Richard Stallman on the Failure of One Laptop Per Child & his new laptop - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonreview.net/BR33.6/stallman.php <comment><USER2> >I plan to try to organize counterpressure while in Peru this November.

All I can picture are some very confused little Peruvian children wondering why the large scary bearded man is yelling about computadora libre.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title is in error. The article is about RMS refusing to use his OLPC since it is capable of running Windows. He has switched to an inferior machine with a MIPS processor that won't have this flaw.

<comment><USER4> i don't think that's fairly representing his case. he stopped using his olpc because he feels that the project has lost sight of its original goals, and that they are now doing more harm than good. if he continues to use an olpc, he feels that it appears he supports what they're doing, when clearly he does not.

i don't agree with a lot of rms' ideals. he's far too dogmatic, which has driven away a lot of would-be supporters. but i have to admire the guy anyway. it's very rare to find someone who believes in things as strongly as rms does, and is willing to go so far out of his way to practice what he preaches.

<comment><USER5> The problem isn't that the project lost sight of its original goals. It sounds more like the goal of this project wasn't clear between groups.

Stallman stated that "the plans aimed for low cost, enabling many children to use the machines, and free software, so they would have freedom while using them." From what I understood, the goal of the project was to get computers into the hands of children in third-world countries, so they could simply get experience with computers -- period. It was my belief that the fact that free software was used was simply out of convenience; since free software was also free (as in beer), it was another step in cutting the costs of the laptop.

When Microsoft stepped in and "offered up" its OS at the extremely cut costs, Negroponte decided that would be a more useful option; I don't think his intention is to force-feed proprietary software to children. Either he believes Windows is a better option, or he is an economically self-serving individual. Regardless, I sense that the ultimate purpose of this project was unclear to certain people.

On a less direct note, I can't stand Stallman's zealotry. It's great that he is able to stand so firm on one particular point, but it is also a terrible trait, considering that he isn't willing to even give a moments consideration to alternative options on a scope/level _outside_ his "cause."

<comment><USER6> It obviously is true that there is confusion about the project's goals, but the confusion is not a simple matter of Stallman's passion coloring his perception. Even today, vestiges of an ambition and commitment far beyond delivering machines to children remain on the OLPC site.

"XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital." --- <http://laptop.org/vision/mission/>

If you read more about constructionism at <http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html>, you will see that it is consonant with the freedom "to improve the program" and all the rest of the Free Software freedoms.

"Our commitment to software freedom gives children the opportunity to use their laptops on their own terms. [...] we do not want any ceiling imposed on those children who choose to modify their machines." --- <http://www.laptop.org/en/laptop/software/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> With all sympathy, it seems to me that a PC that is capable of running Linux AND Windows is more free than a PC that is only capable of running Linux.

I understand the concern of making Windows available to children, but in the end, it is better than no PC at all.

At least if you have a OLPC with Windows installed, hopefully you can find a Website that tells you how to install Linux on it. If you have no OLPC, you can not even install Linux on it.

<comment><USER8> _it seems to me that a PC that is capable of running Linux AND Windows is more free than a PC that is only capable of running Linux_

That's like saying a society where some people are free and some people are slaves is more free than a society where everyone is free.

 _I understand the concern of making Windows available to children, but in the end, it is better than no PC at all._

If it was a choice between a PC running Windows or no PC at all, ever for the rest of someone's life, then I'd agree. But as Stallman says "Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco."

<comment><USER7> Running Windows is not the same as being a slave.

In fact, why not dig deeper. Is the CPU Open Source? Why is it not a problem to use proprietary hardware?

Actually, Windows does not even have that much of a lock-in, or does it? The lock in used to stem from MS Office, and even that is not so severe anymore these days.

And I think for those children it was a question between no PC or a Windows PC. If for whatever reason the government or whoever pays for the PCs says so, what do you want to do against it?

<comment><USER8> _Running Windows is not the same as being a slave._

Of course not. I didn't say it was.

 _Is the CPU Open Source? Why is it not a problem to use proprietary hardware?_

Open Source processor designs exist. It wouldn't surprise me if in future FLOSS operating systems run on them.

I don't consider proprietary CPUs to be a big problem -- though they would be if they were running some sort of Treacherous Computing system or DRM which meant they wouldn't do what the user wanted.

 _Windows does not even have that much of a lock-in, or does it?_

The lock-in is vastly less than what it used to be. I can develop web applications using a GNU/Linux system with no problems.

 _If for whatever reason the government or whoever pays for the PCs says so, what do you want to do against it?_

It's not for me to tell foreigners how to run their countries (it's not my country). Though IMO if they make themselves dependent on Microsoft, they are not acting in their own best interests.

<comment><USER7> I certainly wouldn't advise those countries to use Microsoft products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing that this is the laptop he uses now:

<http://www.lemote.com/english/yeeloong.html>

 _The world's first fully open hardware/software. All system source(BIOS, kernel, drivers etc.) are open source, no close firmware needed._

 _CPU: STLS 2F(Loongson 2F) 900MHz, with integrated DDR2 controller and PCI controller_

<comment><USER9> [http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...](http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=323954&source=rss_topic122)

The end of this article contains a few more details on Richard Stallman's new choice of laptop.

It is slightly ironic that the world's first "free" (by Richard Stallman's definition) laptop is produced by China -- a country notorious for cracking down on human rights. I guess it's the difference between freedom of speech and freedom of "intellectual propety".

<comment><USER10> _Unfortunately, it doesn't have a suspend-and-resume capability, which Stallman called "somewhat inconvenient." Nor does the battery charge while it's running, which he called "an annoyance."_

A lot of people would call these "dealbreakers."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm surprised to read that Mr Freedom of Choice himself is in favour of computers that can't run Windows.

(As if Microsoft wouldn't port Windows to MIPS if it became a large market oh wait Windows CE runs on MIPS devices and Windows NT 3.1 and Windows NT4 ran on MIPS (- wikipedia)).

<comment><USER12> I agree; his concerns are baseless. Any hardware that is free enough to run Free software can be made to run proprietary software. Stallman would like to remove the user's freedom to restrict freedom on hardware -- the hardware analogue of GPL vs. BSD -- but this doesn't work on hardware because copyright doesn't apply, so the best he can do is choose a platform that is merely inconvenient for some proprietary software.

Moreover, OLPC continues work on its Linux software, which is still the preferred distribution. The next wave of Give-One-Get-One machines are shipping with Linux, not Windows. And if Stallman's MIPS machines ever take off, the best educational Linux distribution for them may well be the OLPC's software, so helping OLPC (or, at least, SugarLabs) is not a waste of time or money.

The reason Negroponte is so eager to help Windows onto the device is likely because several countries expressed interest in it, and he wants to boost sales. Urging these countries to instead purchase laptops that are not compatible with Windows is not a feasible strategy; if they wanted Linux, they would not have requested Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco—in a world where only one company sells tobacco_

 _No wonder Microsoft offers the first dose to children at a low price._

neat.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Windows Vista has features to spy on the user, restrict use of data in the machine, and even attack the user (Microsoft can forcibly install changes in the system at any time)."

People take this guy seriously even after spewing idiocies like that? Sorry, Vista isn't 'attacking' me.

</comment><comment><USER15> In a nice coincidence, Guido van Rossum recently posted this:

[http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/11/bibles-or- computers-...](http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2008/11/bibles-or-computers- its-same-thing.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> Link is dead. Found a version on the FSF website: <http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/can-we-rescue-olpc-from-windows>

<comment><USER9> Not sure if that's the same article. Somebody on reddit, copy and pasted it before the original link went down:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7b25e/richard_s...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7b25e/richard_stallman_on_the_failure_of_one_laptop_per/c065u4p)

<comment><USER13> it's up again by now. tsa, tsa, tsa, operating on cpu quota limit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let me guess: didn't use enough Free Software.</comment>


Ask HN: Is .com address absolutely necessary to launch your company? - <AUTHOR>

When all the good .com names are taken, is it OK to go for .net or .info etc.? Thoughts? Experiences? <comment><USER2> If you want people to remember your domain name and type it into the browser than you really need the .com extension. You have to market the hell out of .net or any other type of domain for people to remember it. They might remember your domain name but forget the extension and will likely try .com. If you don't own it because somebody else does you are sending traffic you worked for to them. Most people will shrug it off and forget about your site or worse become engaged in their site leaving your long forgotten. Try to come up with a different name or a multi-word domain to get that .com. The domains are out there, you just have to be creative.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think everyone simply assumes you have a dot com address.

One of the current YC batch decided to change their name from .me to a .com. You can find their reasoning at: [http://blog.imoveyou.com/announcing-our-new- name-getupandmov...](http://blog.imoveyou.com/announcing-our-new-name- getupandmoveme-is-now)

If most of your users are going to find you by putting the company/brand name in google, perhaps good SEO might be enough? I've come across quite a few companies with a .ly domain (can't say how they're doing though).

As a user I probably wouldn't take a .info domain very seriously but .net would be ok.

my 2cents

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like it depends on your audience in some instances. If you have users that don't easily remember one of these more obscure domain extensions, they'll type in .com and be surprised if they don't get you (even if you told them exactly what your address is). Some of them won't have the wherewithal to drop your name into Google either, so it'd be helpful to have the .com.

