Patent Office finds voice, calls for software patent sanity - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080728-patent-office-becoming-a-voice-for-software-patent-sanity.html <comment><USER2> This reads particularly well to me. Are his sources valid? Can anyone with more knowledge on the subject suggest whether this guy's talking sense?

<comment><USER3> Timothy B. Lee is a little off in his analysis. He refers to the Supreme Court not allowing algorithms to be patented. This is true. He is right here. But his next line about the Federal Circuits is off.

"Unfortunately, the Federal Circuit has ruled that merely loading an algorithm onto a general-purpose computer and executing it transforms it into a patentable invention."

That is also true, and furthermore, which Lee doesn't point out, is that the Supreme Court has affirmed this. See Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981).

The often cited landmark case that affirmed this is State Street Bank. See State Street Bank & Trust Co. v. Signature Financial Group, 149 F.3d 1368 (Mass. 1998).

That decision ruled that an algorithm that is calculated by a computer meets the statutory subject matter of patentable inventions. The Federal Circuit in Massachusetts decided that case. The Supreme Court declined to review the decision because at that time the SCOTUS thought the Federal Court got it right.

I am still reviewing Lee's other analysis. There is lots of stuff there. It will take some more time.

<comment><USER4> In any case, if the principle stands that embodying an algorithm in a general- purpose computer does not meet the standard for a patentable device, so many bogus patents will be invalidated that it will be like Christmas. We can end this ridiculous cold war and get on with the work of creating great software without worrying about trolls and bullies.

We're not there yet but there's more hope now than I've felt in ages.</comment></comment></comment>


Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti Push the Limit of Gaming Graphics - <AUTHOR> http://en.businesstimes.cn/articles/102289/20180828/nvidia-s-geforce-rtx-2080-and-rtx-2080-ti-push-the-limit-of-gaming-graphics.htm <comment><USER2> This blog post is just an outline of the Nvidia PR. I don't know how anyone can claim it will "Push the Limit of Gaming Graphics" when there aren't even benchmarks. No one knows how these cards will perform.

<comment><USER3> This x100. It's weird how so many sites, tomshardware being the most infamous of this recently, are trying to push the hype on these cards with so little information.

Take a peep at the comments on this article below \--- [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-rtx-gpus-worth- the-...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-rtx-gpus-worth-the- money,37689.html)

<comment><USER2> It's not unique to TomsHardware, though they are a prominent offender. Look up "reviews" for any tech product, almost every article will be mostly copy and paste from PR. This is on purpose: any marketing agency worth their salt will have relationships with major publishers to get content promoted and editorialized. It even happens with indie people with large social media followings. See the agency Social Native, for example.

tl;dr everything is astroturfed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > mining-related GPU sales only account for 9 percent of its sales in the > first quarter of 2018 as the majority of its revenue still comes from the > gaming sector.

Doubt. is this just me?

<comment><USER5> You don't have to speculate. Since nVidia is a public company their 10-K tells you everything [1].

"GPU business revenue was $2.77 billion...OEM sales included $289 million related to GPUs for cryptocurrency mining."

289/2777 = 10.4%

[1] [https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_financials/quarter...](https://s22.q4cdn.com/364334381/files/doc_financials/quarterly_reports/2019/NVIDIA-Q1Y19-Form-10Q.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am interested to see to what degree the Ray tracing improves realism and is adopted by major game engines and how difficult it is to use.

<comment><USER7> The advantage of ray tracing is all about reflections - not just with glossy reflective surfaces.

A ray-traced scene can have correct reflections, radiosity, shadows, etc. Reflections also lose their resolution limit, since they are no longer accomplished with a temporary camera.

As far as usage goes, that is very dependent on an engine's current rendering pipeline. The main difference would be with the way fragment shaders work. Instead of rasterizing triangles, you ray-trace a scene.

This also changes the way shadows are mapped, and the way reflections are done.

Here is a nice page I found with a lot more detail:

[https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3-wiki/wiki/2.6.1.-Ray- tracing...](https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3-wiki/wiki/2.6.1.-Ray-tracing-with- OpenGL-Compute-Shaders-%28Part-I%29)</comment></comment>


Annual Returns on Stock, T.Bonds and T.Bills: 1928 – Current - <AUTHOR> http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html <comment><USER2> Do keep in mind that absolute returns are not the most important factor in investing. What you should care about are risk-adjusted returns of a particular asset, and return stability of your whole portfolio.

You can always use leverage to magnify the returns of any asset class up to whatever level you want. The only limiting factor there is risk and the cost of borrowing.

Before I learned about finance I thought that the purpose of diversification was safety. And it is, in part. But as a consequence of the AM-GM inequality [1], diversification actually increases your long-term returns. A returns stream of 8% every year will have substantially more money than a returns stream with a mean of 8%, that bounces up and down. If you play around with some numbers, you'll quickly see how profoundly important this fact is.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_arithmetic_and_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_arithmetic_and_geometric_means)

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see a primer for leveraged diversification for people at the Bogleheads level. A lot of people are under the impression that a three-fund portfolio is the pinnacle of responsible self-investing, or a target-date retirement fund. But when I dig in I see people regularly make the point that that isn't true diversification, that asset class diversification isn't sufficient, that diversification is about measuring what investments move counter to each other in different macroeconomic environments, that leveraging is good, etc. I want to know more about how to apply all that when managing retirement funds at Fidelity or Vanguard, but I'm never going to work for a quant firm.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's right. What you want to do is maximize your sharpe ratio. You can play around with this python package to get a sense for how it works:

[https://github.com/robertmartin8/PyPortfolioOpt](https://github.com/robertmartin8/PyPortfolioOpt)

What you should be trying to achieve is a portfolio that earns the exact same return every single year, and you can do that in part by looking at historical covariance of the asset's time series. However, you also want to take a prospective view, and think about which asset classes may become correlated in the future.

There's no universal answer here (in the out of sample case - you can solve it in-sample), however. And another huge, huge factor is tax. Making sure your investments are tax-efficient is _extremely_ important. Nothing will do more to ruin your compounding than taxes. So whatever you do, carefully consider the tax implications of your choices.

A lot of people focus on the tax _rate_. But what's actually quite a bit more important is the tax _frequency_. If you pay long term capital gains every two years on your whole portfolio...that's much worse than paying short term capital gains once at the very end (over a long period). What this means is that you want to choose things like passive ETFs, that are not taxed on their internal rebalancing. Even if you were to find a mutual fund that beat that ETF by 1% every year, the tax consequences of that fund would likely make it not worthwhile, before even considering the high fees it would likely charge you.

<comment><USER4> > _What you should be trying to achieve is a portfolio that earns the exact > same return every single year_

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but wouldn't that mean that you end up with a 100% cash portfolio? After all, that portfolio has exactly the same nominal return every year: 0%.

I would expect that I have to choose a relative weight, to tune the trade-off between maximizing expected returns vs minimizing dispersion of returns.

edit: after reading a bit, it seems that changing this weight would trace out what is called the "efficient frontier".

<comment><USER2> Sorry, stable returns are not the _only_ consideration. You want them to be as high as you can, while maintaining stability. There is obviously a tradeoff there, and yes, 'efficient frontier' is the term of art for choosing points along this optimal curve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that for the 2007 financial crisis, you only had to wait until early 2012 to make up your loses.

Even for the crash of the early 1930's, after 8 years you were back to where you were.

<comment><USER6> That discounts businesses that collapse entirely, or under-preform enough to exit the index market. Indexes are misleading because they have a strong survivor bias. Stocks that slipped out of the S&P 500 entirely no longer register, but the money you had in them sure does.

[https://seekingalpha.com/article/207935-is-there- survivorshi...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/207935-is-there-survivorship- bias-in-index-performance)

I'd like to see the S&P performance of _then current index stocks_ over the same time period, im guessing it would be significantly worse.

<comment><USER7> What happens to your money if you invest in an index fund and companies drop out of the index?

<comment><USER8> The fund rebalances regularly. Before the company is dropped out its value will have dropped, of course, causing the entire fund to drop proportionally in value.

Index funds typically rebalance quarterly, I believe. The index also rebalances, usually called reconstitution [1]; the Russell indexes rebalance yearly, for example.

Which means there can be a discrepancy between the fund and the index at any given time. This can result in arbitrage opportunities, I believe.

Interestingly, the selling and purchasing involved in adding or removing a stock from an index/fund also has an effect on the market [2].

[1] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reconstitution.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reconstitution.asp)

[2] [https://www.cxoadvisory.com/miscellaneous/strategies-for- exp...](https://www.cxoadvisory.com/miscellaneous/strategies-for-exploiting- index-rebalancing/)

<comment><USER5> The broad index funds (VTI, Russel) are indexed to market cap, so when individual stock prices change, it stays balanced or very close to it.

When a fund rebalances, it has tax consequences, so funds are incentivized not to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Keep in mind that these are cherry-picked, they only include American returns. The 20th century was an exceptional one for the United States. The 21st century may also be, but you should definitely be diversifying globally.

The worst case return definitely isn't on this list, it's the returns from 1914 Germany, which didn't break even until 2014...

<comment><USER10> Definitely. Having said that very few countries have an advanced financial system. Probably a handful of cities globally, and even then some like Singapore or HK werent a thing 100 years ago.

But about that whole Germany thing, they did kinda, sorta, really screwed the pooch on that one by starting 2 world wars. Maybe they kinda, sorta, you know...had it coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now the fun part. Pick any 30 year period, and you will beat inflation with stocks. Even if you get in at a peak, 30 years later, you will be well ahead.

