A Capitalist's Dilemma, Whoever Wins the Election - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/business/a-capitalists-dilemma-whoever-becomes-president.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> > The Fed has been injecting more and more capital into the economy because — > at least in theory — capital fuels capitalism.

Free markets fuel capitalism.

The Fed's market manipulation is abhorrent to pure capitalism; it throws the elegant system of free competition and trade horrifically out of balance.

<comment><USER3> I'm a libertarian and I love the free market and pure capitalism.

OTOH, the great depression made a strong case for an intervention by governments at the macroeconomic scale - if only to smooth out bumps that could certainly sort themselves out in the long run, but which could still be uselessly painful for tens of years.

Fiscal policy is IMHO wrong, but monetary policy is not that damaging, especially since it doesn't do much damage to real assets (like say gold)

<comment><USER4> The government helped create and prolong the great depression, from my understanding.

Great book on the subject: [http://www.amazon.com/FDRs-Folly-Roosevelt- Depression-ebook/...](http://www.amazon.com/FDRs-Folly-Roosevelt-Depression- ebook/dp/B000XUBEL6/)

"As already noted, major factors bringing on the Great Depression were the severe monetary contraction that the Federal Reserve presided over, unit banking laws that made it almost impossible for small-town banks to diversify their portfolios, high-wage policies that made it more expensive for employers to hire people, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff that throttled trade, and the 1932 tax hikes that took money out of people's pockets."

<comment><USER5> Banking, education and healthcare: all too important to be left in the hands of government, if for no other reason than they are too important to each individual to be left to the whims and ignorance of the general electorate and/or their representatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _It's as if our leaders in Washington, all highly credentialed, are standing on a beach holding their fire hoses full open, pouring more capital into an ocean of capital. We are trying to solve the wrong problem._

Perhaps this is the cause of the problem and not just a poor solution to the problem.

<comment><USER7> One issue people continually fail to grasp is that low rates are setting a low bar for capital investment. The result is shitty assets/investments/businesses.[1] People will only jump as high as the bar requires.

Think of the analogy of your Kid: Would you set the bar low and expect the kid to excel and get into Stanford? No. Thats now how it works. Without coaching, encouragement, benchmarking, and measurement, success is the exception not the rule.

Why is this so hard for DC to grasp? The empirical datapoint on this is clearly Japan in the 1990's. Ultra-low interest rates, and ultra-cheap capital might spur investment, but not <profitable> investment. Twice as much investment at 1/2 of the return on capital is not moving you anywhere.

That's a major part of the problem. USA have been facing this since the Greenspan stimulus following the Dot-Com crash in the early 00's.

_______

[1] This might work OK in a short run, of 6 months or a Year, but not over 3-5-10 years -- then you are talking entire capital investment life-cycles.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry but that seems to go again the currently admitted way the IS/LM model works <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS/LM_model>

A high interest rate means firms reduce their investment spending to avoid high interest payments ; or said otherwise rising interest rates lead to crowding out of private fixed investment.

Look at the IS curve on <http://macrotutor.weebly.com/2-is-curve.html>

(but I might be wrong - I'm quite new to macroeconomics)

<comment><USER7> _I might be wrong - I'm quite new to macroeconomics_

IS/LM and is not something that I would hang my hat on, here.[1] The reason is that the performance evelope of the firm must be considered micro- analytically. Ie, you need to take the perspective of the firm as a composite of capital investment projects. The aggregate value of the projects will be the value of the firm.

What impacts the decisionmaking of the firm? The spread between the cost of capital and the return on capital. For a fixed opportunity set of projects, a lower cost of capital will result in _incremental_ investment provided that capital is available and capital projects are available that exceed the cost of capital.

How does one get these projects? In the real world, these are "hunted" like big game. These projects are either invented by engineering (new widget X) or they are extensions of current product (widget Y) that are sold to new clients (Z) by sales or bus dev.

Internally, the "green light" for these hunting parties is a hurdle rate (set to an average expected return-average cost of capital=some threshold level). Because there is uncertainty[2] in these big-game hunting expeditions, over time they will converge to the least amount of work necessary to clear the threshold. So, by this logic, the quality of projects will decrease over time as the threshold of project quality declines.

On the other hand, the external environment will also drive down this potential. Other companies will be increasing their hunting parties, increasing competition and reducing the probability of success.

The combination of these two factors, will over time decrease the performance envelope of the hunter/gatherer parties (be they engineers or sales/bus-dev). The issue is that this decline may have persistent effects (ie, learning by doing cuts both ways.)

________________

[1] See my footnote earlier. The IS/LM model assumptions and general methodology will not capture the recursive and inter-temporal effects on the opportunity set of projects that will follow from interest rates approaching zero artificially (ie, by _fiat_ stimulus).

[2] And not insignificant cost.

<comment><USER3> Very interesting. The "innovation" during low interest rate periods would still happen, but as you say would be a lesser kind of innovation, and with lasting persistent effects.

This could explain the current divergence in the GDP per capita curve (usually log linear) if we follow the idea that a continuous pace of innovation is necessary.

A quick wolframalpha graphing of the GDP per capita curve and federal funds rate shows in fact that the GDP per capita curve has inflections when interest rate quickly fall or go below 2.5%.

But considering that interest rates are used by the fed to try and fix the economy and thus highly correlated with high and lows, I don't know if there is a good way to check for this hypothesis.

It could also have bad consequences, since it predicts that countries with low interest rate (currently EU, US, JP) will experience a lesser form of innovation with lasting effects - and unfortunately I don't see interest rates going up, not with the current focus on low inflation.

It still is a very interesting concept. I would like to know more. Is there a name for the model you are describing? (or some links)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Man this article has created all sorts of strange discussions. I've watched in on G+, Facebook and now here, and eventually they get soooo derailed talking about odd ball stuff not really related. I guess this means Mr. Christensen is onto something stirring up this much discussion.

One thing is common among all of the discussions which is the fixation on the tax proposal, but I think it was just a swag at what a policy might look like. I thought the real interesting part of his observation is that we are rewarding efficiency innovation too much and transformative innovation almost nothing. Try and develop a new power system not based on fossil fuels and see how much money people want to give you when your time horizon is 10-20 years out. It is the transformative innovation that recreates jobs for the jobs lost through efficiency innovation. I think that is the more important discussion over a regressive capital gain tax. Remember, most entrepreneurship would qualify for preferential capital gains taxation (except for ISO options oddly) because even the efficiency innovation takes more than 1 year to payback.

His tax would mostly affect wall street and the trader mentality: HFT, ETFs, day traders, etc. Remember people buying or selling securities don't actually give companies money directly. Companies only get more money when the issue more shares (or hold their own shares). If I buy a share for 1 day or 10 years the company doesn't benefit at all from my action.

If you look at the green energy movement a few years back was going to be very transformative, but VCs backed off when it was hard to turn a profit as quickly as information technology. It's that kinda of calculus that needs changing if we really want to do what Christensen is outlining.

</comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Part of this article reminded me of Jacque Fresco talks (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Fresco>). Well at least the part about efficiency and the effect on jobs. I am probably just being an annoying futurist but honestly, I don't see employment problems going away. Manned toll plaza's -hah. Self checkout - more and more common. Vending-machine-like fast food chains - not yet but wouldn't be a surprise. Self stocking shelves....blah blah blah. This will take a while but what are we going to do when low to mid skill jobs are less and less needed?

2\. I hate to be the consumerism party pooper but I think pointing out that it has been 60 months and we still are not at prerecession levels to be a good thing (ducking for cover). The reason we were at those levels is partly because we were operating unsustainably - spending more than we had (or at least more than we should if we want retirement savings) and giving out mortgages and loans to people that couldn't afford them (obviously there are many more reasons...).

<comment><USER10> There is no such thing as _spending more than we had_. The housing boom didn't consist of houses borrowed from a cosmic banker, whom we now have to pay. A nation cannot spend anything it doesn't "have" except by trading with other nations, and trade does not remotely explain the deficit.

As Friedman might say, monetary unsustainability is purely a monetary phenomenon. Even Keynesians know this and in fact that is why they tend to call for higher inflation.

<comment><USER9> _"The housing boom didn't consist of houses borrowed from a cosmic banker, whom we now have to pay. "_

We don't have to pay because people foreclosed and filed for bankruptcy protection.

 _A nation cannot spend anything it doesn't "have" except by trading with other nations, and trade does not remotely explain the deficit._

When did we start talking about the deficit and why are you suggesting the deficit is related to the economy collapsing/recovering (not saying it isn't)? To be fair, when I mentioned retirement savings I wasn't really thinking _public_ programs, probably should have been more specific.

I think many would agree that irresponsible loans were given to people that didn't have the means to pay them off, especially if (when) the adjustable rates adjusted. If housing prices don't get back to prerecession levels for instance - well I think thats a good thing. People where inflating the markets that they really had no business being in and banks gave them mortgages for these markets wearing a grin...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Capitalism is a system where bad ideas and companies fail. They aren't propped up by government.

