NYC cops will fly a drone over the New Year's Eve celebration at Times Square - sahin-boydas https://www.apnews.com/0130ee16062c46c49a7244e721a4fca4 <comment> sahin-boydas [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18161633/new-years- eve-n...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18161633/new-years-eve-nypd- drone-new-york-surveillance)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "The drone will never fly directly above the crowd, he said". What's the point, then?</comment>


The Corporate Contradictions of Neoliberalism - <AUTHOR> https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/corporate-contradictions-neoliberalism/ <comment><USER2> Can't say I agree with all of this, but the part about how ownership and control is separate in a corporation - and how this can be a problem - resonates with me...

Very briefly, my feeling is owners have become so faceless and indirect that executives and boards have sort of "broken loose" and created "their own class", effectively answering to no-one. I suspect that this breeds a "political" work environment, and a kind of inequality that is more difficult to accept psychologically (than the old owner-worker divide): that some people are paid hundreds of times more for what is essentially their labor, and have vastly greater opportunities, than others, mostly based on "who they know". It incentivizes a "you scratch my back; I scratch your's (at the owner's expense of course)" kind of economy.

Anybody feel similarly? Anybody better able to put it into words? :P

</comment><comment><USER3> I really am curious now how a corporation-free economy operates. None of the fundamentals (investors, controlling interest, stocks and shares) seem beyond the scope of basic contract law.

Corporate charters seem most like copyright. If its there, you might as well use it to your own advantage, and you might as well expand it everywhere you can get away with since its using the power of the state to your advantage.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not really related with the article but curiously I have yet to see anybody calls himself a "neoliberal".

<comment><USER5> The term usually says a lot more about the person who uses it than it does the person to whom it is applied. Much like "neoconservatism" it's often shorthand for people who I disagree with, and used sloppily without reference to the history of the few who self-identified under either term.

That said, with liberalism & non-populist centrism in general on the ropes in advanced democracies, I could see the term being embraced and rehabilitated. See the already mentioned /r/neoliberalism for an example that I couldn't have imagined a few years ago. Does meme magic work on centrist compromises?

<comment> aaron-lebo It is neoliberalism itself that is on the ropes. Since Reagan every single administration (Bushes, Clinton, Obama) has been neoliberal in degrees.

 _Early roots of neoliberalism were laid in the 1970s, during the Jimmy Carter administration, with deregulation of the trucking, banking, and airline industries.[76][77][78] This trend continued into the 1980s, under the Reagan Administration, which included tax cuts, increased defense spending, financial deregulation and trade deficit expansion.[79] Likewise, concepts of supply- side economics, discussed by the Democrats in the 1970s, culminated in the 1980 Joint Economic Committee report, "Plugging in the Supply Side." This was picked up and advanced by the Reagan administration, with Congress following Reagan's basic proposal and cutting federal income taxes across the board by 25% in 1981.[80]

During the 1990s, the Clinton Administration also embraced neoliberalism[68] by supporting the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, continuing the deregulation of the financial sector through passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act, and implementing cuts to the welfare state through passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.[79][81][82] The neoliberalism of the Clinton Administration differs from that of Reagan, as the Clinton Administration purged neoliberalism of neoconservative positions on militarism, family values, opposition to multiculturalism and neglect of ecological issues._

You couldn't get elected in this country without being a neoliberal for the last 30 years. Bill Clinton got elected precisely because he was a relatively conservative Democrat from the south. The only reason nobody wants to identify as a neoliberal is because it has the word liberal in it and people want to get elected.

Saw a similar comment the other day about neoliberalism being a newfangled nonpartisan movement (not accusing you of saying that), but the populist movements are around because of its flaws.

<comment><USER3> I think this brings up why the red vs blue dichotomy is woefully insufficient when discussing ideology. The "center" right now is neoliberalism, even if nobody wants to _call_ it that, because that is the status quo. Everything people even want to discuss - from social democracy on the left to fascism on the right - fit on that linear plane, but ideologies beyond neoliberalism like anarchism, communism, or socialism don't fit because they start rejecting the premise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New era for KEXP: How this radio station is doing top-notch live video (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2014/kexp-live-video-stream/ <comment><USER2> KEXP was the first time I saw the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, with Jimmy James on guitar. He's hands down one of the most talented guitarists alive today. Sample vid: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhicDUgXyNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhicDUgXyNg)</comment>


Ask HN: Why does one of the top SV sites, HN, have sucky UX - <AUTHOR> Why can't I collapse comment threads? Why doesn't the reply screen both not take me back to where I was nor be inline and require a diff screen.
You funded Reddit, FFS - it's open source. Learn some UX from them.
When there are 600 comments and you reply to one deep in the thread, it doesn't even take you back to the comment section, let-alone the place you were replying to.
Why? <comment><USER2> Because people get sufficient utility from the site without changing the UX. Sure, the UX could be better, but are you likely to _not_ use the site because of its current form?

Also, I'd argue that people who don't use HN because of its UX probably aren't going to be happy here anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> So the summary of your comment is thus;

 __ _" Because fuck you, that's why"_ __

<comment><USER2> Not really.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The TL;DR is that Hacker News is built on _very_ hacky architecture.

> You funded Reddit, FFS - it's open source. Learn some UX from them.

And so is Reddit, to the point that _no one_ uses the open source code from it, instead opting to build from scratch as doing that won't automatically incur technical debt.

<comment><AUTHOR> You do realize you're posting on hacker news, correct.

You don't think that the premise of my question was that shouldn't HN be able to solve such trivial annoyances given the pool of talent they have access to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You'll be downvoted in 3..2..

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha - yep, I know...

But do I not speak the truth??

FYI: I typically post on HN with the presumptive expectation of being down voted.

@dang has had many conversations with me - but at the end of the day, we are a huge mix of talent and experience. I hold true to my tech-world-view - and at times that offends people and pisses off mods, but I love HN, and fuck the haters :-)

<comment><USER4> Well I agree with you, while scrolling down through comments the identation is not enough to aide readability and follow the conversation.

I'd add these two: \- When I submit if I want to check comments I need to click: profile/submissions/submission. It shoud be a direct link next to threads. \- Links should open on a new window. HN is an aggregator and most likely we want to read 2-3 articles of a given top list. It'd be better to keep the top list in a tab and come back to it.</comment></comment></comment>


The Crisis Facing America's Working Daughters - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/working-daughters-eldercare/459249/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> sexist article is sexist.

How can an "article" that is effectively about eldercare go out of its way to disregard the fact that men have parents too... Do they think we simply "...just spring out of holes in the ground"? and that we don't care for our parents too?

Generalization is a two-way mirror.

They DO mention the idea that women have _gasp_ choices, however they simply gloss over it, disregarding the idea.

This is not exactly the gleaming pride of journalistic integrity.... Oh. Its the Atlantic. nevermind.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. 57% are women caretakers [1]. So while it is a majority. I would not label it a purely women's issue.

[1] [http://www.bls.gov/news.release/elcare.nr0.htm](http://www.bls.gov/news.release/elcare.nr0.htm)</comment></comment>


Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. blames the iPad for loss of American jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.edibleapple.com/rep-jesse-jackson-jr-blames-the-ipad-for-loss-of-american-jobs/

<comment><USER2> So in a nutshell, we should never have allowed the light bulb to be invented because makers of lanterns were put out of work.

<comment><USER3> The sun puts candle makers out of work.

<comment><USER4> <http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html>

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suspect some big players in the book retailing industry gave him a big donation, and then told him why his previous advocacy for "an iPad for every schoolchild" might not be such a great thing. It's amazing how a lobbyist can clarify a politician's thinking! :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> Can't congress discuss the US having the highest corporate taxes in the world, forcing companies to move jobs to offshore? How about giving tax breaks to make it cheaper to manufactur in the US?</comment>


Thanks for the Advice, Grandpa – Debunking Conventional Startup Wisdom - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/thanks-for-the-advice-grandpa-debunking-conventional-startup-wisdom/ <comment><USER2> Great article! I think this really highlights and challenges some of the assumptions that newcomers make about how they approach their ideas and build their companies.

Too many people are focused on protecting their ideas and finding funding (to the point where they ask potential investors to sign NDAs) that they never focus on the most important thing: the product and whether or not it solves issues for potential customers.

It's always good to see a call to action for future bootstrappers and micropreneurs.</comment>


Surprises - <AUTHOR> http://collison.ie/blog/2009/10/surprises

<comment><USER2> "Now, when coding, I try to think: 'how can I write this such that if people saw my code, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it does'."

 _golden._ i've been trying to pound this concept into my head lately, and this is a very well-stated version of it.

<comment><USER3> This is in fact a very powerful idea. It's been my rule for a couple decades now. I think I learned it partly from Rtm, who has always been a kind of code miser.

Curiously enough, there is one weird edge case where this approach can bite you: when you're launching something new that you're going to publish the source of, and which a lot of people are already predisposed to hate...

