U.S. power industry may ask key employees to live at work if coronavirus worsens - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-utilities/u-s-power-industry-may-ask-key-employees-to-live-at-work-if-coronavirus-worsens-idUSKBN2171AC <comment><USER2> Weird. This is normal. I work for a large electric utility in the United States and we already have employees sequestered. This is pretty much par for the course.

<comment><USER3> This is pretty much par for what course?

I understand doing it for covid-19, but is it par for the course for "flu season"? otherwise, how have you established these practices? You can't be doing it all the time if you're having employees quarantine when they're not working, as you mentioned.

<comment><USER2> Think major storms - especially hurricanes and big ice storms. You need people responsible for generation, transmission and distribution in place and sequestered to ensure power is still available to those areas whose distribution circuits haven't been impacted. For the big storms they start moving crews in place, just outside the places likely to suffer the most impacts, before the storm hits so they're ready to go as soon as possible. As far as we're concerned this is just a variation of our _storm mode_ as we call it. We got this.

<comment><USER3> I understand emergency response by responders who are trained, but in this case there isn't a power emergency, the emergency is to protect the people who work the shifts in the power plant from getting each other sick in a pandemic, and off duty too.

I'm not saying that there is any incompetence or shortage of can-do, just seems like something that there may not have been much practicing for. I mean, the way you usually go into high gear might be optimum for spreading the virus, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My girlfriend's mother works at Rockefeller in NYC and they told all essential employees to be ready to move on campus, indefinitely .

Update: typo

<comment><USER5> Could you clarify what institution you mean by "Rockefeller"?

I did a Wikipedia search and it looks like there are several options in New York.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_University](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_University)

<comment><USER4> this link is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not surprising, and I'm glad it's being done. I'd be more worried if the headline was something like "Power companies wait too late to sequester plant operation crews, personnel shortages mount as employees catch COVID-19" or similiar.

I got a taste of something similar to this years back when I was a NOC monkey. I worked a weekend shift. One time, the news reported that big snow storm was coming that weekend. When I showed up that Friday, the site manager gave me the info for the hotel they were putting me up in for the weekend. Yes, he knows I have a relatively short drive to work along routes that will be the first ones hit by the plows and salt trucks. Yes, he's glad I have a fresh battery and snow tires on my car. No, none of that matters, we need to guarantee personnel on site, and the hotel's closer.

Companies that provide important services usually have plans in place for events like this if they have their shit together.

Usually.

<comment><USER8> They probably have an underwriter who won't pay out if any of those t's are not crossed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I sure wish people who are being asked to go above and beyond during this crisis would be compensated above and beyond for it. The idea of people putting themselves in danger for the rest of us for a shitty wage is so depressing.

(I'm thinking healthcare workers, grocery clerks, etc. Not that the power folks are necessarily putting themselves in danger)

</comment><comment><USER10> I've heard rumours about a high-frequency trading shop doing that, too

<comment><USER11> Weird. Can't they work from home?

<comment><USER12> Most home offices don't have 16 displays attached to the desk

<comment><USER13> mine would if I made that kind of money.

<comment><USER14> I'm waiting for someone to bring the vertically curved video slot machine displays to market for general use. Those would make a nice personal command center.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What kind of housing to they have? The article mentions bedding, blankets, etc, but not what sort of living quarters are provided. I hope they don't have people sleeping under their desks. Putting trailers in the parking lots seems like a good idea, to keep morale up if nothing else.

<comment><USER16> Yeah there is also a hygienic threat to the workers. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed more people than WW1, found breeding grounds in the dense cantonments built for soldiers.

[https://youtu.be/fLGNrC9k418?t=2494](https://youtu.be/fLGNrC9k418?t=2494)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am curious what the strategy is for linemen, particularly if a natural disaster occurs (inclement weather), in conjuction with the ongoing 'war'.

<comment><USER18> Probably just send them out, no? Do they even end up particularly close to other people even in normal times? People tend to avoid power lines that are being actively worked on.

<comment><USER17> Yes, they work in crews and travel to different states. They have to eat, and stay in hotels for days or weeks.

<comment><USER8> If you work with a fixed crew and equipment, you'll have whole teams down at once, but other teams won't have been exposed at all.

<comment><USER17> Except they interact with hotel staff and Walmart and grocery store cashiers.

Also, part of my friend's job is transporting equipment to various teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Url changed from [https://energycentral.com/c/ec/covid-19-news-nuclear- workers...](https://energycentral.com/c/ec/covid-19-news-nuclear-workers-may- live-site-during-virus-crisis), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER20> What a wonderful time to attack the US power grid and cause mass mayhem. Would certainly destabilize the world's leading superpower.</comment>


Ibuprofen Is Not A Solution, Only A Buffer - <AUTHOR> http://philippeharewood.blogspot.com/2012/10/ibuprofen-is-not-solution-only-buffer.html

<comment><USER2> Am I the only one that can't get past "Ibuprofen" in the title and his talk of Tylenol (Acetaminophen) in the text?

He would probably be better off taking ibuprofen for his wrists, assuming it is an inflammation problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are indeed correct, yet differences such as these aren't really taken up by some in the population. A few years ago, if I was in throbbing pain, walking through the pharmacy, I wouldn't really have the time or energy (which is really bad and not thoughtful) to search the back labels or ask a pharmacist on whether I should be taking Ibuprofen or Acetaminophen or a placebo.

The point I was _trying_ (maybe failing) to get at, was these drugs regardless of their chemical makeup, most of the time, some of us don't need them but we take the clutch anyway.

They are pain reliefs, not solutions to whatever the pain was caused by.

<comment><USER3> It _does_ matter what the actual active ingredients of medication are, even in pain medication, whether the general population cares about that or not. These things really do have different properties and side effects, pain meds are not interchangeable.

But that shouldn't distract from your general point which I find hard to disagree with: pain medication is symptomatic relief. That doesn't make it irrelevant, but it doesn't mean people should ignore the underlying causes either. At the same time, these causes are sometimes idiopathic, (short term) unavoidable or (long term) untreatable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's worse than that -- regular Ibuprofen users are destroying their livers:

"The Effect of Ibuprofen on the Liver":

[http://www.ehow.com/about_5185317_effect-ibuprofen- liver.htm...](http://www.ehow.com/about_5185317_effect-ibuprofen-liver.html)

A quote: "Hepatitis caused by ibuprofen is marked by abdominal pain and tenderness on the upper right side, dark-colored urine, diarrhea, headache, nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, fatigue, jaundice and white or clay- colored stool (NIH) ... The treatment for ibuprofen-induced liver damage is simply discontinuing use of the drug (NIH)."

So sayeth Captain Obvious.

To me, the problem is not prescription drugs that should be freely available, it's freely available drugs that should be prescription.

<comment><USER5> Is there a substance that you can't abuse? (Not even talking about alcohol, take sugar for example)

If you're exceeding 3200 mg/day of ibuprofen for long stretches of time, you're either seriously used to it, or have something quite serious. In which case it would be quite likely that you'd be getting ibuprofen as a prescription, if that were necessary (or something stronger and with more/worse side-effects).

<comment><USER4> > Is there a substance that you can't abuse?

Do you mean a substance that has no harmful or excessive dose? No, I don't think so. People have had aspirin from prehistoric times (obtained from willow bark), but aspirin has well-established dangers.

My reason for posting was to make people aware that this seemingly benign non- prescription drug can be dangerous.

> Not even talking about alcohol, take sugar for example.

Sugar is a great example of a substance that has all sorts of deleterious effects, from the time it enters you mouth and erodes your teeth, all the way through your system. The central paradox of modern times isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. :)

Apropos, try to guess where the most dangerous place is for the average person in modern times. Ready? The bedroom. And if you're married, the danger is much higher.

<comment><USER6> > _try to guess where the most dangerous place is for the average person in > modern times. Ready? The bedroom. And if you're married, the danger is much > higher_

Protip: when your wife is in the bathroom, unload the pistol under her pillow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If it's your wrists try a dvorak keyboard.

But I would suggest some exercise and healthy eating (aka Paleo) above all.

<comment><USER8> Better yet, learn macros. It's the repetitive stuff that kills your hands/arm/wrist.

Anybody using vim needs to know about the map command.</comment></comment>


F# Data Type Providers in .Net Core (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://lukemerrett.com/fsharp-data-type-providers/ <comment><USER2> Ah, F#, when I was desperately trying to get skills in .NET (lots of .NET in my town, and I don't have a degree) I encountered F# and lost my enthusiasm for C#. Which is doubly ironic now that I work for a JVM shop.

I still have a lot of love for it though. Especially things like measure types.

<comment><USER3> JVM has a lot of functional languages. As well as the usual Clojure, Scala, etc. I think it has some Haskell-like ones.

<comment><USER4> Is there an ML on the JVM? The best part of F# is it felt like a simpler version of Scala, even without things like higher kinded types that are present in OCaml.

<comment><USER5> If you squint very (very) hard, Kotlin can fill that role. You've got algebraic data types via sealed classes, a weaker form of pattern matching via `when` expressions, and decent facilities for higher-order functions.

<comment><USER6> I was going to comment the same thing. I moved from F# to kotlin and have about 80% of what I want / used from F#. With more tools eco system that makes management happy. Arrow adds to that, with it's library and compiler additions.