The Federal Reserve has been shoveling money into large banks, literally lending trillions of dollars to them at times. Interest-free, of course. Then they lend it the US Treasury. Or leave it in their Federal Reserve accounts and collect interest there.

With such a sweetheart deal, anybody could make a profit. How is it these guys deserve bonuses?

One can only conclude that our government has been completely captured by these guys.

</comment><comment><USER12> An empowering innovation we can expect int he next 5 years is a shared value business model. One that will free up a lot of the corporate cash of today and bring better returns for business and society. Michael Porter of HBS has been working on an academic framework.

</comment><comment><USER3> The ideas are interesting, but there is one really big suggestion: "we should instead make capital gains regressive over time" - this is the single best idea I've heard recently!

It would encourage self-sustaining growth instead of fly-by-night profits, made in the present at the expense of the future - ie let the market sort out which sectors are more likely to bring better long term outcomes, considering the current focus on short-term is a negative externality that should be fixed by government intervention.

The author also properly acknowledges that increasing tax on the top 1% will only be redistributive, and increase consumption - which might certainly have better effects on consumption than leaving that money to the top 1% who might keep saving it while there is no current shortage of capital.

But that is only a mechanical property of the progressive tax scheme (lower tax for lower incomes), which makes the redistributed money more likely to be spent instead of saved (or paid in tax) - yet as the author points out trading consumption for consumption is pointless given the current state of the economy.

It's quite a interesting time.

It seems like the current situation is not just a demand shock which can be treated with Keynesians stimulus, but a new kind of shock based on a slowdown of the progress of technology - especially of the "empowering kind".

I wonder how this will make us reassume the traditional models such as Solow (technology drives long term growth) or Romer (technology and education), since it now seems there are different kind of technology and education that we should invest in - and some that we should consider as negative externality (like humanities - I have nothing against such studies, but they should not be on the taxpayer dime)

Introduction to Solow model : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_growth_model>

Introduction to Romer model : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_growth_theory>

<comment><USER13> > this is the single best idea I've heard recently!

Taxes aimed at changing behaviour are generally considered to be bad taxes.

Firstly, you may not like the outcome. Changing the entire time-and-capital structure of an economy is Serious Business and is going to be utterly unpredictable (if it were predictable things would be more stable. They're not).

Now, suppose it turns out to be a dumb decision. For example, say that some unforeseen feedback loop pops up between overdraft facilities and capital now sitting long-term because of tax changes. Suddenly overdrafts become even more difficult for small businesses to obtain and voila, new cash crunch.

Even if it does more harm than good, you've created a powerful constituency for it. Bond market funds, index funds etc are now all in favour of the new tax rules and will lobby with great vigour to keep it.

Now, this is true of every tax ever. But the reason economists counsel against taxing _for non-revenue policy purposes_ is because every tax has externalities that are unrelated to the direct incidence of the tax. You want to minimise those as much as possible.

Incidentally, the tax system already has consequences. For tax reasons that I simply don't understand, Australian corporations tend to be keen on paying healthy dividends and American corporations focus more on driving up the stock price.

> But that is only a mechanical property of the progressive tax scheme (lower > tax for lower incomes), which makes the redistributed money more likely to > be spent

The Australian experience has been that instead of spending the money, Australians are using it to pay down debt. Fine as far is it goes, but hardly the pump-priming that everyone was hoping for. There has been a seismic shift in debt/spending preferences across the population.

> but a new kind of shock based on a slowdown of the progress of technology

The long term trend of American GDP is stunningly linear[1] (edit: log linear -- actually exponential, I fail graph-reading forever); the only real deviation in the past century has been the Great Depression and WW2, a pair of connected economic earthquakes. We're talking about the 120 year period which included the widespread use of radio, television, highway systems, air travel, computers, the internet, modern medicine including antibiotics ... the list of literally _revolutionary_ changes that quickly become blasé is very long indeed.

Yet what we see today as monstrous fluctuations are within trend. Perspective matters (cue someone talking about the past 5000 years ...).

[1] [http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/27/the-ever- sharpening-c...](http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/27/the-ever-sharpening- crisis-of-capitalism/)

<comment><USER3> I don't think with the [1] graph that use a _LINEAR LOG SCALE_ for the Y axis we can talk about a _LINEAR_ growth of GDP per capita as you do.

It's more like an _EXPONENTIAL_ increase!!

Also, if you look at the trend, the recent decline is totally unprecedented - except maybe just before the great depression (the small cut over 1914) and during the great depression.

Considering the decline happened even with a very strong stimulus - and was _NOT_ fixed by the stimulus, I guess we have many reasons to be worried about this slowdown in the pace of growth (and technology).

A tax change may not usually be a good idea - just like a keyneysian stimulus looked weird and was even initially though to be damaging during the great depression.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. We are not there yet, but at least having a refreshing new proposal (regressive tax based on the duration investment spending is kept) is IMHO valuable, if only to have another tool we can use besides the traditional "progressive tax+redistribution to increase consumption".

BTW the Australian example you give is quite interesting. May I ask you for some links ?

<comment><USER13> Links to what?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What are some empowering innovations that we can expect to see developed in the next few years? The only one that immediately came to mind for me was 3D printing.

</comment><comment><USER13> If I may use a single data point, US fiscal and monetary policy is broken. Compare the US experience with Australia: [http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/29/time-enough-for- succe...](http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2012/10/29/time-enough-for-success/)</comment>


The Westinghouse Atom Smasher (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/strange-story-westinghouse-atom-smasher-180961515/?no-ist <comment><USER2> I'd never seen this one before, but the history of accelerators is quite interesting.

In the Boston science museum there is a working tandem Van de Graaff generator with domes large enough that a lab was set up in each one to do experiments with particles flying through a tube between them.

Radio frequency linear accelerators were built with many electrodes that were much smaller, but were still limited by their length.

The cyclotron was an elegant solution that uses a uniform magnetic field to guide ions in a circular trajectory through the acceleration region of the same electrodes many times.</comment>


Osborne 1 vs. iPad 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.stormdriver.com/blog/the-tech-archive-30-years-of-mobile-computing/ We pit Osborne 1 against iPad 2 to see how far we went in last three decades of portable computing. <comment><USER2> And yet, you could save things up to an external device, unlike iPad2 -_-

<comment><USER3> That's true. The iPad and iPhone are the first of a new breed of computer.

Just imagine showing someone from that time an iPad with Dropbox's magic. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a KayPro II, it was awesome! I remember playing Hunt the Wumpus, Adventure, and some run and jump game made out of ascii art.

</comment><comment><USER5> Code bloat's real! I did nice games on a PDP-8 in 4K in FOCAL, and wrote a 2-image swapping wargame on the KayPro II in SBasic in 64K. We also ran 16 users on a 4Mb Vax-11/730. Times change, but man, we've moved a bit to the left on the space/time tradeoff line...

<comment><USER6> Compute time, measured in ops performed, hasn't exactly stayed constant, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will never forget that video RAM started at location 61440 on the Osborne 1.

I should forget, but I won't.

Googling that number reveals various BASIC sources--where's the Osborne 1 emulator?

Here's one more difference: the Osborne 1 was AWESOME. ;-)</comment>


Polymail: A simple, beautiful, and powerful email client for Mac - <AUTHOR> https://polymail.io/ <comment><USER2> Why do I need to "sign up for the beta"? Why do people think this is the cool trendy thing to do? Let us have it or let us know when it's finished. I don't need to know about it now.

 _Are they fishing for a buyer?_

<comment><USER3> Its the same reason why bouncers out the front of clubs only lets certain folks in. It creates exclusivity, regardless of whether it is warranted or not. For me, it is a crappy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does it work with Enigmail? (OpenPGP...)

For me, GPG is an integral part of working with email.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using the alpha of Polymail for a few days now, it definitely exists/works and is actually pretty awesome.

</comment><comment><USER6> How can it tell when my mail has been read?

<comment><USER7> I am sure you will use their server(s) somehow ("added value service"). Yet another email client that is more than what it seems. Of course, all speculation.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Fast suffix arrays in Python - <AUTHOR> https://louisabraham.github.io/notebooks/suffix_arrays.html <comment><USER2> There are much faster SA construction algorithms than skew (check out divsufsort). The O(n) algorithms using induced sorting are also likely much faster than this work. The constants of recent O(n) algorithms are very low.

here a link for some state-of-the-art benchmarks of non-parallel SA construction algorithms: [https://github.com/y-256/libdivsufsort/blob/wiki/SACA_Benchm...](https://github.com/y-256/libdivsufsort/blob/wiki/SACA_Benchmarks.md)

there also now exist linear speedup parallel SA construction algorithms.