<comment><USER4> A Feynman quote comes to mind :

'what do you care what other people think?'

<comment><USER5> Pedantry: That was his wife, Arlene.

(Edit: Though I guess she was a Feynman too at that point...)

<comment><USER6> OT: Seven hours of Feynman lectures online: "The Character of Physical Law" (in case you missed the announcement several months ago, Silverlight required)

<http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html>

<comment><USER4> I love watching Feynman in action, but refuse to install evil MS plugins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first point hit home big time. When you're doing a startup you feel like every day is precious and the tide of change is racing along impossibly fast. It's healthy to remember that the world doesn't reinvent itself every month. The problem you're working on now will probably still be relevant in 1-2 years.

<comment><USER3> It's true that you rarely have to work fast because the world will leave you behind otherwise (though that has occasionally been the case with startups we've funded). The reason you have to work fast is that your initial idea is probably wrong, and you have to iterate till you get it right.

<comment><USER8> Plus you are probably in the process of running out of money and how long you get to tackle the problem(s) has more to do with cash flow than the state of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _How slowly things change._

depends on the context. for huge macro level projects e.g. iPhone reshaping cell phone industry or FB having Google size revenue, ebay's network effects being broken, that all takes time.

but in the same time period (past 2.5 years) a lot of things have completely changed. FB platform has gone from launch to supporting companies that could IPO (and made a whole load of single developers v rich). social gaming has gone from scrabulous to now posing a credible threat to the entire console gaming industry. the wii destroyed the xbox and ps3 within its first year of launch and now sells more than both of them combined.

i'd argue that it's the faster moving trends that impact startups and startup opportunities more than the slower moving macro trends.

</comment><comment><USER10> +1 for paying attention to international customers

For our ecommerce startup, we did nothing as far as internationalization goes other then offering to ship our product outside of the US and Canada. We were amazed at the response we got and it was one of the factors that helped us get cash flow positive very quickly

</comment><comment><USER11> I have a lot of concepts, I'm still narrowing down and going through in terms of what I'm working on next. Time and getting going is a big source of anxiety. This post helped calm that down a bit. Worth the read.

<comment><USER4> what about prototyping smaller pieces? - its a good way to clarify your thinking, try out the tech, and come up with new ideas.

<comment><USER11> I really think through the concepts. Usually dont go as far as the coding. Lots of mockups, design, specs, and sometime even database design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For a web app, what is the least painful way to achieve internationalization? What language/framework would you use if you were writing a fresh one from scratch?

I had tried to convert a php web-app to handle utf8 correctly through and through a few years ago and gave up after a lot of pain. Is life any better now? Any guides/resources? Is life in ruby or python frameworks significantly better in this respect?

<comment><USER13> I've always done it with MS stack. ASP.NET, SQL Server etc all seem to handle unicode correctly (as long as you don't expect your users to still be on IE6!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Niche. For a startup or mISV, catering to a particular internationalization locale makes a lot of sense. But I think you'd need some expertise in that locale, e.g. be able to speak the language, for support, and know the customs and conventions.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would worry about trying to specialize in internationalization. It can be a lucrative market, and things like iphone apps are relatively easy to do. Trying to aim for the international audience, however, can be deceptively hard.

</comment><comment><USER16> Surely the biggest surprise was auctomatic being acquired? and not seemingly for the product but for the team. :/

</comment><comment><USER17> >and everyone was talking about Twitter.

Back in 2007, twitter's userbase was smaller than 4chan's and it wasn't nearly as well-known. In 2009, they're now bigger than MySpace. These graphs should show the difference clearly:

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+4chan&ctab=0&#...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+4chan&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+myspace&ctab=0...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=twitter%2C+myspace&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

</comment><comment><USER18> _"...a good product is so much more important than first mover advantage"_

couldn't agree more.</comment>


I was a fast-food worker. Let me tell you about burnout - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/6/20681186/fast-food-worker-burnout <comment><USER2> To me, there's an enormous difference between the kind of stress at a low- skilled job like this vs. a white-collar career job (or even a blue-collar career job). Fast-food work is hard work, to be sure. Many low-skilled jobs involve working hard. You barely have time to eat or take a bathroom break, they're often physically intense, and even punching orders into a cash register is exhausting.

I don't want to dismiss the struggle of this kind of work, but to me, it doesn't even qualify as stress; at least not the same kind of stress I'm used to as a software developer. Fast-food work can be intense, and difficult, and painful, but at least for me, it's more about busy-ness than stress. At the end of your shift, it's over. You can certainly burn out from being worked like that, but again, it's not exactly the same as the kind of stress software jobs give me.

The thing I find most stressful about software work is that you can't just end your shift and leave it behind. If you have an insane fast-food shift, or a clopen, you might be fried at the end of the day, but you can leave it behind when you leave.

A software job doesn't go away when you go home. There are no shifts. You work on things that take months or years. You think about problems on your way to work, you think about them on the way home, you're constantly planning tomorrow's meeting schedule, worried about Friday's demo, doing homework to research new technology, checking to make sure some server is up, being pinged by a constant stream of email, etc, etc. It never goes away. Your shift is never really over.

This isn't about blue-collar vs. white-collar so much as about job vs. career. For the vast majority of employees, fast-food is not a career. It's just a job. You probably really need the job, and that itself is stressful, but that stress exists at any job. It's not hard to leave one low-skill job and start another. If punching in orders at McDonald's is sapping your will to live, you can walk across the street and stock shelves at Walmart, or choose from a number of other jobs that don't require much or any experience. They all pay the same, and even a small town has many to choose from (assuming a reasonably-healthy economy).

Deep chronic stress, to me, is working a career job that you're trapped in. You can't leave it behind at the end of the day. It's a lot harder to walk across the street and start fresh at a new company. Even in a robust tech market, you're doing real damage to your career if you switch jobs every six months, and if you do that too often, you'll sink quickly. Unless you live in a real tech hotspot, you'll quite possibly have to move to a new town, or spend a long time searching.

I've worked many jobs in both these categories, and I've worked short-term minimum-wage jobs after working six-figure software dev jobs. The minimum-wage jobs were exhausting, but at least when the shift ended, it ended, and tomorrow was another day. I never woke up in the morning thinking about next month's deadlines or went to bed stressed out about tomorrow morning's meeting.

<comment><USER3> > For the vast majority of employees, fast-food is not a career. It's just a > job

I'm not sure that's true. I'm also not sure that your description of how easy it is to switch fast food jobs is true. On the other hand, I've never lived anywhere that I would expect to have trouble finding another job in tech whenever I wanted. At a minimum, your experiences seem too limited to support the sweeping generalizations that you have given.</comment></comment>


GraphQL Conf 2019 in a Nutshell – Some Takeaways - <AUTHOR> https://time2hack.com/2019/06/graphql-conf-2019-in-a-nutshell-some-takeaways/ <comment><USER2> Such a great conference. It is awesome to see GraphQL community grow and mature over the years.

Quick plug - If you're interested in mocking your API in test as described in the "build your own graphql tools", my company just released a library that lets you do that more easily than with `graphql-tools`. We've been using internally for months in our UI tests. Hopefully you find it useful.

[https://github.com/oscarhealth/graphql-mock- factory](https://github.com/oscarhealth/graphql-mock-factory)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. I would definitely give it a try.

And I totally agree; the community has grown exponentially. I have been following the graphql since 2017 and am totally amazed by the power of community and growth of GraphQL itself.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you had been to the conference or watched it live-streamed or watched later on youtube; which talk/part is your favorite?

<comment><USER3> I've been to the conference. I liked it overall, my favorite/inspiring talk was the one about Error handling.

Also loved the documentary at the end. And of course Lee Byron's talk was amazing and fun :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree with you about the whole conference.

I definitely experienced some new aspects on GraphQL.

More importantly, I was so amazed the community being together for one thing, GraphQL.</comment></comment></comment>


How the best hedge funds invest - <AUTHOR> https://www.howhedgefundsinvest.com/ <comment><USER2> This is just an advertisement with no content. It's a link to a whitepaper / sales funnel for the service titanvest.com.</comment>


How a GIF of Aly Raisman's Floor Routine Got Me Permanently Banned from Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-gif-aly-raismans-floor-routine-got-me-permanently-jim-weber <comment><USER2> I wonder how much of the whole ordeal was entirely human-free automation. IOC web-bots web-crawling looking for content. IOC legal-bots generating millions of form E-mails "attesting to" the same thing. Twitter email-bots receiving these and auto-flagging accounts, and Twitter legal-bots generating identical "I ban you!" form letters.

We've created SkyNet without missiles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gotta love the naivety of the post's comment "don't post other's IP." If only life were so simple. One might advocate a conservative position that anything not made by oneself shouldn't be posted. What a culturally impoverished world that would be! You can watch the competitive human activity on the activity organizer's chosen public performance medium but it isn't a good idea to communicate about it--you might be banned for offending someone and not be able to communicate anymore.