I have also been building type providers in Kotlin. Where a gradle plugin scans a file / schema then generates types and DSLs off of it. It's a pragmatic functional language.

The biggest catch to me. Is there are very few places using Kotlin in a fully functional style. On the back end more often than not you'll find Spring. Which undoes a lot of these features / patterns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> F# looks like a great language... A friend of mine who is a non-programmer DBA just reached out to me and asked about recommendations for learning .NET ...

I've not seen anything as elegant looking as F# in the .net world before ... What do people think ... -- is F# a good language for a beginner to learn which is also sufficiently well-supported that they could find themselves building useful script-like database (MSSQL) oriented utilities as early project ...?

<comment><USER8> F# has tended to lag far behind C# in Microsoft's ecosystem. I haven't kept up with in a few years, so I don't know how far behind it still is. It is a fun language for sure.

If your friend is looking into getting into .net for professional purposes, I would steer them towards C# first. That's likely to be much more useful in the long term. Especially since it can be a stepping stone to other C/C++ like languages.

With F# I would bet that they hit some limitation sooner or later where something that could be easily done in C# will take more work in F#. Which could be fine if they have the time/inclination to rough it. I just would not advise F# as a resume builder.

<comment><USER9> >With F# I would bet that they hit some limitation sooner or later where something that could be easily done in C# will take more work in F#.

From my experience of working with both C# and F# for a few years, it's more likely to be the other way around.

<comment><USER10> F# lacks the Visual Studio tooling support that VB.NET, C# and even C++ enjoy.

It is also not officially supported on UWP, and needs some hacks to the generated MSIL (as .NET Native doesn't cover 100% of all MSIL).

<comment><USER9> The support for F# in VS leaves a lot to desire, indeed. However, in my experience, I've found that the developer productivity gains from F# outweigh the inconvenience.

<comment><USER10> Only if what you are doing is directly supported by F#.

If you attempt to do GUI development, then you are forced to look for community projects like Fabulous, use the XAML type provider with a dummy C#,VB.NET,C++/CLI project for the XAML generation, or actually use one of those languages for the UI, with F# used only for the logic.

So even though I am a big fan of ML language family, at the end of the day, the other .NET languages get the green light from most customers and team.

<comment><USER11> I don't recall having too much difficulty getting the VS WPF XAML Designer to basically function with F#. Some features just don't light up like event connecting/code-behind, but that's fine and what I wanted anyway (taking an MVVM-ish approach).

There's a hope that with F#'s upcoming move to the "shared project system" that a lot of the pains will go away in hopefully the near future.

(That said, Fabulous has piqued my interest and I'm debating rewriting my big F# GUI in it, at least in an exploratory branch.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If your using F# want to build (cross platform) UIs take a look at [https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/Avalonia.FuncUI](https://github.com/AvaloniaCommunity/Avalonia.FuncUI)

</comment><comment><USER13> Am I missing something? This appears to be just outsourcing the record schema definition to a sample object in another file.

You still have to keep that sample updated to handle new runtime data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but it is comparatively easier getting say, the result of an API's GET and pasting into a file as a sample, than manually tweaking types. At least when you're starting out or if it's a small F# program. You could even use the actual network path, but that's a bit... wilder in terms of maintenance/reproducibility.

Plus, since you can have arbitrary providers, such as a provider that connects to a DB and generates a type-safe "ORM" over your relational database[0] with no configuration other than pointing to the data source you're going to access at runtime. Perfect if you want to write little data transformation scripts.

[0]: [http://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/](http://fsprojects.github.io/SQLProvider/)

<comment><USER14> It might be easier, but it's trivial to come up with cases where you cannot generate an example that completely satisfies given JSON schema. It feels like this only works for some specific rigid JSON protocols. You also cannot restrict the types to anything more specific than JSON primitive types.

A "better", certainly more common solution is to generate the type based on whatever source code is generating the JSON, if you have access to it (or have the API provided generate the signature for you).

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm still learning, but from what I gather, there's

a) less of a need to deserialize things into specific concrete classes in functional languages

b) it seems to be idiomatic to convert data yourself if you need custom conversions, rather than relying on a library to automagically deduce it. this is helped by how simple doing the manual conversion ends up being in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> With compile time execution, one can do similar things in other languages too.

This video shows a very advanced and practical way of using "static introspection":

Lambda World 2019 - What FP Can Learn From Static Introspection - Aditya Siram (Deech)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElHi2h9Ho6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElHi2h9Ho6M)

What if compile time and type level programming in functional programming languages were easy, something you reach for without even thinking about it? What if you could debug type errors with a simple compile time print statement? Write highly flexible systems by being able to introspect into types at compile time? Pre-calculate large portions of your programs for great efficiency?

Typed functional programming is a great and fun way to write resilient software, and as type systems have become more and more expressive in recent years, we are able to program sophisticated and useful properties at the type level for even better compile time safety. Just one problem: It is very difficult, requires advanced knowledge of the type system, the syntax is convoluted, the error messages are impenetrable, and it is nearly impossible to debug.

This talk will dive into why we should steal static introspection from languages like Nim, and D, state-of-the-art imperative programming languages which can solve all these issues, make type systems much more approachable without losing any expressive power, and offer new design possibilities for functional programs.

<comment><USER16> D is an imperative programming language? I thought it was multi-paradigm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there is a moratorium on adding IL-compatible features to F# ? If so, is it keeping pace with the additions to C# ? If not, what work is being done?

<comment><USER18> What's C# got recently that doesn't already exist in F#?

<comment><USER17> well C# 8.0 introduced async streams, for example

<comment><USER19> F# allows you to implement such features as libraries using computation expressions.

<comment><USER20> So does C# with LINQ [1]. I guess C# language development tends to lean more on concrete syntax than libraries, which is a shame, but it is possible. It's also a shame LINQ can't be extended like computation expressions.

[1] [https://github.com/louthy/language- ext/blob/master/LanguageE...](https://github.com/louthy/language- ext/blob/master/LanguageExt.Core/DataTypes/Task/Task.Extensions.cs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> F# is great, but it seems to be somehow slowed down by C#.

If there's a feature that takes time to implement (eg: Type Classes from Haskell or Polymorphic Module from Ocaml), people would rather wait for CLR or IL to support the infrastructures first.

As a result, there are many essential features waiting to be implemented forever.

<comment><USER22> I'd try F# if it were hosted on JVM or better yet LLVM. Unfortunately .NET is borderline nightmare inducing so I wouldn't want to spend my free time using it. And it doesn't seem to have any better adoption than OCaml which is its supposedly outdated predecessor.

<comment><USER19> I think was true before .NET Core, but now the experience is quite good.

It's also possible to use F# as a compile-to-js language using Fable. This code would run on Node or the browser.

Then there is [https://github.com/dotnet/corert](https://github.com/dotnet/corert) which allows ahead-of-time compilation to native code, but it is a bit more experimental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it possible for the JSONProvider to take a JSON schema as input rather than just a piece of JSON?

<comment><USER24> It looks like there is/was one, but it was abandoned by its developers:

[https://github.com/jet/JsonSchemaProvider](https://github.com/jet/JsonSchemaProvider)

[https://medium.com/jettech/json-schema-type-provider-why- we-...](https://medium.com/jettech/json-schema-type-provider-why-we-built-and- abandoned-it-7b0659afad18)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if they could get the TypeScript compiler to do something similar in future.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that would be very helpful since there's no dependent type in a foreseeable future.

For example, As a front-end heavy language, talking with other systems is quite ordinary -- a very useful case is reflecting GraphQL or SQL type without code generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if Rust macros could be used to similar effect.

<comment><USER27> Many languages with powerful macro systems can do the same. Still, it's cool/promising to see a .NET language capable of compile-time execution like this when they do not support macros in the same way that other languages do (but they do have plenty of reflection features and some codegen features as we see here).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Note: article is from 2018 - since then, the FSharp.Data package has long moved out of preview and many other Type Providers work well on .NET Core.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, sorry for breaking the format. Hopefully a mod can fix it since I'm not able to edit the post anymore.

I picked that article just because it is a very concise explanation, a bit more proper for sharing, than the official documentation, which currently requires a bit of hyperlink-following and generally nonzero familiarity with the language.</comment></comment>


Satoshi Nakamoto's Neighbor: The Bitcoin Ghostwriter Who Wasn't - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/25/satoshi-nakamotos-neighbor-the-bitcoin-ghostwriter-who-wasnt/

<comment><USER2> A much better treatment of the hunt for Satoshi than the Newsweek piece.</comment>


NovuMind is developing a deep learning chip to "do inference efficiently" - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332226 <comment><USER2> I wish I could bet money on this not happening "by February". Dude is promising perf that's 25% higher than Titan X Pascal in a power envelope that's 1/50th of Titan X Pascal, and he's promising to do it with a few tens of millions of dollars and a handful of people.

Yeah, right. Like that's ever going to happen. Sounds like the usual grandiose claims to get clueless moneybags to pony up the cash for series B.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, extraordinary claims and all that.

Especially as this guy has a credibility problem in the first place because of the ML cheating scandal from a few years ago (1) he was in the middle of.

