S&P 500 drops 9%, extending losses after 15-minute trading halt - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/15/traders-await-futures-open-after-fed-cuts-rates-launches-easing-program.html <comment><USER2> We have a virus problem, _not a credit_ problem. The Fed is whipping out all the financial tools and it's totally ineffectual at best, and disastrous at worst as now those tools are used up (as it were).

Trying to address this pandemic with financial tools geared towards the market feels like trying to address a house fire by rebuilding parts that are still on fire _without actually putting out the fire_.

With no one at the wheel addressing the actual problem, the outlook feels grim. RIP my retirement account.

<comment><USER3> What else can they do? Watch people's portfolios burn down tot he ground? Will that make the situation better?

<comment><USER4> Funding and effective virus response and admitting the severity of the problem would be a start. Our country needs to be seen taking this seriously from the top which it most certainly isn't.

I don't think there are any measures that will prevent this drop right now though. Supply and demand are both heavily impacted. We should be looking further down the line to the financial consequences we can prevent.

Layoffs have already started, part time workers are making significantly less, and imports aren't as stable. This is going to have serious knock on effects preventing a quick recovery once the pandemic is under control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Former fund manager here. A few thoughts:

\- Trading halts are there to let people catch their breath, supposedly. More likely it's in order to be able to announce news, because without news what's gonna change?

\- The news everyone wants now is fiscal stimulus. From what I can see, there's a lot of consumers whose personal finances will blow up if the economy shuts for a couple of months. So perhaps what needs to be announced needs to be aimed at those types of people. Certainly people will protest if fiscal stimulus means just handing money to people and companies who aren't in dire straights. How about a rent break or something drastic like that?

\- The effect of systematic strategies should not be underestimated. By that I'm lumping passive index trading in with various forms of systematic rules based trading (my specialty actually). Things that hop on the momentum bandwagon will make the move more extreme. They will also tend to whipsaw on reversals. There's also risk parity funds, which now need to reposition based on risk being higher.

\- Also you have to figure on short options players getting blown up on this kind of thing. (Vol trading was my other specialty). Basically what I mean is in recent years it's been quite enticing to simply sell options to pick up premium, which normally is a bit too expensive in relation to the expected volatility (ie it seems smart a lot of the time). Of course nothing is free, and when there's a blowout the short gamma guys are also pushing the market the wrong way.

\- There's at least one major investment bank that thinks this will end soon, markets to recover in H2, and no systemic risk. (Got that from a friend chain so grain of salt.) Not sure what to think, since this is more a question of how politicians will respond than ordinary day-to-day reading tea leaves.

Interesting times.

<comment><USER6> > \- The news everyone wants now is fiscal stimulus

Market-clueless newbie here. How would fiscal stimulus help a market that is seizing up due to reducing supply side (factories close) and reducing demand side (pubs to be closed, airlines crashing because of border closures, & more) and a disease that is likely to stress many countries medical provisions to breaking point, and then beyond.

Didn't the US dump 1.5 trillion dollars in a few days ago, and the market bounced but briefly? I mean it was obvious to me that it wouldn't work, why do you (as an expert - and I don't mean that sarcastically) think more stimulus, or indeed any, would help at this point?

<comment><USER7> > _How would fiscal stimulus help a market that is seizing up due to reducing > supply side (factories close) and reducing demand side (pubs to be closed, > airlines crashing because of border closures, & more) and a disease that is > likely to stress many countries medical provisions to breaking point, and > then beyond._

If we literally hand money to people, they can pay their bills on time while we work through this thing.

I'm not sure what else will work at this point.

It's not feasible to simply have "rent holidays" or some such, as the OP suggests, as that rent expense is someone else's income.

<comment><USER8> Most of that rent goes towards a mortgage, which can also be suspended. The landlord still looses income, but not in a worse way then other bussiness which had to close.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every time I see one of these articles I'm reminded that it was only just over a month ago I had a conversation on here with people suggesting that taking a 7 year car loan to buy a car and using their saving to buy mutual funds was a sound financial decision.

It's amazing how quickly the whole world can be flipped upside down.

<comment><USER10> It all depends on how long your investment horizon is.

If you have another 30 years until retirement it would be foolish not to buy stocks now. Not saying to dump every penny you have into the market at once, but increase your buying NOW. The dollar is being devalued as we speak, holding cash makes little sense.

When all the dust and panic around this virus has settled, many quality companies will still be around. Procter & Gamble will still be selling detergents and tampons, McDonalds will still be frying hamburgers and Microsoft will still be selling office subscriptions.

<comment><USER11> If markets fall another 20-30%, it won't have obviously been a good time to buy today. These aren't normal times.

In the depression, stocks fell for about three years. Also, your dollar argument makes no sense: the stocks are valued in dollars, and are falling faster than the dollar.

It's great to buy at the bottom, but who knows if that's it.

<comment><USER12> The point is that even in the worst-case-scenario, if you bought stock the hour before the great depression, you'd still be way up when you retire in 30 years later.

<comment><USER11> The dow went from 400 to 50 in the depression. If you bought at the bottom you'd have 800% more than if you'd bought at the top!

The fact that stocks go up long run isn't an argument for pouring money into a plunging market. This might be the bottom, it might not.

<comment><USER13> As you said _It's great to buy at the bottom, but who knows if that's it._ , so I'm going to continue investing whatever I can each fortnight.

I'd rather risk paying more now before a big crash and continuing to invest through the big crash than risk missing this opportunity and the market going back to a bull one in a few weeks.

<comment><USER11> That's fine. The parent comment was recommending people increase their buying right now however. My point was this isn't necessarily a special opportunity just because it's off a peak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand this at all. Stock prices are supposed to include estimates of all futures earnings of a company, discounted for distance in the future, right? Even in the worst case where four or five percent of the population die and the economy is impacted by quarantines for a few years until we reached herd immunity, I don't see how this lowers future earnings by 30% and more.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that stock prices were artificially inflated over the last several* years. If we were in a bubble, then this coronavirus ends up acting more as a catalyst for popping the bubble, then you would see a significant drop to the market beyond the immediate effects to the market.

> Even in the worst case where four or five percent of the population die and > the economy is impacted by quarantines for a few years until we reached herd > immunity, I don't see how this lowers future earnings by 30% and more.

Though, that worst case scenario a 30% drop seems low to me. For some particularly hard-hit sectors, a lot of business would go to 0 in the scenario you described.

* For some pretty ambiguous definition of "several" that I can't pin down with precision

<comment><USER16> > I suspect that stock prices were artificially inflated over the last > several* years. If we were in a bubble, then this coronavirus ends up acting > more as a catalyst for popping the bubble, then you would see a significant > drop to the market beyond the immediate effects to the market.

I don't really get the bubble theory. Stock prices were "artificially inflated" because the Fed was keeping interest rates low. That causes people to borrow money and use it to invest with, because the risk-adjusted return on the investments is higher than the interest they have to pay to borrow the money. Which creates more demand for stocks and drives up the prices.

But that demand continues as long as the interest rates are low. It's the same as housing -- low interest rates and easy money increased housing prices, which then came to a head when interest rates started to rise and suddenly that demand fell off, sale prices fell and people were underwater on their mortgages. That's what happens when interest rates rise, which is why the Fed has been keeping them low for more than a decade, but they just fell even more. The "pop" happens when interest rates go _up_ too fast. Stocks are down right now because of the coronavirus, not because interest rates went up.

The trick is how to get out of the low interest rates without causing the market to decline, and there are two options. One is high economic growth, so that natural demand can replace the demand created by low interest rates, which you take if you can get it but hasn't been the case recently. The other is inflation -- the government creates a bunch of new money and gives it out, which creates a tendency for nominal prices to increase and offsets the decrease caused by raising interest rates.

We may be at the point where that second one is making a lot of sense, because "high economic growth" seems pretty unlikely in the immediate future, but "print a bunch of money and give it to people" is _exactly_ the sort of thing you want to do during hard times when there are existing deflationary forces in effect. And then it sets you up for a subsequent recovery that allows interest rates to rise as the deflationary forces wane and the inflationary effect from creating the new money catches up and allows you to raise interest rates without reducing nominal asset prices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel bad for the Fed folks because they were stuck in a terrible position.

Their options were basically:

Don't do anything - "Fed won't save us!"

Do something as scheduled (March 18) - "wow, we already priced this in and that's really all they're doing?"

Do something ahead of schedule (Sunday rate cut) - "they're panicking! They have no other tools left! I thought the Fed was supposed to be independent of the President!"

<comment><USER17> The Fed lost its independence at least a year ago, since the President has maintained a sustained and public campaign to pressure them.

But the real issue here is that people don't see this as a monetary issue and the fiscal side is dependent on an administration that has only just come around to recognizing it as a problem after having spent weeks trying to minimize it and actively discourage steps to reduce the impact of COVID 19.

<comment><USER18> Your first paragraph has been said by various people for various reasons for at least the last 10 years.

<comment><USER17> The difference being no other president in at least the past 3 decades has publicly tried to influence the Fed.

I'm sure every president has done so privately. Doing it publicly is not the same thing.

There's also the fact that no other president did so during a boom cycle. That was new as well.

