It all made sense when we found out we were autistic - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/women_late_diagnosis_autism <comment><USER2> I'm curious why people find the diagnosis to be so important. I can't at all imagine identifying with the sentiment, "Nothing is wrong with me, I'm just autistic," as one of the women in the article says. When I go to a party with my girlfriend, I want to come off well, if only for her sake, and I would like to have some interesting conversations, and maybe (very optimistically) to meet someone I can share an interest with, since some interests can only be pursued in a very limited way by one's self. I would like to become closer to people I find interesting or admirable. I would like to be able to offer people the pleasure and comfort of a friendly greeting and conversation. These are things I find very difficult, and I can't imagine a diagnosis erasing my regret at mostly failing to do these things, or eliminating my desire to achieve just a little bit more success at them.

My therapist suggested that Aspergers might help, along with other factors we had already identified, explain a lot of my childhood experiences, so I asked her if a diagnosis would give me a new way to work on my current issues. She said no, given my current status, it wouldn't affect our approach, just our retrospective understanding. Given that, I didn't quite care enough to spend time and money meeting with a specialist who could verify her suspicions. I might do it someday just out of curiosity, but I can't imagine it giving me any sense of relief or validation. My deficiencies are my deficiencies, with or without a diagnosis. Too often someone who encounters me leaves thinking I don't like them, and I know their natural tendency will be to fill in the reason with something they don't like about themselves or something about themselves that people harbor prejudice against. I hate that, and a diagnosis won't stop it from happening. A diagnosis won't make people think of me when they're planning something. A diagnosis won't give me the right words when someone has lost a loved one. I've put in a lot of work and made substantial improvement, and unless a diagnosis can help me progress further or faster, it just doesn't mean anything to me.

<comment><USER3> I'm Autistic. Diagnosed at the age of 16 with moderate-severe Asperger's in 2001. I struggled all throughout middle-school high-school and even some college to understand other people and to make friends. Middle school was the worst, because I was endlessly bullied, very depressed, extremely lonely, and constantly told that I was "weird".

Before my diagnosis I remember breaking down in my school's counselors office begging her to teach me how to make a friend. It was a lottery based "art school" because my 5th grade teacher thought I would be a good fit there because that's where other "weird" kids were. I hated art, but I went anyway on the advice of my mother. By breaking down, of course, I mean crying hysterically just trying to reach someone to tell me how I could not be doomed to a life of bullying and loneliness. She told me "The best way to make friends is to be a friend." That was her best advice. It was completely useless to me. I thought "What does it mean to be a friend?".

During that time I saw countless psycologists, and was diagnosed with ADHD (wrongly), major depressive disorder (wrongly), and bi-polar disorder (wrongly). I was doped up on so many experimental medications that I have completely forgotten my life from the ages of 12-17. At some point my mother gave up on me and put me in foster care for 2 years. I spent 9 months of that time in jail for doing some pretty scary things. Namely burning down a 3000 gallon trash can (which I did for attention), and my attempt to commit suicide by jumping in front of a semi, which failed and got the police called on me. I tried to commit suicide by cop, which also failed.

I ended up in a couple psych wards. Once at an awful, horrible place called Fox Run, a few others in between, and then finally at a place called Parmadale in Cleveland, Ohio. At Fox Run, the doctor's decided to do an experiment and take me off all the drugs I was on so that I would "reset" and so he could properly diagnose me. He didn't get the chance but he told my social workers that he was concerned that I might be autistic and misdiagnosed. So when I arrived at Parmadale they disregarded my entire history, and evaluated me as I presented there. I was diagnosed with Autism 2 months in.

Later my brain would be used in a series of studies at the OSU Medical Center on diagnosis through brain scans. I recently found out these scans are in several published papers on the subject.

Anyway, Parmadale focused on rebuilding my self-esteem and focused on teaching me social skills, practices and techniques to overcome my disability. I haven't taken any medication since I left that facility at 16 years old. I went onto graduate high school (with honors), and I have a degree in Video Game Design and Development from Fullsail University in Florida. I've worked in software and startups for years, doing everything from interactive media, to web development, to machine learning, to whatever is next. It's taken me several years of practice, but most people I know both personally and professionally now have no idea that I'm autistic. I fake it very well. Occasionally I meet people who tell me later that they had no idea.

Things could have gone very differently without a diagnosis. I am certain that without a diagnosis I would have ended up dead or in prison for a very long time.

So yeah, diagnoses is very important. For many people with this condition it can be life and death. For me it was at least. I'd rather have a million people who are misdiagnosed or just awkward and misrepresenting themselves as having autism than a single unfortunate teenager out there struggling with this disorder and having no idea how to overcome it. Awareness is everything.

As an autistic person it makes me concerned to hear others gatekeeping on this issue or seeing it as the new ADHD. That might be the case, but before you disregard it, please think of that 16 year old kid acting out, lonely, depressed and misdiagnosed because no-one seems to know what's wrong with him. Then ask yourself whether or not that diagnosis and label is important and could help.

To fix any problem, you must first understand what the problem is.

My name is Raymond Chandler III and I am Autistic.

<comment><USER4> You are right about the importance of understanding problems.

But in your story, a lot of the problems came from people giving you (wrong) diagnoses. dkarl is saying what works for him is just working directly on the constellation of traits he has without looking for a diagnosis. True, things got much better for you when you got the _right_ diagnosis of autism. But as i14ng points out below, autism is "just" a name for a for a constellation of traits similar to dkarl's.

It sounds like your case is a lot worse than dkarl's so I believe you that naming the syndrome was a good thing. But overall, would you have been better or worse off if society just made fewer psych diagnoses and you never had the right or the wrong ones, but people just helped you work directly on your traits?

<comment><USER3> > But overall, would you have been better or worse off if society just made > fewer psych diagnoses and you never had the right or the wrong ones, but > people just helped you work directly on your traits?

I don't think it's worth speculating on the past, on whether one approach would have been generally better than the other. Hindsight is 20/20, right?

I do believe in one aspect of the argument, and that is one of empathy. If you see someone struggling with something, or they are exhibiting a "trait" that you think isn't normal, then finding a way to help them is a worthy goal.

I think the problem here is trying to understand and define what is "normal" and what "traits" are worth looking out for. This is where things start to devolve in philosophical disagreements. As other commenters have said in the thread, there is a difference between being socially shy, having extreme social anxiety, and being autistic. Even in the realm of the autism spectrum you have different issues and presentations to address. When is something actually a problem? How do you identify the problem, and then how do you address that problem?

I don't think it's as black and white as we want to believe. I think labels and diagnosis can help, and they can hurt. The most important thing is to be aware, and to have empathy and compassion for others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Aspergers was not a thing when I was growing up in the 70s so I was never formally diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I'm on the spectrum, and the result was a pretty painful childhood. I managed to drag myself out of it and give myself an education in social skills, and nowadays you'd never guess that I'm Aspie (my wife still doesn't believe me, but I think she's an undiagnosed Aspie herself). Even to this day there are a lot of things that "normal" people do that are utterly foreign to me, like going to clubs or watching sports on TV. My idea of a good time is reading up on quantum mechanics or the ordinal hierarchy. I think mild Aspergers is a lot more common than most people think even today because it is possible to hide it completely, and there's a lot of societal pressure to do just that.

[UPDATE] A lot of reply comments are of the form: what you have described here is not Aspergers, it's just normal growing up. Well, yeah, it's not so easy to give a complete description of my situation in an HN comment, and I'm not sure I'd be willing to do it even if I could. I'm not particularly proud of the person I used to be. But I will tell you this: in retrospect, when I was a kid, I was completely oblivious to the fact that my peers were agents in their own right, with thoughts and preferences and hopes and dreams that might be different from my own. That, I am now given to understand, is the hallmark of autism spectrum disorders. But I don't think it matters whether or not I "actually" had/have Aspergers. What matters is that because I was clueless, I behaved obnoxiously (not realizing that I was doing so) and as a result of that I had very few friends. It was intensely painful, and it took many years of concerted effort to change my situation, but I ultimately managed to do it. _That_ is really what I want to convey: whether or not it was abnormal, it hurt, but I was able to make it better. And if I could do it, so can you, regardless of what label we choose to attach to our conditions.