15 tflops of even 3x3 stacked in 5 watts? 'Taped out by Feb' \- I am sceptical to say the least.

(1) [https://www.enterprisetech.com/2015/06/12/baidu-fires- deep-i...](https://www.enterprisetech.com/2015/06/12/baidu-fires-deep-images- ren-wu/)

<comment><USER4> It's not impossible. I've seen a company go from zero to tapeout in six months. However, they did wind up getting stuck due to bugs on the motherboard. (the chip did work)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but inference only and convolutions only is kind of a non-starter for a specialized chip, since the field is simply too dynamic for it to be really useful to focus on only 3x3 convolutions. I'm guessing FWIW, that this guy is implementing the Winograd filtering method or something similar in hardware, hence his restriction to 3x3 kernels.

<comment><USER6> There is a slight risk but I think it does make sense. There has been papers on the advantage of 5x5 and 7x7 convolution filters and the consensus seems to be that 3x3 are probably the way to go.

If this was out, right now, it would have tons of use. The field moves fast but it is credible that in one year the field will still uses 3x3 and it is certain that being able to do todays applications for a few percents of the energy used now to do them is going to have business applications.

Research moves fast but user usage move at a different speed. The first GPU came out when people were not sure if we would be doing triangle-based renderings, realtime raytracing, or something more funky.

<comment><USER5> That's a fair enough point, but i don't really see why you need to restrict yourself to only 3x3 when you can support others at a slight penalty. For that reason, i suspect it's a winograd convolution ASIC or some similar algorithm.

<comment><AUTHOR> The penalty is not that slight. As said in the article, Google TPUs struggle to feed themselves data, while their big convolution units simply ends up being a waste of die area</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sex, politics, and pay gaps in the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.visualmagnetic.com/html/sex-politics-income/

<comment><USER2> Nice map/presentation, but I fail to see what relationship these metrics are suppose to have with one another. There' doesn't appear to be a strong correlation between them and it comes off as rather sophomoric.

<comment><AUTHOR> author here. a more rigorous analysis would include a co-variance matrix and a best fit line to quantify the relationships between the variables.

on the surface, there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation. not all exploration reaches a definitive conclusion or even a correlation. the alternative would be for me to shelve the visualization on the grounds of "no conclusion". and that would be the file drawer effect in action :) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#File_drawer_ef...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias#File_drawer_effect)

<comment><USER2> OK, but what made you pick those three variables to start with? I can see political leaning vs pay gap, because equal pay legislation/administration is a somewhat partisan issue. But the length of sexual intercourse measure doesn't seem to tell us much about anything. Why not measure annual consumption of corn dogs, or the going price of onions?

I'm open to there being a good reason you chose to include it, but you didn't offer on on the page so I'm just confused; it reads as a sort of really abstract titillation, even though it could be interesting to learn what it _does_ correlate with.

<comment><AUTHOR> i saw nerve.com's data on intercourse duration and started to wonder which variables might cause or correlate with the same. of greatest interest to me at the time: how does in/equality affect our sex lives? income is one measure of equality. politics is a natural third dimension of general interest.

it is a somewhat ad hoc trio of variables, sure, but there's a singular underlying question: which popular psychographic dimensions affect our sex lives? given finite time, i picked these 3 and ran with it :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for taking the time to explain. Although I was critical of that aspect I thought the design itself was clean and effective, and you should keep exploring this line of activity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Data visualization should be informative and intuitive, at its basest. This is neither, especially with the distracting, unnecessary animations.

Data visualization can be well designed, yes, but it's not necessary, and it should definitely not come at _expense_ to ease of interpretation.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi. how would you suggest making it more informative & intuitive, aside from removing the animations?

<comment><USER4> What is your purpose in graphing these three metrics at the state level? What are you trying to communicate?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In addition to the criticisms raised by others (the most important of which is significance!), I'd add that the dots are a poor way to demonstrate the pay gap. People are notoriously bad at estimating area, particularly when the variance is so small. The only reason pie charts are acceptable is that you double encode the metric in area and central angle.

Here you are trying to demonstrate the ratio between two values: the average pay of women versus men. However, the dimension encoding this metric is overall area, so the fact that this is a ratio is obscured. Perhaps worse, the areas are misleading: WY pays its women 37% less than men, yet the dot is barely visible, far smaller than 63% of the area of the circle (which would be the intuitive explanation); likewise, it looks (on the scale to the right) that even 100% pay equality is represented by an incomplete circle.

Also, it looks like you're plotting DC but it's basically impossible to click on to see the data; for that matter RI, CT and MA are pretty hard to deal with.

It seems like you're using a force-based layout for the charts, which I take to mean that the states aren't accurately placed. Please don't move data points around to suit aesthetic concerns.

Okay, enough negativity, some positives. I quite like the scales to the right. Some may complain about the animation, but I think that's valuable object constancy in action. It makes it quite intuitive what's happening when rolling over the various states. I also like the use of left/right to represent the political lean.

However: it isn't at all clear where the ends of the scales are and why they were chosen. The arrowhead makes estimating the length of the political lean bars difficult. The fact that they are offset by the width of the circle makes comparison around the middle impossible, and comparison elsewhere hard.

Is this data geographically related? If not, a choropleth is probably not the right solution. The fact that you're charting state-based data is not enough to justify a geographical representation.

EDIT: the most important aspect of a data visualization is the message. Don't just try to make something pretty: think long and hard about what you are trying to convey. And add text! An explanation is required to make an interesting visualization comprehensible. If a visualization is completely understandable without an iota of text, the message is probably entirely obvious without the visualization.

</comment><comment><USER6> The "pay gap" statistic does not control for occupation, age, or education. What's the purpose of such an apples-to-oranges comparison?

</comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is interested in a similar basic crossfilters written in d3, you can check out dc.js - [https://github.com/dc-js/dc.js/wiki](https://github.com/dc- js/dc.js/wiki) (edit: i have no relation to the project, but it's pretty neat)

Here is a list of community contributed examples: [https://github.com/dc- js/dc.js/wiki#examples-contributed-by-...](https://github.com/dc- js/dc.js/wiki#examples-contributed-by-community) including some geographic visualizations.

<comment><USER5> You could also simply work with Crossfilter [0] and D3 [1] directly. They're both great libraries, and learning their APIs independently seems more valuable.

[0]: [http://square.github.io/crossfilter/](http://square.github.io/crossfilter/)

[1]: [http://d3js.org/](http://d3js.org/)</comment></comment>


Learn to let it go ... - <AUTHOR>

I've found myself watching the item numbers here on Hacker News having realised some time ago (before the item that mentioned it) that it was getting close to submission/comment number 10^6.  I found myself thinking: OK, in the past M minutes there have been S submissions.  I can linearly project that to predict when numver 10^6-10 is submitted.  Then I can write a script that checks the projections, and when 10^6-10 has been submitted, submit 20 in a furry.  I can delete the 19 that got it wrong, and I'll have the millionth submission.
So I'm sitting here not getting anything done, waiting, planning, getting ready, and this voice in my head says ...
Let it go.
Sometimes things aren't worth the effort.  Sometimes the reward doesn't match the work invested.  Sometimes you simply have to let it go.
It's a bit like the "Greybeard Stories" stuff I've been doing.  They've disappeared without a trace here, in the very forum where I thought they would get their most appreciative audience.  I guess no one really cares, so I've got to learn to let it go.
Maybe I'll come back and write more later, and maybe I'll follow the suggestion made by  DanielBMarkham and gather them into a book.  Or maybe someone else will do it.
Right now, I've got other stuff to do, stuff that's probably got a better reward-for-effort ration.  So I'll go do that.  I won't try to get the millionth entry, I won't polish my next Greybeard story.  I'll go back to writing code for my project/startup.
I'll take another step towards learning to let it go.
When it's the right thing to do. <comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to let go, but I'm working on it, so as a last throw of the dice, spin of the wheel, let's give these one last airing and if they get no response I'll move on:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994358>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996250>

</comment><comment><USER2> Close, but not quite 10^6

This would have been quite ironic if you did hit it

</comment><comment><USER3> 29 away ;)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great. Now you have me watching it.

<comment><USER4> And that's not a good thing -- totally trivial.

<comment><USER4> It moves very quickly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> it was 8 away</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't Google/Facebook owe taxes for uploaded content? - <AUTHOR> It's seems like if I gift or barter, I would owe taxes on the value of the gifts/goods received.<p>When someone uploads content and grants a facebook/youtube a license why aren't they taxed? <comment><USER2> Only in the USA... In Canada you can give people stuff if you like. Lotteries and gambling winnings are tax free. Gambling and lottery losses are not deductible. I am constantly amazed that the USA taxes or tries to tax all that stuff, and defrauds you on the input deduction. You buy a lottery ticket = say $10. If your winnings are taxable, your $10 ticket cost should be a deduction - right? Not in the USA. Then there are medical costs = fraud at a new and far higher level.</comment>


Twitter Is Suspending More Than One Million Accounts per Day in Latest Purge - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/twitter-is-suspending-more-than-one-million-accounts-pe-1827409235 <comment><USER2> It always strikes me as amazing that so many accounts could be created in the first place. Twitter are pretty strict now and require phone verification to make an account. It just makes me wonder how many simcards are being used to fuel the disinfo/misinfo/psyops campaigns?</comment>


Californians: Ashamed of Senator Feinstein's lies on surveillance? Join Us - <AUTHOR> https://shameonfeinstein.org <comment><USER2> If you really want to get Feinstein's attention, an internet petition, even an incredibly well-written one like TFA, isn't likely to do much. You need to pick up the phone and interact with a human being in her office, making sure that person understands the importance of this issue to you, one of her constituents.