<comment><USER12> This happened for one 100 year period when the world grew from 2bn to 7bn. Good luck in the next 30

<comment><USER3> You think we're at market top for the next 30 years? Inflation adjusted?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It would have been great if someone could have also added REITs. The argument I always hear is real estate vs the stock market.

<comment><USER14> Real estate is tricky because you're usually gambling with someone else's money (ie a mortgage) and your access to that is dependent on many factors like provable income and credit rating.

<comment><USER15> He said REITs- ones' personal income and credit rating is not relevant

<comment><USER14> You're right, he did, but "the argument I always hear is real estate vs the stock market" doesn't make me think REIT, it makes me think of a renter considering buying a house as an investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Last weekend I built an S&P returns calculator that exposes similar statistics and adjusts for inflation.

Accounting for inflation reduces the ROI by an order of magnitude, but the result is still impressive! (36,560.12% return)

[https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/stocks/s-p-500/1928](https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/stocks/s-p-500/1928)

<comment><USER17> The bar plot below "Here's the rate of gains and loss by month, including dividends" has the y-axis off by 100x (i.e. 0.2% instead of 20%).

<comment><USER16> Thanks. Decimal conversion issue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I recommend you download the spreadsheet, it can be really helpful in doing the 'null' hypothesis in financial analysis. I always like to compare my choices in investments versus the 'stick it into SPX500 ETFs' as the alternative. To do that you need to collect all this data, which is doable, but hey here they have it all in a nice package.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm curious -- what does HN think of factor investing [0]? It has been shown over long periods of time to outperform the total market, and has seen many new ETFs available. Does anyone here tilt towards small cap value? Do you think those effects will last, now that they're more widely known, or are the last 15 years evidence of them weakening? I've been looking into investing but I'm probably going with a total world stock market. Part of the reason I find those ETFs less attractive are the higher associated fees as well as the more "active" look. I have trouble believing anyone who claims there is a way to consistently outperform the market while charging me for it.

[0] [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/factor- investing.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/factor-investing.asp)

</comment><comment><USER20> Which 30 year period you get to live and work in is what matters most, and the timing of the bad years. Which is why I recommend this calculator: [https://firecalc.com/](https://firecalc.com/).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see this plugged in to a tool that asks 1) What allocation percentage of stocks/bonds do you want, 2) What length of period in years (i.e. 20 years, 40 years), 3) What confidence level (50%, 75%, 90%) and yields what APY you can expect. (The higher the confidence, the lower the APY.)

I'm still convinced that the general advice out there is highly out of whack, and that someone's expected returns should be very low. I'm currently modeling under 2% (post-inflation, more like 4% with) for the future, for a simple allocation model and a 10-year window.

<comment><USER21> I like to use Portfolio Visualizer for that sort of thing:

[https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/monte-carlo- simulation](https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/monte-carlo-simulation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Given the bulk of a median American household's wealth is tied to the equity of their primary residence, it would be interesting to see how these returns stack an investment in a single family residential home.

I imagine it would be difficult to parse out home improvements and so forth, but it would be a comparison that more people to could relate to given the average person doesn't buy T-bills and such.

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's a quickie (linear/log) line chart of the data in this table:

[https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/annual-returns-on- stocks...](https://observablehq.com/@jashkenas/annual-returns-on-stocks- treasury-bonds-and-treasury-bills)

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm interested in how they're pricing the S&P 500 before it existed.

Yes, you could just say, "the biggest 500 public companies in the US" \-- but it's a little more nuanced than that, so it'd be interesting to see how it's calculated.

</comment><comment><USER25> So a $100 investment in an S&P 500 equivalent (not yet an established index) on January 1st 1928 would be worth $382,850 by January 1st 2019? That's over a 250x return after adjusting for inflation, pretty neat.

<comment><USER26> With maybe the note that $100 in 1928 was worth quite a bit...

I am drifting into another point entirely and your point still stands.

<comment><USER27> Looks like back then most people made $.40-$.60 an hour, so figure $900 a year?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Wait! These figures are not inflation adjusted. Inflation has been about 15X since 1928. So, the $382,000 shown on the chart for 2018 is now worth about $26,000 in 1928 dollars, against $143 value sometime in 1928. That is, in constant dollars, about 180 x over 90 years, not a bad return on investment, but, not what's shown on this chart!

However, if you start your comparison with 1932 instead, market average value has increased from about $50 into about $26000, or 520 times return over investment over 86 years, a dramatically better result! Illustrating the second most basic rule of investing: buy low.

Consider, if you'd invested in a market fund in 1999 instead, you'd have turned $156,000 into about $253,000 (inflation adjusted) or a gain of about (uh-oh) much less than 2x over almost 20 years. In other words, ROI of much less than 10% per year. Investments not so good in this century, even with the huge stock market run-up of the past few years!

Just for comparison, a plumber in the US seems to have made about $1.25 an hour or so in 1928, compared to about $27 an hour in 1998 (according to BLS). In constant dollars, wages seem to have less than doubled. So, long term, investors did much, much better than workers, that's for sure!

And since 1997 plumbers have just kept up with inflation, according to BLS (going from $17.50 an hour in 1997 to to $27 an hour in 2019 -- equivalent to $17.50 in 1997 dollars).

So, big news. Invested capital has increased much faster than compensation of labor in the US, both long and short term. Well, if you think plumbers are typical.

Obviously in the past 20 years, hacker pay has done much better than plumber pay! In fact, hacker pay has increased much more than return on investment! Does this mean, capitalists should fight for lower hacker wages? Or does it mean, we have met the enemy and it is us? Only time will tell...

</comment><comment><USER29> The volatility of equities in the 1928-1942 period is crazy.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, but given the historical contex it's understandable if not expected. It's the great crisis (probably including it's preludium) untill 2nd WW situation clarified.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why is the volatility so high only recently on the 10 year note.

e.g. historically it only fluctuated low single digits, while stocks have always had large volatility ranges.

<comment><USER32> Possibly due to the weird interest rates in the last 10 years? I think T-Bond pricing will vary based on interest rates, like if the interest rate has declined since you bought your bond it will be worth more iirc, so the weird interest rates market recently could have an outsized effect here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wish they'd say what "Stocks" means. Is it the entire market? On which exchanges?

This is a relevant read: [https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/survivorshipbias.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/survivorshipbias.asp)

<comment><USER34> The very leftmost column of the table has the heading 'S&P 500 (includes dividends)', so I assume that's the meaning of 'stocks' in the other columns. If not, that would be very misleading.

<comment><USER35> I think it's worth noting that S&P 500 index funds didn't exist until the 70s. You'd be spending a lot of time and money to approximate it before that.

<comment><USER15> The S&P 500 just tracks the largest 500 publicly traded companies. So no, it's not difficult to approximate.

<comment><USER35> You need to pay commission and spread every time you rebalance your portfolio (daily, if you copy the frequency of modern funds)

So at the £5ish/trade of my current broker, that's a cool £912500/year on just commission.

For some reason the massively reduced ease of entry to a trading strategy like this is never considered when lauding its historical performance.

<comment><USER15> > daily, if you copy the frequency of modern funds

Modern S&P500 funds like SPY or VOO rebalance quarterly FYI

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Is this adjusted for inflation?

</comment><comment> nappy-doo FYI, stocks show CAGR of 9.59%.

</comment><comment><USER37> The way to play treasuries are in massive highly leveraged carry trades. They're not for actually holding, unless you are starting with $100,000,000* in capital.

*This amount is tied to how much you want to make a year based on the treasury bond's interest rate. This will always be lower than inflation.

<comment><USER38> > The way to play treasuries are in massive highly leveraged carry trades.

Isn't that how you lose all your money when e.g. the Fed lowers interest rates?

<comment><USER39> I guess hint was in the word "play", hehe</comment></comment></comment>


Did Google and the Hour of Code Get "Left" and "Right" Wrong? - <AUTHOR> http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/12/24/169204/did-google-and-the-hour-of-code-get-left-and-right-wrong <comment><USER2> No</comment>


The iPhone 3Gs Debacle Switches into High Gear - <AUTHOR> http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/06/the-iphone-3gs-debacle-switche.html <comment><USER2> ... produces whining sound</comment>


Reddit Bans Nazi Groups and Others in Crackdown on Violent Content - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/reddit-violence-policy.html <comment><USER2> It's really, really not easy to stand up for the rights of Nazis. If you're a Nazi, you can use voat.co as they are very free speech oriented. You don't have to be a Nazi to participate, but it's a good idea to have a thick skin if you do go there.

I go there and talk to the White Nationalists. They are pretty much Nazis. They know I'm not white and that I don't agree with them. They don't scare me. They are scared and powerless, looking for meaning in their empty lives, easily swayed, and not entirely unaware of some of the ironies.

I've actually invited a few of them to my home, but no takers so far.

Point is, I'm not sure banning does any good. Reddit can legally do so. I still think there's a better way to deal with the mentally ill and disenfranchised.

<comment><USER3> > I go there and talk to the White Nationalists. They are pretty much Nazis.

Nazi is a term loosely used today. Actual 3rd Reich Nazis commandeered by America & the Soviet Union after WW2. Wernher von Braun was a committed Nazi & was allegedly a willing participate in WW2 war crimes. See Operation Paperclip for more info.