I once had an email address during college that ended in .at and I'd put it in presentations for classes. People swore I had a typo in my email address. .me, .in., .at, etc. still seem to be a niche sort of thing.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks all for your comments. I have been able to put my goals in perspective because of your replies.

My understanding after this post is that for a web startup, it's absolutely necessary to get a .com. My app, however, is a mobile app first and a web-app second. I'm thinking it's probably OK to go with a non .com address for now. If the app takes off, I'll consider getting a .com. Right now I should spend my time in getting the app off ground. That should be my focus right now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Craigslist is a .org, but they seem to have the .com as well.

I definitely would stick with one of the long-time three-letter ones: .org, .com or .net. Nothings says spammer like .biz or .info.

But... when it comes down to it, better to have a 'creative' .com than a .net where the .com is taken.

</comment><comment><USER6> The trend seems to be build the brand around a less ideal domain and then buy the .com when you can afford to. Facebook (thefacebook.com), Dropbox (getdropbox.com), Delicious (del.icio.us), and Groupon (getyourgroupon.com) did this.</comment>


Chinese media say it's now "embarrassing" to use an iPhone in China - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/22/iphone-in-china/ <comment><USER2> Imagine if this trade war was a big ruse to force Americans onto iPhones and Chinese onto Huawei phones. It'd reduce the fear of other nations spying on your residents, as well as increasing the coverage of your own national spying capability. It's win-win as far as both presidents are concerned. Maybe they'll declare the trade war is finished once they are satisfied with the uptake of spy-enabled hardware in their countries.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's very interesting culturally. There seems to be two mindsets in the same country: 1. Proud nationalism and 2. Trade driven optimization

</comment><comment><USER4> It would embarrass me _here_.

Each time I see someone with an iPhone (especially with the ear things), I have to consciously remind myself that it is not enough, by itself, to indicate that they are kind of stupid. Different people really do value things differently, often legitimately. Apparently in some places you have to have one to attract what is considered the right sort of mate. I guess such a mate would be less judgmental than I am.</comment>


You Might Want to Uninstall VLC. – Immediately - <AUTHOR> https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/07/you-might-want-to-uninstall-vlc-immediately/ <comment><USER2> This is not true. The exploit was fixed over a year ago (since v. 3.0.3): [https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1153963312981389312?s=21](https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1153963312981389312?s=21)

</comment><comment><USER3> Article immediately and repeatedly redirects wih JS disabled.

Alternate: [https://outline.com/FrYujS](https://outline.com/FrYujS)</comment>


Grey goo - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo <comment><USER2> No one may find this interesting, but in virtual worlds, this is a very big problem. For example, in Second Life, if a bug report/ticket contains the terms "Grey Goo" (or) "Gray Goo" it is immediately taken care of. To the point where, if you are a worker who can handle it, you will be given a phone call and you must drive to your office immediately- it doesn't matter what else you are doing. Grey Goo can destroy a server in a matter of seconds.

<comment><USER3> Presumably they have automatic safeguards against it, and these emergencies occur when somebody outsmarts them. I wonder if this can be generalized to an interesting theory--how do you prevent all-consuming self-replicating behavior in a system with minimal intervention otherwise? Is this question even meaningful?

<comment><USER4> It should be pretty easy: keep track of the ancestry of each object and kill off any family tree that's expanding too quickly if the server gets overloaded.

<comment><USER5> You'd think so, but when all of those objects are (potentially) things purchased by players, it gets a bit more complex than kill it at the root. Also, I believe that (at least at one point), objects could attach scripts to other objects. So the family tree wouldn't work in all cases.

Internally Second Life calls their countermeasure the "gray goo fence" but I can't find many good descriptions of how it actually works online, except some mentions that the restrictions on how much something can "rez" increase exponentially. This link was the best description of it I could find:

<http://alphavilleherald.com/2006/09/linden_lab_grey.html>

I believe that, since the attack mentioned therein, they've done other things, such as restricting certain scripting functions to trusted people. But folks have been known to find exploits anyhow.

Of course, feel free to correct me if you actually play Second Life. I've only been following news of it from the outside. I've never actually played it.

I've never understood why people are that worried about it with nanomachines, though. We already have gray goo (though much of it, like algae, is green). I mean, most single-celled organisms are capable of that kind of mass replication. And they can be found pretty much everywhere already. I'd be more worried about accidentally engineering a super-virus or whatever than gray goo per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This assumes that some artificial organism we construct would be more robust and efficient at self-replication than run-of-the-mill single celled organisms.

<comment><USER3> What's wrong with that assumption? There are some efficient mechanisms that evolution hasn't invented because they could not be reached by a series of gradual refinements. The wheel has long been said to be one of them, but I guess now we know that that's not strictly true. But nature's wheels are all very small and are bound to remain small because of their purpose, even though many organisms could benefit from large wheels.

It's true that replication is evolution's specialty, but maybe the initial construction of grey goo would require some specialized environment that doesn't naturally occur. Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon.

<comment><USER7> _Nuclear bomb isn't so complicated that evolution couldn't figure it out, for example, but it didn't and won't anytime soon._

That's kinda true, but there was a natural nuclear reactor: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor>

Also, the Sun seems to work pretty well.

If course, neither of these _evolved_ though biological mechanisms, though, but they did arise in a natural environment. I find it difficult to imagine circumstances under which _evolution_ would "figure out" a nuclear bomb - ie, I'm agreeing with your point that evolution usually requires a series of gradual refinements rather than a big jump forward.

<comment><USER3> Fascinating link.

The nuclear bomb was a needlessly confusing example--I could have just mentioned explosives in general. Evolution is all about weapons, and explosives make for damn good ones, and it's not hard to imagine a realistic organism that uses them, unlike a nuke-wielding organism. Only I'm not sure that no organism uses explosives. I was already wrong once today about what nature can't do!

<comment><USER8> Bombadier beetle? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombadier_Beetle>

<comment><USER9> I'm surprised at the creationist angle in that article, it's not as though that has any bearing on informing people about an insect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's going to need a power source external to what it eats. Contrast: there already is grey goo built to work on local (not transmitted) energy, and it's called bacteria. It doesn't eat the world, because local energy isn't really that abundant relative to the cost of carrying around the means to utilize it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Self-replicating-nanobot Earth-death final-state.

Things like this always make me think of Sam's Archive's "Geocide" page. Which, by the way, points out that this does not in fact bring about the _destruction_ of the Earth: <http://qntm.org/destroy>

<comment><USER12> There's another site called "Exit Mundi" that has a lot of doomsday scenarios. In particular, the grey goo problem: <http://www.exitmundi.nl/graygoo.htm>

<comment><USER13> What a powerful concept. It really does boggle the mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In a battle between Grey Goo and a Paperclip Maximizer, who wins?

<http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer>

<comment><USER15> Grey goo. A grey goo unit just needs to produce more grey goo units. A paperclip maximizer needs to produce both paperclips and other paperclip maximizers. So the goo is more efficient.

<comment><USER14> But the Paperclip Maximizer is smarter!

<comment><USER15> I don't know if that's necessarily true by their definitions. As I see it they could be the same intelligent devices with different programmed goals. One group of nanobots you tell, "Make as many copies of yourself (including this instruction) as possible." The other you tell, "Make as many paperclips as possible."

I think they would make it their first order of business to destroy each other, postponing their primary goals in order to make weapons or enlist the help of allies. If they failed at destroying each other, they would reach some kind of peace treaty. Or maybe they would try peace first, realizing that war has too high a chance of wiping them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are all kinds of disastrous applications of technology waiting for us.

like an microorganism or device designed to impregnate every women on the planet

or maybe people will start modifying their offspring to worship them

my personal favorite are tiny robots that interfere with the unjust use of force worldwide, causing the collapse of most governments

<comment><USER4> The last one will never happen, since it's the government that defines "just".

<comment><USER16> No, its whoever invents such a technology that will define it. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines._

I suppose their memory holds both code and data?

<comment><USER18> Well, von Neumann was John McCarthy's menthor, and McCarthy made LISP. There's no wonder why programming code (e.g. functions) in LISP is data, and why LISP is heavily used in AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "They might be "superior" in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable."

A good reminder for businesses. If your only goal is to dominate the market, it is not a worthy goal.

</comment><comment><USER20> Drexler thinks it's nonsense:

<http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/indepth/19648>

<comment><USER21> No, Drexler doesn't think it's nonsense. He just thinks that it will be _unnecessary_ to make replicators for the manufacturing purposes he has in mind. He says

>In particular, it turns out that developing manufacturing systems that use tiny, self-replicating machines would be needlessly inefficient and complicated. The simpler, more efficient, and more obviously safe approach is to make nanoscale tools and put them together in factories big enough to make what you want.

(note that he explicitly acknowledges the safety risk) and

>The popular version of the grey-goo idea seems to be that nanotechnology is dangerous because it means building tiny self-replicating robots that could accidentally run away, multiply and eat the world. But there's no need to build anything remotely resembling a runaway replicator, which would be a pointless and difficult engineering task. I worry instead about simpler, more dangerous things that powerful groups might build deliberately - products like cheap, abundant, high-performance weapons with a billion processors in the guidance systems.

