New OS X uses Windows file sharing by default - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/new-os-x-uses-windows-file-sharing-by-default/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content) <comment><USER5> SMB has an extension mechanism and SMB 1 has support for Unix extensions for over 15 years - I was the author of the original Unix extensions spec. You can get full Unix semantics using them (links etc).

The predominant form of extension is an "info level". Somewhat analogous to a data structure like that returned from stat, the numeric info level controls what structure is returned (or supplied). Microsoft had a tendency to add new info levels that correspond to whatever the in-kernel data structures were in a particular release rather than longer term good design.

The general chattiness comes from their terrible clients like Windows Explorer (akin to Finder for Mac folk). I once did a test opening a zip file using using Explorer. If you hand crafted the requests it would have 5 of them - open the file, get the size, read the zip directory from the end of the file, close it. Windows XP sent 1,500 requests and waited synchronously for each one to finish. Windows Vista sent 3,000 but the majority were asynchronous so the total elapsed time was similar.

I worked on WAN accelerators for a while where you can cache, read ahead and write behind, in order to provide LAN performance despite going over WAN links. In one example a 75kb Word memo was opened over a simulated link between Indonesia and California. It took over two minutes - <USER2> instantaneous with a WAN accelerator. The I/O block size with SMB is 64kb so they could have got the entire file in two reads, but didn't.

If anyone is curious about what it was like writing a SMB server in the second half of the nineties I wrote about it at [http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html](http://www.rogerbinns.com/visionfs.html)

<comment><USER6> Do you know the cause of the 3k requests which Vista made? Do you have a sane theory why these were occurring? Also, do you have any suggestions for better clients to use?

<comment><USER5> > Do you know the cause of the 3k requests which Vista made? Do you have a > sane theory why these were occurring?

Backwards compatibility and layers of indirection.

Microsoft has always made great efforts for backwards compatibility - <USER3> Chen's blog is a good source of stories. Quite simply if you upgraded Windows and apps stopped working then you'd blame Windows. Of course it is almost always the apps relying on undocumented behaviour, ignoring documentation, relying on implementation artifacts etc. This means a lot of code to detect and work around problems in other components. For a networked filesystem client the simplest way is sending lots of requests and picking results of interest based on what comes back. Networked filesystem servers also work around client problems in various ways - eg they may return smaller block sizes than the client requested because it is known to have occasional problems. All of this builds up layers and layers of workarounds, workarounds to workarounds, having to test against OS/2 etc. SMB2 was an attempt to wipe the slate clean (no more OS/2!) but of course the crud starts building up again.

Explorer isn't a program that displays files and directories despite appearances. There are layers and layers of abstractions, parts provided by COM etc. The code that knows it wants to display the listing of a zip file is many layers away from the code that generates network requests. It is always easier to write code that does more than strictly needed than the absolute minimum necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Time Machine, only works over a LAN with destinations that support AFP. This > is at least in part because of Time Machine's reliance on Unix hard links, > and also in part because it has to be able to ensure that any OS X files > with HFS+ specific metadata are correctly preserved.

This is not the reason. Time Machine does support hard links, legacy Mac metadata, and other Unix features. It does this by writing all the data into large blobs (a sparse bundle) with an embedded filesystem of its choosing (i.e. HFS+). It can use any destination filesystem for the blobs, including FAT.

<comment><USER8> In particular, Time Machine makes large use of hard links to _directories_ , which not many filesystems support. With HFS+ Apple can be sure that support is always there.

<comment><USER9> Actually I think you'll find it makes use of hard links to files. Its basically a reimplementation of rdiff-backup, or it might be the other way round. I can assure you that no directories get hard linked, and I'm sure someone will furnish the obligatory xkcd.

Edit -- I stand corrected! It does in fact link folders as well. Also: [http://xkcd.com/981/](http://xkcd.com/981/)

<comment><USER10> It hard-links directories, which is non-standard but supported by HFS+. It's kind of crazy to do in general, but in this specific use case it's a great idea.

<comment><USER9> Agreed - having read up a bit on how it works I have to say that its a pretty neat trick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Finally. Someone at Apple must be a Bukowski fan. I'm reminded of his poem "16 Bit Intel 8088 Chip" (not his greatest, but suitable):

[http://bukowskiforum.com/threads/16-bit- intel-8088-chip.2791...](http://bukowskiforum.com/threads/16-bit- intel-8088-chip.2791/)

<comment><USER12> I had never heard of that poem before, I think it's awesome :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Back in the early nineties I worked at Miramar Systems on an AFP server and actually a full AppleTalk stack that ran on Windows 3.11 (VxDs!) and OS/2\. Macs could run full AFP and whatever the printer protocol was called to a network of PCs.

IBM sold a version of our stuff that was called LanServer for Macintosh so back then Macs and AFP were covered!

It was quite a popular product at the time. Although I never enjoyed working on Macs I thought that AFP was pretty cool. We all had "Inside AppleTalk" pretty much memorised - what a great book.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would have preferred NFSv4 over SMB2. They are quite similar technically, but the former has less chance of veering off into supporting strange Windowsims which will be hard to translate to a POSIX client. That said, SMB2 is widely deployed and Microsoft is innovating in SMB faster than NFS is improving.

Fortunately OS X does not use Samba as their SMB2 client.

<comment><USER15> Most users are going to have a Mac and a Windows machine, SMB makes far more sense. You're going to see NFS in enterprise situations and Apple does not really aim there target there.

<comment><USER16> Not only that but nfsv4 has its own issues in regards to userid/gid mapping.

Setting that up with kerberos is... not fun (speaking from the solaris/linux/aix side of things).

Not that smb would be better for most unixes mind you, just that nfsv4 is its own version of hell in some ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great. I can finally interoperate with linux and windows.

Every time I connect with AFP, my CPU would spike to 100% under Ubuntu.

<comment><USER18> This isn't new functionality, it's just that SMB2 is now the default.

<comment><USER17> I heard it was kind of buggy in 10.8.x.

<comment><USER9> Buggy is not nearly strong enough - supporting lots of mixed environments has given me ragequit levels of stress, precisely because Apple dropped samba and decided to write their own.

<comment><USER19> Why are people doing so much peer level file sharing anyway? Performance? Security? In a company it would be a lot better to have centralized servers with high availability, probably with some kind of web-based CMS to store files, something like Confluence or Sharepoint.

<comment><USER20> > Why are people doing so much peer level file sharing anyway? Performance? > Security? In a company it would be a lot better to have centralized servers > with high availability, probably with some kind of web-based CMS to store > files, something like Confluence or Sharepoint.

You have to assume that the majority of Apple's users are home/edu/SMB users, who don't have centralised infrastructure.

They just want to share files between each other, or from a small NAS. Those who have Macs in an enterprise environment likely have a working solution via other methods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can someone chime in, with the pros and cons of each network filesystem. And which is a good fit for Linux - or rather for those OSs that don't need to cooperate with Windows? Was NFS ever updated - or replaced? How much of SMB is now open after court rulings? And is their one that is technically better than another?

<comment><USER22> Use ReiserFS

<comment><USER21> Is ReiserFS a network file system?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> OS X's interchangeability with PCs is actually more badly broken than this. This is mind boggling because if Apple can get this one thing right more people would be willing to buy Mac Mini and put on their home networks. I recently tried to use external device full of NTFS formatted hard drives on Mac Mini. First thing I discovered was that OS X can't natively write to NTFS formatted drives. Even after you discover and purchase 3rd party apps that enables writing to NTFS formatted volumes, OS X can't share them via SMB. This is because Apple's own SMB implementation that they tried to replace is broken. So you have to disable that and install open source SMB anyway. There are quite a bit of hoops to accomplish this.

So there is no built-in way to share your external drives connected to Mac Mini on network if they are NTFS formatted.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm hoping this results in vastly improved SMB support, which I am in full agreement with other commenters, has been infuriating since Apple decided to roll their own. I frequently hop to my Windows machine to manage my Windows Home Server even though I'm just doing simple SMB communication and file cleanups that should work fine in OS X, but don't.

</comment><comment><USER25> Related: I take it there is no maintained open source SMB server that isn't GPL3 these days? Sucks since apple abandoned samba2. How stupid would it be to use apple's old samba2 for an appliance? (guess: very?)

<comment><USER26> Can you not just install modern samba yourself?

<comment><USER27> I'd guess polshaw wants to sell/distribute an appliance containing proprietary software (hence the reluctance to use a GPLv3 licensed component), not just install it on his own device.

<comment><USER28> No, polshaw sounds like he has religious reasons against GPLv3 (as do Apple :-).

There are many people shipping Samba on an appliance containing proprietary software, there is no problem doing that with GPLv3 code.