It's possible Obama and Bush tried to influence Bernanke and Greenspan. But it's definite Trump did so. I only need to look at his twitter history to confirm that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It will turn around one day. It feels like that's impossible but it will. If you're holding anything the just keep holding them. If you have cash, start dollar cost averaging with it over a many, many months timeline.

We will be fine eventually. I don't claim to know when - just that eventually better days will come.

<comment><USER20> Problem is that dollar cost averaging becomes nigh impossible if you loose your job because of the situation.

<comment><USER19> Yeah you shouldn't gamble your cash cushion. Just if you have extra cash you've been waiting to invest, or have been cost averaging, etc.

Prepare to not have a job - always.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not surprising this is happening a day after many states are in almost lockdown. Too many unknowns and lots of small business that lost their income. People are fearful and they have good reasons. Clearly this cannot continue for too long.

No one knows what will happen but I'm optimistic that like in South Korea and a couple of other places, next month things will get start looking better in Europa and US. FAANG companies should be fine too. They all have services that must be surging in demand. Amazon shopping, Netflix and FB usage, etc. Apple is likely to be the one most in trouble but they have so much cash they will survive. Ad spending will take a hit as companies wide down on spending, but should be only temporarily.

Currently no one knows what will happen. But long term investors should sleep well at night.

</comment><comment><USER22> Serious question: Is this now a good time to refinance a home mortgage? Or should we wait until negative interest rates, which would surely set up the minimum positive mortgage rates. Or does it become irrelevant to mortgage rates at some point?

<comment><USER23> Mortgage rates have moved surprisingly little. They usually trade at around a 2% premium over the 10-year government bonds for a 30-year fixed. Right now that would mean about 2.8% but my local bank quotes 3.5%. My guess is that spread is going to shrink over time but who knows. I'm waiting...

<comment><USER24> It dipped last week, but popped back up from refi surge. I'm thinking to give a few weeks to settle. Hoping to see 3.0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why not just close the markets down? If everyone has to take a break from congregating and in some cases working (think retail and restaurant workers), then the market should have to as well. Everyone take a 3 week break from working and partying and chill the F out.

<comment><USER26> It has been proposed [0]. The sheer fact of how unprecedented it would be makes it unlikely.

0: [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-16/data-a...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-16/data- and-psychology-may-argue-for-us-stock-market-closure?sref=1kJVNqnU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I got worried when Kai Ryssdal opened _Marketplace_ last Thursday with, "this is the scary part." For those not familiar, he's a voice of extreme moderation and calm regardless of what happened that day or week in the markets.

I think what we're seeing is the market trying to price in the complete halt of the worlds' economies for an unspecified length of time. Monetary policy doesn't cure coronavirus, and until we see the end of the health crisis I don't think we'll see the floor of this ongoing crash.

<comment><USER28> That's also my opinion, monetary policies have no effect because this isn't a financial crisis, it's an existential crisis because economies needs to stop with a lot of uncertainty, no amount of money can solve that.

<comment><USER29> This rate cut is just feeding into fears.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On the bright side, the virus might buy us a year or two before we hit climate change tipping points. Imho, climate change is the actual threat to future earnings.

</comment><comment><USER30> > The White House coronavirus briefing has been moved from 10:30am to 3:30pm, > per updated White House guidance.

[https://twitter.com/KFaulders/status/1239540793213366273](https://twitter.com/KFaulders/status/1239540793213366273)

Guess they're gonna try the "goose it right before the close" thing again.

</comment><comment><USER31> We've got a long way to go down, IMO. A lot of these highly leveraged companies are going to implode, and the companies that lent them money will also implode.

The biggest victims (out of survivors) of this coronavirus panic are probably going to be the millions of people who will lose their jobs and go broke for a variety of reasons. Foreclosures will jump, big company CEOs will get large government handouts, and the poverty gap will just get wider.

<comment><USER32> Since the government response is a LAGGING indicator (I.e. people are already the steps to contain the virus before the government), we probably saw pick virus.

Also, the stock market becoming cheaper actually reduces inequality since it allows new savers to get in at a lower price. And the same thing for housing.

<comment><USER33> > Also, the stock market becoming cheaper actually reduces inequality since it > allows new savers to get in at a lower price. And the same thing for > housing.

It increases inequality: people lose their jobs, people can't pay their rents, people can't pay their mortgages.

Most people can't put money in stocks and work paycheck to paycheck. Those people are going to get hit the hardest.

When the stock market is doing the best ever, these people aren't benefiting, but when the stock market crashes, these people have the most to lose.

It's exactly why our economy shouldn't be tied to the whims of the stock market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there any aggregated source to see how Angel Investors and other startup financial investments are tracking? I wonder if there is going to be a financial crisis on a smaller scale for startups running out of runway.

<comment><USER35> > Is there any aggregated source to see how Angel Investors and other startup > financial investments are tracking?

I know it seems like an eternity, but we're only a few weeks into this.

Startups are generally expected to be unprofitable for a long time anyway. They're not going to implode after a few weeks of a slowed economy. The real effects will take months or years to see.

<comment><USER36> But they do tend to need new rounds of investment every few months...

If those dry up, the startups will too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Compared to other crashes where there seemed to be an underlying economic issue - this one feels like it will bounce back quickly at some point in my amateur opinion. Am tempted by some 2022 SPY leaps for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER38> God, as a normal consumer investor this is terrifying because I don't know what to do without contributing to the problem - if there's even anything I can do.

<comment><USER39> as a normal consumer investor your choices are a drop in the ocean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> No real solutions until credible leadership takes charge.

For example: [https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel- coronavirus-2...](https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel- coronavirus-2019/media-resources/press-briefings)

</comment><comment><USER41> My mind is blown that the fed would cut rates again before the Senate passed that bill from the House. All they did was highlight the fact that this is a huge problem and that we have absolutely no plan in place to deal with the fall out. Powell caving to Trump's tweets is embarrassing, I've lost so much respect for the Fed.

</comment><comment><USER42> Well. Now all the previous 10 years of growth through wild money printing, affirmative action, green subsidies, life-saving regulations, etc are showing their real 'worth'.

<comment><USER42> The truth is that by printing money and stealing value from someone you don't make the pie larger...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Edit: looks like I was wrong about this being the Fed's biggest tool to correct the market. See below.

The 0% interest rate cut was supposed to be the last bullet and the Fed has very likely used it up too early. I suspect there was pressure from Trump to do something right this instant, because I don't see the Fed doing this out of their own accord. Possibly election related, we'll never know.

What can they do now? Negative interest rates? Everybody will withdraw their accounts at the same time. Combining this with the zero reserve requirements that was put into force for most banks, this is a recipe for a disaster unlike any we've seen before.

<comment><USER35> > The 0% interest rate cut was supposed to be the last bullet and the Fed has > very likely used it up too early.

The Federal Reserve isn't the only lever the government can pull to modulate this.

Expect to see some fiscal policy measures implemented soon. I wouldn't be surprised if Americans start receiving checks in the mail at some point.

<comment><USER36> "Thanks for being a citizen. Have $1000."

Sounds a lot like a Universal Basic Income...

<comment><USER44> I think handing out checks during a crisis is vastly different than doing it all the time.

<comment><USER22> It is, but it still "sounds a lot like." Not exactly like, but a lot like.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gay dating app - <AUTHOR> http://boys.one <comment><USER2> Wow! Cool app! Here is another great app for males oriented toward other men [http://www.cupid.com/gay-dating.htm](http://www.cupid.com/gay-dating.htm) . A good fiend of mine met his soulmate on there.</comment>


Will capitalism survive the robot revolution? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/29/will-capitalism-survive-the-robot-revolution/ <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about this recently myself. Even as a developer, how long is it before a computer can make it's own software? I know we don't consider ourselves in the direct line of fire of automation, but I guess it depends on what sort of development you do. The article mentions accountants, and most accounting can probably be automated, but there is an element of creativity in software and accounting at the top of the field, which I don't think will be easily replaced by machine, but that is only the top 20%.

A minimum salary and everybody having access to the same services and goods free of charge seems easy on the surface, but what happens with things like real estate where we are truly limited in how many homes can fit on a specific bit of real estate. Is there no more 'upward mobility'? Will poorer people always be stuck and rich people have little risk of losing their position? Is there a way we can all truly live in a fair and equal utopia?

<comment><USER3> how does change get funded do panels of rich people decide? or do robots decide? who gets to keep the profits? what if you rent space on some ai service to come up with an idea on how to better do xyz how does it get implemented? just tell the robots go do xyz this way now? who gets to keep the profit?</comment></comment>


Amazon and Starbucks pay less tax than sausage stall, says Austria - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37259278 <comment><USER2> Hi, I am Austrian and I read the original interview in an austrian newspaper. It was very unspectacular and I am quite amused that it got international attention.

Our prime minister is wrong or at least slightly populist here. Yeah, Facebook/Google are not paying advertising duty. But no one does, at least in the internet. You only have to pay this duty if you advertise in TV, Radio, newspaper, etc. but it does NOT apply for the internet! See for yourself on the homepage of the austrian finance ministry (unfortunately in german): [https://www.bmf.gv.at/steuern/a-z/Werbeabgabe.html](https://www.bmf.gv.at/steuern/a-z/Werbeabgabe.html). The law is from 2000, so probably before advertising in the internet became big.