This does _nothing_ to diminish the risk of replicators if they are, in fact, created. And there are all sort of possible problems where replicators would be essential. For example, we may want to release replicators into the environment to clean up certain kinds of pollution which can't be easily brought to a central facility.

<comment><USER20> That's like saying, "This does _nothing_ to diminish the risk of a Moon-based Turbo Death Ray if one is, in fact, created." We might be able to make one if we tried really hard. But it would be pointless and difficult, and there are so many more pedestrian failure modes that it seems pointless to worry about it.

Drexler thinks we underestimate the difficulty of building run-away replicators. Nature's had 4 billion years and hasn't managed it. Yes, I'm aware of the wheel argument.

<comment><USER21> First, you say building replicator is pointless without giving an argument. This is clearly wrong. I have already given you one example of the use of creating replicators, and here's another: weapons.

Second, you say it is difficult with many failure modes. So was going to the moon. How can you possibly think it's so difficult that it will _never_ get done? In a thousand years?

Third, you cite Drexler to claim that we underestimate the difficulty. (Who underestimates it? Me? The irrational people who Drexler is afraid will take away his funding, or the handful of academics who seriously consider the issue?) The argument for extreme caution does not rely on it being _easy_ to build run-away replicators, only that it is reasonably possible and that the results are catastrophic. Can you really argue with 99% certainty _against_ the feasibility of future technologies without any sort of restriction based on physical law?

Fourth, you say you are aware of the wheel argument...so...what is your reponse? Should we also consider the laser argument? The computer argument? The space-ship argument? Or the argument from any of the nearly countless things that humanity has created in the past 40 years that never existed in the previous 4,000,000,000 that life was around?

<comment><USER20> I apologize, but I don't have the time to put together a considered response right now, though I wish I did. Maybe this evening.

I do think it's interesting the amount of anger I encounter whenever I even remotely question one of the Singularitarians' babies. There seems to be more ... emotional attachment ... than is healthy for skeptical inquiry.

<comment><USER21> You would encounter less frustration if you engaged others' arguments rather than dismissing them out of hand. That doesn't mean you have to argue with every crank on the internet, but there's not much point in writing a comment which declares an argument wrong without giving an explanation for why.

I'd very much like to hear what you have to say, because even when I've discussed this with academics who work in nanotech (though I've never spoken to anyone working directly on replicators), I've never heard a better argument than "it's really, really hard".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me of what humans are doing with this planet.

<comment><USER23> I suppose ultimately it models any organism at its simplest level.</comment></comment>


Everything You're Thinking About Nintendo Is Totally Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2014/01/nintendo-mobile/ <comment><USER2> I agree with a great deal of what is said here, but the article doesn't discuss the fact that it appears that multi-touch devices have become the entry point to gaming (and technology in general) for very young children.

At coffee shops I am now constantly seeing the situation where adults are chatting amongst themselves and a toddler has been given a mobile phone or tablet to watch netflix or play some very simple kids game.

I think it should be genuinely concerning to Nintendo that kids growing up with multi-touch tablets may never feel the need to move onto a Nintendo system.

It makes me wonder if there is space in the market for Nintendo to develop a toddler focused, bomb proof, tablet in addition to their traditional handheld lineup.

</comment><comment><USER3> This comment on Reddit gives a much more convincing argument about where Nintendo went wrong with the Wii U, and so what they need to do to fix it:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1vowvg/how_can_n...](http://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/1vowvg/how_can_nintendo_right_the_ship/ceuqe4g?context=3)

TL/DR: Bad marketing and branding.</comment>


View the ripples of your post shared on G+ - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/b/104273320601694264357/ripples/details?activityid=z13hhlqhbmrydrhxk04ce1xipxrtujbacu00k

<comment><AUTHOR> More interesting one: [https://plus.google.com/b/104273320601694264357/ripples/deta...](https://plus.google.com/b/104273320601694264357/ripples/details?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsigmajs.org%2F)</comment>


Google is losing allies across the political spectrum - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/google-is-losing-allies-across-the-political-spectrum/ <comment><USER2> They are just getting too big and have too much information. I wonder if a tax system could be created that discouraged companies to grow beyond a certain size and instead favored smaller ones. The potential for abuse by giant companies like Facebook and Google is just too much.

<comment><USER3> The change you want is political campaign finance reform. Everything else is secondary.

Without financing reform, the accumulation of wealth leads to political influence that furthers the accumulation of money and political power... creating laws that constrain the market to favor the big players over free innovation and competition.

Google/FB are not alone... broadcasting, fossil fuel, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, cell network, retail chains, financial corporations, individual citizens are by far the least significant voice in our elections.

<comment><USER4> Campaign finance changes can't do what you think they can. Political influence just flows naturally from immense wealth.

Canada has a complete ban on corporate donations. So whenever Bombardier wants something they just add on "or else we'll have to cut thousands of jobs" and they get it.

You can even argue it's a better deal for large corporations. They get to keep their influence but never get shaken down for donations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good. Corporations are not your friends, and you shouldn't trust them. Their interests may temporarily align with your own but this is ephemeral.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Disclosure: My brother works at Google.

His brother is the cofounder of Firebase? He must have some pretty interesting dinner conversations.

</comment><comment><USER7> Google is scary but I suspect it's actually a decently moral incarnation relative to many alternatives, and is really a victim of the confluence of a few megatrends that are unavoidable, such as the simple technical ability to systematically monitor and profit from monitoring all behavior (to good and bad), and the ability to affect all discourse and information flow. These are megatrends that Google just happened to have a lead on. I have no faith that we will replace them with anything better if we decide to tear them down. I also don't find it a coincidence that Google is at-risk because of the recent spike in our authoritarian PC left which is pathologically obsessed with tearing down all productive institutions.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's starting to seem like there's an orchestrated anti-Google media campaign under way. I wonder who's behind it?

</comment><comment><USER9> Google is reminding me of when a very well regarded (also, internally, by its employees) grown-large company went public.

It wasn't all instantaneous, but over the course of a couple of years, it went from highly sought to bureaucratic pressure cooker.

At Google, the engineers aren't running the show any more, I'm guessing. And it shows.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm happy with Google having political influence than any other company.

But overall I'm disenchanted with tech companies doing the same things that earlier big corporations did to gain political influence.

Probably naive, but I was thinking they'll change the game wrt lobbying etc.

Is no one 'disrupting' political influence?

</comment><comment><USER11> I think they are too big, have too much information, have too many near- monopoly positions they abuse, and far too much control over the internet.

Same thing applies to facebook, and to a lesser extent Amazon.

break them up.

<comment><USER12> None of them are a monopoly. There are alternative search engines, email providers, and phone OSs. There are alternative social media platforms and alternative online and physical marketplaces. There is no natural factor about them that tends toward a monopoly (like limited wireless spectrum or need for public right of way). US Government doesn't have the right to selectively punish people or their companies just because it's politically popular right now.

Beyond that, there is really nothing wrong with monopolies in general, only if they became monopolies via government corruption like, ma bell, wired ISPs, alcohol, and possibly big banks, big defense, and big pharma. Google built search from nothing and remains by far the best offering. Facebook spends exorbitant sums to aquihire its rivals and preserve its market share. Amazon has always reinvested and certainly has made shopping and web hosting less expensive for me.

While I agree they have too much of our personal information and influence with elected officials, the solution isnt more regulation which would crown a loser and make lobbying an even better investment. Should we also break up Bing, Twitter, and EBay?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As somebody who has received immense value from Google, I am sad to see the limit of human ingenuity. You start with good intentions but your genius becomes a burden.</comment>


Show HN: How Monocle uses Discord for live chat in spreadsheets - <AUTHOR> http://monoclemoney.com/how-monocle-uses-live-chat-in-spreadsheets/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the guy who wrote the article. Let me know if you have any questions about migrating from Slack to Discord, or about how we've been using widgets to extend Google Sheets!

</comment><comment><USER2> What is Monocle? What are "Monocle Sheets"? Where does a chatroom fit in a personal finance spreadsheet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if it wasn't clear in the article! \- You can get to our homepage from the header that says Monocle \- I added a link at the very start of the article

In short, Monocle is a service that we're building to push your bank transactions to GSuite. Part of it is you get a nice spreadsheet that acts as a dashboard. You can see an example on [http://bit.ly/monocledemo](http://bit.ly/monocledemo)

The chatroom is used for live support. Honestly, I think it's easy for someone to get overwhelmed in Sheets and have a bunch of open questions. In that context, I think that live chat is superior as a means to help someone, than say sending support tickets or such. So I wanted a solution that would let people chat with us from within the spreadsheet.