<comment><USER6> Being interested in science does not mean you have Aspergers. Neither does _not_ having certain interests like sports or clubbing. Only a minority go to clubs anyway, so I don't even see why they are the "normal"? (I'm not disputing your self-diagnosis here, just pointing out choice of hobbies have nothing to do with it.)

<comment><USER7> I have never been formally diagnosed because autism is still not a thing in Eastern Europe, but the following self-assessment leads me to believe I am:

1\. Constant fear of losing my belongings like keys, which leads me to check what's in my pocket every minute or two while I'm walking.

2\. Overly obsessive about following a particular "ritual" for everyday stuff like washing my car or cleaning the house. Every small spot needs to be covered every time, even if it was previously clean. Otherwise I feel uneasy for completely irrational reasons.

3\. Great confusion and anxiety when things in my job or everyday life cannot be done according to my carefully crafted plan.

<comment><USER8> I find it pretty common for people to tell me I'm not on the spectrum when I reveal it, as if in 5 minutes they have a better handle on me than I do. It's helped me understand just how annoying "mansplaining" can be (even when it's done by a woman.)

<comment><USER9> > I have never been formally diagnosed

That's important though... you can feel like you have something but actually have something pretty different. I understand that it must be pretty annoying for you if you are actually diagnosed but sadly, believing an internet diagnostic is too often a pretty bad decision.

<comment><USER10> it depends on the experience of the diagnostican then, and all they can work with is what you are willing and able to tell them, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My wife and I believe our daughter has a (thankfully) mild form of autism. It took us a while, but when the realization came, it was a relief, as we stopped being angry at her and at ourselves: 1) hopefully we did not do anything wrong to cause this, and 2) it is not our daughter's fault that she behaves this way.

We did not get a specific diagnostic, and I'm not sure it's worth seeking one. As far as I know, the diagnostic is not scientific, so I wouldn't consider it a strong validation of what we're experiencing. However, a diagnostic might make it easier to explain to our family and friends what is going on, and talk about it.

Any thoughts?

<comment><USER12> I mean, IANAD but I would definitely get a professional diagnosis before acting on the assumption my child has a specific medical condition...?

<comment><USER13> It sounds like the parent is talking about validation, not specific psychiatric action. I think it should be OK as long as they don't present their child as professionally diagnosed as such.

<comment><USER11> Thanks. We're only acting on it insofar as we read about it and try to find practical ways to deal with it. We're not going to medicate her! And when we discuss the topic, we always start with: "We believe that..."

<comment><USER14> It's not standard to medicate for autism, FYI. The standard recommendation is therapy (Applied Behavioral Analysis, occupational therapy, and speech therapy are most common). One benefit of a diagnosis is that often your insurance company will cover more therapy.

The right next step is to get an actual diagnosis, in my opinion. You might be off-base in your suspicions, or it may turn out that your child is more affected than you suspect.

<comment><USER15> > It's not standard to medicate for autism, FYI

Autistic people are routinely over-medicated, and that over medication one reason for the difference in life-span for autistic people.

<comment><USER16> After diagnosis? There are no drugs specifically indicated for treating ASD. You might find people on the spectrum getting prescribed ADHD meds, say, but I understand that's more of the exception nowadays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Haven't got a diagnosis myself but I tick a lot of boxes for mild autism and a few articles I read about it 5 years ago (31 at that time) made me realize it's a pretty good explanation for me. I'm not surprised that women are diagnosed less, they are integrated into the social web of family and friends a lot better and from early on. I'm pretty sure I didn't have even a 10th of the social interactions my little daughter has. If only I could remember more than 10 things from my childhood.

On quote from the article that I find heartbreaking is this one:

> I've watched people carefully and studied psychology to degree level to get > me to the point where I can now act quite naturally.

Acting to appear normal, I can do this for a few hours (assuming they serve a social lubricant ;), but put me in a room with small kids, parents and bad acoustic and I need to get out after an hour. My wife's not helping in such situations, actually is embarrassed by my reserved behaviour and inability to connect. She knows that I think I'm an aspie but held it against me so often, that I wish I hadn't told her. She even complains about me not looking in her eyes when she talks, despite know that I'm not wired to do that. On the other hand, no one before pointed that out to me.

What's the point of a diagnosis at 36 when all I'd do with it is show it people who wouldn't believe me otherwise?

<comment><USER16> If you're a high-functioning adult, a diagnosis won't do much good -- you've already figured out what you needed to at least unconsciously. But suppose now that you have children. And one of your children is on the spectrum. If you know what to look for, you might save them and yourself a ton of stress.

<comment><USER10> Already have one, perfect child, active, social, caring, chatty, curious, definitely nowhere near the spectrum. Which is a relief because on her mother's side there's a brother on the spectrum. But I'm able to spend a lot of time with my little family, so that makes it easy for me to grow with our child, make sure she doesn't feel rejected because I'm a weird guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I understand they have a disorder, and yeah, it's "not that bad", for SOME. But come on. My son has autism. He is 13, and still cannot speak. He has to have 24 hour care. I understand that autism is a spectrum, but realize that what they're talking about here is much different. It's like saying someone has a paralyzed pinky versus a being a quadriplegic.

<comment><USER16> I've only known people on the extremes of the spectrum. I don't know anyone who is clearly "in the middle". I do wonder if it is a spectrum or just two different spectra, because I agree that the extremes are not really comparable. My heart goes out to you. I hope your son catches up eventually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since the causes of autism are not really understood, it's defined and diagnosed based on behavior, or symptoms, if you will. Thus, is there an actual qualitative difference between "shy, socially anxious/clumsy" and autistic, except for the extent of those properties?

<comment><USER19> It's very easy to diagnose someone with extreme autism, just as it's easy to diagnose someone with extreme dwarfism. It's blurrier when you get to mild autism (and mild shortness) where there is less visible impairment, less obvious behavior, and often visible benefits.

<comment><USER10> I'm 1.93 and my knees make trouble. can you give me a diagnosis? :D

I'm reading a book at the moment, in german, "Ich liebe einen Asperger" and even proper autism was barely recognized by people working with kids 15yrs ago: "... but it couldn't be Autism!?" is one quote from an educator about the family's most autistic child. Things probably haven't changed that much.

One other thing, even though it is exhausting, kids on the spectrum try to mimic others, act normal etc just to get a good feedback. In the book it took months until the psychologist got through the kid's defenses and was certain about the diagnosis. It's sad really, so much frustration the family describe that could have been prevented.

<comment><USER19> "try to mimic others, act normal" is mild-to-moderate autism, and leads to challenges like not realizing that it's so much harder (in mental effort) for one person to perform behaviors that are so easy for most people.

Severe autism has symptoms like nonverbality (unless treated with years of intensive communication therapy), extreme repetitive behaviors (tapping, bouncing, etc), and freakouts/meltdowns in response to unexpected situations and sensory inputs, of the sort of intensity and sensitivity well beyond what you'd see in the average person over the age of about 7years.

In years past people might not have been able to pinpoint "autism", but disregarding the minor important of the label, it was still easy to see a lot of what was going on with the person with the condition. (Effective _treatment_ is of course much harder than mere diagnosis.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Although im male i also had a late diagnosis (33) which brought about several "oh now that makes sense" moments. im not really surprised i wasnt diagnosed, i grew up in a tiny middle of nowhere village in the 80s, autism was pretty much unheard of i was just the "problem kid" of the village.

ive also always had various quirks that id always previously just put down to me being "weird" the most pronounced of these is that i am a vegetarian, however not by choice, i just cant see meat as edible, i can and have killed/cleaned/cooked things before so that doesnt bother me, i wish i could change it but i simply cant.

its not all bad though, yes i lack empathy and im socially awkward to say the least but i also have an excellent memory and a solid affinity for electronics and IT, i didnt need to be taught, ive always just sort of known.

so while a diagnosis didnt change anything about my life it did answer some questions about why i am who i am

</comment><comment><USER21> "Five times as many males as females are diagnosed", but the problem is of course that women are not diagnosed enough... What about there is a big problem in our society that make males more prone to autism that we should fix first?

That article seems to be political rather than informative to me.

<comment><USER22> I'm inclined to agree.

