An open letter to Paul Graham - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/newco/an-open-letter-to-paul-graham-3d4f3369fe76#.28fltpvf4 <comment><USER3> This is a rare situation / age we're in, because we haven't seen these levels of income inequality in a long time.

To the degree to which I would apply labels to myself, I'm a capitalist, and I'm a libertarian. I don't trust our corrupt political system anymore, and I certainly don't think the government has the ability to help society as much as it hurts it, at least most of the time. Because of this, I think that any extra taxation that the government levies will commensurately damage our society.

That said, I can't help but think that our entire economy has been swept out from under our feet by the financial sector. It's not tech companies and supposedly "rich" tech founders that capture our economy. It's VCs. A VC can give a company that would otherwise be insolvent the capital it needs to capture an entire market, and then raise the prices. We see it time and time again.

We're trained to believe that, without VC, the tech industry would somehow be stifled. This is simply untrue. Without VC, a lot of our "side" projects that create true innovation would have a chance at success. The reason many of them don't is because they're up against the same thing from a VC-backed competitor. Except, the VC-backed version is cheaper (or free), is backed by an unsustainable, large team of skilled developers, and doesn't care that it's hemorrhaging money, because once it creates a monopoly it will pay dividends for life to the very few who own it.

<comment><USER4> I'm very much on the other side of the political spectrum, but I would have a lot more appreciation for libertarianism if someone could come up with a credible, practical solution for making monopolies (or monopolistic behaviour) rare or impossible. With the proviso that it acknowledges the reality that monopolies form even in the absence of government influence.

<comment><USER5> _With the proviso that it acknowledges the reality that monopolies form even in the absence of government influence._

If I remember back to my anarchist philosophy, that is ceding too much ground. Patents, access to cheap capital, "artificial" interest rates etc... are all government influence that large companies can take advantage of to become monopolistic. Without those the argument goes, that firms would never get so big because competition would sprout up immediately to cut into their market dominance.

If you look at Standard Oil or Bell System, the case studies for all monopolies, they all hinged on some government grated protection. In Bell's case it was initially a patent and then subsequently "legally sanctioned regulated monopoly." In the case of Standard Oil they utilized Trusts, which were legally recognized forms of distributing ownership to stay within the law.

So unfettered capitalism might not lead to long and enduring monopolies, but it would be much nastier and competition much more fierce because the systems on which business is built today would have to go away in total - to include regulated banking, infrastructure standards etc...

The question should instead be: Is the world in which there is no regulation one that you would actually want to live in? I would argue no.

edit: Note that I don't agree with this view, it is however the argument that is made.

<comment><USER6> While government regulations provide a fertile ground for growing a monopoly, I do not believe they're a necessary condition. A for-profit business will seek the most effective ways to reach its goals. It happens that in our world, those often involve abusing the regulatory framework. But if you remove that framework, it won't make companies magically stop trying to monopolize markets. They'll simply grab the next most effective way to do it. Maybe some will band together, now that there is noone saying that they can't. Maybe some will start cutting more corners on the product, or ignore even more of what used to be environmental laws. Or maybe the few remaining competitors will enter a literal fight, involving guns and bombs and tanks.

And now that your monopolies have guns and tanks and can openly play dirty, good luck for the small upstarts trying to take them down. They won't be able to.

\--

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that if all governments were to suddenly disappear tonight, by tomorrow morning many corporations would be already on their way to forming some new quasi-governments. I believe high-level executives are aware that a) social order is good for business, and b) having a working framework for establishing and enforcing contracts is vital to their operations.

<comment><USER5> _And now that your monopolies have guns and tanks and can openly play dirty, good luck for the small upstarts trying to take them down._

Well exactly. That was my point. In the absence of regulation, there might not be monopolies but it would be a Mad Max style business environment.

<comment><USER6> I think that "Mad Max style business environment" will actually evolve back to the rule of law. That's how our present world came to be, after all. We moved from warlords to cities, then to regions, nation states and finally to international unions and trans-national government organizations. We moved, because at each step, grouping together and establishing some shared rules was good for people _and_ good for business.

<comment><USER5> Indeed it would.

The Greek philosopher Polybius referred to this cycle between anarchy and totalitarian state as the anakyklosis

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacyclosis)

<comment><USER6> This is actually... a) very insightful, and b) something I don't recall ever encountering before. Thanks a lot for the reference!

(Increasingly, I'm starting to feel that a lot of things I figure out for myself - often while writing HN comments - is something that's been widely known for thousands of years. I guess I need to sit down and read some of those classic works.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You have an unsubstantiated argument with presuming that taxing billionaires or millionaires at 80% would be good for society.

Let's set aside arguments of individuality vs. socialism and whether government should operate for the hugely debatable, ephemeral term, "the greater good". I think that invites a separate essay on its own.

