Always Connected: Generation Z, the "Digitarians" - <AUTHOR> http://randyapuzzo.com/blog/opinions/generation-z-the-digitarians/ <comment><USER2> I have a gaggle of children, and I have noticed that my 5 year old son thinks many devices have voice control, and he views this as normal.

My 11 year old son and 8 year old always think every screen has a touch interface, but they don't use voice.

To me, it seems that there is a break in those generations. The 5 year old is voice activating his tablet, amazon fire tv, watches his parents voice command their phones driving - this is all totally normal to him and you can see he will often try a voice command on a device unfamiliar to him.

The older boys think using a PC is novel, and look at me strangely when I tell them about DOS and Windows 3.1 //// oh well...

<comment><USER3> Do they think all the magic takes place on the devices, or somewhere else? e.g. do they think of "syncing" as something that occurs directly between devices, or that involves services in the middle?

<comment><USER2> I don't believe he thinks about it at all . It has just always been so to him, like the sun comes up in the morning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just got back from a family reunion and my relations' kids were glued to their tablets playing mindless games and watching YouTube unattended for 4 hour spells and more day after day. It was so depressing, all these boring consumer drones in the making.

My kids get 1 hour of screen time a day, max (until they decide to become coders, and then the cap is lifted. :)

<comment><USER5> I was raised by parents who strictly limited my computer time to one hour a day. I spent most of it playing games, so perhaps their concern was justified. But I loved the computer, so, so much. And of course, I would do anything to sneak around the limits: wait until my parents went to sleep, binge while they were away, etc.

It created a rather ugly tension between us; very adversarial. Upon later reflection, I realized that the root of it was that my parents had never made an effort to understand what compelled me to "veg out" in front of that screen as much as possible. They never asked me what a particular game was about, why I liked it, whether I was any good at it... in fact, I turned out to be exceptional at a number of games, winning amateur competitions and the like -- but I never shared those achievements with my parents, for fear that they would berate me for wasting my time developing useless skills.

My dad tried to teach me Java and Ruby, but gave up when they didn't seem to stick. He didn't notice all the time I spent "programming" games of my own in RPG Maker 2000. (I did wind up pursuing programming seriously in college.)

I guess my point is: before you limit something, make an honest effort to understand it first. Maybe play a round or two of that game with your child. Maybe ask them what sort of YouTube videos they like to watch (my younger cousins watch endless hours of _other people_ playing games, which I still struggle to understand...). As I matured, I was able to forgive my parents; they did what they did out of love. I just wish it hadn't taken me so long to realize that.

<comment><USER6> I was allowed many hours on the computer(albeit often having to take turns with my brother), but I concur that the emotional labor of listening and understanding is the number one thing my parents never "got." As I got older, their vicarious-living tendencies became more obvious - they wanted me doing things they personally liked and that was the farthest they could see.

That would be fine, but if it wasn't on their radar of likes, they saw no reason to bring it up or discuss it - and if I brought it up, they had a pattern of dismissal with no pledge of support or further discussion - sometimes using the Grave Serious tone, sometimes using the Explanatory, That's Nice, or Maybe Later tone. If I escalated or presented work to them, they would categorize it as a "career", "hobby" or "skill development" and position it relative to their preferred activities in a way which induced anxiety and discouraged me from continuing. The only thing I wanted was basic interest or acknowledgement, and they consistently messed that up by wheeling every conversation directly towards their comfort zone. To this day, if I try to talk about a personal issue, they rush to provide unsolicited solutions and explanations. I finally managed to unlearn the explaining pattern myself as I got into my later 20's, as my friends brought it to light.

So, at least at that time, I gave up on parental engagement and hid my life away in the computer instead, since at least there were people online, while weathering the (relatively mild, compared with others) storms of their own fancy. So too, I think, is the role of all of today's devices - when the family doesn't care, the screen fills in. It's a symptom.

I think it's right to set down rules at an early age. That is one thing I think my parents did do right, and the early years are probably more crucial overall. But they had no idea how to proceed from there - kids aren't going to be exactly like their parents, and that requires a lot of listening when they get into adolescence and try to speak for themselves.

<comment><USER7> The thing that people are missing is, tech is being used as a baby sitter. Just like TV was for me. Now it's worse because It's always connected. Parents are fucking lazy today. I see it constantly. It's about being connected to your kid that I'm for. That's fucking hard and people don't want to do hard today when they come home from work. They would rather sit and watch their own shit on their device because parenting is hard. Just look around the mall, airport or a dinner table. We're not talking about 12 year olds. These kids are 2, 4, 5, 7 and 9, etc... Their brains are developing and technology, scientifically proven, gets in the way of brain development- just like TV and video games in my gen. It's not bad, in moderation, just like everything else in this world. So, it's not about the tech it's about the family. My 9 yr old kid reads 5-10 books a week. She looses herself in her books to the point she can't hear anyone. Learning, safely, for the most part. Using her imagination instead of it being fed to her by the vast majority of the shit out there. she gets to play learning and thinking games, not fruit ninja. What has changed from my gen is being connected 24/7 has giving adults an easy way out from doing something hard. I fucking want yell at a parent who is out to dinner with 2,3,4 year olds at the table playing with an iPad. While the parent is buried in their own. I limited the tech not because it's tech, trendy and cool to do so but, because we want our kids to be able to communicate with other human beings and the ability resolve conflict through something other than a text or Facebook. They will have plenty of opportunities to be immersed into technology and all troublesome things that come with it as a teen.

I know technology is empowering at the right age. But, I want both my kids to be exposed to cooking, knitting, skateboarding, swimming, playing sports, books, music and art by actually doing it versus it being fed to them on an iPad. If either one of them wants to learn a different programming language than me, I hope the fact that I've connected with my kid so we will be able to discover it together.

Bottom line, Generation Z is being raise by Apple, Samsung and Amazon. As a parent, I'm not OK with this.

<comment><USER5> For the most part I agree with your sentiment. You make a good point about the parents being as sucked into technology as their kids.

Regarding books though...is a book objectively "better" entertainment than a video game? Both require user participation, as opposed to the mindless consumption of television. There are low-quality games, but there are low- quality books as well. I'm inclined to agree that books are better, but I'm having a hard time justifying that belief.

<comment><USER7> @ nemo1618 I agree, books can be bad, too. We try to monitor what they read, but it's just as hard. They are going to sneak and hide the ones we don't want them to read - human nature. But, as a connected parent, I make it priority, even for just literally a few minutes, to sit down and ask about what she is reading. That way, she knows I'm participating. It makes a big difference. And, we do struggle with her reading constantly.. we get her out and go for a walk, bug hunts, etc.

The downside to a connected parent? I see one TV show a week with my wife, I'm tired, the laundry piles up and the living space is a lot dirtier.

Back to the point, I feel we are both making: It doesn't matter the medium, too much of one thing is bad. But, it's so much easier to put 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 year olds in front of devices, because it's easy parenting. By the time they are 7, they won't want to read - it'll be too boring.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With all due respect, what a bunch of b.s. Goes to show that always being connected maybe isn't all it's hyped up to be. From the sound of it, it doesn't appear to produce any lasting insights.

p.s. Whoever typed "exec" to run a DOS program?

p.p.s. "Software is a dead. Digitarians know apps, games, and web browsers." WTF?

<comment><USER9> Digitarians know how to push big buttons, know nothing of how said buttons work, progress indeed. Depends on your definition of progress.

<comment><USER10> We rural farmers have found the ignorance of city folk about how their food and electricity and water are produced depressing and hilarious in this ambivalent way for decades. One can only wonder how far society can build technical, monetary and moral debt in this matryoshka doll sort of way before collapse...