<comment><USER3> Hi, do you have some pointers for "linear speedup parallel SA construction algorithms." ? Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, sorry, I don't have anything in particular. However, it seems that [http://snnynhr.github.io/ParallelSuffixArrays/](http://snnynhr.github.io/ParallelSuffixArrays/) contains interesting algorithms and links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there another implementation we can compare this with?

Kind of crazy to say that this is fast without any comparisons with anything else. So far I've been using suffix trees from here: [http://www.daimi.au.dk/~mailund/suffix_tree.html](http://www.daimi.au.dk/~mailund/suffix_tree.html)

<comment><USER5> Article seems to be mostly about efficient, not fast.

<comment><USER4> "Suffix arrays : How to compute them fast with Python"

The assumption is it's fast in Python without using Cython etc. My intuition says that looping and iterating in Python is slow. It seems like a great reference implementation, but I don't think anyone should use it if there are implementations that are (possibly) orders of magnitude faster.

I guess my bigger issue with this is that in many cases it's much more time efficient to just drop to Cython earlier on instead of fighting with the language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When i was doing a derivation of LZ compression using suffix arrays i used induced sorting. Here is a good overview: [http://zork.net/~st/jottings/sais.html](http://zork.net/~st/jottings/sais.html).

Also i think Doug's C implementation of MM suffix array is worth mentioning : [http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/sarray/](http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/sarray/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool page! It would be really great to have the code shipped in a single file so that people can use it!

I love Jupyter notebooks because 1) they are beautiful 2) if you download them, you can play :)

Doug's implementation seems indeed really fast.

<comment><USER6> It's not mine. Sorry if my comment gave that impression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone remember "sary"? It was doing suffix arrays 17 years ago. Last update was in 2005.

[http://sary.sourceforge.net/](http://sary.sourceforge.net/)</comment>


Ask HN: Leave job in covid19-times to start new business - <AUTHOR> Hello! I started working a side project 5 months ago, it was just for fun, motivated by a serious injury in my ankle. Today I see it could become a good profitable company. In any other circumstances I am pretty sure I would leave my job and give it a try.
However, this Covid19 global crisis might be changing everything, I am worried of leaving a good job, that pays well every month, and later having problems to find a job just as good.
I am 26, no kids.
What would you do? <comment><USER2> maybe validate your idea first. Do some user study to be sure

<comment><AUTHOR> I have talked with couple of companies, and they are willing to pay, I would say there are good chances this could work, now the question is, even if you validated the idea, would you wait and see what happens with the current crisis? or you would just do it?

That's my dilemma:)</comment></comment>


Goodbye Facebook. - <AUTHOR> http://techsavvybutterfly.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/goodbye-facebook/ <comment><USER4> Facebook will struggle to make the next leap (IMHO, of course) because there's a disconnect between how users want to use it, and how Facebook wants/needs you to use it.

Outside of the sub-group of individuals who thrive on sharing every aspect of their life, most people want Facebook to be a fancy email. There's all your friends; you can talk with them and literally see what they're up to . And to be honest, the platform is great for that.

Facebook, on the other hand, needs you to be an information sharing and data providing machine, talking about brands and products, all while doing whatever they can to entice (or trick) you into putting your information in the public domain. They want to you be connected with _everyone_. People are learning that's a lot of work.

The problem is that the more Facebook pushes the latter, the worse the former -- the user experience -- _has_ to get. Nobody wants to stare at ads and feel like they're being "watched" (by both Facebook and other connections) while they "engage" with friends. As the author discovered...it's odd.

<comment><USER5> This is probably a generational thing, but I don't care about being watched. If I am, that information doesn't go on Facebook, in an email, in a text, and perhaps even not in a phone call.

Facebook is getting impersonal without a competent list/circles system. I find myself texting or messaging content to people more than posting it on my wall because I want to be selective about who views it.

Sometimes these are stories about the cute girl I talked to at Starbucks or a service I'm loving. Sometimes it's a personal story with little branding value. But I naturally have both types of conversations and so don't see the mutual exclusivity between encouraging conversation and getting data.

Similarly, the problem with friending everyone goes away with a decent lists/circles concept - I add a lot more people on Google+ (granted, I don't post _anything_ there. But I'd like to).

<comment><USER6> I'm seeing similar things on Facebook. A group of my friends is in a Facebook group that was originally intended for a business purpose. It is still used for that, but we also frequently post things there that we want to share to a small audience and not broadcast to all Facebook contacts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For all of you wondering _"Can I really give up Facebook?"_ the answer is an emphatic "Of course, stupid." You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes.

The other day someone sent me an e-mail or text (I forget) to invite me to an event. They knew I had abandoned Facebook and wanted to make sure I was included. I felt slightly honored that they would go "out of their way" to include me, and it was much more meaningful than the average Facebook invite- all event listing.

Have you ever met someone you hadn't seen in a while, and they ask you what you've been doing, and you get a plethora of different reactions as you explain the ups and downs of your recent adventures? You don't get that if they're on Facebook. Human interaction is based on communication, and Facebook is not communication. It's the Reader's Digest version of The Truman Show.

Maybe I am a luddite. But what i'm fighting against is the replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology. Maybe someday soon, Google Glass will become so ubiquitous that we'll all watch snippets of other people's lives instead of status updates, and we'll never have to live life on our own again; we'll just live through someone else.

<comment><USER8> >the answer is an emphatic "Of course, _stupid_."

Ignoring your patronizing, insulting tone for a bit, somehow I doubt it's that easy for most. If you're addicted to something (and I mean really, truly addicted), and it has negative consequences on your life, the answer is always "Well just stop it doing it, then". However, people do not work that way, and it's at the very least naive to assume it's that simple.

>You got along fine before it existed and you'll forget about it _once you're not refreshing your feed every 10 minutes._

Applies to Twitter, email, SMS, basically any communication method ever. The fact that becoming addicted to a communication medium can have a negative impact on your life is not a valid argument against said communication medium, because it applies to all of them.

>Facebook is not communication.

What would you call it then!? It's a platform where you share and talk with friends. How is that not communication?

>replacement of emotion and social interaction with technology.

If you've never been emotionally impacted by a social interaction which did not occur with the person standing right next to you (i.e. via technology), I daresay you are either leading us on, or are not much of a communicator to begin with.

<comment><USER7> Any bit of information can make an emotional impact, if it's meaningful to you. Maybe you learned that your whole family burned alive via morse code. Doesn't really matter how you got the information, you got it. And you'll probably have an emotional response. That isn't what i'm talking about at all.

I said _replacement_ of _emotion and social interaction_ with _technology_. It's the removal of the human element that troubles me. When people stop reaching out to one another, and instead reach out to a plastic widget. When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly punching out comments on data streams, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction. Facebook is stripping away our humanity.

The simplest example is the occasional comment-box-flame-war you'll see when someone posts something about race, religion, sex, politics, etc. Total strangers haranguing your friends because they decided your status update's comment box was a nice place to have a pointless argument. It's made worse by the vagueries of the internet and the invincibility of the internet.

Email and text don't work the same way, and aren't a threat to human interaction in the way Facebook is. Twitter is similar, though, which is why I also deleted Twitter.

<comment><USER8> >When instead of sharing, laughing, and crying together, we take, laugh, and cry in a room, alone, our thumbs and index fingers hurriedly typing out replies to communication, missing vital clues and skipping over the common human courtesies we learn and use in the course of physical interaction.

You say "human courtesies", I (and others) say impediments to effective communication. Think of the average phone call. Think of how much of that is completely needless and only dictated by tradition as opposed to any real informational, emotional, communicative, or any other value.

And if you can't look past the medium to see the person on the other side, there's not a whole lot I can say on that. My BF on the phone vs Skype vs Facebook vs Twitter. It's all the same person, all their communique are special to me, medium regardless. In fact the textual ones have a benefit - <USER2> can easily retrieve those later.

Who really uses Facebook to the exclusion of meeting in person?

>Facebook is stripping away our humanity.

Such hyperbole.

>the negative consequences ("lack of pictures and status updates") are not nearly as broad as addiction to most other things in life.

You realize there is such a thing as mental addiction, yes? Your brain chemistry doesn't have to have been impacted by chemicals to be addicted to something.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to continue this discussion but it's verging on pointlessness. I don't know how to describe the immense value that talking to someone has over making a comment on a status update.

I guess, try to imagine yourself in a state where you cannot move any part of your body but your eyes. Your body is slumped into a mattress for so long that there's a permanent dent in it. You can not hear, you can not talk, but luckily technology has progressed to such a state that you can project text through some technological medium onto a computer. Facebook is your only connection to the world you knew.

After years and years of existing in this state, one day you are miraculously cured. Do you think you would still find a phone call to be an impediment to communication at all? Maybe, maybe not, depending how comfortable you had become with your new world. But I know what would be important to me. I'll take a human conversation over text, every time.

<comment><USER8> I fail to see how this contrived situation applies to the majority of the world who are not paralyzed, deaf, and bedridden.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh boy another internet "experiment" when someone gives up $technology and ends up saying absolutely nothing in their post. I sure do love reading these pretentious pieces of "intellectual" prose.