From a purely utilitarian perspective, the rich often leverage their capital to achieve things that would be impossible or difficult to do without access to the capital they created.

Case in point, is Elon Musk. If he didn't take home most of the money he earned from his involvement in Paypal, the odds of Space X, Tesla, and Solar City ever happening are decreased dramatically. When in the hands of an extraordinarily talented individual like Musk, capital can work to create long-lasting ripple effects that benefit society as a whole.

If you had taxed Musk at 80%, and he was left with a paltry $30 million or so, it's likely that one or more of the above companies never happen. The opportunity cost is that less jobs get created, unique and innovative technology never gets formed, and the ripple effects (such as spurring Chevrolet and others to make electric vehicles) never happen.

While not always the case, it is often the case that private capital investments do improve society in meaningful ways.

The economy is a very fungible thing and the idea that it is approaching "zero sum" is an unfounded one in the extreme.

<comment><USER8> > Case in point, is Elon Musk. If he didn't take home most of the money he > earned from his involvement in Paypal, the odds of Space X, Tesla, and Solar > City ever happening are decreased dramatically. When in the hands of an > extraordinarily talented individual like Musk, capital can work to create > long-lasting ripple effects that benefit society as a whole.

What you're claiming here is that Musk can allocate capital better than a government, right? That leaving the money in his hands was better than taxing it and spending it on government projects? (note that all three of SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City received substantial amounts of funding from the US government (directly or indirectly) and would likely not be viable without it, even leaving aside all the USG-funded basic research that was necessary to make them possible in the first place).

Even if that's true for Musk specifically (which I doubt), is it true on average? How efficient is the average billionaire at using their money for social good? You gloss over a lot with "While not always the case" \- how does the average return to society on a private capital investment compare with a public capital investment?

<comment><USER9> Who defines 'social good'? You assume an elite that can determine efficiency! This is the socialist conceit.

Milton Friedman:

"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost.

Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch!

Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. "

<comment><USER10> Spending somebody else's money on somebody else describes a large fraction of what many employees of a business do. It looks to me as if those employees generally do a decent enough job of buying useful things at a reasonable price.

How can that be, given what Milton Friedman says? Two reasons. First: there are incentives in place to encourage them to do it. If they buy useless things or spend too much money, someone may notice and they may lose their job. If they find a particularly good bargain, they may be rewarded. Second: most people are not perfectly selfish utility-maximizing _homo economicus_ , and even when spending "somebody else's money on somebody else" they do in fact prefer to do so in a way that benefits the second somebody-else at not too much cost to the first one.

Guess what? Much the same applies in government. Suppose you're a doctor in a nationally-run health system like the UK's. You examine a patient and prescribe a drug. Does the fact that you're spending "somebody else's money on somebody else" really mean that you won't prefer to prescribe a drug that actually helps the patient's problem? Does it mean you won't prefer a cheaper drug over a more expensive one that performs no better? Of course not. And if in fact you are the way Milton Friedman professes to be -- if you prescribe with blithe indifference to whether your patients live or die and to whether your national health service goes bankrupt -- then there's a real risk that someone will notice and you'll be out of a job, or pilloried in the newspapers, or something similarly undesirable.

<comment><USER11> The problem with government is that the bar to fire people is too high for it to work the way you describe. And it's that way for a reason.

The system used to be that, when a party won an election, they'd fire the existing government employees, and replace them with members of their party. "To the victor go the spoils", and this was called the "spoils system". But that meant that the knowledge of how the day-to-day government functioned got lost after every election, which was non-optimal. So laws were passed to eliminate that practice, but at the price of making it hard to fire government employees. (Add in public sector unions, and it gets even harder.)

<comment><USER12> Great point,never realised thats the reason,may i say it has a very negative effect when you have tolitarian type admin with no,age limit on appointments,cant admins be obliged to shift people to other sections or sack people after 12 years if results of department had a lacklustre performance ,when opposition wins? On the VC thing i think it stifles compatition and tax paying and i dont want to have any taxes diverted for somebody to go into space its not making my life any easier .id prefer all companies pay full taxes in 1)the countries where the raw materials are sourced ,2) the credit card payment,end user country ,rather than keepng money in convinient little tax places ,charity setups and all that stuff ,its getting very unrealistic feeding of other peoples hunger and poverty and thinking your doing good!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who was born in Soviet Union, and (thankfully) escaped at a fairly early age, arguments like this just completely boggle my mind.

Why do people think it's ok to take other people's money? If a billionaire has money - regardless of whether they earned or inherited it - it's THEIR money. If they earned it lawfully, they should pay the same % of tax that everyone else pays - and keep the rest to do whatever they please. Who are YOU to tell them how to spend THEIR MONEY better?