If her staffers start being effectively being DDoSed from doing their jobs by phone calls about NSA surveillance, she _will_ hear about it.

Source: my cousin and his wife were both Senate staffers for a number of years.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've evaluated our options for influencing Feinstein's office directly and there is no precedent for a citizen movement causing the Senator to change a publically announced position.

We are trying to adopt a strategy more like the 2nd Amendment groups to discredit and delegitimize.

<comment><USER3> 2nd amendment groups like the NRA use the direct method, not petitions. They send out pre-written postcards for the member to fill out and send in. They also send out contact information for all the member gov't representatives, phone numbers included, and tell them to call.

The grandparent is right. Give people the number to Feinstein's office and tell them to call and say:

1\. I live in Feinstein's district

2\. I oppose X

3\. If Feinstein votes for X, I will vote against her next election.

The call can take less than 1 minute, but her staff will record the comments and present them to Diane.

<comment><AUTHOR> EFF has a great action site on this issue. [https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action3/common/public/?a...](https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9437)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fact that there's an "Is this safe" link next to the button for signing the petition is itself a telling indicator of the chilling effects of this sort of surveillance.

A couple of years ago people wouldn't even have imagined the possibility that there'd be consequences from this sort of very low-level, very legitimate, democratic participation.

<comment><USER5> The organization opposing surveillance is the one putting the button there. Its pure propaganda on their part.

<comment><USER6> Honestly, if you had to bet, would you bet for or against the following hypothesis?

hypothesis: A significant amount of people nowadays think twice before writing or voting on something that could be interpreted as critical of government surveillance. They fear they will be included in some list and that this may have future negative consequences.

<comment><USER5> I don't know how you're defining "significant." I don't think its appreciably higher now than it ever was. I think the latest news just validates people who have always been paranoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Feinstein beyond reproach. She's probably too old to run again and she just won her election. She's a lame duck with a ton of power. She can take the flak I think with no repercussions.

I also don't think she's lied. She's been open about her position. I don't agree with it, but I don't think she's ever misrepresented herself.

<comment><USER8> Feinstein has been like this forever, but she's in a seat where the electorate would rather vote for a Democrat that eats babies over a moderate Republican.

<comment><USER7> California elects republicans statewide all the time. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pete Wilson, a Senator can win too. Not that I would want them to.

<comment><USER9> > California elects republicans statewide all the time.

Well, California has an unusually large number of separately elected Statewide officers, but for the big three statewide offices (Governor and the two US Senators), "all the time" would be something of an exaggeration. In the last 19 years, Arnold Schwarzenegger's reelection as Governor is the only time a Republican has been elected to one of those big-3 statewide offices in a normal election.

> Arnold Schwarzenegger,

Arnold Schwarzenegger was first elected in a recall election which uses different procedures (an open plurality election with no primary to filter the field, with a side-by-side majority vote on the same ballot for actually recalling the incumbent -- more people voted for the incumbent Democrat to be retained than voted for the Republican Schwarzenegger to replace him.)

> Pete Wilson

Pete Wilson -- the last Republican elected Senator from or Governor of California, was last elected Governor _19 years ago_. The political landscape has changed a bit since then.

> a Senator can win too.

Pete Wilson did it the last time _25 years ago_. Sure, the Republicans _could_ run a candidate that could win, but they haven't shown much propensity to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The _ONLY_ way that you can have an impact is by (1) raising money (I'm talking $1000/person), and (2) donating a significant amount of time to working for their challenger.

Go after some of the most ardent supporters of NSA and get them defeated. Once you make an example of a few such politicians, the rest will fall in line. That's what the NRA does, and it works swimmingly for them.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is anyone weighing in on this in touch woth how california actually votes? It doesn't matter how bad DFi actuallu is, our party voters are too busy protecting you from republicans. i didn't hear one reason in favor of hr last term, the only justification for voting i got was "fioria is terrifying"

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Get involved: We organize primarily through our mailing list. [http://restorethefourthsf.com/mailinglist/](http://restorethefourthsf.com/mailinglist/) & Facebook Group [https://www.facebook.com/groups/RestoretheFourthSF/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/RestoretheFourthSF/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Campaigns won't work, be it email or phone. A lot of Californians (and US citizens in general) have been trained to automatically vote for someone with a D (or R) next to the person's name. They've also been trained to apologize for their politicians, buy into whatever they say, and ignore serious issues. Skepticism and criticism only apply to people from the other side, and even then, it's only the easily marketable rhetoric people will repeat.

In California, Feinstein will be re-elected into her grave because of that D next to her name. She could support almost everything George W Bush stood for, just say otherwise, and that D will keep her in office. Want proof? Look at Obama.

</comment><comment><USER13> Feinstein's husband: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Blum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Blum)

All the controversies about self-dealing must just be coincidence: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Blum#Controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Blum#Controversy)

</comment><comment><USER14> Ashamed? No. Her actions are no reflection of my own character or behavior. I've never voted for her. Ashamed is not the right word.

</comment><comment><USER15> When you open this page with NoScript, all the alerts are shown.

* Thanks for Signing We've sent you an email. Please check your inbox to complete the process.

* We've already got a signature for your email. Thanks

* You appear to be overloading our servers. Please stop.

* Something went wrong. Let us know on Github

<comment><AUTHOR> We are serving all of our javascript over SSL. We think think that should protect our users against malicious attacks if they are using TOR to access our site for instance.

We could pretty easily provide a fallback HTML form for sign up. I'll try to get that up and running soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Lies on surveillance is one if many issues Senator Feinstein is an embarrassment to me. It started with her own self serving nature even as mayor of San Francisco.

Google her stance on gun ownership and the steps she took for her own private interests.

</comment><comment><USER17> pretty sure her office is around Santa Monica blvd. and Sepulveda IIRC, should anyone want to do protest more physically.

</comment><comment><USER18> Feinstein consistently opposes the interests of her own Tech industry. She's gotta go.

<comment><USER19> I'm as unhappy as the next person with regard to Feinstein's track record, but to say she's opposing the interests of her own industry is just Silicon Valley bias. She's a US Senator, not a congresswoman from Palo Alto.

Yes, the tech sector is very large in California but they've largely been apolitical in the past. There are two massive industries who lavish politicians with donations and who Feinstein is representing just fine:

Military and Entertainment.

How many defense contractors from the top-100 list[1] are based in California? How about the world's largest entertainment companies (who would profit immensely from SOPA / PIPA)?

Ignoring these political realities is unhelpful.

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government)

<comment><USER20> I didn't read OP's comment as saying Feinstein wasn't serving any industry's interests -- but that she was being actively and passively hostile to the tech sector which comprises a significant part of her constituency.

I'm happy to say I've voted for her opponent in every election where the option was available to me. I suggest everyone living in California do the same, barring her running against a truly ghastly opponent. (But isn't that always the issue...)</comment></comment></comment>


What will happen when a software company downs tools for a week? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/02/what-will-happen-when-a-software-company-downs-tools-for-a-week.html

<comment><USER2> We do something similar around each major release, we call it Branching Day as it's when we create the maintenance branch in cvs. We branch on the thursday and each developer is free to try something new out to kick off development on the next version until friday afternoon. If there's much worth showing we get the company together for some beers and demonstrate what we've come up with. It's normally backendy or code tidying kind of stuff which might not otherwise might not get pushed up the priorities or some visual nicety we know people will like but again are unlikely to ever shout for.

</comment><comment><USER3> I personally do this all the time. I actually keep several major projects going at all times just so that I can benefit from the creativity boost that comes from switching onto a new task with a fresh outlook.

Better still, I find, is to travel. This last week, for example, I spent hopping fishing boats between villages on the pacific coast of Colombia, well out of Wifi range, phones, and power.

Having a grand total of 8 hours laptop charge to eke out from the hammock over that week really focused the time I had. And I came back to 2 days of ridiculous productivity as all the pent-up ideas flowed out into the IDE.

Sure, you have to deal with 100 customer emails when you get back, but overall I consider it a big productivity win.

(and you get to go surfing in Colombia!)

</comment><comment><USER4> cool, but after the title I had the horrible thought that this was about an SaaS Company powering down for a week...

<comment><USER5> Yeah, the headline doesn't parse. The verb is "downs," it seems, but they're not taking anything down.

<comment><USER6> They haven't _taken_ anything down, they've _put_ down their tools.

<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throw_down_one%27s_tools>

<comment><USER7> Except that they haven't. They've just been told to work on other things for 3½ days.

I like the idea though.

<comment><USER8> That's exactly what confused me, they aren't putting down tools, they're just using them for whatever they want.