<comment><USER25> Hi there, hopefully you will still see this..

No religious objection. The problem for me with GPLv3 is that it is not compatible with (privately) signed code. If it is possible to run unsigned code on my appliance then my proprietary code would not be secure, putting the entire business in jeopardy. If you can square this circle then I'd love to use it.

I'd be interested to see a list of shipping appliances (meaning not open hardware platforms) with GPLv3 if you know of any.

<comment><USER26> >No religious objection. The problem for me with GPLv3 is that it is not compatible with (privately) signed code. If it is possible to run unsigned code on my appliance then my proprietary code would not be secure, putting the entire business in jeopardy. If you can square this circle then I'd love to use it.

Your code is still under the full protection of the law. And no signing mechanism will prevent a competitor from simply dumping the flash and reading your code off there, if they really want to - if anything this is probably easier than running their own code on the system. So I don't see what using the GPLv3 changes.

If you're really paranoid, how about running samba in a chroot/jail/etc. where it has access to the data files it needs to serve/store, but not your code? (Your code can operate on the same data from outside the chroot). As long as you make it possible for the user to upgrade samba (which should be fine - <USER4> don't care what code runs inside this chroot, because it only has access to the same files the user could access via samba anyway, so the samba that runs in the chroot doesn't have to be signed) you're compliant with the GPL but haven't exposed the rest of your system.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the follow up! +1

>law

If it is a straight rip-off then the law should protect (at least in the west), but if it were just _used_ (for learning or adapting from) then it could be exceedingly hard to prove or even know about. I suppose what I would be most worried about is if it were leaked such that anyone could use it on any platform without paying. Who would buy an apple TV if you could run it off your raspberry pi? (I know the analogy doesn't quite work-- aTV is decent value as hardware-- but as a start up I will have higher costs so higher prices).

>flash dump

This is why you encrypt the private data on your flash :) Decryption codes can be stored in the processor (it's been a while since I looked at the system- I'll have to look again, but it seemed solid). So that means they'd have to either de-solder the RAM while somehow keeping it freezing cold too, or use an electron microscope or something on the CPU. If they are that capable then I'm sure they could just rewrite the code themselves without my 'help'. I'm not sure how much security compilation would offer, and if the details of that matter, that's something I should look into further. But the above seems pretty solid AFAICT.

>samba in a chroot/jail/etc

Thanks! This is a great idea. IIRC it is possible to break out of a chroot, but (IIRC again) not BSD jails.. so that could be a great option down the line if I am able to use BSD. It adds a fair amount of complexity legally (although it seems sound at first thought) and technically though (can they be hacked?), so perhaps one for later.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Supply and Demand Does a Poor Job of Explaining Depressed Wages - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-05/supply-and-demand-does-a-poor-job-of-explaining-depressed-wages <comment><USER2> _> Supply-and-demand theory once made sense. That was before employers gained so much power._

Except power itself is determined by supply and demand. Employers have gained more power precisely _because_ of the increased labor supply (more women, more robots, more foreign workers) that is also responsible for stagnant wages.

The power, of course, comes from the need for others to have association with that person/business. In the current market, if one employee doesn't like the terms and conditions of the job, there are many others who will be quite happy to take their spot. This gives the employer leverage as employees want to be employed.

However, if there were actually more employers than employees, then the reverse would be true. Employees would be free to treat employers however they wanted, and force them to pay more money, without repercussion since if the employer walks away, there would be many more willing to take the worker. This gives the leverage to the employees as employers want employees.

<comment><USER3> My summary of the article would be:

If supply and demand were working, a minimum wage increase would cause a loss of jobs. We studies minimum wage increases and jobs were not loss. The conclusion was therefore that Supply and demand were broken.

Then then want on to say how they found a link between having a small number of employers in a field and lower wages.

<comment><USER2> _> The conclusion was therefore that Supply and demand were broken._

Which seems like a rather bizarre conclusion. Minimum wage is a form of supply management. You do not have to lose any jobs, but you have eliminated the competition, at least on factors of price, as it is illegal for someone else to do the job for less. With a smaller labor supply, effectively speaking, price is able to rise.

<comment><USER4> That's a rather bizarre interpretation of supply and demand. A minimum wage would not decrease labor supply. No one is going to say "I was willing to work for $6/hour but not for $7/hour". If anything you would expect more people to be willing to work at $7/hour than at $6/hour.

You would expect it to decrease labor _demand_ because people who would be willing to pay $6/hour for a certain job might not be willing to pay $7/hour. Lower demand for labor should lead to fewer jobs, if it doesn't that indicates that there are more factors at play than a monotonic supply and demand curve.

<comment><USER2> _> No one is going to say "I was willing to work for $6/hour but not for $7/hour"._

I am not sure this is a correct interpretation of what supply actually means. For all intents and purposes, supply is the people willing to do job _for less_. If minimum wage is $7/hour, there is nobody going to say "I will do it for $6". If you, a business owner, want to pay less than $7/hour in this scenario, what supply do you think you are turning to? _There isn 't any!_ You have already hit equilibrium (where supply meets demand) at the level of minimum wage.

Someone who wants $12/hr. for a minimum wage job is not supply in that market. Supply isn't all people who are willing to work just as demand isn't all people who want something. If you have $100 in your pocket and say you want to buy a new Ferrari with it does not mean you demand a Ferrari. Demand requires that you be willing and able to offer a price that actually gets what you want.

 _> You would expect it to decrease labor demand because people who would be willing to pay $6/hour for a certain job might not be willing to pay $7/hour._

That can be true, but minimum wage work is often providing an inelastic service. People aren't going to stop eating because minimum wage for agricultural workers went up. They'll just accept the higher price. What choice do they really have? Eating is somewhat essential.

It is true that the definition of demand says that all else equal, a higher price results in less demand, but in the real world not else is equal when the price rises due to minimum wage increases. A higher price does not always mean less demand.

<comment><USER4> > It is true that the definition of demand says that all else equal, a higher > price results in less demand, but in the real world not else is equal when > the price rises due to minimum wage increases. A higher price does not > always mean less demand.

That is exactly the point I was trying to make and I think the article was trying to do the same. Unless you make the assumption that demand for labor is perfectly inelastic or is one of the very rare goods, like Veblen goods, that have a positive price elasticity of demand, raising the minimum wage would be expected to decrease the amount of labor demanded. If it doesn't, then one of those assumptions must be incorrect. Either labor has perfect or positive elasticity of demand (unlikely because very few things do, even things that most people would describe as absolute necessities) or there are more factors at play than just the law of demand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Supply and demand does a great job of explaining depressed wages. We had two kinds supply shocks in the recent history in the labor market. One is women entering the workforce and the second is mass immigration.

Both coincided at the end of the 60s and 70s. Exactly since then wages are not correlated to productivity anymore and are basically stagnating.

<comment><USER6> You blame women and immigrants, but a much more likely explanation is the decline of union participation in the private American workforce. They've been on the decline since the 1970s, and the more they've declined, the more that productivity has been captured by upper management and shareholders.

<comment><USER2> That is still explained by supply and demand though. A union works by artificially constraining the labor pool, reducing the employer to buying from (typically) one seller (the union) instead of many (each employee individually). Unionized workers are usually able to make more money than they would in a non-unionized market because of that smaller supply of sellers relative to the demand.

However, as a Canadian who saw peak unionization in the mid-80s, long after wages also started stagnating in our country, and a country that still has relatively strong unionization even today (especially compared to the significant decline seen in the USA), I'm not sure that this explanation holds.

<comment><USER7> _A union works by artificially constraining the labor pool, reducing the employer to buying from (typically) one seller (the union) instead of many (each employee individually)._

Closed-shop unions, you say? Do they still exist? I work in the UK, and I've worked in many workplaces where there were active unions, and the very idea that you'd have to be a member of the union to work there was laughable and, if I recall correctly, illegal.

In my experience, a union does _not_ work by artificially constraining the labor pool. In every job I've ever had in which I could have joined a union, I only had the opportunity to join the union _after_ I was employed. Before I was employed, I didn't even know there was a union there.

<comment><USER2> Closed-shop unions are typical where I live. My mistake on them being typical across the world.

However, even in an open shop, the collective bargaining is still limiting the employer to a single vendor with respect to those it wants to hire that are engaged with the union. The only other supply is those who want to bargain on their own, and even then you're probably not going to find too many who are willing to severely undercut the union, unless the union is on the brink of collapse anyway.

The supply is still constrained. Although perhaps not to level it is in a closed shop.

<comment><USER7> _However, even in an open shop, the collective bargaining is still limiting the employer to a single vendor with respect to those it wants to hire that are engaged with the union._

Even that is another interesting thing; the idea that one of my employers, past and present, might actively seek out union members to employ, is so strange to me (and completely unworkable; I think it might even be illegal). The supply was in no way affected by the union.