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Operation_Paperclip](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Operation_Paperclip)

> They are scared and powerless, looking for meaning in their empty lives, > easily swayed, and not entirely unaware of some of the ironies.

White Nationalism is the natural response to Identity Politics. In a sense, I don't blame them for not taking the high road, since Identity Politics has not been kind toward white people & the majority of white people think they are discriminated against. Btw, every racial group thinks they are discriminated against, so it seems like Identity Politics leaves nobody happy.

[http://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white- am...](http://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-americans- think-theyre-discriminated-against)

This leads to the real problem being Identity Politics. White Nationalism, Black Power, La Raza, various Jewish groups, etc. are all entities that create dissonance in the communities of America. Whether the members have valid points or not, there is a sense of tribalism & the inherent backlash.

While it's healthy to promote heritage, legacy, & the positive aspects of a cultural identity; Identity Politics sows division by redistributing opportunity (which is unfair from a merit standpoint) & transferring wealth via government policy.

If we are to have a society based on hard work leading to just reward, where opportunity is given to all, then Identity Politics has no place in it. Even if Identity Politics were to balance opportunity, the underlying issues within communities are not addressed. Instead, the government manages opportunity leading to a culture of entitlement, laziness, dispute, grudges, & group hostility.

<comment><USER4> > Nazi is a term loosely used today.

Not by me. When I say Nazi, I specifically mean someone who publicly identifies with that group, uses their words, wears their clothes, and carries their flag: [http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt- weaken...](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weakened- dead-charlottesville-170920081948414.html)

If you show up to a rally carrying a Nazi flag, I'll unapologetically call you a Nazi. It's only identity politics in the sense that I'm identifying the politics someone espouses based on the symbols and words they're using.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twitter has banned over 350,000 ISIS accounts in the last year or two, and that's happened without Hacker News noticing, as far as I can tell. There's not any stories about it that come up in HN search with as many points as this has now.

How is this situation different?

<comment><USER6> I'll tell you why. Nobody who isn't an ISIS member has ever been called an ISIS member. However the favorite tactic of American left lately has been calling anyone who they disagree with a Nazi. For example most people are probably politically to the right to the likes of Anthony Fantano or Laci Green. And yet both of them have been unironically branded Nazis, as a quick Twitter search will confirm.

So yeah, if you haven't been already, somebody's probably going to brand you a Nazi at some point and call for your banning from every social platform, no matter how "woke" you think you are. It's just a fact of life.

<comment><USER7> > I'll tell you why. Nobody who isn't an ISIS member has ever been called an > ISIS member.

I do seem to recall a certain presidential candidate calling Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama _founders_ of ISIS...

Painting all Muslim or even brown people as ISIS or terrorists is a pretty common rhetorical tactic of the right.

<comment><USER8> > I do seem to recall a certain presidential candidate calling Hillary Clinton > and Barack Obama founders of ISIS...

The clear and obvious intent of that sentence was to imply their policies allowed ISIS to exist, and that they would not exist had the power vacuum not been created. This new literal reading of everything is just another part of the decline of our political discourse.

<comment><USER7> When Hugh Hewitt suggested that Trump only meant it that way, Trump objected: "No, I meant he's the founder of ISIS," Trump said. "I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton."

Trump then explicitly disagreed with that "clear and obvious intent" re a power vacuum:

HH: I don't. I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn't create ISIS. That's what I would say.

DT: Well, I disagree.

[http://www.hughhewitt.com/donald-trump-makes-return- visit/#m...](http://www.hughhewitt.com/donald-trump-makes-return- visit/#more-31501)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing ( well, more like sad ) that the first comments I see are "well, we can agree that nazis are bad, but this is a slippery slope, what about BLM, and antifa"

Nazism - The belief ( on pseudoscience i may add )that other races ( a term that has no scientific basis ) are only worthy of extermination ( death, MDK )

BLM - The belief ( on experiences of some in society ), that Black people are not treated the same in their interactions with the government. Main vehicle, in your face protests.

Antifa - an aggressive anti-hate group ( whose tactics, in the view of some, seem to make them a violent group ). The anti-nazis if you will.

Really? Do these things seem REMOTELY equal?

cue in the nitpicking about my definitions...

PS: to be perfectly clear/blunt, since it seems as I suspected people started nitpicking... One group calls for the extermination of HUMAN BEINGS.. the other calls for the extermination of IDEOLOGY... now see the difference?

free speech DOES NOT and HAS NEVER given you the right to call for the extermination of others... that is as clear cut case of "not protected by free speech" as there is.

and yes.. if you take on the name of "nazi" or "national socialism", well, you don't get to redefine those terms in a "wink wink" manner.

<comment><USER10> Of course people are going to question your definitions when you've gone overboard in making one absolutely wrong and the others absolutely right.

There's bad in both sets, which is why banning 1 group could have an effect on the other 2, eventually.

<comment><USER11> Well to be fair, one is entirely bad, jut to be clear thats the Nazis. There may be some rogue elements in the other groups who perhaps would use violence to further their cause but it is not their fundamental belief. Whereas Nazi ideology specifically calls for the extermination of others, neither of the other 2 groups are anywhere remotely near that position.

There are no good Nazis. Sure there were some Nazis in WWII that were Nazis because they were German soldiers and not necessarily because they wanted to exterminate Jews and gypsies, so some of them did good things (not in the name of the Nazis but because they were not entirely evil people) but anyone claiming to be a Nazi today is doing so because they believe in Nazism ideologically and everything that goes into with it.

<comment><USER12> This is part of the problem with these debates that I've noticed: it's an attempt on the one hand to carry on the debate purely in terms of free speech, abstracted from the contents of any particular ideology.

And yet, part of what makes you "wrong" to oppose speech of particular groups is that you are just as bad as them. That's a judgment of the "wrongness" of a particular ideology, being directly appealed to, to justify a position on free speech.

For some reason that's supposedly _not_ a slippery slope toward widening the scope of "free speech" to include things destructive of democracy.

<comment><USER13> Funny how the "slippery slope" argument seems to only get used by people resorting to false equivalencies immediately upon commencement of discussions on this topic.

<comment><USER12> Right, this is precisely my point. I can't count how many times I've seen people defending hate groups resort to slippery slopes and false equivalences. If you don't give hate groups unrestricted access to audiences, they claim 1984 is supposedly right around the corner.

But if you confront them with the slippery slope of equal logical validity which supports the opposing argument, suddenly they're mindful of the dangers of slippery slope arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why has free speech fallen out of favour with SV? Ironically, it happened rather silently.

It's not just an Eternal September-like phenomenon. The very same people who used to support it not only don't any more but pretend they never did in the first place.

 _Speaking of the founding fathers, I ask him what he thinks they would have thought of Reddit._

 _" A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. It's the digital form of political pamplets._

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit-c...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/02/reddit- co-founder-alexis-ohanians-rosy-outlook-on-the-future-of-politics/3/)

<comment><USER15> There's no shade of gray here? Either you host nazi propaganda, or you're "anti-free speech?"

<comment><USER14> Reddit, Twitter and others have banned a much wider selection of posters and communities than nazis. Of course they lead with NAZIS! but then it's anything from r/coontown to voting in the wrong thread.

To answer your question, you're not running a bastion of free speech if you ban people for their political opinions.

<comment><USER15> Fortunately reddit is banning communities that advocate violence, not communities with certain sets of politics. It just so happens that there's a major overlap of political views to inciting violence.

Even the first amendment recognizes that there are limits to free speech- namely when they infringe on other people's rights.

<comment><USER16> Which political views would those be? Most of the politically-incited violence of the past few years has been left-wing. From Antifa, to the Berkeley riots, to the BLM riots (and BLM-inspired cop executions in Houston), and the "Bernie-bro" attempted assassination.

<comment><USER17> It was Dallas, not Houston.

>Most of the politically-incited violence of the past few years has been left- wing.

Is this claim based on data or anecdotes?

<comment><USER16> From the WITS - [https://imgur.com/a/nE1of](https://imgur.com/a/nE1of)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Incidents_Tracking_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwide_Incidents_Tracking_System)

If you know a good replacement, please let me know. That's worldwide data, but even using worldwide data, there just aren't that many violent Nazis out there.

<comment><USER17> This is going to take me a few minutes...

WITS was discontinued 5 years ago.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/theories- mean...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/theories-meaning- trump-many-sides-remark.html)

[https://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-the-far-right- hol...](https://www.thenation.com/article/why-does-the-far-right-hold-a-near- monopoly-on-political-violence/)

[warning, pdf] [https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/MurderAndE...](https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/MurderAndExtremismInUS2016.pdf)

[2015 study; warning, pdf] [https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/Kurzman_Schanzer_...](https://sites.duke.edu/tcths/files/2013/06/Kurzman_Schanzer_Law_Enforcement_Assessment_of_the_Violent_Extremist_Threat_final.pdf)

I'm actually quite certain that antifa has either been infiltrated by agent provocateurs or is populated by useful idiots. I say this as a life long Republican (until March '03).

Edit: Am I supposed to summarize these 4 articles in order to be considered adequate response to a wiki link of an org that was dissolved 5 years ago?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What tends to happen when toxic subreddits get banned is people who liked them and supported them start whatabouting about edge cases and claim the ban wasn't done "consistently," eagerly pointing out instances of mistaken bans.

