China Said to Exclude Apple From Procurement List - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/china-said-to-exclude-apple-from-procurement-list.html <comment><USER2> #1>Obama bans wind-farm purchases by Chinese company [http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/28/news/economy/obama-china- win...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/09/28/news/economy/obama-china-wind-farm/)

#2>Huawei, ZTE Banned From Selling to U.S. Government [http://techonomy.com/2013/04/huawei-zte-banned-from- selling-...](http://techonomy.com/2013/04/huawei-zte-banned-from-selling-to-u- s-government/)

#3>Obama Imposes Tariffs On Chinese Tires [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/obama-imposes- tarif...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/11/obama-imposes-tariffs-on- _n_284271.html)

#4>Chinese exclusion policy of NASA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NAS...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exclusion_policy_of_NASA)

#5>Obama BANS U.S. government from buying Chinese-made computer technology over cyber-attack fears [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300518/Obama- BANS-U...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300518/Obama-BANS-U-S- government-buying-Chinese-technology-cyber-attack-fears.html)

What was the news again?

<comment><USER3> The news is that China is imposing additional import restrictions on US technology.

The fact that the US also does this – something we're all aware of – doesn't change the fact that this is interesting news!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A country the size of China with the technical expertise available to them can create an open stack that they can manage and control. They already have several hardware manufacturers in their territory to make any hardware they may need. I honestly don't see why they would ever have been buying Apple and Microsoft products in the first place, and I'm an American.

<comment><USER5> Because not so long ago the Chinese hardware sucked big time. I'm talking about 5 years back or so.

They made huge improvements (Huawei, Meizu, Xiaomi, others) and are going to outsell brands like Apple and Samsung.

<comment><USER6> >They made huge improvements (Huawei, Meizu, Xiaomi, others)...

Agreed, and we can only expect more improvement as China moves up the value chain.

>and are going to outsell brands like Apple and Samsung

 _In China_ , sure. I think Xiaomi is neck-and-neck with Samsung right now. But it will take a bit longer in the rest of the world for those firms to compete elsewhere. I expect an integration of product mix, with China joining the club of developed nations, rather than a takeover of manufacturing by Chinese producers.

Chinese brands are in the position of Japanese brands in the late 70s, trying to shed a reputation for making "cheap knock-offs," even when those knock-offs were better than the originals.

The path to fast growth in Asia seems to be: industrialize, specialize in cheap products, move into massed-produced consumer goods, improve quality by copying foreign competitors, then use your new engineering knowledge earned by cloning competitors' products to leapfrog the competition.

Japan did it to us, Korea did it to Japan, and now China will most likely be next.

And don't think the United States didn't do it ourselves. Heck, we invented the model during the industrial revolution when we leapfrogged Europe using plenty of "borrowed" ideas.

The upshot though is that economic growth is mostly a universal good these days. Certainly both the United States and Japan are better off than they would have been if Japan never caught up with us. We should be celebrating the rise of China's people, not fearing it.

And while their government may be antagonistic and repressive, it is leaps and bounds better than it was a few decades ago. If one were to construct a Maslow's hierarchy of needs for the Four Freedoms, Freedom from Want would be at its base. Further progress seems likely.

The vector is pointed in the right direction for everyone involved. All we have to do is not screw up the course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not too surprising. I'd expect the fallout and economic impact of mass surveillance to unfold over several years, with a gradual move away from US- based technology companies, including SaaS & PaaS, in favour of open source software and self-hosted solutions.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if there will be a comeback of self-hosted software in the near future just for the security and surveillance reasons, especially in business environment. There was the whole Cloud craze not so long ago, where many companies were pushing all their data outside local infrastructure, but I wonder if this is a good move in the long-term. SaaS has many advantages over "classic" solutions, but security and reliability was always a weak point and it may be a major factor against it in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> More protectionism is not the answer. Restraints on global trade are probably the most harmful thing we do to ourselves as a species.

Now I understand that national defense is paramount. Some restrictions for national defense may be necessary (and neither China nor the US has helped promote trust in each other's products for defense uses lately), but trade restrictions should only be used as a last resort.

We often forget that we have been down this road before. The world on the eve of World War I looked far more like the world of today than the world of our parents.

The entire globe was experiencing massively interconnected rapid economic growth, not just from industrialization, but from the speed and ease of global trade which the new technologies enabled. American ice was sold in India, India tea in Russia, German farm implements in Britain, and British everything everywhere.

Then came first the Great War, and then the Great Depression. And with the Depression came every politician's favorite way to fight economic woes: keep out the foreigners. One restraint led to immediate retaliation by other nations, creating a frenetic negative feedback loop, until finally the open system collapsed in its entirety.

And in its place we created a hidebound monstrosity, an incomprehensible series of trade regulations that were nearly impossible to navigate.

Of course this protectionism only drove us deeper into the Depression, caused global output to plummet to historic lows, made the global economic engine seize like an un-oiled V8, and threw lit thermite into the already smoldering tinderbox of militant nationalism.

It took two World Wars, a global standoff that threatened to consume all of civilization in nuclear holocaust, and most of a century to get back to where we started. Let's not throw away those hard-won gains over international intrigue. Trillions of dollars, and the lives they support, are at stake here.

Free trade is good. Full stop. It builds massive wealth through compounding growth. It pulls people out of dire poverty. And it stops wars.

To step away from it now, just as we enter a truly globalized world, would be the single largest self-inflicted wound to the global economy since the collapse of Rome.

<comment><USER9> Lets not kid ourselves, security isn't the impetus behind this. It's politics. And politics is just grown men acting like children, while pretending that they're looking out for our best interest, all the while screwing us more than the people they are protecting us from.

<comment><USER10> This is won't stop corrupt Chinese officials with money to burn, and also will play out just like the BYOD scenario for mobile phones in corporations in the US:

BYOD phenomenon:

      * company issues BlackBerry or Windows 6.x phones
      * executive has money to burn, likes the iPhone/iPad
      * executive brings iPhone/iPad to work and tells I.T. guy "hook me up or you're fired"
      * I.T. makes an exception, deals with it
      * other people start bringing their iPhone/iPad to work
      * corporate policy adjusts and everybody can bring iOS/Android, corporate issues iOS/Android
      * players like Citrix, MobileIron, etc., have a market for Mobile Device Management

Chinese gov't evolution:

      * corrupt official has money to burn
      * corrupt official buys MacBook/iOS/iPad or Samsung, etc.
      * corrupt official uses his stuff at work despite policy
      * underlings want to show off too and bring their devices
      * Hmmm, except the US gov't still depends on BlackBerry, at least DHS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't surprising at all considering our government seeked to block Huawei routers from being used in telecom infrastructure back in 2012 [1], over some of the same national security concerns.

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-usa-china- huawe...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/08/us-usa-china-huawei-zte- idUSBRE8960NH20121008)

<comment><USER12> The difference being, of course, that US can in no way block the use of Chinese equipment, given that most of the hardware is actually manufactured in China (or neighboring countries).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone chime in and help the rest of us understand the relationship between business and government in China?

I can't help but think this is more of a move to help China's internal industries, but it's hard to say without understanding the political climate.

<comment><USER14> It's not dissimilar to every country really. Critical or large businesses e.g. energy, telecommunications always have an unusually close and unfettered relationship with government. In China it would likely be closer similar to say Russia.

Australia recently banned the use of Chinese equipment from our national broadband rollout for national security reasons so this isn't an unprecedented move.

<comment><USER15> Well, top government officials have big ownership interests in national champions; companies have party secretaries on site who can pull rank on management; trying to compete against companies with ties to government is generally going to be quite difficult...not exactly like every country.

The iPhone is a luxury product in big demand, and being out of favor with the government will make it in even greater demand. The people targeted by Apple like their bling, people buy the foreign product because it's higher status and more trusted than the local product; in fact they'll go to Hong Kong to buy foreign products because they're afraid the one they buy locally will be counterfeit or crappy localized version. People trust Apple more than they trust the government or the Xiaomi knockoff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if this isn't also an attempt to force Apple to give China access to the iOS and OS X source code.