Perhaps I'm just getting old and cynical but it seems like a lot of people consider it a badge of honor to be diagnosed with some sort of neuro/psycho disability. Granted, that's not a terrible thing per se, because if nothing else, it means there's a significant shift away from the stigmatizing perception of the past. I just have a hard time accepting the celebratory nature of things like this. Similar to the body positivity movement, which itself is a healthy shift towards acceptance and responsibility, there's always a fringe element who seem to romanticize and glorify something. I personally believe it's because many people want to feel included in "something", and that's fine, I don't have a problem with that. I just get grumpy when the initial context goes from understanding the way a disorder can impact your life and raising awareness to "let's make an exclusive group to carve out a little island only me and other special people like me can hang out on". It feels a lot like the reason and purpose are hijacked and unfortunately the message gets lost and tainted, creating more of a backlash than anything else. I don't have a problem with exclusionary groups at all either; my issue is when they use the growing awareness of something else to piggyback off of. I dunno, that's my $0.02 that no one asked for lol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Both my kids are aspie. My son was diagnosed when he was seven because of some speech delay when he was younger and social awkwardness.

My daughter was diagnosed at sixteen after two years of missed school and barely leaving the house due to incredibly high anxiety. Oh, and the first time she was assessed eighteen months prior she was only "borderline" aspie even though in retrospect she has been effected much more profoundly. (She also had a similar speech delay when she was younger too, btw.)

We need to get a lot better at recognising the condition in girls, as we have with boys.

§

If you are wanting to know more about autism in all its flavours, google for just about anything by Tony Attwood. In more recent years he has been concentrating more on autism in women, so adding "women" to your search terms will surface specific material in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think this is an interesting intersection with the recent episode of Full Frontal... in which the host points out that women appear to be under-served by Medicine.

Are we failing half the population so completely?

</comment><comment><USER25> I have a lingering suspicion that a good amount of monks during the middle ages had some form of ASD. Monastic life involved repetitive activities that are usually enjoyed by people with ASD, and monks often had intellectual hobbies that made them probably the closest thing to nerds that existed in the middle ages, which is linked to ASD.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder sometimes if I had Aspergers and just effectively trained myself out of it. All I did was read when I was a kid. At recess, at home, etc. I just read. I didn't really understand social interactions and when I left my family and went to boarding school for high school it became apparent I was extremely socially behind.

Sitting in conversations trying to figure out a) what the heck people say, how do they even come up with something to say on inane topics? and b) when am I allowed to say the one thing I managed to find relevant? was excruciating during my early years.

Being too literal, to this day, is a problem. Struggling with social norms around "honesty", another daily issue. The idea that lying is A-Okay (particularly in business) and that there are some thoughts/ideas I'm not supposed to share due to social norms hasn't come easy. I'm lucky I've opted into a career where it's assumed I'll be a little weird (software engineer), so it's given a pass when I'm too honest, literal, etc.

For me, the big turning point was when I joined acting class my Sophomore year of HS. I basically just thought, "Oh, this is convenient! I'll just ACT like someone who is <x> and it'll all work out!" And, yea, for the most part that's been true. The difficulty of quickly sliding in between "me" and a "social mask" at work hasn't been fun, but overall I feel like the "mask" has become me a solid 40% of any given day to great positive effect.

I still find a social situation to be a lot of work. If I allow myself to drink or do anything that fuzzes my brain at all so I stop DOING all that work of analyzing the room and figuring out how I'm allowed to engage appropriately while still being as much "me" as I can, well, then I spend probably the next 24 hours in a shame-cycle about how poorly I must've come off because I KNOW if I don't do that work then I'm dropping the ball in a million tiny ways.

Early in my relationship with my SO anytime I had caffeine we fought...because I just stopped reading him and went off on my own happy little zig-zagging butterfly path. If he didn't explicitly say he was unhappy, I was not going to pick it up.

It'd be nice to just be able to point to a diagnosis rather than have to blame myself for fucking up another social scene by letting my attention wander or drinking or whathaveyou. But, you know, I could just be a normal introvert who has to work at being social in an extroverted world...

I sort of assume it's the latter.

</comment><comment><USER27> Autism, like cancer, is not a single thing. Toward the start of the spectrum, including Asperger's, it seems to be essentially "clinically-significant weirdness, not otherwise specified" (on the later end of the spectrum, it's "major or profound mental retardation, not otherwise specified").

A more productive discussion might be why we feel the need to pathologize so much about ourselves. Why do we need a person to look us over and say "Ah, none of what you are is your fault" to feel OK?

Worse, why do some parents need to hear that about their children? I've known kids who've been paraded to several "mental health professionals" until one would finally give the parents what they ultimately wanted, a diagnosis-as- scapegoat. In the 90s that scapegoat was ADHD. Today it's Asperger's.

<comment><USER19> Mental Retardation is not autism, though it is often correlated.

[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088357606021002...](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/10883576060210020301)

> "Overall, the findings indicate that more empirical evidence is needed > before conclusions can be made about the percentages of children With autism > Who are mentally retarded."

Diagnosis isn't a scapegoat, it's a doorway to effective engagements and improved quality of life.

<comment><USER28> I think you're missing his point. What good is a diagnosis if its not accurate?</comment></comment></comment>


Google and Facebook battle for the ads sales: who controls the net? - <AUTHOR> http://m.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/google-fears-facebook/all/1

<comment><USER2> Facebook has an advantage for two reasons:

1\. Facebook ads point to other Facebook pages. 2\. More people fill out their FB profiles than their Google profiles.</comment>


Greeks set to face fines if they don't spend 30% of their income electronically - ur-whale https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/greeks-set-to-face-heavy-fines-if-they-don-t-spend-30-per-cent-of-their-income-electronically-20191209-p53i14.html <comment><AUTHOR> >> Tax evasion has been labelled a "Greek national sport" and it was estimated in 2016 to cost the country's coffers up to €16 billion every year, largely through fraud on VAT or income tax.

Although I've made this joke myself in the past, about tax evasion being our national sport, it's insulting to see it repeated by an Australian publisher. Personally, I've only had to pay taxes abroad, in the UK, where there was no opportunity to evade them (because they were directly deducted from my salary - I'm a PhD student now hence the past tense). I wouldn't really say I'm an expert tax evader.

That said, any discussion of taxation and tax avoidance in Greece as well as the rest of South-Eastern Europe must also take into account the sorry state of public services, which tax money is meant to support. It's a chicken-and- egg problem, but it's easy to see why nobody would want to be the malakas who pays their taxes properly only for their tax money to disappear down the black hole of corruption before having any chance to improve the national health service, education, our roads, etc etc. Taxation makes sense when it's spent to improve and maintain the commons - not to line politicians' pockets.

Of course, that's not absolving my fellow Greeks of responsibility. Corruption is high in Greece because we support corrupt politicians with our votes, and because we have done so for three generations since the "metapolitefsis", the change to democracy after the years of the military dictatorship (ended in 1974). To wit, Kyriakos Mitsotakis (the current prime minister, pictured in the article) is the _second_ Mitsotakis to be prime minister, grandson of the first - and his mom is also an MP. And before him we had Papandreou I (in the '50s), II and III and also Karamanlis I and II to rule us (and all their friends and cousins as MPs). We keep voting the same "houses" in power and then complain that they suck us dry and destroy the economy. And then of course it's every man and woman for themselves.

It's a fucked up situation and we are very much guilty for our choices over the years. But silly jokes about national sports don't help to get to the heart of the issue, or convey its seriousness.

<comment><USER2> Maybe you can verify this story that I was told. On a few vacations to Greece I wondered why so many buildings of all shapes and sizes had some re-bar sticking out somewhere, usually at the top of a post. I was told that it is about evading property taxes by never completely finishing construction, that taxes were not due on unfinished buildings. So they were never finished. The buildings were all occupied and fully livable but I guess the owner could point to the re-bar sticking out and say it was not really finished.

<comment> saiya-jin This is exactly what I heard about Bolivia, more specifically La Paz. The city looks like 80% of the buildings were started 1 year ago and waiting for another storey to be completed, and put paint on it. But no, you see these unfinished buildings, with just raw concrete and bricks, and people happily living there.

It might have caught law makers by surprise initially (not really buying that), but its so damning visible even to outsiders, it just highlights the rampant corruption and lack of actual care from politicians there.

<comment><USER3> I heard this when I was in Egypt too. Seems to be a common problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The parliamentary financial evaluation committee has already declared it as unconstitutional.