I really like the idea too, at my last job there was a lot of discussion for a while about taking 4 hours each week to work on whatever you wanted and present it to the group at the next team meeting. It never really panned out, at least not officially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This sounds similar to the "Hack Day" conceived over at Yahoo!. We shamelessly stole the idea here at AG: once a year every single developer & business analyst takes 24 hours to gather into loosely planned teams with even more loosely planned ideas and see what kind of cool stuff we can build. Prizes are awarded for Overall Best Hack, Funniest Hack, Best Internal Hack, Most Likely to Go Over Budget, etc., and in fact, several projects who saw their inception as throwaway Hack Day ideas have charmed the company brass and become fully- implemented, revenue-generating projects in their own right. Very exciting!

</comment><comment><USER10> Twitter originated this way, I believe.

<comment><USER11> yeah, they said so at startup school: <http://bit.ly/bUfWf></comment></comment>


How to Buy Clothes That Are Built to Last - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/climate/sustainable-clothing.html <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: The sections are

1\. Will I wear it again?

2\. Does it feel good to the touch?

3\. Can I see my hand through it?

4\. Does it pass the tug test?

5\. Do the pockets square?

6\. Is it a good blend?

7\. Can I maintain it?</comment>


Rising US Inequality: How We Got Here, Where We're Going - <AUTHOR> https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/rising-us-inequality-how-we-got-here-where-were-going <comment><USER2> "But the last 50 years have been terrible for people with lower skills. Adjusted for inflation, the average earnings of a man who didn't go to college is lower now than it was 50 years ago. That's unheard of."

How much of this effect is the vastly higher percentage of people who now go to college? If you line up 100 people by vague estimation of their likely earning potential in 1970 and do the same today, but now 2.5 times as many people attend college, the population remaining with "no college" in 2020 isn't really the same population as it was in 1970.

<comment><USER3> Also, how much of this effect is basically the rest of the world playing catch up in terms of economic production?

China and the rest of Asia are magnitudes more competitive compared to 50 years ago. And prior to that US industry was unmatched thanks to the massive effects world war 2 had on the other, western industrialized nations.

<comment><USER4> > Also, how much of this effect is basically the rest of the world playing > catch up in terms of economic production?

If the rest of the world becoming more productive results in US workers being worse off, then something is severely wrong with US trade policy. For one, it contradicts the dogma that more trade is strictly beneficial.

<comment><USER5> >For one, it contradicts the dogma that more trade is strictly beneficial.

It is strictly beneficial, in aggregate. But in any situation, there are winners and there are losers. There are no decisions you can make where everybody wins. If you live in a first world country and your skill set is worse than somebody in the developing world, you're going to have a bad time.

<comment><USER4> > But in any situation, there are winners and there are losers.

The usually trotted-out theory of comparative advantage claims there are only winners.

<comment><USER6> again, only in the aggregate/ entity of measurement level.

I would argue anyone who says otherwise is either being disingenuous or doesn't actually understand economics.

That is not to say that is not trotted out frequently.

Also, to be fair, during my economics education they had this whole focus on modeling policies and finding optimizations where no one is worse off.

Of course, in the real world, that practically never happens... and there is an argument that the focus on efficient/competitive markets/ equilibria/rational agents is also a bit "wouldn't it be nice if the world was actually like this...", whereas in the real world only the most trivial goods/markets can vaguely be described as such...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how much effect immigration has had on the matter of inequality.

I'm going off these assumptions:

-> Lesser immigration would've led to a higher GDP/capita figure for US.

-> More resources to subsidize college and lesser cut-throat competition for jobs.

-> Employers would be forced to pay higher wages and people would be more easily to retrain for different jobs.

-> Bonus points: We can help Africa and South american countries with a much higher monetary amount and resources to help them catch up to a developed world status.

<comment><USER8> Huge assumptions there. And some significant work has gone into investigating the first and found it's the other way round: [https://www.oecd- ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264288737-8-en.p...](https://www.oecd- ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264288737-8-en.pdf?expires=1561925471&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=2A3252FE21068EDB1E66CE9EB3362356)

> We can help Africa and South american countries

It would be a significant improvement if the US stopped "helping" South America. Allende would like a word.

<comment><USER9> The effect you're talking about is not instant. If you get a lot of asylum seekers in a short time your GDP/capita will take a hit until they've been integrated into society and become a net positive.

<comment><USER7> And that period to get assimilated and become net positive might be a period of +- few decades which is an insanely long time in today's world of super fast moving money and economic conditions and 4 year hyper partisan election cycles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most of perceived rise in inequality is actually growing healthcare costs.

[http://www.econtalk.org/mark-warshawsky-on-compensation- heal...](http://www.econtalk.org/mark-warshawsky-on-compensation-health-care- costs-and-inequality/)

"Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Warshawsky shows that because health care benefits are a larger share of compensation for lower-paid than higher-paid workers, measures of inequality and even measures of economic progress can be misleading or distorted. "

</comment><comment><USER11> The credibility of the article is undermined by hyperbolic statements such as, "For a lot of children, when they're 8 years old, it's too late. If your parents aren't engaged in the education system, in 10 years you'll be competing in the labor market against people whose parents sent them to violin lessons and summer programs in the Dominican Republic. There's inequality of opportunity."

It's too late for "a lot of children" by age 8? And you're underprivileged if you didn't attend a summer program in the Caribbean?

<comment><USER12> I think that's an un-generous interpretation of the quote.

Yes, I think there is good evidence that if you are in a poverty-stricken family and you don't get very early intervention, that by mid-elementary school it _is_ too late for your _average_ poor kid. The reason being that the rest of your environment of poverty is going to be pretty much pulling against you the rest of your childhood, so intervention while your hopes and goals are not yet formed is your best bet.

And come on, the author wasn't saying if you didn't attend a Caribbean summer program that you're underprivileged. I believe he was just using that to highlight the pretty extreme lengths that middle class and above parents go to provide their children with educational enrichment (including music lessons, sports programs, summer camps, etc.) that put poor kids at a lifelong disadvantage.

<comment><USER11> I largely agree with you. But the following line from the article is devastating, "For a lot of children, when they're 8 years old, it's too late."

And this mawkish line is published under the banner of Stanford, an arbiter of the truth. I expect better.

edit:

My comments seem to have sparked a nerve. I simply wanted to point out bad rhetoric that undermines the cause and weakens an institution of trust. The situation is bad, so there's no need to exaggerate or lie to deliver the point. And this isn't a partisan issue. A conservative like Thiel would deliver a similar message.

There is, however, a pernicious insinuation in that quote. The notion that if you haven't achieved x by y age you're done. That's a debilitating notion. And we have it in the tech community, if you can't code by z age give up. Or if you haven't achieved some startup success or some corporate title at an early age you're a failure.

<comment><USER12> It is possible for both to be true: For many children, if they have not had early childhood intervention, by 8 years old it _is_ too late, but that for _any individual_ child, they can still improve their lot later in childhood (or even, of course, well into adulthood).

As a similar example, it is _extremely_ likely that a child who is overweight or obese by middle school will be overweight or obese their entire life, and many scientists and clinicians believe that it is much easier to prevent childhood obesity than try to correct the weight imbalance later on. That doesn't mean that some people who are overweight kids won't eventually lose the weight and keep it off.

Hanging on to the hope that people can change at any point in life does not mean we should ignore the fact that many of our personality and social "guiderails" are laid down pretty early.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _A large portion of what reduced inequality was the destruction of wealth during World War II and the fact that the U.S. benefited afterward from being the last standing industrial economy._

I seriously doubt that.

We shipped essentially all able-bodied men off to war, so much so that we filled a lot of jobs with women. Birth rates were low because the men were physically absent.

People were encouraged to grow Victory Gardens so farm food could feed soldiers. Tobacco, sugar etc were all rationed. We stopped making cars and converted car factories to keep factories.

A lot of families had two incomes, no children and couldn't spend their money on luxury goods because they simply weren't available. Savings rates during the war were extremely high, above 50 percent some years.

The boys came home, bringing veterans benefits with them. This included help buying a house and going to college.

Unlike with modern lottery winners, this formula did not encourage people to just blow their money frivolously. They began buying houses at such high rates we invented new ways to throw them up quickly, giving rise to the modern suburb.

Celibacy, low birth rates, frugal living, hard work and high savings rates helped reduce inequality. A lot of that could be replicated. We just don't typically have the self discipline to do so individually.

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure what you mean by that last sentence. Are you saying if only the poor were better with money they'd stop being poor?

<comment><USER13> I'm saying there were large-scale forces at work during WW2 that forced many people into that pattern. It's much harder to do on an individual basis without those forces, but can be done sometimes.

Among other things, I paid down debt while homeless. My last student loan payment was made in July 2017. I was back in housing in September the same year.

Of course, your framing sounds like I'm being accused of blaming the poor. I'm not. I'm just questioning the assertion of the article because it honestly doesn't fit with what I have read of history.

The Baby Boomer generation is the children of the WW2 veterans. It was a very widespread phenomenon.

There are factors at play now that are definitely different from then. Most new houses in the 1950s were about 1200 sqft. Now they are nearly 2500 sqft.

