Why the 'Git'?  Linus: I'm an egotistical bastard... - <AUTHOR> http://1.qinghuai.org/s/okzbke/github_retard/comments/fydl1r#c_fydl1r <comment><USER2> I think this submission is related to yesterday's discussion on Github's banning of the word "retard". Some people pointed out that git is a "bad word" and they should censor projects that use the word, such as [http://github.com/git/git](http://github.com/git/git)

The word as its used today means a person who is "pig headed, thinks they are always correct, argumentative". The original meaning was "a person of illegitimate parentage". If we applied Github's logic to this, it is clear that people born out of wedlock feel unwelcome in the open source community.

<comment><USER3> The problem is it's not the business of GH to take a political side - but with arbitrary censorship - you end up having to.

If you make a satire of feminism (C+=, ToleranUX) you get banned.

It's ok to harass [https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker/blob/master/sou...](https://github.com/freebsdgirl/ggautoblocker/blob/master/sourcelist.txt) in the open, because it's a girl running the project.

<comment><USER4> Be careful when you talk about that blocker. Roberto Rosario criticized it, calling it's algorithm the most idiotic algorithm he's seen in 29 years of programming. He later apologized for that wording, but said he still disagrees with the algorithm.

This, and a tweet where he said that while he takes no stance on #gamergate, as Chairman of IDGA Puerto Rico he has to denounce someone who said everybody who is pro #gamergate should be sent to Nazi gas chambers, got him labeled a harasser, and a _leader_ of gamergate.

In the 9 months since then, he and his family have been harassed. Much of that is linked to in the discussion here [1].

He has since been forced to stepped down as Chair of the Python Cuba working group due to the harassers contacting his employer and his employers clients [2].

[1] [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- cuba/2015-June/0000...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- cuba/2015-June/000071.html)

[2] [https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- cuba/2015-July/0001...](https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- cuba/2015-July/000106.html)

<comment><USER5> This sounded like an unusually cut-and-dry case, which is unusual for, like, the world we actually live in, so I dug in further and read this dude's tweet stream back through 2014. I'm surprised at how much nuance you left out, since you're someone I bucket as a "nuance junkie".

* Rosario wasn't criticizing the implementation of the block list but rather the policies it was based on; in particular, he was upset that he'd been added based on his use of the #gamergate tag.

* A reasonable person reading that tweet stream could easily come to the conclusion that Rosario was a GamerGate person; he used the tag consistently and, in every case I saw, positively. I take no position (here) on the implications of supporting GamerGate, but do object to the paragraph you wrote suggesting Rosario should have been surprised to see himself associated with them.

* In response to being added to the blocklist, he escalated, threatening to resign from IDGA unless they repudiated his inclusion on the blocklist. A reasonable person can argue that his response to the blocklist made this about his role at IDGA.

Not that it matters, but by way of bona fides: I'm not a fan of Harper and I think her block list, like every other block list created in the history of humanity, has stopped being about principle and become an instrument of factional politics. On the other hand, having a temper tantrum about being included on a Twitter blacklist seems to me like not a particularly good use of time and energy, and I think less of people who are vocally upset about Harper's blocklist.

<comment><USER2> Do you mind if I ask you an OT question? How do you spend time on HN making these long, seemingly well researched comments and still get time to do all the other productive things you do?

<comment><USER5> When I was 15 years old I hitchhiked with an old blind BBS sysop I met in jail to a BellSouth central office in rural Mississipi, where the devil appeared before me and allowed me to bet my soul that I couldn't best him in an alt.atheism flamewar. I wrote a comment that worked Kibo, Hitler, the game of Diplomacy, and 15 logical fallacies, 3 of which I invented on the spot, and a vanquished prince of the underworld gave me the gift of "Most Powerful Message Board Nerd on the Planet". The blind sysop went on to become Steve Vai. You can still find Satan if you know the right subreddit to look in.

<comment><USER5> I think the shorter answer might just be "was a teenager on Usenet".

<comment><USER4> Ahh...usenet. I was on usenet a long time...early 1984 [1] until a couple or so years ago.

Every time I have to deal with some crappy forum software on the web, I remember how much nicer newsreaders were, and wish people would do web based forums by using an NNTP server and providing a browser-based NNTP client for it, and would allow people to use their own clients if they wished.

[1] [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.unix- wizards/CYh...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/net.unix- wizards/CYhCInFq2bA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an aside Google Translate has come a long way. I was able to figure out what people were saying despite never learned any Mandarin ever.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've never seen qinghuai.org. It seems to be a Chinese-language HN. Is that correct?

<comment><USER8> Specifically, it appears to be a fork of Lobsters ([https://lobste.rs/](https://lobste.rs/)).</comment></comment>


Chernobyl with Zero Tourists - EB-Barrington https://yomadic.com/chernobyl-tour-open-selfdrive/ <comment><AUTHOR> Many years ago, a woman named Elena rode through this area on a motorcycle and documented quite a bit of it: [http://kiddofspeed.com/](http://kiddofspeed.com/)

I have always found pictures of the decaying remnants of human settlements to be fascinating. This series of pictures is great!</comment>


TechStars Boston Graduates Ten New Startups In 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/techstars-boston-2010/ <comment><USER2> Really an impressive group to see pitch. The Boston Angel community had the Angel Boot Camp the day before and seemed very anxious to get involved in more early stage deals.

Pictures are here: [http://www.facebook.com/techstars#!/album.php?aid=440599&...](http://www.facebook.com/techstars#!/album.php?aid=440599&id=14729035542&ref=mf)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really exciting to see how much this event has grown!</comment>


The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective - <AUTHOR> https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/western-elite-chinese-perspective/ <comment><USER3> "... randomness is not merely the noise but the dominant factor. And those reasons we assign to historical events are often just ex post rationalizations. As rising generations are taught the rationalizations, they conclude that things always happen for a reason. "

I didn't realize it until contemplating this statement, but this applies to interpersonal relationships as well as nations. It is the root of tolerance and acceptance. People wind up where they are largely through circumstance, not intention. Circumstance may be as finite as meeting a person in a purely random situation who then goes on to change your life.

Yet we lionize persons we deem successful and study what led them there, rationalizing that the set of attributes that we can observe about them must be the cause of their success. And in speaking with them personally, you'll find, in many cases, impostor syndrome because they understand the randomness that played in their favor.

I make a conscious effort to keep that in mind. It helps keep me from becoming judgmental.

<comment><USER4> "People wind up where they are largely through circumstance, not intention. "

There may be a lot of randomness on the way to becoming, or almost becoming a doctor, but you don't get to be a doctor by randomness.

See what I mean?

You get to be a doctor only with quite a very long term intent and perseverance, by stacking the odds, and rolling the dice a lot.

Though I get what you are saying - I also don't think that most people as of yet realize how much actual control they have over themselves and their lives, and they can possibly make it better. That's still a huge hurdle for a lot of people.

I suppose those that have jumped that hurdle could often learn a little empathy for those with bad dice :)

<comment><USER5> Well if you really want to maximise your odds of becoming a doctor, the best thing you can do for yourself is choose your parents wisely.

Don't choose to be born in a slum in a third world country, or a trailer park, thats gonna hurt your chances. Make sure you don't pick a family that will abuse you as you grow up. Try to make sure you at least get average genetics for general intelligence and memory (50% of people won't...).

Ideally, choose to have at least one doctor as a parent (increases your odds by more than an order of magnitude). A good mentor or role model at the right time could substitute though.

Of course, people _can_ control their own lives, but most people who succeed at becoming doctors were both lucky AND hard working.

And I'd be willing to be that though they did work like hell to do it, a lot of doctors "sleepwalked into it" because a teacher at school or a parent told them thats what they should do.

<comment><USER4> " the best thing you can do for yourself is choose your parents wisely."

Maybe.

I'd rather have a good worth ethnic than 'rich parents' on the road to becoming a doctor anywhere in the Western world.

There are innumerable lazy rich kids and they won't be getting into med school.

<comment><USER6> Amazing how downvotes correlate with the political opinion of the people here. And then you see comments like "I haven't even seen anti net neutrality arguments at all.. Why would the FCC do that?" You choose to close your eyes, you get a seemingly dark world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I find it interesting that the author only considers America from the top down - from the perspectives of institutions (Stanford, Goldman Sachs, Costco) and slogans (American Dream, All people deserve to live healthy lives). Part of me wonders if that's due to America's own marketing, or due to his upbringing in a more totalitarian government, but for most Americans these perspectives are just as foreign.

At dinner tables and in churches all across the country, you hear people say "God is in control". You'll hear reminders to be humble and appreciate what you have, because anyone can get ill at any time, or lose all all their belongings in fire, or any number of bad events. The chaos out there is real, whether one believes in it or not. And there's an even bigger danger in trying to control the chaos, and history has plenty of examples (Mao's China and USSR most recent). The limited government in America was founded on a distrust of power, top-down control, and people who want to control the world. Without that bottom-up perspective, America will never make sense.