Being based on Google Sheets, we were lucky to be in web. So I looked for ways to embed something in Sheets, which led me to two options: Sidebars and Dialogs. They allow embedding, which works well with Discord. So we decided to use this solution to provide people with live support.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. Now that I understand where you're coming from the idea makes a lot of sense and the article may be useful (I started reading it before, but stopped because I needed a background, which I now have).</comment></comment></comment>


YC startup Slapvid does P2P video from a browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/25/slapvid-peer-to-peer-video-in-your-browser/ <comment><USER2> Personally I don't think that P2P video from a browser is probably the best utilization of this technology. Someone mentioned that even the top videos on Youtube only have 4-5 concurrent users. That alone generates a lot of difficulty for that approach. I supppose that the distribution of traffic on Youtube will have a rather fat long tail. Also from a user's point of view for this approach to work it would require storing not only one video but many. I don't see the point of using my diskspace and my bandwidth for Youtube. That's different for Joost. They get users to download, install, and share the bandwidth as they have more valuable less fat tail content to offer. What's more if you are watching fullscreen you probably won't mind that Joost is making use of your upstream. However if you interpret P2P in the browser as a potential Web cache, and don't restrict yourself to the video approach there are lots of interesting things one could do. You just have to look out for Power-Law shaped traffic around big chunks of data. Maybe internet radio with high quality streams where you could time-shift streams to make optimal usage of the P2P approach. Or the distribution of software. Once you have several millon users using your applet or whatever, you could become the next akamai. To get there one probably would have to go to those guys where bandwidth really hurts. Thinking of sites like the underdogs.com, shareware distributing sites, web radio, etc ... . If you can make them happy by potentially saving bandwidth, and the users are happier by potentially increasing download speed, you might get those guys to ask user's on their web sites to download your little thingy. I think there is room for a P2P based web cache, probably not in distributing Youtube like videos. Perfecting the P2P part, and being able to aquire a sufficient install base, a lot of opportunities might arise. Go speed up the net ;-).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like a cool solution to video bandwidth problems. I'd like to read more about the technology behind it..

These guys should consider trying AIR or Silverlight rather than a Java applet for a more transparent and lighter weight implementation. Java applets are quickly going the way of the dinosaur..

<comment><USER3> My guess is they're using the applet to run the P2P program and the Flash client to connect to various P2P "servers" over HTTP (or possibly) RTMP for streaming.

I don't think you can bind to local ports and run servers inside AIR or Silverlight, but you can in Java applets.

They could theoretically have 100k P2P Java applets running on "super node" (high bandwidth) machines serving an audience of millions of leeching peers. Hopefully they've realized this. It's probably the best way to mitigate the applet problem: only require 10% of people to have it.

<comment><AUTHOR> AIR actually has a full network API, Silverlight might too but I'm not sure. So listening on a local port should still be possible. Just be mindful that your protocol makes it through NAT ok.

Your distributed idea is cool, but I think the intended benefit here is to avoid escalating hosting costs when having to do it all in-house. YouTube was paying $1M per month in hosting fees pre-google acquisition.. ouch

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have anything against java applets, but I'd like to hear their rationale for using them--pg is known to have publicly criticized java, after all.

Applets only have one major problem, which is their iffy deployment process. Once running, they're about as good as a desktop application.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow: the mouse becomes the remote control!

That's the way i watch TV -- next, next, next ..., OK interesting but next, OK i like...

This is way better that the Joost interface.... I just want a quick preview, but a even quicker way to get to get to the next one...

<comment><USER5> "This is way better that the Joost interface"

For when watching quick, short videos...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the video currently being delivered using the P2P tech? The platform note indicates that the P2P is still being tested.

Congrats on being techcrunched, I actually graduated about a month ago with a couple of the founders.

</comment><comment><USER7> In theory P2P sounds like a nice idea, on the other hand, why bother, if other services (YouTube) offer to host the video for free?

I mean what is the incentive for the user to run the P2P network?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's genius they're using Flash to play it, but seriously crippled by requiring the Java applet.

Very interesting work, I'll be watching those guys very closely.

<comment><USER8> Using Flash to play video is _genius_? What?

<comment><USER3> Not by itself, but in combination with P2P. Yes.

<comment><USER8> If they're using Java they could just as well use a Java video player. My _guess_ is that it's closer to "off-the-shelf" for Flash, and the networking stuff is closer to existing code in Java. I'm sure those parts'll all be redone in Flash next.

<comment><USER3> A Java player would suck and a Flash client couldn't do what the Java piece does.

<comment><USER8> What can't Flash do?

<comment><USER3> I explained what I think they're doing in thread above:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30705>

<comment><USER8> Hmm, apparently a missing listen() means they have to bring in an entire second language and VM. I don't get why normal sockets are so anathema to web purveyors.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Great Cyberheist - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> Shadowcrew was an awesome place. You could get pretty much anything there. The marketplace was built on reputation -- you'd send a new offering to the senior members, who'd review you.

The coolest guy there was MacGyver. He knew everything about everything. You'd ask for feedback on the new SSN cards you were selling and he'd casually drop that the SSA used band printers back when your card would have been issued, so there should be little marks here or there.

From what I could tell, he never profited from any activity there, but being a senior member and receiving goods for review, receiving credit card blanks and numbers was enough to put him away. By the time it occurred to me I could send him a letter in prison, he was already out.

Sure, he was indirectly contributing to illegal activity, but to a kid looking for fake ID info, he was a god.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is long, but really good, it reads like a movie.

Gonzalez not only hacked computer networks, but also personal networks. He may not have been great at code, but he was definitely good at navigating social structures. Gonzalez was certainly a great hacker, but not necessarily good.

I'll be keeping my eye out for author James Verini in the future, this was a great read.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention keeping an eye out for the movie. It would be awesome, and perhaps the commercial success of The Social Network will make it more likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems odd to me that both _'can barely write simple code'_ and _'it is hard, if not impossible...[for Gonzalez] to conceptualize human growth, development and evolution, other than in the language of building a machine'_ are applied to the same person.

It seems that Gonzalez is not actually a talented cracker at all — he just found relationships with people that did. In that way, he's more of a standard crime lord than a hacker (using the NYT's definition of hacker).

<comment><USER6> To put it in mundane terms he's just more a sysadmin type than a programmer. Sometimes I think it's easy for programmers to have a bias against sysadmins because they aren't "creating", but the fact is that the scope of systems a typical sysadmin deals with is far greater than any programmer will ever program. Being able to grasp the scope of things and how they are working at both a high and low level is a special skill, and one that seems particularly applicable to the kind of hacks described in this article.

The wardriving and SQL injection, that's kid stuff, right? But what do you do once you're inside the system? That's where he seemed to shine.

The fact that he wasn't a great coder I think is more reflective of the fact that he didn't spend a lot of time writing code, but I don't think it reflects on his computer skills in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "He started to trust us...I was well aware that I was dealing with a master of social engineering and deception. But I never got the impression he was trying to deceive us."

This is the epitome of irony.

</comment><comment><USER8> It was interesting to hear the government's side of the story. Yet again I'm convinced that the most proficient computer security experts are way outside the government. Gonzalez doesn't seem exceptionally competent. I mean the only reason he got caught was because he used a bunch of cloned debit cards in front of a cop. Yet for several years he managed to inform for the Secret Service and keep his crimes hidden.

I'm not sure the Secret Service realizes what message they're sending to criminals. Sure they punished Gonzalez for his betrayal, but they basically advertised, "If you become an informant, you risk getting a much much worse sentence."

<comment><USER6> > _but they basically advertised, "If you become an informant, you risk > getting a much much worse sentence."_

Uh, you mean if you not only continue your crime, but escalate it to unprecedented levels after agreeing to be an informant? I think that pretty much goes without saying.

<comment><USER8> Gonzalez's actions as an informant still reduced the total amount of credit card fraud. If he hadn't informed, his associates would have committed more crime and the Secret Service probably wouldn't have caught as many of them as quickly as they did.

Assuming the Secret Service's goal is to reduce fraud, they should prefer informants who commit crimes to no informants at all.

<comment><USER6> > _Gonzalez's actions as an informant still reduced the total amount of credit > card fraud._

Did they?

<comment><USER8> Almost certainly. ShadowCrew was much bigger than just one person. The Secret Service claims 4,000 members, but the real number was probably several hundred. Without the help of a well-established member (Gonzalez was actually a founder), it would have been much harder for the government to crack this fraud ring.

<comment><USER6> Okay, so let's assume that's true, despite the fact that it's an extremely dubious claim considering the magnitude of the operations Gonzalez was running. Even then, your original claim was "what kind of message does a stiff sentence send", but then you come back with this as if it's better to send a message that the secret service are a bunch of suckers who you can play til the end and _still_ get off hook. Crime wouldn't be down for very long with that kind of message, and don't even get me started about the consequences of congress hearing that message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome article - here is my favorite quote:

"They pulled James's police records and found that in 2005 he was arrested by a Palmetto Bay, Fla., police officer who found him in the parking lot of a retail store in the middle of the night. The officer didn't know why James and his companion, a man named Christopher Scott, were sitting in a car with laptops and a giant radio antenna, but she suspected they weren't playing World of Warcraft."

</comment><comment><USER10> NY Times single page link: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html?ref=technology&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER11> Related:

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, "Hackers Gone Wild: The fast times & hard fall of the green hat gang," Rolling Stone, June 10, 2010, p. 64. <http://sabrinaerdely.com/docs/HackersGoneWild.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER12> wow, what an awesome read. I referenced the TJX hacks in a ton of customer presentations to sell Cisco's security suite, but never knew what happened behind the scenes. On one hand, he caused $400M in damages to his direct victims, but made a fortune for IT software/security companies by instilling FUD in enterprises across the globe.

</comment><comment><USER13> Man, I hate hearing about someone so gifted throwing their life away. Can you imagine if he had gotten interested in stopping the spam epidemic? That would have been awesome.