For those that still manage to save some of their income – a luxury for very few nowadays – the plans to tackle this were already though out. For example, a large purchase of a high end tv at the last day of the year, which then would be returned a couple days unopened. The ministry would be "happy" and your savings would not really have exchanged hands permanently.

It mostly illustrates the inability of the government to be effective.

<comment><USER5> But was the goal to actually force people to spend money? Not just force it to be tracked electronically?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope it's a joke, or something is missing there. I try to save as much as possible and I barely spend 25% of my income. Forcing me to spend more is not right.

Maybe they were rather thinking about: move your money electronically, which would also include getting salary on a bank account, or wiring it there.

<comment><USER7> If I understand it, the point is to avoid cash transactions that cannot be taxed. One article I read pointed out that the 30% would include rent or mortgage payments, utility bills, and such things.

Personally, I would find it easy to hit almost 100% of the transactions I make electronically - I use cash rarely now (living in France, no cash tips etc.).

I think I would struggle to only spend 25% of my income, though. Even if I am saving a lot, once I pay rent, family groceries, utilities, phone and internet, I'd be past that. If you don't mind to share, how do you manage to spend so little of your income? There's always room for me to save more, and I'd love a couple of tips.

<comment><USER8> Allow me to explain better.

The 30% comes before any tax. Also it does not include payments for taxes, rent and other things.

So, let's say I make €40K/year. My tax will be about €11K. Further taxes, such as owning some property, owning a car, can add €1-3K more. My rent may be €7K.

So now, I have already spent ~€20K but this does not count towards this limit. I still have to spent €12K on various things (food, services, goods, which come with 24% VAT in Greece) or I get an additional 22% tax.

It's madness!

<comment><USER9> The article says that payments for rent do count towards the limit. Can you re-confirm?

<comment><USER8> I can. Rent does not count towards spending but it counts towards... earning.

So, if you own a house and rent it to others, the rent is part of your income. If you rent a house to leave in, the rent is not part of your spent amount.

There is a special clause, that if you spent more than 60% towards tax, rent and loan payments, then you only have to spent 20% of your income on services, goods, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> why-oh-why Excuse me, what? If they know what 100% of my income is, they can tax it.

Payments under the table stay there; that money is not part of your percentage. People receive payments and make payments without that money ever appearing on any bank accounts.

This is unenforceable and doesn't solve anything.

<comment><USER10> This comment here was what struck me immediately upon reading the story. Surely the Greek state has thought of that? Surely?

<comment><USER11> You have no idea how stupid they are

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale I am afraid that - while this is extreme - this is pretty much a taste of things to come for many industrialized countries.

Cash is well on its way to being outlawed in many places, thereby giving states historically unparalleled control over their flock.

Complete and detailed financial transactions are pretty much the least noisy dataset you can imagine to build a person's detailed profile.

</comment><comment><USER12> I feel like this will only lead to more people not declaring their income.

<comment><USER13> Ironically, the move is supposed to deter people from doing that. The article doesn't go into details about how it will be achieved. It'd be nice to see how the Greek public reacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's pretty messed up. What about the elderly and the poor?

My grandmother (American) has never done one thing online in her life.

<comment><USER15> Syriza was right and Varoufakis should have called the ECB's bluff but instead the ECB knew Greece was just pretending to call the bluff and just let them hang.

They'd have been better off if they had executed Grexit than be saddled paying off German banks.

<comment><USER16> > _They'd have been better off if they had executed Grexit than be saddled > paying off German banks._

Yeah, the scheme works like this:

\- Greek state was bankrupt

\- German banks and financial interests were over-exposed

\- Germany used EU and EU funds to "aid Greece". The funds are not used in Greece in any way, but to repaid the debt, so its basically EU -> Greece -> German banks. Germany benefits tremendously, Greece is merely kept on life support (still bankrupt, still with the same -and bigger debt as before the "aid", just with a credit line that goes straight to debtors, e.g. mostly exposed German banks), and Greek state is forced to sell assets for 1/10th the price for select German and other players (with political and economic pressure as to which those would be).

\- IMF piles on, pushing its own agenda (deregulation and other neoliberal/anti-welfare etc policies)

So it's basically a swindle on the EU populations, to make them pay for German banks using Greece as an intermediary + a way to not let Greece default, but have it suffer a fate worse than default (mostly, selling everything to the lowest bidder and still being in the same piled-on debt).

Well, that would be German elites. German people still paid like other Europeans for this scheme -- though the transaction also benefitted Germany economically, so somethings trickled.

<comment><USER17> Well, not exactly. Debts of government were written-off about 50% [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government- debt_crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis)

As far as I know that means that creditors from northern Europe paid 50% of debts. This is organized default and a deal package that came with it. I wouldn't say German banks were exactly winners here.

<comment><USER18> It's the same story in many countries ... populist governments increase public deficit via corruption and salary increases in the public sectors in order to secure votes for the next election, then get loans to pay said debt and then everybody blames the evil banks, FMI, EU, they blame anybody else but themselves for supporting corruption and populism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is sad to see how hard life is made for the average Greek due to the economic sanctions they were hit with to save malpracticing banks.

<comment><USER20> Ha. Widespread tax evasion is not the fault of the banks. If there is a country where a huge proportion of people work in the grey and black markets then normal government tax policies don't work.

If governments don't have income then they can't do the things that they need to do. If you've got a country then I think by definition you require taxation, borders, etc.

<comment><USER13> I might be oversimplifying. Tax evasion becomes necessary when one knows they'd lose more money (than necessary) to taxes, especially when the benefits of the tax has not been or cannot be felt. If that's the situation, taxing becomes an exercise of government just because of nation and economic theories. The way to solve that isn't to surveil earnings and spending. It is to make a good case for why people should pay taxes. And usually, it involves spending the current tax money well.

<comment><USER18> > " _The way to solve that isn 't to surveil earnings and spending. It is to > make a good case for why people should pay taxes_"

What makes you say that? Has that ever worked?

IMO taxpayers should pay their taxes simply because they are citizens and that's _the law_. If the taxes aren't bearable or just or aren't spent wisely, then they should vote accordingly at the next elections.

Tax evasion does in fact reward the corruption that has led to tax evasion.

And the way to end tax evasion IMO is to (1) decrease taxes, as to make the burden bearable for everybody, but then (2) put tax evaders in jail, show no mercy.

<comment><USER13> > IMO taxpayers should pay their taxes simply because they are citizens and > that's the law. If the taxes aren't bearable or just or aren't spent wisely, > then they should vote accordingly at the next elections

Let's assume that this is the reason for tax obligations. What will be the equivalent statement made for the government? Government should collect taxes from citizens because it's the law to collect taxes from citizens?

Tax collection isn't a sport. It's toward national development. If one end happens (tax collection) but the other doesn't (national development), expect rational beings to change attitude towards the first.

<comment><USER21> Are you seriously saying draconian taxes are acceptable because you can decide not to pay them? This isn't how a democratic government is supposed to work. That's just pure anarchy and probably points to why Greece came into this situation in the first place. Citizens do not face the consequences of the government they elected and therefore they have no incentive to actually vote for politicians that want to solve the problem. Instead everyone is trying to break the rules in every way possible and then once a rare and naive guy gets into government and wants to suggest a real solution your little raft made out of discarded PVC pipes that you have carefully built over the course of your life isn't good enough anymore. Being forced to upgrade to a kayak is going to be painful but it will be worth it in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That sounds like an ugly hack and I suspect that tax evasion reporter bounties would probably work better but I don't know their system and problems in details beyond "rampant tax evasion and loopholes in an economy that isn't as advanced as it should be".

I had a related thought while having breakfast. A hypothetical transparent economy where everyone had open ledgers of transactions and how utopian or dystopian it would wind up.

Money laundering still be possible in that system - any uncertain value fudged up or down in exchange for illicit hidden transactions would work for that practice.

<comment><USER23> >That sounds like an ugly hack and I suspect that tax evasion reporter bounties would probably work better

Giving people an monetary incentive to rat on each other for something a large slice of the population engages in (to varying extents) almost always increases distrust and dysfunction in society. You can sometimes get away with it in some places where trust of government is very high and allegiance to local community is very low but Greece is not one of those places. Right now one of Greece's problems is too little trust in government (part of why people feel justified dodging taxes). Incentives like you described would be counterproductive.