<comment><USER8> This is a good point, but there's an awful lot of post-hoc Just World fallacy wrapped up in those same statements of faith. The really spurious ones - <USER2> 9/11 or Katrina being divine punishment - get media coverage but there're more bland ones that are actually more harmful; like disease or disaster being all part of God's plan. It's all good for living a life where you have to cope with what you can't directly control, but not so good when it comes to supporting policy that aims to take action on healthcare, climate change, etc. I'm not saying this to support any specific existing policy proposal, just that when/if the "right" one comes it's unlikely to undergo a rational debate.

<comment><USER9> How does that tie with the statistics showing US citizens - and in particular more religious people - as good donors for charities and disaster victims? Seems contradictory.

<comment><USER8> It's complicated & kind of orthogonal. I am not trying to paint all religious people with the Pat Robertson-style example that I pointed out as egregious. This isn't an anti-religion post; it's just about the downside of thinking something was destined/planned/ordained just because it happened.

<comment><USER9> I wasn't accusing you of being anti-religion, just honestly curious :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought it was a good/enjoyable article and it shed light on many things for me.

Reading some of the comments below, and having known some Chinese people ( I am not east asian) I want to point out that it seems like many people missed the intention/ tone of the author. I think his intention was not to brag as some people have misunderstood, but to provide context to how he got to where he got to.

His communication style is different compared to the western style of communication. There is no single coherent message he is trying to drive purposefully or tacitly, but my guess is he was hoping you learn whatever you can from his experience and his way of thought.

Sure the article title could have had the words 'random' and 'musings' in the same sentence..... meh!

<comment><USER11> I got a sense of a sort of extremely dry, British humour, with a hint of self- deprecation, from it. Which I thoroughly enjoyed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Her life, up to that point, was very similar to the life that I have been > living. And I am sure that, at the time, she was as optimistic about her > life as we are today about ours. But she went to the UK in 1935, and she > went back to China around the founding of the People's Republic of China. > Her education abroad, in a capitalist country, and her belief in individual > rights and freedom often placed her on the wrong side of various political > campaigns and the Cultural Revolution. She lost numerous friends and family > members, including her husband and daughter during these years. She barely > survived a long period of imprisonment herself. It was not until the 1980s > when she managed to get a passport and could move to live with her relatives > abroad. On the ship to Hong Kong, she kept thinking about her decision to > return to China all those years ago.

For those of you wondering, the book he was reading is "Life and Death in Shanghai" by Cheng Nien. For me, that was the most interesting part of the article.

I know very little about modern Chinese history and this seems like an interesting place to start.

[https://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-Shanghai-Cheng- Nien/dp/080...](https://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-Shanghai-Cheng- Nien/dp/0802145167/)

<comment><USER13> > (Someone once said that it is necessary to know English in order to learn > about China. Important perspectives on China are only available in English > and are generally not accessible on the mainland.)

I wonder what other books fall into this category?

<comment><USER14> [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/775647.The_Private_Life_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/775647.The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_Mao?from_search=true)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reading about the west from a Chinese perspective is a breath of fresh air. Similar in background to the author, I have come to the same conclusion; that everything in life is based on a bit of luck and achievement. He also absorbed, which is somewhat unusual in my opinion the differences between U.S. and the U.K. I think he has a much more nuanced view of all three societies that he has written.

<comment><USER16> I also come from a similar background, and his points also seem poignant to me -- the first, in my reading, is about the lottery of birth; would he or I or you have been successful (with presumably our predisposition to succeed in academia) in China merely 70 years ago? Perhaps not. The second, related, is that we should be grateful for the achievements which might naturally appear as the product of our own labor, and (I think) also to forgive others for the achievements that appear to be the product of their labor.

Though implicit, I think this article actually makes an interesting implication about jealousy. What exactly is there to be jealous of in another person if luck, and randomness plays so much in our fortunes?

This article is also a warning against self-help. So much determines our fortunes besides the advice we can take or the effort we make. The best is what -- rolling with the punches --

<comment><USER15> I agree with your points, except the part on jealously and warning against self-help. I view his life similar to investing, as he mentioned: being "long term greedy." I thought him and his parent's story illustrated this. It is unlikely that his parents had the best schooling in the world, but they were successful financially somewhat. When their son struggled in school, they enrolled him somewhere else and gave him more resources. He used that and achieve more by attending the most prestigious institution in the world. While it is likely that luck played a huge role, ie. China's market liberalization and growth, U.K. schools wanting to make more revenue, his stint at GS. He and his parents needed to be there in position the first place to take advantage of all of that. I do not think this is his point to warn against self help, rather than an examination of why and how he got to where he did.

Luck only comes when you are in position to seize it. Yes despite your best efforts, it might never come. But it can come when you never expect it because you are in the right place and the right time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Eventually I was able to meet the chief financial officer of my favorite company, Costco. He told me that they don't hire any MBAs. Everyone starts by pushing trolleys. (I have seriously thought about doing just that. But my wife is strongly against it.) Maybe, I thought, that is why the company is so successful—no MBAs!_

that's pretty amazing..is this really true? So if someone applied for marketing or accounting, they would still have to push carts?

<comment><USER18> I did some consulting work at Costco. Their IT is all people that were once cashiers/trolley pushers. They pride themselves having staff loyal to the company and in turn take care of them. I would assume it's true pretty much everywhere else around the company.

<comment><USER19> Costco is infamously obsessed with seniority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Slightly off topic, but in the early 90's I had to help rewrite the resume of the Chinese friend of a Chinese friend and she was very proud of the fact he graduated from the number one university in China. He had very poor English writing skills so I just unmangled it, did not have difficulty conversing with him, but I was not aware of the admissions difficulty being so high there compared to the Stanford/elite US universities as the writer says, this was about the time the WWW came online so was not so easy to google the answers back then.

<comment><USER21> > I was not aware of the admissions difficulty being so high there compared to > the Stanford/elite US universities

China has a population of 1.4 billion. Peking University has 33k students and Tsinghua has 45k.

Obviously this isn't a great comparison because lots of foreigners come to study in the US, but I think it does give a sense of scale.

<comment><USER22> us has a population of about 300 million and Harvard has a student body of size 6,700. looks almost exactly proportional

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 1\. People who believe they can affect their own future and have control over there circumstances tend to have higher self-esteem and happiness. That tells you at least something about what you might _want_ to believe.

2\. Montesquieu had a theory that people in history rode the wave of what was happening at the time, so Napoleon would not have become Napoleon if he was born in a different time, _but_ if Napoleon had not take control, someone else would have, since circumstances were ripe. Therefore, a person who knows how to read the events & choose a good strategy for the time in which they live will usually be at least moderately successful, and someone incapable of that will nearly always be mediocre. There are outliers and extremely fortunate or unfortunate events, but part of strategy is not becoming a negative outlier and optimizing for higher success. You may miss a specific opportunity, but if you are always looking for opportunity, you will find one of the ones that come along.

</comment><comment><USER24> Its an interesting piece and some of the responses here seem uncharitable even defensive, as if he has questioned sacred gods.

It's not individuals reacting but jingoism, our generation was brought up on the idea of globalism and humanism, that we can connect as individuals. But as one gets older it seems jingoism is as alive as ever, only concealed better, where some things are taken for granted and not to be questioned while pointing fingers at others, judging others and making negative assumptions is perfectly ok.

Reluctance to introspect on your own society while cheering on those who criticize their own is a losing game.

</comment><comment><USER25> > UK's university system is considered superior to China's,..., about one in > ten applicants gets into Oxbridge in the UK, ...,but in Hebei province in > China, where I am from, only one in fifteen hundred applicants gets into > Peking or Qinghua University

"western universities" aren't only for "the best and brightest" but also for those who can afford it, this narrowly reduces the number of applicants.

</comment><comment><USER26> > One class was about strategy. It focused on how corporate mottos and logos > could inspire employees.

Probably not intended as such, but I'll take it as a hilarious send up of "strategy" and will recall it whenever I witness "strategy" being used vacuously.

<comment><USER16> I think he meant it. His English is very fluent throughout the article.

<comment><USER27> As a non-native speaker I say that there is a huge difference between speaking/writing fluent English and doing this in a way that satisfies "unwritten cultural conventions".

For my English, for example, native speakers tend to say that it is actually quite correct, but I have a tendency to use words in a specific way in which few native speaker would use them.

<comment><USER16> I am a non-native english speaker too; I guess I bristle at the the reading that this man isn't in control of his english when he writes with obvious proficiency, a reading I suspect, would not at all be in question were his name John Foster Edwards, or Henry Wickham or whatever Anglo-Saxon name you wish to replace his name with.