In Haruki Murakami's "The Birth of My Kitchen Table Fiction" he mentions:

"It cost a lot less to open your own place back then [1974] than it does now. Young people like us who were determined to avoid "company life" at all costs were launching small shops left and right. Cafés and restaurants, variety stores, bookstores—you name it. Several places near us were owned and run by people of our generation... It was an era when, all over the world, one could still find gaps in the system."

Children are pulled towards these gaps where the giant experience advantage adults have are not already dominating, unless adults spend much one-on-one time grooming children to take over their current roles. Most parents are in roles that will not be around for their children, or the parents cannot give such roles to their children. This inter-generational alienation has grown for centuries.

I fear that our institutions will be, in particular, unprepared to cope with the nigh-invisible problems that the very new increase in life-expectancy will bring. What happens when groups and teams of people performing and designing at unprecedentedly high levels due to abnormal extra decades of experience start dying off, without ready replacements because the strongest minds went to niche tech sectors with the least competition from more experienced older people? I wonder if there is a cohort in some field where people with elongated life-spans dominated limited positions to the point where replacements with enough experience to keep things going will simply be impossible to find. Is this happening already? Any examples? I definitely read that there are a plethora of continuously unfilled job openings requiring too much experience and growing crowds of unemployed who cannot build experience, but maybe this is not too new or unendurable and a brutal transition is not necessary. I hope it is just a neurosis of mine. I welcome any words in response that will soothe this fear.

I think too, here, of how the average age of a Nobel Prize in Physics winner is increasing at a superlinear rate. I feel a new Tower of Babel collapse will come because technological change will outpace the rate at which human brains can learn. I feel technical debt outpaces even national debts and idiocracy is resulting. I had to stop reading (ironically) Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation because it was literally giving me panic attacks. I've always been successful in school and the book just solidifies my conceit that I am king turd of a shit mountain. What if we get too weak to hold on to the shoulders of the

I can understand why society requires faith; maybe it's always been Wile E. Coyote refusing to look down—and Spengler would hardly make one think otherwise. But weren't many older generations working for future generations? When have societies so obviously borrowed from the future instead of building it? Straddled their children with debt instead of taking it on for their benefit? I went to my eighth choice school out of eight to avoid debt and I'm now at an even-worse graduate school (I got into the number 1 grad program for my major, balked at $180k of debt, and am now attending an unranked school, i.e. it's not even in the top 150) and all I get in exchange is worry that the program is not challenging enough, and self-hate that I can't motivate myself enough independently of school.

Todays kids build in Minecraft, just as I built in Legos, because neither of us could fight through the massive amount of red tape to build something real in, say, California. Why should kids go outside when they are allowed to do so little? There's no treasure to be found at the local park, if there was, it's been found by the crowds already, and you're not allowed to dig to try to find some anyway. My mother is a gatherer (as in hunt and gatherer) at heart, and her deepest love is to wander the mesas of desolate Wyoming, find artifacts and weird rocks, bring them home, and add them to an ever-growing found-object arrangement in her driveway that I consider a folk art installation (she is more humble). It is very illegal. But when kids do this in Minecraft or I hunt and gatherer in a Bethesda Softworks game, no one arrests me even if I get caught. But I'm exercising once-valuable skills and instincts that I should fast from and eventually eliminate if I want to gain advantage in my current sociopolitical environment. I fear I'm merely an echo of a old way of life and I find myself unable to enjoy Fallout: New Vegas without guilt or fear, and stressed out when I try to build skills for the new world order.

I once had a vision that I interpreted to mean that absolute power is absolute weakness. I haven't integrated it into my life, but when I think about how people can learn how to push buttons without learning how to build the machines those buttons control, I get an in to the truth, that the pursuit of power, is the pursuit of comfort, is the pursuit of weakness, is the pursuit of stress. And this flux is eternal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone please remind me how demographers defend treating post-WWII generations as being 20 years in length when the evidence is very clear that real generations are much longer?

[http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length](http://www.isogg.org/wiki/Generation_length)

I wouldn't care so much if it weren't for having to endure another round of inane punditry.

</comment><comment><USER12> My son was born this year in March. I'm not sure if that counts as Z or if its something beyond that... but i'm not sure technology is the thing that will "Define" his generation. To be sure, I think VR and AI will definitely impact them by a lot.... but I think more impactful is that he's going to be coming of age at exactly the moment when some of the worst effects of climate change (if we managed to slow it down very soon) are projected to happen.

I think his generation will be defined not by the new tech invented, but by the global changes they have to adapt to.

</comment><comment><USER13> This generation is fighting the largest class warfare battle in history and guess what. There is only mutually assured destruction.</comment>


Extending Your jQuery Application with Amplify.js - <AUTHOR> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/scriptjunkie/hh147623.aspx

<comment><USER2> It's really important to put the BENEFITS at the top. Do I really want to read all this just to find out what it does?

</comment><comment><USER3> I gave up writing my "JavaScript Applications" in a closure the way you see in this tutorial. The reason is, there's no good documentation tool that will parse it. I'd much rather use namespaces to keep my code from polluting the global namespace and then I can use jsDoc.

       /** @namespace */
       var MyApp = {}

       /** My Class
       * @constructor
       * @param {Object} options
       */
       MyApp.MyClass = function(options) {
       ...
       };

<comment><USER4> should be: var MyApp = MyApp || {};

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm confused, why do I need to use pubsub to separate updating an item from requesting an item?

<comment><USER5> It seems this is mostly about organizing your application consistently. It's easy (particularly with jQuery) to quickly amass large collections of event handlers which are later consolidated into the logic of an application. This library provides an abstraction to make it easier to switch that process around. Logic/API first; implementation second.

Of course you can still do that with plain jQuery...</comment></comment>


What causes an INDEX funds price to fluctuate? - <AUTHOR>

Is it the buying and selling of the fund itself that causes the funds price to fluctuate?
Or, is it the underlying investments/holdings of the fund and their prices that ultimately cause the funds price to fluctuate?
Cheers! <comment><USER2> From what I know which could be wrong the price fluctuates based on the performance of the constituents in that fund.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That makes sense.

Edit: Looked into this further and I can verify that you're right here. The price of an index is determined by the price movements of the underlying shares. Demand factors on the index fund play no role

Simply put, the indexes use either a price weightings, or a market capitalisation weighing. Which are like weighted averages.

With market cap weighting index, a small movement in the share price of an indexes underlying underlying share with a large market cap, will give more say than a large movement in share price of a share with a small market cap. The price method works the same way, except giving weightings towards market prices rather than market caps

The Dow uses price weighting, while most other indexes use market cap weighting. And the cap method truly speaking makes more sense.</comment></comment>


Joi company releases spam blocking application for Twitter.  - <AUTHOR>

http://stoptweet.com
We (joi company) created a true spam blocking application for Twitter called StopTweet. (http://stoptweet.com) We didn't like any of the applications that were already out there.  They were all too complicated for the average Twitter user.(or maybe we're just dumb)...regardless, we made the application to do what others don't. It allows you to create your own settings and decide what spammers look like to you. The application is extremely easy to use, and allows you to only block who you want to block without hassle. On top of all this, it's FREE. Most of the apps we found charge a monthly or yearly fee. We do not.
Please let us know what you think, All feedback is appreciated. (and greatly needed as we have no friends to critique us)
Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Jolie, Thanks for the comments and feedback. 1) We don't have plans at this time to monetize. We started it as more of a side project for ourselves. We may charge for bigger accounts in the future if it starts to eat up too many resources, but for now it's just free service we hope others find useful. 2) That's a useful feature. If you didn't select the block users automatically, or report spammers options then you would have to manually click on the stop sign next to the spammer to actually block them.