I suppose there's a balance between stuff to be shared and to not and in the middle there be DCMA take-downs and complaints.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12356098](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12356098)

</comment><comment><USER5> This really should be considered fair use, as they were creating commentary about the floor routine.

If anything sharing a short clip of an Olympic performance may increase the value to the rights holder, by driving more traffic to them.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not only is it ridiculous to permanently ban someone from the platform with 3 minutes notice for copyright violation, this ALSO isn't copyright violation! In the US (I don't know enough about other jurisdictions) this would almost certainly qualify as Fair Use and therefore NOT a copyright violation.

So Twitter is permanently banning people with 3 minutes notice for a first offense of OBEYING the laws (but apparently still pissing off the IOC).

Reversing the ban of this person once the story became widely discussed is NOT an excuse, unless Twitter is also reviewing all other bans.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't read this without logging in, even if I get there through a Google SERP. I'm flagging this because of that, I don't know if that's valid or not.

<comment><USER8> For what it's worth I was able to read it without logging in.</comment></comment>


Flashback HN: Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=player_embedded <comment><USER2> In case you want to see comments from earlier submissions of this, here are a few links.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782171>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390> <<<\-- This one has the comments.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360285>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370134>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376655>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383943>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385999>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388904>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389955>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390588>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1397443>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408731>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1410992>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439939>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1466084>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1640824>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1728970></comment>


What's Blockchain Good For, Anyway? For Now, Not Much - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/whats-blockchain-good-for-not-much/ <comment><USER4> Perfect timing as I sat through a 'for the first time ever blockchain is changing the coffee world' presentation in a room full of poverty stricken farmers and coffee buyers.

Stereotypical sales guy telling these farmers how blockchain is going to make sure coffee is traceable from seed to cup and revolutionize the industry. Everything is immutable, no one in the world is using blockchain for coffee, we are the first and announcing it here today! (just don't google it)

I'm out of the loop on how blockchain would actually help or be truly immutable in a case like coffee. I doubt independent associations are running nodes to prevent data tampering for this private company, and the process from seed to cup has long periods of time between each step. At what point do you enter all the immutable data? If you enter it little by little how do you 100% guarantee the association is correct and you're not mixing up plants, bags of beans, who shipped it, or the 30 other blocks of data we quickly scrolled through?

<comment><USER5> I sat through a similar presentation that was just crops in general rather than coffee specific last year. At no point did they address why you would want to do that or why it's not possible with non-blockchain technology. Just like all of the other presentations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've always been agnostic on blockchain stuff. One of those 'flip-a-coin to determine its future' type of mentalities. On that note, my humble, unsubstantiated hypothesis is that IF it ends up not being a dud technology, then a couple of potential things that make that so might be...

(1) Something to do with the growing number of people not participating in the current traditional financial system (the unbanked etc) together with some sort of negative event in current traditional system (recession/depression etc).

(2) Something to do with future A.I. systems and processes requiring a historical snapshot of everything that happened within the system or process and blockchain somehow ending up being more reliable, secure, and accurate than a traditional database in recording the history of an A.I. system or process.

(3) Something to do with the ability to monetize certain things at scale that either could not be monetizable at scale before or could have been but no tech existed that could have made the project/business profitable.

<comment><USER7> I am honestly surprised you did not put up there self-sustainable economic systems. Systems where people would exchange real goods and services but would not necesitate a central arbiter.

Think of things like Uber or Airbnb. I could theoretically imagine a system with the proper incentives between users, providers and a incentivised system of decentralized arbiters or oracles that could be self-sustainable. You would lack a central authority but they would all work within a framework. But the fact that you lack this authority could potentially make it un-bannable. It would effectively be a system of peer to peer transactions that could offer come form of settlement in case of conflicts.

Hard to pin down, but not impossible, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Decentralized consensus between untrusted parties is a world-changing concept.

The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut" to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is _not_ a long- term viable situation.

There are a multitude of problems with global consensus systems as monetary systems. But, something to consider is this:

Two-thirds of the global population are _not_ served by the present system. Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed. Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money -- _then_ I might start to consider how to help keep "bad people" off of cryptocurrencies.

However, I think that the Gold Standard in international malfeasance will continue to be "suitcases full of USD or EUR $100 bills". As it is today. But, you don't see governments or central banks falling over themselves to fix that problem. Yet, they are actively preventing the unbanked from having access to viable money substitutes.

<comment><USER9> >The fact that Central Banks / Governments have "chained the fire exits shut" to keep people in their explosively bankrupt monetary systems is not a long- term viable situation.

The systems before them, where each local region, each business, each actor, could coin money via IOUs or other forms and trade was much more costly and corrupt than the current system. Local failures, actors running off with capital, low liquidity were rampant.

There are decent empirical reasons the entire world moved off systems tied to how fast they could dig up metal - such systems have an impedance mismatch with productivity, for example, hindering growth when useful and flooding the markets with new gold finds when the markets don't have matching growth. These led to boom and bust cycles.

With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got so smoothed.

After the Great Depression and the resulting solid evidence that non-fiat exacerbated the problem across dozens of countries, every economy in the world move off them. The evidence was that solid.

>Focusing on how cryptocurrencies are "used by criminals" is astonishingly wrong-headed.

Yet it's backed up by factual behavior.

>Two-thirds of the global population are not served by the present system.

Citation? I can find nothing near this claim to be supported by any evidence I can find. From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to transact wages and purchases. If pretty much every person on the planet uses some form of govt issues money, how is that not being served? They're pretty much all capable of local barter, yet choose this other system. Maybe it's better for them? At least they're choosing it.

It is true that a decent chunk of the world has no access to a cell phone or internet. How will cryptocurrencies serve such people?

>Once the world's population has uniform access to viable, stable and useful money

Which cryptocurrencies are anywhere near as stable as a modern first world currency? By stable, I mean the usual financial measure of price volatility against a reasonable basket of goods. Last I checked, BTC, for example, was about the least stable investment one could make. Volatility has serious costs throughout the economy - predictability is vastly better for making contracts like employment or rent or mortgage.

<comment><USER10> > With the introduction of the US Fed, recessions became less frequent, less > damaging, so much so that the period called the Great Moderation still has > economists working on exactly how come the previous boom and bust cycle got > so smoothed.

Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.

> From what I can find, a large majority of the world's population has access > to and uses bank accounts, and the vast majority of the rest use cash to > transact wages and purchases.

All of which are at the mercy of whoever is in power at the time. In the past few years: \- 80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings \- 40 million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings \- 30 million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings

Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.

You think this is good?

<comment><USER9> >Well, this was the narrative up until 2008.

It's still the narrative. 2008 was the biggest since the GD in 1929. Here's a list [1] of all US recessions. There's no question volatility has been reduced since the introduction of the Fed. And the same has been demonstrated in dozens countries.

>80 million turks have lost 80% of the value of their cash savings - <USER2> million argentines have lost 90% of the value of their cash savings - <USER3> million venezuelans have lost 99% of the value of their cash savings

And billions of people have not lost their savings, and billions have been removed from poverty. Cherry picking outliers does not make your case very persuasive.

There's 7+B people on the planet. Demonstrate that your tiny number is worse than before central banking then you will have some room to complain.

The vast literature on this shows the evidence to be otherwise.

>Even the US rate of inflation is likely double what the official measures are.

Yeah, this is nonsense, propagated by places like ShadowStats. There are ample other groups measuring inflation, such as the Billion Prices Project [2], and they obtain the same numbers. If inflation were lied about, there would be ample ways to game various commodities and make a pretty hefty profit. Yet no one I've known in trading has ever heard of such a thing, despite many people trying to do so.

And the most compelling way is you can check it yourself. Take BLS reported inflation for the past few decades. Pick a basket of goods similar to theirs. Measure local prices in a spreadsheet. Now go to your local library or the web and find old ads from decades ago, which is easy to do now. Compute the basket value then.

Even a percent off over a few decades would vastly skew prices. I've done this legwork out of debunking ShadowStats to someone I know that believes their nonsense. You can do it, and disabuse yourself of such unsubstantiated conspiracy nonsense.

>Many other countries have high single digit or double digit true rates of inflation. ... You think this is good?

Yes, it's better than a deflationary spiral. Single digit inflation, if somewhat stable, is vastly better than previous boom bust cycles.

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

[2] [http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/](http://www.thebillionpricesproject.com/)

<comment><USER10> I disagree with almost all of this. I doubt there's any point arguing the individual points with you though.

Time will tell who is correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Blockchain is 12 years old and yet few if any great applications have been implemented. It only took a few years before PCs had great killer apps, what's the deal with blockchain? The deal is hype, a hype that has become very common for new technologies in today's world. [https://issues.org/behind- technological-hype/](https://issues.org/behind-technological-hype/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like it would be good for elections, where you need to verify the identity of voters and then be able to verify that your vote was counted properly.

