Ask HN: What major trend, event, or change is being overlooked by most people? - <AUTHOR> What are we missing? <comment><USER2> It's got to be the impact of climate change?

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the fact that more and more money is being invested in index funds, and index like funds. It feels like to me in the next 10 years something has to break.

<comment><USER4> What would break in your opinion? I, like many, have 99% of my net worth in diversified index funds. When I researched the topic, I came up with the two following considerations that seems to be in agreement with the general thinking of everyone who has not a very strong interest against indexing (e.g. many portfolio managers and investment advisors):

\- If everybody keeps indexing, at some point doing active trading will become so profitable that there will be a partial reversion of some indexers, so in other words it's a self correcting feedback loop like many other economical phenomenas.

\- Index funds will be nearly bullet proof _if_ the capitalistic machine that powers our domestic and global economy will continue to overall thrive, with increasing population/consumption and/or increasing productivity. This one in my opinion is the real threat, considering how horribly we are treating our natural habitat these days.

<comment><USER5> I am not a financial guy, but do have concerns with indexing, given that these days it seems that we've reached "shoeshine boy"[1] levels of "just put all your money in Vanguard's VOO" sentiment--more of an inner contrarian thing than anything concrete.

It is difficult to argue with the diversification of the ETFs and I by no means avoid them, but given that most are market-cap weighted, they skew toward large stocks and self-perpetuate the growth of a handful of large cap stocks. So every $ invested in VOO, has 4.2% in APPL. I'm not sure what impact that would have other than perhaps making these large caps more volatile during a market readjustment or collapse. I also, am not sure there is a better alternative as you probably wouldn't want equal weighting between #1 and #500 on an S&P index fund.

Not a financial guy so am interested in peoples thoughts on this.

[1] [http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...](http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/04/15/211503/index.htm)

<comment><USER4> The true test will come at the next downturn, my speculation is that most of the people who buy index funds because the "shoeshine boy" told them, will panic and sell, realizing significant losses. Shortly after, more active traders will come in and reap the rewards by buying at the bottom (e.g. like Buffett did in 2009).

I believe if you continue holding (I will) you'll do fine if we don't face a catastrophe, but you certainly need to have some sort of financial discipline to see your net worth slashed by 30%+ and stay still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Organizational cultural shifts to meet market demand for innovation and dominant brand archetypes.

</comment><comment><USER7> The use of the internet to put societys into bondage to national governments outside of the west.

<comment><USER8> In what way?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The fragility of most companies and industries.

</comment><comment><USER10> Aging research

</comment><comment><USER11> Blockchain

<comment><USER12> What is blockchain actually useful for?</comment></comment>


2^30 sandpile - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.cmu.edu/~wes/hexsand.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is blurry on Firefox, the whole thing UI and all. O_o</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite CV maker[0], and what does a good CV look like[1]? - <AUTHOR> [0] even if that means something like Vim, what outline and formatting guidelines do you follow? What file format do you export to? Though mostly I'm curious about web app tools<p>[1] i.e. What do you look for in CV as a hiring manager, or what do you find makes a successful CV as an applicant <comment><USER2> canva.com can be interesting: [https://www.canva.com/design/DABq4bQQXZM/rbaXBbOcg1R19Ha0LcE...](https://www.canva.com/design/DABq4bQQXZM/rbaXBbOcg1R19Ha0LcE0og/view)</comment>


HTML 5 Parsing - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/html-5-parsing/

<comment><USER2> I always felt that the <!DOCTYPE html> simplification, while nice, is still a little weird because it immediately precedes an <html> anyway. I recall a blog years ago suggesting that HTML 5 should simply have said <html version=5>, and I think it would have been nice to see something that sane. :)

<comment><USER3> I'm sure the spec authors would love to make that simplification too, but one of their goals is compatibility with deployed browsers. <!DOCTYPE html> works to trigger standards mode in all currently-popular browsers.

<comment><USER4> But shouldn't they _also_ add a version=5 in the <html> tag?

What are they going to do when we get html 6?

Is there any way to suggest it, or the spec basically done?

<comment><USER5> No, omitting version is intentional (and version number did not mean much in the past). HTML5 spec defines parsing algorithm what should be used for all html versions and will never require browsers to do anything different for different versions of html. If the future browser will be capable to parse HTML8 it will be able to parse HTML5 just fine.

<comment><USER6> I think the problem is that a 2009 browser will not be able to notice that the HTML8 it's seeing is potentially beyond what it can do. With versions, a check for versions above 5 could produce a message that says that some parts might not display properly.

<comment><USER7> Why, just because some Zeldman-humping git noticed they could put a bigger number there?

The browser could display an infobar if it _actually encounters something it doesn't understand_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know the reason for maintaining the java and c++ version?

Why didn't they just fork the c++ conversion of the java source and be done with it?

<comment><USER4> Be done with it? Quite the opposite, that means you constantly need to maintain two version.

By using an automated conversion, you only need to maintain one of them.</comment></comment>


Perform math on encrypted data without ever decrypting it - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/0713/breakthroughs-privacy-super-secret-encryption.html?partner=relatedstoriesbox

<comment><USER2> It's been interesting to watch this story roll downhill.

It started out as "fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices." <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1536414.1536440>

Then it got covered by the tech press: "Do calculations on encrypted data."

<http://www.ddj.com/security/218101417>

And is now in Forbes and probably other publications for highbrow laypeople: "IBM's Blindfolded Calculator."

This process has been talked about elsewhere:

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174>

</comment><comment><USER3> Not practical technology yet, note the "multiply the necessary computing time by around 1 trillion" part of the article.

Discussed on HN already, here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=657859>

And here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678975>

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't know anything about this area at all, but I remember in a cryptography lecture, being told you can perform arithmetic on un-padded standard RSA, is this similar to that. I imagine this could be very useful for banks possibly in databases, to for instance increase and decrease peoples funds, without standard employees seeing the total ammount of money in the account.

<comment><USER5> You might be thinking of blinding, which lets you do stuff like affix a signature to an encrypted message in such a way that the signature can be "moved" to the plaintext version of the message (I think that's how it went, anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One should be able to do something similar with analysis of images. You can't scramble them though...

<comment><USER7> How so? Any relevant links you can share?

<comment><USER6> If you transform the image homeomorphically, its analysis may still be meaningful because the topology is preserved. So, you pass the transformed image to me, I analyze it topologically without seeing the real image, pass the results to you, then you can recover the topology of the original image. It was just a thought...</comment></comment></comment>


Apple stopped innovating with the iPhone. You're welcome. - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/06/07/apple-stopped-innovating-with-the-iphone-youre-welcome/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that iPad thing was no big deal. Never mind the 25M units sold. Never mind that everyone is furiously trying to imitate it.

Syncing everything to the cloud and back to all your devices and actually making that work, and signing deals with all the record companies so you can do this with your music collection without it being a prohibitive pain, also no big deal.

Some people are awfully demanding. :)

<comment><USER4> "Yeah, that iPad thing was no big deal."

Since when was the iPad a cellphone? He said right up front "Apple's innovation in the mobile sphere"...

<comment><USER5> Are you from the UK? In context, mobile computing includes laptops, tablets, and smartphones (and maybe even games on dumbphones).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> People seem to forget that not all innovation is disruptive. There's room for incremental innovation, too. A lot of room.

</comment><comment><USER7> Taking great features from others should be nothing to be ashamed of. It's what made Android great (among other things, obviously).

I always hate it when companies are unwilling to copy great ideas because of, well, I don't know, maybe pride? It's bad for the user. Mobile OS A has great feature X, mobile OS B has great feature Y, but no OS has features X and Y – and that just plain sucks for the user.

It goes without saying that sometimes it's good to copy a little less and do things your own way a bit more. That was the situation in 2007. Recently, Microsoft also went that route (and they should be admired for that). But sometimes it's not. Polishing iOS seems like the right thing to do right now – and that includes looking elsewhere for inspiration.

<comment><USER8> Not invented here (NIH) syndrome is poisonous to innovation. It's always embarrassing to watch companies like MS implement a particular "mainstream" feature in their own way just to make it different. This usually ends up awkward.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's not the first time JB apps are implemented on new iOS releases.

I.e.: MobileNotifier, CameraButtons.

I think Apple actually needs jailbreakers.

<comment><USER9> One suspects that Apple wink at jailbreakers.

They can't encourage them overtly without damaging their relationship with the music and film cartels -- without which they lose the most successful commercial music market on the internet. And the MPAA, RIAA and their members _hate_ the idea of uncontrolled access to machines that host their media. (EDIT: Also, the cellcos presumably don't like the idea of uncontrolled smart devices talking to their base stations ... as witness the periodic crackdowns on un-authorized tethering.)

But on the other hand, jailbreaking isn't impossible. And it ought to be -- if Apple seriously wanted to design a machine that couldn't be jailbroken, then some combination of a trusted platform module with remote activation (which Apple indeed enforce) should be sufficient. (Kernel isn't signed by Apple corporate? Boot loader say bye-bye!)