In jobs I've had in the past, any benefits or agreement the union negotiates applied to all employees, regardless of union membership status, and were placed into contracts without any reference to unions at all. Collective bargaining by the union for improved conditions and pay existed; every employee benefited, union and non-union alike.

I suppose the moral of this is just that unions work very differently where you live to where I live.

<comment><USER2> _> In jobs I've had in the past, any benefits or agreement the union negotiates applied to all employees_

Exactly. This means there is effectively _one_ seller. A greater supply would mean that there are people lining up to do the job for less.

Supply doesn't mean all people who want to work. means those who are willing to compete. Someone who wants way more conditions than even the union was able to negotiate at this place of business is not supply.

<comment><USER7> I think I'm happy with this. Sounds a lot better than the race to the bottom I see in some countries.

I think also we see a lot less union activity than you do. I couldn't tell you who was in the union. The most prominent thing they do is put up some posters reminding people of employment law. I never saw them make wage negotiations and to a large extent, that's not what they do. So far as I could tell, they principally exist to provide another channel for enforcing employment law and ensuring safety standards in the workplace were being met, and in the even of unfair treatment provide an employee with support and legal representation. Maybe if they were heavily into negotiating wages and so on, it would be different (I think in some industries maybe they still do that), but I've never seen them do that in any company for which I've worked. Seems that unions do very different things in our respective countries; I expect them to protect me from illegal activity on the part of the powerful, rather than win anything for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It should be pointed out that studies of small increases of minimum wage that show modest harm do not immediately tell us that huge increases of minimum wage will not cause greater harm. Remember that $15/hour is more than the _median_ wage in much of the country.

<comment><USER9> These jobs that are worth less than $15 per hour are going to be the first to be replaced by machines so whatever happens we need a solution to give people at the bottom high(er) quality lives.

<comment><USER10> > we need a solution to give people at the bottom high(er) quality lives.

Training and safety nets, funded through tax revenues.

Keep in mind, the national minimum wage in Australia is currently $18.29. The entire US has been getting a discount on minimum wage labor for decades, and everyone is kicking and screaming now that those workers are having their wages ratcheted up to what they should be making when accounting for inflation [1] [2].

[1] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/04/5-facts- abou...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/04/5-facts-about-the- minimum-wage/)

[2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/21/adjusted-for-inflation- the-f...](https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/21/adjusted-for-inflation-the-federal- minimum-wage-is-worth-less-than-50-years-ago.html)

<comment><USER11> Not to discredit anything you've said, as on the whole I agree with you. But movie tickets are nearly twice as expensive in Australia. [0] [1]

And a popular videogame can be wildly more expensive. MLB The Show 2018 for instance is $60 in the US and $100 in AU. These prices are outside that which is explained by the current exchange rate.

Yes, you are being paid more. The price of living is also drastically higher there. I think there are better case-studies than Australia.

[0] [https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact- finders/cinema/indus...](https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact- finders/cinema/industry-trends/box-office/ticket-prices)

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/187091/average-ticket- pr...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187091/average-ticket-price-at- north-american-movie-theaters-since-2001/)

<comment><USER10> It should be noted that Australia has a healthcare system substantially more equitable than the US, making the price of discretionary goods and services less of an issue. Real estate, education, and healthcare inflation is a thing (despite the price of TVs and tech coming down year after year) in the US (although I am aware of the steep cost of real estate in AU and NZ due to foreign buyers).

"Australia has a one of the strongest economies in the developed world. It survived the recent recession unscathed and hasn't had a real recession in 20 years. And as Australian academics have noted, "Australia and New Zealand, with among the highest minimum wages in the world, have both low levels of unemployment and significantly lower levels of low paid employees.

 _Bankruptcies due to medical costs, which accounted for 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies before the Affordable Care Act, are completely unknown there._ "

[https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/laura- chapin/2014/12/09...](https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/laura- chapin/2014/12/09/australia-bests-america-when-it-comes-to-minimum-wage-and- paid-leave)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> More minimum wage studies are certainly welcome, but the fact that supply and demand models are remarkably poor matches for the labor market is certainly not new. Anyone with more familiarity with Labor Economics than your typical news show talking head should be aware of this.

</comment><comment><USER13> One thing worth noting is that one of the clearest paths to earning higher wages and being more successful in a career lies in networking and learning how to leverage that network. In theory, the dominant tool for this should be LinkedIn.

But LinkedIn decided early on that serving professionals was less lucrative than serving companies. So the vast majority of products and capabilities that LinkedIn has shipped over the years has been to serve the needs and interests of companies. Sometimes at the expense of professionals (InMail spam).

There really isn't a tool out there that workers can use that addresses the power and knowledge asymmetries that exist today.

<comment><USER14> I feel comfortable saying, without evidence, that LinkedIn is unlikely to be useful for workers living at the border of the minimum wage, or in general workers who would be likely to be affected directly by a change in the minimum wage.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you about the current iteration of LinkedIn. But that doesn't mean a different kind of product, focused on professional development, career management and networking couldn't be useful for folks.

I imagine that many people simply leverage Facebook, Twitter and other social networks for this today, in the absence of something for purpose-built.

<comment><USER15> This probably won't be a popular viewpoint, but I personally prefer the decentralized messy version of networking we mostly experience today vs. one big monolith that facilitates all relationships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The world is not driven by economics (and its simplistic assumptions), it's driven by power relations and human nature.

Supply and demand is not the only thing to influence the job market -- power and knowledge asymmetries can do the same thing just as well.

<comment><USER14> I think this is getting into map vs. territory issues. This is certainly the domain of economics -- the particular simplifying model used by many economists does not appear to paint a complete picture.

By analogy, adapting a James Morrow quote: "Economics does have all the answers. The problem is that we don't have all the economics".

Power and knowledge asymmetries are well within the domain that economics tries to encompass.

<comment><USER17> Great use of map vs territory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am reminded of this tweet from one of the Federal Bank guys [1]

> We were at maximum employment. We are now at maximumer employment.

> I thought the "tongue-in-cheekiness" of my tweet would be obvious. Allow me > to translate: We keep saying we are at max employment and then all these > people choose to work. It suggests we weren't really at max employment.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/neelkashkari/status/972142317162369024](https://twitter.com/neelkashkari/status/972142317162369024)

And more recent [2]

> 1\. Yes it matters 2. Even more important is that we should now recognize > our gauge of labor market slack is broken

>> What metric would you suggest instead?

> A combination of factors: prime age LFP and EPOP. Most importantly: when > assessing supply and demand in a market, start by looking at the price. Wage > growth has been surprisingly slow. Suggests more slack.

[2]: [https://twitter.com/neelkashkari/status/978041558342791176](https://twitter.com/neelkashkari/status/978041558342791176)

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it possible that low skill jobs are simply less valuable to the economy than before?

<comment><USER20> It is possible that low skill jobs are simply less valued to the economy. Because life must be made hard for those down, so it can be made easy for... urm... those who already have enough.

Point in case shows once more that that isn't even true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Traditional supply and demand economics implies open and equal information for buyer (employer) and seller (employee). For goods and services, there is transparency in the price of a product. In the labor relationship, the buyer (employer) holds almost all of the information that impacts price (wages).

\- Employers know how many candidates they have for a position.

\- Employers know what they have paid for that position in the past.

\- Employers can often afford to wait longer to decide.

It should also be noted that the US taxes wages at a higher rate than investment or dividend earnings. This may distort the market as certain income streams are incentivized over others.

</comment><comment><USER22> There was this study that actually studied a minimum wage increase in Seattle that did not paint such a easy picture of wage hikes.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-finds- seattle...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/uw-study-finds-seattles- minimum-wage-is-costing-jobs/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Of course. The fact that wages are suppressed is known and expected. The author fails to mention the theory of sticky wages. Why? The author is making a political statement about wage policy. In doing so lets you assume that wages should be related to supply and demand, but they are not. Wage levels are sticky and lag behind changes in the supply and demand for labor. Good news is that you can expect wages to increase in the relatively short-run, from which it seems the author (and most everyone) would benefit.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage- theory.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/sticky-wage-theory.asp)

</comment><comment><USER24> This doesn't seem like a very good analysis.

For one, it makes sweeping generalisations about the economy. It is not true that employers always have market power and employees don't. There are lots of areas where it's inverted. The most obvious example right now is AI researchers but software in general is and has been for a long time an employees market. By the same logic that this author uses to justify minimum wages because it's hard for employees to find new jobs in some sectors, you could justify maximum wages because it's hard for employers to find new employees in some sectors. But nobody would support that - it'd be absurd.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is an interesting topic, but it is sad to see how people react to it.