<comment><USER13> Working in elections I am very skeptical of this. The reason is that electoral systems support the transition of power by creating a publicly trusted mechanism to measure support. People have to believe their votes are being accurately tabulated for such a system to work. Introducing software to the electoral process-- any software -- undermines public trust in the system because most people are not software engineers and are not personally capable of verifying code.

Most computer scientists who study elections are personally opposed to even electronic voting and prefer paper ballots, which I do too. That's because they can be physically counted and intuitively understood in a way that software cannot be by most of the population. That simplicity is a strength in building trust.

<comment><USER12> Seems like a verifiable, open voting ledger is a lot more transparent and obvious, regardless of the code and method of vote collection, which are orthogonal issues. No reason you couldn't use paper inputs and an ID into a public ledger. In fact, it should be much more consistent.

But a simple search on the internet shows that there are a lot of folks who don't want something like this.

<comment><USER14> Well, I'm the head of this family and this family supports the republicrats, so I'm going to be looking at your phone honey, to make sure you don't make a mistake.

Or, I'm offering $10 to you, junkie, to support my party. But if you want to be paid I'm going to use your device/private key/one time code to do it myself. Or maybe you're my employee and we'll have a voting party where I can see you all wisely agree with me.

The privacy of a voting booth where neutral officials who are supervised by all candidates doesn't allow either of these scenarios work.

<comment><USER12> couldn't they issue you a secure private key when you vote?

<comment><USER15> If you can verify your own vote, you can be forced to divulge that information. There's no technical solution to this problem.

<comment><USER14> That is not true. See work by Andrew Neff on verifiable shuffles of secrets. It is practical to produce a proof that can be verified by the voter but not useful in proving which way the ballot has been cast to anyone else.

<comment><USER16> I skimmed through the paper here ([http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf](http://web.cs.elte.hu/~rfid/p116-neff.pdf)) and it doesn't appear to solve the problem. Any time you can see your vote, so can anyone looking over your shoulder.

The described method seems to prevent voting authorities from seeing specific voter's votes, which is useful, but it doesn't solve the "show me you voted for X, or I break your legs" problem.

<comment><USER14> Yeah it makes the use of electronic voting less vulnerable to tampering, but obviously the voting still needs to he done in a private booth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When implemented properly, the main use case for me is to resist censorship.</comment>


Hackers use Google Analytics to steal credit cards, bypass CSP - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-use-google-analytics-to-steal-credit-cards-bypass-csp/ <comment><USER2> > As Sansec also discovered, if the compromised online store's customers would > open their browsers' Developer Tools, they'd get flagged and the skimmer > would automatically disable.

That's kind of cool. I'm not up to date in this scene. Is this a common tactic? Seems smart.</comment>


Percent of population with a college degree, by country - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/files/2008/03/kierkegaard.jpg <comment><USER2> Apparently it's higher than the percent of people trying to squint at that image in 1680x1050. :-(

<comment><USER3> Try it on a 1920x1200 laptop screen :-(

<comment><USER4> with some help of Snipshot

[http://aycu03.webshots.com/image/49922/2001351004567808923_r...](http://aycu03.webshots.com/image/49922/2001351004567808923_rs.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another confounding factor in interpreting such a graph: credentialism.

Countries and cultures vary in how much they value official degrees and titles, and greater reliance on granted credentials is not always better, especially when it serves to protect established interests from competition.

So one interpretation of the relative stability of US education rates across age groups: the US has resisted a wave of creeping credentialism that has afflicted most of the world, having reached optimal level of education earlier than most.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks like Russia, the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and possibly Argentina are the only countries where the youngest generation (25-34) is not the most educated. The U.S.'s education rates have apparently been close to flat for the past couple of generations. Russia's crazy history shows. Germany is in surprisingly bad shape, mostly flat but with the youngest generation at the bottom. Switzerland, Brazil and Argentina resemble Russia; this may mean that in those countries it's more common to get a college degree later in life (or else fewer young people are getting a degree at all).

<comment><USER7> Your assumption is totally false. I'm Russian and I can tell you that more than 80% of Russian pupils join universities (or a college) after 11 years of school. Standard university education program lasts for 5 years, after that you can join "aspirantura" (a post-gradute form of education) for another 4 years and only then you can earn some science degree. Doctor of Science is the highest degree which is usually earned at age of 50. On the opposite, the US's "phD" can be compared to the lowest possible degree here (no one will call/treat you as a scientist if you under 30). Russian academic system is very different from what you have in US or in EU. I believe same applies to Brazil and Argentina and many other post-soviet countries which blindly copied everything from Soviet Union system. So, it's very inaccurate to compare education level of countries that way as on the pic since there's still no unified standard adopted by them.

From my personal perceptions, I admit that more and more ppl here in Russia tend to get higher degrees, hence require higher sallaries. This causes a great problem in society - no one wants to clean streets and work on plants, everybody want to be bankers or at least some financial/oil tycoons. And programming/CS is considered as "street cleaning". :-(

PS: The only seemingly correct assumption that can be made based on the pic is that China, Brazil and India will stay the best "outsource dirty work to" countries at least for the next decade :-).

<comment><USER8> At this point, I should point out that Einstein published his work on special relativity at the age of 26. If it takes 50 years to earn a Doctor of science, the education system is chocking itself. By that age, scientists are too set in their ways to think up anything new (with rare exceptions).

<comment><USER7> Do you know that Einstain was recognized as crazy fag in his 20th and it took him next 20 years to improve his theory and make it real science before he was nominated as genious.

I strictly believe that one has to produce ALOT of theoretical AND practical knowledge before being recognized as scientist, which is not the US case. In US you write down your 100 pages thesis of nothing, partisipate in a couple of speak-about-everything-and-nothing-in-particular conferences and woah you are a scientist! The value of science is heavily and rapitly devaluating :-(.

PS: Same trend is happening here in Russia.

<comment><USER9> Saying that Einstein was "recognized as crazy fag" implies that he was actually one -- which I strongly doubt is the case. Regardless, his 1905 paper on special relativity and his subsequent work (mostly performed within the next 5 years) fleshed out the vast bulk of his theory, and it remained virtually unchanged henceforth. The 20 years you refer to is mostly the time it took for experimental physics to catch up, and be able to experimentally verify the many consequences of his theory. Also, it is somewhat immaterial how long it took for him to be "nominated as genious [sic]" -- the fact that he was indeed correct in all the major components of his theory, a theory which broke so completely with most of physics prior to him, is evidence enough of his genius (which is not to discount Lorentz or Poincare in any way, who were certainly almost there as well).

With regards to your second paragraph (and your prior comment about scientists having to be >30 to be recognized as such and >50 (!) to become one in Russia), the evidence of the works produced by great scientists in the past hundred years strongly suggests that there is something wrong with that belief. Looking only at mathematics, for example, it is difficult to argue that Ramanujan, Godel, Hilbert, Grothendieck, Weil, Weyl, or Deligne (to name only a few), were not truly scientists before age 30 (by which time most of them had published some of their best works).

If the value of science is indeed going down in the US (a fact which is not at all clear to me), then there are lots of other possible reasons for it. But certainly not age.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> there seem to be no correlation between the percentage of educated people and the GDPP. just by glancing at this nations starting with Russia moving towards China, i can state with confidence that a nation with more educated people does not innovate more than others. one thing i would like to know is why some nations are simply more educated than others? and what difference (economically, even politically )does it make if one country is more educated than others?

<comment><USER11> >a nation with more educated people does not innovate more than others

based on the chart you are dead wrong -- Russia was and still is one of the key competitors of US in innovation, albeit in the sectors outside of the semiconductors and IT (which I assume you know best). Russia is an innovator in space, weapons, nanotech and other industries, so i wasn't surprised to see them in the upper 10%. I must admit seeing them at #1 was surprising.

Going from right to left, Japan certainly makes sense as an innovator (e.g. manufacturing), Korea (electronics), Nordic countries(telcom), etc.

On the other hand, countries from Peru and on down are hardly innovators on anyone's list.

<comment><USER10> 3 countries out of 30 make an exception, not a rule. i am not saying these countries are not innovative, but to my knowledge France, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Korea, Japan and Canada are not more innovative than the US.they may be more advanced in one field like telecom, or medecine, or car manufacturing, but as a whole these nations are not more innovative then the US or India, therefore a more educated nation does not mean it will innovate more.

<comment><USER11> India is a bad example -- it suffers from a huge, uneducated population and the fact that top minds usually leave the country (until recently) and spend their most productive years abroad. Do you have any examples where India can claim world-class innovations that weren't created elsewhere?

