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Librespot uses LD_PRELOAD to find and patch the encryption/decryption functions used in Spotify's client so the protocol can be examined in wireshark (and ultimately reverse engineered). I am not the original author, he wrote a MacOS version using DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES to achieve something similar.

[https://github.com/librespot-org/spotify- analyze/blob/master...](https://github.com/librespot-org/spotify- analyze/blob/master/dump/dump.c)

</comment><comment><USER31> In Ruby world a lot of people use LD_PRELOAD to change the default malloc to jemalloc (or tcmalloc): [https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc](https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc)

</comment><comment><USER32> Another interesting preloaded library is stderred, which turns output to standard error red: [https://github.com/sickill/stderred](https://github.com/sickill/stderred)

</comment><comment><USER33> I once used LD_PRELOAD to utilize an OpenGL "shim" driver (for an automated test suite). The driver itself was generated automatically from the gl.h header file.

</comment><comment><USER34> If everyone is giving examples, of LD_PRELOAD — it has serious production use at scale in HPC, particularly for profiling and tracing. Runtimes such as MPI provide a layer designed for instrumentation to be interposed, typically with LD_PRELOAD (e.g. the standardized PMPI layer for MPI). Another example is the entirely userspace parallel filesystem that OrangeFS (né PVFS2) provides via the "userint" layer interposing on Unix i/o routines. That sort of facility is a major reason for using dynamic linking, despite the overheads of dynamically loading libraries for parallel applications at scale. I'm not sure if a solution could be hooked in with LD_PRELOAD, but Spindle actually uses LD_AUDIT: [https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/spindle](https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/spindle)

</comment><comment><USER35> I like the use of LD_PRELOAD in this paper: Long et al., Automatic Runtime Error Repair and Containment via Recovery Shepherding, PLDI 2014, [http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/paper/pldi14.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/rinard/paper/pldi14.pdf)

The authors have a small library that sets up some signal handlers for things like divide by zero and segmentation faults. They LD_PRELOAD this library when starting a buggy binary (they test things like Chromium and the GIMP), and when the program tries to divide by zero or read from a null pointer, their signal handlers step in and pretend that the operation resulted in a value of 0. The program can then carry on without crashing and usually does someting meaningful. Tadaa, automatic runtime error repair!

</comment><comment><USER20> My favorite: [https://github.com/musec/libpreopen](https://github.com/musec/libpreopen) is a library for adapting existing applications that open() and whatnot from all over everywhere to the super strict capability based Capsicum sandbox on FreeBSD. I'm working on [https://github.com/myfreeweb/capsicumizer](https://github.com/myfreeweb/capsicumizer) which is a little wrapper for launching apps with preloaded access to a list of directories from an AppArmor-like "profile".

</comment><comment><USER36> LD_PRELOAD is extremely helpful in troubleshooting libraries. Around 2007, qsort on RHEL was slower than SUSE. I raised a case with Redhat along with a test case; but Redhat was not helpful, as it was not reproducible.

So, I copied glibc.so from a SUSE machine to that RHEL machine and ran the test case with LD_PRELOAD, compared with the RHEL glibc. I showed these results to Redhat. Eventually, a patch was applied to glibc on their side.

</comment><comment><USER37> I personally just hate LD_PRELOAD because it's very difficult to turn it off and keep it off. I am glad others find uses for it and that's great,but I hate the privilege escalation attack surface it opens up,I get that it has uses,but there needs to be a simple way to disable it for hardened systems.

</comment><comment><USER38> I feel like I've learned something new from this, I'd never heard of this before.

Would this work with Go or Rust binaries?

<comment><USER39> LD_PRELOAD only works for binaries that are dynamically linked (LD_PRELOAD is actually handled by the link loader not the kernel[1]), and you can only use it to overwrite dynamic symbols IIRC.

It definitely doesn't work with Go, and Rust _might_ work but I'm not sure they use the glibc syscall wrappers.

[1]: [http://man7.org/linux/man- pages/man8/ld.so.8.html](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ld.so.8.html)

<comment><USER40> Rust uses glibc by default; you can use MUSL but you have to opt in.

<comment><USER39> I'm aware of that, I guess my point was that Rust probably doesn't use a lot of glibc (like most C programs would) so the utility of LD_PRELOAD is quite minimal.

I don't know enough about .rlib to know whether you could overwrite Rust library functions, but that's a different topic.

<comment><USER40> Rust uses glibc to call into the kernel like anything else. The standard library is built on top of it.

<comment><USER39> Right, but does that mean it's only used as a way of getting syscall numbers (without embedding it like Go does) or is it the case that you could actually LD_PRELOAD random things like nftw(3) and it would actually affect Rust programs? I'll be honest, I haven't tried it, but it was my impression that Rust only used glibc for syscall wrappers?

<comment><USER40> We don't provide nftw like functionality in std, and so you can't replace it as it would have never even been called. But for example, malloc and free are used, not sbrk directly: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/sys...](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/blob/master/src/libstd/sys/unix/alloc.rs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Here's mine: [https://github.com/andrewrk/malcheck/](https://github.com/andrewrk/malcheck/)

It uses LD_PRELOAD and a custom malloc so that you can find out all the horrible ways that application developers did not plan to run out of memory.

<comment><USER42> We use a sort of similar trick (not via LD_PRELOAD, though) to inject faults in M_NOWAIT malloc() calls in the FreeBSD kernel. FreeBSD kernel code tends to be a bit better than most userspace code I've seen as far as considering OOM conditions, though it is not perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Isn't LD_PRELOAD's hipness outweighed by the Pandora's box of security issues it gives rise to?