Even if they change this law to include the internet, the Austrian companies that want to advertise would have to pay this tax (5% btw) since Google/Facebook do not have any offices in Austria (see chapter "Abgabenschuldner" in the link above). Google/Facebook don't even need to care about this law! (apart from that extending the law could make advertising in the internet more unattractive).

Why should they even pay corporate taxes in Austria? As already said they don't have any offices here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Part of this makes an intuitive sense, a sausage stall has one _trivially_ accessible "throat to choke", whereas Austria's access to e.g. Jeff Bezos is much more difficult.

Starbucks, though, I'm assuming they've got retail shops in Austria? That just means they can afford better tax lawyers.

<comment><USER4> Being able to pay tax lawyers that are so great that you basically don't have to pay taxes kind of breaks the concept of taxation though.

<comment><USER3> Or this is a establishment politician with a weak hold on power who has not necessarily got his facts right, or if he's talking about absolute numbers vs. rates is probably lying through his teeth, but knows bashing foreign companies is a crowd pleaser.

And maybe they overtax those sausage stalls, lots of/most every? country has tax regimes with lots of insanity. Apple wouldn't be playing the games it plays with the US if we didn't have the 2nd highest or so corporate tax rate in the world (e.g. see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates) when you factor in state tax rates only Cameroon is perhaps higher).

While I was doing the search for that, I noted that as a region Europe has the lowest, but that's no doubt not accounting for VATs, which the US is allergic to, at least unless one of the big other categories of taxes is totally killed off (like, with a "this time we mean it" Constitutional amendment).

Anyway, my point is that all this results in all sorts of distortions. For example, when the Reagan individual tax rate cuts kicked in, I noticed my parent's business and investing strategies change as tax avoidance became much less important. In his working lifetime, the top rates went from 91% ("We Like Ike???") to 70% (which as I recall was split between 50% or more for "earned" and 70% or more for "unearned" (investment) income), to 38.5%, to 28%, before it started going up again (even the George W Bush tax rate cuts only dropped them 4.6% to 35%).

And going back to the distortions, the family exemptions allowed a normal family prior to JFK's 1964 supply side rate cuts to survive with the lowest bracket being 20%; those weren't adjusted for inflation until Reagan's reforms, which turned them into a pretty minor thing with how inflation savaged the dollar during that long period (the CPI peaked at like 13-14% around the time Reagan entered the Oval Office).

<comment><USER5> _> Apple wouldn't be playing the games it plays with the US if we didn't have the 2nd highest or so corporate tax rate in the world_

How low do you think that tax rate would have to be? Ireland's corporation tax rate is just 12.5%, but Apple didn't pay that either. They had a special deal under which their effective tax rate was as low as 0.005% to 1%. This is the deal that the EU has now ruled against under furious protests from Tim Cook personally and the US government.

So yes, if the US lowers its corporation tax rate to effectively 0% then Apple will stop playing games.

<comment><USER6> Apple's latest report said that they paid a little over 6% in taxes, whereas the 0.005% number came from someone looking to score political points (without any evidence); do you have a trustworthy source for either the 0.005% or 1% numbers?

<comment><USER7> It's in the EU documents.

<comment><USER6> My understanding is that EU documents estimate that number for the Irish tax take as percentage of total global revenue, it isn't their total effective tax rate (on profits as is common for corporations). The parent used a meaningless number in a misleading fashion.

<comment><USER5> I think it was completely obvious in the context that I wasn't talking about Apple's global effective tax rate but only about the taxes they pay in Ireland where all of their European sales are booked.

My understanding is that the numbers I quoted (in good faith) are derived from the profits Apple would have made in Europe had they not been allowed by the Irish government to use unrealistic transfer pricing.

[http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-2923_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-2923_en.htm)

The numbers are certainly not meaningless, but whether or not they are misleading is for a court to decide. It was certainly not my intention to mislead and I do not have all the information to come up with more reliable estimates of Apple's real profits in Europe.

Also, as someone who is liable to pay personal taxes on top of profits already taxed through corporation tax I don't feel particularly biased or inclined to score political points in favor of higher taxes.

It is simply my opinion that shifting government income from one tax to another isn't necessarily going to improve avoidance overall. It is also my opinion that taxes always have to be compared to what they buy us, in terms of actual services and also in terms of being humane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon and Starbucks spend a lot of money to hire highly competent tax attorneys and other staff to minimize their payment of taxes. Instead of complaining, countries need to pay more money to hire even brighter people to write better tax laws. Citizens of these countries need to elect officials who will do the hiring and not have obstructive laws that prohibits the payment of the large salaries and fees necessary to hire these competent people.

<comment><USER9> The tax attorney thing is a red herring. Wal-Mart averaged a 29% tax rate from 2008 to 2012--higher than your average American and much higher than companies like Apple and Google. You think Wal-Mart can't afford good tax lawyers? Or to lobby aggressively for tax breaks?

No, the problem both Wal-Mart and the local sausage cart have is they're "meat space" businesses. They can't shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions by parking key IP there. Their ability to arbitrage otherwise reasonable tax laws is limited by the physical nature of their businesses.

<comment><USER8> The countries simply need to hire higher competent people to construct their laws including addressing those newer types of firms such as Apple and Google. Since Wal-Mart and Starbucks are both "brick and mortar" it seems strange that Starbucks can have favorable taxes but not Wal-Mart.

Countries simply need to hire very competent people to construct the laws. Their problems with taxes is one of market competition for intelligent people to write the laws with Amazon and Google who hire people to "legally" skirt the laws, often acting in "grey" areas and loopholes.

<comment><USER10> Or they should, like France, enforce the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tax heavens like law breakers may have critical roles in a stable system allowing it to adapt. But one can not let them run the show as a whole.

International trade is not a new problem. Car manufacturing has been internationally for a while. Rules for transfer pricing have been established. The challenge is with this construct of intellectual property where arbitrary valuations disconnected from any underlying real trade are easier to get away with.

It used to matter less. It matters more now and tax innovations are getting more scrutinized.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why do we even tax corporations instead of just the income that its owners receive from the corporation?

<comment><USER13> Because corporations thrive purely on the society they are making money from. No company lives in a vacuum.

However great and driven Elon Musk might be, he would never have made a single cent if he had started Paypal in Somalia. And what differentiates a market in Somalia from another market like, let's say, France?

Let's take this further. Zuckerberg makes a lot of money in France solely thanks to the technological infrastructure built by the society living there. Why would the French public let Facebook exploit this environment for his personal profit, while not paying its fair share to maintain the very same socio-economic environment that allows it to make money in the first place (and that everybody else is contributing towards)? Anyone would describe this behavior as parasitism.

Let's imagine you spend ten years building a shoe factory. After ten years, a stranger comes in and starts to use your factory at night to make shoes and sell them for his profit. Are you going to let him use your factory for free?

Even if your answer to this is "Well maybe there shouldn't be any public infrastructure in the first place", it simply shifts the problem somewhere else: if a private company would be managing the infrastructure, rest assured they would also ask for usage costs...which is precisely like a tax. A feodal tax.

<comment><USER14> Is your argument that owners would just not take any money out of the company so as to not pay the taxes? In OPs example the company would still be taxed but just at different times

<comment><USER13> I don't see how. Most owners are not taxable residents of the country where companies operates. If I'm personally taxable in the Bahamas, but I make all my capital profits from a company operating in a country with no corporate taxes, that country will never ever see a single tax cent from me, despite me leveraging their infrastructure and society for profit (for virtually free). I would directly profit from their roads, their transportation, their education, their Internet, their police, their laws, their justice, while never contributing to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The smaller you are as a business, the closer you are to being an individual and less of a business. Of course, as an individual, basically any money you earn is taxed. You don't get to not pay tax on the $1,500/mo rent for your apartment where as as a business, you can deduct your offic rent.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does amazon even have a presence in austria? I thought it is handled from other countries.

<comment><USER17> Searching for Amazon Austria brings up Amazon Germany's website, that site also serves the Dutch it seems.

<comment><USER18> Correct. I'm in Amsterdam and bought from amazon.de last night. I'll usually compare with amazon.co.uk for price and occasionally pay more because the supplier won't ship internationally.

There are plenty of Dutch online retailers (e.g. bol.com and coolblue.nl) but their prices are significantly higher (even factoring the slight difference in VAT). Considering we're supposed to be in a "single market", I've never been able to figure out why that is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Something about this story seems off to me.

>Mr Kern, who heads Austria's Social Democrats and the country's coalition government, also said Facebook and Google had sales of more than 100m euros each in Austria.

I'm not an expert on Austria but this suggests to me that this person can propose and possibly pass laws in Austria. He is not just an activist who only has the power to give interviews to BBC. If he thinks that Amazon and Starbucks are not paying enough tax to Austria, why doesn't he change Austrian law to charge them more tax? Don't give me some bullshit about how corporate lawyers will find loopholes - you run the government! Do your job! Change the law! Or at least make a show of trying.

<comment><USER20> Kern only came into power in May, the social-democrats (SPÖ) have been in a "great coalition" with christian-democrats (ÖVP) since 2007. This coalition has been on rickety legs for many years now and there's not much the two parties agree on. There have been no noteworthy reforms for a decade.