<comment><USER7> There's a very interesting point. Both China and India have nearely same population (1.32B and 1.12B people accordingly), and same education level as per the graph. Aslo it seems both countries are on same level of innovation, yet, China's GDP is almost 3 times higher than GDP or India ($10.12T to $4.12T). So, I won't call India an exception. The question is what makes China so productive or what India lacks ? The answer is mentality: Chinese ppl got used to work, whence Indians are not. And I think GDP does not corelate with level of edication and innovation.

<comment><USER12> Concerning this point, it is not necessarily just the mentality. It is worth noting that China has had a government imposed and subsidized industrialization program in place for some time now. India, which is a democracy, is not forcing its people to work in factories when they might be happier living in a village. This might explain the difference in GDP?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Note: College degree does not mean university degree. For US, university degree rate is like 28-33%. Canada's is lower then that.

<comment><USER14> What would the difference be? I go to a university, but am getting a degree from a college within the university. I would think that means I'll have a college/university degree - I don't see how you can get one without the other.

<comment><USER15> In Canada, a college degree (generally referred to as a "diploma") is a two year course, usually in an applied area such as graphic design or radio broadcasting. A university degree is a four year course in an academic area like philosophy or chemistry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Education is less important than economic freedom (free trade, property rights, rule of law) in terms of higher per capita GDP.

<comment><USER7> Say that to Chinese gov ;-), there no freedom in China. Although I totally agree with your point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The blog article with a link to chapter one of the study can be found here: [http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2008/03/the-dumbing-of- america...](http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2008/03/the-dumbing-of-america/)

Seems to be a position paper used to support higher H1B limits. But I found the bit about "immigrant entrepreneurs" to be interesting. Quote:

"The survey found a substantial rise in the share of immigrant- founded venture capital–backed companies in America. The share rose from just 7 percent in 1970–80 to 20 percent in 1980–89"

</comment><comment><USER18> I think the most interesting feature of the chart is that Germany and the U.S. have the smallest spread.

<comment><USER19> Possibly the value of a degree has been consistent for ~45 years (across all the age cohorts), as opposed to countries where the value of a degree has gone up (like Korea, where there's a huge spread).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Huh, interesting graph. Great way to show both country and age cohort comparison.

</comment><comment><USER21> In Russia for example there is no 3 years bachelor degree only 5 years degree which is equivalent to masters degree in North America. So the comparison is useless .

<comment><USER17> These arguments probably would not last as long if you actually track down the source. Because chances are they have addressed your objections. From the study, which is linked from the blog post which can be found above:

"It is important to note that no attempt is made in figure 1.3 to "adjust for quality differences" in tertiary educational experiences between countries. Of course, not every university around the globe is a Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, or Indian Institute of Technology, so invariably considerable "skill aspects" are not included in fi gure 1.3. Such comparisons are significantly beyond the scope of this policy analysis. However, following the axiom that tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects and therefore makes it easier to train them on the (especially services-sector) job, it seems evident that in terms of describing the overall level of high-skilled workers in different countries' workforces, any impact of quality differences among universities will be swamped by the quantitative differences in tertiary skill uptake depicted in figure 1.3.16"

<comment><USER22> >However, following the axiom that tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects and therefore...

I'm not at all convinced that it is axiomatic that "tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects".</comment></comment></comment>


Canadian Supreme Court overturns rule allowing U.S. Super Bowl ads in broadcast - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/super-bowl-ad-decision-overturned-1.5402138 <comment><USER2> After review, the ruling on the field is overturned.

Self Own: 15 yard penalty. Play the American ads.

#fail</comment>


Adversarial patch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/29/adversarial-patch/ <comment><USER2> If you put a sticker that looks like a toaster next to a banana, your classifier will see the toaster and not the banana.

I don't understand what the novelty is - Is the "attack" that you're making an image that's TOASTER++ in a small area?

<comment><USER3> Attacks against computer vision algorithms are pretty much always going to be of the form of "I can make a change to the scene or image which makes no difference to a human but which causes an erroneous classification."

This is a huge problem if we expect autonomous systems to do anything meaningful with vision outside of tightly controlled environments. You're going to be crucified after an autonomous vehicle merrily plows into a semi and the explanation for the crash is "well the truck was white and had the Hidden Valley logo on it which was misinterpreted as clouds." Or if an autonomous car runs a red because there was billboard somewhere behind the light which sorta-kinda looks like a green circle.

<comment><USER4> Or meddling kids put stickers on stop signs that make them look like no parking signs to an Uber automated car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Demonstration video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1sp4X57TL4)

</comment><comment><USER6> This may sound stupid but I am curious what would be the effect on facial recognition. Could a person place a sticker on a hat or side of the face, and would that keep confuse the software? or even on the plate of your car?

<comment><USER7> This is a really interesting question, and makes me wonder how robust the patch is to scaling, different lighting, etc.

This also reminds me of using makeup and hair to prevent automatic facial recognition. I believe this is the project: [https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/)

> The name is derived from a type of World War I naval camouflage called > Dazzle, which used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual > continuity of a battleship and conceal its orientation and size. Likewise, > CV Dazzle uses avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs to break apart the > continuity of a face. Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the > identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like > symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an "anti- > face".

<comment><USER8> This is why in the cyberpunk genre there are theese crazy hairstyles :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They should point out the similarity to the natural phenomenon: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_(mimicry)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_\(mimicry\))

<comment><USER5> Non-mobile link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_(mimicry)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyespot_\(mimicry\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> isn't the main issue here that the classifier that's being attacked is looking for a single subject, not trying to identify the items in a scene? I'm fairly certain a classifier looking for all the items in a scene would still see the banana in the first example.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't you just add a few of these patches to the training set and teach networks to ignore them?

</comment><comment><USER12> How can I get fabric printed with adversarial patches all over it?</comment>


FileMaker 16 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.filemaker.com/products/whats-new <comment><AUTHOR> While I've outgrown the FileMaker platform a while ago, I always liked the idea of a very visual, fast and easy to grasp approach to database and application development.

With this version FileMaker finally opened up to external services, supporting JSON and communication to REST APIs via curl natively. Welcome and overdue features in my opinion.</comment>


What Causes Hunger? - <AUTHOR> http://www.wfp.org/stories/what-causes-hunger <comment><USER2> I'm missing some points:

\- Land grabs: Big investors buy agriculture land to produce cash crops for export, e.g soy beans to feed pigs.

\- Colonial past: Most land in 3rd world countries is owned by a few rich people. E.g. Namibia was a hunger country before 1990, but is now one of the biggest meat exporters after a successful land reform.

\- Frankenfood: Monsanto and other big seed companies destroying the ability of farmers to grow their own seeds.

\- Food laws: One of the first things Bremer did after invasion of Iraq was to install US food laws, basically forbidding people to sell traditional food on the market. Forcing them to buy hybrid seeds.

<comment><USER3> Could you expand on how "Frankenfood" is causing hunger? From what I've read from the farmers that use Monsanto seed, they claim that their crops' yields are more predictable. This claim is backed by recent research: [http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/02/do-gmo- crops...](http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/02/do-gmo-crops-have- lower-yields)

<comment><USER2> e.g. [https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+india+suicide](https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+india+suicide)

The base problem is: Once your neighbor starts to use Monanto and round up, the ground water and soil is poisoned and you need to grow resistant crops also. Using Frankenfood crops means that you can no longer grow your own seeds. You have to buy the expensive seeds, the expensive herbicides, and you end up in debt and poverty.

You can also no longer do classical crop rotation, once you start poisoning your field with roundup. The result is a monoculture that calls for even more fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides.

This is not limited to Frankenfood, but also to hybrid plants. So we come back to food laws, who only allow to sell crops of certain strains. Those strains that are sold by big seed companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to say it, but that list doesn't include the most obvious cause of hunger.

_People who reproduce when they don't have a reasonable expectation of feeding their offspring._

It seems like a whole class of possible solutions to the problem of hunger are ignored with such a tunnel vision approach to the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most people have children with the expectation of being able to feed them, and then things change.

You claim it's the most obvious cause of hunger, but do you have anything to support that claim?

<comment><USER4> _Most people have children with the expectation of being able to feed them_

See already you're off base. Someone's individual expectation is not at all necessarily a "reasonable expectation". There are lots of gamblers in Vegas who expect to win big tonight... doesn't mean their expectations are reasonable.

 _but do you have anything to support that claim_

What, like statistical evidence? No. I don't have statistical evidence that my car is parked outside either, but I'll still take a chance on it by walking to the spot where I left it earlier.

<comment><USER5> "See already you're off base. Someone's individual expectation is not at all necessarily a "reasonable expectation". There are lots of gamblers in Vegas who expect to win big tonight... doesn't mean their expectations are reasonable."

How should people make decisions if they can't trust their own judgment? You're going to one extreme and saying "lots of people are unreasonable". Ok, great. Lots of people are also very reasonable.

"See already you're off base."

That's just a fancy way of starting off the conversation by saying "you're wrong". No, he probably just doesn't agree with _you_. You should stop trying to frame everything in this objective manner. It's actually really obnoxious.