Similar tactics were used in the past to force Microsoft to give the Chinese government access to Windows source code through the China Information Technology Security Certification Center (CNITSEC) Source Code Review Lab.

The US government has accused China of abusing CNITSEC's access to Windows to develop zero-day exploits for offensive use, so if that's true there's an ulterior motive there as well.

That's over and above the article's claim that the Chinese government wants to reduce the number of American tech firms' products in official Chinese government use.

<comment><USER17> Not very familiar with OS programming, but what's stopping them from accessing the source code right now?

<comment><USER18> The iOS/OSX source code is proprietary to Apple. You wouldn't be able to see it unless you worked at Apple and had proper access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder what operating system they'll use on their desktop devices. Both Apple and Microsoft are excluded from the list. Does that mean everyone will be using Linux?

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder what operating system they'll use on their mobile devices. Can't use Android--made in the USA.

<comment><USER21> They can use a fork of AOSP, with all Google code removed. Which is what several large Chinese hardware companies are already doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Not unexpected. Apple have more control over unrooted iphone (or even rooted) than the owner.

<comment><USER14> And how is that different from every piece of electronic equipment ever made ?

The creators of the OS always have more control over how the phone works than the owner. iOS is more locked down than Android (no access to root FS) but I would argue that 99% of users don't know the difference and just blindly install software from third parties.

<comment><USER23> 99% of users? Maybe. But government employees with employer-provided devices often find those devices a bit locked-down by their employer.</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft, please stop doing things for our own good - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/article/3204027/microsoft-windows/microsoft-please-stop-doing-things-for-our-own-good.html <comment><USER2> Anti-Virus is in the domain of an operating system's responsibility and third party AV was a hack that has outlived its usefulness.

Given that most third party AV is increasingly indistinguishable from fear encouraging malware, is it really worth protecting this snake oil security theater industry?</comment>


Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/email.html <comment><USER3> "I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming mail and separates out anything that she knows I've been looking forward to seeing urgently."

Ding ding ding.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I have a secretary like that too; she's called _The New Gmail_

<comment><USER5> ha, the new gmail constantly puts e-mails from my customers into "Promotions"...

<comment><USER6> I'm confused by this response, and I've seen it often. You don't have to use this feature of Gmail. It can easily be reverted back to default email behavior. So I'm perplexed when people complain about it not working very well, and from everything I've heard, few people actually do think it works well...

<comment><USER7> I think it works pretty damn amazingly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly, this is still a style choice.

Just a few more to consider:

* webpage vs web page

* website vs web site

* lifestyle vs life style

* Asian-American vs Asian American

* e-commerce vs ecommerce

* cannot vs can not

* real-time vs real time (as one of the comments in this thread).

[http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/e-mail- or...](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/e-mail-or-email)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain- hyphen-...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/09/21/us-britain-hyphen- idUSHAR15384620070921)

[http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp- aword-20100901,...](http://www.glendalenewspress.com/news/tn-gnp- aword-20100901,0,121602.story)

My English teacher tells us that we change grammar as we progress as a society. Articles from the 1700s will be different from the one from 1800s, 1900s and 2000s.

Also, writing style and grammar are also regional and industry dependent.

Some note from Oxford dictionary ([http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/10/hyphens-in-the- he...](http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/10/hyphens-in-the-headlines/))

> Let's just step back from the hyperbole: how do dictionary-makers decide > whether noun compounds should be hyphenated or not? It's not an arbitrary > choice: for our current English dictionaries, such as the free one on this > website, Oxford's lexicographers assiduously check the evidence of billions > of words of today's English on a huge database, the Oxford English Corpus. > If they see that in the vast majority of cases, a noun such as ice cream is > written as an unhyphenated two-word form, then this is the spelling they > will select to appear in the dictionary.

<comment><USER9> Don't forget realtime ;-) I suppose that could be clarified to "realtimes".

That said, I never wrote "E-mail" with a hyphen, though I still can't stop myself from capitalizing Internets.

<comment><USER8> There is a difference between Internet and internet when we refer to the Internet as we know it today. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#Terminology) but yeah :3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just use "mail". email vs. postal mail or physical mail when it needs further disambiguation.

<comment><USER11> The problem with that is that "email" is an actual word in other languages. In Portuguese, "email" is email, but "mail" means nothing so I guess "email" is a better "global" option...

<comment><USER12> In German "Email" means enamel, so the blessed spelling is E-Mail.

<comment><USER13> Same in Romanian (and probably many other European languages), but it's never confusing due to the huge difference in usage frequency, context, and obviously different pronunciation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have switched from basically real-time email push correspondence to manual fetch every day or two. Basically, when I feel like it. My mail traffic has dropped from ~50 to 1 to 2 a day.

It's hard to say whether it benefited me or not, but I'm sure of one thing - <USER2> don't waste time on email anymore.

<comment><USER15> Does anyone know if its possible to hack GMail such that it only updates your inbox at certain times? I've fallen into a habit of checking it more often than I should (on a computer, both work and personal) and it would certainly help me if the inbox just didn't update with new mail continuously.

<comment><USER16> "Does anyone know if its possible to hack GMail such that it only updates your inbox at certain times? I've fallen into a habit of checking it more often than I should (on a computer, both work and personal) and it would certainly help me if the inbox just didn't update with new mail continuously."

Not by hacking email, but there should be a way to do that using the following.

enable imap in gmail (pull email from the gmail box every "x" hours).

That email goes into a different box, the one you check whenever you want but it's only updated every "x" hours. So you would quickly realize there is no point in checking that box.

Other ways might include setting up a vps that receives the email but delaying the forwarding to gmail until a specified time. So the vps setup email (using sendmail or whatever) simply holds and forwards to gmail every "x" hours.

I'd have to think this through but there is definitely a way using various unix tools, smtp, cron, imap to do something like this. (Probably many ways for sure).

So in other words you are either grabbing from gmail to another mail host every "x" hours (and then possibly forwarding to another gmail box) or you are sending all mail to another mail host (and then sending it to gmail).

If you don't need gmail in particular there are probably a few ways to do this with shell scripting and knowledge of smtp, imap, cron etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anybody else prefer 'non-zero' to 'nonzero'?

</comment><comment><USER18> But people still speak with it in there, great quote btw:

'I don't even have an _e-mail_ address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' \--- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

<comment><USER19> By that, do you mean people pronounce it e-mail, with a long e? Because we have words like emu, evoke, even, elongate, and others. We don't necessarily need a dash to pronounce a long e.

If that's not what you meant, carry on. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Startup opportunity: Secretary, a service that reads your incoming e-mail and holds unimportant e-mail to release it to your inbox every 3 months...

<comment><USER21> And when the machine learning algorithm gets it wrong after lots of right predictions, you find out that someone forgot to renew your domain the hard way. Even googles tabbed inbox makes me miss things, since glancing at the main inbox revealed nothing of importance.. It's not for me at least.

<comment><USER22> > you find out that someone forgot to renew your domain the hard way

Is that really still a thing?

Keeping the bank account used for direct debit for the domains above zero should not be _that_ hard I would assume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Drop the "E". Just "Mail". It's cleaner.

</comment><comment><USER24> The AP Stylebook switched from e-mail to email a few years back.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's off topic, but I think it's funny that he equates email with immediacy. We choose to treat it as such, but some of us don't. One of the few habits I kept from GTD was disabling email alerts, and my life is significantly less stressful at work because of it. It took a little bit for my coworkers to grok, but they prefer I get stuff done, and respect the fact that I can't if I'm continually interrupted. I parse my at regular intervals during the day, but only when I'm completed with a period of focus. I may not take long hours of "studying and uninterruptible concentration," but being a developer does require periods of focus that email can disrupt.

On topic - I haven't called it "e-mail" since the 90s, and usually just call it 'mail.'

</comment><comment><USER26> The New York times finally switched to email last year after holding on to the outdated hyphenated version.