If you're jealous of them having more money than you - this is a truly free country, nothing is stopping you from earning just as much as they have. Yes, life isn't fair, they may be born into wealth and you're not - but try being born in North Korea, then talk about it not being _fair_.

This is the principle that America was founded on, and what's allowed it to be successful.

And as someone who studied just a bit of history, it seems completely insane to me that people think taking money from the rich and distributing it to the poor think it will turn out OK. The same exact thing happened in dozens of socialist countries - those that are in charge of the distribution, somehow distribute the most of it to themselves, and then take away people's freedoms so they would stay in power. To think that something else is going to happen is just plain ignorance of basic human nature.

<comment><USER14> The situation is far more complex than you assume.

It is impossible for one person to make a billion dollar 747. One man simply doesn't have enough intelligence or strength to do construct such a sophisticated device. If a 747 is worth a billion dollars then creating a billion dollars of paper money or making the plane itself are both equivalent concepts.

Thus why is it possible for one man to make a billion dollars in paper money but it is not possible for one man to make a billion dollar 747? Why do billionaires exist?

Billionaires exist only because the paper money was taken from the wealth produced by other people. The Billionaire needs to employ workers to build a 747.

In short, for Billionaires to be Billionaires they must be an owner of some corporation where the wealth produced by the labor of employees is unfairly distributed to them. This is wealth inequality. This was the problem your old country attempted and somewhat failed to resolve with communism.

Whatever you think communism is, wealth inequality is a feature of capitalism and it is fundamentally unfair because it is taken from others.

<comment><USER13> Of course, building the 747 by yourself is not possible. But it is possible to put together a team that has enough diverse skills to build it - that's the whole point of entrepreneurship.

The point that everyone who talks about how inequality is bad is missing is that without the billionaire in your example, there would be NO jobs. Pure labor doesn't produce - there needs to be a business idea, vision, strategy, organization, sales - all those things that the businessman in charge provides.

The reality of the situation is that workers can be replaced - that's why they get paid less. But the businessman creator can NOT be replaced - <USER2> him/her in charge, there would be nothing else.

Soviet Union and other socialist countries tried taking the businessman in charge away - and we know exactly what happened after that.

I know this system isn't "fair", but it's better than the alternatives.

<comment><USER14> Right and I agree with your main point. It's basically the point I'm trying to drive home. Communism isn't the solution, capitalism is better but has problems as well. We should all work to resolve those problems even if capitalism is currently the best possible solution. Extreme Wealth inequality is a problem of unfairness and we should strive to resolve the problem without giving up the benefits that come with capitalism.

I disagree with the fact the billionaire can't be replaced. The billionaire isn't some special human being. I would argue if you replace the current CEO of apple with a random apple SW engineer, the company wouldn't change much.

In fact I would argue that skilled work, the work of software engineers is by far much more irreplaceable. The person who coded the critical infrastructure for the apple operating system, he is by far harder to replace then the billionaire on top. Also note: Steve jobs died, Apple stock has gone up since his death.

<comment><USER13> I think your Apple example is helping to disprove your point.

> I would argue if you replace the current CEO of apple with a random apple SW > engineer, the company wouldn't change much.

That's exactly what happened in the 80's - they forced Steve Jobs out, and the company lost all their market share and was on the verge on dying, before he came back.

> Steve jobs died, Apple stock has gone up since his death.

By that time, Steve Jobs knew he was going to die and picked his successor very carefully - Tim Cook is definitely a great choice. Some would argue, however, that Apple is still thriving because of Steve's ideas, and as soon as they run out of them, Apple will start to decline. The jury is still out on that one, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >> Literally no one in America, save for a very few on the fringe, is talking about "eliminating income inequality."

I don't know about that; I've heard plenty of people talk about eliminating income inequality as an end goal (but I live in the SF Bay Area, so maybe a reflection of demographics out here?)

It's like saying no one but the fringe is going to vote for donald trump, and yet those poll numbers...

>> What people are talking about is a progressive income tax to reduce inequality.

Well, we have that. Taxes are historically low, so I'd be ok with raising them somewhat, but not too much.

>> So by taxing the wealthy and spending it on services, we can better ensure that the level playing field you allude to continues to exist.

This is really the crux of my argument: instead of increasing taxes first, we should hold the government more accountable over spending and look at programs and how they help or do not help the poor. Poverty is the metric that should be focused on, not inequality. If inequality is reduced as a side effect, all the better. But poverty is the problem. If government got more money from taxes, what makes you think they would use it to effectively reduce poverty?

<comment><USER16> The 80% sounds over the top to myself as well, but in the article they were using it in reference to someone with an income of 1 billion dollars per year. To my mind, 80% on 1 billion isn't so crazy. It sounds like the far end of the scaled tax curve. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people (like maybe five) that make in excess of 1 billion a year.