I see your point though. I think he does use words in ways that native speakers do not use, but in his anecdotes -- I think he's actually playing up his Chineseness for the comic effect, and he's very much aware of what's happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > So I bought a heart rate monitor and checked my resting heart rate. Right > around 78. And when the professor said to me in class "Puzhong, I can see > that story brought up some emotions in you," I rolled up my sleeve and > checked my heart rate. It was about 77. And so I said, "nope, no emotion." > The experiment seemed to confirm my prior belief: my heart rate hardly > moved, even when I was criticized, though it did jump when I became excited > or laughed.

Yikes.

> In Communist China, I was taught that hard work would bring success. In the > land of the American dream, I learned that success comes through good luck, > the right slogans, and monitoring your own—and others'—emotions.

I don't understand the value of this analogy. In Communist China, I was _taught_ (something that is done to you) something _false_ , but in the U.S. I _learned_ (note: not taught, learned) something _X_.

Is it true or false? Because it matters whether or not something is true or false. I'm sure the author thinks what he is writing is true, otherwise, why write it? But he just directly compared something he decided on his own to something he was taught to be true that was actually false. This is really murky, and I don't care enough about his feelings about Cambridge or Stanford or Costco to try to make any more sense of it.

<comment><USER29> It's not an analogy, it's a juxtaposition. He agrees with Rubin, and has told anecdotes that support that position. You just don't want to believe his conclusion, and Rubin's. That's your right, but to say that he has no position, that it's all murky and there is no conclusion; therefore you can reject his conclusion, is literally absurd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm only part way through this so far, but it seems like you think in terms of absolutes -> either the world is entirely random, or it is entirely causal. Why can it not be a mix of both, of coincidence and causal relationships, some of which are intentionally planned.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm curious for other immigrants with kids, how difficult is it to break from the more deterministic "study hardest for success" vs relaxing a bit to optimize for happiness and embracing the impact of luck.

<comment><USER32> "... break from the more deterministic "study hardest for success" vs relaxing a bit to optimize for happiness and embracing the impact of luck."

Ahh, yes - the third generation ...

"We are an immigrant nation. The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things; the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas. The third generation snowboards and takes improv classes."[1]

[1] [http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-11/business/ct- bi...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-11/business/ct-biz-1011-bf- donaghy-quotes-20121011_1_quotes-jack-donaghy-business-etiquette)

<comment><USER25> The fourth generation lives from the third and two well, the fifth generation again works their fingers to the bone making things.

<comment><USER33> ...unless all the factories are already overseas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > My parents by then had reached the conclusion that I was not going anywhere > promising in China and were ready to send me abroad for high school.

Maybe the title should be "The Western Elite from a Chinese Elite Perspective". Surely sending kids to school to UK as plan B is not in the average Chinese family's abilities. Doesn't mean we should discount the article or its ideas but it's useful to keep the author's background in mind.

<comment><USER35> Also relevant is that fact that the article contains that statement, "I am the child of modest workers".

<comment><USER36> > Yet I had to do it every day. At the end-of-year exam, I scored second from > the bottom of the class—the same place where I began in first grade. But > this time it was much harder to accept, after the glory I had enjoyed just > one year earlier and the huge amount of effort I had put into studying this > year. Finally, I threw in the towel, and asked my parents to send me abroad. > Anywhere else on this earth would surely be better.

Given his academic performance in his high school, it's unlikely he got a scholarship to a leading UK private high school (Hurtwood House checking his Linkedin). Parents who can afford to send their kid to an overseas high school that charges $40k/year are not modest by Developed country standards, much less Chinese, and even less so Hebeinese.

<comment><USER37> He doesn't say his parents were poor or blue-collar workers, he compares himself to a child of aristocrat. Context is everything.

> He was a child of aristocrats; I am the child of modest workers.

When a one-digit millionaire compares himself to a billionaire like Bill Gates, using "modest" to describe one's wealth would be appropriate in this context.

<comment><USER38> Child of "modest workers" in a communist country can have different meaning. Maybe they're party elites? We don't know. Something just doesn't add up though.

<comment><USER39> In another article he writes: "In China, where I was born, there are a lot of people who work much harder but could not enjoy similar results. The difference is that I was lucky enough to have had the chance to move abroad at a young age, thanks my parents. In other words, as Warren Buffett said, a large part of life is the lottery at birth."

[http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-diary-standing- oration](http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-diary-standing-oration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Probably better titled "Life is a random walk". I completely agree with his premise - 'success' in life, however defined, seems largely a function largely of luck. Those who see the world for what it is - rather than what received dogma teaches - understand this truth.

<comment><USER41> I study testing of the sort he focuses on, and is at the core of a system he points out is more similar across Chinese and Western societies than people think.

What I've come to realize is that everything he wrestles with in the essay is not hidden away, it's right there within the testing system. It's studied empirically, the markets are there, it's all in plain view. It doesn't require any special wisdom or insight and anyone trying to simplify things either way are wrong.

These tests that are scrutinized bear only a modest relationship with what they are trying to measure, and what they are trying to measure is only weakly related to what people want to know. That is, the best estimates suggest that they're only correlated about .30 or .40 with actual ability or understanding in any deeper sense at most. And this is over the entire range of ability, meaning that it includes comparisons between people who score in the 2nd percentile and those who score in the 98th percentile -- a huge portion of that correlation is surely due to gross comparisons of that sort.

What's sobering to me is that we know this. We know these tests are not only imperfect, but severely so. And yet we fetishize it. The money being put into the testing field is astounding.

The reason of course, is because, while these tests are poor measures, they're the better than nothing. And we know that they tell us something about people, on average, across many people.

I'm not sure why we overrely on these things, why these discussions are often framed in extremes, where either a test is the criterion for success, or react to it with claims that the tests are completely invalid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Eventually I was able to meet the chief financial officer of my favorite > company, Costco. He told me that they don't hire any MBAs. Everyone starts > by pushing trolleys.

The CFO went to university himself. What an ass...

</comment><comment><USER43> It's rather poetic that the author who was marinated in the cold-hard "we know best" culture of Communism, then in its self-congratulatory more stochastic variant of occidental capitalism, to come back to what was once the core wisdom of the orient, yet not appreciate it.

Pity that while the Europeans destroyed the traditions of much of Asia's (incl., sadly, much of India's), that the Chinese themselves destroyed a large part of their own heritage.

</comment><comment><USER44> "Rather, the increase in inflation was due to things like tax increases, exchange rate fluctuations, oil price moves, etc."

It seems to me that tax cutting could lead to increased consumption and therefore a reduction in GDP slack and upward pressure on prices (inflation). Why is it that tax increases would lead to inflation?

<comment><USER45> It depends on what the tax increase or tax decrease affect. If a tax cut goes predominantly to those who invest in greater productivity, then increased supply can drop prices - but only if that investment is more efficient than consequently relinquished government investment. These things are horribly difficult to measure. Perhaps Ukrainian defense spending is a total waste, and should cease with a corresponding tax cut. Perhaps it is preventing a transfer of common wealth to an oligarch, and is the most important investment the country makes. I'm quite sure I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Success or failure - these are the wrong perspectives. Happiness, fulfilment and experience; when you're on your death bed you'll not think back warmly to all the money you made, or the great job titles you held.

</comment><comment><USER47> "I told him about the black swan I kept on my desk as a reminder that low probability events happen with high frequency"

Uh... wouldn't low probability events happen with low frequency? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER48> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Could someone explain the point of this article? All I'm getting are:

* Everything is random.

* A generic Chinese man, who did really well on one test is smarter than most people in Britain.

* Americans, who are capitalists, don't seem to want to focus their lives on the supposed end goal of capitalism.

* MBA programs are nuts, especially if you are on the spectrum.

I'm probably wrong about most of those, but like the author, I just don't see the coherent picture.

<comment><USER50> * luck has more to do with results than we think

* "focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result"

This is also well explained by Scott Adams: "Goals are for losers... try systems that improve your odds of success."

<comment><USER51> He more so explained his story, which was essentially: "I studied hard, got into a good school, and got a great job," rather than explaining how he focuses on the process. The only example of "process" was his discovery during his internship that he _should_ focus on process.

<comment><USER52> But the story you're describing isn't accurate. His story is more like "I studied hard, did not do well, as a result my parents sent me to a good school in a different country, and got a great job".

If he had done better than he did in his Chinese High School, his parents may not have sent him to the UK, in which case he may not have been as successful. So it still aligns with the idea of the story that we really discount the value of luck in our successes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Looks like the author also arrived at a similar conclusion:

"It's not about the cards you're dealt, but how you play the hand."

<comment><USER54> It seems to me like the author arrived at nearly the exact opposite conclusion: "I learned that success comes through good luck, the right slogans, and monitoring your own—and others'—emotions."