It reminds me of the fable, though I forget exactly what it was (edit: Loki's Wager), where someone sought to avoid being beheaded not by claiming innocence but by endlessly disputing where their neck ended and head began.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm. This is going to be interesting. I mean, nearly everyone should be fine with banning Nazis. After all, they're vile and in my opinion don't deserve any place on the world except the inside of a jail cell...

The problem is: where will the line be drawn? What about Black Lives Matter? The more, uh, militant parts of the Antifa movement? Militant animal rights groups (which actually are treated as domestic terrorist groups in some countries!)? All advocate, tolerate or embrace violence in some degree, and as there has been the precedent case of Nazis getting banned, it's going to be difficult.

Of course one can say "we simply don't like Nazis, so we're stricter on them", and I'm fine with that, but I'm not sure if a new (or, for what it's worth, also _current_ government) can't more or less force providers like Reddit (but also Cloudflare and the others who booted Daily Stormer off the net) to revive the "good old Red Scare"...

edit: to clarify, for BLM I don't mean that BLM promotes violence - but there are certainly supporters who believe violence or, in one case, murdering cops, being legitimate ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police_officers)). I don't like it myself that the right wing was able to frame BLM as "taking part in the murder", but that image is not going to be corrected soon.

<comment><USER19> >The problem is: where will the line be drawn?

Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance. If BLM, PETA, Antifa want people of other race/class/sexual orientation harmed in any kind of way, sure go ahead and ban them. If on the other hand they want fair treatment, equality or reprieve from targeted brutality, listen to them and see how we as a society can address their concern. If they resort to violence, arrest them and treat them like you would treat a criminal.

It is not really that hard. Right to free speech does not really mean right to say anything anywhere without any consequence.

The irony in this whole thing is, the more tolerant you are to an inherently intolerant ideology like white-spremacy, the less tolerant we become as a society.

<comment><USER20> > Intolerance, you draw the line at Intolerance.

Not that simple! "Intolerance: unwillingness to accept views, beliefs, or behaviour that differ from one's own".

Does unwillingness to accept Nazi ideology make you intolerant?

<comment><USER19> >Does unwillingness to accept Nazi ideology make you intolerant?

Yes, Intolerant to intolerance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Antifa subreddits will be removed?

<comment><USER21> So they banned Far_Right but [https://www.reddit.com/r/farleft/](https://www.reddit.com/r/farleft/) is ok?

What a cool place Reddit is! /s

<comment><USER22> Maybe take it as a mark of grim respect.

Far left and anarchist groups are generally considered to be unsuccessful in the arc of modern history, with even China partially adopting western aspects of governance to remain competitive. Their successes are almost entirely in appealing to moderates and with heavy appeasement of capitalism. One of the most famous attempt at true communism ended spectacularly, with a bulk victimization of many marginalized people who had been coaxed out of the shadows by a regime that failed to hold power to protect them.

Far right groups are taken much more seriously, because a conflict they started and escalated blighted an entire continent.

If it seems unfair that it's okay to make a video game (admittedly: a very fun, enjoyable game) about killing nazis by the dozen is pop culture but games about killing antifa can't even get news coverage, maybe that's true. It's because the victors of the last conflict against organized fascism accept violence as a constant reaffirmation that the binding substrate of civilization is democracy. You're "in-tribe" if you're on that train. If you seek to subvert or destroy democracy, that triggers violent a rejection by most of the western world.

A topical example: It's generally regarded as somewhat funny that Richard Spencer gets punched. Technically, it's illegal and we accept violence is no way to treat citizens in principle. Yet a lot of people in the US do hold racist views even if you take a very narrow definition of racism, and we don't see mass punching at scale. Spencer's singled out because he's publicly part of the ideology proposing the subversion and destruction of democracy. This turns off many of the typical restraints we'd exercise. Bannon and Yarvin probably need to be cautious of punch sqads as well as their profile raises.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (and imo, justifiably) so. As a general rule, America bends its own rules when it perceives something taking advantage of said rules. That's not a new thing, and it explains a lot of the legislative dithering that we have seen over the decades and a lot of the political rhetoric we see playing out today.

But I really do want to stress how much fun it is to have pop cultural license to go back and play a mindless game like Wolf2 for a bit.

<comment><USER23> I had to do a double take that the KirinDave talking about politics on HN is the same one I watched years back play and manage a Minecraft server with the Yogscast. What a small world!

<comment><USER22> Yeah I used to make modpacks for them. It got boring. But I do still stream Minecraft irregularly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clearly the solution is to corralle all fascists onto one big fenced-in echo chamber. What could go wrong?

<comment><USER25> Possibly, hopefully a very impressive implosion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There goes /r/The_Donald/

<comment><USER27> No, they're still there, and no, everyone who disagrees with you isn't a Nazi.

> we will take action against any content that encourages, glorifies, incites, > or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of > people

This also means that people who encourage you to "punch a Nazi" or that there's nothing wrong with punching a Nazi/racist should also be banned.

<comment><USER28> That place promotes violence and hate on a daily basis.

<comment><USER29> Care to give some evidence for your claims?

<comment><USER28> Go to the sub and click the first post you see.

Evidence provided.

edit: Here is the first non-stickied post I found.

[https://g.redditmedia.com/lWzOghJ9C76p2rMmU3CDWhHTtojbXJ9vlu...](https://g.redditmedia.com/lWzOghJ9C76p2rMmU3CDWhHTtojbXJ9vlulE__NUm6s.gif?fm=mp4&mp4-fragmented=false&s=e27a80f2e8636072fb9889757af2e8d6)

> Here is Hillary Clinton shitting herself on 9/11

> Did PETA publicly complain about the handling of that cattle?

> THE SIDE OF BEEF MARRIED A RAPIST!!!

> Hope she had her shitting pants on

<comment><USER27> First post seen at the top of the front T_D page is this: [http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/26/the-last-time-hillary- had-...](http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/26/the-last-time-hillary-had-a- birthday-she-thought-she-would-be-president-slideshow/)

Which is making fun of a HRC tweet from last october which said "Happy Birthday to this future president".

Doesn't seem very hateful to me.

edit: Basd on your edit, I'm curious what you find hateful about this? HRC passed out on 9/11/16 and was dragged into a waiting van. There is a longstanding meme (in meme-years) about HRC being thrown into the van "like a side of beef", which explains some comments.

Yes, the comments are crass, but is being crass the same thing as "promoting violence and hate"?

<comment><USER28> There was a T_D user who faked a knife attack. He said it was a black person who did it because "he was white". He immediately posted his bloody hand on T_D and said "apparently I look like a NAZI".

It was later found out that he made it up. He cut himself.

He did it intentionally to stir up hate for black people. The entire sub is effectively 4chan. Crass jokes, fake news, subliminal degenerate brainwashing.

It is a breeding ground for people to hate blacks and brown people.

<comment><USER30> Do you have a link? I can't find anything after some cursory googling. Also, how did T_D respond when the hoax came out?

Also, do you see a problem with one person doing something bad, and then blaming a whole group?

<comment><USER28> [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/28/neo-nazi- sta...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/28/neo-nazi-stabbing- fake-colorado-joshua-witt)

I remember seeing the user post the image on T_D immediately. Can't find it now, he likely deleted it. It was highly upvoted.

I don't remember seeing a "we are sorry about the fake story" post.

> do you see a problem with one person doing something bad, and then blaming a > whole group?

I am not saying everyone is lying. I am saying the sub exists to find incredibly colorful stories that center around white people being attacked and victimized to stoke hatred against all non-whites. Muslims/blacks/mexicans/etc.

<comment><USER30> Here's some threads I can find about it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6wn655/remember...](https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6wn655/remember_the_man_stabbed_for_his_neonazi_haircut/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6wp8p6/what_a_l...](https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6wp8p6/what_a_loser/)

Upvoted quotes: "What a fucking idiot.", "What an Imbecile.", "Did he just commit self-harm just to get attention? What a retard.", "That's pathetic. Disavowed.", "On the bright side, someone stabbed him."

If you think that is what T_D is about, you obviously haven't spent much time there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm sure these bans will be totally fair and unbiased.

<comment><USER25> Reddit can ban whoever they way from _their_ site, and people will simply either have to accept it or move to another site.

<comment><USER31> Well of course they can.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's going to be interesting to see how the rights of free association evolve as platforms kick more and more people off of them.

On one hand, most people agree that platform owners get to make the rules for their platforms.

On the other hand, some bans might amount to discrimination based on protected classes.

The most interesting thing imo is that political activities and affiliations are protected classes in California, theoretically political bans are violations just like bans on religion / race. We'll see how it pans out.

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/78p7bz/update_on_s...](https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/78p7bz/update_on_sitewide_rules_regarding_violent_content/dovlpdb/)

Though Nazis have taken over the conversation, they did ban a bunch of fetish subreddits too.

</comment><comment><USER34> And yet this is still online: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sjwhate/comments/73h7mx/i_fuck_sjws...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sjwhate/comments/73h7mx/i_fuck_sjws_for_fun/)

<comment><USER35> While shitty and mean, they aren't advocating for violence in that post.

Do you think mean posts should be outlawed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> I know it is flagged but I want to thank the mods for not truly killing it. It was mostly civil. The mods were pretty decent, and deserve our thanks.

For the most part, the comments were pretty good too. I read them all. ;-)</comment>


Corporate America's 'Elite Charade' - <AUTHOR> https://fortune.com/longform/anand-giridharadas-winners-take-all/ <comment><USER2> The big takeaway for me is that fundamentally tax policy needs to be redistributive. That idea has been under assault in America for decades, along with the idea of government itself, and it's been very successful. Both parties are effectively on board with that. But that is what real change would be.