So my conclusion is that Apple are doing "due diligence" -- enough to propitiate the copyright absolutists, but dragging their heels enough to permit a deniable halo of JB developers to generate new ideas, which can then be bought in-house if they work or disowned if they don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd argue that the only true innovation Apple made with the iPhone was with the App Store, which didn't even happen until a bit after the launch. Apple gathered what they thought were best technologies, honed them, and made them work together.

<comment><USER11> Are there phones that predate the iphone that are entirely controlled through a large, multi-touch touchscreen?

<comment><USER10> Not multi-touch, but HTC had been making large, touch screen devices based on Windows Mobile for a while before the iPhone was announced.

<http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_p3600-1694.php>

Clearly not taken to the degree Apple did, but what Apple did was evolve it to the point where it was consumer-friendly, not invent the concept itself.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the link, I hadn't known about those phones. It's a resistive touchscreen instead of a capacitative multitouch screen, but it's certainly fair to count it as a predecessor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> ah bless. Apple product announcement and all the websites and bloggers and journalists are scratching their heads.

"How can I turn this into page views. Gee the overview of what he said - <USER2> done a million times. What about slagging it all off - well it is pretty interesting stuff though. I know. I'll come up with a trolling headline and use some tricksy language making myself look cool so it's not really slagging them off at all. hmm. got it. Redefine innovate to mean first one ever to think of an idea. Bingo. "

"Damm. Better start thinking about the next release......"</comment>


Show HN: Awesome CV – A LaTeX Template for Your Outstanding Job Application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/posquit0/Awesome-CV <comment><USER2> Great template! I used to use Awesome CV myself, and it inspired me to learn the basics of LaTeX.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this template for quite a while now, and my cv stands out, every time :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome stuff :)</comment>


E-learning is dead ? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ticavie-tree.com/2011/10/08/e-learning-is-dead/

<comment><USER2> Flagged as a marketing blog post. The company makes e-learning software.

As for e-learning being, I and thousands others signed up for the online Stanford courses, which start on Monday. We'll see…

<comment><AUTHOR> This wasn't our goal. We have been creating elearning materials for teachers, not softwares. This is our first software project and it's open source (<https://github.com/niclupien/ticavie-tree>).

I posted here to find people interested in our project not to find customers.</comment></comment>


Are We Already in the Matrix? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/are-we-already-in-the-matrix-7492e89be433 <comment><USER3> Isn't the simulation hypothesis essentially convergent with strong theism? If some kind of God created the universe and explicitly created us and is basically running things, isn't this a "simulation" of sorts? Consider that if this were indeed a simulation it means we know nothing about the "host" universe and for all we know entirely different physical laws could be in operation there.

This always struck me as a secular resurgence of a very old idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> In the movie, when one of the people woke up from the Matrix - or died - <USER2> were flushed into the old sewer system. The water there should have been full of rotting corpses, yet the ship easily navigated through what appeared to be clear water.</comment>


Damn Cool Algorithms: BK-Trees - <AUTHOR> http://blog.notdot.net/archives/30-Damn-Cool-Algorithms,-Part-1-BK-Trees.html

<comment><USER2> I couldn't understand what this means -- Say we take an arbitary string, test and compare it to query. Call the resultant distance d. Because we know the triangle inequality holds, all our results must have at most distance d+n and at least distance d-n from test.

Can anyone please explain me in more simpler terms.

<comment><USER3> It's easiser to understand by using 2D geometry. Pick one point on a paper and call it _query_ , the input, and draw a circle of radius _n_ around that point. Your goal is to find the points in the dataset which are inside the circle. Let's call those points _answers_.

Pick an arbitrary point (in the dataset) and call it _test_. The distance between _test_ and _query_ is _d_. Now, you can see the distance between _test_ and the furthest and closest points in _answers_ are _d+n_ and _d-n_ , respectively (assuming _d_ > _n_ ).

Since the dataset is organized by distance, we can quickly narrow the range of search.

<comment><USER2> thanks dude, for clearing it up. I don't know why I always get confused on easy things like this..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Metric trees (sometimes called ball trees) are a simple generalization of this to arbitrary metrics. They're also useful for points in a high dimensional euclidean space that have low intrinsic dimensionality.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see why this would be much better than simply doing fuzzy match on a trie.

<comment><USER6> How do you do a fuzzy match? Are there any sites out there that deal with all the text matching algorithms? I need to do this for a project.

<comment><USER7> No websites, probably, but lots of papers. A good start might be <http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.851/spring07/lec.html> (lectures 8 and 9 or so).

<comment><USER6> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. Has anyone here used BK-Trees in their work?

</comment><comment><USER9> Needs more code.</comment>


2018 Global Annual Mean CO2 Growth Rate Near Record High - <AUTHOR> https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html <comment><AUTHOR> I share this with the HN tech community to raise alertness that not enough progress and change is being made to slow down greenhouse gas growth. The unfortunate reality is we are battling more extreme conditions globally that drive additional energy demands as well as an influx of carbon based travel.</comment>


ONNX – an open format to represent deep learning models - <AUTHOR> http://onnx.ai/ <comment><USER2> We've been looking at ONNX a lot at work. Now that we have the open-source ONNX runtime[1] available, it looks like a really good option. The ONNX runtime from MS supports, or claims to eventually support, all of Windows, Mac and Linux, with API's in Python, C#, C, and C++ (available or "coming soon").

The biggest "hole" in the ONNX ecosystem, that I see, is that Tensorflow doesn't natively support the format. But, there are converters to convert TF models to ONNX, so that shouldn't be a huge issue.

Also, despite the name "Open Neural Network eXchange", ONNX is capable of representing non neural-network models as well. Just something to keep in mind.

[1]: [https://github.com/onnx/onnx](https://github.com/onnx/onnx)</comment>


Thousands of Redditers issue death threats against NK president for "fun" - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/q6x36/damn_that_was_fast/

<comment><USER2> I'm not condoning this, but they are obviously trying to troll the NK president, as a response to the trolling he himself has done to the international media, by continuing to make threats with the only purpose of flexing his muscles. The media eats it up, so he keeps doing it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like something that would be better posted in r/shitredditsays than Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised that you trivialise it like that.

<comment><USER4> It's people saying stuff on the internet. It's highly unlikely any of them will put any effort in following through on what they say... unless what they say is they are about to assassinate a bottle of Mountain Dew.

<comment><USER5> If it was Facebook or Twitter, and the poster lived in the UK, they could be arrested quite easily.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Chinese Education, for a Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/asia/in-china-schools-a-culture-of-bribery-spreads.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER3> This kind of thing doesn't just happen in education, and it's difficult to say how to really stop it. For example:

My aunt had surgery about a year ago, and our family paid out quite a bit of money to everyone involved in her surgery. On top of the normal fees, we gave the surgeon, first assist, second assist, anesthesiologist, and even the secretary large sums of money.

When my mother told me about this, I was shocked. "Why?" I asked. You'll have to understand that my family in China, while well off, has never participated in the cycles of alleged corruption. In fact, my uncle rejects so many bribes (gifts from business interactions) to the point that people have started leaving gifts anonymously at my grandmother's door.

Yet, this wasn't about getting ahead in life. My mother told me, "we just want to make sure they have an incentive to do the best job they can." Honestly, I don't blame her. We didn't pay to skip a line, and we didn't pay for any organs (not that type of surgery anyway). We paid the people involved because we felt it would inspire them to do a better job.

Is that wrong? Maybe. I don't really know anymore.

<comment><USER4> _Tipping, for example, is considered bribery in some societies, while in others the two concepts may not be interchangeable._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bribery>

<comment><USER5> > Tipping, for example, is considered bribery in some societies, while in > others the two concepts may not be interchangeable.

To clarify for our non-American readers: In the USA, and possibly Canada as well, waitstaff in restaurants are typically not paid a living wage (that is, they're paid even less than minimum wage, which isn't a living wage by itself anymore either) because both restaurants and the law expect them to make it up in tips. In some restaurants, the menu will say that an automatic gratuity (that is, a tip) of some specified percentage is added to the bill of parties of eight or more people. Typically, tips range from 15%-20% of the total bill, but there's no law governing how much people actually give.

 _Merely bringing this up in the wrong crowd will reliably generate a massive argument._ So, uh, keep that in mind, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I first lived in Taiwan under its former dictatorial regime. Even then, when the late Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo was president, the people of Taiwan were very proud of the incorruptibility of their university entrance system. They pointed out to me that Chiang Ching-kuo's son was not able to get into university. The university entrance exams there, then and now, are like taking a battery of multiple AP-level or IB-level tests over just a couple days in July. Students were strictly rank-ordered by their scores, and students rank-ordered their choices of university departments. Then a matching algorithm paired students and schools. (There are other details I am omitting here for simplicity.)

The stringency and fairness of the university entrance system in Taiwan seemed to drive a lot of quality in curriculum standards and instruction in secondary schooling in Taiwan. (In those days, compulsory, taxpayer-subsidized schooling for all was provided through ninth grade. Many students went on to three grades of senior high after taking entrance exams for senior high schools. The best and most desired senior high schools were free to attend, having taxpayer subsidies, but of course were hard to get into.)