<comment><USER4> _That 's just a fancy way of starting off the conversation by saying "you're wrong"_

Not pointing out when someone is demonstrably wrong in a discussion is as useless and futile as pretending to want to solve poverty and hunger but not addressing the core issue.

Discussing topics like this on the Internet is already fairly useless. No sense in making it worse with a bunch of disingenuous and logically incorrect validation of opinions.

<comment><AUTHOR> > demonstrably wrong

Your inability to demonstrate it has been noted.

<comment><USER4> Your insistence that this is even a discussion about statistics and proof or based on an article that isn't almost purely an opinion piece without statistics or proof is noted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, I'm giving you the opportunity to change my mind. I'm listening to you, and asking you to provide information that will change my mind.

You haven't done so.

That leads me to think that your first comment was a knee-jerk opinion with nothing to support it, and that you're continuing to defend that position because you "feel" it's correct, even though it could well be wrong.

Your weird insistence that it's right, even though you're unable to provide any evidence to support it, is odd.

I freely accept that the article I submitted is opinion - but it's informed opinion from people who work in this field. The article has links to other organisations who've published research on hunger, and the website for WFP contains a lot of their published research.

So, I'm faced with a multi-national multi-government agency with a lot of published research and many years of expertise saying one thing. And I have some random Internet commenter saying something else, and getting defensive when asked to supply any kind of citation for their claims.

At the moment I'm dismissing what you say.

But, like I said, I'm open to persuasion.

<comment><USER4> _So, I 'm faced with a multi-national multi-government agency with a lot of published research_

Riiiiight... like that means anything. Should it mean something that healthcare.gov is backed by the biggest government in the world yet is a piece of crap that many developers on HN could have done better on in their spare time over the last few years?

Should it mean something that these multi-national multi-government agencies have been talking about and spending huge amounts of money on "hunger" for many many decades and haven't made any progress? At what point does their extraordinary lack of success dissuade you from being such a big fan? My guess is never.

 _At the moment I 'm dismissing what you say._ _But, like I said, I 'm open to persuasion._

I'm sure you tell yourself that, but your credulity of a report because it's "multi-government" tells me that you're a believer in the mechanisms of the State regardless of common sense, their abject failures, and information contrary to that ideology.

If you were open to persuasion you'd be tremendously critical of the weak article this thread is based upon - regardless of whether or not you buy into my point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everyone who is interested in this subject I recommend the book(s) from Jean Ziegler. He is a former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article spends a lot of time blaming things that cannot be changed. There is only one thing that causes hunger; not enough food. It doesn't matter if America has so much food that millions suffer from obesity. Somewhere else, where it costs too much to send food from America, there are people with not enough food, therefore they are hungry.

And as we should all know, organisms under stress, breed. Therefore, anywhere that people are hungry, the population will grow faster than places where there is too much food. No matter how much food you give to these poor people, they will grow their population to once again blow the limit of the capacity of their corner of the world to supple them with enough food.

Whose fault is that? Part of the blaim lies with enlightened rich countries who sent so much health care to these deprived areas that their death rate could no longer maintain any kind of equilibrium. And some of the fault is with rich countries who sent luxuries that these poor people could not afford. And some of the fault is elsewhere and neither you nor I will be able to figure it out.

Best thing to do is to simply ignore this stuff. You cannot help and history shows that you are likely to just make things worse. If you really want to help then focus on yourself, your life and your community. Build a sustainable local lifestyle for yourself and show the poor deprived starving people that it can be done.

</comment><comment><USER8> ctrl+f 'overpopulation' 0 results.

Sure, let's just completely ignore the elephant in the room.

<comment><USER4> As you roll back the calendar, when in human history has lower population meant less per-capita hunger in the world?

<comment><USER8> Allow me to correct myself: s/overpopulation/high birth rates/g

Look at a map showing the countries with the highest birth rates, and overlay it with a map showing the countries with the highest rates of hunger. You won't find a lot of difference between the two.

<comment><USER9> You're making a pretty classic correlation/causation error here. I'm pretty sure that high child mortality and low economic prospects (e.g; conditions where many people are hungry) are considered to _cause_ high birthrates, as the parents attempt to maximise their chances of having some offspring to look after them in their old age.

<comment><USER8> The cause of the hunger is the simple problem of too many mouths to feed. The cause of too many mouths to feed is that infant mortality drops precipitously with the introduction of modern medicine, while family planning is a foreign concept or worse, actively demonized by the very missionaries who bring the aforementioned modern medicine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft to launch Windows 10x as a webfirst OS without local Win32 app support - <AUTHOR> https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-launch-windows-10x-web-first-os-without-legacy-win32-app-support <comment><USER2> I say don't bother with the legacy Windows application streaming functionality, which is baggage necessitated by the Windows brand, and use a new, different brand.

Call it Microsoft OneOS or something.

The inability of the iPad to run Mac apps never stopped it from being successful with its intended market, which happens to be the same market as this cheap Window 10X device. Same story for ChromeOS, which was basically just a web browser at the beginning and isn't much more than that now.

Now, if the iPad was called "Mac Touch," people might be pissed that it didn't run Mac apps. Branding often involves setting expectations.

"Windows" as a brand means "I can run pretty much everything"

Heck the Microsoft branding department is already lazy, e.g. naming Office 365 after the number of days in the year in which you'll be paying for your subscription - why not just pick a different mineral that's not Chrome and name their OS that.

Microsoft Quartz. Quartz OS. Copper OS. Pick one, sounds cool enough. Done, ship it.

Instead, Microsoft is confusing their customers with their as-always-terrible branding efforts. Now we've got Windows 10X, Windows 10 S Mode, and Windows 10 (Home and Pro, and Surface Pro X). It's nearly impossible for a layperson to understand what device does what.

Even if you manage to understand it, it's even harder to figure out why you'd buy half of these ideas. Why do I want S mode? Why do I want a future Surface product with two screens? Why do I want an ARM Surface Pro X instead of an Intel one? Why do I want 10X? Also, why are we talking about 10X publicly before a clear vision of what it's for is finalized?

<comment><USER3> They can name it "Windows RT 2".

That's pretty much what it is except now Edge is based on Chromium.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what that would mean for projects like Reactos or Wine? Would they become obsolete or would they be some haven for Win32 applications?</comment>


US Customs doubles down on OnePlus Buds seizure, citing Apple trademark - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/14/us-customs-doubles-down-on-oneplus-buds-seizure-says-they-violate-apple-trademark/ <comment><USER2> They will never admit they made a mistake and move on. It's insane.

It's not much different if they were to seize all mobile phones coming into the USA because they look like iPhone's, you know...rectangular with screens...

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking at the images, that don't even look _that_ similar. They're obviously trying to save face.

<comment><USER4> I wonder about this phrase -

> Far more blatant AirPods knockoffs are readily available on Amazon.

Does it imply this OnePlus buds are far less blatant AirPods knockoffs? But still "blatant AirPods knockoffs"? And so, it's like arguing with a highway patrol officer, "No sir, that one other car was driving much faster than I, why didn't you stop them first?"

I guess that's an unfortunate choice of words.</comment></comment>


Will you leave your job to join the sharing economy? - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/21/will-you-leave-your-job-to-join-the-sharing-economy/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. I wonder if doing this is a sustainable job market for people long-term.</comment>


Help with updating old submissions on HN - <AUTHOR>

Dumb question, how do I update all my HN submissions (bit the bullet and moved my blog from typepad to a domain/wordpress I own) <comment><USER2> It's an interesting question. Your best approach will probably be to have a redirect from typepad to your new domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the quick reply. This is what I am doing now <http://messel.typepad.com/> but the individual posts are going to come up blank

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll be transcribing some audio recordings and writing for a while. Will check back later in hopes smarter folks than I have a great solution for this problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> you can't. you'll have to figure out a way to redirect.

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe I can just delete the submissions? I was able to do that on reddit

<comment><USER3> i'd only do that as a last resort. there'd be some value even in just throwing up a link and saying "hey, i moved".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your help noodle. I'll just keep on trucking and submit new (topic appropriate) posts from now on. The blog is only a few months old so there aren't that many defunct links lying around. I put up a "Go to new site" message as suggested.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/ <comment><USER2> I love what Peter Saville was doing with his art back then, bringing industrial cues into places that both contrasted and chimed so beatully. I love his Power Corruption & Lies cover where he just adds the colour bar, so simple.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_Corruption_%26_Lies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_Corruption_%26_Lies)

If you look at the promo stuff he was doing for Factory Records in the late 70s and 80s it still looks great today.

<comment><USER3> I think Peter Saville possibly qualifies for the genius label.

If you compare the industry standard sleeve and poster designs of that time with his work for Factory, it's like getting visual communications from another world. (Literally, with the Unknown Pleasures art.)