A lot of comments here saying the whole system is broken.

An average poor man in the US probably lives better than kings lived in the past.

Food, water, food, hospitals, AC, heaters and such. These evil employers/entrepreneurs are the one creating it.

Life by every metric is getting better, can it be better? Maybe.

Now we could discuss how to improve the system, and its flaws, but this level of cynicism is hard to handle.

I guess by coming from a really poor reality it skews my view of the world.

<comment><USER26> > An average poor man in the US probably lives better than kings lived in the > past.

IMO very far from truth.

An average poor man today _has more valuable stuff_ than a king in the past, but this doesn't translate into _living better_ because having a smartphone wont save me from the stress of disliking my boss, having cheap access to varied foods doesn't necessarily mean I have more significant relationships, the fact hospitals exist doesn't mean I can afford getting sick any more than a king, and nothing really changes the fact that I'm still poor relative to the people of today, which matters.

That being said, if we compare poverty today to poverty in the past, things are perhaps better now, sure.

<comment><USER25> > things are perhaps better now, sure

I really think you are forcing here, I said:

> probably lives better than kings

And I do conceded that I have not studied kings lives to know, so I am guessing, but the poor of the past for sure lived way worse then the current poor. No question. The world is a much better place to live, MUCH.

Now we can argue if should be better, based on distribution (rich are richer, than poor should also be richer) or inflation.

But people used to have dozens of kids and only a couple would live, that alone is enough to justify.

My grandparents had 7 kids in the middle of nowhere and none died.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Discussing wages with supply & demand and not taking into account the worldwide labor supply. At some point, it is more profitable for companies to move overseas.

</comment><comment><USER28> > find that in areas where there are fewer employers in an industry, workers > in that industry earn lower wages.

> [...]

> Together with the evidence on minimum wage, this new evidence suggests that > the competitive supply-and-demand model of labor markets is fundamentally > broken.

How does that contradict supply and demand? Less employers = less supply of jobs = oversupply of workers = downward pressure on salaries.

</comment><comment><USER29> One thing I've learned is that the right wing will always tons more money and resources than the left in the US. This is an example of how effective the right wing message machine can be, having been a loud opponent of minimum wage increases for what are increasingly bogus reasons.

</comment><comment><USER30> I miss the times when I thought Supply and Demand could explain wages. In a fully globalized economy I expect it would be more useful to do comparative GDP studies to understand the use of labor capital and its ability to fund production.

<comment><USER31> Exactly, supply and demand is pretty easy for people to grep (including myself) when explained in a simple cartoon or econ 1010 class. It's current application in a globalized market is anything but transparent, which makes it even harder to properly identify manipulative forces in the market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> That's because depressed wages are caused by the drive for ever increasing profits.

<comment><USER33> Yes but the workers have a drive for increasing profits too, and there are more of them. So that's not really a good explanation.

<comment><USER10> Workers have less power to increase wages than corporations have to increase revenue and profits.

This has occurred, arguably, because of right to work laws and the reduction in organized labor (which previously negotiated wages with more power).

<comment><USER34> Is that true? A corporation that relies on 50,000+ employees to deliver a service or product, and those employees collectively stop working?

<comment><USER10> I don't entirely grok your question, but it sometimes does take walkouts to exert force to obtain wage concessions (teacher strikes, pilot strikes, etc).

Teachers striking in several states are exerting enough force to obtain meaningful wage increases.

[http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/the-teachers- st...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/the-teachers-strikes-have- exposed-the-gops-achilles-heel.html)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-teachers-strikes-are- becomi...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-teachers-strikes-are-becoming-a- nationwide-movement-1522584001)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Introducing any very significant productivity increasing tools seems to result in depressed wages. It happened when we moved to factory production, resulting in entire families working 16 hour days 6 days a week to barely earn a subsistence living. And it's happening with computers.

When your employees produce 8% more each year, it's easy to justify giving them 5% raises. What happens when your employees produce 80% more every year? You can't stomach the idea of giving them raises commensurate with that, so you just tell yourself 'its the machine doing the real work, they don't deserve anything' and raises stop.

</comment><comment><USER36> I do not think that any theory that does not include the distorting effects of central banks and governmental regulation will provide the answers they are looking for...

</comment><comment><USER37> Greed explains it well.

</comment><comment><USER38> tl;dr Depressed wages are better explained by employers' ever more powerful bargaining position

<comment><USER39> ....which is dictated my the supply of employers

thanks for the tldr.

<comment><USER40> Except it isn't, it because of the way labor and employers have different costs when an employee leaves, meaning each side has a different equation for how important it is to not sever the employment arrangement.

If an employee loses their job, they lose 100% of their income, and for many they are unable to survive this. If an employer loses an employee, they only lose 1/n of their production, where n is the number of employees they have. They can handle that reduction while they look for a new employee way more than the employee can.

That is what prevents the market from being efficient.

<comment><USER41> > That is what prevents the market from being efficient

The problem is, nobody really wants labor markets to be efficient. Efficient labor markets mean that we would pay workers the subsistence wages, because, why they should be paid more?

That's the thing, labor is not like other commodities, say apples or computers. You want to make the price of other commodities to be as low as possible, and everybody (all humans in society) wins. But for price of labor this is not true.

<comment><USER40> That isn't true; an efficient market doesn't imply that we will pay workers subsistence wages. Market rate has nothing to do with what a person needs to survive.

The rate would be set based on competition with other employers for employees; you pay enough to keep a worker from getting a job at another employer.

So the answer to the question, "why would you pay more?" is, "so they don't start working for someone else instead"

Now, the market system doesn't work for employment because of the reason I stated in my original comment, but it isn't related to the 'minimum wages needed to survive'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Supply and demand does a poor job at explaining anything. The price changed.. why? Was it because it moved toward an equilibrium, from the equilibrium, has the demand curve shifted, has the supply curve shifted?

The problems of general equilibrium approach are quite succinctly described in Keen: Debunking Economics. And compared to approach in Blatt: Dynamic Economic Systems, it's a disaster - too many parameters and assumptions for too little explaining power. It was a pretty decent way to describe the world when Walras came up with it; but it should have been obsoleted years ago.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find top private companies with liquidity events in horizon? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You mean "will need funding soon" or "are going broke"?

Where you are will make all the difference too because different countries mandate different public data for companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> More like - will get a seven figure payday if you join now and they go public.</comment></comment>


The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/06/the-ultra-wealthy-who-argue-that-they-should-be-paying-higher-taxes <comment><USER2> Lucky for them they can!: [https://www.pay.gov/public/form/preview/pdf/23779454](https://www.pay.gov/public/form/preview/pdf/23779454)

<comment><USER3> Being willing to raise taxes on yourself, and unilaterally volunteering extra taxes are very different things.

You probably know this, as do most people making this argument.

<comment><USER4> Why are they two different things?

If you believe that instead of giving to charity or something that the best use of your money is taxes, why would it matter if there was an official change to the tax code or not?

Leadership would be paying extra taxes regardless of whether or not the taxes are raised across the board.

It feels kind of slimy to me to say "oh yes we should all pay extra taxes but I won't do so unless the government officially raises my tax rate" \- uh so you mean you don't believe in paying more taxes unless the government forces you to? Like the rest of us?

It is definitely more along the lines of moral posturing to me. At least I know where someone stands when they don't want taxes to be raised.

<comment><USER5> Everyone's needs to be raised at the same time or it's useless. It's like in a race imagine the fastest route tramples a bunch of flowers. If the individual agrees to go around them they'll lose. There's nothing wrong with proposing something that as a group one should do that as an individual makes no sense

<comment><USER4> But they do it individually once it's implemented. If they pay (just making this up) 10% in taxes why not advocate for higher taxes and then just go ahead and pay extra and do what you believe in while also advocating for higher taxes?

It's like if I buy a big SUV and say that I think we should all drive EVs but I'm not going to do it until someone makes me, but I really believe it!

Uh. Ok. Sell the SUV and buy the EV?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While in other news: "'The rich should pay more' — Bill Gates calls for higher taxes on the wealthy in New Year's Eve blog post"

[https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill- gates-c...](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/bill-gates-calls- tax-hike-wealthy-new-years-eve-blog-2020-1-1028791394)

<comment><USER7> As long as it gets used the way they want it used.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting snippets:

> In the U.S., executive compensation has increased, on average, by nine > hundred and forty per cent since 1978, according to one estimate; during the > same period, worker pay has risen twelve per cent. Income inequality hasn't > been this extreme since the nineteen-twenties.

(...)