I work with government agencies and I am all for them being more accountable, I have no doubt that they could spend a lot less than they do. On the other hand, I am entirely unwilling to wait for them to become more efficient before deciding to severely tax the five people who make over 1 billion per year.

<comment><USER17> So if you taxed those 5 people, you would make 4 billion. We spend over 3 trillion a year. Do you really think the punishment fits the crime?

Wiser management of federal resources would go a lot further than throwing more money down the hole.

<comment><USER16> If this tax regime was put in place, people would find other ways to shelter their money; I don't think the government would end up with a significant windfall. Maybe they'd invest in their company or start a new company and invest in that. I'm sure that with such a large income, they would have many places to put that money.

<comment><USER17> I agree, which is more reason against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >If a billionaire is taxed 80% on the year he or she earns that billion, they will still be worth $200 million. And they are still free to start businesses and pursue wealth. They are still rich. They have not been "hunted" or "killed." The crux of your argument — that "Ending economic inequality would mean ending startups" — is both a straw man (no one's advocating eliminating income inequality completely) and untrue (people can still pursue whatever they want — they just have to pay more taxes on it.)

It sounds simple, but as remote work becomes easier it becomes more tempting to do it in another country (a country that won't tax that person $800,000,000).

Pg addresses this issue in his essay "So if you made it impossible to get rich by creating wealth in your country, the ambitious people in your country would just leave and do it somewhere else."

<comment><USER19> Someone making $800M is not doing "work".

<comment><USER5> What are they doing then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One thing that is often ignored when considering a progressive income tax is that years of income are often sacrificed in order to achieve higher earnings. Consider an entrepreneur who earns <$30,000 for for 5+ years while re- investing in a breakthrough technology, or a doctor who spends 10+ years studying and living on a minimal income who one year earn $250,000+ and fall into the highest tax bracket. Those individuals have basically concentrated all of their earnings into a shorter time period, at (in the entrepreneur's case) significant personal risk/expense. This can make the net lifetime earnings of these supposedly 'rich' individuals actually less, and taxed at a higher rate, than those who don't ever achieve this level of income.

</comment><comment><USER21> > ... we're looking at 2–3% growth from here on out. So, by this completely > rational view of the "pie," it is, in fact, trending towards a zero sum > game.

Not only does GDP not measure wealth, but as wealth increases you might actually expect GDP to decrease. E.g. when self-driving cars put 20M Americans out of work, wealth will have increased, but the GDP will decrease.

<comment><USER22> Well that only reinforces OP's argument... In this scenario you have a few powerful companies taking the pie away from taxi drivers, from small petrol station owners, from small car mechanics, etc... It is a zero-sum game because these people will have to beg on the streets. In this scenario, would the driverless car have helped improve life for humans? Yes it would improve the life of rich people; it will be very convenient for them to not have to drive... But what about regular humans?

An alternative scenario would be to tax driverless car companies and give the money back to the people whose livelihoods were taken.

I have no doubt that in a fully-automated world, society will either be socialist or communist. If wealthy people start thinking about inequality and actively work to improve things, then we will have socialism. If they don't, it will just spread misery and resentment among the lower class and will likely lead to a more dramatic change in the state of affairs.

Oppression leads to extremism. Just look at what happened after world war one when Germany was burried in insurmountable war reparation debt... It created a generation of resentful german extremists - And along came WW2.

<comment><USER23> That's not how it works. Automation doesn't put things in the hands of a few powerful companies. Those items become commodities. You don't get rich selling commodities. Corporations spend billions upon billions to make sure they aren't reduced to commodities.

Cheap access to driverless cars will be a huge boon for the poor. Can you imagine what it would be like to have cheap access to goods no matter where you live? To receive delivery of materials cheaply and quickly? That's not a wealth destroyer. That's wealth creation infrastructure.

<comment><USER22> Maybe, but what is the point of having all that wealth if only 10% of the population can access it?

If automation replaces 90% of jobs, then you're going to have a lot of unemployed people with no money.

I disagree about automation becoming a commodity. Automation is all about monopolies. You only need to write software once and only the company with the best technology will control the whole market... Why would a consumer use a piece of technology if it is less efficient than a competing piece of technology?

Just look at Intel vs AMD. Intel's CPUs became just a little bit faster, and as a result, in just a few years they decimated AMD financially.

Technology is a winner-takes-it-all game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The last few paragraphs where he laid out what PG's actual desire might be (for VC funding to maintain the same tax status), was immensely helpful to me in understanding the whole exchange.

Why PG chose to make a side on argument towards that leaves me a little bemused, however

<comment><USER25> Because it sounds better to say job creators are being hunted than to say I want to keep my sweetheart tax breaks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think that a lot of people that are against higher/progressive taxes or see these level of inequality (income and wealth) as a good thing believe in the "self-made man" myth.

But that is just a myth. When someone "makes it", can you really disregard?