We desperately need to do something about our housing supply. But most people don't want to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Other than "We've also had a combination of tax and regulatory policy that has encouraged capital formation and increasing returns to capital, so labor's share of returns has decreased. The last round of tax policy out of Washington made this worse." it seems they have nothing concrete to say. I definitely agree that capital should be taxed at the same rates as labor. Maybe there was a time when it made sense to tax capital lower but right now we don't seem to lack investment money but we lack demand.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if multiple people of low incomes may someday pool income together and use it to buy housing and food that they can all use to live comfortably. I feel this may be the only way to solve the inequality crisis.

<comment><USER17> You are describing roommates/co-ops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Of course, no mention of inflation, the policy choice which robs from the poor and gives to the rich.

How does it rob from the poor?

[https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for- hi...](https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-higher- inflation/)

"when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts."

In other words, inflation is a policy choice to combat sticky wages, which (if you think that's a problem), the solution is to, apparently, screw labor by devaluing their wages from under them.

How does it give to the rich? The eroding value of the currency all but forces individuals and, e.g. pension funds, to dump resources into the stock market, venture investments, etc, which are largely playgrounds of the economically advantaged.

It also has unfortunate side effects like consumerism and environmental destruction, but that's outside of the scope of the OP.

The timing lines up, too. What happened 50 years ago that caused the divergence? With the ending of Bretton Woods, Nixon closed the gold window which was the last thing holding back policy from rampant inflation.

<comment><USER19> > In other words, inflation is a policy choice to combat sticky wages, which > (if you think that's a problem), the solution is to, apparently, screw labor > by devaluing their wages from under them.

This is complete misunderstanding of how this works. Inflation does not increase the real return from stock markets. Inflation erodes also capital. Capital must work just to stay still.

Inflation or not, the wages reach equilibrium. You can't improve the aggregate sum of wages by deceasing inflation. If nominal wages are too high the equilibrium is found trough periods of unemployment. Small inflation keeps unemployment and friction in job markets in check.

Small inflation keeps income inequality in check.

[https://www.cepweb.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/CEP_WP_Inf...](https://www.cepweb.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/05/CEP_WP_Inflation_and_Income_Inequality.pdf)

>Inflation and Income Inequality in Developed Economies

>We find a U-shaped link between long-run inflation and income inequality. Low inflation rates are associated with higher income inequality. As inflation goes up, inequality decreases, reaches a minimum with an inflation rate of about 13%, and then starts rising again

<comment><USER20> >This is complete misunderstanding of how this works. Inflation does not increase the real return from stock markets. Inflation erodes also capital. Capital must work just to stay still.

I think you made a basic mistake there. The assumption you're making is that the inflation is spread over every single citizen. In reality there is no reason for that to happen. It is equally possible for all inflation to happen in the stock or housing market which is inaccessible to the average low income worker. Therefore the one who is staying still is the low income worker.

<comment><USER21> Asset price inflation != currency devaluation.

There are structural incentives to inflate asset prices (free wealth to the holders), though those aren't ironclad (bubbles burst). Bernhard J. Stein's work (1930s - 50s) is interesting here.

Commodity price inflation tends to have different mechanisms, as does wage erosion. There are other classes of economic goods, including public goods, taxes, interest and (in some cases distinguished from assets) capital goods.

For all that Adam Smith discussed these (the better parts of books 1, 2, and 5 of _Wealth of Nations_ ), they are, IMO, poorly considered in most modern economics. Marginal analysis only explains part of their dynamics.

I'm also increasingly convinced inflation is a symptom rather than a fundamental problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Because the low-wage jobs that left here are considered really good jobs in China. We've lifted a billion, two billion people out of poverty over the past 30 years.

This sort of shit is the worst. People in China doing well is not our problem, just like people in Germany doing well is not our problem, and there is something deeply racist at the root of this suggestion, as if poor people in China are stealing wealth that rightly belongs to Americans. This is not how productivity works. The people stealing from Americans are rich Americans.

</comment><comment><USER23> The article is a lot more substantive than the headline, but the frame that _inequality_ is the problem will lead to 'solutions' that do not solve the real problems.

The root problem here is clearly that living standards are at risk of dropping. That is not necessarily linked to inequality - inequality can rise in tandem with living standards. The policy tools that raise living standards are not the same policies that promote equality (the experiences in the 20th and 21st centuries suggest quite the opposite).

If people became rich relative to their ability to raise living standards - which is the main line of defense for capitalism as a system, by the way - then we expect higher inequality because the people who figure out how to raise mass living standards by small amounts should become disgustingly wealthy. The problem is that current policies are making people rich who aren't productive members of society. They are making idiot bankers rich who set us up for things like the '07-'08 financial crisis, then bailing them out when it looks like the market might call their bluffs.

</comment><comment><USER24> Living standards have gone down and life has become much more economically insecure for most working people as a result of the policies that economists recommend. This includes globalization, free trade, low taxes, destruction of labor unions, and the like. The authors support these policies. These changes have been accompanied by a political system that no longer represents the left behind. So of course the losers are not compensated; that is by design, not accident. I think we have the choice to either become more equal or face increasing political instability and viciousness - and the latter is more likely, witness Trump, Brexit, etc. I have lost respect for economic analysis because it has been so out of touch with political and social consequences as to be hugely destructive to the fabric of society. Much more of this and I hate to see what will become of our society.

<comment><USER25> Economists have not necessarily been blind to social needs - policy makers and politicians benefiting from a revolving door of oligarchs enabled by various institutions culturally stationed to manipulate a larger population into working under these few for smaller and smaller pieces of power. Milton Friedman made it quite clear that a free market doesn't provide a social safety net in any way and that a population that doesn't succeed in the market should need some basic way to survive or we's face huge social unrest. While America had social security and Medicare early on, we've dismantled their efficacy with a toothless, captured government while private sector has gained in power enormously in the form of multinational corporations the Founding Fathers all distrusted (they were no fans of the British East India Company).

I think we'll have one or two more larger scale revolutions before people around the globe learn that consolidated power of any sort whether it comes from religions, the public masses (populism), government, corporations, or perhaps even science is dangerous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> their are natural limits to inequality. As successful people sell out their will to compete. Good news is it opens up opportunities for not yet successful people.

</comment><comment><USER27> Very simple — Dollar is a global reserve currency, and T-bills are of equal prominence in the debt market.

Foreign holding of US debt increased by few times since year 2000.

The more US government borrows, the more TBills are there for purchase for foreign institutional buyers at attractive prices.

Those are of course the real movers of the current account deficit: rates and tbill market

US exports and labour will never be competitive until US can radically rethinks its view on government spendings and debt policy.

</comment><comment><USER28> > Q: A much steeper income tax has gotten attention — some pitching even 70%. > Is that possible?

> Oyer: I can't imagine a 70% tax rate. And I don't think we'll see a > universal basic income for a long time. These are hugely expensive ideas.

Then Oyer is experiencing a failure of the imagination as well as historical recollection. Tax rates have been that high before. Today a marginal tax income over what, 100 million at 70%--even 50%-- and there's suddenly a lot more money to build a social safety net with.</comment>


My Java Experience - <AUTHOR> http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2010/01/14/my-java-experience.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AyendeRahien+%28Ayende+%40+Rahien%29 <comment><USER2> _They came out of sheer self defense out of the amount of toil & trouble that you have to go through using what the bare bones Java EE gave you._

This describes an awful lot of enterprise Java. My most recent discovery was RestEasy, which a) took a week to get working and b) was at least ten times less painful than our previous web services implementation, to the point where I am tempted to delete the wiki, nuke the repository, and cover up any evidence of ever using SOAP or XML-RPC for fear that an incautious code archeologist in the future might open the jar and release the horror upon the world again.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 I think this article would be better titled "My J2EE Experience".

I've been working with Java professionally for 5.5 years in enterprise environments and I've never used EJB, nor do I know anyone who has.

The sad thing about marketing-type speak that ends up calling J2EE "a platform" is that it becomes very easy to misinterpret the nastiness of these APIs - that's what EE really is, just a set of APIs - as somehow reflecting on the state of the entire ecosystem/community.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been doing mostly Java for over a decade. For me, the session bean is the most useful part of the somewhat artificial amalgam that is JEE/J2EE/whatever. Need declarative XA transaction management? "Required" is your friend. Want to remote to a service but also use it locally? Yup. Need to control the number of concurrent invocations of a service? Just configure your thread pools.

Don't need any of that stuff? Then, you probably don't need J2EE. I've never used a stateful session bean on a project and haven't heard too many good use cases to justify them. Pre-3.0 EJBs were a disaster, and everybody just used Hibernate. And EJB3 is basically Hibernate anyway.

For lighter-weight Java, the Spring Framework along with annotations takes away a lot of the misery the author discusses.

</comment><comment><USER4> Use Groovy/Grails if you must develop a Web app on the JVM or reuse existing Java code.

J2EE was a disaster (I have 6+ years experience with it). So much wasted talent and time.</comment>


HackerNewsers - <AUTHOR> http://hackernewsers.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone else try this out? It's fantastic.