</comment><comment><USER27> Eddie: Is it hyphenated? Chief Wiggum: It used to be. Back in the bad old days. Of course every generation hyphenates the way it wants to. Then there's N'Sync. Heh. What the hell is that. Jump in any time, Eddie, these are good topics.

<comment><USER28> My upvote, sir. HN needs more Simpsons' quotes.

<comment><USER29> They only come out at night. Or, in this case, during the daytime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I like the term "the Electromail" as used by The Watley Review [1].

[1] [http://www.watleyreview.com](http://www.watleyreview.com)

</comment><comment><USER31> The great thing about language is you can pretty much do whatever you want. Everyone chooses their own communication strategy based on experience and personal preference. Wanna write _e-mail_? do it. Wanna write _email_? do it.

There will never be a canonical English. Talk the way you want to and the way that is most effective for you, not the way people tell you to.

</comment><comment><USER32> Somewhere along the line, I failed to realize that some people still use the hyphen in eMail.

</comment><comment><USER33> "Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason." \- what he is on about there?

<comment><USER34> Email is the French / German / Dutch word for enamel.

Of course the pronounciation is very different.

<comment><USER35> Thanks. The French linguistic equivalent is the shortening of "courrier électronique" to "courriel".

<comment><USER36> They missed a chance to abbreviate "poste électronique" to "postel", which would also commemorate the creator of SMTP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> i've been sending him messages for years, depositing small amounts into his checking account representing ASCII characters. granted, it takes some time. this ought to get you started:

$0.48 = H $0.49 = I

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Knuth- che...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Knuth-check2.png)

</comment><comment><USER38> What I'd love to see is dropping the www.

</comment><comment><USER39> Massive douche.

<comment><USER40> I love that you just called Donald Knuth a massive douche. That is all.

<comment><USER41> Kids, these days.</comment></comment></comment>


Uber Really Wants You to Use Its Credit Card - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-06/uber-really-wants-you-to-use-its-credit-card <comment><USER2> With Uber it's this never ending storm of bad news. I guess I will just never use Uber.</comment>


ASK HN: Startup the chicken and the egg problem - grif-fin We are implementing an idea that the users are the content providers, for this reason the more the active users the better the quality and the value of the product hence better chance for more users to use the product hence the better quality and the loop!<p>It is always easier to get funding with a prototype ready with active number of users than selling the concept/idea to the investor with nothing to back it up that it would work but with the above chicken and egg problem described what approaches would you take to deal with it? <comment><AUTHOR> Might want to check this out:

[http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for- overcoming-c...](http://cdixon.org/2009/08/25/six-strategies-for-overcoming- chicken-and-egg-problems/)

<comment> grif-fin Good read, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> My understanding is, it's not just active users, but their level of engagement and evidence that the engagement is in a direction that will drive growth. To use a tired example, Facebook at Harvard didn't have a lot of active users from an absolute standpoint, but the people who used it were actively engaged and because the proportion of the target community was so high it suggested a model for growth -- expanding to similar communities.

At first there wasn't a numbers game, there was just something that people used and loved because it made their life more interesting.

Good luck.</comment>


Everything Is Broken – The Message - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1 <comment><USER2> Some great quotes, including "C is good for two things: being beautiful and creating catastrophic 0days"

I'm not really sure what the author's call to action is. Seems they have one in mind about demanding better software, but it's too vague to be actionable. Still a good read.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Sad to see that it hasn't been upvoted much.

To me the article was a very clear warning on the horrific state of software security and that no one should be under any illusions of how little protection they have. My tangible take away is what you've mentioned: stop using C.</comment></comment>


New Slack update combines workspaces into one page to reduce memory usage - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/tomduncalf/status/1151198459778818051 <comment><USER2> Awesome, now you'll be able to run Slack on a machine with only 16Gb of RAM ;)</comment>


Unwalled.Garden: souped-up RSS for P2P social apps - <AUTHOR> https://pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/unwalled-garden <comment><USER2> >Unlike Twitter and the other social networks, RSS never tried to capture the social graph, likes, comments, annotations, retweets, and etc of its userbase. It limited itself to posted content (mostly blog posts) and that was a missed opportunity.

>missed opportunity

Maybe it's just me, but RSS being all about content is the best thing about it.

<comment><USER3> This is the two competing goals of _every_ publishing mechanism - one person wants to broadcast their data and another wants to consume it, and it's very rare for both parties to want exactly the same thing.

<comment><USER4> Except where the same person is both publisher and consumer. I run a couple of systems at work were RSS is invaluable, a website with news and a set of screens on the premises running Xibo, that ingest the news via RSS to display.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks awesome! A few questions if anyone knowledgable is around:

* Does Unwalled.Garden automatically pin the content of people you follow, so that their stuff stays online if they aren't?

* I didn't understand "We also use a second "private" dat for records which should be kept off the network". What is this referring to, the follow request, or some other private content like a DM? I assume that since this is still Dat there is no access control if you happen to know the address?

* How is reader privacy and DHT coming along with this ecosystem?

<comment><USER6> > Does Unwalled.Garden automatically pin the content of people you follow, so > that their stuff stays online if they aren't?

It gets saved locally so you can access it when they're offline. It'll also be possible to instruct your pinning service to seed it on your behalf.

> I didn't understand "We also use a second "private" dat for records which > should be kept off the network".

I'll talk more about this in the future as Beaker 0.9 is closer to release. We basically are creating a filesystem with a root dat (which is private). Your public dat will then be "mounted" to it at /public so it feels like one unified FS. The structure will look something like this:

      /
      /.data/.unwalled.garden/* <- private records
      /public
      /public/.data/.unwalled.garden/* <- public records

> How is reader privacy and DHT coming along with this ecosystem?

At this stage, I'm pretty sure we're going to need to use proxies to solve this. We're open to using an anonymity protocol like Tor but still uncertain about the tradeoffs.

<comment><USER5> Cool, these folks: [https://hashmatter.com/](https://hashmatter.com/) [https://github.com/hashmatter](https://github.com/hashmatter) seem to be doing something with onion routing and IPFS, but I'm quite unqualified to understand exactly what or if it's any good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At first glance -- and that's an important caveat, since I haven't dug in -- this looks like it's duplicating an awful lot of work that's already been done in the IndieWeb using existing, well-established protocols.

[https://indieweb.org](https://indieweb.org)

<comment><USER8> this is for the DAT protocol, not the legacy web (atm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This all sounds pretty exciting. I've been using dat/beaker and I love how easy it is to make a site right in the browser. It made me realize how many barriers there are on http to just build a personal website and host it for free.

This update to beaker makes sense to me as it was pretty hard to discover new sites on the network though I'd love to see dat become a bit more stable. I'd often make a site and a friend wouldn't be able to connect to it. I think if these issues could be resolved is some way the whole network would really take off.

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a reason to keep the post type out of the JSON and store it as file metadata? That works in Dat which supports file metadata, but what about when the data is handled in other ways (as plain files on disk, etc)?

[https://unwalled.garden/docs/how-does-it- work](https://unwalled.garden/docs/how-does-it-work)

<comment><USER11> It's not in metadata, it's in the directory structure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Every client in the network acts like a Web crawler.

So O(n^2) connections? Might be an issue in the long term. But I like the simple interface.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm going to start sounding like a broken record, but I find it peculiar this project claims RSS didn't go far enough, then it creates a short-circuited implementation when the actual went-very-far progression for decentralized information, something like RSS-XML-FOAF-RDF-Linked-Data-Solid, uses well established and open ended schemas for much more than this project's basics. With decentralized identifiers (DIDs), it will work on blockchains too. Fine, make a million different decentralized systems, but why not just use LD in a basic way so it's not just creating more fragmentation?

In following Solid, I've noticed a lot of decentralized projects are interested and adapting to its approach.

<comment><USER6> We're still building out schemas, so I wouldn't rate the protocol based on the current number. I just didn't want to speculatively add a bunch without having the live system to test against.