</comment><comment><USER2> Also, I'd love it if you could show me the exact accounts your app find after running each instance of the app. I just ran light, medium, and aggro blockers, and my follower count didn't change at all for a few minutes.

I'm @jolieodell, feel free to ping me!

</comment><comment><USER2> This looks really cool, actually. I like the light/medium/aggro settings, too.

Free is great, but what products are you monetizing?</comment>


U.S. Orders Al Jazeera to Register as a Foreign Agent - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/business/aj-al-jazeera-fara.html#click=https://t.co/VKTGW2u4S6 <comment><USER2> Even though the reporting can be very biased, Al Jazeera was one of the only news channels we watched in the military, along with BBC. I wish we had similar news agencies in the USA that show actual world news, and aren't just attractive people sitting around a table, gossiping about Democrats/Republicans.

<comment><USER3> The closest I've found is a local public television station that has a block of PBS Newshour, Newsline, DW News, BBC World News, and France 24. It'd be nice if they had Al Jazeera, or even a few more broadcasts from other parts of the world, but I imagine English language broadcasts are rare in certain places.

<comment><USER4> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dsWF2prkR8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dsWF2prkR8) is a thing. TIL.

further thoughts at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23858477)

> "If you agree with it, it's truth. If you don't agree, it's propaganda. > Pretend that it is all propaganda. See what happens on your analysis > reports."

<comment><USER5> Watching live news with a youtube chat next to it is quite an interesting experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a tangential note, it's bizarre how only certain twitter accounts are marked "state media" and all western media accounts (e.g. BBC) are left alone.

<comment><USER7> Which ones are marked "state media"? AJE is not: [https://twitter.com/AJEnglish](https://twitter.com/AJEnglish)

<comment><USER8> RT and Sputnik news have it. But not "voice of america" [https://mobile.twitter.com/VOANews/status/129330694903191142...](https://mobile.twitter.com/VOANews/status/1293306949031911426)

<comment><USER9> Really? That's pretty weird on Twitter's part, cause I know Youtube marks VOA as state media.

<comment><USER10> I think youtube marks anything government affiliated. It marks CBC as gov owned and its run at a fair distance from the gov. Maybe twitter is trying to only mark media that is state mouth pieces, then again VoA is literally founded for propaganda purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Al Jazeera is my go to channel for on the ground reporting in places where few dare to go -- Syria, Kashmir, NWFP in Pakistan, ...

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm from the Caribbean and I find I learn a lot more about what's happening in the world. For years I've watched BBC and CNN international and found them way too biased to from a properly unbiased view about most stories.

</comment><comment><USER13> Another day in the world of tyrannical Gulf Monarchs trying to gain the upper hand on each other.

<comment><USER14> and the big power using them as chess pieces to keep the petrodollar safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Part of the Israel/UAE/Qatar drama. USCENTCOM is hosted in Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, IIRC it's US largest forward base in the region. I doubt US plans to move it to UAE. Doesn't seem like smart diplomacy but not unsound gamble for current admin's ME foreign policy goals. Trumps fishing hard for that Nobel Peace prize.

</comment><comment><USER16> They fish out dirts in others while their home country is never exposed to their investigative journalism.

<comment><USER17> _> They fish out dirts in others while their home country is never exposed to their investigative journalism._

True, and the same can be said of RT, and many others.

This actually seems to be the default configuration for the market in journalism (whether the funding comes from advertising or the state). Afflicting the comfortable even-handedly is a privilege very few news organizations have. There is almost always a hand that feeds them they are reluctant to bite.

The best we can reasonably hope for (WRT Aljazeera) is a competing org with a different source of funding.

<comment><USER18> Comparing RT and al Jazeera is laughable. RT is hot garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Full text: The Justice Department ordered a digital news network based in the United States and owned by Al Jazeera, the media company backed by the royal family of Qatar, to register as a foreign agent, surprising a high-level delegation from Doha just as officials from the two nations met to strengthen diplomatic and economic alliances.

Al Jazeera suggested the move was part of a separate deal, signed on Tuesday and brokered by the Trump administration, in which the United Arab Emirates, a Qatari rival, normalized diplomatic relations with Israel. The Emirates ambassador to the United States said that was not true.

In a letter dated Monday that was obtained by The New York Times, the Justice Department said that AJ+, a network that primarily produces short videos for social media in English as well as Arabic, French and Spanish, engages in "political activities" on behalf of Qatar's government and should therefore be subject to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Qatar, the letter said, provides the network's funding and appoints its board of directors.

"Journalism designed to influence American perceptions of a domestic policy issue or a foreign nation's activities or its leadership qualifies as 'political activities' under the statutory definition," said the letter, which was signed by Jay I. Bratt, the chief of the Justice Department's counterintelligence division, "even," the letter added, "if it views itself as 'balanced.'"

</comment><comment><USER20> On whose orders did we do this and why now? Of course... Israel.

For all the talk about foreign meddling, we never hear anything about israel. You here endless propaganda about russia, china, etc, but never about israel. I'm sure putin and xi wish they had the influence in the US that israel has.

Has part of a presidential election ever kicked off in moscow or beijing like trump did with israel? Can you imagine the lunatic hysteria it would have kicked off in traditional and social media?

Is there any country, other than israel, that you cannot boycott as an american. You can boycott china. You can boycott russia. Heck you can even boycott america as an american. But you can't boycott israel.

[https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights- protesters/new-...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights- protesters/new-israel-anti-boycott-act-still-unconstitutional)

Trump, Pompeo and his administration openly state that Trump exists to save Israel.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/pompeo- suggests...](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/pompeo-suggests-god- sent-trump-save-israel-n986136)

Not to save america, but israel. Imagine if they say they exist to save china or russia. We'd call that treason.

Yes, lets investigate russian and chinese foreign meddling. But lets not stop there. Lets go deeper. Saudi meddling and all the way up to israeli meddling.

Edit: Insta downvote. Interesting.

<comment><USER21> Pompeo's support for Israel has a motive that goes beyond the American mainstream.

He's an Evangelical Christian and believes in an imminent "Rapture" that can only happen when Biblical prophecies are fulfilled. Among these is the return of Jews to the Holy Land. [1]

In other words, the Secretary of State is literally trying to bring about the end of the world.

If this were Iran, people would be talking about a delusional theocracy.

[1] [https://www.ft.com/content/6959f506-6ee6-4d31-9372-ba34d5291...](https://www.ft.com/content/6959f506-6ee6-4d31-9372-ba34d52912f8)

<comment><USER22> [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pompeo-fight-battles- raptu...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pompeo-fight-battles-rapture/)

The juxtaposition of gay marriage ruling and rapture in his speech is, to me, identical to saying "burn all gays".

The irony is this ideology is about as anti-Christian as it gets. Jesus had very few nice things to say about wealthy people, and yet Christianity Inc. loves to sell Americans on the idea of prosperity theology. The book of Job expressly states it's bullcrap. This is why I consider it a cult, they aren't that serious about the religious aspects at all, they just like the parts where some people are rewarded (physically taken to heaven, i.e. the rapture) and their non-believer enemies are all murdered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Foreign news, even state controlled (RT, for example) is always valuable. Partly because we know those news outlets are biased and politically motivated, and adjust our own perception accordingly. Though the glorification of suicide bombing and the killing of US soldiers on Al Jazeera always left a very bad taste in my mouth circa 2003-2004.

The problem is that our news outlets are biased and politically motivated as well, it's just the pressure comes from money and "access". And we don't admit it to ourselves.

A simple example is a person or company will go to a specific outlet to break negative news so they can get a head start on the story. For access to the scoop, the outlet helps write a truthful but "friendly" narrative.