In most countries, over time, democratization leads to ever-greater provision of higher education places, with ever-greater public subsidies. Today, the best universities in Taiwan still enroll very well prepared students, who take many of the core subjects using the same English-language textbooks used at the better univerisities in the States. Some of the lesser universities in Taiwan are barely above the level of typical colleges in the United States, but in general there is still good quality of secondary education there. Selection to higher levels of schooling that is based on achievement at earlier levels of schooling, rather than based on bribes or connections, makes a whole country better off.

<comment><USER7> The situation in Taiwan isn't _quite_ that rosy I don't think.

The result of the examination system (which, FWIW, is not unique to Taiwan) is that high school kids routinely spend 12+ hours each day schooling. When they're not at public school, they're at private cram schools, and success in the exams certainly haven't been democratized for those who cannot afford the extra, private help to get ahead.

So sure, it isn't corrupt, but the integrity of the examination system doesn't mean egalitarianism, not by a long shot.

<comment><USER8> Egalitarianism is never a goal.

A fair competition however is.

The best will rise up - working 12 hours a day if needed. How is that a bad thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's ironic that China was in 587 the first to introduce competitive examinations for government positions.

<comment><USER10> Any distribution system where human examiner is involved is prone to corruption. Doubt it worked that smooth back then either.

<comment><USER11> It's worse than that, the exams were pointless because they only tested knowledge of Confucianism.

<comment><USER12> That's not any different from today's liberal arts degrees, which have nothing to do with the careers most people end up going into.

<comment><USER13> The difference being the Confucianists got jobs which they didn't deserve.

<comment><USER14> I know you're trying to say that testing for Confucianism is not the same as testing for how well you can do a government post, but these weren't worthless tests.

1) Passing old Chinese tests required literacy, something we want bureaucrats to have. This is a big chunk of what liberal arts degrees are about. (Calligraphy, too, was included in the test.)

2) Studying Confucianism meant that you at least had to think and respond about moral and ethical matters. Again, I'd rather have a bureaucrat who has thought about morality and ethics than one who hasn't. And according to Wikipedia,

> The core of Confucianism is humanism, the belief that human beings are > teachable, improvable and perfectible through personal and communal > endeavour especially including self-cultivation and self-creation.

3) People with liberal arts degrees quite often take posts that are entirely unrelated to their field of study.

Saying that "Confucianists got jobs which they didn't deserve" is just a pathetic jab at Chinese culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I predict that education will continue to be a huge political and economic battleground globally for the foreseeable future. There are so many reasons:

1\. Convention and desire for free and equal access to basic education is one of the cornerstones of the meritocracy, which prevents a purely economic solution. Even at the university level the government gives lenders extra recourse and the schools themselves provide aid.

2\. Credentialism: access to well known schools is highly prized and self perpetuating. Even if a new school has an excellent staff it could take decades for graduates to go out in the world and make the school's reputation.

3\. Access to peers: beyond pure credentialism and instructor quality is the caliber of the fellow students that can make a big difference.

4\. GPA inflation. The students constantly try to exert pressure on the instructor to raise GPA. If the instructor gives in what happens is effectively GPA socialism ... if many students have a high GPA the true top students are no longer easily distinguished by GPA. Admissions officers then track the students' performance and incoming GPA versus their originating school ... a high GPA from that school is then worth less.

<comment><USER16> > Admissions officers then track the students' performance and incoming GPA > versus their originating school ... a high GPA from that school is then > worth less.

This already happens.

Waterloo University in Canada, recognized as one of the worlds top CS and Engineering Universities, has admitted tracking grades from each incoming high school and then comparing them to what each student gets at University.

My admissions person admitted this to me in 2000.

It's been going on for a while:)

<comment><USER17> Almost all Ontario universities are doing this now. They share data too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The Chinese education system unfortunately seems to promote dishonesty to children. Plagiarism is endemic and sometimes students are taught to plagiarize. There may be a decent reason - they think kids should model successful thinkers rather than come up with half-baked ideas themselves - <USER2> the result is that they are teaching kids to be dishonest. A classmate of mine from China turned in a rough draft of a paper that was copied from somewhere. The university gave her a standard punishment - she was forced to withdraw from the class and they put a "required to withdraw" mark on her transcript. She was unwilling to accept that she had done anything wrong and insisted that even though the teacher told her not to plagiarize they didn't tell her that she couldn't turn in a rough draft that had been copied.

I've read that this dates back to the Chinese civil service exam system which is ancient by Western standards and has a long tradition of people coming up with clever ways to cheat.

<comment><USER19> The ancient Chinese civil service exam was, at least in part, designed to weed out independent thinkers - that's just not a valued commodity in a society based on Confucianism. So it doesn't surprise me plagiarism isn't viewed as a particularly serious offense even today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That is very sad and concerning.

In my libertarian opinion, the competition start when the participants can make an informed choice - ie when they have a basic education.

Basic education, teaching everyone to read and count, provides positive externalities too- so it's generally regarded as a good thing, and many government provide public basic education. (some push that even further, but let's not talk about that yet)

An alternative is having companies providing basic education, and students enrolling with vouchers - ie opening competition on the education service market while fixing demand, to keep the positive externality. It is even better than the former option.

But biasing the competition even before it is started, by having a single government-run education scheme, where bribery and cronyism replace healthy competition is so wrong!

<comment><USER20> A true libertarian must pay for all education. Vouchers? Vouchers are socialism. Pay in cash or whatever arrangements are mutually acceptable to both sides. The government's only acceptable role is to guarantee the execution of contracts. The market will guarantee efficiency!

<comment><USER8> I agree with everything but your first phrase - a 5 years old kids can't pay for his education and can't enter in a legally binding contract. This breaks that line of thought.

Is that a collectivist troll?

In that event, let me warm your heart: your reasoning hold perfectly well if you replace education by healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My theory is that the reason there are much higher levels of corruption in places like China, Mexico and other countries versus the US is because their so-called "economies" are even more broken and unequal than ours.

The United States GNI at PPP (gross national income at purchasing power parity) is $48,890 whereas Mexico's is $15,120 and China's is $8,430. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_(PPP)_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GNI_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

So if corruption is related to relative GNI at PPP (obviously that isn't the only factor, but I think it is likely to be a significant one) then we can expect problems related to corruption to be about 3 times as bad in Mexico as they are in the US. Similarly we would expect China's problems to be about 6 times as bad.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm interested to know how this compares to private/Ivy League schools. It seems to me that you would also have a price to pay in order to gain access to top education although certainly, in the Chinese case, it's more extreme since there are so many students vying for the same few spots at top universities that everyone is trying to gain some sort of edge.

</comment><comment><USER23> We had similar issue in South India growing up. In my home where Christian Missionary schools were the popular schools when I was growing up, used to collect huge funds as donations (Though they are forced).

Over the years, many Private non church based schools got started with better standards (Since there was money to be made). Most of the schools that were doing well in my generation are now closed or on their death bed.

Its purely supply and demand. If schools can demand huge donations, it matter of time before more & better schools get started increasing the supply.

India is a generation ahead of China in Corruption (Sad but true).

</comment><comment><USER24> Communism, everybody is equal but some are more equal than others...

<comment><USER25> To be fair, ever since China was inducted into the WTO, they have abandoned any pretense of running a communist system.

Their government now seems to have taken the worst parts of capitalism, and mixed it with the worst parts of socialism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Prices looks similar to the US system.

<comment><USER27> Surely you are trolling.

<comment><USER28> Even if its not downright corruption, there is a price for a good education in western countries, too. Highly educated parents will want a good education for their kids, they will move to where that can be had. Since high education is strongly correlated with high income, gentrification sets in, pushing out lower-income households.

And thats just up to high-school; it's very clear that money can get you into any university, merits or not.

<comment><USER27> Granted, but the USA still has vastly more social mobility than china. I'm a bit disgusted that someone would even claim they are about the same.

I had no advantages of highly educated parents nor much money, yet I was able to get through high school and into a good state university, then a decent phd program; money was paid but not that much, and definitely nothing to the public per-university schools I went to.

<comment><USER29> The data really don't give me so much confidence. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Great_Gatsby_Curve.png>

Yes, the US is better than China, but when you realize the US is much closer to China than say.. Canada, it is a bit disheartening.

Yes, you did succeed with little to start with: congratulations. I could find people with your story in China as well. The sad truth though is that most people in your situation did not do as well as you; what happened to all of your high school classmates?

GP may be exaggerating a bit, but there is an incredibly high correlation to parental wealth and success in the US. For high school, if you don't go to a nice expensive private school, it'll really help to live in a (expensive) neighborhood with great public schools.

I attended a public university, but it was very clear that the kids there disproportionately had high parental income. And.. the kids with the high parental income tended to a) get higher grades and B) get better jobs afterward.

<comment><USER27> I live in china, I know how bad it is here; I went through school in the states, I know what goes on there. No one is bribing middle or high school teachers in the states, you would go to jail if you even tried! Our only problem is thte push from parents, oppurtinities are still open if you don't have money as long as you work for it. The same is true in Canada actually, we aren't that far off from our northern neighbors; only our unviserities cost more but are also better at the high end.