There's also the threat of the populist far-right FPÖ, which has been gaining power again after two failed coalitions with the ÖVP 15 years ago (The FPÖ have been polling at ~30% for several months now, which is the largest approval of all parties).

Several members of the ÖVP-government and regional bodies are actively working against the great coalition and undermining the head of the ÖVP, sympathising with going back in a coalition with the fascists.

For all these reasons, Bundeskanzler Kern is not as powerful in legislature as would be desireable. Also I understand his remark as suggestion for a discussion and possibly a proposal for an EU-wide discussion on unifying tax laws. And he's probably fishing for votes with public statements on popular topics.

Personally I think he's the most promising Bundeskanzler we had in a long time, as he's an intellectual and is charismatic enough to potentially neutralize the threat of a far-right government.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the context, it's very useful.

From a US perspective, it's common for our top politicians, when talking about a problem, to present a specific proposal for legislation they would use to fix the problem. It makes their words more credible to me. It is easy to complain that things are bad, harder to describe in detail how things could be better. To be cynical, these plans are written by staffers and the politician may just memorize the key points. But it at least demonstrates there is some commitment to the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You need to ask EU president Junkers about that, though he has the corrupt politician's memory lapse in the face of evidence.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11902939...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11902939/EUs- Juncker-releases-secret-Luxleaks-tax-advice.html)</comment>


Show HN: CSS Scan 2.0 – Instantly check and copy the computed CSS of any element - <AUTHOR> https://getcssscan.com <comment><USER2> Nice demo in your sales page. Love it!

<comment><USER3> True, I really liked the landing page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This needs more upvotes. Demo is awesome, tool looks great.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dear Hacker News,

Creator here, happy to answer any questions :)

As a webdeveloper, I always caught myself having to open Dev Tools when curious about some box-shadow, border-radius or any other rule of an element I liked on the web.

And when you use the Dev Tools to inspect, if the element matches many CSS selectors, you might need to scroll a lot to figure out how it is styled and which rules aren't being overwritten. And if by any reason you want to copy the styles, it's a pain. Alternatively, you can use the Computed Styles tab - but then you'll get all the rules in longhand form, which is bloated and it converts all units to pixel, ignoring %, em, calc(), etc and completely breaking responsiveness.

So I built CSS Scan. With it, wherever you hover your mouse over, you instantly get the clean, computed (but responsive) CSS of that element, and you can copy all its rules with a single click.

 _CSS Scan is particularly useful for:_

      - Discovering how your favorite websites are styled;
      - Debugging your own code;
      - Moving your codebase;
      - Copying specific elements from frameworks/themes/templates to use them without importing huge CSS files.

It's a browser extension compatible with Firefox and Chrome. I'm working on the Safari add-on, which will be released in May.

 _How does it works, technically?_

This isn't as simple as doing something like `el.getComputedStyle`.

As you may already know, this one doesn't read :hover styles (while CSS Scan does) and returns a lot of rules that are only for the browser rendering purposes. Even if you filter it, you'll still get the measuring units only in pixels, whereas with CSS Scan, you get the original unit used (rem, em, % or px), because it gets the CSS through a different way. I'm going to explain it below.

CSS Scan does an XMLHttpRequest for all the stylesheets loaded and add them into an iframe (because of CORS), then check if the current element selector matches the CSS selector, one by one; then checks each selector specificity, rearrange, clean, sort alphabetically and finally caches the processed and optimized CSS with `nano-memoize` for speed.

The extension optimizes all the final CSS with the use of 3 libraries together:

      - CSSO;
      - Shrthnd (I've made some local changes on this one to add more shorthand rules support);
      - PostCSS.

By the way, if you have any ideas or suggestions to improve this flow, I'm open to hearing from you!

Since the first version, which was launched 9 months ago, I've implemented new features, bug fixes, and general improvements:

      + Code syntax highlighting
      + Show rendered font
      + Show element dimensions
      + Option to pin the box
      + Shortcuts (Lots of people asked)
      + Option to move the UI buttons to the bottom
      + Option to pause the scanner
      + Option to truncate classes names
      + Show :hover styles separated
      + Copy :hover styles merged or separated
      + Traverse the element and scan the parent
      + Identifies when elements are being overlapped
      + Now it works on iframes!
      + More shorthand rules support
      + i18n: Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Portuguese
      + Redesign UI and landing page

This is a work that has taken me almost 1 year so far, so I'm excited to share with you and genuinely interested in hearing what you think about it.

SPECIAL: I'm also giving you an exclusive HN mates 25% discount limited for the first 10 sales from here. To use it, buy it from this URL: [https://gum.co/cssscan/hn-mates](https://gum.co/cssscan/hn-mates) :)

P.S.: Please keep in mind that this extension is only for use cases when you want to have an overall vision of the styles; it's far from being a full alternative to Inspect Element.

P.S. 2: The first version took me precisely 50 hours and 17 minutes to develop. I recorded all the development and made a nice speed video! You can check it at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtsNNXpXcYs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtsNNXpXcYs)</comment>


Shredr.co - <AUTHOR> http://shredr.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys! My name is Max. I am Creative Director at Surf studio and creator of Shredr.

Today we bringing you Shredr — glitch art influenced mobile wallpapers gallery. Download exclusive wallpapers from the desktop or right from your phone and explore glitch culture through our SoundCloud, Twitter and Facebook.</comment>


MIT creates LED that cools its surrounding environment - <AUTHOR> http://www.lighting.co.uk/news/mit-creates-led-that-cools-its-surrounding-environment/8627537.article <comment><USER2> That's pretty 'cool'</comment>


Why thinking of nothing can be so tiring - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100920172736.htm

<comment><USER2> The title is misleading. It's not thinking of nothing that is tiring but getting to that state by stopping thoughts already in progress. If their models are accurate this is pretty good evidence for why meditation practitioners let thoughts pass without actively diverting or stopping them.</comment>


The innovation of color: Is the iPhone 5C a big deal? - <AUTHOR> http://virtualpants.com/post/60762919094/the-innovation-of-color

<comment><AUTHOR> People compare the colors of the 5C to the iMac or iPod mini, but the difference is that people already put colored cases on their iPhones all the time. Provides little incentive to upgrade from a current iPhone. Plus, people will just put a (different?) color case on the 5C anyway!</comment>


School district first to permit cell phone use during standardized tests - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/06/school-district-first-to-permi.html

<comment><USER2> > Source: Green Onion News Network

Combined with the fact that no state was mentioned, i think this is a work of parody.

<comment><USER3> Tim O'Reilly tweeted it as if it weren't: <https://twitter.com/#!/timoreilly/status/86171985373179905>

I was taken in at first too—which means it's well-written satire, if it's not true. But either way, the point is this: learning to look things up is not at all the same thing as learning to learn.</comment></comment>


Management starts off with accounting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@bhorowitz/how-to-ruin-your-company-with-one-bad-process-770c2ccef3c3#.f98bfzqew <comment><AUTHOR> I use this title because my wife, the (accounting) controller, would appreciate it. Without her, her company would run overbudget.</comment>


Revolutions around the World, a data visualization using Raphael - <AUTHOR> http://mkaz.com/archives/1605/revolutions-around-the-world-a-data-visualization/

<comment><AUTHOR> A timeline visualization of a history of revolutions around the world. I was playing with the Raphael JS library for graphing/mapping.

Raphael says it supports IE 6.0 and up, but the attempts I tried to confirm if this worked via a terminal server or screen test sites, it appears it does not.

Can somebody confirm if it does indeed work on IE? I only have a Mac and won't have access to a Windows machine until work tomorrow</comment>


Universal Basic Income vs. Addiction - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nataliedenning/universal-basic-income-vs-addiction-9be994f6acc5 <comment><AUTHOR> Disclosure: I'm married to the author.</comment>


Ask HN: Why did 4GL tools like FoxPro, Clipper, Clarion, DBase disappear? - open-source-ux These combined database and programming language products were described as 4th Generation Languages (4GL). They were powerful and far more accessible to beginners or casual users than stand-alone programming languages. Why did they disappear?
These 4GL products seem tailor-made for web projects that require database access. Where enormous scale isn't required (i.e. the majority of web development projects), the 4GL approach seems like a perfect fit. Instead we've settled on a mish-mash of clumsily glued-together (and needlessly complicated) solutions for web development with databases.
Why did 4GL fail to adapt to the web era? Were the tools and language too restrictive? (Hard to believe this when CRUD is the bread-and-butter of many web apps. And these 4GL tools made accessing data far more easily and seamlessly than the solutions today.)
Or was there some snobbishness amongst programmers who didn't view these products as 'real' programming languages? <comment><AUTHOR> FoxPro was acquired by Microsoft and eventually discontinued in favor of Access. How much of FoxPro's technology ended up in Access I couldn't tell you. (On my Mac, I kept running an old version of FoxPro in 'Classic' mode until that was no longer an option).

<comment><USER2> Yep, and after MS (Apple, or some other controlling vendor) pulls the rug out from under you on your development platform of choice you don't go back to proprietary DBs.