If I thought any of the existing standards were winners, I would've gone with them. If you _really_ want to get mad, you can read why I decided not to use RDF or JSON-LD: [https://unwalled.garden/docs/why-not- rdf](https://unwalled.garden/docs/why-not-rdf)

<comment><USER13> But this is why libraries are written. As you use each schema (using json-ld, or turtle, or whatever), wrap it with a library, and it becomes as easy to work with as anything. And you're adding to the critical mass of a read-write "web." Programmers need to work with the data and schemas occasionally, everyone else, forever. You've exchanged YAGNI with NIH. Unless you just expect to gain a critical mass, or don't care about participating in that web.

<comment><USER6> It really doesn't become as easy to work with. You still have to wrangle around the RDF "everything is a triple and attributes are URLs" concept, and even if you hid all that away you'd be attempting to gain something as simple as this design is. We just need a way to share & publish objects which link to each other. We don't need the graph model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Unlike Twitter and the other social networks, RSS never tried to capture the social graph, likes, comments, annotations, retweets, and etc of its userbase."

Except when they do, of course. Some places still have comment feeds.

Still, it's an interesting idea.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I knew there had been some shots at it, but my google fu couldn't pull up anything solid to point to. I'd love to see if somebody ever tried to "go big" with RSS. EDIT: also the comments RSS is generally comments posted to the blog, right? Not quite the same thing as each user having their own RSS feed with their posts and comments.

<comment><USER15> The thing is, RSS is about dissemination of content while follow/like/comment is more about dissemination of opinion. There were indeed some protocols to fill the missing pieces, including json-ld for having some sane, common format and the Salmon protocol to make information go back up to the source. Like a salmon. But it definitely was a patchwork of multiple technologies with various advancement status and quasi-inexistant documentation.

Today all of those are dead now in favor of ActivityPub. AP loses a lot of the simplicity that could make RSS ubiquitous (you need a home server and na application server to handle api calls) but the expected interactions are all there, and it's built to be extensible.

In fact, I think reusing the "everything is a file" is definitely cool and makes things easier to try, but you would definitely benefit from using the whole JSON-LD taxonomy. Things are already defined and have been used for some time in production, so you can expect some work has been thrown at it. It'd also make collaboration easier.

<comment><USER14> Webmentions is a more modern protocol for this sort of functionality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What is the likelihood of Beaker running on Android?

<comment><USER16> Looks like the Bunsen Browser. It is fun to play with although I've never seen so many JavaScript errors without running developer tools. I was unable to load Unwalled Garden which sounds expected given that you are still building a new version of Beaker to support UG features, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone who tries to use JSON for complex, extensible formats that involve documents (as opposed to data structures), metadata and semantic data are shooting themselves and their users in the foot. Just because W3C fucked up in some of their XML-based standards doesn't mean that trying to shove JSON everywhere is a sensible idea.

      {
      "topic": "dat://unwalled.garden",
      "body": "Why didn't you use XML!?",
      "createdAt": "2018-12-07T04:15:44.722Z"
      }

Now, I want to change body to include images or something of that sort. Bam, all the software that parses the old format is now broken.

Just use XML. Preferably, extend one of the existing RSS-like formats. Apply lessons learned from HTML and XHTML. It will work zillion times better in the long run.

<comment><USER6> There's nothing stopping you from extending the JSON schema. We'll probably come up with extension points to make it easier (as subobjects, each declaring their own schema IDs).

The format really isn't the interesting question. The interesting question is how do we get clients to behave predictably with each other. If you start breaking the schemas that everyone on the network is using, then yes your posts should fail to render and probably be ignored.

<comment><USER18> The format is exactly for the purpose of getting clients to behave predictably!

Without defining these schemas to allow for flexible mixed media documents, you're always going to have chaotic implementations floating around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://activitypub.rocks/](https://activitypub.rocks/)

<comment><USER5> Every existing ActivityPub application requires you to rely on a server operated by someone else that controls your identity. This application puts you fundamentally in control of your content: it is just served from your own device by default, with the option to have another server pin your content (all of your content has Dat addresses).

Also, this sort of "use this, not that" dismissal ignores the fact that almost every decentralized application can be bridged together. It would not be hard to have Mastodon/Pleroma pull someones Unwalled.Garden feed and put it on its federated timeline, or conversely for Mastodon/Pleroma to expose its users feeds as Unwalled.Garden files.

<comment><USER20> Okay, but why RSS over Activity Streams?

<comment><USER6> It's not actually RSS, it just uses a very similar model of static files shared off websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21>
      body: string

:( it's 2019, let me write my post with photos & gifs !!

<comment><USER6> We'll get there! Edit: [https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1136710339163238400](https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1136710339163238400)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Basic Q: How/where are these "dat://" sites hosted?

<comment><USER6> The Beaker browser ([https://beakerbrowser.com](https://beakerbrowser.com)) has dat hosting builtin, and you can use hosting services to keep them online when your device is off ([https://hashbase.io](https://hashbase.io))

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was really hoping someone would do something like this, bravo!</comment>


A Real Detective Plays LA Noire, Discusses Its Realism - <AUTHOR> http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/05/27/what-do-real-detectives-think-of-l-a-noire.aspx

<comment><USER2> I can't even read the headline without thinking of a couple yakuza bosses reviewing Yakuza 3: <http://boingboing.net/2010/08/10/yakuza-3-review.html></comment>


EFF: Surveillance Oversight Committees Confused 'Oversight' and 'Overlook' - <AUTHOR> https://supporters.eff.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=2084 <comment><AUTHOR> To be frank- it is very much in the realm of possibility.</comment>


Ask HN: Likelihood of making money algotrading cryptocurrency? - <AUTHOR> Want to start a side project that could potentially be immediately profitable.
What's likelihood of me making money?
Finance knowledge: Buy low, sell high. ML knowledge: 6/10. Perseverance: 9/10. Software skills: 8/10 Problem solving: 7/10. <comment><USER2> Some people are having success with it.

There were a lecture and a workshop at OHM 2013 "Building A Trading Robot With Open Source Tools", perhaps you can find a recording (the OHM 2013 website appears to be down at the moment).

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. Assume the people you will be trading against will be 10/10 in every category. Also assume that they will have so much capital that they can move the market. Assume that they will do so with the specific intent of taking all your money.

2\. Count your lucky stars.

Divide item 2 by item 1.</comment>


How to rescue people from deep poverty, and why the best methods work - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/international/21679812-how-rescue-people-deep-povertyand-why-best-methods-work-leaving-it-behind <comment><USER2> "In the 1990s it became clear that microfinance, then the most exciting tool in development economics, was not reaching the very poorest people... BRAC came up with a scheme to help the ultra-poor. It gives them a small stipend for food, followed by an asset such as a cow or a few goats, which they are expected to manage. Field workers visit weekly for the next two years, teaching recipients, for example, how to tell when a cow is in heat and how to get it inseminated. The aim is to help women 'graduate' from extreme poverty to the normal kind—as Sir Fazle puts it, 'to help them back into the mainstream of poor people'. ...A study published earlier this year in _Science_ showed that similar programmes run by other NGOs boosted consumption in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Pakistan and Peru, with the effects lasting at least a year after they ended. ...Such programmes are pricey. In India and Bangladesh they cost more than $1,000 per household at purchasing power parity. Other research explains why. ...The poorest women, it turned out, did far more hours of income-generating work...Yet they packed them into fewer days... The reason is that they toil mostly as domestic servants and in the fields—and casual agricultural work is seasonal. During planting and harvest they work extremely hard; the rest of the year they do little. Better-off women usually rear livestock, which is not only steady work but pays about twice as much per hour. When the poorest women are given cows, they quickly fill their idle time..."

<comment><USER3> My family tried to do this in China. They donated a flock of sheep to a rural village. But they were tricked into paying high prices for an inferior breed. Keep in mind, my family is in China.

So how do we help foreign countries without losing our donations to swindles?

<comment><USER4> Monitoring for fraud and publicizing good and egregious bad actors probably goes a long way against swindlers.