> It might seem disingenuous for people to try to change the rules after they > have already amassed fortunes via the old, "rigged" system; some might also > see their efforts as a way to generate flattering publicity or to alleviate > feelings of guilt. But the group's members say that they are concerned about > the future of the nation. Some of them feel that severe inequality fuels > corruption and has led to the election of Trump and other right-wing leaders > across the world. Many of them believe that inaction on inequality could > lead to the kinds of violent street protests recently seen in countries like > Chile.

(...)

> the entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, one of the first investors in Amazon, gave a > TED talk called "Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, the Pitchforks Are Coming." > After describing his multiple homes, his yacht, and his private plane, > Hanauer argued that the U.S. was at risk of becoming a neo-feudalist rentier > society similar to France before the Revolution. In an essay in Politico, he > wrote, "Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. > One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the > streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there's no > time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to > New Zealand."

<comment><USER8> > get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand.

Just for those reading along, he wasn't making a rhetorical statement.

Many rich US citizens have acquired citizenship in NZ as their Plan B so they can bug out. It's a nice, stable remote location that probably isn't targeted by any weapons.

<comment><USER9> NZ has very high inequality already and has been on the same course as the rest of the English speaking world. If there is real unrest in the US it is going to spread to other western countries. Why they think NZ'ers wouldn't come for them in their Queenstown compounds in that case is naive and beats me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to pay extra taxes, just do it and stop complaining about how others are living their life.

</comment><comment><USER11> what is better for equality? ultra wealthy charity or relaxing copyright laws?

</comment><comment><USER12> What, precisely, is stopping them from voluntarily paying more? Why the compulsion to use the system to force others to do as they believe they should do, yet (as far as I can tell) do not actually do?

<comment><USER13> If only one rich person does it, over time they'll be poorer than other rich people who don't do it.

It's no different than saying "Why do we need environmental laws? What, precisely, is stopping companies from not dumping industrial waste into the water?" Even if one party plays nice, they'll be outcompeted by all the others that do not.

<comment><USER14> Well, if you believe that companies shouldn't dump industrial waste into the water, and you have a company, the correct thing to do is 1) _don 't dump industrial waste into the water_, and 2) lobby for laws that prohibit dumping industrial waste into the water, and 3) work with industry groups (forming one if you have to) to try to create voluntary association of companies who don't dump industrial waste into the water even if it is legal to do so.

Same thing here. You might become less well off than some other rich person? So? Do what you think is the right thing anyway. Or do you care more about your ranking on the Forbes list than you do about what you think is right? If you care more about Forbes, why should the rest of us care about what you claim is right?

You aren't stuck with a change in tax law or nothing. Do it voluntarily, yourself, if you think it's a big deal. Encourage others to do it voluntarily also. _And_ lobby for the law change.

But if all you're going to do is lobby for the law change, well... not everyone will think that you are serious.

<comment><USER13> Except that if 2 and 3 don't work, you've fallen behind your competitors. And have even less money and influence to continue pursuing 2 and 3. So no, I don't think you're right.

You can't fix a tragedy of the commons with individual action.

<comment><USER14> What you say is true. And yet, what kind of a human being uses "tragedy of the commons" as an excuse why he _has_ to dump pollution into the water?

Back to the actual topic at hand. We're actually talking about wealthy individuals, not about companies. If Bill Gates, say, falls another 10% off of the leader on the Forbes wealthiest list, how much power and influence has he really lost? _Not enough to use that as an excuse for inaction_ , that how much.

<comment><USER13> Bill Gates is already giving most of his wealth to charity, so how much would he pay in taxes anyway, after all the deductions? And why would he pay additional taxes on top of that, when there are billionaires who haven't even done as much he already has?

<comment><USER14> I'm not in Bill Gates' bracket, but I believe that there are limits to how much you can deduct - the alternative minimum tax, if nothing else.

Why would he pay additional taxes on top of that? _If_ he were one of the ones advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy (he's not, so far as I can tell from the article), then he should so that his actions match his words. Otherwise, why should anybody listen to his words?

I'm not criticizing Bill Gates. He has done an admirable job of putting his money where _his_ mouth is. (So, in retrospect, me choosing him as an example in the post that is grandparent to this was an error.)

<comment><USER13> > Otherwise, why should anybody listen to his words?

Because he's already giving his money away. I thought that was obvious.

Regardless of how much wealth one has, it's perfectly natural to want a sense of fairness. Warm fuzzies from doing the right thing only go so far.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are also calling for higher taxes and have also taken the Giving Pledge. I don't know how much of an overlap there is between the group in this article and signers of the pledge, but I'd bet it's significant.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


My Heroes - <AUTHOR> http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/My+Heroes

<comment><USER2> I can't help but feel overtones of contempt when reading this.

"They typically don't get statues and for the most part are vastly overshadowed by those that profited from their work more than they ever did."

I read that as: Steve Jobs stole Steve Wozniak's thunder. That is to say "Wozniak was overshadowed by Jobs", or "Jobs profited off the back of Wozniak's work". As if what Steve Jobs did wasn't worthy of adoration.

There's this sort-of battle that is constantly waged between those who create (programmers, engineers, etc), and those who hustle (entrepreneurs, non-tech founders, bizdev, salesmen etc). Both creators and hustlers feel under- appreciated and under-recognized for their respective talents. It's a vicious cycle. I really question why it has to be this way.

I'm a bit of a cross-over, so I relate to both camps. The conflict is frustrating to me, because the validity of either side's argument is supported only when one attempts to marginalize the other. There's _no good reason_ that these two types of people shouldn't be 100% complimentary.

I'm definitely more in the hustler camp than I am the creator camp. I can throw down some code (poorly), and I do all the sysadmin work for our start-up (and a fair job, I might add), but I'm far more of a hustler. I like people; a lot. I'm a connector. I fit the "makes friends easily" mold, and I leverage it to good effect.

But here, I think, is the key to my modest success. I have a tremendous amount of respect for creator talent. I think the fact that I've actually _tried_ the creator's craft has a lot to do with it. I can read most high-level languages (Ruby, Python, PHP, Javascript), and having written some libraries of my own, I can look at something and know that it is elegant; or that it isn't. When I find someone with talent, I let them know that I recognize it, and not by patronizing them. I let them know by listening when they talk, and recognizing that when it comes to engineering, I can ask questions, but I should respect their views and give them the ultimate say in technical matters.

From a hustler perspective, I can tell you that I rarely get the reciprocal effort from creators. I know that's painting with a broad brush, but that's my experience. As frequently as hustlers marginalize creators, creators rarely recognize that hustlers are the ones with the most customer facing contact. I agree that the customer doesn't always ask the right questions, but I can't tell you how many times I've sat down with a creator and been stone-walled on requests that seem perfectly legitimate to me and the customer, but creators find deplorable. I end up selling to creators as much as I do to customers. That can be really frustrating to feel like someone doesn't have your back.

A large part of the respect I have for Steve Jobs stems from two things:

* He was able to motivate creators in a way that few people could

* He was able to get the world to pay attention to creators' achievements

Steve Jobs could not have become what he was without Steve Wozniak, but the converse is also true. Steve Wozniak may have never created a "personal computer" if Jobs hadn't asked him to. The world may not have paid attention if he had created it without Steve Jobs to hustle the idea. We can't know.

Neither of these two men deserve to be marginalized. The same is true of every talented creator and hustler out there. They're all deserving of the hero title.

<comment><USER3> If you aren't able to do the work yourself, then you'll never gain the respect of your coworkers/employees.

Bill Gates was a pretty good software developer. And you're not Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER2> I may not gain your respect, but how can you speak for my coworkers and employees?

Also, how is the fact that I'm not Steve Jobs relevant? Do you feel that I need to be taken down a notch? It's ok if you do. I'm asking because your reply is terse, so I'm not sure how to take it.

<comment><USER3> I'm not trying to diminish you or your argument, which was in fact quite a good read.

You said that it is very annoying having to sell ideas to both customers and your creators. Well, that's a given because creators are quite stubborn people. But creators listen to other capable creators, for which they have enough respect to just trust without much questioning.

You will always struggle to get creators to do what you want, unless you are a creator yourself that can get shit done. For software engineering, it does not matter that you're brilliant in so many other ways if you are not capable of doing the job yourself (and you mentioned that you can code a little, but I don't think that's enough).

Look for example at Linus Tolvards (since he was on the author's list). He said so himself that he doesn't do much coding these days and his main talent is to get other people to work for him. But he can start stuff like nobody else, his knowledge is unparalleled and when he talks people listen.

About Steve Jobs, it is relevant because he's kind of a role model. But Steve Jobs is also a product of the right circumstances. You cannot be like Steve Jobs without having Wozniak as your best friend (this works both ways, Wozniak also benefited greatly from his friendship with Steve Jobs).