<comment><USER22> Hmm interesting perspective - I would have thought disrupting the "conspiratorial cohesion" as well as turning the greed of enterprises against them. Not what I would have thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Seen another way, companies will have to provide electronic payment options. Hopefully there's follow up incentives to make electronic payments appealing. Credit card cash back isn't still a thing in EU (or at least Germany). That said, I don't know which is generally safer, cash or card, but in my own experience I feel more secure traveling/walking around with my bank card that cash. It's 2019 and there's still several places in Germany where you have to pay > 50eur bills in cash.

<comment><USER24> > Credit card cash back isn't still a thing in EU (or at least Germany)

They will never be a thing in EU, under the current regulations. Cash back work because in the US credit cards charge very high transaction fees. IE: every time you make a payment, a portion of it goes to the credit card company. The The credit card company then gives some of that back to you (hence the name) to push you to use their cards instead of the competitors.

By law, the transaction fees in Europe are really low, so the credit cards company have nothing to give back to you. Credit card is also a far less profitable business in Europe than it is in the US, that is why you see far less ads for credit cards offers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I had a colleague who went on a Greek island cruise and told me a story of a common tax invasion scheme he heard about. I can't say whether this is true or not as he tends to tell "tall tales". He said he noticed a lot of residential properties with tiny churches on them. He said he learned that if Greeks had a church on their property it would be taxed at a much lower rate (or perhaps not at all) and therefore everyone had these tiny one person churches on their properties.

<comment><USER26> No, that's not true. The reason that was done was because of a regulation that forced the electrical grid to treat church grid connection in an expedited manner. So one would built a house with a tiny church and would file papers for expedited connection to the grid. That was happening in places that were sparsely built and the cost of the grid to reach a house was great.

</comment></comment><comment> em-bee china found a better solution for this problem.

businesses were required to use government issued software and receipt paper to print receipts. those receipts had a scratch area which would reveal a code that allowed the buyer to win something. that way the public was motivated to ask for that receipt, and because the receipt was printed with government software, the transaction could be reported directly.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like a case for swapping to land value tax if I've ever seen one. Can't hide land.

<comment><USER28> You can't hide land, but how do you determine 'value'?

We have some such system for funding local government, and the values are, in general, an absurd fiction (in both directions) despite the legal theory that property values should be based on some notion of 'market value'.

One trouble is that when the property market declines, local governments don't take that into consideration, and refuse to reduce property valuations, because that would impact their revenue stream in the direction they dislike.

<comment><USER27> If you ask me, if this was to be done, s the following steps should be taken.

1) The government should commission an expert panel to investigate a system for assessing land value (or perhaps even crowd source it). A set of descriptors (size, location, if it's next to a sewer treatment plant, etc.) should be determined. Along with sale price records, a system should be designed to predict land values.

B) Every part of the system should be public information, including the set of descriptors, so that individuals can dispute them and have them updated in the records.

C) Per law, the system should be regularly reviewed and updated, so that it is as accurate as possible.

<comment><USER26> All of these have happened, in some degree at least. And yet it's still a mess. e.g.

1) That panel exists in a variety of forms. The problem is, how do you nicely estimate land value in an economy were real estate transactions are few (which is happening for the last 10-12 years or so)? In many places it's impossible to estimate due to the above, so the alternative is to rely on very old values which are going to be out of date and don't reflect reality. And you can't put 0 for the land value as that would mean 0 taxes and the state financial situation does not allow that B) That is happening. Dispute is problematic as it takes years for the courts (yes, with the exception of blaring mistakes, the state has no incentive to accept that a land value estimation is wrong, so courts it is) to come up with a decision (never mind the fact that it will be appealed anyway so even more time and money spent on this), but it is happening. C) Again, this is problematic due to the same reason as 1). There aren't really that many real estate transactions to accurately estimate land values. Everything went into a pause for years in a row.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Surely there are better ways to achieve this. Off the top of my head:

* Force business to accept electronic payments.

* Reduce the number of ATMs

* Limit ATMs to lower denomination notes

* Increase VAT for cash payments

<comment><USER30> > Increase VAT for cash payments

People don't pay VAT on cash-in-hand payments, though do they?

<comment><USER31> In most EU countries they do, it's included in the final price.

To find out whether the VAT money goes to the state as VAT or gets "forgotten" in the merchant's pockets is left to the student as extracurricular work.

<comment><USER30> Have you seriously never had anyone offer you a 'discount' for a cash payment? Why do you think they're doing that?

<comment><USER5> I live in a southern EU country, and that's very rare here, in my experience. The only cases I can think of in the last decade were home repair people. Even car mechanics stopped doing that.

<comment><USER30> This article is about how evading tax is _not_ very rare in places like Greece.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


High Performance Numeric Programming with Swift: Explorations and Reflections - <AUTHOR> https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/ <comment><USER2> One thing to look out for is that Swift Arrays aren't really arrays. [https://www.raywenderlich.com/1172-collection-data- structure...](https://www.raywenderlich.com/1172-collection-data-structures- in-swift):

 _"1. Accessing any value at a particular index in an array is at worst O(log n), but should usually be O(1).

2\. Searching for an object at an unknown index is at worst O(n (log n)), but will generally be O(n).

3\. Inserting or deleting an object is at worst O(n (log n)) but will often be O(1). These guarantees subtly deviate from the simple "ideal" array that you might expect from a computer science textbook or the C language, where an array is always a sequence of items laid out contiguously in memory"_

If you want a more traditional data structure, use ContiguousArray, which _is_ an array. [https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/contiguousar...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/contiguousarray):

 _"The ContiguousArray type is a specialized array that always stores its elements in a contiguous region of memory. This contrasts with Array, which can store its elements in either a contiguous region of memory or an NSArray instance if its Element type is a class or @objc protocol"_

<comment><USER3> My instinct is to find this horrifying. Is there a good reason for this?

If I have an array of ints, is it contiguous?

Especially with modern computers and how importance data locality is the name "array" is kind of sacred. If you want a fancy weird-non array give THAT the longer, annoying name.

<comment><USER4> Presumably Objective-C/Cocoa compatibility. Although I'm wouldn't be able to tell you why that would require non-contiguous storage... surely @NSArray is contiguous?

<comment><USER5> [https://ciechanow.ski/exposing- nsmutablearray/](https://ciechanow.ski/exposing-nsmutablearray/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for writing up your thoughts!

I find Julia's core design to be excellent for general purpose programming, better than python in fact since it essentially solves the expression problem with it's type system and multiple dispatch.

It's external program interop is also more pleasant than Python's :[https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/running-external- pro...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/running-external- programs/#Running-External-Programs-1)

Sure, it doesn't have the same general library ecosystem, but even that is being remedied for core areas like web programming: [http://genieframework.com/](http://genieframework.com/) (a full MVC framework), [https://github.com/JuliaGizmos/WebIO.jl](https://github.com/JuliaGizmos/WebIO.jl) (write front end code without javascript) and I'm particularly excited for [https://github.com/Keno/julia-wasm](https://github.com/Keno/julia-wasm), which will allow Julia programs to be compiled for the browser.

For any packages than are python only, it has excellent python interop using the pycall.jl package, which even allows users to write custom python classes in Julia.

With regards to numerical programming, it's obviously already far ahead of swift, and IMO much better placed to beat it in the long run. For example the WIP zyogte package is able to hook into Julia's compiler to zero overhead diff arbitrary code. Using Cassette.jl, package authors can write custom compiler passes outside the main repo and in pure Julia: [https://julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language- compiler](https://julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language-compiler)

In addition, it's macro system, introspection, dynamic typing and value types through abstract typing approach allows for natural development of advanced probabilistic programming languages: [https://github.com/TuringLang/Turing.jl](https://github.com/TuringLang/Turing.jl), [https://github.com/probcomp/Gen](https://github.com/probcomp/Gen), [https://github.com/zenna/Omega.jl/pulse](https://github.com/zenna/Omega.jl/pulse)

<comment><USER7> Agree with everything you've said, it's hard to see why one would prefer Swift over Julia for numerical computing. I use Julia for it's regex too; it's just nicer. Hopefully, the data munging packages in Julia can catch up to dplyr and data.table, then we are talking!

<comment><USER8> I am a happy Julia user, but I can imagine if you had a use case where you wanted to compile a binary or shared library, Julia could be a pain.