</comment><comment><USER14> First five pages, [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1920&bih=938&...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&biw=1920&bih=938&q=%22Francesco+Bongiorni%22+%22The+Great%22&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=)

(google must be the referral for the links to work)

</comment><comment><USER15> Jacking the point-of-sale terminals was inspired - very elegant problem solving.

</comment><comment><USER16> You can follow the google referral to see the article without logging in.

[http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&...](http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22The+Great+Cyberheist%22+Gonzalez)

<comment><USER17> Or just open it in incognito mode.

<comment><USER16> Or "Private Browsing" if I'm using Firefox instead of Chrome? Having noscript installed didn't help. I still got the login page. Does private browsing hide the referrer URL?

<comment><USER17> It is the cookies that matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that the guy was apparently not a good coder:

"He is not a gifted programmer — according to Watt and Toey, in fact, he can barely write simple code — but by all accounts he can understand systems and fillet them with singular grace."

</comment><comment><USER19> I used to be a developer at Target a few years ago. This incident really made them realize how important security was. Things changed (though I can still think of a few holes) it's a lot LOT more tighter.

<comment><USER20> It would be interesting to see if there are any cases where hackers bribe a software company's employee to disclose information on vulnerabilities.</comment></comment>


At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU - <AUTHOR> https://algorithmwatch.org/en/story/computer-vision-police-discrimination/ <comment><USER2> > _This is why, after decades of controversy, Google Translates still renders > the gender-neutral "they are doctors" in German as "sie sind Ärtze" > (masculine) and "they are nurses" as "sie sind Krankenschwestern" > (feminine). Google Translate was not programmed to be sexist. The corpus of > texts it received happened to contain more instances of male doctors and > female nurses. [...] BriefCam's spokesperson added that they used "training > datasets consisting of multi-gender, multi-age and multi-race samples > without minority bias," but declined to provide any evidence or details._

Okay, will we at some point admit that we want machine learning algorithms to be able to interface with symbolic rules rather than pretending that everything is a data issue as if we're living in the era of 1930s inductionism? It's clear that the misgendering issue here is not a stochastic one that ought to be solved by 'balancing out' data, it's that we want to impose strict linguistic rules and constraints on a system in a clear manner.

There really needs to be more work done in AI that makes it possible to interface with the models we built rather than trying to reframe everything as a data problem and then shove it in some end-to-end black box and then hope that whatever comes out at the other end is correct.

The automated systems used in the article are supposed to make judgements about _" Detection of body movements that constitute assault."_ This requires genuine understanding and high-level capacity to reason rather than just pixel-based inference from some camera.

<comment><USER3> Google translates it that way because German nouns have grammatical gender, and doctors are grammatically male, while nurses are grammatically female. It has nothing to do with training ML models (except insofar as most training input is grammatically correct).

Of course, some people are unhappy about it and experimenting with gender stars and gender gaps and other creative orthography, but this _is_ the status quo.

It's quite strange to demand that some ML model is more "progressive" than society and speakers themselves.

<comment><USER2> The issue here is that grammatical gender is not useful information when reasoning about the semantics of some sentence. Toothpaste in German is grammatically female, that's not a reason for an ML system to make feminine assumptions about toothpaste after it combs through data, it has nothing to do with progressive values, it's that the ML system cannot distinguish between a spurious correlation and actual meaning. Today many more medical graduates are women, this will change the ratio in the future and the inference from grammatical gender will be wrong. We should be able to tell an intelligent system from the get-go to ignore something we know to be spurious rather than fiddling around with the data.

And it's not strange at all to demand of an automated system that it behaves exactly the way we want it to behave. It is not human, it has to be more precise because it is rolled out at scale and it needs to do what we tell it to do. When we use industrial machinery in manufacturing we don't go "ah well humans are only precise down to a centimetre, guess we'll let it slide". An automated car trained on speeding drivers must not learn to speed. Automated systems are faster than humans, so errors compound, which requires more precision on part of a machine. If a ML system accidentally learns that ignoring someone wearing a green shirt is okay, and that is rolled out to a million cars, you don't have an accident but a big disaster.

We need a way to interface with ML systems in ways that let us put precise limits on when it makes inferences from data, why it made those inferences and when to follow logical rules, and when to dispose of certain data.

<comment><USER4> Why does grammatical gender exist for toothpaste? I honestly don't understand this (English speaker).

<comment><USER3> Every noun has a grammatical gender in German. It just does. There does not need to be a (contemporary) reason.

Why does declination of nouns exist in German, is almost non-existant in English, more pronounced in Latin, and even more of it in Ancient Greek?

Is one of these languages defective? Should they shed their cases?

<comment><USER4> Maybe. I just can't wrap my head around what useful function they provide for communication. I'd love to be enlightened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> * Brussels * Kortrijk * Prostějov * Prague * Mannheim * Marbella * Nîmes (FR) * Nice (FR) * Cannes (FR) * Roubaix (FR) * Marseille (FR) * Toulouse (FR) * Yvelines (FR) * Warsaw

<comment><USER6> Any correlation with the local political color?

<comment><USER7> All the French ones are right-wing, 5/7 from Les Républicains (The Republicans, a right-wing conservative party).

That doesn't say that much, as most of France is under right-wing leadership at the moment (president is centre-right)

<comment><USER8> Curious, do the French people consider Macron a right winger?

<comment><USER9> France has more than just two political parties. Macron started as a centrist populist with his own party, but has leaned to the right with his actions since coming to office.

<comment><USER8> I understand that there are more than two political parties. I'm not that blind of an American. Just curious how most Frenchmen view their own leaders on the spectrum.

<comment><USER9> I didn't mean to imply that you didn't know that, just gave it as context that it's more nuanced than right or left leaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mannheim is running a "pilot project" called "Mannheimer Weg". It is video surveillance + behavior analysis. The german state of Baden-Würtenberg, where Mannheim is located, has already announced to expand "intelligent video surveillance" to other large cities, starting with Heidelberg this year and focusing on central train and tram stations.

There are many sources in german about this topic, some praising it, some are more critical. Another such "pilot project" is run at Hamburg Hauptbahnhof and that one got a lot more bad feedback, because they also "try" facial recognition and tracking smart phone signals.

It should be noted that the european union invested into this technology starting with the 7th Framework Programm in 2007 under the codenames INDECT, ADABTS and SAMURAI. Expect to be flagged for "abnormal, possibly criminal behaviour" in the future if you run or loiter at a large train station.

<comment><USER10> Germany: the city of Freiburg is also buying 18 new cameras for the area "Bermudadreieck" and "Bertoldstraße". I couldn't find any information on how "smart" that system is going to be.

In Darmstadt the central tram hub "Luisenplatz" is going to get modern video surveillance, too. Bought from Dallmeier Electronic GmbH & Co. KG. The mayor said no facial regocnition is planned, even if the vendor offers integration with such systems. Its unknown if advanced behavior analysis is included. It is likely that all cities buy from different vendors and may get very different quality of automated video content analysis.

In Hannover the local police veiled their own cameras last year during a demonstration against a new police law. The demonstration asked for that and announced to go to a court and the police just complied without waiting for a court order, as they wanted to show clearly that they are not interested in filming and (possibly) personally identifying their political opposition. When the city council in Darmstadt was asked for such a rule for the soon to be installed cameras, they laughed and said both the police and the interior intelligence agency can and will request demonstrations to be filmed on a case by case basis and the people will not be told if the cameras are on or off.

Germany's federal police (BKA) and ministry of interior security ("Ministerium für Staatssicherheit") are unhappy with these fragmented and diversified solutions. They aim for a networked system that can find people nation wide on any camera using biometric recognition when a search warrant is issued.

In the meantime Deutsche Bahn is experimenting with a "facial anti-recognition feature" that replaces faces with fakes because they believe they can easier share the data with third party data anaylsis providers if they do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> @mods, actual title is "Unchecked use of computer vision by police carries high risks of discrimination" which is the big issue here.

<comment><USER12> Yes, mass surveillance is A-OK as long as it's not _racist_.

<comment><USER11> You have no expectation of privacy in public or on state owned areas (roads, walkways, squares, parks).

<comment><USER13> So you're fine with your everyday movements logged and published online? After all, to go anywhere you'll need to step public roads, so you have no expectation of privacy.

<comment><USER9> >So you're fine with your everyday movements logged and published online?

This comment will be downvoted, but this is hyperbole. Your everyday movements are more than just your activity in public spaces.

Likewise any website publishing your activity in public spaces is not entitled to linking it to your PII, because if they do deanonymize it, you now have means to take it down.

<comment><USER14> Your activity in public places is personally identifiable.

<comment><USER9> Again, any website publishing your activity in public spaces is not entitled to linking it to your PII, because if they do deanonymize it, you now have means to take it down.

<comment><USER14> Your activity in public spaces is PII, it's as unique to you as your face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Basically every city in the UK (not technically in the EU since Jan) have it, that's 72 right there. Is this meant to be a secret?

<comment><USER11> The article is about using Machine Learning on the video feeds, not that there are video feeds. And the issue at hand is that ML algorithms can have racial bias in the classifications.