In fact I shall start an "experiment" myself to see if replacing every instance of "experiment" in these kind of articles with "controversial decision" to see if they read better. I mean it's as if people use the word "experiment" to justify being avant-garde.

Except in this case it's not even a controversial thing. People are leaving facebook for tonnes of reasons (fad has died, not finding its uses any more, don't want to be tied with a system that hoards personal data and sells them off to companies etc). Leaving Facebook isn't an edgy thing to do; not before and not now. Anyone I knew that announced that they're "leaving facebook" end up being rather smugly obnoxious when tech news headlines say "facebook did some things that people don't like. boooo facebook!" saying they "knew all along" and they were obviously smarter and more superior than the regular "tech weenie" still on their facebook.

We all know what the result of this "experiment" is going to be. "My life was significantly improved thanks to not using facebook. Just as I thought! Aren't I clever?". There's no point denying it because that's what they're going to say. Just like I said I'll replace "experiment" with "controversial decision". I already know that I'm going to say "Nope. The posts were not better at all. Told ya!" because I know that when it's something I dislike in the first place I'm going to have a visceral reaction to hate it rather than say doing an ACTUAL experiment which doesn't have this cognitive bias.

And I'm right, am I? I mean I'm not WRONG or something? Please someone validate my beliefs which I portray on the internet. I desperately need this!!!

<comment><USER10> Maybe that's how it came off, but if we look past the "look at me and my controversial decision masquerading as an experiment!" layer, and focus on his reasoning behind the decision: can you relate at all? I can.

"Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook" is one of the phrases I've found myself and my friends saying over the past couple of years, and sometimes I don't like hearing it, even from my own mouth.

Nevertheless, announcing it publicly as an "experiment" - it's debatable whether this has any value or point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > I want us to talk. I want a personal email. I want to find a way to share > photos in a way that encourages us to talk about them with each other.

Surely you can do this with or without Facebook.

Maybe I'm a unique snowflake but Facebook to me is exactly the opposite of that: it's a way to give a quick (often meaningless) insight into my life, what I'm thinking or what I'm doing. It's a way to share something that _maybe_ someone will be interested in, but probably not. If I share something to Facebook it's not because I _want_ all my friends to see it, it's because I think those that _might_ see it _might_ find value in it and it represents what I'm doing/thinking/enjoying. If I want someone to see something or engage with me in conversation I send them a message.

Facebook isn't a replacement for "normal" communication between friends, it's an extension. The only reason anyone would want to see complaints about someone's life falling apart is the same reason people watch train wrecks of car crashes. They don't _care_ about the individual, they care about the spectacle. Using any one->many communication platform for complaints about life seems misguided.

Maybe <https://everyme.com/> would fill the void he has in his life.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. If it replaces anything, it's because it is more efficient at it. This is all anecdotal, I know...

Since Facebook, my email inbox is almost devoid of "RE:RE:FW:FW" broadcast messages.

I still get plenty of email from family and friends, but they are more selective in what they send. Things that are personal, or detailed, or very specific to me.

I still use my phone a lot, but spend less time telling people how great (or not) my weekend was. If they want to know, they can look. If they want details, they call and ask.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As I see it, the seeds of this user's disappointment were planted as soon as she starting gaming the system: "my posts became more and more filtered as the 'Friend' list increased. Now, they were getting the facade, the highlights because I donned the 'happy' mask. My closer friends were still catching the true story through instant messaging, text messaging and phone calls..."

The faint echoes of Gödel and Turing in the back of my mind say: no social algorithm can ever optimize its results to take into account how people will modify their behavior in response to the algorithm itself.

<comment><USER14> I would just like to say that that has absolutely nothing to do with anything by Gödel or Turing. There definitely can exist machine learning algorithms which continually adapt, and I see no technical reason why you couldn't try and model human agency as well. The work by Gödel and Turing you're thinking of is about _formal_ systems such as logic or computer programs, and while it is very common for people to turn (i.e., abuse) their results into a metaphor with seemingly broader implications, this is actually a mistake; their proofs simply don't hold under those more general circumstances.

<comment><USER13> andreasvc: AFAIK, there is no program in existence today that can successfully model "human agency" (as you put it). Wouldn't that require major breakthroughs in AI?

And my understanding from chatting with friends in the fraud-detection space is that, while current state-of-the-art machine-learning systems can successfully adapt to the data they obtain from users, they cannot adapt to users learning to game or 'route around' the system -- at least not without programmer intervention 'from above.'

The link to Gödel and Turing I saw is that solving this problem without intervention 'from above' would require a computer program that can successfully model itself as it interacts with humans, but then we run into those two guys, no?

<comment><USER14> Yes I see the superficial resemblance with Gödel and Turing, but it's not more than that. The reason I insist on that is because the value of their theorems lies in the fact that they have been mathematically proven, and the proof only holds in very particular conditions. Basically, a system that is strong enough to prove statements about arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. This hypothesis about the difficulty of certain machine learning tasks is a conjecture, at best. I don't think you could prove it, and if you could, it would look very different from the incompleteness proof. I think it has to do with certain AI problems being hard, but this is a rather vague notion; perhaps we simply lack certain concepts or mathematical tools. The important thing about the incompleteness proofs is that that is completely ruled out: given the right formal conditions, certain things are absolutely impossible to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My problem with fb and the reason I don't use it is simple: principal. I understand the model, and oblige with google (though not g+ as it is pretty quiet in my neck of the woods). But to not only give them the value of my data but also have them go around changing things like registered email without so much as a heads up is a slap in the face. It's like a conceited bus monitor that just goes ahead and "does what's best for me". I'm an adult; I know what email address I prefer to use.

Not only that, but the utter lack of transparency is concerning to say the least. There is this monstrous set of data--PII--that this company holds and who's to say the bus monitor doesn't all of a sudden decide that's it's best for me if they provide this data to Experien. Or to the justice dept.

The real problem is that people are addicted to distraction. Fb offers this droves. So much so that not only are people more than willing to hand over their data, they are willing to hand it over to someone who thinks you don't even deserve to know when they make sweeping changes to which parts of that data are displayed to the world.

/rant

<comment><USER16> I saw the email thing as a non-issue - if you're looking at my info on FB, then the easiest way to contact me is _on FB_. It doesn't bother me that people aren't referred to my Gmail account instead.

<comment><USER15> Again, it's the principle of it--have the decency to tell people what's up. Same applies for all the privacy and other changes that have happened un- announced and un-explained, not just the email change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Aside from the fact that this post is mostly pointless, it's also totally misinformed.

The OP started off by stating his reasons for dropping FB in this "experiment".. namely losing touch with the people for which he originally signed up under.

But he clearly doesn't engage with them if he's not seeing their updates.

Your social graph needs fine tuning. It's like any good bayesian filter, it learns over time what interests you. You can of course give it a push in the right direction by putting people in acquaintances, or hiding specific people from your timeline. (People in your acquaintances don't show up as often in your newsfeed).

This post just shows that you most likely don't understand the full feature set of Facebook and how to best optimize your social graph (not that this is your fault). Facebook has some of the _best_ machine learning for figuring out what is relevant to me. I'd probably argue that you click on too many memes and don't interact with your friends as much if this is what it is serving you.

Don't drop Facebook, just learn how to use it. I personally don't use Facebook for interacting with that many friends. I have about 96% of my friends as acquantiances. I have a small set of about 10 people as friends, and I subscribe to about 100~ people. My newsfeed is so rich with really good content.

<comment><USER18> I don't want to 'optimise my social graph'. Especially given it used to work properly and feed me the relevant content that _I_ wanted about a year ago.

You can try defend the social graph, how much Facebook has done to improve it and so on, but for a lot of people it doesn't actually achieve what it used to, and that's an issue.

<comment><USER19> Isn't the fact we add too many contacts the core issue ? And then it turns out that it's easier to look at funny stuff posted by anyone than diving emotionnaly into the life turmoils of our real close friends ? I firmly believe the simple solution is to have more than one account.

<comment><USER18> I know people with multi-accounts, and multi-hundreds of friends accounts and they all say they're annoyed by how irrelevant most of the content is by default even with as few as 30-50 friends on an account.

<comment><USER19> I have ~60 contacts and I don't suffer from that effect. Doesn't mean I don't believe you though, as I know I made sure to force everyone's updates.

<comment><USER20> I have 20 and even then most of it is muted. I think it's the platform and the culture that the service creates which give rise to hiding stories and unsubscribing from people's feeds.

Either that, or I just don't care for random, short-form content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well the OP is right about one thing: Facebook has become less personal.

I regret accepting old high school/college friends (who I haven't' seen in 25 years), army buds, and family members I didn't even know I had.

Now I post, maybe once every 2 weeks. Usually something safe - like about the current game I'm playing. I don't dare get personal on FB now.