Was doing some great stuff with FoxBase/FoxPRO on the Mac. After that mess with dropping of support my next DB platform was open source (LAMP) way more flexibility and am still using it.

</comment></comment><comment> le-mark I have often wondered this myself. The 90's were all about the 4GLs taking over, and that obviously didn't happen. Here are some thoughts in no particular order.

The languages were usually some flavor of "business BASIC" which were in reality pretty bad. It was far too easy to end up with "ball of mud" apps. I worked for one company on a project over several years to replace a foxpro app with EJB 3 backed desktop app. A lot of the complexity in that project came from documenting and replacing what users were doing by _manually updating_ the tables with proper workflows (permissions to perform actions? egad!). Note this is not the fault of the 4GL in particular, but more a result of the "throw something together" ethos (so I maintain). So my take away here is: great for prototyping, not so great for long term maintenance and support.

There are still companies offering 4GL solutions in this space like [1] and [2]. I have no doubt there is some enterprise version of Microsoft Access that will expose your app to the web, with an appropriate licensing fee.

Another thought I have is all the X compiled to Javascript to run on the browser languages, like scalajs and java (GWT). GWT (in my view) was a failed experiment, I don't know of anyone using it for new development, all the apps I see are legacy. I welcome feedback on this.

Something else I think about is; in those days, although lisp and smalltalk were around, doesn't seem like they were widely used. Nowadays, there's an abundance of dynamically typed, highly productive languages with _extensive_ library ecosystems that essentially enable developers to move the language to meet (any particular) problem domain, and create solutions quickly. So the appeal of environments that bind language/database/display together isn't as novel as it once was. In other words, Ruby and Rails is your 4GL today.

> Or was there some snobbishness amongst programmers who didn't view these > products as 'real' programming languages?

Definitely some snobbishness; but also the fact that as developers, we have to chase 'the new hot' on some level to stay current, and marketable. No one wants to be stuck only knowing coldfusion, when those jobs all go away.

[1] [https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb](https://www.elevatesoft.com/products?category=ewb)

[2] [https://harbour.github.io/](https://harbour.github.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Modern rival [http://witheve.com](http://witheve.com) . Current approaches seems became much more math heavy.

<comment> a-saleh I was thinking if something like eve, would be able to carve out a similar niche. Someplace between spreadsheet (that can surpass simple desktop apps in complexity), database, data-analytics worksheet and a thrown together dashboard?

I need to get around to try eve. So far I got by using Jupyter/iPython notebooks for similar purposes, which means I don't have as much of a need.

If you tried eve already, what did you build with it?

<comment><USER4> Yes, I think Eve will stand a good chance as they integrate with the ecosystem around them, ie: using Rest and javascript, so it will have a better chance of lasting

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because 5th generation programming was better, until it too died for reasons I can't explain.

</comment><comment><USER6> These languages were supposed to eliminate programmers by having analysts do all the tech work. However, doing tech work is career suicide for any non programmer. What if a future VP was caught cleaning the toilets... The curse of frameworks is that at some point businesses outgrow them and then they hit a wall with performance, ability to add some feature, or huge licensing fees.

<comment><USER7> Didn't know that, can you elaborate on that? Anyways 2 guys directly come into my mind which where not programmers but still involved into tech work. (One guy was actually doing FoxPro stuff with his private license, and the other guy had a server with some custom PHP. The one guy was on the lowest point of the career ladder at the company and the 2nd guy got fired eventually.)

<comment><USER6> Well it is rooted in basic anti intellectual thought. How can computer nerds possibly understand business? Therefore we will create fox pro and eliminate the nerds. In reality non programmers have to do guerilla tech work in secret. Yes, it was called guerrilla tech work because IT and nerds were so hated.</comment></comment></comment>


Who wants a ticket to Strange Loop 2011 - <AUTHOR>

I have been a lurker here, but this is my first post.
I posted this on reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ju81v/who_wants_a_ticket_to_strange_loop_2011/), but it isn't getting the same traction probably since there just isn't the same 'hacker' crowd that would appreciate this...
Here is some verification, http://imgur.com/nzwuT. The correct url for Strange Loop is https://thestrangeloop.com
If you need further verification, or are skeptical. I can put Alex in contact with you or you can reach him from the strange loop website.
I really want someone to go to this because it is a great event and I am really disappointed I can't go.
Here is the text from my post.
I am unable to go to Strange Loop 2011 this year.
I contacted Alex Miller from Strange Loop about cancelation, but I feel bad abbout getting a refund from him since he would incur payment fees. Plus more importenly, I took up a spot when someone else could go (like you!).
So this is where you come in!
I want to give one of you a chance to go to the sold out conference. I went last year and it was awesome. I highly recommend it.
Also, it would be great if I could recover at least part of the $250 I spent on the ticket for early registration.
Check out the site, schedule, and speakers at https://thestrangeloop.com
Also, Tomorrow August 26th is the last day to book at the hotel at the reserved rate, so hopefully I can find someone today if anyone is interested.
Send me a PM (or leave a comment), if you are interested and if you want to give me some money for the ticket, let me know :)
~animedbz <comment><USER2> Yes I would be very interested. The sessions look great and the one on Storm looks pretty rocking. Payment wise I could not do more than twenty. I couldn't go to begin with because of the prices but if I get the ticket I am going to try on a shoe string budget. If you get a better offer than that no worries :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey, I may want it, will have to co-ordinate some things, website is <https://thestrangeloop.com/> , not strangeloop.com though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you are right. I should have copy/pasted it, I'll update this post.</comment></comment>


Building a Distributed File Sync in Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sourcerer.io/a-distributed-file-sync-in-ruby-dbcf63a7cdf8 <comment><USER2> I've been wanting a robust open source, end-to-end encrypted, Dropbox-like system for awhile.

Bonus points if it has any of the following features:

* certain nodes can store encrypted blobs without being able to decrypt them

* certain nodes can have read but not write access

* certain nodes can have access only to specific subdirectories

* you could set a policy for retaining old versions of files, to use it as a backup system

Is there anything like this out there?

I wonder if IPFS (and eventually Filecoin) would be a good foundation for such a system.

<comment><USER3> Check out [https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

Written in Go, its lightweight (runs on my beaglebone and pi's) and has been absolutely stable for me for years (100 GB, 10+ devices). It hits all the requirement except encrypted nodes.

<comment><USER4> Syncthing looks like everything I'd want. But, I cannot consider it because I wont be able to access my data from ios/iPhone. Hopefully someone builds that integration in future...

<comment><USER5> You could use a combination of syncthing and NextCloud.

NextCloud checks some of your boxes, and is a nice front-end that could run on top of a syncthing synchronized folder.

<comment><USER4> Cool idea. I will try this combination soon. For someone who has not been following the projects, NextCloud vs Owncloud? Which one should I choose now?

<comment><USER5> Definitely NextCloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The design seems nice and clean, and the primitives on the back-end are about the right level. I wrote something similar, with golang, as a replicated object-storage system. Although I didn't call it S3 I nearly did:

[https://github.com/skx/sos/](https://github.com/skx/sos/)

Obviously there is a difference between "object store" and "file store", but it isn't so bad. I have a similar replication scheme:

* Each node knows the objects it hosts.

* Each host can poll others to see what a node should have.

* Missing blobs can be synced.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting project! As a Ruby developer I love what you have accomplished with do little code</comment>


Inc: Who are the five most interesting entrepreneurs of the past 30 years?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/that-certain-something_Printer_Friendly.html

<comment><USER2> "TJ Rodgers Cypress Semiconductors

Rodgers may be the best writer among Silicon Valley CEOs. The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was when I read it."

So what was the essay? This is tantalizing . . .

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does Bono really qualify as an "Entrepreneur"? I mean, by the time he started in one/red campaign, he was already wealthy. Doesn't seem like there's much risk-taking involved on his part.

(sorry for the bad original title, btw)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was surprised not to see Richard Branson in there. To me, he and Steve Jobs are two people that, like PG said about Sam Altman, will get whatever they want. (music, retail, air travel, soda... for one; personal computer, music industry revolution, taking over a big marketshare with the first phone, Pixar... for the other)

And you can be sure that they would get to where they are again in a very short time if they were to start from zero.

Richard Branson has the added bonus that he seems like a cool person to spend some time (on one of his islands) with while Steve Jobs has a pretty bad reputation on that side.</comment>


Open Source Nano Technology - <AUTHOR> http://opensourcenano.net/ <comment><USER2> Nanotech is the future, the distant future, but a very bright and interesting time to live in.

Besides all the new nano-materials, I am interested in nano-food production. Remember the food pills? something like that. World hunger would be over.

And before someone jumps in to say it would taste like plastic food, I say, what would stop us from adding the best flavors in the world to the nano- pills?

<comment><USER2> After thought: If we can produce food in a factory from its basics atoms, like we process gasoline today in refineries, I guess all farms in the world would be useless so we could recover all that land for human living.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure there will always be people who distrust nanofood or otherwise are willing to pay a premium for organically grown food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow... this is something I would be _very_ interested in. Too bad the site has very little content.