<comment><USER44> What security issues are those? Is there anything you can do with LD_PRELOAD that you cannot do in other ways such as modifying binaries before executing them?

<comment><USER45> As a regular ol' GNU/Linux user, you cannot modify binaries in /usr/bin (or /bin), but you can definitely influence their behavior by "LD_PRELOAD=blah /usr/bin/thing".

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h If you can do that, you can (generally) do `cp /bin/foo ./ && modify foo && ./foo`

<comment><USER46> It depends on assumptions in the way a system is hardened. For example, a home directory mounted noexec. In theory, LD_PRELOAD will not mmap a file in a noexec area. But if you can find an installed library with functions that mirror some other application you have, and you can LD_PRELOAD that library before executing the target application, you might be able to force the library to call unexpected routines. (That's a stretch, granted)

Another would be possible RCE. Say you can get a server-side app to set environment variables, like via header injection. Then say you can upload a file. Can you make that server-side app set LD_PRELOAD to the file, and then wait for it to execute an arbitrary program?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I needed to calculate the potential output file size tar would produce, so what better way than using tar itself to calculate it. It just required hooking read, write, and close.

[https://github.com/G4Vi/tarsize](https://github.com/G4Vi/tarsize)

</comment><comment><USER48> I've found LD_PRELOAD immensely useful patching new code into binaries, saves the pain of trying to squeeze code into the existing binary.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wow, that looks like a security nightmare.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Meh? It only works on your own programs.

<comment><USER50> What do you mean? There are many examples of people using LD_PRELOAD to patch the behaviour of other's binaries.

<comment><USER51> Sure, but not across a security boundary.

Being able to override some library function such that running my text editor does $BADTHING isn't very interesting from a security perspective: if I have the capability to do that, I could also just run a program that does $BADTHING directly. Why bother with additional contortions to involve the text editor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I remember back in the day when LD_PRELOAD first became the go-to userland rootkitting method

</comment><comment><USER53> audio generation from malloc and read: [https://github.com/gordol/ld_preload- sounds](https://github.com/gordol/ld_preload-sounds)

also for OSX: DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

<comment><USER54> One issue on OSX is multi-level namespaces; I had to recompile with a flag to disable them in order to hook malloc/free, for example.

<comment><USER55> In case you can't recompile, you should be able to do the same thing with `DYLD_FORCE_FLAT_NAMESPACE=1`.

<comment><USER54> Where have you been all my life?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> One other useful thing : making a trash can for Linux, by wrapping unlink

</comment><comment><USER57> If I were to provide ld preload based security cover (take any binary and secure it with ld-preload), will that be acceptable to corporates? Or does that increase the attack surface?

<comment><USER32> How do you plan to secure a binary with LD_PRELOAD?

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> one feature to break all software. superb

</comment><comment><USER46> Wait until they find out how Go apps work...

<comment><USER59> ...what's this a reference to?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Static linking, which makes this trick not work.

<comment><USER32> And the fact that Go will embed raw syscalls in its binaries, which is also somewhat annoying.

<comment><USER60> Which is unsupported on anything other than Linux and various BSDs.

<comment><USER20> On FreeBSD, it's supported but kinda sucks. e.g., porting to a new CPU architecture is hell (I contributed to the FreeBSD/aarch64 go port, someone else picked it up now…)

The libc is the stable ABI on pretty much any OS that's not called Linux, just use it.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Okay, but now you're using a C library as the basis for your non-C programming language. I understand why it is that way, but that kind of sucks.

<comment><USER20> Ehh… does it kind of suck? The ABI of libc's syscall wrappers is basically "here's some ELF symbols to call with some arguments using the operating system's preferred calling convention". The only really "C" thing about it, other than the name, is struct layouts of various arguments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Coindera: Bitcoin Alerts - <AUTHOR> http://www.coindera.com/

<comment><USER2> The pricing seems pretty reasonable, but as someone who's built a quick 15 line Python bot that sends me an SMS any time there's a significant change in any of a few Bitcoin markets, I'm not sure how much value this adds compared to, say, a simple open source project that anyone could use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Founder here: we support over one hundred cryptocurrencies. The application supports real-time alerts sent via email, SMS, and push notifications to your Android or IOS device.

Let me know if you have any feedback, questions or comments!

</comment><comment><USER4> It isn't really a service I need, I just wanted to compliment you. That is a beautiful website.

<comment><USER5> Thank you! Compliments like this makes all those long nights we spent working worthwhile!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That is a weird pricing plan: what does 125 texts mean? After that, I just run out...permanently?

<comment><USER3> Nope, you can always purchase more text messages. We wanted to give our 'pro' customers a bundle of text messages when they signed up.</comment></comment>


Facebook launches dating service in United States - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-dating/facebook-launches-dating-service-in-united-states-idUSKCN1VQ1UO <comment><USER2> 400 comments when it was originally announced last week [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20886972](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20886972)</comment>


Lazy Thinking: Modularity Always Works - <AUTHOR> https://mondaynote.com/lazy-thinking-modularity-always-works-27257500a586 <comment><USER2> Truly one of the dumbest concepts I've ever heard.

Calling it "lazy thinking" is probably generous.

No wonder Larry is pissed by all the moonshots. This one didn't have a chance, and I am sure the team members were pretty satisfied with themselves.

I am sad Goog killed off Fiber. I hope that taint of dumb project like Aria didn't contribute to its demise.</comment>