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> His connclusion mirror's the central tenant of bhagavad gita. "Karmanye vadika raste ma phalechu kadachana". Do your duty as best as you can , without expectation of results

<comment><USER56> I think there's a logical contradiction. Without _expected return value_ , how could one measure how good "as best as" could be? The only resolve I can think of is to try to adjust to a blacklist instead, maybe don't expect results, but at least know when you have failed. To me, this is the same thing expressed in inverse logic.

What's the negative of "expectation of results", ie. the normalization of the expression "no (expectation of results)" in constructive terms. I guess it would have to be _perhaps expect failure_

<comment><USER11> The word "duty" is a clue here, and the word "result" is misunderstood. It is asking you to do what must be done, but to be modest in what you expect as return.

It is rather close to the definition of _integrity_ : To do the right thing, even when nobody's looking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This story immediately reminded me of Scott Adams. He spent some time working on financial models before writing Dilbert. If you can stomach polarizing political viewpoints from a cartoonist, I would highly recommend reading his non-Dilbert books and giving his blog a thorough reading. His reflections on life touch on the role of luck, the limitations of prediction models, and framing worldviews from multiple perspectives as a way to narrow down on success, influence, and the very meaning of life.

<comment><USER58> This is the second time someone suggests him. But there is a lot to read. Can you make suggestion for a place to start? Like what's your favorite article? How did it change your view on the world?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I can't help but think that the conclusion being "whatever happens happens, and your actions have very little to do with what your life's going to be" is a very zen / taoism / asian philosophy cliché.

Maybe the reason the west is successful lies in the belief that individuals matters. If that's the case, then i suppose the OP still has a long way to go.

<comment> wu-ikkyu Maybe there's a balance to be struck between the two ideologies: that seemingly insignificant individual actions can have profound effects, while also accepting the fact that there are infinite environmental variables that we have negligible control over which influence every single one of those actions.

<comment><USER59> i don't think you need to "accept" the fact that there are infinite variables, or that you're not all-that-powerful. It's pretty much a given, and it's something you realise at 2 year old, when you really want to play with that ball, or lift that rock, or pretty much anything grown up do, but you can't. And as you're growing up, nature is always there to remind you that you're nothing.

IMHO, the role of education in the most general sense (encompassing the cultural background you're evolving in) is to help you think that you need to keep trying to make a difference, and not give up, because maybe one time in your life you'll accomplish something, and that'll be worth it.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >you realise at 2 year old, when you really want to play with that ball, or lift that rock, or pretty much anything grown up do

Most two year olds can't form complex sentences, and so have yet to be indoctrinated into their culture's ideologies. It seems like the context of this whole thread is moreso about economic ideology than basic physics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> All patterns are post rationalizations.

</comment><comment><USER61> I'm not exactly sure what the point of the article is or what the author is trying to say. It's pretty much an abbreviated biography bookended by some attempts at philosophizing. It is interesting to hear how much easier the author found his British curriculum than his Chinese. I was also amused by how he mocked his Stanford MBA curriculum, and how the career office people were dismissive of his passion to make money.

Smart hard working people succeed much more often than they don't. Born into difficult circumstances, their probability of 'success' (accumulating prestige and wealth) is much higher than for others.

Of course sometimes circumstances are too oppressive to overcome, and sometimes the stupid and lazy are elevated in spite of themselves... But these are exceptions.

<comment><USER52> "Smart hard working people succeed much more often than they don't."

A smart hard working person today might be a hard working computer scientist.

Their skills would be absolutely worthless even a few centuries ago. Their skills would be absolutely worthless even today depending on where they are born and to the parents they are born.

I'm not convinced "smart and hard working" are not post hoc descriptors themselves.

<comment><USER62> Plus, that sentiment is only true with a narrow set of upper middle class, white collar assumptions. What about hard working retail workers or factory workers? Or look how vast the race and gender disparities are...

<comment><USER61> Maybe they don't want to be anything other than retail or factory workers?

Many people don't have ambition, or they have limited ambition.

<comment><USER63> maybe they don't want to be anything other than factory workers. That doesn't mean that they are fundamentally less valuable and less worthy of being paid their fair share.

<comment><USER61> What's their fair share? You think you're worthy to determine that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> "Have I gotten smarter? Or is it just that British people are stupider than the Chinese?"

Wow, false dichotomy and either racism or ego, take your pick.

Hard to keep reading after that.

</comment><comment><USER65> > "In Communism, the future is certain; it is only the past that might not be"

A fine essay, the above quote gave me a chuckle.

<comment><USER66> I'm not so sure what is meant by it. Adherents of Marxism-Leninism utilise the method of dialectical materialism to analyse the past and to provide a model for the structure of the future based on the resolution of dialectical contradictions. The contradictions of feudalism led to capitalism, and the contradictions of capitalism (the value-form in particular, class antagonism) lead to Communism.

<comment><USER67> It is simple. In the future the Communism will be built, and all the people will be happy. It is absolutely certain. Every current event proves this statement, if you think otherwise, you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.

But the past is not so certain, because the past is under control of the government, and the past undego changes sometimes. The past has its blank spots, there are some unmentionable events in the past that do not make communists proud. So no one really knows what happened.

If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984, he described extreme case of such a world view.

<comment><USER66> Communism is not a 'utopia' in the sense that everyone is happy all the time. It aims simply to do away with certain problems, just as public health services don't do away with every problem in your life. Your insinuation that I or any other Communist thinks this way is a strange one, though not unheard of.

>you should educate youself better by consuming mass media.

Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media? Marxist social critic Herbert Marcuse wrote about how, beacuse Communism is a subversive movement, and indeed the Left, it cannot gain mass media time, because of its nature as subversive; it can only be snuck in under capitalism, as capitalism is willing to accept any ideology for the sake of profit. I would recommend _One- Dimensional Man_ on the topic of what problems Communists have with late capitalist media and production, and the hiding of information.

>If you are interested, you might want to read Orwell's 1984

I have; although it's a little funny to see Orwell used to rebut the Communist project, seeing as he was a Socialist himself who fought on the side of anarchists in Spain, there's a deeper point here that _you_ are missing. Orwell wrote about very obvious misdirection - "war is peace", "peace is war". However, you are missing the fact that it is not this easy to see.

Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence but within the noun. In words such as "freedom", "democracy", "control", etc. the actual meaning can be discerned only by the _speaker_ of the word and the historical time period. Please read Marcuse on this topic. I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from.

<comment><USER67> _> Is this not precisely the opposite of mass media?_

Under all existing or existed communist government mass media brings The Truth, the government's interpretation of events. If you live here you should know this interpretation, or you risk to show political illiteracy and to be critisized for that. It can damage your career, or you will be forced to attend to courses of political literacy, or both. I believe it didn't work for blue collars, they had more freedom in this sense, but for white collar political illiteracy was a real threat. It was like now in USA with microagression of white males (as I see it from other side of ocean): if you catched on some sort aggression at female, you could be fired and get a "wolf ticket" (in short, it is markings in papers that does not allow to find white collar job), or attend to some sort of training, bring public apoligies, and so on.

 _> Nowadays, as I am sure you know, the contradiction and control is hidden not in the sentence..._

Are you trying to persuade me that USSR was not as bad as it seems from USA? I know that. And USA is not as bad as it seemed from USSR. But I have no intentions to discuss it here. It is a contraversial topic, and it is like swamp: you step there and cannot get out of it. Moreover I see no point in discussing: there is no USSR now. Was it bad, or not so bad -- it does not matter now.

 _> I don't know where you're getting the idea that I'm in favour of rewriting the past from._

Not you, but all communist states I know about.

<comment><USER66> I agree, however the Communist form is merely a re-telling of the capitalist form, it results from the same contradictions, the same process, and has the same result. Under the states of the past the control is unhidden and in fact presented unashamed by the powers that be. In the present day, the infiltration of the new rationality pervades not only media but all experience within modern society. When you hear Bach in the supermarket or watch the news or go to the voting booth, it is exactly the same domination, but in different forms.

This is why both the USA currently and the USSR formerly deserve the same criticism, and we need to move beyond this rationality of unfreedom, and the answer to this I belive lies firmly within the realm of revolutionary Communist movements, but only after realising exactly what inspired the controlling rationalities of the US and the USSR.

The US (as it continues) and USSR both institute(d) a policy in which the only freedom is that which you are told you are supposed to have, and that any freedom which transcends is called either "Socialist" or "capitalist". These are projected as 'bad' because they appear within their respective societies to reach 'the limits of reason itself'. To the American taken in by his 'freedom', Socialism is not only unreasonable, irrational or unjustifiable but it is impossible itself, because to him what is rational is production, the pervasiveness of technology and relentless consumption. Similar things can be said about the USSR and its descendant Marxist-Leninist states.