C++ of course works fine for this but I imagine Swift would be less terrifying to use.

<comment><USER9> I see a lot of great numerical code in Julia. As a C++ developer, I don't want to deal with a runtime or various parts of the language, but I imagine I could be more easily brought to the table if Julia code could be exported to a shared object file and linked against, or if it could compile to a direct binary.

<comment><USER10> I think Julia is the dark horse to eventually take over a wide swath of computing - possibly wider than Java or C++. As others have pointed out there's an effort to produce static Julia executables, and I think it's already possible to produce libraries. One interesting datapoint is that Julia's C FFI is faster than that of C++...

[https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead](https://github.com/dyu/ffi-overhead)

(For those interested, the order of the first few languages is: lua-jit, julia, c(!), c++, zig, nim, d in order of decreasing speed.)

It's extremely well thought out, concise, powerful, and readable. I think Julia's approach to types and multiple dispatch is a better alternative to traditional OO programming.

One thing the author didn't point out is that C++ (clang), Swift, Rust and Julia all use the LLVM infrastructure, resulting in extremely similar if not identical code generation. If datacenter efficiency truly becomes a priority, highly efficient languages like Julia, Rust and Swift will see increasing use for general purpose programming.

<comment><USER9> Do you know how Julia gets such great ffi performance? Is it inlining, for instance?

<comment><USER11> It's a bit of a JIT party trick by emitting the target address directly rather than going through the PLT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hello folks! I wrote this article - so if you have any questions, feel free to shoot them my way. :)

<comment><USER13> Jeremy, if you're up for it, could you talk any more about your explorations of Julia?

I see (and agree with) your point about worse non-numeric stuff, but if you stand back and squint I get the impression Julia does most of what you applaud here, with the added benefits of a more transparent compiler and a more numeric-focused community (no need for BasicMath there!).

In particular, Flux.jl seems like a fairly direct competitor of S4TF, and this blogpost [0] really blew me away.

[0] [https://www.julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language- compiler](https://www.julialang.org/blog/2018/12/ml-language-compiler)

<comment><USER7> The post says Julia is not good for general purpose programming. I think it is good for that, it's just that it does not have as many packages as Python, that's all. I will offer one reason, Julia syntax is actually very much like Python's in many respects. So how can Python be good for general purpose programming but Julia not? So if the sentence is more like, Julia doesn't have as many packages for general programming then I think it's more precise

<comment><USER12> That sounds totally fair. I haven't used Julia for a couple of years so my comments on it are dated and not well informed. Everyone I know that uses Julia nowadays loves it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Key point here is Chris Lattner is working on this stuff. He's the creator of Swift and LLVM and one of the smartest minds in the industry. Pay atttention.</comment>


Welcome to quebix. - <AUTHOR>

Welcome my friends.It is a very special occasion indeed, and i can assure you that this is the single most important thread that you will have ever read in your entire life. Since I am not a man of many words, the least i can do is offer you a proposal for your inclusion and cooperation to change the world and revolutionize computing in ways never before thought possible.
I am now currently recruiting some of the greatest minds on Ycombinator to see who would be the best potential fit for a  co-founder, someone who will not only help me build great products, but also a great company. If you want some insight into my interests, you can visit my webpage at http://www.myspace.com/164645855, if you're ready to change the course of history, then you can e-mail me at email@example.com.

           quebix.
 How the impossible is done. <comment><USER2> > Welcome my friends.It is a very special occasion indeed, and i can assure > you that this is the single most important thread that you will have ever > read in your entire life. Since I am not a man of many words, the least i > can do is offer you a proposal for your inclusion and cooperation to change > the world and revolutionize computing in ways never before thought possible.

You almost lost me there to the irony of your words.

</comment><comment><USER3> Quantum Field Theory. Swastika. Software for MySpace that stops ALL spam. Update profiles. Coded entirely in Flash...

All of this goodness was not necessary, Brandon, you had me at "SinGlE -N- RdY 2 MiNgLe"! 'Tis poetry.

[The Hypetrain leaves the station at 9am, folks...hurry, hurry, hurry!]

</comment><comment><USER4> stop using my company name please. I show no disrespect or want any problems but your using the trademark name for my company and my companies name. Thanks i'm sure we can come to some arrangement on using "quebix" in public with our consent. However if you continue without our permission we might need to take this much further.</comment>


Ethiopian LGBT Activist Banned by Facebook Under Real Name Policy - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/money/3954390/ethiopian-lgbt-activist-banned-facebook-real-name/

<comment><USER2> Isn't this the point of "Pages" on Facebook? Create a "HappyAddis" page in addition to your personal account. Post any controversial statements in the guise of this page instead of personally. Problem solved.

Whether or not you agree with the real name policy, it's the company's policy and they are entitled to enforce it. If you don't like Facebook's terms then don't use it.

Banning people for using their native or traditional names or whatever is a separate issue; "HappyAddis" does not fall into that category.

<comment><USER3> "Facebook with its "real name" policy makes itself the arbiter of other people's selves.

Under pressure from cross-dressers, Facebook said it would relax the "real name" policy and allow people to use aliases, but only if they are generally known by those aliases.

However, reportedly Facebook has not really changed the policy.

Even if Facebook makes this change, it will be unacceptable because companies and the state will be able to connect the account with your real identity. In order for the site not to mistreat people, it must let you have one account to show your boss and your parents, another for your friends, and others for various kinds of political activism"

[https://stallman.org/facebook.html#realname](https://stallman.org/facebook.html#realname)

Also, real names allows US gov and other non-democratic regimes to identify people and their personal networks and go after them.

<comment><USER2> If you need to say something in the public domain that can't be traced back to your own identity, don't say it on Facebook.

The entire point of Facebook is that there is an easily identified one-to-one correspondence between your Facebook contacts and people in the real world. If people are allowed to become effectively anonymous then it fundamentally changes this experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Facebook is not an appropriate or safe medium for conducting your secret life, if your secret life could get you or your family jailed/killed.

<comment> norea-armozel And yet it's one of the few ways to get the word out for matters like LGBT rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook also thought my name was fake. I went back and forth with support and eventually got someone to ping them internally after which I was able to submit pictures of 2 IDs and get my name on my profile.

<comment><USER6> Now facebook knows your home address and both your ID numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a good friend by the name of Stanford. Facebook did not believe him.</comment>


Bitcoin: Investment or Bubble? - <AUTHOR> http://buckinghamadvisor.com/bitcoin-investment-or-bubble/ <comment><USER2> "...we cannot make any recommendation on whether or not purchasing bitcoin is a good investment..." But we give it to you anyway.</comment>


Dispelling misconceptions about what's driving income inequality in the U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/upshot/income-inequality-united-states.html?ribbon-ad-idx=1&rref=business&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Business%20Day&pgtype=article <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15724797](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15724797)

</comment><comment><USER3> "When I arrived in the office one day I saw my boss coming in with a new big Porsche. I said to him 'nice car' and he replied 'well, if you continue to work hard and give everything to this company, I might be able to get myself another one for Christmas'"

</comment><comment><USER4> We keep hearing the argument that government subsidy or protectionist legal barriers are responsible for inequality, but I think it's an inherent feature of capitalism.

Owning the means of production, whether it's a company or factory, land, patents, natural resources, or simply a brand name, give you a share of "monopoloy power" to some extent, and puts you on a different plane to workers. Your wealth automatically rises with the hard work, creativity and success of those workers, and allows to you to buy ever more "productive assets". The value of which constantly increases to remain beyond average workers' grasp.

</comment><comment><USER5> See also: "The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still [in 2016] the richest families in Florence"

[https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence- in-14...](https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-1427-are- still-the-richest-families-in-florence/)

<comment><USER6> This is a universal phenomenon. Gregory Clark has tracked family names in the UK over eight centuries and shown that 'mobility rates are lower than conventionally estimated, do not vary across societies, and are resistant to social policies'. The names of the Norman colonizers of England in 1066 still strongly feature in the higher social classes.

[http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/The%20Son%20A...](http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/The%20Son%20Also%20Rises/EEH%202014.pdf).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article doesn't say... How is "the richest 1%" defined? Is it by networth? Yearly total compensation? And at what values must one be to meet the definition?

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's what I'm wondering:

\- How do you measure inequality?