He completely transformed the industry's approach to imagery - and I suspect that neither Joy Division nor New Order would have been nearly as successful without his iconic covers.

<comment><USER4> And for a long period, too: the covers for True Faith (1987) and Technique (1989) were still startling in their newness. (If I ever come into serious money I'm buying this: [https://fineartmultiple.com/buy-art/peter-saville- monarch-of...](https://fineartmultiple.com/buy-art/peter-saville-monarch-of- the-glen/) ...)

Worth noting that the pulsar image was actually found by Bernard Sumner/Albrecht, Joy Division's guitarist (and later New Order's singer), though of course Saville transformed it from found imagery to iconic sleeve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 4 years ago there was a similar story on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728124)

And I was bored or something back then and made a Python program that generates random pictures like it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729268) e.g. [http://imgur.com/PtkkESv](http://imgur.com/PtkkESv)

<comment><USER6> I like the next entry, My Number 1 Spring Cleaning Tip

 _" If you haven't used it in the past year, get rid of it. [...] chances are you probably won't use it this year, and the unlikeliness of utility will just compound year after year after year."_

[https://adamcap.com/2011/04/12/my-number-1-spring- cleaning-t...](https://adamcap.com/2011/04/12/my-number-1-spring-cleaning- tip/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's funny that just five years ago, the book "Unknown Pleasures" (by Peter Hook) used the same image on its cover with the claim that attempts to trace the copyright holder had been unsuccessful. When I saw it in a bookshop it seemed like a kind of dismissal of the scientific origins of the image: it was well known where Peter Saville had got it from, though beyond that perhaps the copyright was a mystery.

As far as appearance goes, a similar-looking technique for shading relief maps was invented by Kitiro Tanaka in the 1930s:

[http://www.mountaincartography.org/mt_hood/pdfs/kennelly2.pd...](http://www.mountaincartography.org/mt_hood/pdfs/kennelly2.pdf)

Original paper by Tanaka [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1785198](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1785198)

</comment><comment><USER8> In the film 500 Days of Summer, Tom (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wears a shirt with this design on it.

I have a similar shirt and had no idea what the design was. I know Joy Division, I was familiar with songs on the album, but had never actually seen the cover. My postman, a man in his mid-50s called me out one day, asking me if I was a Joy Division fan. I said yes and asked why he would ask that and he just pointed to my shirt. I assume he thinks i'm a tragic hipster now...

<comment><USER9> Joy Division fans were tragic hipsters before there were hipsters, yo. So, no worries. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is just nice to see how the creator of the image just loved to see his work being used there and did not instantly think about suing the band. Not something you would expect to happen nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER11> It has also recently inspired a ggplot (R) visualisation: [https://github.com/clauswilke/ggjoy](https://github.com/clauswilke/ggjoy)

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone noticed the _1337_ from the article?

> "Successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, CP 1919, are here > superimposed vertically. The pulses occur every 1.337 seconds."

<comment><USER13> Someone on intergalactic IRC is trying to contact us. 1.337, it's not Pi but it'll have to do for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://www.deathdollsnyc.com/product/depeche-mode-boys- don-t...](http://www.deathdollsnyc.com/product/depeche-mode-boys-don-t-cry- division-tee)

<comment><USER13> Is that deliberately Engrish style? A band name with the album title of a different band (The Cure are known for Boys Don't Cry, not Depeche Mode) with album art from Joy Division. Looking at that I felt my mind collapse in on itself.

<comment><USER15> [http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TQlmBXyC8JI/AAAAAAAAK4...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TQlmBXyC8JI/AAAAAAAAK4U/srrQ0kmkZlQ/s1600/how%2Bto%2Bpiss%2Boff%2Bnerds.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Such an iconic album cover. I know people who knew the cover/design way before they even knew who Joy Division was.

<comment><USER17> Never heard of Joy Division nor seen this album cover before.

<comment><USER18> A difficult thing to describe. Joy Division was a product of a man tortured by his internal demons. To me, their music was never really about the usual topics. It was about the a desire for a just (yet unattainable) world given the barbarism of everyday life. If you're fifty, it may be trite idealism but to a teenager in the 1980s who could see the shallowness of it all but could not express it, Joy Division was wonderful. And because of Ian Curtis' suicide, that added to the authenticity and romance of it. Of course suicide is never something to romanticize and is a painful tragedy that leaves family and friends with wounds that will never fully heal. The experience of an adult eventually override the idealism of youth.

<comment><USER19> > The experience of an adult eventually override the idealism of youth.

You don't have to override it completely. Some hold onto a bit of both. Things can still happen you wouldn't anticipate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I always thought it looked like Rutt-Etra synthesis, which often has similar "raster line" effect.

Original hardware (1972) w/ good example of the effect (2nd image down): [http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vidsynth/ruttetra/r...](http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vidsynth/ruttetra/ruttetra.htm)

Minimalist example of the effect: [https://imgur.com/E5tfUuQ](https://imgur.com/E5tfUuQ)

(webgl tool used to make that example): [https://airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/ruttetra/](https://airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/ruttetra/)

</comment><comment><USER21> TensorFlow's dashboard TensorBoard has a stacked plot visualisation inspired by this album cover:

[http://nerdyembeddedcomputers.review/hands-on-tensorboard- te...](http://nerdyembeddedcomputers.review/hands-on-tensorboard-tensorflow- dev-summit-2017/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Great album, Joy division is a legendary band.

</comment><comment><USER23> jim morrison split into two when he passed, one half became ian the other half became ted nugent

</comment><comment><USER24> This has been reinterpreted with cats, I saw someone wearing this T-shirt in Camden the other day.

[http://www.animalsyeahyeah.com/mens-c7/unknown-pleasures- cat...](http://www.animalsyeahyeah.com/mens-c7/unknown-pleasures-cats-t- shirt-p744)

<comment><USER25> I have, what I beleive to be a slightly better version of that, from here

[https://www.threadless.com/product/5040/Furr_Division/style,...](https://www.threadless.com/product/5040/Furr_Division/style,design)

<comment><USER26> The design has been "borrowed" by any number of firms. I have an O'Neill (surf gear) shirt with a version of it. And there was a Disney one with Mickey's outline in the waves.

It seems to have entered the under-mind, as being "that design with the lines" and few people know the origin any more.</comment></comment></comment>


Modified Gravity Theory Passes a Critical Test - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/modified-gravity-theory-passes-a-critical-test-20200728/ <comment><USER2> The Quanta article doesn't appear to address the Bullet Cluster, nor the dark- matter-rich dwarf galaxies.

Looking forward to having a gander at the paper itself.

Edit for context: the challenging thing for MOND is that ΛCDM explains a number of precision observables and phenomena at once. MOND and TeVeS theories can fit individual facts in isolation, but not the ensemble simultaneously. ΛCDM fits those facts with only a single extra concept. It sounds like this iteration claims to address the seminal observation one and one of the most- tightly constrained observables simultaneously. There are several others. Will have to read the paper before saying more.

<comment><USER3> I'm not positive that's true. I think the most challenging thing for MOND is that basically no one will touch it unless they already have tenure because it's a death sentence.

I saw Pavel Kroupa (big name in Milgromian gravity) present in Heidelberg (big concentration of Astro), at the time Volker Springel (author of widely used LCDM simulation code "GADGET") was there and Illustris simulation sets (LCDM major project) had just been rolled out. And Pavel basically got heckled (in a very erudite and respectable way, but constant interruptions from the LCDM majority audience).

But Pavel had one slide, I can't find it now, but it was like 72 different problems that LCDM had not solved (ok, 72 is an exaggeration; you can troll his website for mentions of a lot of them [https://astro.uni- bonn.de/~pavel/kroupa_SciLogs.html](https://astro.uni- bonn.de/~pavel/kroupa_SciLogs.html)).

And like, Pavel's a big boy, he has some of the most cited papers in all of astronomy, he's got tenure, and he's set, so he can take it and not care. But grad students / postdocs I imagine would constantly have their work politely ignored and get shunted into underfunded groups.

I'm just trying to say that LCDM has things it can't explain, and MOND has things it can't explain, but the amount of resources in each theory is seriously lopsided so LCDM can frequently "tweak" itself to solve problems that MOND just doesn't have time or resources to to the same (for example disk formation in LCDM models used to be impossible until they had the supercomputing resources for the resolution required, and they found that the feedback coefficient could a) not promote disk growth, b) promote disk growth, and c) destroy disk growth, depending on how much they cranked it up. That's NOT a triumph of LCDM making an amazing replication of the observation, that's some grad student in a lab with enough CPU to tweak a meta-parameter until it looks good.

Also the CMB is extremely tightly constrained... and multiple huge tightly- constraining studies, WMAP, PLANCK, Gaia, are more than 3-sigma outside of each other's results, so... perhaps too tightly constrained.