\- his teacher from school

\- the doctor that saved his life when he was young

\- the guy on the street that maybe said something that triggered a chain of actions that ended in his success

\- the books he read

\- the peace of mind provided by living in a safe place

\- etc.

Is it enough that you paid for that doctor appointment? I don't know. But you would not be here at all without it, and that doctor himself benefited from all of the above.

A different way of looking at things could be that, as we as a society don't know what works and what doesn't, we invest in people. Some are lucky, and based on their circumstances (and on their personal merit, I won't deny that) will manage to succeed in life.

</comment><comment><USER27> From the fourth point:

 _So, by this completely rational view of the "pie," it is, in fact, trending towards a zero sum game._

It doesn't even matter how growth is trending. Graham's misguided criticism of the 'myth' misses a simple mathematical fact: that the growth in income among the top 1% dramatically outpaces overall economic growth. Consequently, contrary to his assertion, the rich _are_ increasing their income at the expense of the poor. There is no where else the money can be coming from. You can argue (wrongly, in my opinion) that this is solely because the rich are smarter and harder-working than the poor. But you cannot rationally argue that such a shift is not happening in a broad sense.

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone who thinks that an 80% tax on the rich is going to yield spectacular results should take a look at the whole host of countries following the communist economic model as well as the countries that adopted the non- explicit communist model (these include most of the countries in the 'Non- Aligned Movement') to see how heavily taxing the rich as well as trusting that the government is more efficient with capital allocation is working out.

It's not.

</comment><comment><USER29> What is wrong with taxing 80% of the wealth is that then the return on the equity placed into the business to make it real just decreased 80%. At _some point_ then many of those startups won't be created because there won't be enough return to pay for the risk. So then there will not be more of "those jobs" and there won't be any wealth created. Therefore no taxes will be paid. And we just reduced the pie to zero.

I am not sure what the number is, but when I hear 80% taxes, I think someone (maybe me) is not doing their math.

But I do agree that one must first make sure to understand the argument of the other side before articulating a counter-argument. I think in this case, there is also the problem that the message gets diluted because of the messenger: unfortunately PG does not have credibility in this area because (presumably) he has not been on the ground dealing with poverty issues as many others. Then again, many economists haven't either, even as they also postulate solutions.

<comment><USER25> You're assuming these companies create a lot of jobs, but in fact they create far fewer jobs than they did 30 years ago. As Intel founder Andy Grove said (of companies like Apple): "plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs."

Instagram (for another example) had 13 employees when sold for $1 billion.

<comment><USER29> It's a fair point. But I think that the issue is that we then are lumping all of these companies into one category and we should look into what they are doing. So if we think that "dating apps" or "photo apps" derive less social value then we would tax them more than startups that derive "more value" (say, fighting disease or providing solar power). There are systems already in place for this type of incentive, where government provides tax breaks in fields deemed "socially more valuable."

<comment><USER30> You have to be very careful with laws like this where a human has to sit and evaluate the societal benefit of one business over another. Tons of unintended, and potentially very negative, consequences to this.

Simplifying the tax system and increasing the top marginal tax rates back to something closer to where they were 40 years ago is preferable in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Meh. I didn't write a follow up to PG's follow up because I assumed he wouldn't be receptive to my arguments and didn't want to start a war of words over a topic that has been rehashed a bajillion times. Even the economists are saying we need to reduce economic inequality if we want to avoid disaster. That's far more topical thought and information than anyone arguing on HN can bring to bear, I assume. (I really hope I am right.)

The OP article is definitely factual with its four main points-- I'd also like to add that the trick of putting yourself into the opposing position's shoes and reconstructing their argument is one of the best rhetorical techniques that exists.

<comment><USER32> Can you name three? In any case, a good economist typically just says what the state of the world is or will be given x, y, z, not what should be. I can think of one economist (Robin Hanson) who doesn't say "we should reduce financial inequality".

<comment><USER30> Here are four - Era Dabla-Norris ; Kalpana Kochhar ; Nujin Suphaphiphat ; Frantisek Ricka ; Evridiki Tsounta.

They work at a little organization called the International Monetary Fund, and they conclude:

"We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down."

[https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42986....](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42986.0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There is a follow-up by Mr. Graham [1], and there is a follow-up to his follow-up by the original open-letter author [2].

I would like to add one thing. Given that Mr. Graham has put forth an essay on an (macro) economic topic, and his employment of the 'per se' argument method, there is an obvious lack of proper treatment of the basic and foundational economic concept of 'ceteris paribus'.