<comment><USER16> Seems like a red herring. They want you to assume that mass violations of privacy are okay as long as they're not racist.

They're also ignoring classism - It's fine if the rights of the working class are violated, as long as they're all violated equally. Never-mind the people who can afford privacy on the free market.

<comment><USER17> I think as long as your in public then it's fine to assume you're being recorded by CCTV. Obviously the government being able to access cameras in your own house like 1984 is not ok. But CCTV in public does reduce crime and help investigations. For example the Central line in London doesn't have CCTV (unlike most of the other lines) and it has the most assaults. [https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/central-line-trains- ha...](https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/central-line-trains-have-no-cctv- on-board-and-the-highest-number-of-reported-sexual-offences-1-5592640)

I think wether you can trust your government to not misuse it (eg tracking minorities) is somewhat separate.

<comment><USER18> The idea that you should lose any form of privacy the moment you step outside your home is an extremely dangerous one. The reasons we value privacy do not suddenly cease to apply because you live a normal life.

Also, the evidence that CCTV is effective at deterring or solving crime is debatable. There is a plausible alternative theory that it simply moves the crime around. That is OK for you if you live and work in "nice" parts of town, but not so much if you are in the districts where the crime and antisocial behaviour get pushed to.

<comment><USER17> So if all the parts of town had CCTV then it would be better right?

<comment><USER18> Even from a security point of view, that's only true if they actually use it effectively. From direct personal experience, this is not always the case: just because a camera is there, that doesn't necessarily mean anyone will bother to check it, even following the theft of a considerable sum of money.

I suppose in theory, if you blanketed the entire country with CCTV (just one town is no good, the crime can move to the next town over) then you might have a deterrent effect, but of course all the other concerns about mass surveillance would still apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> US has more, per-capita? [https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/Top-10-Countries- by...](https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/Top-10-Countries-by-Number-of- CCTV-Cameras)

USA has 1 camera for every 6 or 7 people?

<comment><USER20> Is this actually a useful metric? Cities should be compared to cities.

Also, that link doesn't seem to say whether cameras are owned by the state. Presumably surveillance operated by the government is more totalitarian than various private businesses.

<comment><USER21> "lawful access" interfaces can mean automatic access by the government. It's outsourced mass surveillance.

<comment><USER19> In the movies and on TV, they always have to 'ask for the tapes'. Wonder how it really works now - the NSA already has it all?

<comment><USER22> If those cameras have any kind of outside accessibility over a network, the NSA is probably just one of many with potential access.

<comment><USER23> The NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them. Come on people...

<comment><USER22> >The NSA doesn't have access to US security cams and couldn't care less about them.

The same NSA that has vacuumed up phone and internet data, including that of US citizens?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Y Combinator CEO: "The True Test of Product-Market Fit Is 'Drowning in Demand'" - <AUTHOR> http://blog.capitalandgrowth.org/michael-seibel <comment><USER3> Reminds me of the Segment CEO line at one of the startup school lectures: "finding product market fit is like stepping on a landmine -- you can't miss it".

</comment><comment><USER4> "Sometimes we see founders who are not 'all in' but are looking for YC to validate them."

Isn't that a bit irresponsible?

I, for one, had to taper my startup ambitions for a year after graduating university because I had student loans to pay and an initial bank account balance of zero.

Some people are a bit more privileged to have a bit more of a safety net when they start, so jumping off the deep end is a bit easier and less risky.

Many tech companies don't see profit for several years. I don't see how that's possible for some aspiring founders without someone like YC giving them that initial boost.

Despite this "strike," I'm fully self-sufficient now with my own business that is ramen profitable despite having a bit more of a barrier to overcome to start with (which meant biding my time at a Big Company and legally moonlighting by doing remote work with my cofounder while building my business).

Is it not equally impressive that someone started with an empty bank account and worked a full time job for a year and then worked 8+ more hours each day after work to bootstrap their own company?

Please keep this in mind, if at all possible, when deciding whether someone is "fully committed." I hope this makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> This seemed a more useful quote:

> Foolish stubbornness comes not from working on the same problem, but from an > unwillingness to iterate on the solution. Many founders fall in love with > their product rather than the problem they are trying to solve.

</comment><comment><USER6> And yet we must still do "things that don't scale" to build up that demand.

The real challenge is to work out when your product isn't being snapped up by users not because it CAN'T be awesomely useful and demanded and valuable, but because your marketing has not effectively sold it to them yet.

<comment><USER7> Yeah- the truth is always more nuanced. Both product market fit and doing things that don't scale are required to get something off of the ground. It's almost never you see a successful startup that didn't have both of those pieces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think it's a true statement, you have plenty of small to medium-size companies serving niche interests which will be never be drowning in demand but are still profitable. But of course those companies are not exactly the right profile for Y Combinator.

<comment><USER9> You don't need an ocean to drown. To me, that means "more demand than they can handle".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This also explains why so many great companies are built by people solving one of their own problems: imagine how high your demand is for a particular solution, if you are willing to spend 100 hours coding it! That means it is worth at least $1000 for you, for many programmers closer to $10,000.

That is for founders who can personally code their solution. Imagine the situation for founders who can only make a proof of concept prototype and need to raise money for them to see a commercial version.

In this case the desire to see their idea in physical form is so great, they would work unpaid for 1 to 2 years for a 20% chance at seeing it. That means their personal demand is $100,000 for a 20% chance to have 1. (And this is why many engineers work for equity / often called a lottery ticket.)

That is another way to see that the world is drowning in demand for your product/vision :) People will donate hours or market salary to having one.

(I realize that the last three paragraphs are mixed with potential financial reward - however for people coding the solution for themselves, this definitely shows that they themselves are drowning in demand for it.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I like the phrase market-product fit more. I wrote about it last month: [https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas- look-f...](https://invertedpassion.com/to-get-good-startup-ideas-look-for- anomalies/)

<comment><USER12> Awesome post. Bookmarked so I can reread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am drowning in demand right now and it is not a pleasant feeling.

<comment><USER14> Whats the demand?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> What would you do if you worked at a startup which, after a year and a half of existing and raising a substantial Series A _hasnt even started_ to define what the product is? Basically the only reason the startup is alive is a single large customer walked in one day in search of the narrow expertise that we excel at, and gave us a contract. But other than that, there's zero product effort, and the CEO doesn't understand he needs to solve customer problems.

How would you estimate the chances of success on something like that. I estimate them at roughly zero in spite of the technological prowess, but maybe I'm wrong.

</comment><comment><USER16> So, for example Tesla has a better product-market fit than the competition because it can't produce the Model 3 fast enough? That seems like a rather 1-dimensional view to me...

<comment><USER17> Look at the differences in product-market fit between Model 3 and its closest equivalent/competitor, the Chevrolet Bolt. Model 3 is obviously a much better fit.

<comment><USER16> There isn't an isolated EV market. People who drive EV can also drive gasoline cars. So the M3 has plenty of competition in the large car market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It depends on what kind of company you want to build.

Yes if your goal is to build a Dropbox, an Instagram etc then you don't have "product-market fit" before you have to stay up all night weeks in a row to keep your service alive.

But sometimes it makes more sense (and joy) enjoy building stuff where the product-market fit and growth curve is a lot slower, read Basecamp's post about linear growth companies: [https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-world-needs- more-modest-linea...](https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-world-needs-more-modest- linear-growth-companies-please-make-some-609b5a10a9e0)

Background: I have build a VC backed company that ended up on a linear growth curve and enjoyed it a lot, today the company is profitable and proud. Today I am VP Growth of a heavily VC backed company that is trying to hit product- market fit.

</comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone here ever been drowned in demand on the Enterprise side? I've been in high growth (50+% annual) and it still felt like we were fighting for every sale.

You can have product market fit but if there are competitors, life still is hard.

<comment><USER20> Slack had about 10 times YOY growth when it first started and then slowed down to about 3-4 times YOY growth which is what it currently looks like it is at.

*these are just my eyeball estimates from looking at graphs in google search for "slack growth"

<comment><USER19> Was this driven by end user adoption, or larger scale enterprise sales?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > You mention not having a technical co-founder as a big turn-off. But we all > know that unless you're doing a 'hard tech' startup, customer acquisition > can often be harder than building a product. Is it not possible to succeed > by hiring external tech talent? After all, Kevin Rose famously built Digg > with $20/hour Rent-A-Coder talent.

How is Digg?

<comment><USER22> Not so hot, but I think most people would be pretty happy to be where Kevin Rose is, financially.

<comment><USER23> Everything's about the scoreboard.

Y'know, unless you want to be happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is also important to tease out if the demand is actually because of pricing your product too low which can sometimes be perceived as achieving product- market fit. Nothing wrong with that if cost efficiency is what you are trying to solve, but in most cases this is a sign of underestimating the true value of the product.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the key point here is: If you have to ask whether you have product- market fit, the answer is "no." Product-market fit, when it occurs, is an overwhelming, white-knuckle ride. Google and FB figured out monetization after they found product-market fit, but once you have users, advertising will follow.

</comment><comment><USER26> The advantage of being oversubscribed is you can be more picky and get the best, great news

</comment><comment><USER21> Funny... all the hackers reading this trying to figure out how they can "game" this system.

</comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Create demand

2\. Acquire users

3\. Own distribution

4\. Iterate to multiply 1

</comment><comment><USER28> If you are "drowning", it's not market fit, it's actually how unfit you are for the market.

<comment><USER29> Interesting perspective and I can agree somewhat... But isn't "drowning" correlates to the validation of your product/business model?

Depending on the business that is, but if there's an unsolved need from the market, wouldn't it be that no one is fit for the market? If so, then the person who's "drowning" is the most qualified of all (given at that moment).

<comment><USER28> Drowning can have bad reasons: you are not ready, your product is under- priced, your product is trendy based on an point-in-time event/PR/whatever, ...

And it can have bad consequences: your customers might get unhappy because of delivery delays, lower quality, you might try to adjust the product/price loosing early customers or making a mess, your thinking and doing will be in a hurry, ...

Overall, the trend might not last, and others might get into that market in a better shape than you.

Market-fit is more about the long run: being able to have regular steady growth, of customers, of the revenue, being able to learn and adapt to it, having positive feedback again and again and again, ...

I think this "drowning" idea is a pure bro/VC one: you demonstrate in a short time that you can attract a lot of customers, you get good press (for that short time), investors, millions (or billions) of money pours in, and it's not really about the customers or the long game of making a product.

<comment><USER29> Drowning is a problem, but a good kind of problem to have in my opinion.

I'd rather have a positive feedback that my business is growing in the right direction but can't keep up with demand than being the never-ending void of finding a product-market fit. This is purely my opinion (so I don't expect everyone should do/think this way), I just feel the trade-off is better.

"Overall, the trend might not last" \- I love this bit. I think this is one of the biggest problems with finding a product-market fit that is often mixed with "catching waves" (think AI wave, sharing economy wave, blockchain wave). How do I know which is which is the driving force of my product when it's mixed up?

You're 100% right, market-fit is about the long run and there's this tendency in tech culture that everything should be fast-tracked to become a unicorn, hyper-growth, press coverage on TechCrunch. It is a purely bro/VC idea.

But iterating your product/business to the best/biggest possible realization that it could possibly be can lead you to get "drowned". At the end of the day, when coming on the crossroads at that point, we should ask if we want to "go big" or "stay as you are". Both are equally accepted answers and comes down to taste and preference.

We all hate the toxic tech bro/VC culture telling us not going big is akin to being a failure and we don't talk/promote enough the idea it's absolutely fine to go slow and steady (my favorite example would be Basecamp). Tech bros are all in to get a few seconds of fame and VC are in maximizing their returns in the shortest possible time. It's unsustainable and unstable idea. I think it's the primary root why there's a diaspora of engineers, VCs, startups in silicon valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the more interesting comment is related to hiring an MBA for a startup.

Having just graduated with one, and meeting Michael at a lunch where he tried to tell us MBAs why we were bad fits for YC, I actually agree.

It's certainly not a differentiator and while it got me a great job in a very traditional firm, startups need risk takers more than credential seekers (which I've come to understand is something I've actually become to some extent).

<comment><USER31> I am a programmer with an MBA. I honestly forget I have it sometimes. Occasionally someone will remind me I have a master's degree (Why did you leave your master's degree off of this form?) and I have to think for a moment. "What?! Oh, yea..."

So, getting an MBA has had very little impact on my career/life. In fact, considering the time/effort involved, I'd say it has probably given me _negative_ value.

<comment><USER32> I am in the same boat, but with a bit more charitable view.

You may not realize it but an education like that will come across in the language you use and the way you present yourself to executives. It won't help in a startup, because there are no executives, only doers, but in a larger company being able to hold a conversation with executives on thier terms and using thier jargon will make you far more effective than someone who can only talk in programming paradigms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Y Combinator CEO", to me, means sama, though I guess his title isn't actually CEO. I feel like a better title would be "Y Combinator company CEO".

Not a big deal, but confused me at first.

<comment><USER25> Sam Altman, sama, is president of Y Combinator Group, which includes more than the accelerator. Michael Seibel is CEO of Y Combinator, the accelerator.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwseibel/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwseibel/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So this cryptocurrency/blockchain demand means that it has achieved the perfect product-market fit?

<comment><USER35> bitcoin transaction volume is down ~50% from 400k/day in december to 150-200k/day recently

the "demand" is from people who like seeing lines that go like this / in their portfolios

the ratio of people who are actually using the "product" to those who are just speculating is pretty insanely low

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Jeff Bezos once said the same thing in different words: "... The true test of innovation is customer adoption."

</comment><comment><USER37> Is it always the demand? How will this work for some company which provides a service which is used once in a while by other companies? So for a long time, there would be no demands. Think of something like [https://dataturks.com/](https://dataturks.com/) . They provide UI tools to manually label data for ML algorithms until some company is doing that specific ML algorithm/task/project.

<comment><USER9> Demand doesn't need to come from the same people continuously. Car manufacturers have plenty of demand, despite their clients only buying a product every few years.

Similarly, Dataturks can have demand from a stream of different companies, each doing their isolated projects.

<comment><USER37> Cold-start will be a big problem, once you have customers it becomes easier. How does one read signals in the beginning ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My only problem with this is that it's not really a test at all, because it is not quantifiable.

It's almost like saying, "The true test of product/market fit is whether or not it's obvious you have product/market fit."

Essentially, the statement is redundant.

There are various levels of Product/Market Fit. There's unicorn-level product/market fit and there's amazing product in a small market-level product/market fit (ie. $25M-$100M exit). YC and others in the VC-world only seem to recognize the unicorn-level because that's the only level that's relevant to them.

<comment><USER39> > "The true test of product/market fit is whether or not it's obvious you have > product/market fit."

The thing is, this is the sort of thing people _actually say_ about p/m fit. E.g. Marc Andreessen: "you can always feel product/market fit when it's happening"[0].

It might feel redundant, tautological and unhelpful, but there are a heck of a lot of startups who are really, really trying to convince themselves they're ready for the next step because "I think we've got product/market fit - <USER2> mean, we got that pilot with a big corporate, didn't we?".

Statements like this are a reminder to bring over-optimistic entrepreneurs back down to earth and remind them there's still work to do.

[0] [https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product- market-f...](https://a16z.com/2017/02/18/12-things-about-product-market-fit/)

<comment><USER40> > _The thing is, this is the sort of thing people _actually say_ about p /m > fit. E.g. Marc Andreessen: "you can always feel product/market fit when it's > happening"[0]._

I've consulted for quite a few startups, and the successful ones really do _feel_ different. Are there lines of people standing outside the booth at trade shows trying to write 5-figure checks? Are the sales people bringing in big contracts so quickly that people start mixing them up in conversation? Is engineering constantly struggling to keep up with ridiculous growth?

Mind you, not all of these companies succeed. Some find themselves trapped in a market that can't sustain growth. Others are mismanaged, or ultimately suffer from too much churn. Sometimes Google moves into the market and everything gets harder.

But once you've seen very aggressive customer demand, it's pretty obvious.

<comment><USER41> Can you please confirm that you have really experienced these scenarios multiple times? In which geography? Can you give names of the companies?

This would TOTALLY redefine my personal definition of product-market fit. Thanks!

<comment><USER42> A poster above wrote that Slack had 10x yearly growth, that sounds like it might be like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've seen startups that couldn't succeed selling dollar bills for fifty cents. There are others, Dropbox for example, that post a video and demand explodes.

I've seen people grind on a startup for years, pivot multiple times, and have nothing to show for it. Then they try another totally different idea and it's an instant success from day one.

<comment><USER44> Put another way, there doesn't seem to be any apparent correlation between effort and success.

<comment><USER45> Effort is a multiplier. A bad idea with a ton of effort won't go anywhere. A good idea with a little effort will succeed in a small way. But a good idea with a lot of effort... that's when things are massively successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The original context is more nuanced. The quote was responding to "Can you have product market fit without monetization?"

> It depends your product. My definition of product-market fit is: you are > drowning in demand—your product is being used by so many customers that you > cannot handle all the new people knocking at your door!

> Absent that you do not have product market fit. Most people use the term too > loosely.

It's easy to sell a dollar for 90 cents and be "drowning in demand". The answer seems to indicate that demand is a pre-requisite, but not necessarily sufficient.

<comment><USER47> This is an incredibly important point that often gets overlooked.

Not only are many businesses actually selling a dollar for 90 cents and therefore _think_ they have product-market fit, but even if you _aren 't_ one of these, your _competitors_ might be behaving this way.

For example, when doing freelance/consulting work, you can try to match the rates of cheap freelancers, but that's usually not smart- they might be doing the equivalent of selling a dollar for 90 cents.

Always worth remembering that 90% of new businesses die within a year (or something like that). That means there's always a significant amount of competition that is doing things that _don 't make business sense_.

<comment><USER48> This is a very common thing to hear, but Fortune couldn't even find an original source let alone actual data to back it up. [http://fortune.com/2017/06/27/startup-advice-data- failure/](http://fortune.com/2017/06/27/startup-advice-data-failure/)

<comment><USER47> Well, it really depends on what you think I meant. You're interpreting me as talking about startups (which I explicitly wasn't, since I was talking about freelance work).