Within the USSR, there was no qualitative change, there was only quantitative change, and indeed due to their rationality, Socialism could only be seen as quantitative change, a sliding axis between capitalism and Socialism. This is because they were fixed by controlling rationality in which Communism has become quantitative, obscuring the fact that it is truly qualitative, Marx said as much all along: Communism is the rejection of all established notions, Communism abolishes all notions of morality, justice, freedom and indeed stands in opposition, contradiction to all previous societies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> >I had the second-worst grades in the class and had to sit at a desk perpendicular to the blackboard so that the teacher could keep a close eye on me

Maybe he had the second-worst grades from not knowing the meaning of "perpendicular" even though he studied math

</comment><comment><USER4> The most odd thing for me was the bit about how he didn't understand how 'long-term greedy' would not inspire most people.

Also - we should consider that the kinds of kids who grow up super talented, go to Goldman and top Schools etc. are probably not very representative of the Chinese population.

</comment><comment><USER69> Interesting that in one section, he casts doubt on the notion that mathematical models can accurately describe reality, and in another, he uses a heart rate monitor to conclude that he doesn't have emotions.

<comment><USER70> I thought it was brilliant. He "innocently" exposed the whole class as a hoax.

<comment><USER69> Are you really so sure? It's not an easy thing to maintain awareness of the workings of one's emotions, especially for someone raised in a repressive, collectivist culture that doesn't value the internal life of the individual, and especially if that individual is on the spectrum, in which case the emotions are "buried" even deeper.

<comment><USER67> If his emotions are buried so deep, that there no way to see real world consequences of them, than maybe it is better to say, that there are no emotions?

I think, that mottos in Western culture are just pathetic ones. Western culture knows nothing about how to raise steady emotions in people. I was born in USSR, and I saw how it should be done. But there is one consequence: with experience comes tolerance to external attempts to raise my emotions by some lovely motto. Now it is really hard to. "All people deserve to live healthy lives" \-- what is it? I was grown on ideas of Worldwide Communist Revolution and bringing freedom from damned capitalists to all people? I read books, I watched films, discussed this in a classes, I learnt world history in terms of societies struggling to make one more step toward communism. And after that I hear motto for preschool kids. The topic for boring school essay about role of Communism in bringing healthy life to everyone. I had eaten tons of this shit before I came to a school. I have eaten even more in school. Why I should have any emotions now?

Really, I can hardly believe that any adult can be touched by such a motto. I'm unable to understand it, even when I try to imagine how it could be, if I was not born under ideologic pressure.

The Black Swan can be a good motto, because it is a symbol of some non-trivial idea, because it reminds me something that I can forget to think through one more time. It reminds me about ideas which I want to think through again and again. But "healty lives for everyone" is something like communism, it will not be like that in the overseeable future. It is just one more ideologic lie, which is must be spoken due to some social protocol. Pointless tradition.

<comment><USER54> I've never heard a good case that emotions exist. I'm a believer that we have both a sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system that are activated reflexively by the same types of stimulation that activate them in other animals; and as humans who deal with abstractions as physical metaphors, those abstractions stimulate our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems by activating the same ancient reflexes.

As humans are rationalizers, they construct reasons for these nervous activations after the fact. If you inculcate them with simple slogans that become habitual, they will interpret themselves in terms of those slogans. It's a failure of introspection, or rather a rerouting of any rational introspection through a lens of theory-theory[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory- theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-theory)

<comment><USER71> Are you arguing against dualism? What kind of existence could emotions have that is not "rooted" in the material biological world? Emotions are a useful concept that helps explain and predict human behaviour and makes human interactions more predictable/rational. If a person is sad at t0 i know that his answer to go to a party at t0+1 will be lower than if his emotional state was happy at t0. That you can describe emotions by biological processes is inconsequential. See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> he misses many points, including the meaning of the phrase "long-term greedy". It is not about "everyone else in the market was short-term greedy and, as a result, we took all their money. Since traders like money, this was inspiring.", but a philosophy of enlightened self-interest, which I suspect would resonate with the class and professor more. Yet he subtly uses this as an anecdote about how MBAs are dumb and the classes "herd mentality". What aarogance!

</comment><comment><USER73> > In Communist China, I was taught that hard work would bring success. In the > land of the American dream, I learned that success comes through good luck, > the right slogans, and monitoring your own—and others'—emotions.

FTFY:

> In highschool, I was taught that hard work would bring success. In college, > I learned that success comes through fooling people with good marketing.</comment>


The illiteracy-promoting interior design abomination called "backwards books" - <AUTHOR> http://www.joeydevilla.com/2018/01/03/illiteracy-promoting-interior-design-abomination-called-backwards-books/ <comment><USER2> "illiteracy-promoting interior design abomination" may be a bit of hyperbole... I won't be shelving my books backwards, but if some designers enjoy the look of backwards books, so be it. Seems like an expensive way to decorate though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think several designers have become confused as to the rationale behind this trend.

The purpose is detract from the books in the picture and focus on the design of the room. No one in their right mind actually thinks you're supposed to turn books around in practice. Unfortunately, there are many people not in their right mind. These people deserve to be mocked.

</comment><comment><USER4> It is probably fair to suggest that the spines hidden don't belong to SICP or Hume's or Macaulay's histories, but to whatever the designer got from The Strand's books by the yards shelf. Why tip off the guests or the readers of the magazines that the books are Readers Digest condensed, or maybe in some language it is implausible for them to believe you know?

If I read these magazines, I might be grateful that I wasn't tempted to squint and try to read the spines.

<comment><AUTHOR> I consulted last year at a company that bought books in bulk as part of their cool decor [http://bulkbookstore.com/](http://bulkbookstore.com/) some books were interesting, but most of it was crap and, being the kind of guy I am, I was always irritated walking to my workstation down the long aisles of books with titles repeating every second case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a reason we put bindings on books - to protect them - I know what some of my older math books from the '80s look like, and if they'd been spine in, they'd be dead - to me this translates to 'books are things and I don't give a damn about their actual contents' I think I might seriously walk out of someone's house if I saw this.

</comment><comment><USER6> Why do you care how other people choose to decorate their homes?

</comment><comment><USER7> It looks like a bunch of paper that should be thrown out.

Or like the old man montage near the end of 2001 A Space Odyssey.</comment>


Ask HN: How do we hold news media accountable? - chris-orgmenta The Issue:
Murdoch et al's interests clearly don't align with the commmon person.
We've obviously entered a new age of misinformation (where spread/penetration has increased, rather than the accuracy of the information itself necessarily).
Sensationalist news is more successful in spreading / catching interest than accurate news.
---
My Question:
How do we solve this, rather than just lamenting the situation?
Is it a governmental body that should regulate this? A not for profit? Or do we leave it to the free market?
How do we force a higher degree of integrity from media outlets? How do we reduce bias?
Do we need an independent body here?
Do we force, through legislation, the requirement for newspapers to make 'louder' apologies for misleading information?
Do we force, through legislation, large fines for gross negligence?
Do we issue a 'badge' to news outlets that consistently maintain good standards of research and impartiality? How do we maintain the integrity of this badge?
Do we hold individual journalists accountable too, rather than just the org? (Sarbanes–Oxley-esque).
How do independent journalists & bloggers fit in here?
What's the light at the end of the tunnel here? <comment><AUTHOR> > Sensationalist news is more successful in spreading / catching interest than > accurate news.

This is largely a direct result of the advertising model of the internet/news where advertisers believe they can measure "engagement" on websites. Sensationalist news grabs more eyeballs, and keeps them grabbed more (i.e., more "engagement" being measured) which internet advertisers are willing to pay more to obtain [1]. Since the "news" is advertiser funded in very large part, the "news" is drawn to publish ever more sensationalist stories to increase their magic "engagement" number that the advertiser believe is telling them something in order to bring in more money for the "news". Repeat the cycle over about a ten to fifteen year period [2] and you get the current crop of stories specifically designed to make nearly everything maximally sensationalist.

So it would seem that one solution is to find a way where "the news" is not perversely incentivized to sensationalize every story for the purpose of maximizing their own revenue. I am, however, unsure of exactly what form that solution might take.

[1] I'm ignoring counter arguments that would argue that their measures are likely faulty and/or are not measuring what they think they are measuring. Those arguments, while likely true, miss the fact that the advertisers believe their measurements are measuring what they believe is being measured, so they pay more for more of it, whether it is really there or not. I.e., they have convinced themselves that their measurements are accurate, regardless of reality.

[2] which is about how long it has been since major "news" really /discovered/ the internet and figured out how to try to profit from it.

</comment><comment><USER2> The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, this guy saw it in 1971

[https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H- Bagdikian/...](https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H- Bagdikian/dp/0060902582)

The problem is not only worse than you imagine it is worse than you can imagine.