This happens all of the time with large businesses also, and it's evident in the headlines. Where did you think all of that PR consulting money goes?

<comment><USER24> > glorification of suicide bombing and the killing of US soldiers on Al > Jazeera always left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Are we talking about the same Al Jazeera? I've never seen such glorification. I am an American living internationally for a long time now and, where I used to value BBC World, I have preferred Al Jazeera English for close to ten years at least.

<comment><USER25> I think this was mostly perceived to be on their Arabic station, not the English one. In those days people I know who watched the Arabic Al-Jazeera said it was a whole different channel than the English one (in terms of bias, etc).

(Although I didn't hear anything specifically about support for suicide bombings).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Personally, Al Jazeera English has been a valuable source of counter propaganda to the hegemonic western media companies I usually end up getting my news from (NYT, Guardian, Atlantic, etc. on the liberal end and WaPo, BBC, etc. on the more neutral/conservative end).

I think it's fair to say they are more directly aligned with Qatar and don't do as good a job criticizing their owners as John Oliver with ATT. But, I cannot find anyone, not even BBC, that does as good a job at covering grassroots organization efforts and local stories from South America, Africa, the middle-east (particularly Palestinian stories), South Asia, and parts of East Asia.

It has been refreshing to see humanizing perspectives of people who are usually cast as 'the other' or 'backwards' implicitly or explicitly in western media.

I wonder if Australian, European, or Israeli news/media companies ever have to register as foreign agents.

<comment><USER27> If you think the Atlantic is on the "liberal end" and the WaPo is on the "neutral/conservative" end of the news spectrum, I think you have a fuzzy understanding of the political divides in US news sources.

<comment><USER26> True, perhaps I am wrong in my classification. Maybe not fair to say WaPo is conservative. And The Atlantic does give space to neo-liberal ideas. It's very biased by how and which stories have stuck in my mind from these sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think it does make sense. When UAE-Israel peace/recognition deal was announced, Al Jazeera journalists were the ones who seemed to be complaining the most on Twitter about it. They have built a good reputation for journalism and I think they are going to exert that influence for their state, just like I have seen lately even SCMP do.

Sure, they do cover lots of parts of the world, and do some really good in- depth reporting but there is a definite bias to their reporting and selectiveness in what they cover, and if it is a state influenced, good to call it out.

<comment><USER29> Al Jazeera is Qatari. UAE and Qatar don't get along well with one another, so why wouldn't they complain about it? If it wasn't for the oil I'd expect the US to be aligned with Qatar.

<comment><USER28> Why would US be aligned with Qatar over UAE? I don't find much difference in UAE and Qatar. The whole 2022 FIFA world cup being held in Qatar has been a blot on the sport from possible corruption in bidding to gross worker(human) right violations in construction.

> why wouldn't they complain about it?

Wouldn't it be nice if journalists try to stay unbiased and do factual reporting and not be a broadcast arm for their state's interests. If they can't, it seems appropriate to brand them as a foreign mission.</comment></comment></comment>


One Hundred Naked Citizens: One Hundred Leaked Body Scans - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5690749/ <comment><USER2> Duplicate: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1910533></comment>


Show HN: PgANN Approximate Nearest Neighbor Searches with PostgreSQL Back End - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/netrasys/pgANN <comment><AUTHOR> The motivation for this work came about since most ANN tools (Annoy, FAISS etc.) are relied on in-memory storage of vectors and would not support CRUDs. pgANN leverages the GIST index and cube extension (postgres) to provide ANN searches with CRUDs and easier management. Hope this is of some use to the community.</comment>


Ask HN: UK contractors, what plans are you making around the IR35 legislation? - <AUTHOR> IR35 seeks to make the end client responsible for determining whether contractors are, in fact, disguised employees. This is leading to FUD amongst many people I know. What strategies, tactics, contingencies are you deploying to handle the uncertainty? (Mixed with an upcoming election and Brexit) <comment><USER2> Huh? IR35 has been around for 20 years. Most recent press has been around it being an overly complex waste of space for the tax raised, that should be simplified out of existence.

I managed to see out my time contracting by ensuring back to back agency and client contracts outside IR35, by ensuring the service company retained the key rights - direction and control, substitution and so on. Essentially you just had to tick off all the indicators on the Revenue's list, but other real demonstrations of being a business in your own account helped too. Most agencies were willing, though I know when the revised agency regs came in they tried to resist. Yes, it meant you were doing more than merely being an agency worker hiding behind a PSC -- which for me turned out to be a good thing as it brought additional income and opportunities.

I never had an IR35 caught contract, though several started as clearly IR35 caught offers. I never walked from an offer due to failing to get it put outside, and contracts adjusted. The PCG - Professional Contractors Group (now IPSE) were a big help in combating the FUD, and suggesting successful counter measures.

If I ever went back to contracting, I sure as heck wouldn't be doing it via IR35-caught contracts. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> same answer as what ill be doing in response to the complete idiocy that brexit is, im leaving the UK, im currently touring japan deciding which city to make my home, before 2020 is finished ill be living here permanently</comment>


Bayesian Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://samgentle.com/posts/2015-08-28-bayesian-democracy

<comment><USER2> Interesting. This seems like more of a support structure for direct democracy then a final solution.</comment>


AVG new privacy policy: they can/will sell your browsing history to 3rd parties - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/3l4apg/avg_anti_virus_just_updated_there_privacy_policy/ <comment><USER2> I enjoyed seeing the recommendations for Linux Mint in the comments ;)</comment>


Rob Pike on good commit messages (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-dev/6M4dmZWpFaI <comment><USER2> That's a lovely description of why the fix was needed, but I just took a look at the go source, and NOWHERE IN THE SOURCE CODE IS THIS FACT DOCUMENTED.

Signals are tricky, temperamental beasts; exactly the sort of thing you'd want to have comments about in your code. The way things stand, nobody would ever know why the signals are set up the way they are unless they trawled through 40,000 commits. Yes, 40,000: git log --oneline | wc -l.

I'm all for giving a helpful description of why a commit was needed, but this is FAR too detailed for a commit message, and belongs in the CODE, which people will actually be reading while they debug an issue.

As for his other examples of bad commits, "Moved A to B" is not necessarily bad, unless there was a reason to do it other than to just rearrange where things lie. Same goes for "Add convenience functions" or "Code cleanup". If you're not fixing a bug or adding new functionality, you're just doing janitor work. And that doesn't require detailed descriptions.

Commit messages are to let people know in a concise way why you made the commit. Comments are to let readers know why you've done things in an unexpected way, or to describe things they're not expected to be familiar with, or tricky gotchas.

<comment><USER3> Do not agree. Commit messages can be more expansive than comments, because comments bitrot more readily: they are not rooted in a time and change to the code.

I use commits for the largest bulk of explanation, particularly "why," which can be rather detailed and not of much interest to someone skimming the code rapidly.

Comments I use for pointers that are unlikely to bitrot and/or important to prevent error. Except for the most timeless design elements in a project, I do not commit long documentation.

<comment><USER4> I do follow your reasoning, bad comments are worse then no comments, but in this particular case it really feels to me like the meat of the commit body should also be a comment. Just so that when someone looks at the code and wonders, hmm, why is this flag here, he/she can figure it out without having to do a blame/log on the file. (Don't get me wrong, great tool, but has it's own problems).

Judging whether or not comments are permitted on the bitrot-ability of a piece of code seems hard to begin with, and even then a bit arbitrary. In this case, the whole comment would be just for that flag. So if someone really just gets rid of the flag but not the comment, especially on code like this, and that also passes code review then I think there are more pressing problems then bitrot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After being in the field for almost a decade now and guilty of so many poor commit messages, I came to the firm realization that a very important trait of a good software engineer is the ability and diligence to write detailed commit messages, and I would have never remotely imagined this during the first few years of my career (I was "raised" in companies who didn't care at all about this and all commits were always "add x", "fix foo", "fix build", ...). It became way too frustrating when I looked back at code committed by myself (or others) years prior and wondered "what is the reason why this code exists?"