<comment><USER2> Thanks for expanding on your comments. I suspect you're right. I work with a lot of other people in the hustler camp, none of which can write any code at all, and I find it much, much easier to get things done (with my team). When you can sit down with a creator and talk their language -- and understand their challenges -- it's a lot easier to relate to them. As a hustler, you have to know when to advocate for your creator. Nothing brings a creator in to the fold better than having their back in a client/project group meeting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _"Behind each of these names lies a story worth telling, and ... there are 100's more like it that you'd have never heard of_ "

So true. We all stand on the shoulders of giants but it's not often that we look down to see who they really are (probably different for each of us).

<comment><USER4> My absolute hero is Richard Feynman. Required reading:

\- "Surely You're Joking"

\- "What Do You Care What Other People Think"

\- <http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm> "Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle" (Challenger disaster report)

\- Also, consider torrenting videos of his "Messenger Lectures". The youtube snippets do not nearly do them justice. They're some of the most intellectually interesting things you'll ever watch:

Richard_Feynman_Messenger_Lectures_at_Cornell_- _The.Character.of.Physical.Law_-_Part_1_The_Law_of_Gravitation

Part_2_The_Relation_of_Mathematics_to_Physics

Part_3_The_Great_Conservation_Principles

Part_4_Symmetry_in_Physical_Law

Part_5_The_Distinction_of_Past_and_Future

Part_6_Probability_and_Uncertainty

Part_7_Seeking_New_Laws

<comment><USER5> There's also a small series of Feynman that has been put on Youtube called "fun to imagine." They are short and most of them are very good:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pYRn5j7oI>

<comment><USER6> There's also a lovely three part series: Part 1: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRmbwczTC6E>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice list, Jacques. My list of heroes is shorter and even more obscure:

Samuel Weissman & Louis Marcus

My grandfathers

There were two of the smartest people I ever met, but neither ever went to school a single day of his life. Both worked very hard and succeeded at everything they tried. I imagine that if they had been born 80 years later, we may admiring their Silicon Valley achievements right now.

Both came to the U.S. very young and alone, surely knowing that they would never see their birthplace or most of their friends and relatives ever again. They did it to build a better life for themselves and their families.

And they did it all for me, long before I even existed.

That's why I have to succeed; I could never let them down.

<comment><USER8> I don't want to overstate this, and it's been brought up before, but I find it interesting to consider the matter of heroes we don't personally know versus those we do.

I don't know whether this has changed, over recent decades. But it seems that we have so much "media attention", these days, that many things we at least ascribe as being very significant to us are actually at great remove from our personal lives.

I don't mean this by way of judgment, but by way of reflection. And introspection: Who has really influenced me, and am I acknowledging -- to myself, or to them -- their roles in my life? Am I using such understanding to make my own decisions and in my own actions?

Taking this a bit further -- perhaps too far and potentially getting a bit judgmental: Am I trying to be on the billboard, or the organization that decides whether the billboard is a good idea for the neighborhood?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Jacques points out : "My heroes are not 'sexy', they don't wear hip gear or use cool gadgets...", but, Woz owns every apple product ever made... He was also in the line for iPhone 4S. An exception.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for that, J. The cargo cult and cult of personality junk sometimes gets under my skin. You're going to catch some heat for fighting it, but it's always the good fight. Rock on!

</comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting that antirez mentioned in a blog post that Steve Jobs was not his hero, because he values different types of contributions and accomplishments. His post got flagged and removed from HN, whereas this one seems to be fine. I guess it a matter of saying the same basic thing in different ways and with different context.

</comment><comment><USER12> At least post-MS Gates does deserve some esteem imo. He's putting his billions to work into bettering the world in ways that are registering before our very eyes, after all.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3128320>

It seems to me that he's made a careful calculation about how he can make the biggest difference in the world, and has set about doing it.

</comment><comment><USER13> salman khan? along with those names?

<comment><USER14> I'm sure Salman Khan would agree with you.

Now let's give it 50 years and we'll see how 'Global Free Education on any subject that matters' sounds.

<comment><USER13> You may be right - although I find myself inadequate to predict 6 months hence not to talk of 50 years. It just seemed the easiest 'odd man out' scenario so I commented.

<comment><USER14> The interesting bit is that in 50 years or so people will likely go "Salman Who?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice list, but it is only me that see a problem with the fact that only 2/3 names here are not from English-speaking world?

<comment><USER16> No. This isn't meant to be a your list or everyone's list, its Jacques' list. I'm going to assume his list is going to include people he's familiar with and those likely skew English speaking. Mine would too because that's what I know.

<comment><USER17> I don't know Jacques, but based on his name I'd guess that he's not even from the English-speaking world anyway.

It's no secret, though, that English speakers have had an influence on history far out of proportion to their numbers. The world didn't have to work out that way, it's just that it did.

<comment><USER15> You seem to confound History and the history of web startups in the last 20 years.

I fear HN id slowly becoming us-centric, it's sad. Now I feel like a stranger, more and more.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Fastest search engine on dotnet core - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kreeben/resin <comment><USER2> Can we use it on bubblehunt.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure I don't see why not. This is meant to be a Lucene replacement. What are you using currently on bubblehunt?

<comment><USER2> Now we using Elastic and Postgres. And in the future we plan to use Big tables.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bigtable sounds like a massive undertaking. What is it that will eventually make you upgrade your data architecture? Is it the amount of data that is the main issue or is it something else?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


FAA Grounds 'Uber for Planes' - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/faa-grounds-uber-for-planes <comment><USER2> This was completely expected: while Uber and Lyft can mostly carry out arbitrage against the patchwork of local regulations on taxi services across the country, air travel is federal and there are no conflicting local rules to take advantage of at different times, just the FAA saying "yes" or "no" nationwide.

And it also shouldn't be controversial: everybody knows Uber and Lyft are taxi services, despite their occasional "we're not a taxi, honest" dodges, and doing the same with aircraft... makes you an airline, and trying to go back and pull a "we're not an airline, honest" is not going to fly.

<comment><USER3> I don't care whether or not it's classified as an airline, but if I want to catch a flight with a private pilot and compensate him, fully understanding the risks and rewards of general aviation vs commercial aviation, where's the problem exactly?

<comment><USER4> Private pilots by regulation cannot be compensated. Only commercial pilots can be; and even in that case the buyer must separately acquire the pilot for hire, and plane for hire. If the buyer goes to a single source for pilot and plane for hire, that is an air carrier, i.e. commercial aviation.

<comment><USER5> That's not correct. See 14 CFR 61.113 (c) A private pilot may not pay less than the pro rata share of the operating expenses of a flight with passengers, provided the expenses involve only fuel, oil, airport expenditures, or rental fees.

edit: the exceptions of the CFR are (b) through (h) but (c) is the most typical

<comment><USER6> Tried to edit my other comment but accidentally deleted it.

So I just skimmed over the ruling here:

[https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/77E3D4B7...](https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/77E3D4B73DFDB22685257F1F005456E8/$file/14-1168-1589331.pdf)

and you're right (if you're getting at what I think you're getting at).

The argument is that expense sharing is compensation, but it is allowed under the FARs in specific circumstance. Difference here being that the combination of holding out on a public website and receiving compensation via expense sharing put it in common carrier land.

Which does seem to make sense under current rules.

<comment><USER5> Np. And right. I hated to be pedantic but outright dismissing the fact that there are exceptions to the compensation rule is wrong.

edit: wording

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't this technically continue to run "under the radar"? (pun intended)

If this is already legal as they mentioned, but not as a "platform", you could just work on better facilitating the communication and let payments and logistics happen offline (or in private like email)

<comment><USER8> Heck, use a cryptocurrency for extra plausible deniability on payments.

<comment><USER9> The issue here is that pilots are not going to risk the licenses they've spent potentially over 100k on to make money this way.

<comment><USER7> I think the FAA was the issue, not the pilots. Those who don't want to give rides, won't. That's pretty simple. The FAA even said that splitting the cost of rides with friends is OK, so then it will be down to proving if someone is your friend or not.

<comment><USER8> It's possibly a safety concern. With paragliding, which is largely self- regulated by the USHPA _(FAA airspace use regulations notwithstanding)_ , I don't believe you can technically take payment for a tandem flight unless the passenger is a student pilot, at least on paper.[1] IIRC, this is to discourage pilots with a tandem rating taking undue flight risks to make money on giving rides.