But whatever problems we have in the states, the problems in china are very different and much more wicked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> China seems like a not very good place to live in... Everything you read about China confirms this idea even more.

<comment><USER7> Bear in mind your sources of information. The US media is perennially down about all issues East Asian, and even moreso at a time when America feels threatened. This goes beyond China, if you turned the clock back 20 years it was Japan.

This happens on the other side of the fence too, the Chinese media also covers disproportionately the failures of the US.

The only takeaway here is to not get all of your information from one place - even if it is the New York Times.

<comment><USER27> With the People's Daily or CCTV you'll get a much less biased view of china (joking).

The system sucks and kudos to NYT for informing us, even if it has landed them on the wrong side of the great firewall. Ya, bad things happen in the states too but the NYT has no problem reporting on that! The western and Chinese press are just completely incomparable when it comes to bias. Wen is also right, this corruption will tear china apart if it doesn't end soon.

That being said, china can be a nice place to live if you are a foreigner, have lots of moment to send your kids to international school, or are a local with lots of guanxi, or you don't have kids yet. You'll hardly realize corruption in your daily life outside of some key but rare activities (like buying property or dealing with local schools).

<comment><USER7> I think you and I are talking about completely different things.

My post is in response to the notion that, given all the reporting you see in Western media re: China, the whole country looks like one gigantic shithole.

This perception is not entirely surprising. Even when one gets all of their news from the NYT (which as far as as bias and truthfulness goes, is pretty damn good), there is a systemic bias in getting Eastern news from Western sources by mere virtue of the fact that you'll never hear the good with the bad - you'll just hear the bad.

This isn't some evil conspiracy to slag China - it is this way for the same reason the 6 o'clock news is full of murders and robberies. Except, unlike the 6 o'clock news, you don't have real-life experience to temper the one- sidedness.

If you get all of your world view from local news sources, you'll have a very skewed world view, even if all of the content you consume is factual.

<comment><USER27> Right, I see what you mean. I was just pointing out if you only used Chinese media to learn about china, it would be the best place in the world since they cover up most of the bad, it's not like the west where our press is more than happy to air our dirty laundry.

<comment><USER31> I think it is a bit more nuanced than that. Yes, there is censorship in China, but not everything is censored equally. In particular, bribery cases usually get wide coverage in the media, even in China Daily. If my understanding is correct that's because the consensus is that the top brass is clean, it's just the "underlings" that can be bought. So, the leadership allows reporting of corruption (or even encourages it), as a means of keeping local officials in check. Because the central government is well aware of the problem and regards it as an existential threat, too.

<comment><USER27> Wow, the propaganda has worked really well on you. Bribery cases only get publicized when someone has another ax to grind with the official, because otherwise EVERYONE does it. The top brass is not clean at all, even Wen Jiaobao (just check out the NYT reporting about his family's wealth!) but they have enough guanxi to not get called out for it. That Bo Xilai was called out had more to do with him tapping Hu Jintao's phone than him being a corrupt general bad guy!

China's family-power politics is very entrenched by now, no one is really immune to it: if you try to be clean, you'll get kicked out because that would make you immune to the nuclear option (don't tell on me, and I won't tell on you). The government will give the public some bones whenever some official makes a serious mistake that can't be covered up, or otherwise someone who has more guanxi than the target has some score to settle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The problem is that there is pent-up demand and an open market is not being allowed to operate. This always, everywhere, leads to what economists call a "parallel market" and what everyone else calls a "black market".

</comment><comment><USER33> This is terrible.</comment>


Scaling Pandas: Comparing Dask, Ray, Modin Vaex, and Rapids - <AUTHOR> https://www.datarevenue.com/en-blog/pandas-vs-dask-vs-vaex-vs-modin-vs-rapids-vs-ray <comment><AUTHOR> hey HN, author here.

I have used Python for data wrangling for years, but there were a bunch of libraries and frameworks I hadn't used and didn't properly understand, so I learned a lot writing this summary.</comment>


How basic income could fail in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-how-american-basic-income-could-fail-2016-12 <comment><USER2> How about an alternate idea of "basic employment"? The government guarantees a job to anyone who wants one, but they do have to show up to work. These can be jobs that are at a loss, and are explicitly "make work" jobs. For example, cleaning up parks, repairing roads, etc. This may solve some issues with basic income: it's not "free" money, which doesn't present as much of a problem to people's values. It won't feel like a handout, and people will more easily transition back to a real job if they want.

<comment><USER3> The biggest turn off for me is that most UBI advocates seem to have the opinion that people freed from jobs will turn into philosophers or artists or otherwise make productive use of their time. I argue you don't really have to look very far to find the answer to that question: check out what an underemployed ~25yo from a small rust-belt town is up to. Chances are not a whole lot.

That's why I'm really in favor of a scheme like this. Ensure that people supported by the community at least give something back. Go a step further and increase funding for the arts so we can create jobs there too.

<comment><USER4> You can't very meaningfully use someone's not making "productive use of their time" while lacking employment (and therefore income) as an argument _against_ UBI. They don't have the income that might — yes, _might_ — enable them to be their flavor of productive.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that a lot of people's flavor of productive might turn on "artist" or "writer" where very few will be interested in "coal mine equipment operator", or "customer service person for DELL." For the foreseeable future there will always be jobs people don't want to do that machines aren't capable of taking over.

<comment><USER6> I agree with this. What will be interesting though is to see if the wages of those jobs will increase because people won't want to do them, or if wages will decrease because there will be so many more people that aren't employed, and there may be a certain prestige to being employed to do any work at all.

<comment><USER7> I suspect that no matter how you slice things, there will always be people who don't qualify for UBI (probably anybody without citizenship or a green card), and that those people will end up working many of those jobs for low wages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Basic income will have to come with extremely limited immigration EDIT: or immigrants will be ineligible for the income.

That's something that a lot of people miss, that a universal basic income in a developed country (US, Western Europe) corresponds to a lifestyle of the lap of luxury in most other parts of the world.

<comment><USER9> This is an important point, especially because the first country that implements UBI will be the most attractive country to immigrate to for people who have no value to employers. Many potential immigrants who want to work hard will choose to go to other countries, so the country with UBI will miss out on their productivity and their tax dollars. That would certainly put a burden on the UBI system.

<comment><USER10> What immigration system allows people who have no desirable skills to immigrate currently?

<comment><USER11> Th kind in which cities refuse to enforce federal laws, eg, New York.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think Tyler Cowen's post, "What are some of the biggest problems with a guaranteed annual income?" is one of the better analyses of why basic income is likely to fail even if it is implemented: [http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/what- are-some-of-the-biggest-problems-with-a-guaranteed-annual-income.html)

The bottom line is that we have our current mess of welfare systems because social, moral, and political forces have made it that way. Those forces will warp basic income into something resembling the system we have today by adding all kinds of exceptions and supplementary programs to it -- most of which will be politically popular and morally justifiable to most people. Think of it as Mostly Universal Complicated Income.

<comment><USER12> Along the line of relevant analyses, there was an insightful post by Brad DeLong recently: [http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/is-the-problem-one- of...](http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/is-the-problem-one-of- insufficient-market-wages-inadequate-social-insurance-polanyian-disruption-of- patterns-of-life-.html)

Apart from the clunky title, the bottom line is this: Most people don't want to be taken advantage of, but they also don't want to feel like they are taking advantage of others. This is a useful heuristic for living in small social groups. But most of the value that is being produced today is not really down to individual contributions, but results from our collective inheritance of technology and productive networks in society. This completely messes up the built-in heuristics of humans.

It's basically a different angle from which to view what you wrote and sama is stated as saying in the article.

<comment><USER13> The larger point of that article is an important frame for this discussion: Everyone's income is based on the total economic surplus. No one's value to society is equivalent to their income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Paying people to not contribute to GDP will result in decreased GDP. Lower GDP means less income to be distributed.

UBI is not the first time someone has proposed that a central authority should determine the income of the general population. It doesn't take much research into Russia to recognize this as 'serfdom'.

<comment><USER15> Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).

original source of this example: [https://ploum.net/largent-doit-il-etre- notre-seul-objectif/](https://ploum.net/largent-doit-il-etre-notre-seul- objectif/) (in french, but interesting essay)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, try that in scale for a few years and watch the economy collapse under runaway inflation.

<comment><USER9> You're missing the point. The point is that GDP increases don't necessarily mean productive work is being done.

<comment><USER5> Not on the short term no, but when you scale it on the long term it evens out and artificial increases like Keynesian style economics are temporary and GDP is in fact a good indicator of productivity.

The original argument was that GDP would decrease if we had less people producing, the counter argument seems "we could make GDP artificially increase" presumably as a way to suggest that GDP isn't meaningful. That's not a very good argument because artificial GDP inflation is a temporary solution that has devastating results down the line

<comment><USER9> Nobody said that pursuing GDP inflation was actually a good idea. It's just an example of how GDP and income are not the same.