These days, every single commit I push has an entire paragraph or two clearly describing the changes, and the motivation behind them, even if it's a one- line diff.

My team praises me for this, and I think I've been able to influence the culture as I see more junior people taking their time to craft good commit messages and edit their commit history before pushing a PR.

<comment><USER6> Ok, but how much time have you "wasted" wondering what a piece of code was doing versus how much time would you have wasted writing good commit messages?

<comment><USER7> It's a balance, but I've definitely seen that a good commit title can massively help newcomers, yourself when you can't remember why something is the way it is and can be a boon when debugging.

A nice balance I've found is to not care while developing, but then squash all commits into a single one when merging a pull request and give that a good message.

<comment><USER8> This is what I do, means I don't have to worry about describing a "fix linting errors" commit. Just on squash merge ensure the commit message captures what's required (and on gh the pr is automatically included and I typically put any linked issues in the additional info area)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At about the same time, Chris Beams wrote this, which I have loved ever since:

[https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/](https://chris.beams.io/posts/git- commit/)

I note with some glee that magit colorizes my commit text and flags long lines,etc. largely in the style of this advice.

The money:

 _The seven rules of a great Git commit message

        Keep in mind: This has all been said before.

        Separate subject from body with a blank line

        Limit the subject line to 50 characters

        Capitalize the subject line

        Do not end the subject line with a period

        Use the imperative mood in the subject line

        Wrap the body at 72 characters

        Use the body to explain what and why vs. how*

<comment><USER10> > Limit the subject line to 50 characters

It's nearly impossible to get certain points across in 50 characters. I keep mine under 72, and even then, I sometimes struggle to adequately describe a change in that little space, even at a high level, to the point that it would be useful for someone searching for something.

Honestly, all of this stuff matters way less than the actual content of the commit message anyway. Style is worthless if there is no substance.

<comment><USER11> > It's nearly impossible to get certain points across in 50 characters.

Usually that kind of stuff goes in the body of the commit message.

<comment><USER10> But most Git UIs only show the first line of the commit message when displaying the log, so if you're searching for something specific, you're only going to see that without clicking into a commit. I want that first line to tell me whether this commit is relevant to whatever I'm looking for, and it's extremely difficult to do that in 50 characters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We take a "PR all the things" approach using MS VSTS/DevOps. Every PR needs a work-item attached and a description, and those get cooked into the commit.

We always squash, but squashing is dubious - if the any of the commits of the branch are still kicking around in other branches, it looks like they're ahead when they're not. Imho, this is a huge flaw in GIT - I don't _want_ to squash, but I do want a clean history and I don't want to require that juniors and student developers waste their time curating their history. The fact that there's no way to mark commits as "this is unimportant crap leading up to the merge" in Git is annoying.

VSTS logs the PR number and the relevant work-items in the message so for any given commit it's easy to get back to the PR where you can see the detailed discussion of the change, requirements, etc.

But either way: reviewers enforce useful PR message, and we discard the intermediate commits. This works very well for clean history.

<comment><USER13> > VSTS logs the PR number and the relevant work-items in the message so for > any given commit it's easy to get back to the PR where you can see the > detailed discussion of the change, requirements, etc.

I've worked on a couple project that took the approach of documenting the details of what was done in the bug tracker (or PR/MR), etc, and then just putting the bug# and a one-line description in the commit history.

In every one of these projects, we ended up later moving to a different bug tracking system. In some cases the bugs were transferred, but the numbers were not, in others nothing was transferred. Suddenly all those bug numbers in the commit history were completely meaningless and useless.

I'm now a strong advocate that the detailed documentation should be in the commits messages themselves. One of my biggest complaints with gitlab is that you spend all this time writing a good MR description, and then it has no mechanism for including that description in the actual merge commit.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, for me the approach is that the PR describe the _what_ that was done at high-level, and the requirement describes the _why_.

That said, MS is good at long-term support if nothing else. Our TFS/VSTS/DevOps instance is older than dirt so I don't have to worry about losing history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I also encourage everybody I know to write descriptive merge commits: "Merge feature X" instead of "Merge someone/master into master". It really helps when using

        git log --first-parent

to avoid displaying intermediate messages.

This really helps with the so-called "Aligator" [1] workflow: create a merge commit for every bugfix or feature, instead of just rebasing (you can still rebase if you want). That makes the history contain more metadata: a bit like a HN or e-mail thread can be collapsed to filter it out, first-parent helps filter the noise (implementation details) to display topics.

I wish web UIs such as gitlab's allowed to collapse commit graphs according to this.

[1]: [https://euroquis.nl//bla%20bla/2019/08/09/git- alligator.html](https://euroquis.nl//bla%20bla/2019/08/09/git-alligator.html) (no mention of first-parent in that blog post, unfortunately.)

<comment><USER15> > I also encourage everybody I know to write descriptive merge commits...

Or alternatively, use a branch naming scheme that includes a little ticket metadata: "Merge branch 'feat_4714_default_tag_filter'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Then single best commit messages you are ever going to find in any given project are in the Linux kernel:

[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/)

<comment><USER17> [https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=6609fee8897ac475378388238456c84298bff802)

Wow, that's a great commit message for one character change!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Somewhat important to note that he's talking about change list messages, not commit messages. Change lists are full sized chunky patches.

<comment><USER19> True. In git language that is PR level, not commit level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can't help but feel a sense of cognitive dissonance in the fact that we put such a large degree of importance on a write-once piece of data.

If getting the comments "right" on commits is really that important, then you should be able to revise them based on new information.

Are they important, or are they only important because you _have_ to get them right the first time so you have to treat them that way?

(That's a bit of a rhetorical question. I get quite a lot out of walking the commit histories on code, but often it's the shape of the commit that contains the information, not the comment)

</comment><comment><USER21> Pike's summary seems pretty spot on: _What, why, and background._ Right on.

I really don't understand the reply in that thread, _" what" doesn't matter because it's in in the code_.

Of course it matters. The whole point is that you get your bearings from the comment text, and you only need to look at the code to see the details of the 'how'.

</comment><comment><USER22> One problem with commit messages is that they get overwritten. Often code is refactored multiple times so the original good quality commit messages are hard to find amongst upgrading/refactoring/moving/cleaning messages. Makes me wish for comments perhaps.

<comment><USER23> Github has the nice ability in its `git blame` column to show the _previous_ commit for chunks in cases where somebody does a large-sweeping cleanup commit. I often wish git-blame had the option to show this as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> One one hand, I like a nice long commit message. On the other hand, human nature is terrible.

I know that if long commit messages catch on, some synergetic managers will start insisting on minimum lengths for commit messages, and start having meetings discussing standards and policies for commit messages, and start filling binders with more rules than one person could ever memorize. Soon, fixing a single-character typo in a comment will take 20 minutes, and pressing enter will be nerve-racking because you know there's just something you're forgetting from the binder.

<comment><USER25> I feel you here, but it's up to tech leads / Sr. Engineers to push back on management bullshit like this because otherwise the commit messages aren't the only thing in that culture that'll make an engineer miserable.

My management horror story here is having a SCM (source code manager) who was responsible for taking code checked into a VCS and deploying it to prod (using a CI system no less). He used to insist on engineers sending him a word document with a very specific template on what files changed, what binaries need to be re-deployed etc. etc. for every single commit or it wouldn't get deployed at all and his day was made up of yelling at engineers because the template was incorrectly formatted, or used the wrong font or whatever.