[1]: [https://www.ushpa.aero/4721.asp](https://www.ushpa.aero/4721.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's depressing to me that the useful idea of a "sharing economy" has been redefined to mean "Uber and things similar to Uber."</comment>


Ask HN: E-mail invites to our closed alpha. How to gather? How to send? - <AUTHOR>

As my co-founder and I finish work on our prototype, we're setting up a closed alpha version that we can invite people to participate in for initial testing. We'd like to have a long list of e-mail addresses, from people wanting to participate, waiting for us when we're ready; so that means updating our neglected holding page with something beautiful, interesting, and presumably containing some kind of "Enter your e-mail address for an alpha invite" form.
Rather than re-invent the wheel, do you have any recommendations for back-end tools meant for this purpose? What's the best way we can gather (opt-in) e-mail addresses from visitors, store them, and then use them later to send out invite codes/links?
Thanks in advance for all recommendations & tips! <comment><USER2> <http://www.launchsplash.com/> sounds like what you're after. Theres an overview at [http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9973373-2.html?part=rss...](http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9973373-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware)

<comment><USER3> Great suggestion, very cool site! Someone should submit this as a HN link. Pretty useful resource for hackers I think. I have like 70 domains that are just sitting around with lame Godaddy parking pages (with godaddy adwords). I'll probably spend some time tomorrow and just convert them all to LaunchSplash parking pages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using crm.zoho.com - it has a web-to-lead form, which adds the details as leads in the CRM. I can then contact them via the CRM, or extract them all using the REST API

edit: BTW: it's free

<comment><USER5> I checked out launchsplash... It offers one or two free sites also...

both look pretty good though..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wufoo is great for this

</comment><comment><USER7> Why not be different and have an open alpha?

<comment><USER8> Mostly because "alpha" means "alpha" not "release candidate".

Ask yourself: do I want to associate my brand with the product in it's current state? If it is alpha quality but you still want feedback, think damage limitation. It's no accident that programs get code names: you associate all of your alpha woes with a brand you can throw away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are you asking how to save form data in a database?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. I'm looking for recommendations for _specific_ tools for a _specific_ process, and tips relevant to that specific process. I'm asking how to train for and win a 10 mile marathon, not how to use my legs. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> constantconstact.com. with any list you use don't forget about CAN-SPAM laws.</comment>


Ask HN: Other online communities like HN? - <AUTHOR> Interested in knowing if vibrant online communities exist where people talk shop similar to HN for other industries, e.g. construction workers, teachers, actuaries, doctors, etc. <comment><USER2> [https://www.barnacl.es](https://www.barnacl.es) \- Business

[https://www.journalduhacker.net/](https://www.journalduhacker.net/) \- French Hacker News

[https://write.narwhal.space/](https://write.narwhal.space/) \- Writing

[https://g33kz.de/](https://g33kz.de/) \- German Hacker News

[https://paperkast.com/](https://paperkast.com/) \- Academic Papers

[https://bitmia.com/](https://bitmia.com/) \- Finance/Investing

All of the above are based on [https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/), which is pretty much like HN with a few extra features and less Off-Topic

Also, there are independent StackExchange-like sites for physics and bioinformatics

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

[https://www.biostars.org](https://www.biostars.org)

<comment><USER3> A lot of these seem like HN-clones (UI-wise) except that they are ghost towns, with no comments on the top stories.

I think it would be more useful to share sites that have great communities, even if they use different software.

For example, for investing, the Boggleheads forum is excellent: [https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php](https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php)

<comment><USER4> Really fascinating. g33kz.de has 25 stories on its front page, and none of them have any comment.

<comment><USER5> I also has very good about pages that make it seem like a lot of love and thought went into it.

For example, all moderator action is public. You have to give a reason to downvote comments or flag stories, and other mods as well as the user in question can see those in the case of comments, everybody can see them in the case of stories. If a user is banned, the reason for the ban will always remain visible. It has a tagging system for stories, every user can customize what tags they want to see. People can apply for "hats", which means being officially authorized to speak for a website, a project, an organization or company.

Pretty awsome, if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For frequent flyers, FlyerTalk is excellent.

It could also be described as the birthplace of WhatsApp, in which one of the co-founders asked for 'thoughts on my free iphone app'[0], which is amusing in retrospect.

[[https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel- technology/952359-tho...](https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel- technology/952359-thoughts-about-my-free-iphone-app-whatsapp.html)]

<comment><USER7> +1. FlyerTalk is excellent. There are some seriously experienced travelers on that site, and reading comments from 2000 is always fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any number of subreddits?

Construction workers - [https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Construction/) "A subreddit for construction industry professionals."

Teachers - [https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/) "The goal of r/Teachers is to provide a supportive community for teachers and to inform and engage in discourse with educational stakeholders about the teaching profession."

Actuaries - [https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/](https://www.reddit.com/r/actuary/) "Articles and links of interest to those in the actuarial profession."

Doctors - [https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/](https://www.reddit.com/r/doctors/) "This is a community for clinicians."

Etc.

<comment><USER9> Some more that might appeal to the HN set:

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject](https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/coding](https://www.reddit.com/r/coding)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY](https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning](https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning)

</comment></comment><comment> david-cako Slashdot is fun if you want a more cynical take on some of the topics that show up here. Slashdot's articles typically are general tech, science, security, and politics (esp tech related). Here there's more software community stuff, blogs, update notes, personal projects etc. I read both HN and slashdot daily, they each have their own thing.

<comment><USER10> I remember when Slashdot was THE online community for tech news.

Insightful comments, amazing (!) moderation system.

It all went downhill years ago though and now the quality of the discussions is horrendous.

<comment><USER11> [https://soylentnews.org/](https://soylentnews.org/)

is one of the Slashdot breakoffs from when they went too far. They are using an old fork of the Slashdot engine.

<comment><USER12> Sadly the site is mainly populated with about 8 extremists and it mainly covers political angles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I continue to be impressed with the lesswrong "site" which, it seems to me, is the proper evolutionary step forward from a BBS onto the medium of the web.

</comment><comment><USER14> For Designers [https://www.designernews.co/](https://www.designernews.co/)

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning](https://www.reddit.com/r/machinelearning)

Very high quality.

</comment><comment><USER16> indiehackers.com!!!

<comment><USER17> Indeed

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://habr.com](https://habr.com) – russian community about IT

</comment><comment><USER19> Not exactly like HN, but stackoverflow has a lot of different sites for niche and interesting topics

<comment><USER20> Of all the things you can do or can't do on stackoverflow, "discussions" are probably the thing you are going to get doxxed the hardest for.

<comment><USER21> Wow you get _doxxed_ for going off topic??

<comment><USER22> Not in my experience. You will however get the discussion shut down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Arfcom GD: [https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General- Discussion/5/](https://www.ar15.com/forums/general/General-Discussion/5/)

Definitely a right-wing slant, but there are ton of very knowledgeable people there. Signal/noise ratio is kinda middle of the road, but the quality of the signal more than makes up for it in my opinion.

<comment><USER24> Ha, I used to post there all the time, still do once in a while. Alas, it's an old-style PHPBB system with no voting, so it gets to be harder to find the good content and keep track of discussions you've been in. And yes, it's a good place to get the pulse of what "Red Team" is thinking in general, and you can get banned for being too Blue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Aviationherald, it's a bit of a mix but there are some really knowledgeable people on there.

also: [https://theairlinepilots.com/](https://theairlinepilots.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> BiggerPockets.com is great for real estate (but beware of the scammers).

bogleheads is great if you're into personal finance of all sorts

airliners.net is great if you're into airline operations; PPRuNe.org too

</comment><comment><USER26> For the same industry:

\- [http://indiehackers.com](http://indiehackers.com)

\- [http://getlatka.com](http://getlatka.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> encode.ru Data compression. Low flame. "paq man" is there, "durilca man", "ans man", "zstd man"... ("oodle man" left ...)

</comment><comment><USER28> [http://www.airliners.net/](http://www.airliners.net/) \- mostly about civil aviation

<comment><USER12> And [https://www.pprune.org/](https://www.pprune.org/), which is the "professional pilots network", and usually has some indepth incisive posts when bad things happen to planes

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My favorite for Business : [https://gladiacteur.com](https://gladiacteur.com) (French)

<comment><USER30> What would be my option to read this without knowing french?

<comment><USER31> The same options as someone wanting to read Hacker News without knowing English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For gaming and a lively off topic community, resetera.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't think there's anything comparable in terms of activity/traffic. Lobste.rs is the closest but it just has way less active users and daily content.

</comment><comment><USER34> reddit.com - let the down votes begin :)

</comment><comment><USER35> Lobste.rs, however it's invite only to participate.

</comment><comment> type-2 lobste.rs

</comment><comment><USER36> www.defence.pk</comment>


The Case For (Almost) Monopolies - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/48938736267/the-case-for-almost-monopolies

<comment><USER2> I would hesitate to generalise from the behaviour of students to make sweeping statements about the behaviour of large companies run by groups of atypical individuals.</comment>


Tensorflow.js: Machine Learning in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://www.tensorflow.org/js/ <comment><USER2> I recently wanted to learn how to use tf.js, so had a couple of mini-projects. The first is a minimal working example showing how to train a model in python and then load it in javascript.