<comment><USER22> "I don't dare get personal on FB now."

The irony.

<comment><USER23> Indeed - the more 'connected' we are, the more socialized we're forced to be. Facebook is not the third place simply because there are too many appearances we're have to maintain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've gone "old school" (trying to connect to people in 'old fashion' ways) on many somewhat prolonged occasions and it doesn't work. It's a reflection of society not my particular grouping of friends.

I spent a year writing many handwritten letters. People loved receiving them but seldom, if ever, returned the favor. I try and try again to meet with my friends to catch up (ie, going for coffee). Almost never happens, and when it does it's a chore to actually set up. Instead, it has to be an 'event' and it should be 'social'. I text my friends and they respond rather quickly...because I know if I call, many times they don't answer.

Of course, all this means is that the LCD is either me or society.

<comment><USER24> I think it's a rational trend. Our direction has been towards more "omniscient/passive" forms of information, where you can update at your own pace, and others consume that information optionally. Doing this is cost- effective and allows people to prioritize their contacts by reading their feed occasionally, rather than by doing "pavement pounding" to make calls and arrange dates.

In doing this we miss out on some deeper conversations, but I think we gain on balance because it allows people to _choose_ which conversations they want to pursue. That's the key thing here - if you aren't feeling a benefit from socializing, you aren't motivated to do it. Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that most people are finding each other boring, even if they're friends...

<comment><USER20> "most people are finding each other boring, even if they're friends..."

this kind of frightens me, even though I lean towards introversion.

<comment><USER25> I more than "lean" towards introversion, and this doesn't really _frighten_ me; it makes me a bit sad, that's all. But I doubt it's a new observation. I suspect most people have always found most other people boring much of the time, even if they are friends. It's just more evident now because people have more alternatives for spending their time that fill a need for "socializing" without requiring direct in-person interaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The anecodte the poster gives is spot on and huge. There have been many times I've thought "I wonder why I don't hear from this person anymore" and it was simply a matter of Facebook no longer prioritizing their posts in my news feed.

Just because someones post isn't "liked" or clicked on in some way doesn't mean it's not valuable. It's a passive form of communication.

I don't know if this is just my perception, and maybe Facebook doesn't prioritize things in the news feed. Regardless, it's a UX question that needs to be asked by their team.

<comment><USER27> But Facebook offers comprehensive controls that let you decide who appears on your news feed and who does not. You just need to use them.

<comment><USER28> Can you block sponsored stories? Besides, what good are controls if they keep 'evolving' and force you to actually maintain those settings. Settings and prefs should be fire and forget. I should not have to revisit settings in response to some new feature. For example, that jackass new @facebook email thing. Facebook is circa 1999 Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It seems more and more people are realising it: if you value your friendships, get off Facebook.

<comment><USER30> I wrote something about this several years ago, when I got tired of repeating the reasons I wasn't on Facebook. Here it is if you're interested: [http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation...](http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relationships)

<comment><USER31> I didn't make it through two paragraphs. Can't I read a sentence without being linked to three other web pages?

<comment><USER30> everything2 is weird like that. Ignore the links. They are a semantic graph pointer, not hypertext.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't know why everyone takes Facebook so seriously.

Well, actually I do but I don't want to dive into a long comment about how it's a voyeuristic, social panopticon and how easy it is to project your insecurities onto it. Well, I have a small and strange solution to staying in contact with your friends, do what I do: remove all your actual friends from your newsfeed.

When you see them, you won't already have eagerly instantiated things to talk about, you won't jaw off about some article they posted about the latest bath salt murder -- you'll actually catch up and connect in genuine conversation.

The site only has as much power as you give it, posting a long diatribe about how it has no power over you anymore because you deactivated is legitimizing its power over you.

</comment><comment><USER33> I have to agree with the sentiments here: it seems to me that my Facebook feed is much less useful than it was about a year ago. I don't know what they've done, but it's really not good.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not being on Facebook seems to be the new "I don't even own a tv" [http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly- mention...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning- he-doesnt-own-a-tel,429/)

<comment><USER35> Now that Facebook is going downhill (for me at least) I'm again actually contemplating the idea of getting a TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think people put too much emphasis on Facebook and what perceived problems it is 'suppose to solve' in their lives. You get out of it what you put it into it, just like anything else (mostly). If you don't feel connected with your friends, it's not FB's fault. FB to me isn't designed to make my connections with friends stronger, it's designed to keep lingering friendships going.

On a side note, why is it so important to declare that you are no longer using or on Facebook. This isn't limited to the OP either. I've met people in real life, who take great pride in not using FB anymore. I find it in the tech & podcast world too. It's a strange type of snobbery, between 'those in the know who aren't on facebook' versus the 'sheep who are on facebook'.

Well, I am no longer using brand name nasal spray. It wasn't fulfilling my life I like I thought it was supposed to. I used it like the bottle says too and while it does what it says it's supposed to, it's not what I want.

<comment><USER37> Oh, thats easy. Because there is a huge group of people that will view you as "off the norm" if you don't use Facebook. Which is snobbery as well. Every time i ride the bus, I hear the word "Facebook" at least once. So, the thing itself is a hot topic, so why not talk about it, even if you are not using it?

Your nasal spray, however, is not a hot topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Many of the complaints could be resolved with more transparency on Facebook's part. The frustrations seem to be generally focused on managing communication: incoming and outgoing, an issue of curation.

The problem is, despite Facebook having many tools to calibrate one's communications, Facebook is still a blackbox. We click the appropriate Account Settings radio button and like the good scientists we are, wait to see what happens. The fact of the matter is, we are pulling a lever and hoping it is attached to some mechanism on the other side.

The same is true of Google and SEO.

Odd that obfuscation is the hallmark of our internet experiences.

</comment><comment><USER39> Facebook is defective by design as a social network. It's for profit driven, privacy abusing and etc. and etc. It's a pity that it became a virtual monopoly. Same bad as happened with Windows on the desktop.

</comment><comment><USER40> I really like the "Share to Facebook" button at the end of the post.

<comment><USER41> Aren't they automatically added on every internet webpage?:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> So just because you don't have the proper settings on your news feed, you're quitting facebook altogether.

I agree that facebook is a lot less personal than it used to be. Personally, I rarely update my facebook status or stare at the newsfeed. I use facebook to connect with "friends" whose phone number or e-mail address I don't have and to join or create events.Those two situations are perfectly well handled by facebook.

<comment><USER22> Not just proper settings on his news feed. He also felt like he had to filter himself for propriety, and found little worth in the communication that resulted through that facade. That's not a technical issue, it's his valid personal issue. He's not the only one with that view of facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yes, I too had the similar problem. I was missing out on updates from my brother while being bombarded with stupid gifs. But as pointed out in another comment it's just one day I had to sit for an hour and put everyone who I don't speak on phone regularly as acquaintances. Problem solved!

It was a bit hard for me to do this though, nearly took an hour.. so here are two suggestions

1) Brute force: option to mark everyone as acquaintances in one go and then de-select the people back to friends.

2) More automated: Facebook should make a module where if a person allows the app access to the phonebook, it somehow recommends a list of people who are important to me based on my frequency of calling/speaking them offline. I know privacy conscious people would absolutely scream in horror so this is why it should be opt-in only.

P.S. 3) Oh and timeline still sucks. It is just too hard to read, there ought to be a way to going back to the simple news feed.

<comment><USER44> Facebook Purity

<http://www.fbpurity.com/remove-facebook-timeline.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> > _Conversing with a friend, I start to share a story I'd earlier posted on > Facebook. Since she didn't comment or "like" the post I guessed she hadn't > yet seen it. Instead, she cuts me short: "Yeah, I saw your post on > Facebook." And that was it. No dialog, no joy at conversing with each other, > just friends passively watching each other from a distance. I'm guilty, I've > done it too. We've become quiet ships, passing by in the dark silence of the > night._

Hmm, that's just a tough anecdote to use to make his point...it could be that that his friend is not much of a conversationalist with him.

But I admit to using FB to promote things that I don't feel like wasting real- time talking about...like projects or articles I liked...And everyone who's ever been on the receiving end of a mass-email is happy about that.

</comment><comment><USER46> Curation of social media is becoming a big problem that only occured within the last few years. Trying to solve it algorithmically with plus ones and likes and upvotes seems to work when the content is centered around a specific topic, but not something so general as your Facebook friends list or Twitter feed.

And you can't just deny people you know from being your friend on Facebook. It's rude. If you're ok with being rude, this doesn't apply to you, but the quality of my Facebook stream is not worth sacrificing my manners - not when I can get better content elsewhere without having to do so.

I haven't left Facebook, I just ignore it, because there's nothing interesting there. I don't want to clean it up when my accounts on Twitter, Quora, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange provide much more interesting content.