Noone else could touch prod (or even staging) except him and all of this process originated from an engineer messing up a deployment and bringing down prod.

My takeaway from this entire experience was tech middle management at smaller, enterprise-y shops was just completely broken and all these guys were capable of was playing silly political games. If possible, just work with smart people, if you can't evaluate if someone's smart during an interview process, just work for one of the big tech-cos and you can't go wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems like what was said by Austin Clements was more of a bug report than it was a description of a solution for a bug. Which is the job of reporter and not the person fixing the problem.

In my mind, a commit message should not be the be all end all for what can be said about a particular bug fix. If someone needs to know the details then they can look at the diff and if the person who made the change feels it was complex enough then they should add a comment on the bug report about what was changed and how it was changed prior to marking the bug as *fixed.

</comment><comment><USER27> This should carry over to version changes visible to the end user. "Stability and performance improvements" is the equivalent of "Fix bug" commits.

</comment><comment><USER28> I follow the format of the first line being a tag with a short one line description, followed by a new line, followed by further explaining of the what and why.

Example:

"Fix: router now asynchronous.

Our previously implementation of a synchronous router was causing a 30% slowdown when tested with `wrk` (hyperlink to utility used to test)."

with an additional link to a Jira ticket if the particular commit addresses one.

Seems to float well with everyone I've worked with.

<comment><USER29> this makes perfect sense and one should show care when constructing commit messages. That being said, if commit messages require too much care, then folks will start to make less commits as they become rather expensive to do. As with all things in life, when and how often to commit is a balance.

<comment><USER30> What do you think about committing with one-liners as you develop so that you can rollback, and then completely rewriting history before pushing?

<comment><USER13> I absolutely agree that you should commit early and often, and that short one- liners for those commits are fine. It is when you go to merge that you need to have good messages and there are several ways you can do that, depending on your team's preferences:

* You can rebase and groom your commits into meaningful sets of changes each with good descriptions (how Linux uses git).

* You can squash all the commits, and always just have a single commit for each merge with a detailed description.

* You can keep your full commit history as a record of how the work was actually done (Fossil encourages this philosophy), but always have a detailed merge commit that can stand-alone in describing all the work done in that merge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I recently started to write git commit messages as if I was writing an email to my future self. It enables me to write the commit message without thinking too much about what's important. I also tend to write more since, because an email with just one paragraph is pretty rude.

</comment><comment><USER32> Personally, I find little use to stashing a lot into a commit message. Nearly all work is managed outside of Git.

Provide a short description, reference the work you're doing (a ticket, a PR, etc), and hold the discussion there.

Rebase many, meaningless commits into a single one for integration purposes.

<comment><USER10> I used to believe this as well, but then a company I worked for switched away from GitHub (we used GitHub Issues prior), and we lost _all_ of that information. Commit messages are immutable, whereas anything else can easily disappear or become inaccessible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Totally agree: [https://blog.jgc.org/2013/07/write-good-commit- messages.html](https://blog.jgc.org/2013/07/write-good-commit-messages.html)

</comment><comment><USER34> A somewhat related discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289827)

</comment><comment><USER35> wrote a little post on just this [https://www.topaztee.com/markdown/git- commit-message/](https://www.topaztee.com/markdown/git-commit-message/)

</comment><comment><USER36> I like this. A large description of what's changed does a load of good.

What kills me is when using pull requests, putting a _complete_ description into the pull request... and then finding my commits not squashed after my PR is approved.

<comment><USER14> Well, I usually prefer to write descriptive commit messages for individual commits before opening a pull request. If I feel it needs to be squashed, I will do it myself.

It crushes my heart every time someone squashes my detailed, self-contained commits together.

If there is more information in the PR than in the commit messages themselves, I will add that to the merge commit (see my other comment about merge commits).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > What's really sad is how often I find myself telling people this. It should > be part of our culture...

Somehow I don't think whining about this problem on some google group is going to help.

<comment><USER38> It isn't "some google group", it's the golang-dev mailing list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit- mess...](https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit- messages.html) (2008)</comment>


Batman: Arkham Asylum features secret glitch to foil pirates. - <AUTHOR> http://kotaku.com/5356752/deliberate-glitch-foils-arkham-pc-pirates

<comment><USER2> Didn't they learn a lesson from Titan's Quest? [http://www.quartertothree.com/game- talk/showthread.php?t=426...](http://www.quartertothree.com/game- talk/showthread.php?t=42663)

If you must use DRM, make sure the user _knows_ that the DRM failed, not the product itself. Don't silently make the game unwinnable or dump to the desktop with no explanation. Otherwise you're going to hurt your product's reputation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Bah... EA tried doing this with Godfather: The Game. The PC version, when pirated would not allow the player to exit out of a vehicle. However, a new patch was made which addressed the issue and allowed pirates to play as they wanted.</comment>


Whithdrawal of the United Kingdom and EU rules on .eu domain names [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/notice_to_stakeholders_brexit_eu_domain_names.pdf <comment><USER2> See also current discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16714581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16714581)</comment>


Ask HN: Who is on my ballot tomorrow? (US) - <AUTHOR>

Tomorrow is the midterm elections, and I have no idea who I'm voting for. Not only do I have no idea who I'm voting for...but there isn't even a convenient place to get a list of all candidates on my ballot. Is there?
Does anyone know of a site which will tell me, based on my address, who will be on the ballot tomorrow?
I can get this information through my state website but it's not straight-forward (I have to look up each elected position individually!).
Help! <comment><USER2> 1\. It's very difficult to tell you what's on your ballot when it's not clear what state you are in.

2\. [http://ballotpedia.org/](http://ballotpedia.org/) has a list of most of the elections, but certainly not all. For example, it's missing one of the county-wide ballot initiatives for me.

3\. If you are in maryland, this website may be helpful: [https://voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/VoterSearch](https://voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/VoterSearch)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the links. While I did ask about myself, I was also hoping to find a general information resource I could point friends and family to which was easy to use. So far I haven't seen anything but [http://ballotpedia.org](http://ballotpedia.org) is promising!

Also, your second link for MD specifically __does __give me a sample ballot PDF customized to my legislative and congressional districts but I 'd have to copy/paste all of the candidate names to do research on them.

Thanks again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I live in NJ, sometime last week I got a paper which shows exact layout of buttons there will be at election with all the names. So in theory I can practice at home pressing on buttons (I think the paper folds out to same size as the actual booth machine).

So it's pretty convenient. Of course I still have to go online to look each individual's positions, but there's no way to present an unbiased view of each candidate, at very least you will present them in some order, and even that matters.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's kind of a mess, but does this page help? [http://www.fec.gov/data/CandidateSummary.do](http://www.fec.gov/data/CandidateSummary.do)

Edit: You can find which district you're in by putting your ZIP code in here [http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/](http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. Lots of good information out there, just I think there is a real need for it to be made more accessible for lazy people like me.

<comment><USER4> Found this today [http://yourfuckingpollingplace.com/](http://yourfuckingpollingplace.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't know what state you're in, but google for your secretary of state's website. They'll usually have all the info.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup! [http://www.elections.state.md.us/elections/2014/primary_cand...](http://www.elections.state.md.us/elections/2014/primary_candidates/)

They have all of the information there but I would have to know all of my districts to get a complete view... it's not as simple as I'd like and from what I can see there definitely isn't a nation-wide site/app which can tell me who is on my ballot so I can educate myself prior to an election.

<comment><USER6> This seems to be what you want:

[https://voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/VoterSearch](https://voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/VoterSearch)

On the page it says _You can use this tool to:_ ... _View your sample ballot._ "<state> sample ballot" is probably the most effective search to find these things.