[https://github.com/paruby/mnist](https://github.com/paruby/mnist)

The second is the classic game of snake, controlled by pointing your head in the direction you want to steer the snake.

[https://github.com/paruby/snake-face/](https://github.com/paruby/snake-face/)

This uses the MediaPipe Facemesh model with the device camera to work out which direction your head is pointing in.

<comment><USER3> I have a hard time sorting through the ml logic vs the game logic, it would really help my learning (and others too) if the game logic was decoupled from the ml logic into 2 separate files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a non-ML practitioner who has an interest in the field, I have a question I was hoping someone could answer.

Looking at the page this links to, it gives pretrained models for "common use cases", among other things. Can you actually do anything interesting or novel with those? I feel like any meaningful new use of ML will not be possible with such "beginner building blocks" and you would just wind up with a weaker version of existing offerings. Could someone give me any examples of meaningful ways this can be used?

<comment><USER5> Sure. The innovation often comes from how you use the model, not trying to build new ones (although that happens too).

They have pose detection: [https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs- models/tree/master/posene...](https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs- models/tree/master/posenet). One day during a talk with someone who works in aged care I worked up a demo of fall detection using this.

<comment><USER6> And some years back I use posenet in node.js, just for its head tracking, while exploring 3D UIs. Because it was fairly robust, at least as long as an eye was visible. Even now, it degrades more gracefully with heads turned away than some face nets. Though its positions are a bit noisy, which hurt multi- camera-parallax 3D pose estimation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any example of this being used in the wild? I feel like it could save with backend costs (especially for hobby projects) but the bandwidth/loading time might make it infeasible?

Also if you have any novel model it will be trivial to reverse engineer it. You gotta send the weights over to the client and they can just run tensorflow.js themselves right?

<comment><USER8> I used it in the wild for some week-end project [1][2]. To get around the bandwidth issue, I used it as a browser extension. This means that weights are downloaded and installed only once during the setup. But I also used it in the past in a website for real-time audio processing when model are small enough [3].

Novel models will probably need to have some custom layers, which are quite painful to write. The weights for the web version will probably be a low quality of what you achieve on a more powerful machine. And you don't need to provide the code for the training, nor the dataset used, so you will still have an edge over people copying you.

The main problem I have with tensorflow.js is that it's not production ready yet. It's probably 10 years ahead of it's time. Most people don't have recent GPU or recent video drivers. As it's doing some tricks with the GPU to have some acceleration, a fraction of your clients will encounter random bugs and crashes. I even got some bad review for causing reboots on Firefox :). For some people it will be so slow it will feel unresponsive, and others will find that it's unimpressive because you would have to use the minimal model. In a day and age where you need 99% satisfaction to exist, picking tensorflow.js is a mistake.

[1] chrome : [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorify/pipnfjhpb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/colorify/pipnfjhpbdpejoemmkhoglekbjakmnkc)

[2] firefox : [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/colorify/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/colorify/)

[3] Wisteria : [https://gistnoesis.github.io/](https://gistnoesis.github.io/)

<comment><USER9> I was playing with tf.js last year and there were some core components still being converted to WASM, which gave me some big performance boosts once I switched. I had some problems with WebGL-related bugs too. It seems that they're currently in the process of writing WebGPU-based back-ends. I'm hoping that when WebGPU is on-by-default in most browsers, and there's been a year or two to sort out all the major teething problems, we'll see some wide-spread uptake.

Internet speeds are still increasing exponentially, so hopefully the model size problems will become less of an issue - perhaps aided by some CDN-served (and thus cached across domains) "base" models that are fine-tuned with some parameters downloaded from the server. I think I could start playing with it seriously if I could get the model sizes under 30mb or so. In a few years (with increasing internet speeds) that might be 50mb. I think huggingface's distilled GPT-2 model is a couple of hundred megabytes, for reference, so we're certainly not going to be doing anything revolutionary in the browser, but I have a bunch of neat little ideas that I think would be useful.

For bringing the "big" stuff to the web we're probably stuck with APIs, like OpenAI's new GPT-3 offering. I think access to SOTA models on hard problems is going to be almost exclusively via APIs for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Joe-Z-L Super noob question, I have a awesome use for image classification on my job, can I make it on Teachable Machine export as TensorFlow Js and make a simple page/app with simplistic UI just to drop/choose a image for the model to compare. What would be a roadmap or path to do this ? (I started programming literally yesterday With the intention to make what I wrote real)

<comment><USER9> Yep! It looks like that's exactly what the new version of Teachable Machine is for: [https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/](https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/)

I might have misunderstood your comment, but if you've just started learning to code, I'd probably start with simpler tutorials and projects - just to get a handle on the basics. Depending on your background it could take a good 6 months of daily practice to get comfortable with the basics. It took me and my friends at least that long - similar time frame to learning a spoken language like Japanese, say, to a basic level. Learning to code is absolutely worth it though - 6 months is a very cheap price in my opinion. I'd probably start with a tutorial like this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPWkPOfnGsw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPWkPOfnGsw) Or the Khan Academy computer science course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's something I made awhile back that uses it to generate Bob Ross drawings live from your sketches. (Never wrapped it up into an app but maybe I should):

[https://twitter.com/jdwlbr/status/1131244682317484032?s=20](https://twitter.com/jdwlbr/status/1131244682317484032?s=20)

<comment><USER11> This is fantastic. Any way to see and learn from source?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe here someone can help me with my struggle.

I'm trying to tackle the topic of ML / AI for some time but I don't want to just use any existing tool and go with the flow - what I would like to do, is to understand how everything works, including underlying math.

Just to give you an example, I would like to build my own image recogniton tool from scratch and understand every part of it.

Where can I start? Any book recomendations would be greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER13> For an image classification project I wanted to complete, I had to do a bunch of matrix/tensor manipulation, and I thought it would be interesting to do it all client side in JavaScript. Things like changing the color space, taking slices/patches of images, etc. I'd be happy to share some of that if people are truly interested!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I'm interested. If you have notes please share. The more documented examples there are of how to use Tensorflow.js the better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I will have to purchase a new PC soon. Provided I want to play around with Tensorflow.js, is there anything that I shoudl avoid o urgently include in the spec? Any specific graphics card or processor?

<comment><USER13> If you can wait, wait as the other commenter stated. However, if you're just interested in playing with machine learning, you don't need to get the latest and greatest tech! Even the raspberry pi can do some machine learning experiments or inferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do you know how to consume model produced by python using tensorflow.js ?

<comment><USER2> I played around with tf.js a few weeks ago and learning to use python-trained models was the first hurdle. I made a minimal working example of this here, feel free to check it out:

[https://github.com/paruby/mnist](https://github.com/paruby/mnist)

See model/mnist_js.ipynb to see how the model is trained and exported to a js readable format, and you can see in lines 13-15 in index.html how the model is loaded.

Note: I have a decent amount of ML experience but almost no javascript experience, so YMMV

<comment> johnx123-up TF Lite to TFJS might be a good option. But, this ticket is pending for a long time [https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/issues/991](https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs/issues/991) Do you have any solution for this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Will it be blocked by Chrome as resource heavy ? [https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/resource-heavy-ads-in- chro...](https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/resource-heavy-ads-in- chrome.html?m=1)

<comment><USER17> That's only relevant to ads. Hopefully no one is putting AI models in adverts.

<comment><USER18> I'm afraid that will happen soon</comment></comment></comment>


The World of Competitive Rock Paper Scissors - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-world-of-competitive-rock-paper-scissors/ <comment><USER2> The article makes some convincing cases why an experienced RPS player should be able to beat someone who has never considered the competitive aspects of the game: things like poor randomization and physical clues. But I'm not convinced that the skill ceiling is high enough for there to be an interesting competitive scene.

I could be wrong, but it seems like tic tac toe. The slightly experienced player can beat the noob, but no one can reliably beat the slightly experienced player. Surely if you can eliminate your physical signals and memorize a randomly generated sequence, no one should be able to reliably beat you. Perhaps eliminating the physical signals is just extremely difficult?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really interesting considering that if you just memorize a sufficiently long string of random Base 3 numbers you can't lose more than 50% of the time, but with any discernible strategy you use to gain an edge there is a counter strategy to remove it.

<comment><USER2> This bot can reliably beat me, until I start using a randomly-generated sequence. Presumably, even in the absence of physical signals, if you could compute this algorithm, you could beat a human who isn't also using such an algorithm.

[http://www.essentially.net/rsp/play.jsp](http://www.essentially.net/rsp/play.jsp)</comment></comment>