\- What amount of inequality is acceptable?

\- What amount of inequality should be targeted?

Inequality is part of any system. It's inevitable due to the inherent randomness of our universe.

<comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article contradicts itself.

First it says that it's not managers that are increasing inequality then they say a bunch of businesses that are behind it.

Quote: Almost all of the growth in top American earners has come from just three economic sectors: professional services, finance and insurance, and health care, groups that tend to benefit from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.

I've never met an individual that offers insurance... it's a corporation. So... if it's not managers the only other thing is the owners of these corporations.

But the New York Times didn't want to say that!

More fake news bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER11> TLDR:

Financial and medical fields have a lot of rich people because of regulatory capture (i.e. no or little competition because they make the rules).</comment>


Quora Blocks Startup Search Engines - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/quora-blocks-startup-search-en.php <comment><USER2> When our startup was just getting going, search spiders were an unexpected problem for us.

Our project was a bit odd, in that we had millions of documents available to browse. We wanted them all to be available to search engines, but it was an operational headache to keep that much data moving.

Our normal daily traffic might have been 10,000 users with perhaps 50K page requests. We built our first small web server to handle this load.

We were caught blindsided by the Googlebot, which from day one demanded hundreds of thousands of pages per day. Googlebot offers no option to slow it down, and if you try to slow it down on purpose your search ranking will suffer.

So 90% of our early operational burden was devoted to keeping Googlebot happy. This was an unexpected burden, but it was worth it to be in the Google index, because they sent a lot of traffic our way and kept our fledging startup alive.

But it was definitely _not_ worth it to spend equivalent operational expense to be in marginal search engines that don't refer much traffic. To a site operator, they don't offer any value in exchange for what they demand.

It was very interesting to see the relative volume of requests that we got from Googlebot versus the other crawlers. While Googlebot found us on day one, it took over 3 months before we appeared in Microsoft's index, and even then, they had perhaps only 10% of the coverage of our site when compared to Google.

<comment><USER3> You can slow down Googlebot via the Google Webmaster Tools

<comment><USER2> At the time, I recall that our choices were between "too fast" or "way, way too fast".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did anyone actually go through the robots.txt file? <http://www.quora.com/robots.txt>

The first two lines are:

        # If you operate a search engine and would like to crawl Quora, please
        # email email@example.com. Thanks.

Looks sensible to me.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, because mailing every two-cent site to get permission to crawl is a sensible way to build a search engine.

Quora should just get over themselves.

<comment><USER6> Ironically I believe that this is to protect the users privacy on the Quora site. They have an option to hide your username from your answers, so if someone were to Google your name your Quora answers wouldn't appear.

<comment><USER7> If one wants to be an idiot or an asshole on the Internet, then one is free to do so. If one wants to attach their real name, address or some other identifiable bit of information to such outbursts, then once again, one is free to do so.

The same goes for life off of the Internet, which of course could be recorded or reported, and subsequently placed on the Internet.

The real problem is people mistakenly believe they can secretly operate with impunity in an age of increasing transparency.

<comment><USER6> You've successfully identified a fundamental problem with society, and it is by no means limited to Quora.

I think the search engine privacy feature is a fantastic innovation from Quora to help absolve _potential_ problems in the future. (eg: you google my name and see my Quora answers on Sex)

<comment><USER7> The supposed "potential problems" are fictitious.

If you wrote public answers on questions of sex, why should they be hidden? --You made your answers public _intentionally_ and also provided the answers _intentionally_ so others would hopefully learn from them. Additionally, you did both while knowing your name is attached to them. In other words, you _want_ to be known both for and by your contributions.

If you did not wish to be known for and by your public contributions, then the only answer is to either not make public contributions, or go to rather extreme lengths to only make public contributions anonymously. The latter fraught with plenty of caveats to maintain anonymity correctly, so the only real answer is to only make public contributions you would want attributed to you.

Back in the 80's when Chico State was the number 1 party school in the US, recruiters would show up in droves looking to get new employees. The unstated reason was very simple; if someone could graduate from Chico, it pretty much proved the person could not only get things done but also have a really fun time doing it.

Who would you rather work with? --A fiercely academic but socially limited graduate, or the guy who can get stuff done and also do keg stands?

If I searched on your name and found your public opinions, I'd think far more of you for having the stones to make your own contributions than I would be concerned about your predilection for midget porn.

Of course, the trouble with trying to be non-judgmental and unbiased is assuming others will do the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Running a scraping site pretending to be a search engine is an oldy, but a goody.

[http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=site:duck...](http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=site:duckduckgo.com)

Way to play the openness card Gabriel.

</comment><comment><USER9> "...Google, Bing, Blekko and other big players access..."

Wait, since when was Blekko big? Also, why has every article about search engines recently ended up talking about DDG? :p

<comment><USER10> >why has every article about search engines recently ended up talking about DDG?

Because they're the new darling, and tech types like them. It's always nice to see someone come in as a substantial underdog and make a real effort to succeed. Also, their results seem to be at least as good as Google's which is pretty impressive.

<comment><USER11> "Also, their results seem to be at least as good as Google's which is pretty impressive."

They're Bing with some twiddles on top. DDG uses Yahoo! BOSS, which is Yahoo's API to its search service, which is now powered by Bing. Your DDG results all originally come from Bing's index, they just get filtered and possibly re- ranked by some custom code Gabriel's written.

<comment><USER12> Actually, that's not true and it really isn't hard to verify so I'm not sure why you keep saying that.

<comment><USER13> Where are you getting your results?

<comment><USER12> From the FAQ:

How do you get your results?

 _From over 30 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites, Yahoo! BOSS, embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing & Blekko._

Just do some searches and compare to Bing, etc., e.g. <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=hacker+news> vs <http://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker%20news> vs [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news)

<comment><USER13> Alright. I think the spirit of what our ancestor poster was saying is that it's mostly just powered by an API (by which most of the "work" is being done). In a previous discussion I asked if you were going to do full-scale Web crawls, and you said:

>We never stopped crawling; we just scaled it back for specific purposes, mainly now for spam detection and zero-click info

So if you've scaled back the crawling and are mostly using it just for spam detection and zero-click info (forgive my ignorance, but I'm not sure what zero-click info is) then does that mean that you are getting the majority of your result data from outside APIs like BOSS?

Edit: And does that mean that you store those pages in your database and use your own ranking algorithm, or are you using their ranked results for a query and then rearranging them on the fly?

<comment><USER12> No, the spirit of the above comment was condescending, dismissive and only mentioned one source: _They're Bing with some twiddles on top._ (I believe he is a Google employee.)

About 50% of queries show information from my index. I've concentrated on the fat head of the search space, where I get a lot of volume (1 and 2 word queries). For long-tail stuff, yes, the majority of results come from external APIs, but even there it is inaccurate to say they are all derived from a direct call to one API. It really varies by query. Some will look like Bing for sure, but others will look very different. I'm not going to disclose everything I do of course.

<comment><USER13> >No, the spirit of the above comment was condescending, dismissive

Well, I didn't even think of it that way. Naturally you're probably looking at these types of criticisms under a magnifying glass since it's your project.

>About 50% of queries show information from my index. I've concentrated on the fat head of the search space, where I get a lot of volume (1 and 2 word queries).

See now that's actually good to know! From many people's point of view (including mine), DDG _is_ Bing with some twiddles on top. Maybe out of ignorance, but what can you expect? If you aren't already enamored by the idea of DDG then you probably don't care enough to find out what you're really doing on the back-end, which is what really matters most to me in these discussions. (Not the results since unless I'm told otherwise I just assume it's Bing or Yahoo.)

Edit: It's quite humorous to be down-voted by the fan boys for expressing an honest and IMO helpful opinion to the owner of DDG. If all he gets is blind love he won't know how to get the rest of us on board. Believe it or not, the down vote button isn't the disagree button. If you have something constructive to add, say it.

<comment><USER10> See, and you were doing so well until the edit. I was about to upvote your rather interesting reply, but reddit has left an unforgivably bad taste in my mouth for people who say "not sure why the downvotes" or "I'll probably get downvoted, but..."

I'm not going to downvote you, but next time just say what you have to say. If people like it and upvote it, great. if not, it's a meaningless metric on a fairly small social news site. There are far more important things to worry about.