Immense damage is done to the framework of reality itself by the mere act of saying that the cud the president regurgitated at 4am last night is news but that 1000 important things that happened to your community were not.

It is inevitable that news introduces "harmless" errors such as the airplane hijacker identified as "Dan Cooper" is misidentified as "D. B. Cooper" by reporters, then the F.B.I. puts "D. B. Cooper" as the name on the file because they think it sounds badass.

The most difficult problem is that the media tends to cast discussions into "two sides" that somehow need to be dealt with "equally". Frequently one side or both sides are disingenuous on one level or another, and participation in a bogus discussion is one of the best ways to "run out the clock" and keep other issues off the agenda.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can get very accurate news from OAN. Some cable companies offer it. Also, they have a video app, and are on the web: [https://www.oann.com/](https://www.oann.com/)</comment>


Iran Not Cutting Off Internet Access, Bullet not Dodged - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/10/iran-not-cutting-off-internet-access-bullet-not-dodged/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clarification:

 _Which is why this report from the International Business Times is distressing. Much like Mike Daisey's false reports from Foxconn, the reports have told half-truths, and once discovered, mislead the public into believing that there is no problem. This is only compounded when other outlets (like PandoDaily did) repeat the news. There is a problem, but it hasn't fully developed yet._</comment>


Tell HN: Great new co-working space in LA: CoLoft + Lean Startups Meetup tonight - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking for a place to work in LA that is startup friendly for a few weeks and just found CoLoft last week. Wanted to post to let other members know about this place, they just opened up a few weeks ago.
The space is great to work at. I've been very productive here and met some cool people. There are two conference rooms you can use whenever you want, monitors (keyboards + mice) are provided so bring your laptop and dual monitor, there's free parking and its in a great area: 5 minutes from 3rd street promenade in Santa Monica.
They also host startup related events, there's a lean startup event here tonight at 6:30. You can see more events on the calendar on the coloft website.
Hope this is useful to someone! <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable website link: <http://coloft.com/></comment>


America's food giants swallowed the family farms - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what would be the optimal size for a (mostly)self sufficient 'village'..with enough for themselves and then to trade? Can we go back to the times when we can have free markets AND a limited amount of protectionism AND self sufficiency? Or is that contradictory.

If 1 square mile is 640 acres. Let's say it can support 600 individuals or 150-200 families...can we stop expanding at that point and rather than have dense cities, simply add another square mile to form another self sufficient town ..all interconnected and clustered..with local governance and self sufficiency. (I am speaking generally and not particularly about CAFOs) I am not romanticizing going back to feudal farming economy..but just borrowing their structure and applying it to our modern times to not stress resources and not create pockets of dense urban towns and then urban sprawl and then rural boondocks.

I could be wrong but at least with soil Ag, economies of scale don't seem to matter with full automation as we rely on less labour costs. The supply chain is a problem and it is likely people will a little more for food. But we already way too little for food and commodity Ag is subsidized. We can't be worse off by automating farms and making them smaller and doing away with economies of scale.

<comment><USER2> When did we have free markets? Because I can't think of any time.

No, we can't 'go back'. Cities are more efficient than what you propose. Apartment buildings need less heat. Water treatment and district heating are cheaper than individual systems. There's also more things to do in cities. In theory cities can be built on land which is not good for farming, but the sprawl of Chicago shows that people will pay more for city land than farming land.

The number I've heard for land area is about 5 acres per person. See [https://www.primalsurvivor.net/much-land-need-self- sufficien...](https://www.primalsurvivor.net/much-land-need-self-sufficient/) . And that's if you have good land, water, and growing season. I've only heard 1 acre for land with some of the very intensive methods like hydroponics and vertical growing. These require more equipment (made elsewhere) and labor. Most people don't want to be subsistence farmers.

As your user id is 'jelliclesfarm', I assume you are a farmer. My g'father was farmer in Michigan, but that's because he was poor and land was cheap. The farm work fed the family while the cash money came from his also working as a machinist.

I don't see how more automation would help achieve the goals you want. Quite the contrary. Factory farming is successful because of automating farms.

As an example from the article: "In these industrial farming units, pigs, cows and chickens are crammed by the thousand into rows of barns. Many units are semi-automated, with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video, with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations."

For another example: Investors buy the land, and they have tractors and combines that you can run by computer," she said. "They'll hire somebody to sit in a little office somewhere and run that stuff off the computer and farm the land that way.

That is, we could easily be worse off (if your goal is a low-density/village- centered society) by pushing more farm automation.

<comment><AUTHOR> I come from a very populous country and I am not impressed by the arguments made by high density proponents. In my lived experience, it degrades quality of life.

As a small acreage farmer, I see that the market forces don't work for me due to economies of scale. Or lack thereof.

Having said that..the water and soil are really abused in rural areas. Ag must be distributed and especially in sub optimal land rather than prime fertile land. Good land should be returned back to nature as we reforest and bring ecological balance.

Now we have soilless Ag and indoor Ag and CEA. If every urban center is food self sufficient, we can remove 'farm regions' and help restore habitat and bring ecological balance. We need grasslands more than trees and forests to sequester carbon.

If people didn't farm and food production is automated, they can do more productive work. Humans can be trained to do higher skill jobs. And fulfilling work that doesn't crush them. Every 'industry' is detrimental. It consumes more than it contributes.

With farming(crops, not cafos in the original article) as an example, it's not just the carbon released due to tilling but also the loss of habitat and erosion and chemicals and water. Add to it the distribution of food from farm gate to food hubs and the entire supply chain. And then the transportation and the refrigeration of perishables. Even the workers who need to drive to work and all the energy they expend. The math just doesn't work out. How much are you spending in terms of calories and $ for a head of lettuce? The cost is too much for what we get back in return. It makes no sense.

<comment><USER2> You did not say when we had the free markets you want to return to.

You switched from "can we go" back to "in my lived experience."

These are two different things. I observe that most people disagree with your experience. But that's okay - we aren't all the same. But in order to reach your goals you're going to need to do a lot of convincing.

You wrote about "soilless Ag and indoor Ag and CEA". My points haven't changed concerning the need for expensive equipment and higher labor. I'll note that you originally wrote "self sufficiency" but now say "food self sufficient". Who makes the plastic and the light sources? Where does the power for the lights come from?

In essence, how do you get the costs down such that it best the natural advantages of (say) growing food in California and shipping it by rail to the rest of the US?

You write: "If every urban center is food self sufficient"

Population of NYC = 8,622,698. Size = 784 km2. That's 0.02 acres per person.

People love living in New York. People move (from farms even!) to New York. What do you think would convince most New Yorkers to move somewhere else for food self sufficiency?

"they can do more productive work" .. Certainly. That's what every factory farm system always says. That's been the mantra of automation for the last few centuries. Funnily enough, all those profits go to the capital owners, and in doing so has lead to critiques of the free market, including by Marx.

Who gets to say what "fulfilling work" means? The stage environment around Broadway, or the tango culture of Buenos Aires, could not exist if we all lived in small towns like you propose. Isn't that also fulfilling? There are all sorts of things which big cities have that smaller ones simply cannot.

I am mostly only concerned with replying to your 'self sufficient 'village'' question. My critique does not mean that there isn't a huge negative environmental and cultural impact of current agricultural practices, nor does it excuse the dependency of modern ag on cheap oil, which appears to be what your last paragraph is about.

<comment><AUTHOR> Enumerating points:

1\. Free market economy exists in Asia. Singapore, for example..is run like a corporation. I want to say it's a free market economy but it's only partly free markets. Because of its resource limitations, there is some govt interventions. It is not self sufficient and yet it functions smoothly. So that would be the model closest to what's in my mind of a free market economy.

2\. We are 'going back' on a timeline of self sufficiency. A hunter gatherer didn't have markets. There was no supply chain or cold chain or transportation. They ate when they hunted and foraged the rest of the time leaving a lot of free time. Of course, I am not saying that we ought to go back to being hunter gatherers ..I am just saying that the world has not become smaller physically but the resources have shrunk. It's the physical dimensions of resources, water, energy etc that must be localized and where we ought to be self sufficient.

My 'lived experience' is high density highly populous urban experience.

3\. There is no doubt that current Ag practices have to change. Most of it has to go indoors.

4\. I also feel that high density living has its advantages as long as the resources needed for the tightly packed people are also accessible.

You mention NYC. It has a good transport network and parks and ingress/egress and homes and offices and shopping. So even though it's high density, it's liveable.

I live in a Silicon Valley suburb that is transforming into high density and just high density housing. And it's awful. Because we have traffic issues and no public transport. The city isn't walkable and there is no shopping or entertainment and people who work here travel from far off and those who live here work elsewhere. It's an unformed high density failed city with no ecosystem.