For example, these posts are critical of Heifer International:

[http://blog.givewell.org/category/heifer- international/](http://blog.givewell.org/category/heifer-international/)

But they are mostly concerns about the whole concept of giving livestock, so it's probably still an effective strategy for someone that wants to give livestock to give money to Heifer International rather than trying to do anything more direct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > What is striking is not so much their greater wealth ... Their relatives > have started talking to them. Asked to explain how their lives have changed, > one of the first things they say is that they now get invited to weddings.

This is the most interesting part to me. Their escape from "deep poverty" has allowed them access back into their social networks.

<comment><USER6> It's also very unfortunate because such social networks are key in preventing individuals from going into "deep poverty" in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> >>Such programmes are pricey. In India and Bangladesh they cost more than $1,000 per household at purchasing power parity.

I wish there was a way I could send $1,000 directly to a named individual, rather than the usual charity practise of putting mony in a pot and getting a duplicated letter from your sponsored person.

<comment><USER8> GiveDirectly[0] provide a minimal 'charity layer' of such a service (transferring money directly to the right people).

If you feel disillusioned by modern charity, effective altruism might interest you. I recently read "Doing Good Better" by Will Macaskill and I recommend it - it puts forward a very compelling case for how to optimise charity-giving.

[0][https://www.givedirectly.org/operating- model.html](https://www.givedirectly.org/operating-model.html)

<comment><USER7> I guess what I want to do is help 100% of one person, rather than 0.001% of a thousand.

<comment><USER9> Why? Isn't it the same in the end?

Money is fungible.

<comment><USER10> Some people like having concrete evidence of where their dollar was spent?

<comment><USER11> Here's my thinking, along these lines... Everyone's all into Gamification, right? Well... I started to wonder what would happen if you made the ultimate cross between Entertainment and Philanthropy. Wrap it up as a video game you can give to a teenager in the first world, to try to teach them some empathy. I tried to describe what it's like to play this game, as if one teenager was explaining it to another teenager.

...

"Save A Kid"

It costs $100 to buy the game, and it's $15 per month to play.

When you pick a character, you get to pick a Country of origin, and then an age and a sex. Then you get to start customizing, by looking for a character that has a given race or religion, if you care about that. For newbies, I'd definitely recommend picking a character that speaks a language you can speak fluently. And if you're an Expert, you can play a character that has different Disadvantages. It doesn't give you any bonus attributes, but you get bragging rights for playing one of them well. There's like, Orphan and Kid-With-AIDS, and then there are harder ones like "Scarred by War" where the kids have missing limbs, etc. Anyway, newbies should probably avoid those at first.

So, anyway, it's kind of like The Sims, or a Tamagotchi, or Farm Town, or something.

You log on every day, and depending on the character you picked, you either get an email, or maybe a voice mail or a video mail. The character tells you about how much it appreciates the new computer ([http://latptop.org](http://latptop.org)) and the food ([https://www.fmsc.org/home](https://www.fmsc.org/home)). The first couple levels, it's all about gaining Health Points. You can totally nerf your character by spending some of your monthly allotment of extra gold points on buffing the kid's parents ([http://www.kiva.org/](http://www.kiva.org/)), if he has them. The parents start generating more gold points on their own, which makes it a lot easier to play. Some people even buy buffs online ([http://www.heifer.org/](http://www.heifer.org/)), which I think is cheating, but for a newbie, it's an easy way to keep your kid alive.

Anyway, you and your friends can make a clan, and all play characters in the same village. I've even heard that some really crazy rich players can buy buffs for the whole village, like a potable water and electricity system (fora.tv/2008/07/03/Dean_Kamen_on_Potable_Water_and_Sustainable_Electricity).

There are Events in the game, where like the country the kid is in goes into War. That sucks, because sometimes you lose your character, and the game is perma-death, which is lame. They do a really good job making the game realistic, because sometimes you even see in the news that the real country is in war. Most of the time, they just make stuff up though, because most of the wars never show up on TV, but your character won't shut up about them.

Anyway, it's a sandbox game, which some people don't like. But the AI is incredible. Your character will like ask you how they can keep their food from spoiling, and if you look it up online ([https://www.ashoka.org/fellow/mohammed-bah- abba](https://www.ashoka.org/fellow/mohammed-bah-abba)), and explain to them how to do it, they can save some of their food. Or like, how they can build a windmill from scrap metal ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kamkwamba)).

Anyway, you play the same character as long as you want to, but most people get bored after the kid has a job and their own family, and they start over at level one. Restarting costs another $100 though.

The game developers say if too many people play the game, they might even run out of characters to play. I don't buy it. They'll always make up some new War, or some world-shattering Disaster like a typhoon or something, and then a bunch of new characters will open up. Expansion packs, and all that.

A lot of people play this game like 40 hours a week, or something ridiculous. Some people say that playing this game has changed their lives or whatever, and they give up their jobs and play it full time ([http://www.peacecorps.gov/](http://www.peacecorps.gov/)).

...

Anyway, I guess you can already play most of those mini-games in other forms, but until they package it up in a nice box that you can buy at Best Buy, and they set up some dedicated servers, and set up a scoring ladder (good grades in school, etc.) and maybe some achievements ("high school diploma", "got a job," etc.), oh and a nice technical support line to answer questions and give advice, I don't think the game will really take off.

<comment><USER12> I'm trying to figure out whether I more want to laugh at that -- or invest in it.

<comment><USER11> As Zoidberg would say... "Can't it be both?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> what are the best methods? (for someone who doesn't want to register to read the economist)

<comment><USER7> You get a few articles free, or go to the homepage and open in incognito mode.

<comment><USER13> a yes, those economists ain't got nothin on Incognito

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sounds like BRAC is doing very promising work indeed. I wonder why I never heard of them before.

<comment><USER15> To some extent, you probably _have_ heard of them, under the rubric 'direct transfers' or cash payments. Direct transfers of valuable assets (cows or cash) to the very poor have done very well when evaluated in randomized experiments, and I suspect you've seen at least one article on them in the past (albeit it might have been on GiveDirectly or one of the other programs rather than BRAC itself).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that women who were offered cows, goats and intensive training in the Indian state of West Bengal not only did not fall back into indigent poverty but kept climbing out of it.

Lets not minimize the effect of "intensive training". Education is just as important as the goats.

</comment><comment><USER16> >This is a clue to why microfinance does not reach the poorest.

I have worked with the poor in developing countries. I am highly skeptical of the claims made by microfinance. This work described here is VERY interesting because it does not involve debt and it ADDS education.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if anyone has just tried giving these people the $1,000 up front? Maybe with some resources on how they can invest that money?

I bet most would opt to move to a place with better opportunities, which isn't a bad idea.

<comment><USER16> Often the problem is that they do not have the talent to manage money. Giving them livestock causes them to work for rewards. Its easier for them to learn. There is a commitment required. Also people are willing to help them, in their learning. If they show willingness to earn rather than beg, people are more apt to help. Still, there needs to be an evaluation into the charter of the recipient. Some could sell the livestock and buy booze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be really interested in seeing the actual presentation. Does anyone have a link to the slides?

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://qz.com/566702/finland-plans-to-give-every-citizen- a-b...](http://qz.com/566702/finland-plans-to-give-every-citizen-a-basic- income-of-800-euros-a-month/) FTW</comment>


Apple set to launch cloud-based music service ahead of Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/21/reuters-apple-set-to-launch-cloud-based-music-service-ahead-of/ <comment><USER2> ... but behind Amazon. I much prefer their idea that the music actually belongs to the purchaser. This concept that it would need licensing is bass ackwards, and harmful to consumers. The only situation where it seems appropriate is if these services are trying to compete with the likes of Last.FM and similar and trying to be social with music, but we all know that Ping hasn't been a winner for Apple. The RIAA needs to start showing actual value in what they are doing, which I guess they can't, meanwhile we all march on to other things.</comment>


Myspace looked like it was back, but was a pawn in an ad fraud scheme - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/remember-tom?utm_term=.uajQ9V5yA#.hnRwoK71M <comment><USER2> Viant (aka Specific Media) is a well known fraudster. Nobody in the ad industry thought MySpace was "back" after you heard who bought it years ago. The Vanderhooks (the brothers who founded Specific and continue to run all their schemes) pioneered the pop-under and have been running darker scams ever since. I worked for Specific for a few years and the brothers were refreshingly tech savvy. The penchant for fraud was always the dominant strategy (grown from a kernel of organic, like all good ad fraud).