Edit: Found it, here is the great astronomical bloodbath of 2014: LCDM (Springel and Rix) vs MOND (Kroupa). Great watch. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPVGDXNSBZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPVGDXNSBZM)

<comment><USER4> My experience from MOND talks is that a proponent of MOND gets up, explains their theory, and then starts explaining how their theory explains the rotation curve of galaxies.

They're then confronted with a bunch of really basic questions from the audience: how does your theory explain the spatial spectrum of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background? Is your theory consistent with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis? Can your theory explain Weak Lensing measurements? How does your theory deal with the Bullet Cluster? The answer is then generally, "I'm not sure, but I'm working on it." That causes all the astrophysicists in the room to lose interest. Standard cosmology explains all of these basic observations with a minimal set of assumptions. If your theory can't or doesn't explain the most basic set of observations, and there's another theory that does, why should I care about your theory?

<comment><USER5> Imagine what proponents to heliocentrism such as Galileo had to face explaining their theory and how it explain a simplified elliptic orbit for the planets rather than the strange curly orbits known by geocentrists.

They'd be confronted with basic question from the audience: Why would things fall down if it was not the center? (That was before Newton) Wouldn't we see paralax in the stars (stars are much further away than what was believed at the time). Wouldn't we feel it if earth turns so fast? "Maybe that explains the tides" said Galileo (but it doesn't)

The previous model was also explaining the observations quite well at the time. Why should we care for another theory? (God works in mysterious ways.)

I'm not saying that MOND is correct. ("they also laughed at Bozo the Clown".) Just that the fact that there are some unexplained missing piece does not mean one should reject it so quickly.

<comment><USER4> Comparing oneself to Galileo is generally viewed as a sign of crackpotery, especially if it's used as a response to legitimate criticism.

> Just that the fact that there are some unexplained missing piece does not > mean one should reject it so quickly.

It's not just one missing piece. It's a whole series of basic properties of the observed universe. Most MOND theories are tailored to match one particular observation, but fail to match everything else. Until there's a MOND theory that matches a basic set of observations (like CMB anisotropies and the large- scale structure of the Universe, the ratios of abundances of the light elements, weak lensing measurements, etc.), MOND is simply uninteresting to most astrophysicists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Help me understand why this is so controversial in the scientific community. I'm neither a physicist nor do I study any other relevant fields, so I'm asking as a "layman" as it were.

A cursory search shows that "dark matter" hasn't been observed at any point in time. It looks like it's a sort-of mathematical placeholder for the "something" that's missing that we can't see (or can't see _yet_.) Am I correct in my understanding that these alternative theories are trying to prove that there's a way to explain these discrepancies without inventing something unobserved?

Why is that so controversial? To me, again as an outside observer, it feels so counter-intuitive to _invent_ a new type of matter you can't observe than to just say that your calculation is close but not right and to start over. Is it not a crutch?

If I were to take this approach into another field that has an equal amount of controversy where there is a huge gap in my proof, and say that the cause is an "unseen force" that I just invented to explain how my theory works despite the fact that I can't prove in any way that the key part of my theory exists, would I not be laughed out of a room? How did dark matter become accepted while being invented instead of observed?

(I hope my tone isn't coming off as mocking. I'm genuinely trying to understand without a lot of knowledge on the subject, and I don't intend to discredit the current accepted theory nor support the alternative ones, only to understand why the scientific community came to accept the one that is accepted.)

<comment><USER7> _> Am I correct in my understanding that these alternative theories are trying to prove that there's a way to explain these discrepancies without inventing something unobserved?_

I would say MOND is just postulating a different "unobserved" thing--an alternate theory of gravity, or an additional "field" that looks like an alternative theory of gravity, instead of dark matter. I don't think MOND has any advantage in the Occam's Razor department.

Or, to put it another way, the word "unobserved" is not quite correct. We have actual observations that can't be accounted for, as best we can tell, with our current theories of physics, without adding _some_ new element. Dark matter and MOND are just two different choices for what new element to add. Neither one can say it's not adding _anything_ new.

 _> Why is that so controversial? To me, again as an outside observer, it feels so counter-intuitive to _invent_ a new type of matter you can't observe than to just say that your calculation is close but not right and to start over_

MOND is not just doing a different calculation that is claimed to be more accurate within existing physics. It is adding new physics. See above.

"Starting over" would be something like finding errors in the calculations based on existing physics (GR and the observed distribution of visible matter) that, when corrected, removed the discrepancy between observations and theory. Nobody has done that, and the calculations based on existing physics have been checked every which way, so it seems highly unlikely that there is an error lurking there that hasn't been found.

 _> why the scientific community came to accept the one that is accepted_

My understanding is that MOND, in general, does not close the gap between observation and theory as well as dark matter does. The paper referenced in this article appears to be claiming that its version of MOND "catches up" with dark matter in terms of closing that gap. I haven't had a chance to read the paper in detail so I can't say how credible I think that claim is at this point.

<comment><USER8> Dark matter (at least any of the non cold baryonic matter and standard model WIMP candidates) adds new physics too it's just adds it in different field of physics that often is much less related to cosmology than gravity is.

<comment><USER7> _> Dark matter (at least any of the non cold baryonic matter and standard model WIMP candidates) adds new physics too_

I never said it didn't. The point is that _both_ MOND and dark matter add new physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The reason work on alternative theories of gravity is important:

We have one reality R, for which we have various possibly imperfect theories T(R) and a large set of possibly imperfect observations O(R).

For gravity, we know that general relativity doesn't perfectly match current observations -- GR(R) != O(R). Since R is the same in both sides, this is not supposed to happen. There are three ways to resolve this:

\- GR() is incomplete,

\- O() is incomplete,

\- both are incomplete.

Dark matter focuses on the second, MOND on the first. We shouldn't give up on any option until there's either a solution or a counterexample.

<comment><USER10> What observations differ from general relativity?

<comment><USER7> Observed galaxy rotation curves (the speed of rotation of stars around the galaxy's center as a function of distance from the center) cannot be accounted for using GR and the observed distribution of visible matter in the galaxies. You need to postulate some extra matter that is not visible ("dark matter") to account for the observed rotation curves using GR. That is the discrepancy that originally prompted physicists to postulate dark matter. Since then the same postulate has also been used to improve the match between theory and observation in other areas, notably our model of how the early universe evolved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's worth pointing out that modified gravity has less acceptance than even string theory. It's worth working on, as a somewhat plausible alternative to the standard theory, but it's not very likely to end up being correct. It's worth ruling out fully, though (the same can't be said of e.g. flat Earthism).

This particular work seems like adding on epicycles, or overfitting as you'd call it in machine learning.

<comment><USER12> To be fair, from the outside at least, a lot of string theory looks like adding epicycles as well.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that is a common view amongst most physicists.

<comment><USER13> I disagree, it's not a common view. It's common for physicists to think string theory might be empty theorizing, but it doesn't look at all like epicycles. With epicycles, you start with an existing model and than add complexity. That's not strings. Strings starts with something entirely new, that's already complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this level of math even possible... like... how are people hard-working enough to reach this level of understanding?

<comment><USER15> If the general hacker news sentiment is anything to go by, then it's just hard because of the archaic mathematical notation. If we could just use better notation then a simple mathematical bootcamp would make mathematics accessible to all the brilliant self-taught programmers as well /sarcasm.

<comment><USER16> If only those pesky physicist and mathematicians would name their variables correctly everything would become self-evident.

<comment><USER17> Newton, why do you want to name this the 6th dimensional electron-graviton interference coefficient? Just call it G for gravity!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Actually this is classical general relativity, the math is not particularly advanced. When I was doing Theoretical Physics I would have considered this paper "easy", at least relative to most papers on hep-th.I never believed in MOND and even this paper is not convincing, since the lagrangian is built ad- hoc rather than derived from a clean principle.

</comment><comment><USER19> Posting this here in case anyone finds it rehabilitating: [http://www2.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~dlw24/universe/](http://www2.phys.canterbury.ac.nz/~dlw24/universe/)

<comment><USER20> What has been the response to this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is the distribution of dark matter correlated to regular matter in a way that suggests one is more causal to the other than to itself?

</comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting work! Great to see people are still putting effort into alternative theories of gravity.

</comment><comment><USER23> The problem with MOND theories is they require the existence of a fifth force to account for the deviations of Newtonian gravity .

<comment><USER24> Isn't a cosmic-scale force much more likely than invisible untouchable matter that's almost (but not) everywhere?

<comment><USER25> You mean like neutrinos?

<comment><USER26> ... except that neutrinos are detectable. Kind of an important distinction.

<comment><USER27> We decided neutrinos almost certainly existed long before we could detect them.

<comment><USER26> This not the same; at the time when they were postulated due to mass defect in nuclear reactions, there was a reasonable mechanism of detecting them, if nothing else the principle of microscopic reversibility. With current dark matter there literally is no known way of detecting them that doesn't beg the question, and all of our attempts to identify them are literally "shots in the dark".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>