<comment><USER5> I don't know what you are reading but that post had nothing about income or the relationship between individual income and GDP:

>Increasing the GDP is easy. First, pay me 50$ to dig a hole. Then I pay you 50$ to fill the very same hole. We created nothing but the GDP increased by 100$ (well, tax aside).

there's nothing about individual income there.

<comment><USER9> Yeah there is. People are getting paid to dig holes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing I haven't really seen adequately addressed is this: what happens when some people inevitably waste their $2000 a month stipend on non- essentials and then don't have enough money for rent or food?

Do we just end up recreating the current welfare state _on top_ of UBI? Perhaps a better way to ask that is, what would _stop us_ from recreating the current welfare state on top of UBI?

<comment><USER17> What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?

They have no income whatsoever. If you waste 1 months income of UBI and end up on the street, you will have learned a very harsh lesson, but there will always be the next payment coming. Hence if you're not a total imbecile, you presumably will make better use of money in the future.

This "thing" is not addressed because it really isn't an issue for UBI. What happens to a teenager who wastes say a $1000 present for his 18th birthday? Presumably they become better at managing money.

<comment><AUTHOR> _What happened to create all those homeless people that exist today?

They have no income whatsoever._

I am currently homeless and I previously had a class on homelessness. Not all people on the street "have no income whatsoever." Not having enough income to afford a middle class lifestyle and _no income whatsoever_ are not the same thing.

Just to be clear: I am not for basic income and I blog about that and I intend to blog more about it -- when I have the time. At the moment, I am busy trying to do more paid work so I can try to get myself off the street in the near-ish future, now that some of the underlying problems that caused my homelessness are nearly resolved.

<comment><USER18> You make some great points from personal experience which some might take as anecdotal but I'm grateful for you sharing something I haven't dealt with personally.

 _You obviously have no idea what you are talking about._

This statement unnecessarily weakens your comment as it comes across as an attack and uncivil, regardless of the context. Your comment is very strong—and makes this very point—without it.

Thanks again for sharing your personal experience here. I trust you'll continue to do so!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. I have deleted that piece -- not intended as shenanigans -- and ... maybe I need more opening lines or something. It certainly wasn't intended as a personal attack. We all have areas of ignorance -- aka simply not knowing.

<comment><USER18> I think I'd just remove it. An alternative would be to elicit in a charitable way what they're basing their comment on, or what their experience with homelessness is. That can be a tough to do (speaking from my own personal experience in online discussions). If I can't figure out a way to do that, I just leave it out.

For me the goal is reaching greater understanding. If someone were to tell me "You have no idea what you're talking about" I know my knee-jerk reaction would be to get defensive, and that wouldn't put me in a good place for continuing the discussion constructively. Granted, it's not a perfect reaction, but it's a very human one.

In any discussion I choose to participate in, I've tried my best to determine if I'm adding something purely factual/informational or trying to reach understanding of where the other person is coming from (not necessarily agreement), or sharing my own understanding. That _sharing_ word is important to me right now. Some might choose _teach_ or _show_ or _correct_ (which is where I hear "You have no idea where you're talking about" coming from), but I think words like these put up a barrier (or at least a speed bump) to understanding.

Like I said, that's where I'm at right now. Still trying to figure this stuff out.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I totally agree. I probably have some bad habits leftover from toxic school environments and from ...initial experiences on HN, which were a bit rough, with being openly female here.

It can be hard to see the beam in our own eye while we nitpick the mote in another's.

Have a great evening (or whatever time span it is where you are).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Basic income will require a major shift in attitudes. We already have a situation where even highly profitable companies refuse to pass on to their employees more share of profit than absolutely necessary. Why would the people who make these decisions support basic income? And they are the ones ultimately in power.

I bet even if basic income was implemented media would soon be full of stories of slackers not doing anything and soon politicians would run on a platform of cutting basic income. So I the end it wouldn't look much different from what we have now.

I think it would be much more important to address income inquality. Maybe the share of national income that people like Altman receive is just too high? How about making sure that someone who is working 40 hours per week can actually live off that income ?

<comment><USER20> The shift in attitude needs to be that slackers are being paid to stay out of the way of people that want to work and that's a good thing

<comment><USER9> > The shift in attitude needs to be that slackers are being paid to stay out > of the way of people that want to work and that's a good thing

The people who work, who I assume are the intended audience of your argument, will also be aware that their income taxes are going directly into the pockets of the slackers.

The perception that hardworking peoples' income tax goes to people who do not deserve it is at the root of much of the opposition to welfare programs today. It's such a strong sentiment that it makes it difficult to get political support for even the rudimentary safety net we have now -- it would be an even more potent political argument against UBI.

<comment><USER21> Hardworking people would be free to leave paid employment and live on basic income themselves, rather than subsidise the unemployed. I think the hope is that work would become more pleasant as basic income lifts workers' bargaining power and that most people would choose to add to their basic income through paid employment.

<comment><USER21> Why the downvote?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _Altman envisions a scenario in which the majority of Americans, fresh off > their initial basic income payments, become perfectly content to sit at home > in their virtual reality headsets. He questions whether that future is > necessarily better than the stimulation and (modest) physical activity found > in commuting to work and chatting with coworkers._

> _" People do form bonds with their community and their society through > work," he says. "And I think it does contribute to our national cohesion."_

I'm biased by my experiences and by the company I keep, but I doubt this is at all a likely outcome, at least for the majority of people.

I know exactly one person that would be content to sit inside a small room all day long, eat just enough to exist, and spend his time playing video games. That's his passion, and as awful a life as it would be for me, I can't really say it's wrong.

Everyone else I know would rather spend their time outdoors or in their community or doing something that doesn't always have to have money attached to it. There are about 120 volunteers in our county's search and rescue organization and we'd be happy to have more [1]. There's another group self- funding an indoor climbing facility. Other groups working on improving the county's economy, attracting more talent, improving the organization of the talent we have. Still another group that runs a maker space.

It could be that this county is an outlier or it could be the people I choose to associate with, but I've yet to see for myself any evidence that basic income would make people socialize less or even be less productive. The opposite, in fact.

[1]: Come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of our search and rescue volunteers are all retired people -- they're the only ones that have the time and residual income to handle the commitment it requires. There are a few professionals with semi-flexible schedules, and fewer still business owners like myself that have managed to eke out some of the benefits of retirement before actually reaching retirement age.

<comment><USER23> Its the company you choose to associate with. You probably don't hang out with the drug addicts,[0] unemployed[1] or the surprisingly large number of DUI arrestees.[2] Everyone has their own filter bubble of community, but I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it's just human nature and the place you live won't change that.

[0] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CANEVA0URN](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CANEVA0URN) [1] [https://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/hhsa/bh/docs/Alcohol%20and...](https://www.mynevadacounty.com/nc/hhsa/bh/docs/Alcohol%20and%20Drug/Nevada%20County%202010%20Drug%20and%20Alcohol%20Data%20Report.pdf) [2] Nevada County has a much higher rate of alcohol involved motor vehicle accidents than Placer County or the State as a whole

<comment><USER22> I've given a place to stay, a place to stow belongings, and paid work to homeless drug addicts. I am more familiar with their problems than most on HN (incl. the ones that are vocal about the contrast between the tech environment and the homeless in San Francisco).

Again, this is tangential to the debate over basic income, and is its own complex issue.

In the BI article, Sam Altman expressed concern that basic income could further isolate people, and I was responding to that specifically.

> _I could pretty much guarantee that there will be people everywhere that > waste UBI, and do nothing with their time, it 's just human nature and the > place you live won't change that._

a. You can't guarantee that anymore than I can guarantee with my anecdotes that there won't.

b. Even _if_ it were true, that would mean UBI would be "wasted" as welfare is "wasted" already.

c. There exist right now entire classes of businesses which survive on exploiting poverty, and UBI might make them go extinct, and that would certainly be a net good for society. For one example: [http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in- the...](http://time.com/3182726/if-you-want-to-see-inequality-in-the-u-s-at- its-worst-visit-an-impound-lot/;) for another: [http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court- fee...](http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fees-punish- the-poor) (and before all the supply-side armchair economists appear to tell me that UBI just means that impound costs and court costs will rise to exactly match: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/04/econo...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/04/economists- agree-raising-the-minimum-wage-reduces-poverty/))

d. The U.S. has some serious problems with poverty and inequality right now ([http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing- the-...](http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/12/america-is-failing-the-bad- break-test-and-people-are-dying.html) and [http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record- number-...](http://business.time.com/2010/09/16/why-are-a-record-number-of- americans-living-in-poverty/)) and it seems prudent to start exploring multiple solutions to that problem. The people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that UBI won't work are presenting no more evidence for that than the people who are steadfastly and ideologically claiming that it will solve all of our ills. In between are the poor schmucks like me saying, "hey, it sounds interesting, my bet is it won't go as badly as some people think it will, let's give it a try."

e. Google is failing me for a citation, again, but the U.S. has (arguably) lost millions of IQ points to poverty in the last decade. On a site like HackerNews, that should give any reader a reason to pause and wonder what else we've lost as a society as a result of that.

f. Further, UBI provides benefits to people not currently on welfare, so even if it were wasted, it might still be a net improvement over our current system.

g. And still further, the overwhelming evidence supports that both addicts and felons are less likely to continue their self-destruction when they have economic opportunity.

h. You look at a few tragic cases and argue that they are just human nature; are my anecdotes somehow less "human nature"? Is it not human nature to make things, to create art, to develop science and technology? If that is your argument, how do you reconcile that with the last 10,000 years of human civilization?