There is a troubling trend (here in California and in urban hearts) where housing is being concentrated with high density goals without providing infrastructure or an eco system. It's crippling. The local economy suffers..local businesses suffer...infrastructure degrades faster and schools become over crowded. To me..it's a bad example of high density ..nyc is a workable model of high density.

Mobility and roads will be the key to how successful a city can be..and for that we rely on fossil fuel. But think 100 years down the timeline or a time when fossil fuels becomes less available ..cities may become isolated and they would need to be self sufficient modules that are networked to other city clusters and yet even operating independently, they don't collapse.

5\. I dont worry too much about the cost of technology or labour to create technology. As far as I am concerned, money is something we can print. We will never run out of it. The detail is in the macro and micro economic word wrangling.

Resources ..on the other hand..are finite. Fossil fuel is finite..water, top soil ..the space around us. Regardless of how high density can be packaged as 'sustainable', we still need resources to maintain every warm body. A lettuce grown in your hydroponic or soil kitchen garden takes less resources than one that is grown 3000 miles away and is transported and refrigerated and sold in a store and then people are paid to sell it to you and you have to bring it back home. And by this time, the lettuce is likely 10 days from the time it was harvested.

It's a ridiculous amount of energy spent on lettuce you can grow from seed and pick whenever you want. So why don't we do this? Why can't we grow at least half of our food at home? We have a laundry machine and dishwasher and fridge all built in to the house. Why not a hydroponic cupboard that is part of the home construction? Why not a roof top garden or a attached temperature controlled greenhouse like it's another bedroom or a bathroom. The marginal cost isn't a lot but energy savings is enormous.

6\. Further..think at a larger scale. If a city can grow all it's herbs and nightshades and greens but only needs to buy grains and nuts and fruits from outside markets, it's all the more self sufficient. Every city can do what it does best and relies on outside clusters for what it lacks.

7\. I have a farm. There is no justification to make a human being work under the merciless sun..bending and picking fruit or lettuce for eight hours a day for minimum wage. We are not doing anyone any favors. Its borderline disgusting to me and highly illogical and unnecessary.

<comment><USER2> If the mixed capitalism and socialism model of Singapore - [http://www.rollingalpha.com/2015/03/23/singapore-a- success-s...](http://www.rollingalpha.com/2015/03/23/singapore-a-success- story-not-a-free-market-one/) \- is a free market then the US now is also a free market.

You now write "going back' on a timeline of self sufficiency .. A hunter gatherer didn't have markets". However, earlier you wrote "back to the times when we can have free markets AND a limited amount of protectionism AND self sufficiency", so you clearly weren't talking about hunter gatherers then.

FWIW, I think your view of hunter gatherers is idealistic rather than being based on (for example) archeological evidence. You write that they had "no supply chain or cold chain or transportation". Quoting [http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-10-Tra...](http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/1-CompleteSet/MES-10-TradeEncyc.pdf) "Trade was widely practiced in all parts of the ancient New World, among societies of all levels of social complexity, from the earliest hunter- gatherers to late prehistoric empires like the Aztec and Inca." Quoting [http://members.peak.org/~obsidian/pdf/connolly_etal_2015.pdf](http://members.peak.org/~obsidian/pdf/connolly_etal_2015.pdf) "This contrast suggests that obsidian toolstone procurement in the caldera during middle Holocene and later times was not simply an activity embedded into a complex of hunter-gatherer routines, but a targeted activity on a scale that suggests a commercial enterprise."

Quite clearly hunter gatherers _had_ supply chains and transportation.

You write "Most of it has to go indoors." I quote the Wikipedia entry for CEA: "The economics of indoor farming has been challenging, particularly the price of electricity, and several startups shut down as a result." As the source reference for that quote points out, at [https://finance- commerce.com/2018/05/people-power-costs-keep...](https://finance- commerce.com/2018/05/people-power-costs-keep-indoor-farming-down-to-earth/) , "It's tough to compete with plants grown in dirt with free sunlight, after all."

Moreover, if we switch to a solar power economy, then your proposal turns sunlight into electricity (energy loss), into LED lighting (energy loss) into plant growth. That is, current indoor farming uses power which mostly comes from relatively cheap but non-sustainable non-renewables (70% of the power in the US comes from coal, natural gas, or petroleum.)

You write "I also feel that high density living has its advantages". This seems to contradict your earlier statement "I am not impressed by the arguments made by high density proponents. In my lived experience, it degrades quality of life."

Now you clarify that your experience is that of a post-war American city designed around cars. However, 'the arguments made by high density proponents' are specifically saying that car travel and designs like what you mention must be avoided. (Eg, in [http://www.hcd.ca.gov/community-development/community- accept...](http://www.hcd.ca.gov/community-development/community- acceptance/index/docs/mythsnfacts.pdf) \- "With high-density housing, stores serving neighborhood residents move in, allowing residents to walk to buy groceries or to the dry cleaner instead of driving.") So you _do_ agree with them.

I mentioned NYC to show that your view of what society should be is not reasonable, in the senses that 1) it requires much more land area, with more duplicated resources (eg, water treatment facilities cannot be shared), 2) it reduces the diversity of experiences that people can have, and 3) the fact that millions of people live in NYC means that your views are far from commonplace.

You write "A lettuce grown in your hydroponic or soil kitchen garden takes less resources than one that is grown 3000 miles away and is transported and refrigerated and sold in a store and then people are paid to sell it to you and you have to bring it back home."

The failure of many hydroponic farms shows that your statement is not trivially true.

You know there are disadvantages to your model, right? It means that everyone currently living in an apartment now needs more space in order to grow those crops. That space is _expensive_ , both because city land is more expensive than rural land, but also because the costs are not shared with anyone else. How much more expensive are the construction costs for everyone to have an extra hydro room? It looks like about $150/sq. ft. for the US and you're talking, what, 100 sq. ft. so $15000? Price of organic lettuce at a farmer's market is about $2, says [https://thenaturalfarmer.org/article/price- comparison-of-far...](https://thenaturalfarmer.org/article/price-comparison- of-farmers-markets-grocery-stores-and-co-ops-on-organic-and-conventional- food/) , so that's 7,000 heads of lettuce. Now add in the price for the hydroponics equipment and power.

In addition, my time isn't free. These aren't turn-key operations you're talking about and it takes time to learn how to farm. Many of the people doing home hydroponics do so as a hobby so value the farming experience. Also, if I go on a trip for a month, what happens to my home farm? Sure, there can be farm sitters, just like there are dog/cat sitters, but that's also not cheap.

Finally on this point, I've lived in apartments with shared laundry machines, and houses with no laundry machines - we used laundromats. This suggests that your views on what are reasonable seem based on being rich - you have a _farm_ in _Silicon Valley_ \- and living in suburban houses.

You write "If a city can grow". And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Again, the experience so far shows that it's not economical to do as you propose. It appears to be more economical to have farm areas with (sustainable) ag practices and ship the food to living areas/cities, even with the extra transport costs.

Is there justification for paying people a living wage to work on a farm? What about $20/hour plus access to good quality nationalized health care?

FWIW, there's also no justification to make a human work under a merciless boss. That is, your statement, which uses the word "make", implies a lack of job mobility and lack of social safety systems for the jobless more than something intrinsic to the job itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem with your post is that the Dollar is central to how you think...but 'currency', as we know it... is entirely arbitrary.

Systems thinking uproots most of your objections.

On a related note: I do enjoy these kind of exchanges but I feel like you want to 'take me down' ..and that's ok. I feel like any statement I make is a challenge to you. For that reason and because my time is limited, I am stepping back from this discussion.

Thanks for the engagement.

<comment><USER2> Why the ad hominem and hand waving, instead of pointing out how my objections are wrong? You need only point out one or two, not the whole array - an array which, btw, increased as you continued to bring up new points.

I mean, I could simply respond with "Systems thinking shows that your views are wrong" and we would both be none the wiser.

I want to point out where you are inconsistent, especially when it results in what appears to be you making misinterpretations of what I wrote.

I want to point out places where I think your personal experiences result in what I think is an incorrect bias; in which case I try give concrete counter- examples (eg, non-universal presence of laundry machines, time costs involved in hydroponic farms)

And I want to point out places where your statements appear to be outright wrong (eg, regarding the lack of long-distance trade among hunter-gathers).

If that's a "take me down" attitude then _shrug_. How should I have responded to point of yours which I think are wrong or unsubstantiated? I guess I'll never know.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Take care. I have nothing more to contribute.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Intel Reveals Post-8th Generation Core Architecture: Ice Lake, Built on 10nm+ - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11722/intel-reveals-ice-lake-core-architecture-10nm-plus <comment><AUTHOR> "Given its position as a post-8th gen architecture, Ice Lake is likely to hit sometime in 2018, perhaps 2019, depending on Intel's rate of progress with larger chips and the 10+ process. Intel's other market segments, such as FPGAs (Altera), Xeon Phi (MIC) and custom foundry partners, are also in the mix to get into some 10nm action."