Without employing the tool of 'ceteris paribus' in his his essay Mr. Graham has left the door _wide_ open for discussion of all sorts of things which might form a critical response to his argument: "But economic inequality per se is not bad." On the same topic, in his follow-up he weakens his argument substantially by prefacing it with: "I thought it might help clarify matters if I tried to write a version so simple that it leaves no room for misinterpretation." Less words does not necessarily make for a smaller room, Mr. Graham.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/sim.html)

[2] [https://medium.com/@RickWebb/paul-graham-s-second- inequality...](https://medium.com/@RickWebb/paul-graham-s-second-inequality- essay-is-only-slightly-better-here-s-what-s-still-wrong-with- it-9b57ba8e516d#.hum2bsuur)

</comment><comment><USER34> It's interesting to me that these types of arguments always boil down taxing the wealthy. That is a way to redistribute wealth, but what about working to do a more efficient job of redistributing wealth from government to the citizens?

Consider the author's idea of levying an 80% tax on people who earn $1 billion a year. Chances are that anyone who is smart enough to earn $1 billion a year is smart enough to hire a small army of accountants/tax attorneys to reduce her tax load. The relevant tax authority thus has to counter by hiring their own army of auditors/tax accountants to enforce these sorts of tax laws.

In the end, the tax authority may collect more money, but they also have to spend significantly more. In the end, will such a scheme really result in more money in the government's coffers??

And then, what happens to money once it reaches the G?? How much of the money is wasted on poorly planned/executed programs? How much is wasted by massive, overstaffed organizations? How much of the money designated for 'social services' ends up in the hands of lower income people versus how much ends up paying for bureaucracy?

Please tax the wealthy, but first, it's a better idea to run government in the most efficient way possible.

<comment><USER35> "Please tax the wealthy, but first, it's a better idea to run government in the most efficient way possible."

Yeah, if someone tells me that they can spend Elon Musk's money more productively than he can, I'd kind of like them to be able to point to some track record of having done that in the past with all the other money they've had their hands on.

<comment><USER36> Many people think Musk is in the top percentiles of "using money well." While I think it is always appropriate to want the government to run better, it's probably not fair to set such a high bar for it.

One might just as easily say "no VC should invest money in any company whose founder has a poorer track record than Elon Musk" which is of course a ridiculous posture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Most of problems of inequality come down to the fact that rich are allowed to invest into land / housing.

One can argue if enormous capital gains should be taxed or not, but the problem starts when rich park their money where it inflates "normal people"'s necessities.

Best jobs are concentrated in few big cities, workers have to live there. Rich don't have to live there but they corner the housing market in order to extract maximum percentage from workers' salaries.

I don't care how much money the rich have as long as they don't inflate the housing so I can afford to buy my own.

Capitalism has learned to extract more surplus value from labour about the moment when worker productivity and salaries started diverging. It used to be that the rich are very few and once they bought all the London property normal people could live their lives. Nowadays there are so many foreign billionaires (China) who either have money or can access cheap debt that they can corner property market in every major city.

</comment><comment><USER38> 'Dr. Mr Graham' surely it's just 'Dr' or just 'Mr'. It can't be both. We're not German here.

<comment><USER39> Maybe he's German? In German it's customary to say "Frau/Herr Doktor XXX" (Madam/Mr. Dr. XXX)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> In living (for some), 80%+ tax rates have been used and tax was very high for about 5 decades:

      - the top marginal rate of tax was 62% in 1932 (up from 25% in 1931)
      - rising to 91% in 1963 (income over $200k)
      - It was at 70% in 1981 (before dropping to 50% in 1982)

[http://taxfoundation.org/article/us-federal-individual- incom...](http://taxfoundation.org/article/us-federal-individual-income-tax- rates-history-1913-2013-nominal-and-inflation-adjusted-brackets)

and a graph here: [http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2010/02/04/historical-m...](http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2010/02/04/historical- marginal-income-tax-rates)

Though I can find very little that talks about the affects of this taxation on society.

<comment><USER7> The 80%+ tax rate were used to pay for WWII debts. Also, tax loopholes were absolutely rampant prior to the 1986 tax reform act. Because tax rates and deductions are so fungible, and vary from country to country and even state to state (if we factor state and local taxes) the only objective measure is to look at tax revenue as a percentage of GDP: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Also the talk of GDP growth slowing down is so off-putting. It just goes to show that the author has no understanding of economics. GDP growth tends to slow down as the base increases. The entire article sounded like an adult making the case that if he ate more, he'd grow taller.

</comment><comment><USER41> I read PG as saying, "You can't fix exponential forces with linear solutions." Furthermore I got the impression PG's essay is in favor of progressive reform such as reduced incarceration rates and even something like basic income but is going out of the way to make the point it still won't get rid of in equality because it _cannot_ as long as we embrace technology. He's trying to say instead of going after the impossible bogeyman (inequality) let's go after the very real bogeyman (poverty).

I feel like the author of this post reads PG totally different. He seems to think PG is saying, "Inequality isn't a big problem and it can't be fixed and screw these dumb poor people."