<comment><USER13> I understand your point, but I'm not worried about the actual points being added or subtracted from my karma. People here tend to continue up-voting something that's been up-voted or continue down-voting something that's been down-voted. I'm attempting to curb any further lack of real consideration for my comments due to the blind nature of many of the users here regarding voting etiquette. If you've seen me around here before you'll know that I often post comments that attempt to uphold what I consider to be the HN standard. Which is why I ended it with "if you have something constructive to add, say it." I realize some users may find this grating, but perhaps those users aren't the target audience for the remark to begin with. Thanks for the heads up though.

To add to that, if I were trolling or being rude or vicious I would not have edited to bring up the down-voting. I hate to see this site slip into the bad habit of down-voting legitimate and helpful points due to simple disagreement with the commenter. With so many new users coming to HN daily it's important to occasionally remind people that this isn't Reddit, it's not Digg, and it's not Slashdot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the article:

 _"[Quora's] robots.txt file explicitly grants Google, Bing, Blekko and other big players access"_

Blekko is a big player? It launched two months ago and it's still in public beta. According to Compete.com [1], it attracts only 120,000 visitors a month.

I'd say that if Blekko is a big player, DuckDuckGo is one too.

[1] <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/blekko.com/?metric=uv>

<comment><USER15> Blekko has around 800 servers, each with 64 GB RAM and 8 TB of storage across SATA drives.

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/the-secrets- behind-...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2010/12/the-secrets-behind- blekkos-search-technology.php)

Has DuckDuckGo published the details of their data-center anywhere?

Also, Blekko may have launched recently, but it was founded in mid-2007.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree wholeheartedly. For comparison, I currently see ~95% of search engine referral traffic from Google, 2.8% from Yahoo, 1.4% from Bing, and <1% from all other search engines combined. It makes no sense to let X, Y, Z random search engines index content like Google, when they send nowhere near the traffic. As others have mentioned, blocking by robots.txt often doesn't work as some bots don't obey it. I currently use an extensive rewrite rule to block those bots' User-Agents, and block specific IPs as a last resort.

<comment><USER17> Problem is, that by disallowing those smaller players, you are preventing them from getting bigger because they would need to be able to index sites to actually become good enough to attract visitors.

Also, when disallowing a spider you can be sure that you won't get ANY visitors from them, as you are not in their index to start with.

I mean: if I disallow any bot but Googlebot, I will have 100% Google referrals by design.

I can understand that in an emergency situation you might want to block some bots, but blocking all of them because they are currently small feels a) a bit unfair due to not giving them the chance to grow and b) shortsighted due to never knowing if they might be getting big enough or the visitors they deliver might be better ad-clickers

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Speaking from experience, this is why robots.txt files don't work; they've become anti-competitive in nature. If you actually build code to obey them you get locked out of actual sites, while the real scrapers you don't want don't listen to robots.txt anyways.

If a site really doesn't want you there, they can block you at the IP/User- Agent level, which is what Quora will end up doing.

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the penalty (if any) for ignoring robots.txt and crawling anyway? Any citations of it being legally enforced via TOS or ASP?

<comment><USER20> robots.txt in the past has been the legal defense against claims of copyright infringement.

<comment><USER21> Curious if you have any citations for this remark. I have always been under the impression that robots.txt is entirely optional, both to implement and to respect.

<comment><USER20> IANAL and looking for other sources, but it's discussed along with many other factors here: <http://www.benedict.com/Digital/Internet/Field/Field.aspx>

Essentially, the existence of robots.txt and meta noindex has made courts more comfortable ruling that the index of search engines constitutes fair use.

<comment><USER21> But this still doesn't specifically answer the question, "What is the penalty for ignoring 'User-agent:* Disallow: /' in robots.txt, or meta tag no-index", only that without a robots.txt or no-index tag, crawlers can't be found liable for accessing information that is freely available to them.

Interesting link, however. I was unaware of that case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't blame them for doing this. They are trying to protect their assets (questions and answers). However, this is not a good move for two reasons:

1\. Honoring robots.txt is optional, so this doesn't actually offer any form of asset protection.

2\. They are losing serious amounts of exposure that they would reap if they'd lift this restriction so that smaller engines can find them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is robots.txt against net neutrality? net neutrality for bots.

<comment><USER24> I think the answer is no, because it's on an endpoint. Net neutrality is about making sure that middlemen don't abuse their position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Question: Are smaller search companies allowed to build off of the results of other search providers, or is this blocked by the TOS.

<comment><USER26> Google in particular absolutely does not allow automated search queries.

<comment><USER27> Why does <http://lmgtfy.com/> still exist then?

<comment><USER28> lmgtfy just issues a redirect, it doesn't perform a query and return results of its own

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Did anyone look at the robots.txt?

It looks to me like it doesn't block anything - it does have some specific settings tailored for various big-boy search engines, with a catch-all rule at the end for those not otherwise defined.

It also says right there at the top "# If you operate a search engine and would like to crawl Quora, please # email firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks. "

So they're trying to get the right data to the right search engines the right way - makes sense to me.

User-agent: * Allow: /$ Allow: /about$ Allow: /about/ Allow: /jobs$ Allow: /challenges$ Allow: /press$ Allow: /login$ Allow: /login/ Allow: /signup$

<comment><USER30> The important part is Disallow: / right after the allows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Search engines can be a real PITA for a site. They can take a site down. When it's my site - I don't have to let you, or anyone else, index it. We can do it nicely through robots.txt, or cold-war style through firewalls and script and tarpits and who knows what else. So - assuming Quora took the time to put what they did in their robots.txt, in a world where many sites still don't bother at all - one can assume they are paying close attention to the business value they are extracting from search engine driven traffic.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is indeed a disturbing, oligopolistic trend.

Craiglist policy of specifically disallowing only classified search engines should look kinder in retrospect.

It is reasonable to block sites which aim to merely re-frame your content within a "search" parameter. But that kind of thing can be dealt with terms of service.

The problem is that it takes time to actively filter against offenders.

</comment><comment><USER32> If they are blocking to save resources, then it might be worth noting that startup search engines will not bomb their servers the way Google and Bing can. Are there any published numbers as to how the crawling load varies from startups to Googlebot?

</comment><comment><USER33> Just about everybody effective blocks (or throttles to near zero) all but the top 3 or so crawlers. For a popular commerce site a significant fraction (like 1/3rd) of the infrastructure capacity is just responding to crawler traffic.

</comment><comment><USER34> Aggressive spiders are a pain in the ass. I'm with them on this.

<comment><USER35> Search engine spiders, too.</comment></comment>


Daily Covid-19 Update from Dr. Smith at Columbia - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/ColumbiaSurgery <comment><AUTHOR> Dr. Craig Smith's daily letters are a fantastic source of non-politicized information on the outbreak.</comment>


An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511846/an-autopsy-of-a-dead-social-network/ <comment><USER2> Meh, these guys got it blindingly wrong. But I suppose now that MIT TR picked it up, I have to write up a a response. Bother.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would definitely be interested in reading your response.</comment></comment>


Open-sourced startup marketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.binpress.com/community/leaderboard

<comment><USER2> Just a clever new name for affiliate marketing.

</comment><comment><USER3> What exactly is open source here?

</comment><comment><USER4> Ok, I get it now. I think 'Open-sourced startup marketing' is a very creative way to describe what you're doing.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, what exactly are you offering? This doesn't become clear to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is basically a community challenge to incentivize users to promote software components from our marketplace.

We're making it fun by having a leaderboard showing the progress of each user (the user UI will also show you the traffic source and point generated on each action - that way you can focus on what works and what doesn't).

Each month our top users win up to $15k in credits hosting and some fun prizes (This month we have a playstation VITA but next month we'll have more prizes).

Users who really amaze us with their creativity might have a chance to work with us (or would I say we would be honored to have them as part of our team).

Bloggers, sites and platform with relevant content can apply to our affiliate program and make 10% on any sales generated by their traffic.</comment></comment>


Executing code in comments? - <AUTHOR> http://programming.guide/java/executing-code-in-comments.html <comment><USER2> umm, is the title misleading ? fta, it is actually executing code _not_ in comments :)

<comment><USER3> The question mark in the end indicates that it's a question. As in "Can I really execute code in comments?" The answer is obviously no.

If I accidentally stumbled across this functionality, I would probably google those exact words.</comment></comment>