<comment><USER3> Why did you work for them for a few years if they were engaging in fraud?

<comment><USER4> These things are rarely gone over in the initial ramp up in my experience :)

It usually takes some time to see what the actual core values of an organization are.

<comment><USER3> Not years

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another article about this kind of click fraud. And again only lots of details where the traffic goes and how it is then used to "spam" impressions on ads.

Does anyone understand what devices/users are actually going into this "funnel" and where they come from? Botnet? Junk traffic from porn sites? Iframes?

<comment><USER5> [http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/20/technology/ad-fraud- online-m...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/20/technology/ad-fraud-online- methbot/index.html)

<comment><USER6> Damn, $5MM a day. Even if your network gets broken up after a few weeks that's still a massive win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Crawlers & bots trigger video playback on the websites they visit, though it's probably unintentional in most cases. At Mux we have taken steps to identify such video views to limit their impact on aggregate video view performance metrics: [https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric- sh...](https://mux.com/blog/do-androids-watch-videos-of-electric-sheep-how- bots-react-to-web-video-2/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is certainly click fraud. Is that fraud in the legal sense?

<comment><USER9> If it can be demonstrated that your'e intentionally and knowingly deceiving someone in order to separate them from their money, it's fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facebook is probably also juking their stats. I don't trust any of their numbers.

<comment><USER11> Does it matter? Their effectiveness is proven at this point.

<comment><USER12> When have they proven the effectiveness of their ads? From my understanding, in fact it is increasingly being discovered that much of their clicks and likes, etc are fake.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Golang Clean Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bxcodec/go-clean-arch/pull/21 <comment><AUTHOR> The author is here.

I learned Golang a year ago and trying to create an architecture on it. But later I found the "domain" term. So then I try to implement it on this PR.

I'd like to hear your opinion about it. :D

</comment><comment><USER2> clean arch == no arch?</comment>


When Will This Low-Innovation Era End? - <AUTHOR> http://blog-admin.wired.com/opinion/2012/04/opinion-fox-net-innovation/ <comment><USER2> The issue is not innovation, per se. the Issue is more like "progress" or improved lifestyles, culture, families, etc. The critique of the past 10 years is that there has been plenty of <empty> innovation. Lifestyles are "worse", despite more stuff. People are living in the same houses, but they are 3x as expensive. The mobile phone was very useful, but the crackberry/iphone has become more of a ball and chain, than a tool of freedom. The internet has turned into a giant blinking neon light, meant to be stared at, so our attention can be "leveraged" by advertsisers. Every thing that is meant to be an improvement ("contextual, personalized content") has an orwellian alternative case (GPS Tracking, DeepPacketInspection, rogue cookies). So the issue is not "innovation" per se. It's innovation on the upside. Innovation that is absent the downsides. Much (if not most) of the innovation in the past 10 years has been on these _downsides_. Thus, the things that are better (ipods, retina displays, amazing batteries,macbook air, dslr, etc) are sort of bitter sweet. [Flamesuit Donned!]

</comment><comment><USER3> Just because there is a lot of attention paid to the instagrams of the world does not mean there is nobody tackling big problems.

 _Then the internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation."_

The ability for everyday man to broadcast is as big a revolution as the printing press.

Typed from my glowing sheet of glass, from my couch, to be shared with the world.

<comment><USER4> > The ability for everyday man to broadcast is as big a revolution as the > printing press.

In the words of Jason Scott:

> It is not unreasonable to say that a person putting up a web page might have > a farther reach and greater potential audience than anyone in the history of > their genetic line.

<http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2402>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article just doesn't apply for the developing world. The China, and India of 1990 was completely different from what it is today.

Speaking from experience, 20 years ago most people in India did not have a phone and it was impossible to get a home phone without string-pulling and bribery. Now 50% of the population has a mobile phone; no bribes. 30 years ago, Sugar was rationed and you could buy a 1 kg of Sugar for a household per month. Now, there is plentiful Sugar.

Things that Developed countries take for granted - Fridges, Washing Machines, Microwaves, Dining tables, TVs, personal transport (cars, motorcycles), better access to health care, better access to education, simply did not exist or was out of reach for most. I'm not saying that they are now available to everyone, but the reach has expanded.

20 years the politicians made promises that Rice would be available at low rates, now they make promises that TVs would be available at low rates.

If that's not a revolution, I wonder what is. Heck even electricity is still a luxury in India.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is utter bullshit. Warren Ellis's _excelent_ "How to see the future"[1], addresses why we're perpetually bored by the times we live in, and are always nostalgic about some bygone golden age:

        ...We look at the present day through a rear-view mirror.
        This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the
        Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-
        seeming future narratives. He said, "We look at the
        present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards
        into the future."

        He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed
        Moon landing: "Because of the invisibility of any
        environment during the period of its innovation, man is
        only consciously aware of the environment that has
        preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully
        visible only when it has been superseded by a new
        environment; thus we are always one step behind in our
        view of the world. The present is always invisible because
        it's environmental and saturates the whole field of
        attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an
        earlier day."

He goes on to cite some examples of stuff that seems banal and boring because we're just so used to it:

        There are six people living in space right now. There are
        people printing prototypes of human organs, and people
        printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh
        and the human electrical system.

        We've photographed the shadow of a single atom. We've got
        robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just
        stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a
        cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are
        getting ready to launch three satellites the size of
        coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone
        apps.

        Here's another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more
        than 11 billion miles away, and it's run off 64K of
        computing power and an eight-track tape deck.

        In the last ten years, we've discovered two previously
        unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the
        surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on
        Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this
        is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on
        your phone, because this is the present time and these
        things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in
        fact a communications devices that shames all of science
        fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators.
        Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it
        couldn't text or take a photo that he could stick a nice
        Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn't see the mobile
        phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass
        windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things
        happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn
        wizards.

        That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said
        that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic.
        And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but
        magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all
        now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning
        it into the present. It's here right now. It's in the room
        with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science
        Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across
        the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.

[1] [http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314&utm_source=buffer...](http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=79ce3)

<comment><USER7> The point is that the difference between 1900 and 1960 is fundamental on every level.

Carriages -> Cars

Land Travel -> Aerospace

Iceboxes at best -> Modern refrigeration

Pen and Paper -> Computers

Newspapers -> Ubiquitous electronic media.

Living at the mercy of infectious diseases -> Antibiotics/vaccines.

Coal (at best) -> Nuclear

Outhouses -> Modern Plumbing and sanitation

Etc. You could make similarly great comparisons between 1840-1900.

What do we have now? Looking at atoms? WTF does that matter in any practical sense? And even if you want to get sciency, it's clear that 1900-1960 was when the big changes in physics occurred, at least since Newton.

All of the big _practical_ changes since 1960 have mainly served to isolate us, as amusing as they might be.

<comment><USER8> In the future people will look back at comments like this and wonder how we could be so blind. But that's because what will be obvious to them is not so obvious to us. We are immersed in our history, we are distracted by flashy short-term trends and comparatively blind to subtle, long-term trends. Partly because we lack the foresight to see which trends will win out in the long run.

However, let's look at how the very nature of the world has changed in the last half century and how that might play out over the next few decades.

Let's look at the developed world. 50 years ago that was pretty much just the US/Canada and Western Europe, with smatterings of incomplete industrialization elsewhere. Today Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea are unarguably developed, first world nations. And the coastal parts of China as well as Chile, Brazil, and several other countries are well on their way to that status and will join it within the next decade or two.

Meanwhile, war is becoming less common, and average quality of life as well as longevity is, overall, increasing everywhere in the entire world. This is an unprecedented event in human history, we are becoming more peaceful, wealthier, and healthier. And not just a small elite portion of the world, all of it (see Hans Rosling's TED talk for more on that).