Even assuming we're talking about startups, the article is looking at venture- backed startups, and defining failure as returning less than 1x. This gets two things "wrong":

1\. If talking about startups, most people (founders, investors) will consider a return of 2x to be a failure as well.

2\. You're already limiting the discussion to startups that have been venture backed.

IIRC in venture-land, the number of startups that are considered to be returning a meaningful return is around %10-%20 for the best funds.

<comment><USER48> I went with startups because I thought they were even more likely than average businesses to fail. Do you think that's a bad assumption?

<comment><USER47> No, I think that's a great assumption. Well, startups vs. general businesses - I think specific things like restaurants might fail at a pretty high rate too.

I think the rest of my comment stands though. And especially, if you're singling out specifically VC-backed startups, I'm guessing their 1-year failure rate is practically zero, since they usually raise enough money to survive at least 18 months. That's why the details of what exactly we're talking about matter a lot here.

I think, for all VC-backed startups, there are statistics that show a more-or- less 90% rate of startups "failing" in the sense that VC's care about. But it's really more-or-less- I'm assuming it's a made up statistic that is in the area of the truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> You need demand and user retention. Just the former is a false sense of success. Many startups flameout without the latter at high frequency. I've witnessed 100s.

<comment><USER50> Also, uh, money. Coming in. Income. You need this. If you don't have income (or a clear road map to it before you run out of funding) then you don't have a company, you have a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER51> Sorry, but do you think Google (prior to turning on AdWords) was a ponzi scheme?

<comment><USER52> >Both Brin and Page had been against using advertising pop-ups in a search engine, or an "advertising funded search engines" model, and they wrote a research paper in 1998 on the topic while still students. They changed their minds early on and allowed simple text ads.

Sounds like a road map.

(Wikipedia)

<comment><USER17> But here we should remember what internet ads were like before the appearance of textual Google ads. They were image banners of standardized sizes, much more intrusive and way more pointless.

<comment><USER53> I think that depends on your definition of intrusive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Physical Key Extraction Attacks on PCs - <AUTHOR> http://m.cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202646-physical-key-extraction-attacks-on-pcs/fulltext <comment><USER2> Could a moderator change the link to something other than the mobile version? The other versions on the CACM site should be more nicely formatted.

For example, the full HTML version is

[http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202646-physical-key- ext...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/6/202646-physical-key-extraction- attacks-on-pcs/fulltext)</comment>


In about 20 years, half the population will live in eight states - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/12/in-about-20-years-half-the-population-will-live-in-eight-states/ <comment><USER2> _The House and the Senate will be weighted to two largely different Americas._

So, in some sense, the system works?

The whole point of having two different federal bodies based on different criteria is to try to ensure that minority populations or different demographic details of different states don't leave any population utterly without representation and a voice. The intent is that they will be forced to hash out their differences rather than just straight up letting one group run rough shod over everyone else completely unchecked.

<comment><USER3> The only entities that are guaranteed representation are states. It's not obvious that statehood maps to any other demographic attribute over time.

It made sense the ensure states felt they had some guaranteed level of representation in order to get the states to agree to enter, or remain in, the union. But now that it's established precedent that states cannot leave the Union (at least without Congress) it's not clear to me that it's important to guarantee individual states anything.

<comment><USER2> I'm trying to comply with HN guidelines and not be snarky here, but, to my ears, that sounds an awful lot like "Now that the states are the bitches of the federal government, they don't need a voice at all." And that doesn't remotely sound like a democratic system to me. It sounds pretty tyrannical.

<comment><USER4> Knowing the history and the current makeup of the south outside of large metropolitan areas like Atlanta, "states rights" should frighten anyone who is any type of minority.

<comment><USER5> The nice thing about states rights is that there were actually states to fight it. Think if slavery had been sanctioned on a federal level?

<comment><USER6> It was sanctioned at the federal level for nearly 100 years.

<comment><USER5> It was never ever sanctioned. It just wasn't not sanctioned.

<comment><USER7> This is just a tiny nit - but slavery was actually sanctioned at the federal level through the Fugitive Slave Law. This was one of the events that led to the Civil War - since the northern states suddenly had to enforce southern slave laws. Northern states who did not oppose slavery (as long as it was below the mason dixon line) and could coexist with the south suddenly opposed slavery since they were being forced to enforce southern laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It should be noted that this effects the House as well as the Senate.

Federalism is ingrained in the US Constitution. The degree to which power has flowed to DC is something that's happened despite the Constitution not because of it. There's a line in the Constitution that says everything that's not explicitly granted to the Federal government is in the hands of the State governments. Think about that.

Can anyone name anything that a State government can do that the Federal government can't? I'm not saying things that it doesn't do but things that it cannot do.

As long as that's the case having an undemocratic Senate - and that's what it is - is trouble. It will in the long run end up weakening the Senate as an institution. To the degree the US system is a federated one you can make an argument for the Senate but as things become more centralized the arguments for the Executive and the House - indeed for changing the House into a genuinely proportionally elected body become more and more plausible.

<comment><USER9> My guesses offhand would be marriage licenses, birth and death certificates. States register real estate and collect property taxes, and you need a state to allow you to incorporate a business.

<comment><USER8> Clearly the federal government asserts a fair amount of control over marriage - See DOMA or Obergefell but beyond that, do you think congress couldn't pass a law creating a national marriage license? Or say a minimum marriage age?

I wouldn't argue that the Federal government doesn't delegate a lot of things to the States - see Medicaid - but that's not the same thing as the States doing something only because they can do it.

<comment><USER10> We really need to step back and take a hard look at what the federal government is constitutionally allowed to stick their fingers in and what they do. One way or another, that discrepancy ought to get ironed out

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've never understood why the number of congressmen per state wasn't purely based on population. Why does land get voting rights?

<comment><USER12> (I assume you're referring to the Senate and not the House, which does do somewhat population-based apportionment)

The two-assembly structure exists because it was a compromise to not give the densely-populated states all the power in the new Republic. _Crucially_ , this sort of compromise was important because it helped the less-populated states get on board with the whole "federal government" concept without fearing that power over their own affairs would be continually swamped by places like New York. "Land" gets voting rights because those who were in charge of that land (the state legislators) wanted it in order to sign onto the project.

This is why I find the modern media complaints trying to do away with such structures very troubling. It may be more vestigial at this point, but the setup was supposed to emphasize a collection of states rather than mere administrative subdivisions of a faraway government. Frankly, if there would be any change to the state-based system for senators, it should come with a free ability for smaller states to secede as a group; because it would be _going back on the deal_.

<comment><USER13> Correct. However one of the key differences is that when the Republic was established, per the Constitution, States' Rights were a primary aspect of legislation. The federal government had very little power and very few laws compared to today. Most laws existed on a state-by-state basis. The USA of the late 1700s was really more like the EU than it is today.

And that's why New Hampshire needed senators. New Hampshire needed to ensure that it could still get the things it needed from the federal government (presumably money in most cases) to make New Hampshire a good place to live. That's why land has voting rights -- New Hampshire (using it as an example for all less-populated rural states) used to be a lot more sovereign.

Now things have changed. New Hampshire isn't just ensuring that it gets the resources it needs. Because most laws in the US are now enacted on a federal level, New Hampshire is deciding implicitly how /other/ states behave. And this is the problem, and is clearly against the intent of the Constitution ("any power not explicitly granted to the federal government will be left to the states").

So, the bicameral legislature as designed made sense. But in its current context, it's fundamentally broken. If we want to return it back to its original intent, then it's time to get back to a period of States' Rights.

<comment><USER14> "most laws in the US are now enacted on a federal level"

That's simply not factually true.

<comment><USER8> Factually false but effectively true? I understand what's trying to be gotten at with the statement but it's not exactly laws per se. It's more a power dynamic but quantifying that is a bit tricky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a thought: in a Federal Republic, perhaps most issues that are heavily affected by population imbalances shouldn't fall under the scope of Federal legislation.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the complaint about the Senate having a different makeup than the House begs the question - why even have two houses in Congress? The original Constitution had State governments choose their Senators and the House was the "People's". The 17th Amendment changed that, so now we have the People choosing two different houses of Congress based on two different ways of dividing up the population, which leads to these complaints.

</comment><comment><USER16> "half of the _US_ population" would be more accurate title.

<comment><USER17> "half of the _US_ _human_ population" would be an even more accurate title.

<comment><USER16> I would imply "human" when "states" are mentioned. My issue is I was expecting an article about world's population (not much interested in US domestical problems).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Time to break up California and Texas into multiple states.

<comment><USER5> Or even better combine some states. Loiusiana, Alabama, and Mississippi could be one state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How is it that only three of the states are named?

<comment><USER20> There are diagrams. I guess nobody thought about accessibility.

50%: California, Illinois, Florida, Georgia, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas

20%: Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Washington

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is why states' rights are important.

America is not a homogeneous nation, nor should we be. Residents of Wyoming should not live in the same environment residents of New York do.

Through diversity comes greatness. The wisdom of the founders is amazing.</comment>


Composable QueryViews - <AUTHOR> http://blog.composableanalytics.com/2017/02/24/sql-for-everybody/ <comment><AUTHOR> For anyone who cares to play around with this themselves :) [http://cloud.composableanalytics.com/QueryView.aspx](http://cloud.composableanalytics.com/QueryView.aspx)</comment>