My state lets anyone look at any ballot, that seems better than asking for voter information to show something (but you have to look up the district info first). Maybe I just didn't find the option there.

I think the value provided by aggregating the info that most states already have obligations to provide isn't that huge an opportunity. "Vote MD" seems to try, but I just came across it by accident just now, I don't know anything about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> democracy.com and crowdpac.com I think both have info on local candidates available</comment>


Apple seeking next-gen smaller, cheaper Lidar for self-driving cars – Autoblog - <AUTHOR> https://www.autoblog.com/2019/04/17/apple-smaller-cheaper-lidar-self-driving-cars/ <comment><USER2> To paraphrase Steve Jobs, self-driving is a feature, not a product.

I'm pretty sure once LIDARs become cheap commodity hardware then every line will have self-driving, just like it has happened with every other new thing in automobiles since forever.</comment>


Future Economists Will Probably Call This Decade the 'Longest Depression' - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-delong/global-economic-depression_b_8924596.html <comment> rm_-rf_slash In the course of selling his New Deal to the impoverished American public, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt pitched his reforms by stating: "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all try something. The millions who are in want will not stand by silently forever while the things to satisfy their needs are within easy reach."

The most frustrating part of this "longest depression" is that in our hyperconnected age, there more ideas than ever to at least try, from guaranteed income to subsidized apprenticeships, yet our elected representatives spend at least half of their time asking for money to run in their next election, and nothing at all gets done. For at least the United States, any substantial economic reform will require a corresponding reconstruction of how our representatives campaign and are elected and held responsible to the needs of their constituents, lest the economic engine be left to muster no more than a tired sputter.

<comment><USER2> In my opinion, the most frustrating part is that despite our hyperconnectedness, people still believe the propaganda that we're not in a depression or that our leaders got us out of the recession. Future economists will call the decade the "longest depression" not out of 20/20 hindsight, but simply because there will no longer be a need to make things seem rosy.

<comment><USER3> The propaganda is the statement that we are in a depression. We are NOT in a depression, nor a recession and have not been for several years. So, in fact, historians will not at all call this period a depression.

More likely, they will look back and wonder why so many people thought things were bad when, by all objective measurements, things were actually quite good. Low inflation, low commodities prices, decent wage growth, cheap housing, strong stock growth, a huge surplus of investment capital.

<comment><USER4> Does no one remember how negative everyone was at the height of the boom in 2007? We look back on that period as a time of incredible prosperity, but I remember it was basically the same as today: everyone complaining about everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> First off, that prime age employment graph is a problem. The best way to lie with a graph is to fuck with the scale, so unless your intentionally misrepresenting data, your graphs should start at 0.

Secondly, his reasoning is, as he says,

"Back before 2008, I used to teach my students that during a disturbance in the business cycle, we'd be 40 percent of the way back to normal in a year."

Yet, this has never been the case after a major crash. Not in 2008, nor '99, '87, '78, etc. Compared to history, we are doing a bit better than previous recoveries.

Sounds like he's just pissed off that the US is the doing well despite not following his political beliefs regarding economic policy. It's like a preacher on the street corner talking about how we are all on the path to hell, despite all evidence to the contrary.

</comment><comment><USER5> We already have a "Long Depression": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression)

There are some interesting parallels to the current time - that was the era of the robber barons, for instance.

<comment><USER6> Big difference was dependence on gold and/or silver for currency at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like goalpost moving, where slightly mediocre growth becomes a 'depression'

The 2008 recession, while deep and sudden, was narrow, only lasting about 16 months until growth picked up, where it has remained. Hardly a decade.

Also, the authors seem to be cherry picking the bad data (weak wage growth, China, shrinking labor force) and ignoring the good data such as exports, consumer spending, robust S&P 500 profits & earnings, technological innovation, stock market gains, etc.

 _Right now, we're in a Goldilocks economy of modest growth, no stagnation, tame inflation, and no meaningful economic headwinds. Some pundits like Summers and Krugman bemoan how America's economic growth is too anemic, especially compared to the 40′s and 50′s, and that its best days are behind it, but as I show here and in the graph below, US GDP growth has broken from the pack, since 2008 exceeding pretty much all g-20 nations. Yeah, 2-3% GDP growth ain't great, but compared to pretty much everywhere else that has either no growth (Japan, UK, France) or high-inflation growth (Turkey, India, Brazil) – it's pretty good._

source: [http://greyenlightenment.com/america-is-not-in-decline- long-...](http://greyenlightenment.com/america-is-not-in-decline-long-post/)

 _And that is especially impressive for an economy as large as America. We're never going to get back to 40′s era growth, and that's fine. Law of large numbers and diminishing returns. It's harder to grow an economy that is 5x larger at the rate it was growing when it was 5x smaller.

Post-2008 GDP growth is pretty much back to the historical average, or at least back to where it was in the late 90′s and 2000′s. Not hyper-speed growth, but certainty not recessionary.

Recent real GDP (below) doesn't differ too much from historical performance:_

[http://i.imgur.com/znVtqaH.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/znVtqaH.jpg)

Real US GDP growth is roughly back to where it was between 1997-2007, and no one was complaining about stagnation back then.

</comment><comment><USER8> "I was wrong. He was right."

That's an statement that you don't see frequently. Huge respect to professor DeLong.

<comment><USER9> I can take more evidence than has been accumulated over the last 5 years to turn him around, but once he changes his mind, he's usually pretty up-front about it and giving credit where it is due. You are right - it's a nice feature of his character.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Back before 2008, I used to teach my students that during a disturbance in > the business cycle, we'd be 40 percent of the way back to normal in a year. > The long-run trend of economic growth, I would say, was barely affected by > short-run business cycle disturbances. There would always be short-run > bubbles and panics and inflations and recessions. They would press > production and employment away from its long-run trend -- perhaps by as much > as 5 percent. But they would be transitory.

Wait, how do you know this isn't the long-term trend now?

<comment><USER11> This has bugged me for a while, too. People look at the trend from 2000-2008, and think that it was the long-term trend. But we were blowing a bubble then; why does anyone think that that growth rate was sustainable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's the decade(s) where it took a really long time for us to figure out we just can't have our cake and eat it too.

If we want to continue with our economic preferences toward growth and capitalism, fine, but we also need to make sure the people at the bottom have enough to contribute meaningfully too, or we blunt the potential in all of that.

It really is like a field. Farmer grows some years of high yield, high drain on the soil crops. Good times, until they aren't.

Greed may see sucking it dry as a good thing, but the expectation of high profit at low investment just won't last. What happens when the bounty in a rich, fertile soil is gone?

Tepid returns, that's what. Increases in risks and costs too.

Edit: One could seek new, fresh ground, and repeat this. At some point, there is a lot of sour, drained ground with the winners all fighting over the ever shrinking fertile ground remaining, a clear case of diminishing returns at the macro level, despite many success stories suggesting otherwise.

On the other hand, either taking a little less, say by staggering crops or resting ground, or reinvesting some of what is gained to keep the ground healthy and fertile, act together and the bounty possible goes from an awesome peak to something less, still good, but sustainable longer term. Wealth can still be accumulated, but perhaps less liquid and larger amounts happen over longer periods of time.

In a very general sense, this all feels a lot like placing blame and shifting risks and costs around to avoid the more simple, direct and growing issue of how many of us just aren't able to participate in the economy in a growth meaningful way.

In this sense, disruption is like crack. Big gains are often had, and we like, want and need those, but it's all just buying more time, not actually getting at root causes. Because of that, many larger gains are offset by problem growth and tepid demand growth, neither of which do any of us longer term good.