Let's look at trade. In 1960 trade was remarkably limited. The world population was about 3 billion, gross world product was about 7 trillion USD (compared to 70 trillion today). In between the world grew by about 2x and got about 10x richer. Part of this is due to the invention of containerized shipping, which brought about a revolution in international shipping, increasing shipping tonnage by an order of magnitude or more. Today the total value of goods being transported internationally on the oceans is twice the value of the entire world economy in 1960.

Let's look at communications. Even in, say, 1980 the world was still a relatively disconnected place. Most people on Earth had never made a single phone call, and news of the world was still hard to come by. Today the world is knit together by a world-spanning instantaneous communications network, and the power of communication has been put into the hands of the world's population. It is not unusual nor terribly expensive to carry on a conversation in real-time with a person across the world, not just in the "1st world" but in the "3rd world" as well. News from all parts of the world now comes in the form of first hand reports and cell phone videos as much as it does from reporters repeating accounts from interviewed locals.

And that revolution in communications that has largely taken root only in the last decade has had a transformative effect on the world, and on geopolitics. Look at the revolutions of late, how quickly they spread, how they are still spreading, and how much they have overturned about the way we thought the world worked. The geopolitical landscape of 2015 will be unrecognizable from the perspective of 2005, and much of that is due to communication technology.

Let's look at business. In the US there has been an explosion of entrepreneurship on a massive scale. Many of the largest and most influential companies of today (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) were created not just within the last half century but even within the last 30 or 20 years. And new companies are sprouting up all the time (such as facebook). Meanwhile, a great many people are acquiring the capability to work for themselves on their own projects. The internet has made it that much easier for people to run their own businesses. Musical artists have found out how to be successful without signing on to a major label. Webcomic artists have discovered how to make a living without working through the syndication companies or being employees of large comic book corporations. Craftspeople have discovered how to sell their wares directly to the public through etsy or ebay or their own websites. And so many folks of many varying talents have taken their careers on a sharp detour via crowd-funding systems such as kickstarter. Already hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars are flowing through this new economy of self-made businesses, and it's growing at a fantastic pace. How fundamentally will this change the economy? In the next 20 years will it be more common for people to be their own boss and work as independent contractors than to be employees of a large corporation?

Let's look at medicine. AIDS was discovered in the 1980s. Throughout all of human history the only effective "treatment" for a lethal virus has been a vaccine, and yet scientists managed to develop effective treatments for AIDS within a matter of years. And today AIDS can be treated as a chronic illness. And too our understanding of biology and biochemistry has exploded. We've decoded the genome of not just homo sapiens but many other species and we've only just begun to understand biology on that level. But we've been able to experiment with amazing things, lab-grown organ replacements, genetic therapy, etc. Today someone with insulin dependent diabetes can buy actual, human insulin for a very affordable price. And this is because the gene to produce that insulin has been taken from humans and placed into bacteria which are then grown in vats and the insulin is extracted and purified. This is an amazing, futuristic achievement, and yet it is bog standard ordinary for today's world.

Let's look at technology and manufacturing. Computing power, of course, has exploded, and it will continue to do so as we develop new technologies like memristors and other breakthrough ideas. Manufacturing is in the midst of a sea change, as computer powered CNC machine tools, 3D printing, and much more are paving the way toward vastly accelerated cycles of development (whereby the time-frame between coming up with an idea and seeing that idea borne out in mass-production manufacturing has been shortened to a matter of weeks if not days, in the near future that will be measured in a matter of hours or minutes). And that will pave the way for fully automated manufacturing and fully configurable manufacturing. Imagine if anyone could visit a website, fill in a form, upload a few 3D models, pay a modest sum of money and have a bulk shipment of manufactured goods that were defined by that data (say, laptops, or smartphones, or bicycles, or automobiles) loaded onto a boat in a matter of days. What happens when a company with, say, 5 employees can build iPhones of the same quality and in sufficient volume to challenge Apple? What happens to the undeveloped world when we can make factories that run on solar power and bulk materials and output industrial goods (like tractors, cars, refrigerators, power stations, and water purification equipment), or when factories can produce factories themselves?

The world is a much different place than it was a half century ago, and it is on track to become an astoundingly different place than we can scarcely imagine. And the roots have been planted right here, right now.

P.S. Also, a tremendous amount of social change has happened in the last 50 years, both in the US and in the world. Much of that was enabled or assisted by technological change. It's easy to miss this because when comparing across time we tend to compare like with like, however we should remember that the lives we are comparing to in the 1960s aren't necessarily average lives, they are probably elite lives (e.g. straight christian white males with high-paying jobs).

<comment><USER9> "In the future people will look back at comments like this and wonder how we could be so blind."

Are you trying to suggest people are going to look back on your comment and wonder how you were so blind? I'm kind of wondering that right now.

<comment><USER8> I think it's obvious what "this" I was referring too. However, I do include myself and my post in that comment (which is why I said "we"). I have pointed out some ways in which our world is changing and has changed, but I certainly can't predict the future. Looking back from the perspective of the year 2040 there will no doubt be many trends that in retrospect are blindingly obvious but are not apparent to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love how people talk about stagnation and then check the stock prices on their phones.

Nobody cares at all about mobile phones today; we take for granted that the smart phones are simply the yuppie upgrade for the RAZR or whatever.

But they are still causing the most dramatic and unprecedented shift society has ever seen, no questions about it.

Watch an old Star Trek episode. The main piece of technology isn't the ship, it's the transponders.

tl;dr: look in your pocket before you spray the internet with small minded thinking.

</comment><comment><USER11> Let's not confuse lack of visibility with absence. Most engineering these days happens at invisible scales. An old railroad bridge might look impressive, but the cell phone tower next door is actually a much more complex structure. (You'd have to look at it with a microscope and a debugger, though.)

</comment><comment><USER12> We are absolutely about to see it all pay off.

Let's not discount universal access to information, first of all. I'm 28 and when I was in high school 10 years ago, it was right about the time you could now find the quadratic formula by searching the Web, but before you could Google how to write a resume, find a good doctor in your area, or read blogs about developing better study habits. I think the world must have been a little darker before the Google age.

Then there's universal distribution of software (the web, mobile devices) and the relative ease of developing niche apps today. The transformation of the world by (good) software is just beginning.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think this is sort of a 80/20 situation, where the last 20% of the project is taking 80% of the time to complete -- the project here being the "migration" from the physical to the digital world. That's why change is not so palpable. This project is a great one nonetheless: we're redefining how humans relate to each other, how we handle and share knowledge, how we collaborate. I think these changes affect society in a more profound way than some great new device or technology.

</comment><comment><USER14> I honestly think that this line of thinking is now outdated. There will be a mental revolution for those who believe in this, because the rest of the world believes we are already in a revolution.. Stop being negative, make room for the people who are ready to innovate. Quit hating, in less words. There are generations who are adapting to this new environment, even if they don't realize it.

I'd say this: stop focusing on the negative and start being creative-- this article is just a bunch of bullshit excuses that will in itself slow innovation. Feed the hungry, don't kick them when they are down. "We" young entrepreneurs need inspiration now more than anything, not criticism. Big ideas are going to happen, regardless of you believing in them (yet).

The tools we all have access to is unbelievable. If you don't feel like the future is already here, and it's just prime time to start making the new generation of innovations using these tools, you're going to be left in the dust.

Innovation never goes anywhere it just needs time to adapt, I think.

Come and see me 5-10 years from now, and maybe I can say I told you so.

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking at the comments, I find it kind of odd that this issue is polarizing. What exactly is the nature of the divide between the extremes of the people who think we've had no progress vs those who think we've had considerable progress?

I would hazard a guess that the "substantial-progress" crowd is assuming that physics and chemistry have been largely figured out and there's nothing else to do there except tidying up some loose ends and working with what we've got and the only place progress could possibly come from is through information technology manipulating what we have.

The no-progress crowd are waiting for the next big fundamental breakthrough like the discovery of the microbe, quantum physics, and electricity.