<comment><USER5> Engines of Creation:

<http://e-drexler.com/p/06/00/EOC_Cover.html>

<comment><USER4> Right... I meant participating in open-source work on nanotech.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Normally I hate linkspam, but if you are in any way interested in this fascinating subject and you want to learn more about, you can visit <http://www.nanopartikel.info> :)

</comment><comment><USER7> there was something similar to this for synthetic biology too, though it was much further along with a complete sdk to do basic, ummm, synthesis? does anyone know what it was?

regardless, this is dope.

<comment><USER8> Possibly BioBricks and the parts registry: <http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page>

Or iGEM: <http://2010.igem.org/Main_Page>

If neither of them perhaps DIYBio could point you in the right direction: <http://diybio.org/>

<comment><USER7> wow, thanks dude, diybio looks like an awesome little community, some interesting looking projects too

<comment><USER8> At the moment the focus seems to be mainly educational and artistic. It looks like they're struggling getting more research type projects going but there is certainly a lot of potential in the community which I hope will lead to good things.

You may already be aware of it but if you're interested in biology/medicine you might want to take a look at <http://hackermed.com/> as well which kyro is trying to get going. Only just started so users and content are lacking but again hopefully good things will come from it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are some of the major problems being faced because of web scraping? - <AUTHOR>

Disclaimer: I work for an anti-scraping service company. I am not trying to advertise it, but simply understand problems that people are actually facing because of web scraping and how it is affecting them. <comment><USER2> I'm sure there are instances where scraping websites causes legitimate issues, however most of the complaining I've seen from website operators was the perceived theft of their data. (even though it was publicly available through the browser) Not so much of a bandwidth or performance issue that the scraping causes.

I'm of the opinion that web scraping has an unwarranted bad reputation. As long as I'm respecting your robots.txt and not scraping behind logins, etc... then it's no different than how Google operates.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think bandwidth costs and the possibility of accidentally DDoSing the site if the scraper gets out of control are probably big issues along with the 'theft of data' mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER4> Surely you should know the problems if you are working for an anti-scraping company.... Anyway...

Most people who own small website dont necessarily know there website is being scrapped on a daily basis (talking sole traders, tiny businesses). If they are paying for adwords or local advertising through parish or county community websites then they may think they are getting bang for the buck than they actually think. If they get 10 visitors a day and 8 of those are scrapers what does this really mean for there advertising revenue. Obviously they should be basing there return on investment against revenue but still a website is seen as a big thing for most small businesses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is very true that many fail to realize that they are getting scraped simply because there aren't many tools which show the traffic classified among humans and bots. This surely is a problem. Thanks for leaving a comment!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google penalising a site for not having original content may be one. Ofc, it uses bandwidth and costs the site you're scraping resource/money for no benefit to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interestingly I just came across this - [http://torrentfreak.com/google-asked- remove-345-million-pira...](http://torrentfreak.com/google-asked- remove-345-million-pirate-links-2014-150105/)</comment></comment>


Twitter ditches MySQL for open source database to cope with growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/internet/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=18994 <comment><USER2> This is a confusing title, they're using Cassandra, but to say mysql isn't open source is well, not true.</comment>


Can Computers Prove Theorems? - <AUTHOR> http://chalkdustmagazine.com/features/can-computers-prove-theorems/ <comment><USER2> Related (and fabulous) from not long ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200721)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20909404)

<comment><USER3> Also related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362470](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21362470)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lean is also a really, really good dependently typed functional programming language. If you're on the software developer/computer science side of the coin I highly recommend looking into it. It's not _only_ for maths research (although that is definitely a big focus of the majority of the Lean community).

I'm working on a forthcoming series of blog posts investigating FP concepts from scratch in Lean to see how it takes with the FP-curious.

The refreshing features Lean has to offer over other FP languages like Haskell is that

1\. It's dependently typed which gives it a lot more flexibility to define objects that depend on types and types that depend on values, such as vectors that know their size.

2\. Lean is _interactive_ by default -- type inference is really fast, even for complex objects and functions.

From my perspective Lean is a great programming language that happens to have a theorem prover available. This, in itself, can be a great feature for code that needs to provide strong guarantees about its operational parameters.

<comment><USER5> How does Prolog relate to more formal languages like Lean/Coq? Prolog (pretty easily) has dependent types [1] as well. Is there something in the language itself that would make it unsuitable as a theorem prover, or is there something it's missing? I'm trying to get a feel for Lean from the vantage of a bit of familiarity with Prolog.

[1]: [https://llaisdy.co.uk/2014/05/07/dependent-types-in- prolog/](https://llaisdy.co.uk/2014/05/07/dependent-types-in-prolog/)

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure I can answer that question. I don't know enough about Prolog. I can say that your example could be encoded in Lean as a type and the definition would probably be much shorter.

Does Prolog automate some of the work involved in writing a proof?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title is a bit misleading. The author doesn't really discuss whether computers can perform the act of proving. He's mostly focused on whether computer languages can represent proofs (yes) and whether computers can check them (yes).

Computer can also search for theorems and proofs to those plausible theorems. There are issues, of course. Both of these spaces are very, very large. It's not clear what makes for an "interesting" theorem to prove.

Proof through proof search is also semi-deterministic in that the search will continue until it finds an answer. If the search hasn't terminated yet, it's either because there is no proof or because it just hasn't worked hard enough... yet.

You could conceivably "race" searches between P and (not P) and hope that this would save you since now one of the two will return in finite time. Unfortunately, most of these proving languages are constructive and thus it's possible for _both_ of those to be unprovable.

It's all very cool, but we're still not getting close to having computers realistically "prove" things of interest.

Edit: Worth also noting quickly that proof search is used pretty regularly in these systems, but it's a sort of localized, partial, and interactive proof search where "tactics" for the search are human specified or search is used as an interactive tool for skipping over "boring" parts of proof construction.

<comment><USER7> > Unfortunately, most of these proving languages are constructive and thus > it's possible for both of those to be unprovable.

The fact that it is possible for a given proposition P to be neither provable nor disprovable has nothing to do constructive mathematics. This happens in classical mathematics as well – in any incomplete theory. All theories which serve as foundation of mathematics are incomplete (ref. Gödel).

It is just that a constructive mathematician can be at peace with this situation, since they does not believe P ∨ ¬P to be a tautology – while a classical mathematician will forever be tormented by the existence of theorems they cannot prove in their chosen formalism.

<comment><USER8> I was going to say "what if you look for a proof of (¬¬P)∨(¬P)" , but, to my surprise, apparently that is also not a tautology in intuitionistic logic? So, I knew that ¬¬(P ∨ ¬P) is a tautology in intuitionistic logic, but, to my surprise, (¬¬P)∨(¬P) is not.

Here is a twitter bot that evaluates whether statements are tautologies in intuitionistic logic, and it gives the answer that (¬¬P)∨(¬P) is not, and gives a "kripke counterexample" [https://twitter.com/ipc_bot/status/1189953697486229504?s=20](https://twitter.com/ipc_bot/status/1189953697486229504?s=20)

Mentioning this because I was going to respond by saying "but isn't (¬¬P)∨(¬P) still a tautology? Then, how does intuitionistic logic / constructive logic, help with avoiding the problem?", but then I checked, and was surprised, so I thought other people might have the same misconception I had, so I'm saying this.

However, if (P is provable in classical logic)∨((¬P) is provable in classical logic), doesn't it follow that either ((¬¬P) is provable in intuitionistic logic) or ((¬P) is provable in intuitionistic logic) ?

<comment><USER7> I can give you some intution as to why (¬¬P)∨(¬P) isn't provable. The essense of a proof of a disjunction A ∨ B is to either have a proof of A or a proof of B – as well as a label telling if we proved the left or the right hand side. So, to have a proof for every P that (¬¬P)∨(¬P) means that for every P you can either cough up a proof that ¬¬P or a proof of ¬P. This is impossible.

Your final paragraph mixes object level and meta-level in a way I am not quite able to decipher. But there are results in a similar vein, but restricted to particular theories:

The Gödel—Gentzen translation[0] translates formulas of Peano artithmetic into formuals in Heyting arithmetic in a way which preserves provability. But there are quite limited which theories this works for. For instance, such a translation does not exist in set theory between, say, ZFC and CZF. So there is in general no way for a constructivist to give meaning a classical proof.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%E2%80%93Gentzen_neg...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%E2%80%93Gentzen_negative_translation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, it's already possible[1] with Coq. There are two strategies for that - lowering the CIC (Calculus of Inductive Constructions) to SMT[2] and employ SMT solvers like Z3, and employing Deep Learning[3][4]. For the Lean part, compared to Coq - there is an interesting discussion[5] why Lean might be not as good as they claim.

[1] [https://coq.discourse.group/t/machine-learning-and- hammers-f...](https://coq.discourse.group/t/machine-learning-and-hammers-for- coq/303)

[2] [https://github.com/lukaszcz/coqhammer](https://github.com/lukaszcz/coqhammer)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.07794](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.07794)

[4] [https://github.com/UCSD-PL/proverbot9001](https://github.com/UCSD- PL/proverbot9001)

[5] [https://github.com/coq/coq/issues/10871](https://github.com/coq/coq/issues/10871)

</comment><comment><USER10> " _This is the last Lean proof which I will give here. The reason is that for proofs any more complex than this, it gets hard to follow them on paper. The way to understand these proofs best is to look at them in Lean itself. If a proof were running in Lean on a computer then you could click anywhere on the proof and see Lean's state (what it knows and what it is trying to prove)._ "

Yeah, there's the problem: Proof-assistant produced proofs are difficult to read _as proofs_. The alternatives are to execute them, as you would execute a program in a debugger to understand it (um, ick), or to "pretend to be the computer" and execute them manually.