<comment><USER23> I actually _agree_ with your points here! I'm not trying to say all homeless or drug addicts would waste a UBI or other benefit. I think it is a great idea, and will work for the vast (some number of nines) majority of people, of any (current) income or social status.

I was just trying to say that no matter what we do, or how carefully we plan, there will always be some exceptional cases that UBI will fail for, and that these failures will generally be the same (very) small percentage pretty much everywhere in the world, people that behave in this way have always existed. The fact that this happens is therefore nothing to do with the community you are in, the government in power, the way the benefit is administered, etc. These outliers will always be available as anecdata, and it is useless to claim that you live in, or will generate, a utopia where they don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Another prerequisite for basic income would have to be the separation of health care from job based health insurance.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm curious whether the basic income studies being done by Sam Altman and others will also cover what happens when subsidies are withdrawn?

Ideally, UBI would be guaranteed and never withdrawn, but it would be a pretty good argument for basic income if you can say that people continue to have a better outcome for years after payments stop versus people who never were enrolled in the first place. On the other hand, if most people become dependent on the payments and do worse than the control group when payments stop, that would be a strong argument against UBI.

(I imagine the outcome might also be very different between study participants that know their payments are going to stop at a certain time, participants who have their payments withdrawn suddenly without warning, and participants who are told in advance that their payments might be withdrawn at any time.)

</comment><comment><USER26> I liked this quote from the article: "People don't choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things."

I can't claim to know what BI would look like if widely implemented, but I think it's preferable to mass un/under-employment, which seems like a clear possibility.

</comment><comment><USER27> Basic income seems to be an acknowledgement capitalism does not work for the majority, wealth concentrates at the top, and self interest of a few take precedence.

Here are a few tiny scraps is akin to a kind of feudalism. How do they assert influence in a such a structure? Is life to become a spectator sport? Do people gain purpose from a collective goal in which each plays a part or one in which they sit on the sidelines? Wouldn't a better option for most then be to echew industrialization and 'progress' and revert to the land and village like communities.

The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured societies.

But is basic income really an answer in an inherently calvinist society? Add to that the preponderance of the soulless ideology of Rand among sections of US society and the entire social goal it seems has been effectively reduced to celebrating personal achievement and supermen and superwomen.

There are large questions around human progress, how to define it and the best way to achieve it that need to be revisited. Is a society merely economic interests coexisting or does it mean more than that?

<comment><USER28> > The costs of too many unemployed and underemployed is far too high on > multiple levels including to those who are not in either group than any > social or welfare net and it's absence leads to higly unstable and fractured > societies.

Excellent comment.

Some points to consider:

* Poverty is not the problem. Westerners make a big deal out of poverty. They need to believe that poverty is the worst thing in the world and that buying things is the key to happiness. This is obviously not true and a stroll through the many slums of the world will reveal that some of the happiest people in the world are very, very poor. Marx was right about this.

* Unemployment is the problem. Unemployment really is the worst thing in the world. It's something that's difficult to really understand: unemployment is like an _invading army of Mongols_. Unemployment doesn't just destroy one life -- it destroys _families_ and, on a large enough scale, it can destroy whole _cities_. It was unemployment that burned Detroit to the ground. It is unemployment that will destroy Baltimore [1]. I say again unemployment is a national security threat far more serious than anything else out there. Marx was right about this too.

* Welfare is the natural state of humanity. Again Western propaganda warps the truth. If you believe the propaganda America is full of self-made men who forged brilliant fortunes despite government interference. This is obviously a lie to even the most casual observers. Westerners benefit tremendously not just from parental welfare (seriously, look at college tuition prices) but they are the beneficiaries of an extraordinary historic investment. (Which, many would say, was itself the result of historic theft and literal slavery.) Marx was right again.

* The key point: feudalism is exactly what we have today. It's difficult to see this because there's so much propaganda in the way but I think people are starting to pick up on it. Certain people enjoy tremendous aid and support and all types of valuable welfare while others are thrown to the wolves. And it's not clear who is doing the choosing or how or even why. The numbers are breaking through though: the falling life expectancy, the total loss of socio-economic mobility [2] and the rapid decline of historical social norms. A historically unprecedented binge of private debt in the early 2000s managed to delay this but now the debt binge is over and what we're seeing is the emergence of an American serf class. (Or rather the normalization of serfdom -- arguably this is nothing new for minorities in many parts of the country.) Eventually the serfs may get angry but what's the worst that could happen? (Marx was probably right here too.)

I'm not a fan of basic income. Basic income can lessen the worst symptoms of the real disease -- mass un-and-under-employment -- but it isn't a cure. And I suspect in the end private producers will capture much of the basic income surplus either in the form of depressed wages or exporting the true costs somewhere else (probably the environment). People don't appreciate (1) the extraordinary lengths private producers will go to in order to avoid taxes and (2) how accommodating politicians are to help private producers and so (3) in the long run, in any conflict between private producers and private labor, private producers always win unless the government steps in to help labor.

(Remember the only reason governments exist at all is to protect against private predation. All of this comes back to the fact that feudalism works! For much of history, for thousands of years, most of the surplus was wholly captured by a few families.)

The right solution is probably something like a Job Guarantee [3]. There's a lot of details that need to be worked out but the basic principles are sound: (1) (involuntary) unemployment must be avoided and causes tremendous harm (2) the government is never going to run out of money and (3) there's always some productive work to be done even if that work is mispriced/underpriced/non- priced by the market. Let the government step in as the employer of last resort and at the least we could slow the bleeding.

It's too bad to see all this work being done on basic income. It's a very seductive idea and it has an element of the underpants gnome logic to it which is very hard to resist. (Step 1: Give people money Step 2: ???? Step 3: Profit!). Giving every citizen a job is a much harder problem and if you buy into the strong AI thesis that problem might not even seem worthwhile.

[1] [http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-baltimores-young- blac...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/how-baltimores-young-black-men- are-boxed-in/)

[2] [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-m...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social- mobility-america/491240/)

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

<comment><USER29> Marx was proven wrong even in his own lifetime.

For example, he wrote:

[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage- labour...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage- labour/ch09.htm)

>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?

and

>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

Yet by the 1860s, real wages and standard of living had already risen substantially from the level they were at when Marx penned the above.

He was a totally irresponsible and self-absorbed demagogue whose lies wreaked terrible damage upon society.

To see you elevating him in such a manner is disappointing to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If the goal is to have more people working and we assume that the government would be paying the money for this "basic income", why don't we just subsidize companies that hire lots of people based upon how many people they have. And if you focus it toward jobs that require low skill only _and_ manufacturing, then it directly benefits many companies in the US that would probably choose the same price for having something built in the US vs China. I am honestly pretty tired of flying to china to get products built.. Been doing it for years and I'd prefer to fly to Texas instead..</comment>


MTVs Jersey Shore As An Example Of Game Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/jersey-shore-cast-gets-greedy/kids-these-days/

<comment><USER2> Yes, but the "best solution" to prisoner's dilemma is to actually rat the other person out.

<comment><AUTHOR> As long as they don't rat you out too. Thats the catch.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Similar to a prisoners dilema. They're all better off if they stick together and no individual gets greedy.</comment>


What If Everyone Makes Money Except Twitter? - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2009/09/09/what-if-everyone-makes-money-except-twitter/ <comment><USER2> The article misses the point of the original techcrunch article.

Techcrunch never questioned how much/if twitter could/would make money. Rather, the original article made a genuinely interesting point that choosing to turn on revenue generation mechanisms (which is obviously possible for twitter) poses a risk for twitter if they're seeking an acquisition. That risk comes from the fact that real revenue gives acquirers something concrete to base their purchase price on, rather than a speculative guess at revenue potential.

I don't know if this is actually influencing twitter's thinking, but I certainly found the idea interesting.

This article I simply found annoying, because the tone is almost haughty while the content demonstrates the author didn't understand (or maybe care about?) the point of the article he referenced.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the poster answers his own question of how twitter will make money.

He says "In other words, what happens if hundreds of businesses are created using Twitter's API but the entity supporting them – Twitter – can't make revenue or, at least, enough revenue to be viable."

Why not monetize the API, and do it to the extent that heavy users pay a heavier burden. Give away some free access every month, but once an app hits some critical mass and hopefully becomes profitable, then start sharing in the money. Twitter is at the point that if it were to do this, there would be some backlash, but it certainly wouldn't be an end for them. It would just drive all the "Feeder" companies to figure out how to make money quicker.

<comment><USER4> Exactly!