</comment><comment><USER47> "Conversing with a friend, I start to share a story I'd earlier posted on Facebook. Since she didn't comment or "like" the post I guessed she hadn't yet seen it. Instead, she cuts me short: "Yeah, I saw your post on Facebook.""

lol, my wife does this to me all the time :) (or should the emoticon be :( )

</comment><comment><USER48> The arguments are valid here, not one more 'Zuck I HATE YOU, remove timeline' when actually timeline does not make any difference unless you are stalking some one every day :))

I like the idea of the news feed filter algorithm. Just implementation is not the best. The only way to 'fix' it is just to change friend status (acquaintance, friend, close friend, etc). But... I am not sure if the algorithm can be improved actually. It determines whether to show or not by how much do you interact with some one on facebook (more or less). And it's the only way to determine whether you might be interested or not. Because believe me, you wouldn't be happy if you could see what everyone is posting if you have 200+ friends.

</comment><comment><USER49> "One evening, over pizza and wine she's telling me about a breakup and a poem she posted. I never saw the poem. When I visited her Timeline I realized she had been posting every day and it never once showed up in my Newsfeed. Instead I see a photo of someone I don't know; gliding down my Newsfeed simply because one of my friends "liked" it and the original poster doesn't have their privacy settings in place."

Aye, totally agree. The day Facebook launched EdgeRank was the day Facebook started it's decline. In fact, there's a pattern that happens to companies that try and "assume" what their users want to see.

</comment><comment><USER50> These posts are pretty common I feel in HN. Every time it just comes down to FB gets harder to use. I have a Close Friends tab and I put my close friends in it. That's it.

I "Like" some pages but you can easily click on that drop down to unsubscribe.

FB is pretty flexible on what content you want to appear in your feed and sometimes there are surprises but you can pretty easily scold it with a few button clicks and it'll fix right back up. Works for me. I understand there's a need for it to just work without the use of any interaction but then you'd lose a lot of features if you had that.

</comment><comment><USER51> I've been on the fence about quitting Facebook for a while.

On one hand, it feels like junk-food-friendship: it feels like you're connecting and communicating, but in reality the time you spend scrolling lists on your phone could be spent with something far better: closing the FB app and calling a buddy.

On the other hand, so many people use FB that it's tough to completely pull away from it. It's where my generational cohort shares photos, so I can't fully walk away unless I want to miss out on the photos from last week's camping trip, etc.

</comment><comment><USER52> I have taken about 2 weeks of Facebook fast. It was great. You are more peaceful. Their is no guilt about not being able to do all the things that you should to be doing. You save time. You have more intense face to face or phone conversation with your friends.

I am back on Facebook because it is easier to connect to future-to-be-friends. You connect on Facebook and may be become good friends.

I plan to slowly wind Facebook down and eventually leave it for good.

</comment><comment><USER53> So this is exactly the problem Google+ was designed to solve.

Don't want your entire friends list to see a post only share with with a specific circle.

Don't care to hear useless banter ? Don't include a person in your circle or turn down the volume on that circle. I had a good friend of mine from growing up who decided one day he was going to post nothing but memes. He went into the silent circle and I can check in on him every now and then if I so choose.

</comment><comment><USER54> The problem seems to ultimately always boil down to "I added far too many people to Facebook as friends, and now Facebook is useless!"

To which the solution is easy: cut down the number of people you are friends with on Facebook.

For me, I have < 30 people I've friended on Facebook. But they're real friends and family, people I know and want to keep in touch with. And that's made all the difference to how I use Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER55> Has some good points, but I think many get the wrong idea about facebook. It's a way to keep in touch with far off friends who you wouldn't hear from at all otherwise. It's never affected a real relationship for me in the slightest, other than, "I saw your pics." The news feed could be better, but it has become more relevant since I've silenced a few overposters and blocked apps, etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is fucking on-point. The Timeline is just completely useless anymore as a way of keep tabs on people I care about. I rarely care if my friend was tagged in a picture, and I never care that they commented on a wall post by some random person I've never met.

I wish I could ditch it altogether, but the events and messaging are an integral part of my social life now.

</comment><comment><USER57> This is what many people use facebook group for. To keep in close contact with a group of like-minded individuals.

</comment><comment><USER58> Please, please, can you consider implementing a higher contrast color scheme for the text on your blog? It's really painful to read as it is now; I wanted to and tried but had to give up.

</comment><comment><USER59> Without an analysis of causes, I can agree that my own FB "news feed" has been becoming consistently crappier. Especially since roughly the beginning of this year.

</comment><comment><USER60> Isolated and alone, other people making money off you, and your friends don't talk to you any more? Sounds like prostitution to me.

</comment><comment><USER61> I did the same thing 2 weeks back. People whom I meet keep asking, but honestly, I haven't missed it for one second. I wrote a little something about it [http://tumblr.bhashkar.me/post/23712148539/why-i- deactivated...](http://tumblr.bhashkar.me/post/23712148539/why-i-deactivated- my-facebook-account)

</comment><comment><USER62> how about de-friending some people? I do it and it works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER63> You'll eventually get over being "too cool" for Facebook. It's ok, I did it too. We'll welcome you back when you change your mind. Life is too short to worry so much about these things.

<comment><USER28> Life's too short to be watching cat videos and sifting through sponsored stories.

<comment><USER63> All your friends do on FB is post cat videos? ..and this is Facebook's fault? Ha. Maybe it's time to make some new friends?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> goodbye facebook. why?

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm considering leaving facebook for the first time, because of the Sponsored Stories thing, which is showing up with disturbing regularity, and frequently winds up as ads for things that make me angry.

Nowadays, if you "Like" something, then that something can pay for the privilege to insert whatever stories it likes into your friends' facebook feeds, under the heading "so-and-so likes such-and-such" followed by your own message. Interestingly the person whose name is being used for the advertisement has _no idea_ what ads are going out under their name.

Two of these in particular show up in my facebook feed several times a week and raise my blood pressure every time they do. One is a particularly annoying evangelical preacher slash motivational speaker who fills up my newsfeed with god-stuff due to the fact that a vague acquaintance I've met a couple of times happens to "like" him. Another is a political thing which fills up my newsfeed with posts I find highly disagreeable under the name of another friend of mine.

What were they thinking? Facebook has designed a feature which makes me hate my friends.

<comment><USER66> Facebook already includes tools to solve your issues. Either unfriend the vague acquintances, hide all their posts from your feed, or hide the annoying posts following some criteria.

<comment><USER67> It doesn't work, there is a family member I have set to "Never show up on my news feed", and keeps coming back every time.

<comment><USER68> I "unsubscribed" from the family member I no longer want to hear from. That way we're still "friends", I can visit his page and read what he's been posting, but it doesn't show up on my feed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Hold on. First off, you should have deleted your account years ago.

"Connecting with friends" is a terrible point to make: e-mail has been around for decades. However, such a point does intersect with my main goal for making this post. People are lazy. Now programmers are saying it, and now everyone else will realize just how true it is, and being lazy has consequences.

So, we've had e-mail for decades. Why won't people use it? Instead of wasted texting plans, etc.? You could always keep up with your friends and family through e-mail. But the interfaces were either ugly, inconvenient, or disorganized. It's beyond me that an {interface} should have to tell me to contact my mother or that an {interface} should compel me to "keep up with old friends."

This. Is. Absurd.

[Luddite Rant:] Sorry, but pick up the damn phone and call them. (Or click "compose" and just {try} to type out something meaningful.)

I believe this finely leads into my next point: Not many of you have anything Gricean (<http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html>) to say. What [would] you say in an e-mail to a friend? --

People don't have much to say anyway (and for my personal stake in it, it's because they're not reading anything interesting), and Facebook isn't going to change that. That, I think, is the point behind <http://weknowwhatyouredoing.com/>. There's nothing-to-hide, and conversely, there's nothing-to-show either. FB is an enabler of oversharing, and it's allowing people to empty out too much without taking in substantive content.

I'm going to say it engenders bad cognitive hygiene.

<comment><USER70> How is it this same tired argument pops up every time quitting Facebook is discussed? The sweet spot for Facebook is acquaintances. People you would not usually email or call, and only hear about once in a while through the grapevine. It maintains familiarity. Subbed in a co-ed game of ultimate frisbee and met some people? Add them on Facebook.

<comment><USER69> I think it's a "tired argument" because its not easily defeated. _Why_ wouldn't you "usually" e-mail or call? Why? Why would you? (This seems like Churchill's point: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.") E-mail didn't fail, this is why we're seeing a resurgence of it (<http://three.sentenc.es/>, 501 developers against e-mail bombardment, minimalism over e-mail organization, etc.). Why has FB suddenly become "the best we've got" when all people seem to argue for is particular features that could be replaced. FB is a mash-up; this has nothing to do with "maintainability of social grace." It's a mash-up; and consumers like mash-ups.

Seriously: _Why?_ Why do we need we need a "social framework" that captures the rest of our human-interaction? We do we need a "social baseline"? Why do we need a system to maintain familiarity for us? I'm not even sure I understand the value of the point you've made, even if it is a good argument. _I_ maintain familiarity; Facebook is a tool for supporting what I do naturally.