And while each success appears to hint at an answer, we in a macro sense, just can't seem to string enough of them together to make sustainable gains.

GDP limps along, while we all chase bright spots... and for many, standard of living declines, despite some growth which should seemingly preserve at least parity.

</comment><comment><USER13> Decade recession, maybe, depression no. Depression is when few who want to work have jobs and many dont have money for necessities. 80 years since the last one. People may not be getting ahead like they used to, but few are actually suffering.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is a terrible article. It strikes me as too technical to do anything but anger the casual reader (see the article's comment section for examples) and too vague to say anything meaningful to the informed reader.

The only new information presented here is the professor's (extremely late) admission that his strict adherence to a misguided school of theoretical economics that no longer applied in the face of structural changes and non- economic factors ("politics and ideology" as he repeats throughout the article) was wrong. Great - how much did they pay you to put your brand name behind this article in order to lend _The World Post_ , the Huffington Post's new highbrow project, credence?

As for what the author says we should do:

 _What we need now is 1) debt relief to unwind the overhang and 2) much tighter financial regulation to prevent the growth of new fragilities. And if those prove inconsistent with full recovery, then we need massive government spending on infrastructure and other investments financed by money printing until full employment is reattained.

The second task will be one of political organization. For until politicians, finance ministry technocrats and central bankers feel under pressure to respond to and in fact internalize the diagnoses of Stiglitz, Eichengreen, Wolf and others, our problems will remain, as Stiglitz puts it, "not rooted in economics, but in politics and ideology."

And it is only after those ideological and political blockages have been removed that the tasks of economic policy -- and then of shifting policy to deal with the new problems that arise as consequences of fixing our current economic policies -- can be seriously begun._

1) _debt relief to undwind the overhand_

First of all, which debt is he referring to? Which overhang?

Bank mortgage debt caused by people taking out stupid loans on stupid housing projects, then walking away from that debt? That was already absolved and nationalized by in 2008.

Federal government debt? So we're going to ask everyone (including our own pension funds) who owns a treasury bond to forget that they have some claim that the US gov promised to repay? Or should we continue with QE and currency wars to try and devalue the dollar so that old debts become relatively less expensive, and long-term interest rates continue to fall?

Student loan debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy? This one is actually semi-reasonable, but would create a huge moral hazard for anyone looking to invest in education. We should probably stop creating that debt in the first place.

The debt that the captains of finance and industry owe to the average American for leading their companies and the country in an irresponsible and destructive fashion? Only one trader saw jail time post financial crisis - Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse who is serving 30 months. The rest have apparently absolved their debt through billions in fines paid out by the shareholders of the companies they managed. [1]

2) _much tighter financial regulation_

We established the Financial Stability Board, which adopted Basel III capital requirements, countercyclical capital buffers, surcharges for TBTF banks, stricter liquidity coverage ratios, minor decentralization of TBTF banks, enhancements to the terrible securitization model, etc. [2] What additional regulation is the author calling for, specifically?

Not to mention that financial regulation is causing the banks to be unable to lend out QE money! AKA restricting aggregate supply! So even if we were able to boost aggregate demand, it would be met with banks shrugging and saying - we need to keep more capital due to new regulation so we can't invest in your business or provide you with a loan, sorry.

3) _massive government spending on infrastructure and other investments financed by money printing until full employment is reattained_

Why would you return to Keynesian ideals when you've just admitted they were wrong?! We've already "printed" all the money we need through QE. We then gave it to the banks, who have subsequently parked it with the Federal Reserve, earning interest on it due to the LACK OF AGGREGATE DEMAND that the author describes in the first paragraph! It would make more sense for the Fed to enact a _negative_ interest rate in order to spur the banks into loaning that money out!

As for spending on infrastructure - what budgets should we cut to get the funds? Social security and healthcare (~50% of budget [3])? Older voters would destroy any candidate who would even suggest such a thing, as they very well should. They contributed what the gov said was their fair share, they expect to be paid back in their old age.

Defense department (17%)? Good luck getting that past war lobbies and a public that's terrified of any mention of terrorism whether real or imagined. Other mandatory (12%)? It's mandatory. Interest (6%)? Can't change without renegging on bond contracts which would be terrifically destructive.

[1] [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how- wall...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets- bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/)

[2] [https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2014/wp1446.pdf](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2014/wp1446.pdf)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/media/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_- _FY_2011.png)

<comment><USER15> > Older voters would destroy any candidate who would even suggest such a > thing, as they very well should. They contributed what the gov said was > their fair share, they expect to be paid back in their old age.

So people have a moral ('fair' is a moral judgement word) right to unbounded medical services because some politician told them in the past that they could have things without paying for them? Would it be 'fair' for the youth of today to pay 50% of their earnings (plus all existing taxes) to the government to provide those services?

<comment><USER14> I'm 23. Do I think paying 50% of our budget on medicare and social security is sustainable? No. Personally, I believe it to be completely unsustainable given the lower birthrates, higher medical costs, higher levels of chronic disease and obesity, much higher life expectancies.

Can I empathize with someone who paid into these programs with years of hard work and is expecting the "fair" payout they were promised? Yes.

Am I making a value judgement of what is truly "fair"? No. That's completely subjective and can be argued in favor of either side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> elephant in the room alert : huffingtonpost.com is a click farmer with questionable content.

<comment><USER17> So point out where the article is wrong.

Argument fallacy alert: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A Solow-humper sees the error of his ways. It's the feel good hit of the new year.

<comment><USER19> Just curious, what do you think any of this has to do with Solow? Brad Delong was mistaken about certain shocks within the framework of the 'Keynesian' model - the Solow model is about how investment, capital and productivity (enabled by technology) sets long-run output.

<comment><USER18> > Back before 2008, I used to teach my students that during a disturbance in > the business cycle, we'd be 40 percent of the way back to normal in a year. > The long-run trend of economic growth, I would say, was barely affected by > short-run business cycle disturbances.

it was a stupid flip comment based on that, probably best it was downvoted</comment></comment></comment>


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Company offers to pay people to drink coffee - <AUTHOR> https://www.wpri.com/dont-miss/indiana-company-offers-to-pay-people-to-drink-coffee/ <comment><USER2> "Our European visitors are important to us.

This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws."</comment>


Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skylake-users-given-18-months-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/ <comment><USER2> it'll still work fine in linux, so no worries.</comment>


Show HN: Street View Meets Snapchat: Interactive Neighbourhood Tours - <AUTHOR> http://buzzcrowd.co

<comment><AUTHOR> Imagine if you could walk around the whole neighbourhood, and into every store, and choose all the things they offer, like all the different items on the menu, to see what they really look like. Then you'd know what to eat for dinner tonight, from home!</comment>


Show HN: Check the smoothness of webpages using rendering perf metrics - <AUTHOR> http://perfmonkey.com/#trynow

<comment><USER2> Yeah not happening:

> This application will be able to read and write all public repo data. This > includes the following:

<comment><AUTHOR> You can also change this file - [https://github.com/PerfMonkeyCo/browser-perf- runner/blob/mas...](https://github.com/PerfMonkeyCo/browser-perf- runner/blob/master/config.json) and send a pull request to the repo. Will run the same tests for you.</comment></comment>


How to Go from a Engineering Student to an Entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaJKPCdimLA

<comment><USER2> Hm so all the successful entrepreneurs were younger than 30 years old when they started?</comment>


The Freelancer's Guide - <AUTHOR> https://freelancersguide.co

<comment><AUTHOR> An online course teaching freelancers how to communicate better, land more clients, boost your sales, and kickstart your freelancing career.</comment>


I wish I'd never been born: the rise of the anti-natalists - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/14/anti-natalists-childfree-population-climate-change <comment></comment>