In olden times, this is how new villages popped up. Someone would dig a well and find water. But if he tried to sell this water, a village wouldn't grow over there.

But if he gave away the water for free, a lot of people would show up. And he could then sell the land surrounding the well to these folks and make the money.

So the best way to make money off twitter is by charging for API access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This sounds very similar to Sun and Java. Many companies profited greatly from Java -- except Sun. Where is Sun today?

</comment><comment><USER6> Acquire the revenue makers.

Maybe Twitter is just waiting to see which API user makes the most money, and they'll just BUY them.</comment>


Google shareholders say "Go right ahead, be evil." - <AUTHOR> http://jwz.livejournal.com/761788.html <comment><USER2> What happened here?

"Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin together hold 66.2 percent of Google's total shareholder voting power, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. All three are members of the board of directors, which has recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal at the company's annual meeting on May 10."

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/dumbgroups2.jpg>

Sersiouly though, it's a complicated issue and the suggestion to reject the proposal may simply be because it needs revision.

<comment><USER4> If that were the case, why didn't they mention that, in principle, the proposal was good but needed to be revised which is why they recommended voting it down in its current form?

<comment><USER3> If it were me, it would be to avoid clutter and confusion, as there are only two possible ways to vote.

But that's just a guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I assume that Google is evil, I am not sure that accepting censorship is actually evil. The alternative would be that Google would not be available at all in China. On the other hand chinese internet surfers are probably aware of the censorship anyway. I think Google acts just like a company trying to do it's job within the constraints of the environment.

</comment><comment><USER6> You guys are still arguing about this after two days? There ought to be a variant of Parkinson's Law about how much easier it is to argue about politics than other matters. It's like a ground state one sinks into. Individuals and sites...

<comment><USER7> I've never heard of those, and the last time I tried to edit an OS X keymap I gave up in frustration, but for HTML, a workaround is to type '

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I used your suggestion to get apostrophes, which is why it will seem incomprehensible to anyone reading it later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I were Larry/Sergei/Schmidt, I'd vote against it too, just because I get annoyed when random shareholders try to tell me what to do with my company. When I first read this in a different context, it was worded so that the shareholders who weren't otherwise involved in the company brought up this proposal to force the company to do this stuff. IMO, even if I were going to follow the general intent of the proposal, I wouldn't want these random people who bought a bunch of stock to start snooping over my shoulder all the time.

Furthermore, the measure seems likely to prevent the governments of said countries from allowing Google into them at all. It is debatable whether having a censored Google or no Google is better for oppressed peoples.

<comment><USER4> A censored google targeting political activists does nothing good for the oppressed people. It only makes ad revenues for Google while helping the opressing government pull the wool over their subject's eyes and jail and/or kill their political enemies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Damn, it is scary that they didn't accept those obvious guidelines. Google is being evil after all - not a good thing for those fighting for freedom in unfree countries where Google operates. Hopefully this breach will generate enough bad publicity for Google that they will reconsider.

<comment><USER9> In which countries do you think that would have allowed them to operate?

Unfortunately, all countries have problems and this isn't as black and white as the link seems to imply.

<comment><USER4> How can they justify operating in a country like China where their technology is used directly to target political activists? I see no possible excuse for this. They are providing the most efficient and effective censorship and political targeting software ever created.

<comment><USER9> And you think that none of that is going on in the United States or other western countries? Should Google refuse to operate in the US because some of our laws are bad?

<comment><USER4> Um, when was the last time someone in the US was thrown in prison and/or executed for a political opinion? This happens in China right now, and there are already several cases where they used Google and Yahoo information to do it. Hence the very justified outcry against a US company directly aiding such an evil Government.

<comment><USER9> You don't necessarily know what's going on in the US, for example: <http://jwz.livejournal.com/745986.html>

I'm not claiming that the US and China are the same, btw, just that it's not a matter of absolutes. In this country freedom is violated in the interests of Disney and such.

<comment><USER4> Can you give one example of a person put in jail or executed for their political views in the US? One example of government forced censorship? The difference between the US govt. and the Chinese is more than black and white. You have the right to disagree with US policies - try complaining about Chinese politcal policies in China and see what happens. This issue has no gray.

The case shown in your posted link is not an example of political persecution against the ISP. We have no information on the reason for the request by the FBI, so I won't speculate. Even with an FBI gag order, the person made the whole case public and went to court. Try that in China.

<comment><USER10> I was just in China on vacation last November, and in terms of the atmosphere in public places, the U.S. almost seems like more of a police state than China is. Some examples:

I had mistakenly packed scissors (y'know, sharp pointy things?) in my carry-on when passing through the Beijing airport. The security guard said, politely and apologetically, "I'm sorry, I can't let you take these on the plain." On the trip back through Chicago/O'hare, a woman was yelled at and pulled out of line for having _hand lotion_.

There are no announcements in Chinese airports saying "By order of the TSA, no liquids may be carried on board flights, and all persons are subject to search by uniformed TSA officers."

There are no announcements in Chinese subways saying "Safety is our number one concern here on the MBTA, and so we ask you to report any suspicious persons or packages to the nearest MBTA employee." People are not manhandled and pulled off trains for talking about explosions, as happened to the person sitting next to me yesterday.

Chinese people can and do criticize their government all they want - verbally. Several people we met told us "Yeah, the government censorship is disgraceful, but it takes time to change things like that." When we visited a Taoist temple in Hong Kong, there were Falun Gong posters all over the place.

China's certainly not perfect, and overall I think its political freedom is somewhat less than the U.S. The Chinese media is still very much controlled by the state, and people _can_ have reprisals made against them for things they say in print. The Internet is censored, as everyone knows by now. China lacks the culture of dissent that the U.S. has, so many people seem accultured to political passivity. China leads the world in executions, though it's worth noting that only it, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have more executions than the U.S.

But it absolutely _is_ a matter of degrees. China is not _that_ much worse than the U.S. is. And China's velocity is at least in the right direction: if the U.S. continues the course it's been on since 2001, within 5 years it will be a far more repressive regime than China.

<comment><USER4> You probably didn't talk to jailed dissidents, the families of executed political prisoners, the mothers who 's babys were killed because they went beyond the child quota, the people who were forbidden to have another child, the prisoners forced to work in factories, the prisoners killed to have their organs harvested, etc. Vacation is one thing, but the evil of the government is well documented.

Hong Kong used to be the freest country in the world prior to 1997, and it enjoyed one of the greatest generations of wealth in the world because of that freedom. Even their money was privately minted. I was fortunate enough to visit before the hand over, and what an amazing place it was. That tradition of freedom still lingers, but is being snuffed out. Those posters hidden away in the temple would have been out in the streets in the earlier freer days.

Technology, like the search engine provided by Google, is giving the government the power to keep the masses from doing what they should do - overthrow the repressive regime. Another Tiannamen square will come, and the regime will use any and all force to subdue it. Their only principle is maintaining power - that has been their history and present and future until they loose power.

Comparing this to the US system is dramatically misunderstanding and utterly taking for granted the amazing freedom we have and the reasons for it. The difference is in kind, not degree.

<comment><USER11> As a European living in the USA: the USA is much less free than any country in Europe. But not for lack of noble laws, in which the USA excels, but rather, for lack of public education that would entitle everyone to be aware and enjoy such freedom.

Add to the above the blatant lack of equality in opportunity: if one's family is not focused in providing an environment (and usually the funds too) to foster a high education --by which I don't mean a university degree--, one is screwed forever.

In short: high schools and undergraduate degrees in the USA _suck_ big time (only at grad school does one see a proper, comparable level to Europe), and parents wander clueless as to what is important to create self-sufficient, independent and free adults.

<comment><USER12> "As a European living in the USA: the USA is much less free than any country in Europe."

Not according to Freedom House. The US and most of Western Europe are equally politically free: <http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=15>

And economically the US is freer than any country in Europe <http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/countries.cfm>

"lack of public education"

What are you talking about? The US has more than enough public schools.

"Add to the above the blatant lack of equality in opportunity"

Urban Myth. The per-capita GDP in the US is higher than almost every European country. Around $10,000 more than France, the UK or Germany. So your average US citizen is 30% wealthier than your average European.

Income inequality (assuming that's a bad thing) is only slightly lower in the US than Europe too.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality>

Also the US has a much higher proportion of the population with University qualifications than most of Europe too: <http://www.oecd.org/document/31/0,2340,en_2649_201185_33710751_1_1_1_1,00.html>

"In short: high schools and undergraduate degrees in the USA suck big time"

Could you back that up with some evidence?

<comment><USER11> "Not according to Freedom House."

The website you cite defines a Free Country as one where there is: 1) a broad scope for open political competition, 2) a climate for respect of civil liberties, 3) significant independent civic life, 4) independent media

The USA does not have 1 (locked two-party system with associated elite families, if not in theory, at least in practice), 2 ( 9/11 related policies? Federal agencies capturing information on citizens continuously?) and 4 (there _was_ an independent media some decades ago, not anymore). 3 is allowed in full only within the privacy of your home. Don't confuse economical prosperity with freedom.