It's not something small like a basic income, which has become popular for certain VCs and people in Silicon Valley to promote, but real massive and transformational programs that would actually cost those people something. Frankly I think UBI is a cynical ploy to give people some nominal amount to avert something more substantial like Medicare For All (or some other universal healthcare system).

My own politics was pretty neoliberal until a few years ago (markets, globalization, free trade!) but now I'd say I'm firmly in the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders camp. I will vote for anyone that wants universal healthcare, puts a price on carbon emissions, strengthens labor, and takes on monopoly (in the tech industry but other sectors as well).

<comment><USER3> > It's not something small like a basic income, which has become popular for > certain VCs and people in Silicon Valley to promote, but real massive and > transformational programs that would actually cost those people something. > Frankly I think UBI is a cynical ploy to give people some nominal amount to > avert something more substantial like Medicare For All (or some other > universal healthcare system).

I hear this sentiment a lot from people on the left, and I don't understand it. A fairly modest UBI of $1,000 per month (the basis of Yang's campaign) for adult citizens would cost $3 trillion, which is about 14% of the US' GDP. That's a bit less than healthcare as a fraction of the nation's GDP, but it's also a historically unprecedented amount of wealth being directly redistributed. How can one seriously argue that this is not a "massive and transformational" program?

<comment><USER2> Medicare For All would cost $32 trillion over 10 years [1].

[1] [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/7/30/17631240/m...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/7/30/17631240/medicare-for-all-bernie-sanders-32-trillion-cost- voxcare)

<comment><USER4> Compared to the $40 Trillion we are going to spend on private insurance over 10 years that's a bargain.

[https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and- systems/sta...](https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and- systems/statistics-trends-and- reports/nationalhealthexpenddata/nationalhealthaccountshistorical.html)

<comment><USER2> I don't personally care about the cost because I think it's a moral imperative, but yes it'd actually save money if a single payer were negotiating with all the providers and drug companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some years back, I talked with someone who had research funding from the Gates Foundation. The were almost apologetic about it. It seems they felt compromised; that they were serving as cover and cog for a patent generation scheme.

So if the video's argument vis Google doesn't resonate, perhaps that's a simpler example. It's a reoccurring critique of GF in global public health, especially when it's working with Intellectual Ventures, that... it has a strong preference for approaches that generate patents, and profit large incumbents, over approaches without those properties.

In contrasting Tesla vs old-auto engineering culture, someone described an old-auto engineering design career/car decision matrix. If something is good for both career and car, great, do it. If bad and good, drop it. If good and bad, pursue it anyway. So regards engineering social change, it would seem unsurprising to find a variety of engineering cultures present, perhaps with a variety of properties.

</comment><comment><USER2> His talk at Google was great: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM)

<comment><USER6> great talk.. !!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aren't we seeing how this is already backfiring in some ways? I think Google is a good example. This is a company that seemed to stoke socially progressive ideals among employees and then created this environment where employees are protesting the company's involvement with the military, more conservative employees accusing the company of bias, the company now saying political discussion is frowned upon at work, etc.

<comment><USER8> Because it's all sophistry. The elite or corporations have no ideology or principles with which they are operating. They are machines that will say anything anyone wants to hear to make more money. And then they will stop saying it once it no longer works. Same goes with the freedom of speech rhetoric when it was found what it actually means, the elites agreed to put a kibosh on it even if the government can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another thing I hate is all these places asking for additional money to give to charity. So they can engage in corporate giving. If they are so interested in corporate giving why don't they give from their profits?

</comment><comment><USER9> Why not move social policy to the states? Scotus justices have said that, and that's what the constitution directs.

Let people have real democracy, and get what they vote for and experiment with what works and not. Move with your feet if you have to.

The whole world doesn't need to be united under the same social policy. People are also very bad at figuring things out without experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER10> America as an organization exists to leech money from poor and middle class people, from medical costs for people with crappy insurance to traffic fines concentrated in poor areas.

</comment><comment><USER11> Double irony: this article appears in Fortune magazine.

</comment><comment><USER12> While the article was addressing more than just elite philanthropy, it was one of the issues touched upon here and this post is highly relevant reading every time criticism of billionaire philanthropy comes up:

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against- billio...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire- philanthropy/)

</comment><comment><USER13> This article reminded me of Napoleon, who was a smarter and wiser man than most anglophones give him credit for;

> There is no such thing as an absolute despotism; it is only relative. A man > cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows. A sultan who cut > off heads from caprice, would quickly lose his own in the same way. Excesses > tend to check themselves by reason of their own violence. What the ocean > gains in one place it loses in another.

The part that sticks out for me is, "A man cannot wholly free himself from obligation to his fellows." It's a simple statement, a simpler lesson, but a profound statement that we've forgotten. Society wouldn't exist if it weren't for the consent of those around us. Society wouldn't exist without the agreement of those with us. Society is in its essence a bond and a privilege - it gives us the permission to do more and ask for more by the virtue of its existence. We have mutually agreed to not rape and kill each other for scraps, but to let each other do their own thing unless it hurts others (or abrogates their contract with one another).

That's why taxes exist. For me, they're the subscription fee for civilization. There has never been a civilization that hasn't had some form of governemnt. There has never been a civilization that has acted and organized purely on "self interest." Someone has to dig the ditches, run the sewer lines, lay the roads, and stop people with a crowbar from coming into your house and killing you in your bed. Someone has to pay the fee that allows the contract to exist.

Each time this covenant has been breached, it has been met with a short and bloody end. No despot has ever been absolute. Stalin couldn't get out of bed without fearing a gun to his head - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kirov#Assassination_and...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kirov#Assassination_and_aftermath) . Pol Pot might have met an ignominious end - [https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/21/cambodia](https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jan/21/cambodia) [https://web.archive.org/web/20110918095455/http://articles.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110918095455/http://articles.cnn.com/1997-06-21/world/9706_21_pol.pot_1_khieu- samphan-anlong-veng-fields-reign?_s=PM:WORLD) . And Hitler died alone after putting a gun to his head.

If _they_ couldn't rid themselves of their obligations, how can we?

<comment><USER14> Historical note: it has always been true that the rulers have an obligation to the ruled. A fact often totally forgotten these days.

Even kings and queens that subscribed to the notion of divine right, recognised that they had an obligation to the people they ruled over.

This exchange of power was often codified. The relationship wasn't one group of people ruling with an iron fist over another. If you were a serf, you had to provide labour but you received rights and benefits in exchange.

That system often broke down in periods of population growth (a common example is vagrancy laws in the late 16th century) but even there was an established right to riot and dissent as a way of pressing claims.

It was only during the Cold War that we really saw this understanding of dictatorship/monarchy/whatever completely break down (imo, there are a ton of books on the above i.e. Polyani but I am speculating now) as dictators were able to maintain power through their allegiance to the US/Soviet power (and changes in technology made this easier too).

And, of course, our notions of community/society have totally changed too. Substantial reductions in economic and physical uncertainty has made most people unwilling to live in a system in which another person has dominion over you.

But this doesn't change the fact that this is why these systems existed in the first place. And, in most cases, people who have tried to rise up and create systems in which the bottom class rise up and have found themselves crushed under the weight of the obligations they are forced to assume (they do not disappear, risk has to be assumed by someone).

<comment><USER15> > Even kings and queens that subscribed to the notion of divine right, > recognised that they had an obligation to the people they ruled over.

"Divine right of kings" is the fig leaf. The "obligation" comes not from the divine, but from the threat of pitchforks and torches.</comment></comment></comment>


Fuck. You. Money. - <AUTHOR> http://zackarymorris.tumblr.com/post/10246623452/fuck-you-money

<comment><USER2> My thoughts and feeling echo yours nearly in parallel. If you ever decide to make the programmers community a reality, please ping me.

I have had a vision for quite some time of such a community, one that was self sufficient and still focused on technology and the bleeding edge. Working on disruptive technology would be the only way to do it right :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya I think so too. I feel like I'm just getting started, and trying really hard not to fall back into old patterns of passive cynicism. Here are a couple of posts under my old username along these lines that didn't get much attention:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1988313>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2841993>

I'm watching all of these and am trying to put together some kind of site like idevgames.com only with the idea of several developers working together to make a hit and if they do, dividing the funds more fairly (like maybe the main dev gets half and split the rest evenly among everyone else). It would have really forward-thinking concepts, like encouraging people to work remotely if it's better for them and using non-mainstream tools and languages if it gets the job done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Too bad that's at a Tumblr and I can't comment there. I'd point him to posts I've done in that vein over the years. He is not alone. And I'm well before generations were given alphabetical designations.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK I just updated it to have disqus comments, would you mind trying it now? I was a little hesitant to have comments because my blog's going to get pretty inflammatory, but maybe newer comment systems can handle that.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Notado – Content-First Bookmarking - <AUTHOR> https://notado.app/ <comment><USER2> Great frontpage and app. I love the integrations and automation section which shows great potential. Few critics and requests:

* Please make the signup box more visible/highlighted. Took me 2s to find out where to signup.

* Your page is catered towards people who already use a bookmarking serivce. Some of the audience may not yet use a good bookmarking service. For eg: I use a history recorder and don't explicitly bookmark.