</comment><comment><USER42> I really don't like the word "progressive" being used in a context like this, and it seems more like a cognitive anchor for associating actual progress with this proposal.

It seems really backward and regressive if anything.

</comment><comment><USER14> PG talks about startups as if they are the best thing that ever happened to this world.

The iphone did not come from a startup. Nor did the internet. The world needs startups but if the startup fails like the way most of them do... then it's just wasted capital producing a good that has zero utility.

Anybody have a good argument for why we need startups for every little stupid business idea? PG almost describes the "entrepreneur" as some sort of genetically superior being.

<comment><USER43> PG (or anyone involved with YC) has a financially vested interest in everyone believing that startups are great. I don't know the dude, so cannot presume his full thoughts or motivations, but he is FAR from an unbiased source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Because poverty is not actually a bad thing that causes income inequality, it is a circumstance of it."

Poverty is a circumstance of living in a world with limited resources where trade offs have to be made in virtually all decisions. When I have lunch today, I am, in a twisted interpretation, depraving someone else of that food.

In a world where everything has a cost, whether hidden or real, poverty in some form will exist.

</comment><comment><USER23> Every response post I've read is terrible. Frustratingly so.

Inequality is bad. People want to reduce inequality. Startups strive to strictly increase inequality. Now what? An extreme progressive tax plus startups will STILL increase inequality. Not decrease.

To be honest I want to increase inequality even more. Because I want to allow more immigrants and refugees. You can't let in hundreds of thousands of refugees without increasing inequality. It's not possible.

What some of these posts say, without actually saying it, is that oh some types of inequality are bad and some are good. A small local business that earns it's owner a 6 figure salary? Well that's _obviously_ good. When people say inequality is bad they meant those filthy point-oh-one percenters on Wall Street. Not the plumber who has 10 employees and made $350,000 last year. Obviously.

Inequality is at most a 2nd order derivative. It doesn't actually matter much. Things can be good with high inequality or they can be bad with low inequality. It gets far more attention than it should, imo.

<comment><USER30> The current consensus among economists is that increasing inequality will lead to disaster for the entire economy, while decreasing inequality actually increases growth.

Sure, you're right that nothing is set in stone, and you could have a country that has low inequality but it's still a terrible place to live by other metrics, but this is useless hypothesizing and speculation. What evidence do you have to support the statement that "An extreme progressive tax plus startups will STILL increase inequality. Not decrease." Seems to me, in the years when the top marginal tax rates were higher, those were some of the years with the least income inequality in American history.

Why not look at what people who study our current economies are saying instead of speculating?

From the IMF:

"We find that increasing the income share of the poor and the middle class actually increases growth while a rising income share of the top 20 percent results in lower growth—that is, when the rich get richer, benefits do not trickle down."

[https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42986....](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42986.0)

<comment><USER23> It's not that simple. Bringing in more refugees increases inequality. Bringing in more refugees is also good for the economy. Therefore an increase in inequality does mean economic disaster.

Not all increases in inequality are equal. They can not be treated as such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A somewhat less nuanced response, that (despite a lively conversation) never made it to the front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261)

</comment><comment><USER45> [https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still- askin...](https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-asking-to-be- eaten-5f021c0c0650#.84ry1qyun)

</comment><comment><USER22> I think capitalism has been a zero-sum game for a very long time. Marketing just dominates everything now - 90% of the work people do is to figure out how to make the company that they work for gain market share over the companies that other people work for and the solution these days is usually marketing... Instead of focusing their energy on how to make their product cheaper.

The cost of RAM memory seems to have stagnated. The prices of vital drugs are going up. Property prices are going up.

The era of value-creation is over. The real winners are those who can make other people create all the value and just capture that value.

</comment><comment><USER46> uh, money to the government doesn't end poverty, not even remotely. the question we should all ask is whether individuals, individually motivated, better allocate money than the government. the idea they don't give to charity or fight poverty with their billions is also preposterous.

</comment><comment><USER47> >If a billionaire is taxed 80% on the year he or she earns that billion, they will still be worth $200 million.

Ah, yes. One can be rich, but don't you dare be TOO rich!

<comment><USER48> What's wrong with that? The gap between the rich and the poor (and the problems this creates) is at the core of the economic inequality issue, in comparison with the poor, it is possible to be 'TOO rich'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It drives me nuts that Hacker News is such an awesome resource but the person behind it is such an arrogant jerk.