I'm at <http://hackernewsers.com/users/messel.html>

other newsers are automatically pulled in by adding a link to your about

[http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/<your_HN_name>.ht...](http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/<your_HN_name>.html)</comment>


Comcast loves chat(ting) - <AUTHOR>

With comcast, you need to undergo a painful 15 mins of a chat session to reset your password. When I try to log in, it tells me
"There is a problem with the information in your account and we need to talk to you in order to reset your password. A customer support agent will assist you and help you reset your password securely". And then the torture begins.
And this is not just with reset passwords, its also with signing up for new service. After you select all options and you are ready to checkout, it stops you. There is no "Place Order/Confirm" but "LIVE CHAT".
I ended up calling them and placing the order. But not without wasting another 20 mins.
For every freakin' thing, they want you to chat with someone.
Has anyone else experienced the same issue. <comment><USER2> Yeah. I helped a friend of mine get signed up. You enter all your information on their web site (address, phone #, etc.) and then during the chat, they make you confirm all the information you just put in. Why the hell did I waste 10 minutes filling out the site just to have to retype it in during the chat?

And their shopping cart is all f'ed up. They let you put conflicting deals into your cart (i.e. she chose a deal on internet that was only for current customers and a deal on cable that is only for new customers). And the cart happily allowed it. Around the 10 minute mark of the chat, the rep says "Oh. I just noticed that those deals aren't compatible. You'll need to do X instead" where X was about $20 a month more. I canceled the order, called them, and asked how was a person supposed to know which deals are conflicting and which ones aren't if their own website doesn't stop them from being put in the cart? Finally I got the rep on the phone to give me both deals. Took about an hour of reasoning with them, making them walk through the website with me (which I'm sure they didn't), and finally just threatening to hang up and go with Qwest and DirecTV. I think it was the latter that finally tipped the scale. Of course, she can't get Qwest or DirecTV at her apartment :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> yup.

during my chat with the agent to reset my password, i asked him why did they force me to chat and he said that they justed wanted to confirm the "security" info.

I said, I already put that in on the previous screen. There was no answer.</comment>


GameLad – Gameboy emulator written in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Dooskington/GameLad <comment><USER2> I finished a Game Boy + Color emulator about a month ago: [https://github.com/khedoros/khedgb](https://github.com/khedoros/khedgb)

It was my second major emulation project, and took roughly 3 months to write. Years ago, I started work on an NES emulator and worked on it on+off for...well, probably about 5-7 years. Despite the time investment, khednes is a much uglier chunk of code than khedgb. I like to think of it as evidence that I've learned some things in the meantime.

Game Boy's fun; the CPU's a little nicer than the NES's, the memory controllers in the cartridges are less numerous and more regular, and the video controller is built in such a way that most games use less cycle- counting than they did on NES, so timing isn't as finicky.

I'm moving on to Game Boy Advance now. Figuring out ARM instruction decoding and reading up on the architecture has taken about the amount of time that it took to write my initial GBZ80 implementation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Writing Gameboy emulator is fun, just like writing a raytracer. And it can be nice way to learn a new language. Is there something special/different in this project compared to many others?

For me the most interesting GB emulation project is Mooneye due to being written in Rust and its emphasis on accuracy and documentation of GB hardware: [https://github.com/Gekkio/mooneye-gb](https://github.com/Gekkio/mooneye-gb)

<comment><USER4> My thoughts exactly. Being written in C++ isn't interesting enough on its own.

What about the implementation is interesting? Does it make heavy use of some new feature like coroutines, or something? It is supposed to be very elegant? What?

<comment><USER5> Does it have to be interesting to share? Writing a gameboy emulator is a fun and challenging project in and of itself, and something that not everyone can do. That alone I think is impressive enough to share.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool.

I wrote a gameboy emulator a few years ago now in Go ([https://github.com/djhworld/gomeboycolor](https://github.com/djhworld/gomeboycolor)), it was a personal project that had a lot of highs but crippling lows.

Very rewarding, but frustrating. I don't think it builds anymore due to library conflicts.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice, looks awesome! I've been writing my own GB emulator off and on for a few years now. Was this your first emulator? What were the major challenges with this project for you?

</comment><comment><USER8> This is cool - well done. What sites / documents did you use to be able to create an emulator?</comment>


Tom Duff on Duff's Device (1988) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lysator.liu.se/(nobg)/c/duffs-device.html

<comment><USER2> I wonder what programmers at the time would think of CPUs eventually being so good at handling loops that unrolling changes from an optimisation technique to be performed manually, to one that compilers might sometimes do, to an anti-optimisation:

[http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=142](http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=142)

 _It is so important to economize the use of the micro-op cache that I would give the advice never to unroll loops._

[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html)

 _by eliminating all instances of Duff 's Device from the XFree86 4.0 server, the server shrunk in size by _half_ _a_ _megabyte_ (!!!), and was faster to boot_

<comment><USER3> It seems from his comments that the idea of a compiler being able to do it better in some circumstances wasn't completely outlandish.

> Don't try to be smarter than an over-clever C compiler that recognizes loops > that implement block move or block clear and compiles them into machine > idioms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Funny that he is more famous for this than for inventing Porter-Duff compositing algebra, one of the cornerstones of modern image manipulation.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for mentioning this. I found a nice article about it and generalisation to blend modes here: [http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/porterduff.html](http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/porterduff.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "A second poster tried the test, but botched the implementation, proving only that with diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly."

This made me laugh. "with diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly" should be one of the truths carved into an obelisk outside every CompSci department or at least on a t-shirt.

</comment><comment><USER7> > (Actually, I have another revolting way to use switches to implement > interrupt driven state machines but it's too horrid to go into.)

I'm really, really curious about what that code is.

<comment><USER8> This is just a guess, but perhaps something like: [http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html](http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/coroutines.html)

<comment><USER9> I just used it a few minutes ago: [https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode/blob/gh- pages/interpola...](https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode/blob/gh- pages/interpolator/main.c#L150)

[https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode/blob/gh- pages/interpola...](https://github.com/nraynaud/webgcode/blob/gh- pages/interpolator/cnc.h#L111)

One problem is the reset of the functions, I just created a makeshift exception, but I don't know how far I want to deviate form the norm.

I still don't know if it's a good idea, but that's what personal projects are for.</comment></comment></comment>


Nginx 1.8.0 stable has been released - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.org/?1.8

<comment><USER2> Been waiting for this: "backend SSL certificate verification". Thank you nginx team.

<comment><USER3> Could someone kindly explain that for the uninitiated?

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure it's verifying SSL certificates of the proxied (backend) servers in a reverse proxy configuration-- so that you know you're talking to the backend server that you think you're talking to (in case your internal network gets MITM'd, I guess, or if you're talking to backend servers across a public network).

At least, that's what I gather from the new config options they linked to (the relevant options are the proxy_ssl_* directives).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm always confused by nginx's version scheme. What does "mainline" mean? Is mainline better or worse than stable?

<comment><USER6> Mainline is where new features arrive. Think of it kind of like what used to be Firefox Aurora. Stable is snapshots of mainline taken less frequently that are considered suitable for long term use.

Mainline has newer features, but isn't quite a nightly build. Stable has fewer features but is more stable. I use mainline for my needs, including in production.

<comment><USER7> The really interesting point is that nginx considers mainline to be more reliable than stable because stable does not receive all bug fixes, only the critical ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does it come with the new TCP load balancer?

<comment><USER9> The upcoming 1.9 mainline release will include the TCP load balancer.

<comment><USER10> Is RFC7469 planned in 1.9?

<comment><USER11> Isn't that just a header? Or do you mean for backend validation or ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Difficult for me to get over the idea of waiting for x.1 releases.

Tired of being a beta tester.

But nice feature list.

<comment><USER13> This is what iteration looks like. Would you like to not have the opportunity to see smaller releases? You can look away.</comment></comment>


The decision to apply schedule pressure to a project - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattblodgett.com/2008/07/select-quotes-from-peopleware-part-3.html <comment><USER2> From the article: _Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever ("Just wake me up when you're done.") had the highest productivity of all._

I'd love to meet that team...

In my own experience, development projects that don't have set deadlines (and someone applying "schedule pressure" as the deadline approaches) always go much, much longer than originally estimated.

In fact, I'd argue that developers especially are prone to overruns because, with code, there always seems to be something else that can be done to improve it. Even if you complete a discrete number of features and they all test fine, there's always the temptation to go back and refactor.

<comment><USER3> It depends also on how you characterize your deadlines. If you allow slippage when things take longer than expected, or to adapt to changing requirements, you can impose deadlines without laying the hammer down.

In the end though, that ends up being more a case of managing scope than of imposing deadlines.

Give the developers a well-defined scope, and unless they're putzes, they'll get the job done. Give them a hard deadline, and either they'll slip or they'll do shoddy work.

Most projects base everything on deadlines. As a result, most of them deliver shoddy projects, and the company ends up with something that either doesn't work, or it works barely but that requires far more maintenance than the project's scope justifies.

<comment><USER2> Absolutely agree with you about needing a well defined scope and how that can reduce the chance of an overrun. Likewise, laying the hammer down simply because an arbitrary deadline is on the calendar isn't good project management.

But I still argue that a good, reasonable deadline that everyone on the team has a say in setting acts as a commitment -- the team is saying, "yes, we agree to deliver a product in this timeframe." Once you've made that commitment, the deadline then acts as a forcing factor that drives everyone to prioritize the most important tasks.

<comment><USER3> Agreed -- that's what prevents the endless rounds of re-factoring, and keeps everyone focused on building a product, rather than drifting off on tangents.