* Would be great to see an integration with some push to kindle service. I'd signup in a jiffy. (I use fivefilters currently and never actual "read" anything on a monitor).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback! I have made a note about think about how to engage people who don't already use a good bookmarking service and integrations with Push to Kindle services.

I see what you mean about signup visibility; I'll take a stab at improving this a little later in the week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No self-hosting capabilities unfortunately make this a non-starter for me, but I do really appreciate how slick your front page is and all the integrations you're offering out of the box. I wish you the best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> As I mentioned in another comment, this was not something that I had thought about before reading the suggestions today on HN, but it's definitely something that I am actively considering for the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks exactly like something I've been looking for. Would you ever consider making it available for self hosting ala BitWarden for a license fee? I'd be more than happy to pay a BitWarden like price for if I get to self host this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had not thought of this possibility before reading your comment. It is definitely an option that I will consider for the future, but it is not something that should be expected in the short term.

<comment><USER4> Sounds good. I'll definitely keep my eye on the project. Please let us know if you have a Twitter/Github handle with updates about Notado.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/notado_app](https://twitter.com/notado_app)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest risk for bookmark app nowadays is that you don't know when it's going to disappear.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree with this. It's for this reason that I've tried to make it as easy as possible for users to automatically sync data from their Notado accounts to other services and make regular or ongoing backups either through the API or by listening to their own RSS feeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Your email input box might need some tweaks. I entered my email and had a space after it ( i actually used a text expander to quickly input it resulting in the extra space), it showed "Invalid Email"

Then, I obviously removed the space and got the login link, BUT others might get confused leading to unwanted churn ( in case they also put an extra space)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to report this! I will fix this issue later today.

Edit: The fix is now live

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a post here to explain why I felt the need to create Notado and how it fits into my own workflow: [https://notado.app/about](https://notado.app/about)

</comment><comment><USER7> I use readwise.io as something similar. Does this support adding quotations from books?

I guess you could reference an ISBN database as a hack for the primary key.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't support adding highlights from books; I primarily listen to audiobooks these days so it wasn't a feature that made the cut when I was defining the scope for Notado. Additionally I think that Readwise already handles this use case very well.

I would like to support automatically syncing notes from Notado to Readwise, but it seems that they do not provide a public API yet. It's still possible to indirectly synchronise notes from Notado to Readwise by syncing them to Instapaper as Highlights, and then syncing those Highlights to Readwise, though this isn't something I have done myself so I can't vouch for the reliability of it.

<comment><USER8> One of the creators of Readwise here :)

Love what you're doing and we're about to ship a public API.

Hit us up at firstname.lastname@example.com!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i literally posted the need for a similar app yesterday on reddit data science channel [https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/ho8y6z/best_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/datascience/comments/ho8y6z/best_toolframework_to_save_online_technical/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like this quote from your post:

"i want to be able to remind myself why i bookmarked something so that I later don't have to read through entire article to jog my memory."

This is one of the major things that motivated me to create Notado!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Trying to sign up. I click the "Log in to Notado" email link and get a "401: Unauthorized The request requires user authentication." error.

Am I doing something wrong?

<comment><AUTHOR> The magic link from the login email has expired (they are valid for 5 minutes from the initial request). You'll need to request another sign up/login link from the main page and use it before it expires.

Thanks for taking the time to report this issue! I will fix this later today so that in the case of an expired link being clicked the user is redirected to the landing page with a message that explains the link they tried to use has expired.

<comment><AUTHOR> This has now been addressed and clicking on an expired magic link will now show an error banner explaining to the user that their magic link has expired and that they should request a new one which will needs to be used within 5 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heads up: The landing page looks completely broken to me in OS X, Chrome 83.0.4103.116

Looks fine in Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking the time to report this!

I have a feeling that this is probably because requests to [https://cdn.jsdelivr.net](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net) are being blocked by a Chrome extension you have running. This request is required to load the Bulma CSS framework (which includes no Javascript).

There are no third party requests besides this on the website, and in fact the whole website and web app once logged in is 99% HTML, with four JS functions included directly in the HTML responses within a <script> tag to allow for the copying of saved notes and links to the clipboard, rendering UTC timestamps in local time, and toggling the menu on mobile browsers.

<comment><USER12> Chrome with uBlock Origin is too common of a configuration to ignore for your landing page. I would serve your CSS from elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right in that Browser + uBlock Origin is a very common configuration, in fact, it is my own personal configuration. However, as far as I can tell, this domain is not blocked by any of the default lists, and uBlock Origin ships parts of its own assets from this domain.[1]

[1] [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/search?q=jsdelivr](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/search?q=jsdelivr)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nice idea. Love that it works without passwords.</comment>


Ask HN: Great Press Release company? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am launching a new project and am looking to gain some press. It is in the lifestyle industry and I need a PR company to edit and publish a release. Does anyone have any recommendations.
The site is http://www.makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com
JB <comment><USER2> i'm almost ready to abandon press releases. imo, they were meant for journalists...not bloggers. bloggers want to hear from YOU. craft the story for them & build a rapport with the ones that are your domain's tastemakers...don't try to spread yourself too thin.

i'm no PR professional, but if you want somebody who knows how to leverage twitter to your advantage, i'm happy to send some other pointers your way.

best of luck!</comment>


In America's Panopticon - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/in-americas-panopticon/ <comment><USER2> It's too bad this doesn't cover the more recent amounts of surveillance, starting from, say, the Patriot Act forwards. The article mentions that but I'm curious if any HN users would know of any works that do attempt to cover what those changes are?

I personally have no memory of living in a pre-Patriot Act world and so privacy seems like this mythical hometown main street concept that I'd like to see if I can experience even if only intellectually.

<comment><USER3> The FBI's Vault is surprisingly informative.

[https://vault.fbi.gov](https://vault.fbi.gov)

[https://vault.fbi.gov/civil-rights](https://vault.fbi.gov/civil-rights)

[https://vault.fbi.gov/anti-war-movement](https://vault.fbi.gov/anti-war- movement)

[https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro](https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro)

[https://vault.fbi.gov/Helen%20Keller](https://vault.fbi.gov/Helen%20Keller)

[https://vault.fbi.gov/Howard%20Zinn%20](https://vault.fbi.gov/Howard%20Zinn%20)

<comment><USER4> Meta-question: why the trailing %20 on the Zinn URL?

<comment><USER5> As in the majority of cases, it's likely a mistake that has held over or gone unnoticed from the time when content was created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a review of Sarah E. Igo's recent book, _The Known Citizen_.

Book detail:

[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737501](http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737501)

Podcast:

[https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/dovetail.prxu.org/1...](https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/dovetail.prxu.org/106/b0dbc51c-1c5d-49ac-a449-f66260b2e768/IHUB_ASEG_REV_WEB_102018.mp3)

Youtube:

FPF Privacy Book Club - The Known Citizen by Professor Sarah E. Igo [https://youtube.com/watch?v=LnyGcJiZAjI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LnyGcJiZAjI)

Sarah Igo: "The Beginnings of the 'End of Privacy' in the Modern U.S." [https://youtube.com/watch?v=AlWbNYvnxhg](https://youtube.com/watch?v=AlWbNYvnxhg)</comment>


The Art of Naming (Military) Operations - <AUTHOR> http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/1995/sieminsk.htm

<comment><USER2> this is a great read! thanks</comment>


Ask HN: What are the different types human organizational structures? - <AUTHOR> I get
corporations, benefits corps, LLCs,
Limited partnerships, Coops, ESOPs, Non Profits, Governments <comment><AUTHOR> Liquid democracies, IOCs, MLMs.</comment>


Global Warming's Worst-Case Projections Look Increasingly Likely - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609620/global-warmings-worst-case-projections-look-increasingly-likely/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_content=2018-01-15&utm_campaign=Technology+Review <comment><USER2> If the "science is settled" and an outcome better than the predictions is impossible, then an outcome worse than the predictions is also impossible.</comment>


Googling Strangers: One Professor's Lesson on Privacy in Public Spaces - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/03/10/702028545/googling-strangers-one-professors-lesson-on-privacy-in-public-spaces <comment><USER2> As someone that pays attention to things around me, it is interesting the number of people who's name badges I see on display in coffee shops and cafes, indicating, usually, not only their name but also their department, and usually their "rank".

At times I see people with visitor badges on lanyards designed to indicate their security clearance when visiting another department and which are absolutely not meant to be worn off-site.

It might seem pretty benign to the person wearing a green lanyard with a green badge bearing only the word "unescorted", but to those who know, it gives at the very least a security clearance level.

Coupled with their name and department on their usual badge, also being worn, against policy, visibly, in a public space, that information is not only careless but potentially dangerous.

<comment><USER3> Can't most of that information be found on LinkedIn?

<comment><USER2> Some of it, yes, but it shouldn't, you're not supposed to disclose above average security clearances, period, which is what the green badge indicates.

<comment><USER4> If above average security clearance is disclosed immediately by someone seeing my badge then thats on the company, not the person with the badge.

<comment><USER2> The badge exists to identify you and your access privileges, it's purpose is to be on display, and clearly indicate these things.

They're not to be worn outside, and the employee policies state that.

You can argue all you want with your superiors about who it's on while you're being escorted from the building for gross misconduct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article is re-reporting of:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/google- privacy.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/google-privacy.html)

(which it does link to.)