The interesting part is that _exactly that problem_ is faced with software, which developed ways of writing programs that are easier to understand, including using formal methods.

<comment><USER11> I'd be very curious to know, empirically, whether people who aren't trained in computer science, software engineering, _or_ pure mathematics consider reading a proof or reading a program to be easier and more understandable.

<comment><USER12> I would guess that they bad enough at both that the difference doesn't really matter. I would be interested in what someone at the highest levels of all three fields thought, but I'm not sure these people exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We have a bunch of theorem provers - Lean, Coq, Agda, Isabelle

If you prove something in Lean, can you automatically convert the proof into a Coq one (even if it looks like uglyfied/minified code)?

It feels like it should be possible to "merge" the proof repositories of these languages together into a common one.

Or to put another way, if you can prove in Coq that Lean is correct, then it should imply that Lean proofs are correct too.

<comment><USER8> I asked a similar question in the comments on a youtube video, and Mario Carneiro, one of the people who work on Lean, answered me.

He said he does work on this area, and it kind of works (at least for the theorems you would want to translate?), but in addition to the proofs being very not nice to read, the way the statements of the theorems are translated are, by default, also rather not nice (being statements about specific formulations of the objects (such as the set of integers) as they are expressed/defined in the language being translated from, instead of referring to the corresponding objects that have been defined in the language being translated to. However, he says that it doesn't take all that much work to manually massage it until the statement of the theorem is expressed in the way that you want it to be.

I'm on my phone right now, and the phone youtube app doesn't give me a permalink, but I'll try and edit this comment soon on laptop to include link to the comment section.

Edit : here are links to what Mario Carneiro said in the thread click the read all replies to read the full thread)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp- mQ3HxgDE&lc=UgwpFSmapLZ5S...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp- mQ3HxgDE&lc=UgwpFSmapLZ5S8caeH54AaABAg.9-lfXqsNEk29-wEI6kwEni)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp- mQ3HxgDE&lc=UgwpFSmapLZ5S...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp- mQ3HxgDE&lc=UgwpFSmapLZ5S8caeH54AaABAg.9-lfXqsNEk29-wJfoexc7_)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lean has been going hard at PR at the moment.

I would really like to dip my toe into the theorem proving waters from a scientific/mathematical perspective.

I'm not sure whether to start with Coq, Agda, Isabelle or Lean. Does anyone on HN have a feeling as to a sensible one to start with?

<comment><USER6> Coq is definitely the best documented. Unfortunately, the tendency to use the tactics language—while incredibly practically useful—obscures how the structure of proofs relate to their theorems.

This isn't really a problem per se, but instead an invitation to look into, say, Agda to see that side of things, too.

<comment><USER15> Agda just uses proof terms directly - you could do that in Coq and Lean as well. It's a bit of a bummer though that neither Coq nor Lean have a currently-maintained declarative mode ala Mizar/Isar. The former C-zar included in older Coq versions (aka Mathematical Proof Mode) was especially nifty, albeit not totally free from bugs.

(One other approach is to generate a "declarative", human-readable version of the proof directly from the proof term. Very old versions of Coq (6.x series) and IIRC even Agda (1.x) could essentially do this. Declarative proof mode integrates better with complex tactics however - proof terms can sometimes get a bit weird.)

<comment><USER6> I agree that you can—I've done that in Coq, though I don't have any experience with Lean.

The advantage of Agda is that everyone else does, too. This provides two things: one, there's a huge set of examples of how people have constructed their proof terms which encode best practices and are themselves designed to be as readable as possible, and two, people also build tooling which helps you to make them.

In Coq, since tactics are primary, you end up with things like Sledgehammer. This is super practical and useful for tactics management, but it's a whole culture that will take you further and further away from understanding how proof terms work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Computers can directly prove some theorems today, and in other cases there are various interactive provers that let humans and computers work together to find formal proofs. In some systems using computers can give _much_ better confidence that the proof is correct, because computers are very good at carefully checking every step; nitpicking is their forte and they don't get tired.

Freek Wiedijk maintains a list of 100 challenges for math formalization and the status of various systems here:

[http://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/100/](http://www.cs.ru.nl/~freek/100/) \- Formalizing 100 Theorems

Lean hasn't accomplished as many as some others, but it's certainly a contender!

</comment><comment><USER17> Jean-Yves Girard says that true theorems have corollaries.

Computers can prove all sorts of _propositions_ , but the gooey philosophical question is -- which propositions are Theorems in the grand civilizational project of mathematics?

<comment><USER7> Yes, the job of a mathematician is not to prove theorems. But rather to find the interesting or beautiful ones.

<comment><USER18> However currently the most difficult and time consuming part of the job is proving those interesting theorems.

<comment><USER19> I'm genuinely curious, why do you believe this? From experience? From hearing mathematicians say so?

I'm currently working on my first formal math paper, and I've been spending a lot of time figuring out how to best present the information so that it is comprehendible and easy to read. Things like structure of the paper, wording, notation, and more.

There's probably a lot of time to spend convincing others that your theorem is interesting, too. Some of the most respected works in mathematics after all are thoughtful compilations of previously proven results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "However, if computers do get better than humans at proving theorems, I might be out of a job anyway."

Not until computers are coming up with useful axiom-sets and effective tactics, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER21> If this is interesting to you, I recommend "The Book of Why" by Judea Pearl.

</comment><comment><USER22> There exists the software Coq which is a theorem prover. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coq)

<comment><USER23> Correction: it is a proof assistant, not a theorem prover. Z3 (also from De Moura) is a theorem prover.

EDIT: Main difference between the two is that with a proof assistant, you write a proof and the assistant checks its correctness, while a prover provides you with a proof of a proposition's correctness (or of its lack thereof).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This article is about lean and I really like and want to like lean. But... At the moment it bothers me that the authors still consider it an experimental engine. In this case it means development stopped on version 3 when they started version 4. No bugfixes, no enhancements are accepted into version 3.

When/if they make the mental switch from experimental to a supported product, I'll definitely use it and maybe even contribute to their proof library (if there are low hanging fruits left).

</comment><comment><USER25> > Occasionally we mathematicians find that we need a new tactic—for example > proving that (a+b)^3=a^3+3a^2b+3ab^2+b^3 just from the axioms of a ring is > surprisingly difficult!

Perhaps because what you need there is not just a ring, but a commutative ring :P

Jokes aside, that was an excellent article and introduction to interactive theorem proving. I'm looking forward to seeing what Lean 4 brings to the table when it's released.

</comment><comment><USER26> For (some) much simpler first-order logic systems, the answer is certainly true. Tarski's axioms imply that there exists an algorithm that, for every proposition in (a restricted) Euclidean geometry, can be shown either true or false.

</comment><comment><USER27> You can axiomatize anything. The axioms are chosen because they reflect reality. The axiom reflects the blocks, not the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER28> Computers can prove any theorem which can be proven by a computer.

</comment><comment><USER29> ctrl+F

Gödel

ctrl+w

<comment><USER30> If the headline question were something more like "can computers prove _all_ theorems reliably?" this response would be more understandable. But a fairer interpretation would be "do automated theorem proving techniques stand a chance of making novel contributions to the mathematical literature?", to which I think it's pretty unfairly dismissive to rule out the possibility at this point. Considering it's still pretty early days for automated theorem proving, there's already some promising progress: an automated prover resolved the Robbins conjecture.

If you think Gödel's incompleteness theorems are hard evidence that computers can _never_ consistently perform on the same level as humans at theorem proving, take it from someone who understands Gödel's results well: you're mistaken.

\---

I think one sense in which the headline seems a little misleading, though, is that on a skim it looks like it's more about formalizing mathematical knowledge so that computers can _verify_ theorems proven largely by people, than it is about computers themselves proving the theorems. (Which is also a fine topic, I'm not complaining.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Can computers solve the halting problem? If not, then they cannot find their own Godel sentence, and thus are limited in their ability to prove things.

<comment><USER8> Is the problem with finding the Gödel sentence, or with proving it?

I believe the issue is the proving it.

For a sentence to be a Gödel sentence of something, that something, I think, should be a formal system, a set of inference rules and axioms. While there may generally not be much issue in talking about "the Gödel sentence of [a process/thing that uses such a system]" to refer to the Gödel sentence of the system that the thing uses, in this case, I think there is no issue. Finding the Gödel sentence of a system is, iirc, a fairly straightforward computational process, given a good description of the system.

So, it should be no difficulty to have a program that takes its definition of a system, and checks proofs in that system / looks for proofs in that system, and also computes the Gödel sentence of that system.

Furthermore, I think (but am slightly less sure, though still fairly sure) that consistent and sound systems can prove things like "if the system [description of self goes here] can prove [Gödel sentence of the system], then it is not consistent." .

Furthermore, I see nothing establishing that humans can do any better than computers in this regard.