We're saying the same thing, here. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spectrum Crunch: The cell phone industry hits its limits - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/02/21/technology/spectrum_crunch/?npt=NP1&hpt=hp_c1 <comment><USER2> I would love to know more information about this article. Any subject matter experts out there? The article lacks a solid technical background.</comment>


GAO: Information Technology: Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Systems [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/677454.pdf <comment><USER2> Nice tidbit: >the Department of Defense uses 8-inch floppy disks in a legacy system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces.</comment>


Nearly two-thirds of US adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust – study - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/16/holocaust-us-adults-study <comment><USER2> Nearly nine-tenths of US adults are probably unaware that 20m Russian soliders died in WWII.

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Human_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Human_losses_by_country) has military deaths for the Soviet Union at between 8 and 11M - bad but some way short of 20M.

<comment><USER4> Who are you going to believe? An anonymous poster on Wikipedia or an anonymous poster on HN?

<comment><USER3> The anonymous poster(s) on Wikipedia do include links to sources, including, e.g., [http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/SovietLosses.pd...](http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/SovietLosses.pdf) which has the 11M estimate and seems reasonably well researched.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm hesitant to undermine the substance of the report but when it's mentioned "Six out of 10 respondents in Texas could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto" my first thought was to ask what other facts might we be surprised to hear were unknown to the same group ? For more than half of that group to not know the name of any concentration is hardly ideal but if the same proportion of people were unable to give you a coherent summary of the events of the Second World War it's a lot less significant.

By contrast the parts of the report which touch on "constructed facts" (e.g. "Jews caused the holocaust") are potentially more troubling. They too might be due to ignorance (Q: "Did the Jew cause the holocaust ?", A:"Errrh, Yes ?") but equally could be due to empty vessels being filled with something nasty.

<comment><USER6> I couldn't find the survey itself, neither at [http://www.claimscon.org/news- media/publications/](http://www.claimscon.org/news-media/publications/) nor [http://www.claimscon.org/news-media/](http://www.claimscon.org/news-media/) . Schoen Consulting doesn't trivially appear in a search.

69% for france, 58% for austria (millenial and gen Z respondents). Interestingly, the french and austrians both modally respond that there are "few" neo nazis in their countries, but "a great deal or many" in the US. The surveys were taken close to 27 January, so I hope those perceptions mostly reflect Charlottesville.

80% of respondents in all three countries thought it should be taught.

<comment><USER3> This seems to be the survey summary - [http://www.claimscon.org/millennial- study/](http://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/) \- with breakouts like [http://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NO- WATER...](http://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/NO-WATERMARK- State-by-State-Executive-Summary-Millennial-US- Study-9.10.2020-EMBARGOED_added-language.pdf) and per-state breakouts like [http://www.claimscon.org/wp- content/uploads/2020/08/Millenni...](http://www.claimscon.org/wp- content/uploads/2020/08/Millennial-Holocaust-Survey-KANSAS- TOPLINE-8.11.20.pdf) which gives you the script (although nothing more than percentages for the responses.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Could we please have a title edit?

As of writing, it's titled: "Nearly two-thirds of US _young_ adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust"

"According to survey of adults 18-39 ..."

<comment><USER7> Surely someone in their thirties is just an adult, not a young adult.

<comment><USER8> The article does not include US adults aged 40+ and it's explicit about it. It is just misinformation to widen the claim to two-thirds of all the US adults.

<comment><USER6> Even the two-thirds unaware is slightly widened.

From [http://www.claimscon.org/wp- content/uploads/2020/08/Millenni...](http://www.claimscon.org/wp- content/uploads/2020/08/Millennial-Holocaust-Survey-KANSAS- TOPLINE-8.11.20.pdf) (thanks, zimpenfish!) page 5, the question and responses were:

9\. Approximately how many Jews were killed during the Holocaust? Please select from the following list:

        25,000      2%  :
        100,000     3%  :
        1 million   4%  :
        2 million  13%  #:
        6 million  41%  ####
        20 million 10%  #
        Not sure   27%  ##;

of which 6 million, even including "not sure", is clearly the modal result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Almost every comment in this thread seems to be some variation of either "So what if a lot of jews died—a lot of other people died in the holocaust too ya know!", or "So what if a lot of people died in the Holocaust—a lot of people died in communist Russia too ya know!".

I find this kind of whataboutism on this topic to be extremely gross and creepy.

</comment><comment><USER10> Even less people know that the total number of casualties of WW II was about 70 million. Many people in the West are under impression that WW II was all about Jews. It wasn't. Even Holocaust wasn't solely about Jews, as they were also people of other nationalities killed in death camps.

<comment><USER11> Holocaust is by definition only about Jews. Holocaust is not about all the people who died in camps nor only people who died in camps. It is specifically word for genocide of Jews during WWII.

<comment><USER12> There isn't international agreement on the definition of Holocaust.

[https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introducti...](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction- to-the-holocaust)

> Holocaust, Hebrew Shoʾah ("Catastrophe"), Yiddish and Hebrew Ḥurban > ("Destruction"), the systematic state-sponsored killing of six million > Jewish men, women, and children and millions of others by NaziGermany and > its collaborators during World War II. The Germans called this "the final > solution to the Jewish question." Yiddish-speaking Jews and survivors in the > years immediately following their liberation called the murder of the Jews > the Ḥurban, the word used to describe the destruction of the First Temple in > Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 bce and the destruction of the Second > Temple by the Romans in 70 ce. Shoʾah ("Catastrophe") is the term preferred > by Israelis and the French, most especially after Claude Lanzmann's > masterful 1985 motion picture documentary of that title. It is also > preferred by people who speak Hebrew and by those who want to be more > particular about the Jewish experience or who are uncomfortable with the > religious connotations of the word Holocaust. Less universal and more > particular, Shoʾah emphasizes the annihilation of the Jews, not the totality > of Nazi victims.

Versus

[https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introducti...](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction- to-the-holocaust)

> The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of > six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators. > Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire." The Nazis, > who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were > "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior," were an alien > threat to the so-called German racial community.

> During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other > groups because of their perceived racial and biological inferiority: Roma > (Gypsies), people with disabilities, some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, > Russians, and others), Soviet prisoners of war, and Black people. Other > groups were persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds, > among them Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and homosexuals.

<comment><USER11> The two links are identical, the first one is likely wrong.

The linked article focuses on Jews and seems to define Holocaust itself as Jew issue - while trying to make sure reader knows that is not the only atrocity that was going on at the time. I think that the other groups being mentioned too is not to define Holocaust through their murder, but to not make impression it was just that.

The first quote is confusing, because it simultaneously counts in "and millions of others" while also saying "The Germans called this "the final solution to the Jewish question."". And then turning again to say that it represents totality of victims and supposedly Sho'ah should be word. I have never seen Shoʾah being used in English language. I have seen that in France, but it was in French language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And probably even less aware of the other 11 million people murdered by the Nazis in their camps.

</comment><comment><USER14> Stalin killed over 20 million, Mao almost 80 million. How many adult Americans know that?

</comment><comment><USER15> How many know the kill count of Cambodia under Pol Pot?

It's more recent and after the "Never again"

The entire propaganda behind the Holocaust is so we don't repeat it, yet no one cares when we do.

So I'm a little lost on why we should care? Will this survey help the Rohingya people today?

<comment><USER16> Why shouldn't you care? You obviously think a genocide is a big injustice. Your frustrations with injustices cause you to belittle another injustice and even call the actual act of rememberance "propoganda".

People should care, about both examples of human atrocities, the lesson should be universal, but it's up to us to fight for that. Belittling the holocaust doesn't do anything to help the fight for this cause. if anything, it hurts it.

<comment><USER17> > Belittling the holocaust doesn't do anything to help the fight for this > cause. if anything, it hurts it.

Theoreytically that might be true. The fact is that today 70 years after the event, and several other genocides the amount ot attention all these other genocides that happened is miniscule compared to the attention that holocoust gets.

So there is clearly something wrong, in the whole "let's not allow genocide happen again by remebering holocaut" story.

<comment><USER11> Holocaust happened here and was done mainly by western country. It was very much result of western ideologies. It was also successor of history of pogroms and antisemitism that existed in Europe. Europe still have some of people who did lived through it. The movements that made holocaust happen and their ideologies still exist and are alive in Europe and in western countries.

America is quite close culturally, literally fought in that war, literally fought a lot in that war because Germany was threat to America too. America did not had just few units in WWII, it was major player.

It would not be surprising for history of "us" and politics of "us" be more prominent in western countries then history that happens in different countries. Afaik, in Cambodia, they do talk about their genocide and have museums of it.

<comment><USER17> >Holocaust happened here and was done mainly by western country

I know it will sound very controversial, but take it notch further and you will see it not so much because was done by western countries. Western countries have done plenty of genocides. It is because it was done to white people .

>The movements that made holocaust happen and their ideologies still exist and are alive in Europe and in western countries.

Actually Hitler drew a lot of inspiration from USA and its eugenics attempts.

> Afaik, in Cambodia, they do talk about their genocide and have museums of > it.

20 something year old from Cambodia, have no clue who Paul Pot is. Speaking from personal experience with people from Cambodia.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>