As far as privacy is concerned, what should worry more about? A random stranger ID'ing me or my license plate being read all over town, and soon enough, my face being recognized. Because frankly I'm more worried about the state than a random stranger. And not even because I'm think I'll commit a crime, but more in the Brazil sense where the state makes a mistake and I somehow get associated with some other person's crime.

That's the dystopia I fear.

You know, my house isn't a fortess of security either, but I don't worry too much about it because mostly homes don't get burgled (at least in my neck of the woods) and should mine, well I have insurance. Similarly, most people aren't going around trying to ID the folks around them. (To what end anyway?)

Society only works because mostly people follow the rules and are basically good to each other most of the time. The golden rule applies here: would you want someone to ID you? No, then don't go around ID'ing other people.

I guess at the end of the day: don't be an idiot but you probably don't need to be paranoid about this either.

<comment><USER6> > Because frankly I'm more worried about the state than a random stranger.

But that 'random stranger' could be working for the state, or your health insurance company, or just be a good old fashioned scammer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I still liked that Russian app that lookedup people on social media account from their photo. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FindFace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FindFace). I'm sure it wont be long before that is just normal.

<comment><USER8> Combine that with the Chinese social credit system and the implications are pretty bleak.

<comment><USER9> Eh, or just with Western systems. Presumably when you contact a company through Twitter they already prioritise based on the amount of followers you have - if they do this in real-life interactions as well, I'm not too excited about it either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They mention students identifying strangers based on just a few details, but not whether they verified the correctness of that identification. It's easy to think that you successfully doxxed a person, only to later find out e.g. that you misspelled their name and all the info you found was actually about someone else.

<comment><USER2> I guess finding a photograph of them, which is quite likely these days, is confirmation enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A few years ago, one of my sons' soccer team finished in the second to last spot and so they were relegated to a lower tier. I knew that the team above was "cheating" by playing too many players from out of their district. Our Club President said "prove" it to me and I'll do something about it. Well, it's amazing how much public information is out there such as where the boys attend school, phone numbers they tell people on unprotected Twitter and Facebook accounts, etc. I felt dirty knowing all this information about young adults. In the end, even though we had the proof, we didn't do anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Some of the most outspoken skeptics of privacy protections in her class — > the ones who once suggested that they didn't need privacy because they had > nothing to hide — were stunned at how quickly they'd found out details of > the lives of strangers who happened to cross their paths.

I don't think I understand this.

A person says they don't need privacy because "they have nothing to hide". Then they are shown how easy it is to track / identify someone. Why should it affect their views on privacy? After all, they claim not to care about being tracked or identified in the first place.

<comment><USER13> Let's say you think you have nothing to hide, your life is boring.

Then you find out details about strangers, and you start judging them based on what you found out. (Oh, they don't exercise much -- they must be lazy).

Then it dawns on you: others will see the details of your boring life and will judge you and reach conclusions about you that are likely to be wrong. Because, guess what? They don't really know you. They are just using some datapoints they found on the Internet.

<comment><USER14> And then you stop judging people so much?

<comment><USER12> I'd love to see that but I don't have my hopes high :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Social hacking is alive and well. During my studies in computer engineering we had lectures on cybersecurity and the person used the following example

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc7scxvKQOo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc7scxvKQOo)

Human error is still one of the most popular hacking techniques. By getting an e-mail address you can check haveibeenpwnd to see if there were any leaks related to that e-mail address and there's already a lot that you have on a person that you don't actually know. Recently there was an increase in phishing schemes where hackers obtained the passwords of really old leaks (from myspace, armorgames etc. etc.) and sent letters to people with legit passwords trying to extort money. This was a hugely successful campaign. I'm not saying don't mention your name in public but for sure use a password manager and a VPN if you're on public wi-fi a lot. And don't shout your cred card number while buying coffee.

</comment><comment><USER16> From a tech standpoint there is not a lot of new information in this article.

My other thought is that people information has must have value for it to be relevant to both good and bad people in the world. Googles data caches on geographical - location and how they used that data to target mobile adds for example has more value.

This begs the question. Do people need more protection from data caching apps or the commomn human?

<comment><USER17> As the world has grown more interconnected, the actual value of people's identifying information has sharply risen (as has the availability of it), but we haven't figured out how to adjust our expectations for it. We still use a bunch of bits of fairly small data as high-value sources of information.

In the US, social security numbers were not intended as a unique or unguessable ID, especially since they used to be (still are?) given in ranges to facilities for births/etc, so knowing their birthdate and where they were born let you drop a bunch of possible values.

An even better example of uncontrolled information value, to me, is phone numbers. We used to, with few exceptions, list publicly people's land phone numbers in regional books, unless they opted out.

Now, increasing numbers of people don't have land lines, we don't have a public cell phone number <-> name mapping (though it often leaks through other public information sources), and worst of all...since we've started using phone numbers as both an "in case of emergency contact here" for account lockout, and as a 2FA source (either SMS or actual calls), and these networks were not designed with robust security guarantees in mind, just knowing your phone number can be sufficient to forge a SIM card to hijack the number. [1]

But not giving out your phone number defeats the entire point of having it, and we have not yet convinced most institutions to stop using phone numbers as reliable contact endpoints, so what's to be done?

[1] - [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqax3/hackers- si...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbqax3/hackers-sim-swapping- steal-phone-numbers-instagram-bitcoin)

<comment><USER18> SSNs are no longer keyed to geographic assignment. Only changed a decade ago though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks to LinkedIn it's shockingly easy to find people like this. I once searched for someone in 5 seconds because they had a uniquely identifying TShirt.

<comment><USER20> Isn't that the point of LinkedIn? To be found? If you have someone's name... used to be you could find out where they lived and their phone number, in a book that a private company sent to everyone's house.

<comment><USER21> If you have someone's _first and last name_ , yes, LinkedIn is intended to make them findable.

I think most people would be uncomfortable that I can often find them simply with the first name + city pairing.

<comment><USER20> Why would they be uncomfortable having their LinkedIn found by any method? Forgive me for sounding obtuse, but I just don't know what the point of having a LinkedIn would be otherwise. It's essentially a placeholder that says, "I exist and am employed in such and such industry and at so and so company." It consists of information I would voluntarily give anyone who asked, sitting next to me on an airplane, standing in line for coffee... What malicious deeds should I be worried about being done based on someone finding my information on LinkedIn?

<comment><USER21> > _Why would they be uncomfortable having their LinkedIn found by any method?_

Harassment.

How would you feel if you broke off a conversation on Tinder and someone moved over to LinkedIn to harass you? That's a real world example that has happened to female friends of mine.

Even if you use a different phone number, email, and photo, just first name + city alone can be enough to find someone on LinkedIn if you know what they look like.

Social networks cause context collapse: we live in multiple spheres, but technology allows those streams to cross, and the result is often unpleasant.

<comment><USER20> I get that other people have risk factors that I don't. Are these risks not mitigated by the privacy settings on LinkedIn? Full disclosure: I checked my privacy settings on LinkedIn and disabled some features I no longer value. Thanks for reminding me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sorry, I dont believe this for one second. You mean to tell me that this person was given an assignment to "de-annonymize" someone in public, and then coincidentally runs into someone at a coffee shop who very loudly provides: 1\. Name 2\. Address 3\. CC Number 4\. PWD's to accounts

While on a phone call, at a coffee shop?!

The professor, the NY Times, and NPR, are all fools if they believe this way too convenient series of events. gauranteed if this "guy in a coffee shop" is even real, he has some connection to the student.

<comment><USER23> I sat behind someone in business class on the Eurostar who was a C-level exec at another company. He was on the phone with a client and reassuring them that they took data security seriously, used VPNs and safes and FDE etc. He left his laptop unlocked when he went to the toilet, with (what looked like, I didn't snoop) a fairly confidential spreadsheet open.

We both worked in an infosec related industry. He was a c-level exec of a direct competitor. I fully believe this story.</comment></comment>


The Jasons: The Secret History Of Science's Postwar Elite (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/books/review/16horgan.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER2> I find this fascinating: `Yet the disturbing implication is that, under different circumstances, nuclear attacks might make sense. Finkbeiner accuses Dyson and his co-authors of "supping with the devil."'

I can't tell if that's the review author or the book author speaking. It's the point of such a group to think of such things? Isn't there indeed an unambiguous case in which "nuclear attacks made sense": Hiroshima?

I find it hard to think of cases where a nuclear attack would not be worse than not doing so, but not impossible.

<comment><USER3> I had a similar question. While we're playing with hypotheticals, say the Allies had gained atomic weapons in 1941. It's pretty easy to imagine that using them then would have been preferable to what followed. That the author apparently didn't consider such a thing makes me think this piece is excessively colored by his idealistic mindset. Too bad, sounded interesting until I saw how judgmental he is.

<comment><USER4> Atomic weapons were not feasible for use until we destroyed the Imperial Navy and the expert aircraft pilots that made up their offensive and defensive air- service, from what I know, which admittedly is not expert-level.

<comment><USER5> You're right, the parallel for Europe occurred in early to mid 1944. Might have shortened the war six months? It's not clear though. It could be argued the turning point was really boots supplementing the ongoing strategic bombing. Or maybe the key event was Hitler exiting and handing things to Dönitz, who immediately suspended operations and began winding down all the madness.*

Interesting tour of how air control fluctuated in WWII here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy#World_War_II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy#World_War_II)

*Maybe because the writing was on the wall, but I think a case could be made that Hitler was a little crazy and other leaders might have been more pragmatic, seeking earlier options for peace. Who knows though.