About "lack of public education": I am no native English speaker. I meant to say, lack of education of the public. General culture levels are very low among USA citizens. My data: you have no idea how many times I've been told that Spain is in the north of Mexico, and not by Mexicans obviously. Plus how many USA citizens can locate Iraq in a map? The statistics I've seen are hilarious. Severe lacunae in geography and history among USA citizens is the norm -even though my daily social environment is a university. Exceptions are very much welcome, and I have found out they are almost all first-generation americans with properly educated parents (by which I mean, their parents were born elsewhere and came to the USA as adults).

If you get the GDP and remove the top 5% of rich people, the average citizens' wealth changes _a lot_. But the main point is: if born poor and grown uneducated, here in the USA the citizen is likely to remain poor and uneducated. Where I come from, free access all the way up to PhD education is the norm, then you're on your own and it's up to you, but at least the impact of the socioeconomic status of one's parent's is removed from the equation (not totally, but substantially).

In my daily experience at the university, senior undergraduate students show the level of knowledge I am used to expect from freshmen, and the writing skills of a 14 year old. There are exceptions of course. And it's good that they catch-up during the first two years of graduate school. Something is horribly wrong in the education USA citizens receive between ages 14 and 22.

<comment><USER13> And yet here you are.

I'm curious: what made you decide to move to a country with no freedom, bad education and no culture?

<comment><USER12> Good point! And hanging out on the forum of a company which explicitly helps people start companies to freely get rich.

<comment><USER11> I came to the USA following a professor I just wanted to work with. He came here in the 80's because of the weather (no kidding), given an existing research environment similar to Europe.

Before landing here I thought the USA was a great country. But my preconceptions have fallen.

I am aware I have started a thread that is drifting way off topic and can potentially get very personal. If you'd like to discuss the issue further over a beer, that'd be great. We can then talk about why I pay almost identical income taxes in the USA and in Spain, and yet here my money doesn't seem to come back to me. You can reach me at my surname at ucla edu.

<comment><USER12> "I am aware I have started a thread that is drifting way off topic and can potentially get very personal"

You sound like a nice guy, I just hate these myths that the US is somehow a hellhole compared to Europe. And you failed to demonstrate why the US is less free than Europe.

"We can then talk about why I pay almost identical income taxes in the USA and in Spain"

USA: top income tax rate and the top corporate tax rate are 35 percent.

Spain: top income tax rate is 45 percent, and the top corporate tax rate is 35 percent.

Now for the jugular (from heritage.org)!

USA: Unemployment: 5.5%, $39,676 per capita

Spain: Unemployment: 11%, GDP per capita $25,047

It would seem that Americans are almost twice as wealthy as Spaniards, pay less income tax, and have more than half the unemployment.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Docker for Mac is so much screwed up? - <AUTHOR> There are so many issues are still pending or aborted. Is there any alternative? Had to switch to Linux machine for docker.
Look into the issues: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/410
https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1759
https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1835
https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/5s9v72/is_docker_for_mac_extremely_slow_for_anyone_else/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46406980/rails-assets-are-very-slow-on-macox-docker <comment><USER2> I feel it isn't a big priority. Production Servers run Linux, Docker prioritizes features for Production Servers. We will probably see Docker being better in Windows than in Mac soon with Microsoft investment due to Azure. If I had to estimate I would say 90% of the servers are running Linux, 9.5% windows, 0.5% Mac.

</comment><comment><USER3> maybe its because docker is based on LXC (LinuX Containers)?!?!</comment>


South Korea: We're Spending $2 Billion To Put Our Textbooks on Tablet PCs - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2011/07/06/south-korea-were-spending-2-billion-to-put-our-textbooks-on-tablet-pcs-by-2015-what-are-you-doing/ <comment><USER2> Very nice. I like books, but this is a big commitment and including "connectivity" is even better.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you invest $50K? - <AUTHOR> If you had $50K to invest, which would be your entire equity, cash money, how would you invest it?
It's your equity so a HIGH risk would definitely be considered. Looking for creative advices, not boring banking stuff...
Similar question taken from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13223818 but with 10% of the money <comment><USER2> Boring and low risk: index fund

Exciting and high risk:

$15K in Bitcoin

$5K in Ethereum

$20K in the stocks I think have a huge future (tech, renewables, biotech, GMO)

$5K in metals I think will be in huge demand

$5K in small cap stocks with some basic research.</comment>


Less Distractions = More Pageviews. Go Figure. - <AUTHOR> http://journal.drawar.com/d/less-distractions-more-pageviews-go-figure/

<comment><USER2> I believe this is a case of correlation / causation mixup, as there are a number of variables aside from the design which could be affecting PPV, for example Location of the user - tablets and smartphones are used in different locations than desktops for web access - for example, I only use a desktop while working, and I only use my smartphone apps while away from my desktop (i.e. commuting on a bus/train). I am more likely to read more articles while commuting than working at my desk - regardless of what the website looks like.

<comment><USER3> This was the second thing that came to mind for me. In addition to that, it seems reasonable to assume that people who bothered getting your app in the first place are most likely the people who spend more time on your website.

But the first thing I thought, I thought upon reading the title. It was: "Yes, indeed! I _do_ enjoy your site more if it isn't littered with ads and navigation bars and lists of related articles and sidebars and comment threads". I have written about 50 element hiding rules and Stylish scripts for news sites that I visit regularly, just to get rid of all of the stuff that distracts me from _reading the article I came to read_.

That's fine for geeks like me, but for everyone else, I can think of few things that would improve the web more than a serious reduction of this kind of clutter. I was a little disappointed in the OP that it did not talk more about this.

<comment><USER4> >> _it seems reasonable to assume that people who bothered getting your app in the first place are most likely the people who spend more time on your website_

This is a HTML5 [web] app.

I believe that you are correct in what you posit, but it is not applicable here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I do not get the same conclusion.

For me, if I'm browsing via my phone or tablet, I'm in a completely different mindset than when I'm at the computer. See, the computer has a ton of things going on, and I'm usually trying to get something done with it.

The tablet/phone, on the other hand, is purely for entertainment. If I'm using that, I'm there to explore and browse. And that's pretty much exactly what they're seeing on their site.

</comment><comment><USER6> Well, this is not surprising. If you put less content directly on the first page, users have to click on links in order to view the content that is directly accessible in the desktop version, which generates more page views.

</comment><comment><USER7> The first thing I'm looking for on a news-site when I can't actually _read_ the article from all the BLINKENLIGHTS is the print button, can't find that, or all I get is a pop-up to actually really print the article? - Either zoom in enough to be zoom past the crap, or leave.

Don't get me wrong: I have an adblock in all my browsers: But the new, hot, web 2.0 stuff means there's some Facebook crap loading, there's ~7 buttons to share and ~5 buttons like the article through different social channels -- all of which I couldn't care less if I'm interested in the actual content.

</comment><comment><USER8> Less IS more. It's true. While users can be quite good at multi-tasking, when it comes to reading, concentration is key to retention. And even if the eye can "see it all" it really pays to edit what is seen, so that the user can quickly discern what to read (scanning) and what to pass on, so that they may quickly get through all the content they want. It's no wonder that in web design, there is a beauty in simplicity; the challenge is to make it simple enough to be efficient and user friendly, but not so simplistic it comes off as mediocre or boring.

</comment><comment><USER9> My guess is that it was the change in performance that improved the # of pageviews as the correlation between the two has been well documented at this point.

</comment><comment><USER10> Far from conclusive evidence here. And my intuition says something different to me. A controlled experiment would involve showing the mobile UI on the desktop and vice versa. You might also want to control for things like page load time (native mobile apps are often snappier)

</comment><comment><USER11> Dammit, it should be "Fewer Distractions". Sorry, that's my peeve.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let's not neglect the "tablet on the toilet" effect

</comment><comment><USER13> The Google+ notification spot is introducing a lot of distraction to the search pages that are Google's Golden Goose... I wonder how much that's costing them.</comment>


ShadowSocks, RedSocks2 and ChinaDNS on OpenWrt - <AUTHOR> https://xuri.me/2015/09/04/shadowsocks-redsocks2-and-chinadns-on-openwrt.html <comment><AUTHOR> This seems like a great router setup for those of us in China:

\- Shadowsocks doesn't seem to suffer much from blocking

\- RedSocks will make all TCP connections go via Shadowsocks

\- ChinaDNS will mediate DNS requests so that you can avoid (i) DNS poisoning from local DNS servers, and (ii) lack of CDN optimisation from foreign DNS servers</comment>


Ask HN: CTO of a start up? What does your average day look like? - <AUTHOR> I think it would be interesting to hear from CTOs from start ups of all sizes, from 1 to 100 employees. What has your role evolved into? Please be sure to mention which industry you're working in. <comment><USER2> I assume that answers like this are difficult to frame because being a CTO probably has to deal with the individual situation in question/the reality of the affair in front of them. You might have to add more dimensions to your question to have it relate to you.

I say difficult to frame, but I do not mean to imply that there isn't a possible good answer that's informative.</comment>