Could we speculate it was a "forced reveal" in order to counter AMD's latest releases? This Ice Lake is definitely not coming anytime soon.</comment>


Ask HN: How are taxes/deductions in the Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I'm going to be moving to the Palo Alto/Mountain View area in May to start an internship. I'll be making close to $15/hour and I'm wondering how much of that will be deducted for taxes or other reasons? Also, in Canada (I'm from Toronto) there are TD1 tax forms that students who are still in school and paying tuition can fill out to lessen their tax deductions. Is there anything similar in California?<p>Any help is appreciated! I've never been to California and I can't wait to move out there. Also, does anyone have advice on finding a cheap place to live for one person in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area? <comment><USER2> Like Canada you can tweak the amount of deductions on your paystub but you'll owe the same amount in the end. You'll file both US and Canadian taxes for 2011 which is slightly complex but you won't get double-taxes for the most part.

You'll pay roughly 6% CA state tax, 15% US federal tax plus medicare and a few other small items that I never know how to calculate.

As for places to live, ye olde Craigslist or your university housing service if interns from your school regularly get jobs in the valley.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depending on your stautus the tax could be worse. If you're coming over as a student then it's going to be rough because you're basically going to be getting zero deductions or ways pay less tax. If you're coming over on q TN1 or a H1B. Then you could file as a resident after 183 days and take the same tax deductions and savoys as a majority of all the other Americans.

Hope this helps

</comment><comment><USER4> For a general, slightly overestimated rule of them ... expect to bring home ~60% after taxes, health insurance, etc.</comment>


Ask HN: Have you seen repeat/similiar submissions recently? - <AUTHOR> This is sort of a meta-question, which was prompted when I saw the another submission of the same url that I submitted reach the front page of HN. Is the HN submission tool broken?
My example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21913030
Example of similar posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21918610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916651
I'm sure there are other examples out there. <comment><USER2> There is, or at least was yesterday, a problem with 'Ask HN' submissions. Story (question) submission worked fine but users got an error message, so they kept submitting the same again.

The example you list seems new indeed. Usually there's at least a difference in URL. Or the older story is a day old (stories that didn't gain traction get another chance).

This is something for firstname.lastname@example.com to check on.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agreed, I've noticed that too. Also noticed quite a bit more spam posts than usual, not sure if it's related.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some other examples of this happening:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916831)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21920583](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21920583)</comment>


Further hardening glibc malloc() against single byte overflows - <AUTHOR> https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2017/05/further-hardening-glibc-malloc-against.html <comment><USER2> > Now, if the attacker has an off-by-one corruption with a small value (NUL or > \x01 - \x07) that hits the lowest significant byte of a length > (malloc_chunk->size), the attacker can only use that to cause the length to > effectively shrink. This is because all heap chunks are at least 8 bytes > under the covers. Shrinking a chunk's length means it will never match the > prev_size stored at the end of that chunk. Even if the attacker deploys > their one byte overflow multiple times, this new check should always catch > them.

Is the LSB of the heap chunk size always >= 8?

What about a malloc_chunk->size with a multiple of 256? (Or anything else with an LSB < 7). With a one byte overflow one of this they could cause it to think that the size is up to 7 bytes more than the size of the real chunk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, good question.

The lower bits of ->size are actually masked off when considering a chunk's size, because they are flags:

#define SIZE_BITS (PREV_INUSE | IS_MMAPPED | NON_MAIN_ARENA)

/* Get size, ignoring use bits */ #define chunksize(p) ((p)->size & ~(SIZE_BITS))

So you really can't increase the size by less than 8. However, I know what you're now thinking: an attacker with a 1-byte overflow can mess with the flags! That would be a topic for another blog post, but I'm not aware of any techniques where messing with the flags would permit a clean ASLR bypass.

<comment><USER2> Ah, good point.

From: [https://sploitfun.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/understanding- gli...](https://sploitfun.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/understanding-glibc- malloc/)

        Last 3 bits of this field contains flag information.

            PREV_INUSE (P) – This bit is set when previous chunk is allocated.
            IS_MMAPPED (M) – This bit is set when chunk is mmap'd.
            NON_MAIN_ARENA (N) – This bit is set when this chunk belongs to a thread arena.

It certainly doesn't look like those could be used against ASLR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't you trivially harden against single byte overflows by just changing your malloc implementation to add one to the requested allocation size?

<comment><USER4> No doubt. However, if the single byte off the end is reliably accessible, then programs may come to rely on it by accident. If a program is allocating n but using n+1, then a single-byte overflow would access n+2 and the problem repeats. Better to have that single byte off the end be reliably crashy to touch, but not exploitable.

You'd also incur substantial space overhead for small allocations in many cases. I'm not familiar with Linux's implementation, but on the Mac, for example, all allocations are a multiple of 16 bytes. It's common to allocate 16 or 32 bytes for small objects, so padding the allocation by one byte will bump you up to 32 and 48 bytes respectively.

<comment><USER5> One of the funniest things I've seen in code I saw in PHP core a decade ago; they had a buffer underflow where they would overwrite arr[-1] with some character. Their solution was to save the contents of arr[-1] before the loop, then restore it afterwards.

<comment><USER4> Sweet Jesus. I could _almost_ understand it if they allocated an extra byte and then used an offset base pointer....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yet another patch on the Swiss cheese of memory corruption, with very little impact on future CVE database entries.

</comment><comment><USER7> Now this is what I want to see more of on HN.

<comment><USER8> You sure you don't want more politics mingled in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just write programs without overflows, and malloc() will not be a problem.

<comment><USER10> It's a miracle! We have the solution to every bug in every program that will ever be written! Just do not put bugs in your code, you fools! ...

<comment><USER11> Technically, that's why Rust was invented.

<comment><USER12> Bu Rust also must have an allocator under the hood that is unsafe and rust apps can call C libraries or C kernel so why do I see the Rust strike team complaining that something that they use indirectly is improved.

<comment><USER6> There is a big difference in using a programing language where unsafe code is explicit and easy to track down, versus one where each line of code is a possible security exploit.

Also Rust isn't the only option to write more secure code, it was already possible before C was even created using Algol and PL/I variants.

Quote from Tony Hoare's ACM award article in 1981, regarding Algol use in the industry, a programming language almost 10 years older than C.

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."

EDIT: younger => older

<comment><USER12> Yes, there are many languages that are safer, including c++ collection can be used safely but you don't see Java/c# devs popping up in a C/C++ related thread mentioning again their favorite language. Btw there are also languages that are safer then Rust and you do not see those people asking to not use Rust, again better tool for the job(where in most of the cases the project is a huge one and is done).

<comment><USER6> How young are you?

I imagine you missed the BBS and USENET flamewars against C.

<comment><USER12> I have internet access for 10 years.

<comment><USER6> Which means you missed all that BBS and USENET bashing fun.

No, bashing C is a common practice from those of us on the memory safe side of the fence since the early days.

Take the paper "A History of CLU"[0] describing how CLU was designed and implemented in 1975.

"I believe this is a better approach than providing a generally unsafe language like C, or a language with unsafe features, like Mesa [Mitchell, 1978], since it discourages programmers from using the unsafe features casually."

There are tons of other examples, all available in old papers, BBS and USENET archives.

[0] [http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS- TR-56...](http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-561.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I will read it, so are you of the opinion that there is no job that C is the best tool? Btw I am not a C developer and I would never use C except if I am asked to work on a project that uses C already. I would use C++ with Qt for GUI though.

<comment><USER6> Exactly, C only became widely adopted by the industry thanks to AT&T only being allowed to charge a symbolic price for UNIX and making the source code available to universities.

Which 80's startups like Sun and SGI used as basis for their workstation OSes.

Bjarne created C++, because after having to use BCPL instead of Simula to finish his PhD, he never wanted to work like that ever again.

So C with Classes started as a tool for Bjarne to target C, while staying productive and able to write safer code.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Are Physical Limits All in Our Heads? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/opinion/marathon-eliud-kipchoge-world-record.html <comment><USER2> Working for 4 years as a videographer for Snowboarder Magazine convinced me there is a lot of truth in this claim made by the title. In action sports, the "head game" is often valued over the physical one and my experiences of both intimate and high-pressure public scenarios is that it's the most important.</comment>


eBay Horror Story - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sirinath/status/1213690911798046720 <comment><USER2> Return shipping is covered by the seller only if the item listing says that.</comment>


Google Is Testing AMP Results in Desktop SERPs - <AUTHOR> https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-is-testing-amp-results-in-desktop-serps/350048/ <comment><AUTHOR> Seems like Google is trying to take control over everything.

What's your opinion about this?

I feel this will give more control into the hands of Google. And that will cause more harm than benefit in longer run.</comment>