<comment><USER3> Yes, delivery systems must be considered. Wonder what the Allies would have built to deliver a 10,000 lb bomb in contested airspace if one had been ready well before the B-29.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Surprised not to read anything about Roy Schwitters in this, although he had just taken over as chief of JASON shortly before this article.

One amusing note, many of the JASONs (I believe it supposed to be capitalized) often have thinly veiled experiments/projects, I.e. UT Maya muon tomography research, which was to discover techniques to calculate tomography of a Mayan pyramid, was obviously taken up with actual hopes of muon tomography for vehicle inspection (in fact, most of the experiment's research was exactly concurrent with Roy Schwitters reign of JASON.)

More notably, you also have the NIF.</comment>


Parametrising Code Over Modules: Towards Backpack in Practice - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3ehG4GQpxU <comment><AUTHOR> I'm really excited for backpack, because with its release, 2 of the 3 major problems that I had working with Haskell have been solved, in addition to the dependency/cabal hell problem being solved by stack last year.

1\. String types(Text, Bytestring, String...)

2\. Lack of modules being... modular: The Haskell ecosystem has loads of code/interface duplication, with Lazy/Strict versions of data structures, modules that work with only a specific version of other modules and so on.

The third major problem I have is records. There are lots of different proposed solutions to this(vinyl, hlist, rawr and so on) but nothing really satisfactory yet.</comment>


Analysis of population density thresholds in the influenza pandemic of 1918 - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3641965/ <comment><AUTHOR> For reference, current population density in popular places:

\- Population density threshold from the article: 175/sq mi

\- Santa Clara county: 1,400/sq mi

\- New York City: 27,016/sq mi

\- San Francisco: 17,246/sq mi

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density)

I believe that suburban population density still can provide significant advantage in infection rates/population loss over urban areas with extreme population density, despite being 10x the threshold for the last pandemic.

I guess we'll get access to that data pretty soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Population density by zip code: [http://zipatlas.com/us/zip-code- comparison/population-densit...](http://zipatlas.com/us/zip-code- comparison/population-density.htm)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best features of your favourite language? - <AUTHOR> I've been hacking away at a scripting language for a while and I'm interested to see what language features from your day-today programming you like most?
I'll kick it off with:
Java 8 - Streams, collection processing.
TypeScript - progressive typing. <comment><USER3> PHP - make changes, just refresh browser. No compiling, node/pm2 restarts, anything.

<comment><USER4> Also amazing for creating MVPs. If you are a solopreneur with no shame (as in you don't give two shits about bugs, best practices, continuous delivery, etc) then I believe that a week is more than enough time to launch even the most ambitious of projects with PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Common Lisp: The tooling; outside of smalltalk there is no language with implementations containing the combination of dynamicism and performance. I can profile a function (all the way down to assembly), make a change, recompile and re profile in seconds.

Seriously after using lisp, the amount of time C++ takes to link (much less compile) feels like an eternity.

The other usual suspects are nice, but a non-lisp with tooling that competes with slime I could still be happy with.

(other usual suspects):

The condition system: seriously every language with lexical closures should scrap their system for what common lisp has.

Macros: a bit like seatbelts or airbags; you can go for years without ever needing one, but when you do, you're really glad you had it.

</comment><comment><USER6> C# - LINQ - <USER2>

<comment><USER7> Once you go LINQ you never go back! Also, easiness of async/await.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once considered this web server "LightTPD" as an alternative to Apache2, and I read some officially published and comparatively astonishing benchmarks for performance written in a language called Lua. Can anyone else speak to Lua's alleged superiority in the web service regard? Or, is this a consequence implicit to LightTPD?

(Sorry--not an response to question, explicitly, and thanks!)

<comment><USER5> LuaJIT is one of the faster JIT VMs in existence.

Lighttpd and nginx both started to get mind-share in the english speaking world at about the same time (nginx was written by native russian speakers IIRC).

Lighttpd was faster than apache for the same reason that nginx was, a more modern, non-blocking design.

I don't think that lighttpd is written in lua though. It probably supports lua scripting, though I haven't used that feature of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been learning Ada as a hobby and I really like the language. Type system is powerful and flexible, compiler is really user friendly, OOP implementation is refreshingly DIY, support for concurrency via Tasks, C binding not too difficult.

Still learning, and there's not much out there in terms of libraries to interface with other tech, but its been enjoyable.

<comment><USER10> Are you using GNAT? What kind of programs are you writing to learn? Why Ada?

<comment><USER9> Yes, I'm using GNAT. Right now I'm working on a text based adventure game with procedural generated content. I was initially interested in the language because of how it allows for nested functions, so I bought a book and started working through it, and like a lot of the other features it offers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Red: amazingly easy gui creation and cross compilation. There's a lot to like about that language and its toolset.

Following somewhere after that, are JS's prototypes, my first introduction to inheritance.

But then again, I don't know that many Languages and barely touched red. I'm only waiting for their gui backend on linux and then I'll dive right into the language.

</comment><comment><USER12> Best feature also most confusing aspect of Vietnamese: the "pronoun" system. The way you uses a pronoun in a sentence reveals your relationship toward that person, your social standing to that person, and your emotion toward that person (not necessary all at once but certainly more nuanced than "you")

<comment><USER13> Can you elaborate a bit, possibly add examples? Sounds very interesting.

<comment><USER12> In Vietnamese, there are some noun used as pronoun. Therefore the number of pronoun in usage is much more diverse than say English pronoun. For example, the word pronoun "you" in English is used for both addressing the second person both singular and plural. However, there is no one translation for "you" in Vietnamese.

How you would address the person you speaks to depend on the circumstance:

\- If you are a child and you are speaking to your parent, "you" would be "ba/cha/bố" (father) or "mẹ/má" (mother).

\- If you are speaking to your sibling, then "you" would be "anh/chị/em" (older brother/older sister/younger sibling).

\- If you are on the street and speaks to a person around your age "anh/chị" (even if they are the same age or younger than you a little bit, it's show polite to refer to them as if they are your older sibling). This show that you can express politeness through the usage of pronoun.

\- On the flip side, if you are really casual, you can use "mày", which usually mean "you" but very impolite. Some people can take offense if you use this to refer to them.

\- Also the word "you" translate to different word for each person in your family tree (same thing with Mandarin if I remember correctly) as you refer to people in your family by their relationship to you, and there isn't just a direct translation for the English pronoun "you" for conversation around the family.

One of the thing I appreciate from English is that you just need to say the word "you" when refer to the person you are speaking to. You never have to worry about the context of the conversation that you are having and adjust your pronoun usage accordingly. When I speak Vietnamese, I often just estimate their age and use "anh/chị/bạn" (older brother/older sister/friend" accordingly. Also I try to use their name in place of the pronoun, which can sound weird sometime.

On the other hand, you can get away by not saying any pronoun in some case, mostly very casual case.

Non exhaustive list can be found here (along with an in-depth explanation of how this mess works): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_pronouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_pronouns)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As I learned modern JavaScript this year, coming from Clojure most recently, I'm really digging JS's destructuring, extended object literals, spread arguments, and lambda syntax. It's a pretty dang sweet language to write in today.

</comment><comment><USER15> C++ - All the power of C, but with better data structures

</comment><comment><USER16> Python - a tie between metaprogramming features and comprehensions.

</comment><comment><USER17> Python - Introspection, metaprogramming

</comment><comment><USER18> Elixir - Pattern matching for function signatures. So many conditional statements just nuked from orbit.

<comment><USER10> That's a good one. Once I started making use of that my functions are a lot smaller and cleaner.

To add to Elixir, I would say the ease of interoping with Erlang. It allows me to easily take advantage of the massive Erlang libraries that are built in (such as crypto) without having to do anything extra.</comment></comment>


Quite breathtaking new site from Maersk, track ships in real time #html5 #css3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.maerskfleet.com

<comment><USER2> The pirates must love this — hope they're adding some noise to the positions to the ones of the somali coast!</comment>


Show HN: Callergy – Full Year Visual Allergy Forcasts. Built with React and D3 - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/callergy <comment><USER2> From [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

> _Show HN is for something you 've made that other people can play with. HN > users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread._

> _Blog posts, sign-up pages, and fundraisers can 't be tried out, so they > can't be Show HNs._

So for a ShowHN you should submit a link to your site, not an indirect link.

Some feedback anyway:

* The name is used by many sites. I first didn't find the link in PH so I tried Google and I get many many many sites that are not related to your site.

* If you are going to post this again to HN I'd cheat a little and post a link to the info of a city like NY, instead of the home page. The home page is too clean, the info of a particular city gives a better understanding of the service you provide.

* By the way, is it possible to make a permalink to the info of a city?

* If I see the info of a city and I try to delete the name to type the name of another city, the name reappears and I can't get the new city.

(I.E. 1) type NY and view the info. 2) hit delete until the name of the city disappears, and one or two more times 3) try to type the name of another city)

* Which cities are supported? Are you tracking the unsupported cities that are popular in the search box?

* Do you have a disclaimer in case some moron see "low" and decides to skip his antialergic medication?

* It would be nice to replace the squares that say mold/grass/trees/weeds with some small graphics of them instead of a square. IANAD

* It doesn't work in IE11 (don't worry too much, most sites don't work in IE11)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your very honest and fast feedback/tips. We are keeping track of searched cities that do not exist.

I especially appreciate your advice on the disclaimer. That definitely should be a consideration.</comment></comment>