> It maintains familiarity.

I'm not sure what this means. How does it do this? By making an API function do... What?

> Subbed in a co-ed game of ultimate frisbee and met some people? Add them on > Facebook.

Add their e-mails? Organize your labels.

The sweet spot for _who_? I'm telling others to drop it because you can achieve those goals through other interfaces; you're telling me that others shouldn't set their goals too high (acquaintances). My point still stands. E-mail [certainly] would make more sense within the "acquaintances" counterpoint.

Facebook is a set of opinions as to how one should manage (or maintain?) one's social life. Isn't it clear that if one rejects that System, one might be expected to provide an alternative, or possibly simpler, solution? The argument cannot really be a surprise to you, surely.

[EDIT:] I'm _struggling_ to understand the point about "maintaining" familiarity. I really do wish to understand it, as I feel it touches the heart of the matter. However, such an idea may require a break-down.

I think the issue of "discovery" is an important one, but what actually am I discovering in this digital world? A portfolio? Or a person? To argue that FB's sweet spot is about acquaintances from the evidence that it's a good tallying tool, or a notes tool, for friends made in the physical social world, I think, is a bad argument, or at least it's not very compelling. I think such an argument only re-confirms the "tired argument" I initially presented.

<comment><USER70> So, you're at an ultimate frisbee game. Everyone introduces themselves. You can then go home and find them on Facebook based on their name and mutual friends (since you probably know some other people on the team). No asking for contact info and all the associated social baggage. There's one benefit.

Now, once you're friends with them, Facebook passively (or actively, with minor communication such as comments) maintains familiarity. Basically what this means is if you happen to run into them six months later, it isn't like meeting them for the first time. Facebook can by no means fully maintain this sort of low-level relationship indefinitely. However, I've found it's very effective at increasing the half-life of such things.

Facebook automates the maintenance of my social network. That is valuable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I have privacy concerns about Facebook, and resent the fact that it's such a silo, but in the main in succeeds where other technologies have failed.

It's useful for finding people - a directory. If I want to get in touch with someone - and I don't have their contact details I can probably find them on Facebook and fire them a message.

If email was just as easy, people would have probably taken to that. Which is a shame, because Email could have been that easy. Privacy used to be more of a concern, and spam drove people away from publishing their addresses in directories.

I've left (privacy and personal reasons.) I since have missed the community. It's encouraged me to pick up the phone more, which is a nice thing. You just can't have the same rich interaction with people when typing compared to talking. But you can have a greater audience. Perhaps you communicate to more people with less content over something like Facebook, compared to having richer relationships with fewer people. It might all balance out.

Ultimately time is a premium. I certainly don't think G+ is the answer - it's much of the same.

</comment><comment><USER72> With Facebook you are not their customer, you are their product. If anything, if Zuck would like a way to monetize better without alienating users he should add some kind of Facebook Premium/Gold account upgrade. Where users can choose to throw a few bucks at them each month or year, whatever, in exchange for some cool extra features, and/or to be exempt from advertisements and privacy shenanigans. Money is money, so they shouldn't care exactly where it comes from. But if you give the opportunity for each user to decide for themselves whether they wish to be a product or a customer, I think it will lead to a better situation for everyone involved. Also better fits that market divide between the folks who want the cheapest experiences versus the best experiences.

</comment><comment><USER73> Facebook has a feature specifically for this, so that you see every update posted by people on your "VIP" list. I only know this because they put the feature in my face, I didn't go looking for it. Come on.

</comment><comment><USER74> Facebook is the new television.

<comment><USER75> Related: "I don't have a Facebook" is the new "I don't have a TV." For some reason, those who either refused to sign up or chose to deactivate their accounts feel the need to share this with everyone everywhere.

<comment><USER28> And people that do use Facebook feel it their duty to post status messages everytime they take a dump. Who's the real ass here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've really never seen a "facebook sucks" post that wasn't based on one of the following tired arguments:

       - <USER3>
         Usually of the form:
         Technology is *TEARING US APART* don't you see?! (Response: No, not really, perhaps you just suck at communicating?)

       - Ignorance of use
         Usually of the form:
         WTF I got fired for posting all those pictures of me using drugs?! (Response: Learn to use the privacy settings!)
         or: It's too noisy, all of these stupid game requests.. (Response: Block the offending apps and ask your friends to knock it off)

       - Bad connections
         Usually of the form:
         or: [annoying/offensive] $person keeps appearing in my news feed (Response: Block the offending person!)
         or: All of my friends post pointless, boring minuate of their lives! (I.e. the Twitter argument) (Response: Don't friend those people!)
         or: I don't want to turn down my Boss' friend request and look bad! I'm $sociallyUnfasionableThing! (Response: Use lists.)

It was refreshing to see one that actually lays out with an actual example what the problem is, in this case, algorithmic changes which ruined his experience. He veered toward #1 above at the very end, but still this was interesting to read.

Every single one of these things above, though, traces back to ignorance (usually) or cirucmstance. Could Facebook do a better job of making these things obvious? Absolutely. Facebook is not an intuitive site to use, and even when you have your head around it, they usually change something arbitrarily (the recent email thing comes to mind).

However, that said, you really shouldn't dump on the site wholesale just because it doesn't work for you. It works for millions of other people just fine.

<comment><USER8> Anyone care to rebut instead of downvote and run?</comment></comment>


Say Hello to the New Fantastical - louis-paul https://flexibits.com/blog/2020/01/say-hello-to-the-new-fantastical-for-mac-ipad-iphone-and-apple-watch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Fantastical is great, I've been using it for ~3 years now. Glad to see they added the sign in with apple option and consolidated their app development.</comment>


An Analysis of Linux Scalability to Many Cores [OSDI'10 PDF] - <AUTHOR> http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/linux:osdi10.pdf

<comment><USER2> Summary: they found bottlenecks in many applications and found that by implementing various code changes to the kernel, about 3000 lines worth, they could greatly improve performance on a 48-core Linux box.

For instance, per-core data structures to speed access to commonly used kernel items.

They also introduce a concept they call "sloppy counters" which is a per-core, reduced lock contention method of handling certain systemwide counters.

</comment><comment><USER3> As noted in the paper, something of relevance: Receive Packet Steering is a recent patch from Google for the Linux Kernel addresses the issue of packet processing by hashing packets to specific cores, while honouring data locality.

<http://lwn.net/Articles/328339/>

Facebook also apparently made some changes to their Kernel to optimise the IO path for memcached. Mark Zuckerberg presents some of the modifications in this (slightly long) techtalk: <http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=631826881803>

</comment><comment><USER4> It's worth pointing out that people rarely get the gmake speedups that the authors are seeing from gmake -j because most makefiles contain problems that constrain parallelism and cause broken builds. For example, many have missing dependency information, or reuse the same file over and again for intermediate results.

Fixing that was part of the motivation behind Electric Cloud.</comment>


Emergence - <AUTHOR> http://emergence.maxcooper.net/ <comment><USER2> I always love seeing anything following the philosophy of emergence[0], I think the "composition of simple rules leading to organic unpredictable complexity" is a powerful metaphor that can help understand nearly any natural phenomena.

It's exciting to see the increasing emergence of this idea (see what I did there) in modern science & industry, such as in MIT's Mediated Matter lab[1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) [1] [http://matter.media.mit.edu/tools](http://matter.media.mit.edu/tools)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was lucky enough to see the show live in London in the beginning of December. It was stunning, one of the most beautiful blends between music and visuals that I've ever seen.

I really hope Max will release the entire thing on DVD, I would buy it in a heartbeat for all my friends. He has a few shows coming up in Europe, if you guys are nearby you won't regret it.

He has the first third of the show up on his Facebook page (it was broadcast live and Facebook keeps the videos). Sadly I can't find how to share the URL.

<comment><USER4> There are some here: [https://www.facebook.com/maxcoopermax/videos/101555859077736...](https://www.facebook.com/maxcoopermax/videos/10155585907773636)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> None of the "View More" links work in Firefox. Event handlers should use the events passed to them, not window.event. Quick fix in the console:

       window.event = {preventDefault:()=>{}}

<comment><USER6> Fixed - thanks for the support :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Max also did a very nice Essential Mix for BBC two years ago. (The mix also introduced me to Niels Frahm, which I found very enjoyable. Check out his album _Spaces_ if you don't know where to start.)

[https://m.mixcloud.com/livesetsdjmixes/max-cooper- essential-...](https://m.mixcloud.com/livesetsdjmixes/max-cooper-essential- mix-sat-02-28-2015/)

<comment><USER8> Nils Frahm's "Less" remains one of my favourite examples of minimal music. So many small details. I won't ruin it, but if you like the song you should google how he got that sound.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, I'll check it out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So it looks like almost all of them are videos, but only some of them look vimeo-playable. Does anyone know why, or where to get the full thing?