Be careful when using the Gödel incompleteness theorems as justifications of positions! They are often misinterpreted.

<comment><USER31> Humans perhaps cannot goedelize themselves, or perhaps it's not possible to formalize the mind. However, in either case, it also intuitively seems that humans can goedelize any finite, formal system. Thus, the human mind is not reducible to a finite, formal system.

<comment><USER8> A human only can fit only finitely much information in their memory. There are formal systems that no human could fit a description of into their mind.

Also, the way humans reason seems more like something paraconsistent than something truly self-consistent. A person can be convinced of something by some argument, and then convinced the other way.

It is true that the human mind is not an example of [thing which the incompleteness theorems show cannot exist], but this is not surprising.

<comment><USER31> We can augment our memory with physical storage. We might not analyze within the lifetime or capacity of the universe (or multiverse), but that's a practical limitation, not a theoretical one.

Humans are irrational and all, but we make surprisingly consistent formal systems. I don't think an inconsistent system could do this, so this suggests the human mind is something beyond finite formal systems.

For example, we could model this ability as access to an infinite table of all possible Turing machines and their halting status, perhaps with some noise added to represent our irrationality. We would still have something beyond the limitations of goedel's theorem, as well as computation and randomness, which would account for our intuition in the matter.

So there is no good reason to dismiss the idea there is something special about the human mind not captured by formal systems.

<comment><USER8> I do agree that there is something special about the human mind not captured by formal systems (in the "set of axioms or axiom schemas + inference rules" sense). (not so much for empirical external evidence reasons, so much as for like, what I want to call "teleological reasons"? Like, my goals and values are more coherent/less nonsensical assuming that there is something special, so it makes sense (as far as my goals are concerned) for me to assume that there is something special.)

However, I'm not so sure that this something special includes anything Gödel related.

As to whether an "inconsistent system" could "make" consistent formal systems, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. A formal system (in the sense of set of axioms + inference rules) is not an agent, so I'm not sure what you mean about it "making" things. We talk about a formal system prov"ing" something, but perhaps a more clear way of saying what we mean by that, is that the system admits a proof of the thing, or that there is a proof of the thing, for/within that system.

If by a system "making" a system, we just mean that it "proves" (as in, "admits a proof") that some other system is consistent, then I see no reason that a paraconsistent system couldn't show that some other system is consistent.

Have you seen the "Logical Induction" paper by MIRI ?

If a system is inconsistent, then there is a proof that it is inconsistent. Logical induction assigns "probabilities" to different mathematical statements, and it can be shown that these probabilities converge in reasonable ways. If there is a proof of a statement in the system that the logical induction thing is working under, then the "probability" of that statement will converge to 1. Also, this statements that logical induction applies probabilities to include statements about itself.

I think that, if some particular system is self consistent, then, well, for one thing, the probability for the statement "that system is inconsistent" will not go to 1, and furthermore, that there are statements of "the probability for 'that system is inconsistent' will be below c at step t" (for t much larger than the current time step) which will (I think) go to 1.

In that sense, I think logical induction could probably do a good job at concluding that some systems are probably self consistent.

Now, I'm not totally sure of that. I don't 100% understand the logical induction results. But, yeah. Seems relevant to me.

<comment><USER31> Not looking for agreement. I think there is an empirical, mathematical case to be made for this 'specialness' of the mind that is beyond what computation and randomness can give us.

Another way to state this is in terms of the halting problem. Halting oracles are possible and detectable. Halting oracles can authenticate the Gödel sentences for all finite, consistent formal systems.

Looking at the logical induction page, I'm not sure it offers anything beyond Solomonoff. If they have a computable method, then it will be deficient compared to Solomonoff induction. Leonid Levin published something called randomness conservation in 1984, which implies computers cannot learn math, or any other consistent logic, beyond what they are initially fed with. So, given an initial set of consistent axioms, a computer cannot come up with anything new and consistent.

Anyways, bottom line of what I'm saying is halting oracles are possible and empirically detectable. We should entertain the possibility that the human mind is a halting oracle, and set about researching that idea. We are making no progress with our assumption the mind is computational.

<comment><USER8> Solomonoff induction can make eventually good predictions about any computable environment, but: While Solomonoff induction is limit computable, it isn't computable, while logical induction is.

Logical induction can reach conclusions about what a system using a computable approximation to solomonoff induction would conclude. Actually, it can also assign probabilities to what full solomonoff induction would conclude.

Solomonoff induction cannot accurately model a world which contains agents who use solomonoff induction. Logical induction plays nicely with self reference.

Importantly, with some naive ways of attempting to do probabilistic induction on mathematical statements, if you give the system different facts in an adversarial order, you can cause it to alternate between being highly convinced that something is true, and that it is false. Logical induction solves this problem.

I don't think solomonoff induction can be straightforwardly applied to this task. Solomonoff induction predicts what inputs it will receive, but this isn't, I think, immediately well suited for assigning credence to mathematical statements.

I'm not sure how a halting oracle could be empirically detected? Well, I guess if one believed that "this is like a halting oracle except only for the first 3^^3 Turing machines" and the like we're substantially less likely than "this is a halting oracle in general", which I guess seems reasonable.

Ok, I guess I can see that, sorta.

Not sure what practical tests you have in mind though.

<comment><USER31> Everything is a bitstring, and Solomonoff is optimal for predicting bitstrings. Probabilistic induction, if it is computable, cannot do better than that.

Halting oracles require fewer program bits to generate longer bitstrings, so they make compressible bitstrings more likely than Turing machines. Applying bayesian reasoning, the existence of compressible bitstrings implies the existence of halting oracles. Or, even simpler, given the fact Turing machines might not halt, but halting oracles can always halt, the mere existence of bitstrings implies the existence of halting oracles.

<comment><USER8> Solomonoff induction is optimal for, given an initial portion of a computable bitstring, predicting the rest of (or the next portion of) the bitstring.

Logical induction (my apologies for referring to "probabilistic induction"; I was speaking unclearly when I did so. What I meant to communicate by that phrase was "if you attempt to do Bayesian updating on math statements in a naive 'just apply Bayes' rule' way", as an example of something that doesn't work) on the other hand, will assign probabilities to different statements, which it updates over time, and these different probabilities aren't for mutually exclusive events, unlike with solomonoff induction.

Now, I don't mean that if you had an oracle for solomonoff induction, that you couldn't make a program using that oracle to produce something much more powerful than logical induction.

And I'm also certainly not saying that the algorithm found for logical induction is the fastest one for the problem it solves. If it was (at least, if it was for small amounts of time? Perhaps it could be asymptotically optimal for large amounts of time), I think it would be strong evidence that the human mind is special with respect to estimating the plausibility of mathematical statements! (The algorithm is very slow).

But, I do think that it is quite probably better at that task than straightforward applications of computable approximations of solomonoff induction. (Like computable approximations to solomonoff induction, logical induction also goes through an enumeration of all possible programs and eventually tries each one of them.)

By the way, this thread is getting to the point where I have to click your specific reply in order to get to the reply link; do you want to move this to email or discord or something? Totally fine if you want to keep it here of course, just wanted to offer the option.

Also, I need to read up on the thing you mentioned on randomness conservation. Sounds interesting. Sorry for not having gotten to that yet.

I'm confused by what you mean by "implies the existence of halting oracles". Do you just mean as abstract objects? (in which case, yes, I completely agree that halting oracles exist as abstract objects. There is a fact of the matter as to whether any particular Turing machine halts, and so there is a function from Turing machines to whether the input Turing machine halts on an empty tape. Similarly for halting oracles for Turing machines which themselves have a lower halting oracle.) Or do you mean that they exist or might exist as physically implemented (err, not sure "physically" is exactly the word I mean. Like, if human souls are the only things in/"in" the universe that can solve the halting problem, I don't think I'd call that "physically implemented", but I don't mean to exclude this option) things?

I'm currently skeptical of the latter, but that is approximately the question we are discussing, so maybe I'm wrong.

Are you saying that, you think it plausible that humans can (in a sense) compress strings in ways that Turing machines cannot, (or that a Turing machine with access to a human / to humans, can compress strings better than a Turing machine can alone), and that, if true, that would be evidence for humans containing/having-access-to halting oracles?

If that is what you mean (and my apologies if I've misunderstood you), I do agree that this would be evidence for that, yes (though I'm, of course, less convinced that access to humans as an oracle would allow a TM to compress strings better.).

[fifth letter of toboggan]mail btw: Madaco dot madaco

Edit: have started to read the Leonid Levin paper "randomness conservation inequalities" now. Quite interesting so far.

<comment><USER31> Yes I'll continue over email. Good discussion! You are surprisingly open minded on the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Only if contexts are defined and logically comparable. Otherwise it will just risk or tilt on question like any other human, until the risk taken take down the problem to increase the definitions. The right question would be: can computers define concepts(names for numbers) by itself? Would you trust while it makes you happy or will you investigate by yourself the magic?</comment>


Linux Terminal Goods II - <AUTHOR> http://diego-pacheco.blogspot.com/2019/09/linux-terminal-goods-ii.html <comment><USER2> > Yes! We need emojis on the terminal, why not.

Great reasoning. There may be a reason why emojis in the terminal are mostly used by the nodejs community.</comment>