I still don't understand why the vitriol is thrown around on this one so hard by the "substantial progress" crowd. Maybe they think that the "no-progress" crowd are a bunch of lunatics for believing there are fundamental things that we could discover that could significantly increase our understanding of the fundamentals of physics, chemistry or biology.

</comment><comment><USER16> The reason that I agree that there is low innovation is that innovation eventually results in economic acceleration. Think industrial revolution.

However, innovation has not stopped if you consider that in the last century we have Ford Motor company, fast food, marketing as industry, rock-and-roll, Sony Walkman, Levis, iPod, etc. There is a ton of innovation.

But unfortunately, it needs to be _disruptive_ innovation that changes how efficient we are and improves quality of life. Writing new webapps does not do that. Designing new iPhones does not do that.

Something else to consider is that the time is ripe for something other than technological innovation. What if we could better understand the world we live in and come closer to God? What if we could overcome the 50/50 political divide causing so much hate in our country from both sides? What if peace could be reached with all countries? That would also be innovation, because we can't seem to figure out a way to do it currently.

</comment><comment><USER17> The real lack of innovation is in the social and political structures we have to live with. And those are a product of primate brains that evolve at a much slower rate than our technological sophistication.

Right at the moment, the dominant political regime on this planet is still concerned with areas of land under military hegemony, and is apparently completely incapable of dealing with things like keeping this planet habitable over the short term, much less the long term.

We have paleolithic brains dealing with state-of-the-art environmental problems in the context of 17th century political institutions and 20th century financial institutions in a society run by people who would like to retreat to 12th century religious values because THE FUTURE IS SCARY AND UNCERTAIN.

Like someone said, we are in one whole joojooflop situation here.

[1]. Joojooflop <http://www.zootle.net/afda/faq/e.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER18> Having globally usable handheld networked computers with location capability and voice and video communication capabilities that is simple enough for the average person to use is a pretty big innovation of the past decade.

Just look at the latest smartphones, they are amazing. That much computer, network, sensor and display power in that size of a package is incredible and real innovation even if it has been evolutionary over the last couple of decades rather than a single point revolution.

It has made room for a massive amount of minor steps in app development filling in the space created by the modern phone. There is still room for improvement, more accurate location will open further possibilities

</comment><comment><USER19> What is innovation? The author seems to focus to much on the dramatic or thing that directly impact our lives. While there are a lot of things that don't directly make our lives more meaningful (Halo,etc.), there are amazing advances that have made living today so very exciting!!

Hand, face, arm, leg and ovarian transplants. (& others) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation#Timeline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplantation#Timeline_of_successful_transplants)

Better response to heart disease, (near) instant medical record sharing, targeted cancer treatments, human genome, anti-smoking research & bans in 27 states, functional MRI, robots performing surgery [http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/PublicHealth/1...](http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/PublicHealth/17594)

snopes.com gave people accurate so that we don't have to rely on crap information- no matter how good it sounds.

Doctors can better diagnose patients thanks to information available on PDA.

GPS- now that's amazing. Google "GPS saves lives" seriously!

Cell Phones- also saves lives, makes contacting someone infinitely easier. How did truckers know to call home if there was an emergency at home? Much more difficult!

Ham Radios, Satellite Phones, hearing aids, pacemakers etc. Amazing devices that have done so much for us!

All of the tiny details made it possible to disseminate information, keep better contact perform incredible medical breakthroughs & decrease poverty worldwide. (Cell phones, internet, square, etc. facilitate economic development)

I'm an IT graduate. I look at the amazing inventions in my field. It feels like they all came less than 4 years ago. (when I graduated)

Oh, I forgot to mention the Nobel prizes. (many are very impressive!) Innovation is happening faster than it ever has before! In another 10 years, we may say- poverty & consumer debt is decreasing systemically worldwide, robots are plowing our fields & HIV has a vaccine! I enjoy the wonderful present and look forward to our bright future!

</comment><comment><USER20> The greatest innovation shall be human compassion and decency. The kind of discovery that doesn't let half of the world starve in a vain pursuit of tech gadgets. The kind of invention that will make it obvious that 47% of a population is not aspiring to live any less freely than the other 53%. The kind of transformation that will end all prejudices.

Alas, while we are great at opening Pandora's box, we totally fail at evolving as spiritual beings.

</comment><comment><USER21> I believe it has been governments (societies) putting all its resources into something that has been the driver of pushing things forward. Corporations are experts at optimizing the status quo. Real progress takes real capital and great amounts of risk and investment that won't see returns for decades if ever.

</comment><comment><USER22> Technology cannot solve the problems of the world, because the real problem is human nature. Machiavelli got it right when he said that history repeats because man's passion never changes. The world is nonlinear, everything is cyclical. When history stops repeating, progress will have been made.

</comment><comment><USER23> The world's 4th largest economy was over 40% powered by solar for two days in May this year. I think we can consider the innovation in PV technology a game changer that will impact the way we live greatly.

Imagine a world with 0 fuel costs, just capital costs.

</comment><comment><USER24> This era is a fuel towards next golden era. low tech with a very high profit, we need as much resources to go to the next level. As an example -> google mobile (android) + facebook + wikipedia, etc = Project Glass.

</comment><comment><USER20> All efforts should be spent on finding ways to generate and store clean energy. Instead, VCs keep funding Facebook and Google wannabes.

</comment><comment><USER25> We just need more of Einsteins, Nikola Teslas and Thomas Edisons less of Zuckerbergs, Steve Jobs and Larry Elisons.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."

✓

<comment><USER24> [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/wikimedia_uk_scandal...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/20/wikimedia_uk_scandal/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't think the pain point for a lot of us is that there isn't much innovation. It's that most of us don't get to take part, nor to guarantee ourselves a fair share of what innovation produces. Most people are barely at the table, without any role or say in the innovation that is going on (which is probably more than at any other time in history).

We have one tiny minority (well-connected political and economic elites) that captures most of the value generated by any change, even though they produce absolutely nothing, and often they get to call the shots, even though they fuck up every decision they make. We have another small minority that is socially inferior and gets less direct benefit out of the changes, but drives them and thereby gets to _participate_ in the current round of innovation.

Then there are the 99-plus percent who are effectively non-players, some well- compensated and most not, but all at the mercy of forces that are not just out of our control (no one actually _controls_ them, no single person has anywhere close to that level of power in this world) but over which we have no influence and no role in the driving.

The angriest among us are the "Cognitive 1 Percent", the ones who know we could be making these important decisions better than the people (politicians, corporate CEOs, VC kingmakers) currently able to make them, the entrenched players being above-average but not at our level.

It feels like there's no innovation. There's plenty, in comparison to any other time in history. There just isn't much of a role in it for any but the most well-situated people.

<comment><USER28> Isn't this normal ? It was the same with the industrial revolution.Those new innovation enabled shitty factories on a mass scale.

One could even say it was the same in the beginning of the automotive revolution: In the 30's cars we're nice and all , but the new powerful motors and radios enabled nazism and tanks and blietzkrieg more than prosperity.

Maybe it's common : Some get fast insight on the use of new technologies and create huge inequality, but with time and struggle societies adapt and better use those technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's ending right about now

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/a-robot-with-a- del...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/a-robot-with-a-delicate- touch.html)

[http://arxivindex.blogspot.ca/2012/09/new-form-of- universal-...](http://arxivindex.blogspot.ca/2012/09/new-form-of-universal- computation.html)

[http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/nanoelectronics-and- tissu...](http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/nanoelectronics-and- tissues-0827.html)

<comment><USER30> That's not an ending, that's a continuation of the progress we've been making for decades. Someone just wanted to write a bitchy article in Wired because they aren't in Minority Report yet.

<comment><USER29> I have to disagree a little there. There's been huge progress in communication but actual physical things (household robots or medical advances) not much. The linked-to articles (as well drones/robocars) show a beginning of a breakthrough in that sphere.

edit: I agree it's basically a continuation (cheaper) but you can say the same about internet (made in 60s but breakthrough in late 90s)</comment></comment></comment>