This is gorgeous. It's the thing of thing I want to shove in people's faces when I see unimaginative things like the umpteenth golden ratio overlay on nature or a basic and extremely pixellated rendering of the julia fractal.

<comment><USER9> What about this is more imaginative and deep than something like a fractal? If anything these videos seem more hokey to me in that they are implying a deep connection between the mathematical model and reality (where there might be none, or just an artistic interpretation/expression) whereas fractal lovers like fractals for their own intrinsic beauty. I'm not saying that artistic expression is bad, but if you "shoved" this in the face of someone who was interested in the math of fractals, they'd rightfully say this is mathematically gibberish.

I agree that the golden ration nonsense is worthless.

<comment><USER9> I guess, the point of a fractal is not to be imaginative, but in that the object itself is interesting. If you're saying people's unimaginative renderings of fractals are dumb, I'd be inclined to agree, but I don't think there are necessarily "good" renderings of fractals either, or that the bar for such hasn't, in my opinion, been met.

<comment><USER10> There are a good many fractal renderings which meet the bar as far as my taste is concerned. Have you seen any of the videos by Julius Horsthuis, for example?

[https://vimeo.com/juliushorsthuis](https://vimeo.com/juliushorsthuis)

<comment><USER9> See I'd say these are unimaginative because they're all too similar. Once you've seen one you've seen them all, and they're all the same degree of gaudy. It's like the McMansion of fractals, intended only to overwhelm you with the impression that the creator has a really good rendering engine.

Maybe I'd be more impressed to see the process, but every time I watch one of those videos of someone making fractal art, it's just them tinkering with settings on some fractal rendering engine they bought online.

Of course, this all just shows my standard for good fractal art (and good art in general) is orthogonal to "using a powerful rendering engine."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Beautiful, thoughtful. I love seeing the intersection of science and art through such a talented artist!

</comment><comment><USER12> My favourite among the vidoes is "Adaptation", for the song "Order From Chaos", created by French VFX artist Maxime Causeret: [https://vimeo.com/196269431](https://vimeo.com/196269431)

</comment><comment><USER13> Does this have anything to do with Dwarf Fortress?

</comment><comment><USER14> Quite impressive.</comment>


KDD CUP 2019:context-aware multi-modal transportation REC challenge - <AUTHOR> https://dianshi.baidu.com/dianshi/wise/competition/29/rule?fr=hackernews <comment><USER2> We're introducing a context-aware multi-modal transportation REC challenge as one of kddcup2019 tracks. Think u have what it takes to recommend a travel plan which considers various transportation modes? Register to enter & the opp to win $45K.</comment>


Tuning Linux servers for scalability - <AUTHOR> http://www.madhur.co.in/blog/2017/01/30/tuning-linux-servers-scalability.html <comment><USER2> Thanks, great resource of info presented a very nice format</comment>


In sudden announcement, US to give up control of DNS root zone - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/in-sudden-announcement-us-to-give-up-control-of-dns-root-zone/

<comment><USER2> Prior discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7401999](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7401999)</comment>


In Maritime Logbooks, a Trove of 'Extraordinary' Imagery - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/arts/design/in-maritime-logbooks-a-trove-of-extraordinary-imagery.html <comment><USER2> "Extraordinary"?

Are they not sure?</comment>


Infusion Profusion: Game-changing Fast-'n-cheap Technique - <AUTHOR> http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/08/11/infusion-profusion-game-changing-fast-'n-cheap-technique/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in time for the weekend!

Backstory: go read this McGee article - <http://j.mp/9AFtRz> \- but long->short: there's a trendy technique for creating intensely flavored drinks called vacuum distillation/infusion. Temperature and pressure are obviously closely related; by messing with pressure, you can distill flavored alcohols at much lower temperatures, which greatly intensifies flavor.

This article, by the Dir/Technology at the French Culinary Institute, gets results that are often comparable to what people are getting with $2k-$5k vac machines --- using a cheap ISI cream whipper you can get off Amazon (or, I guess, at Williams-Sonoma) for $60. _In one minute._

So for instance, if you wanted to make a mojito, you could infuse rum with lime zest and mint and start the cocktail with an intensely flavored perfectly clear liquid.

It apparently works with other (non-alcoholic) liquids too. I can't wait to try this. (Erin wants an ISI whipper anyways, to make aerated chocolate).

There's apparently even _science_ involved! ---

 _Well done! You've rediscovered nitrogen cavitation and put it to novel use. Cavitation is used in cell biology labs to gently disrupt cells in a vessel ominously called a "nitrogen bomb" (as the gas here is nitrogen). The usual explanation is close to what you surmised: under pressure, gas penetrates the cells, then forms bubbles to disrupt the cells when the pressure is suddenly released. Your use of the technique looks a lot more interesting than my experiences with it in a lab._

<comment><USER2> _by messing with temperature, you can distill flavored alcohols at much lower temperatures_

I'm guessing you mean "by messing with _pressure_..." here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doh! Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have to try this for iced teas...

<comment><USER4> I haven't tried the method described in the article yet (great post!), but I've done slower extraction methods. They works especially well for things that are either fatty or excellent fat/oil solvents. Quite a few flavors are oil-based, or have a significant oil component, and they don't mix as well in just water.

Vodka and cream are particularly easy bases for infusing flavors, so you're in luck if you're into cocktails and/or ice cream.

Butter works, too, but liquids are easier to work with. Sugar also holds flavors nicely - that may be the best route for iced tea, if you don't mind it being a bit sweet. Vanilla sugar is classic, but for iced tea, spearmint leaves may be better. (And mojitos, of course.)

Either steeping in vodka (for a few weeks) or gently heating in cream will extract flavors. For butter, just mix it with minced herbs or whatever. For sugar, chop/grind/mince whatever and keep it in a jar full of sugar for a few weeks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since the technique relies in part on the solubility of N2O in water, I'd be surprised to find out that cavitation worked well in oil.

<comment><USER4> I wasn't talking about extracting _in_ oil, but extracting oil-soluble flavors: clove, mint, vanilla, rosemary, cardamom, garlic, bacon, coffee, capsaicin, etc. Cream and vodka both have plenty of water.

I haven't tried cavitation (yet!), but I've done extraction by slower processes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Reader Alternatives - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/5990456/google-reader-is-getting-shut-down-here-are-the-best-alternatives

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are two other related links :

[http://www.ghacks.net/2013/03/14/the-ultimate-google- reader-...](http://www.ghacks.net/2013/03/14/the-ultimate-google-reader- alternatives-list/)

[http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-57574201-233/google- rea...](http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-57574201-233/google-reader-is- dying-but-we-have-five-worthy-alternatives/)</comment>


Loading JSON with JavaScript using eval... wait Google, what? - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/gdata/docs/json#Request <comment><USER2> I bet the article was one of the first to cover JSON and was only updated two years ago to the new stylesheet.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it says updated in 2012, but if you go to the articles section, for instance, they're all 5-7 years old.

Though it's poor form even back then that they'd link to JSON.org (which has the JSON library which we all used before native browser support) and then not use it in the actual sample code.

<comment><USER2> Google was all about efficiency. In the early days, as with JSONP, the point was to eval the stuff. In some ways, it was a step back. Had we pushed for more E4X implementations we might have sent HTML over the wire instead, and would have avoided JS-based template languages, the overhead of converting JSON to at least one representation of HTML, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google feel confident enough that they wont be returning malicious JavaScript.

Obviously, you should use JSON.parse in 99.99% of cases, but if you can trust the source of the content (not as easy as it sounds), and you have no other alternative, eval wont cause any security problems.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well supported: [http://caniuse.com/json](http://caniuse.com/json)

Use JSON.stringify() and JSON.parse() - only gives issues in IE8 with an incorrect doctype (go figure?!?!).

</comment><comment><USER6> just a question - is this any worse than the "JSON-in-script" output method?

<comment><USER7> Significantly worse. Using the jsonp[1] format is passing a regular javascript object to a global function

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP)

<comment><USER8> It seems that if the attacker controls the source URL, he could eval anything he wanted in any either case?

<comment><USER7> While that's true in this case, it's considered a bad practice to eval json to get a javascript object. Most browsers (all modern ones) have a JSON.parse method that will safely evaluate all json strings to js object. The really old browsers have libraries to accomplish this.

It seems that this article hasn't been updated in a while by the very fact that the next section is called "JSON-in-script output" and not jsonp, keep in mind this article even has a reference to json.org on the bottom of that page which includes a library to do said function</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cursors - <AUTHOR> http://cursors.io <comment><USER2> Does anyone knows a curated list of games/sites like this? I was playing stabby.io and I found it pretty entertaining.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you create a good brand? - <AUTHOR> curious about this topic as I'm working more these days on my company's brand. any thoughts/tips? <comment><USER2> [https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Branding-World- Clas...](https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Branding-World-Class- ebook/dp/B000FC10H0)</comment>