Am I banned now?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your core evening to morning routine? - <AUTHOR> I feel like our evening routine in conjunction with our morning routine helps set-up a productive work day. For example, if I switch my bedtime or wakeup time around, I feel groggy in the morning and substantially less focused.<p>Can you please share the highlights of your evening to morning routine? What are the key elements that you make sure to check off? <comment><USER2> Lately- i sleep as soon as i'm home, much more time in the morning. These helped me too.... [https://odysseyblanket.com/](https://odysseyblanket.com/) [https://www.amazon.com/Relaxzen-Full-Shiatsu-Massage- Cushion...](https://www.amazon.com/Relaxzen-Full-Shiatsu-Massage- Cushion/dp/B01LX4ZOTO)</comment>


Apple tells app devs to use IPv6 as it's 1.4 times faster than IPv4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-tells-app-devs-to-use-ipv6-as-its-1-4-times-faster-than-ipv4/ <comment> blaser-waffle > "And when IPv6 is in use, the median connection setup is 1.4 times faster > than IPv4. This is primarily due to reduced NAT usage and improved routing."</comment>


Why Apple Killed the MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2019/10/12/apple-macbook-pro-steve-jobs-tim-cook-powerful-macos-ios-iphone-defeat-broken/#423ae8a84895 <comment><USER2> I still love my MacBook despite all its flaws, but I can't wait to see what the rumored October event will bring to the table.</comment>


Judge and prepare to be judged - <AUTHOR> http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/05/judge-and-prepare-to-be-judged/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is ultimately an obvious truth -- if you are selling a product for a small profit per customer, you need a large number of customers to make enough profit to cover fixed costs. You need a scaleable, low cost way to reach those customers. The lower the profit per customer, the lower your customer acquisition cost needs to be.

You _can_ build a business entirely through offline word of mouth if you are selling >$100k items and there are limited potential customers. Specialty professional products/services, especially in security, tend to work this way. Blackwater got publicity, and you saw what happened to them; most defense contractors (both systems and operations) tend to operate in relative silence.

But, even in the case where you can do this, say selling to the government, there are _other_ good reasons for publicity besides being discoverable for your customers. Palantir has a baller PR effort, even though most of their sales (for one of their two products) are to the government -- Palantir's reputation makes it easier to justify the decision to buy, and it helps with recruiting (both raising awareness by candidates, and helping to justify to "dragon parents" when a graduate goes to Palantir instead of Google or Facebook.

(an ex-Palantir guy on Facebook pointed out that this Suster post: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most- startups-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-startups- should-be-deer-hunters/) is relevant...)

</comment><comment><USER2> So, is every post from this site going to be submitted to HN? I already have an RSS reader.

<comment><USER3> _So, is every post from this site going to be submitted to HN?_

Hopefully. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good intro, I can't get my browser to load the rest of the article though. Disappointing, I usually like her posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> It ends rather abruptly with "Let's give them something to talk about.", but that's intentional. This is sort of a teaser post for their new pivot I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Be the change you want to see in the world" - if you want support, then be supportive of others, positive / helpful criticism or otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER6> Again with the Alexa-worshipping.

Twilio's rank is really low for a company with that much name recognition/revenue/employees/valuation etc and is actually great evidence that Alexa is a terrible indicator of B2B success. And Zendesk's number is skewed because they use their domain to setup customer service portals for their users. 99% of that traffic is going there to submit a ticket to some other company and could care less about Zendesk or their product offerings.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it matters that Alexa works. What _does_ matter is finding publicly accessible leading indicators of startup success.

Maybe those are watching the browsing behavior of experts in a field. Maybe it's watching for twitter references. Maybe it's sitting outside a company's office watching foot traffic. Maybe it's looking for who sponsors conferences. I don't really care what the indicators are; what I care about is that someone cares about finding them, and is diligent and intelligent enough to find them.

<comment><USER6> >>I don't think it matters that Alexa works.

It matters when it's used to handwave dismiss a valid argument and followed by "so don't even try that line on me".

<comment><USER7> This argument doesn't make sense. Should Tumblr not get credit for subdomained blogs, or Wordpress.com? This seems tantamount to not giving Facebook or Pinterest credit for logged in sessions. How is this traffic any less an indicator of usage?

<comment><USER6> I think you're referring to Zendesk. Insofar as Alexa's rankings are accurate (they aren't, but that's another matter) then Zendesk.com is indeed the 650th highest trafficked site on the internet and they are clearly getting a lot of usage. That's great for Zendesk, but it says very little about how they compare to other B2B companies. Just as a low Alexa rank (above a certain minimum threshold - say 500,000) tells you very little about how a given B2B company is doing.

Example:

Website A: CRM software for real estate agents that charges $2,000 per month. Alexa rank 120,000.

Website B: in the same business but gives their software away free, lets users host blogs on their site and advertises with popups served from the domain (a huge Alexa boost to lots of porn sites, ad networks and others) and as a result has an Alexa rank of 9,000.

If you were to do a post on the real estate CRM industry you'd probably dump on company A and praise company B - even though we know essentially nothing about either business. Website A could be doing millions per month in revenue and have 50+ employees and B could be one guy working nights and weekends and making $2,000 per month.

tl;dr apples-to-apples comparisons between B2B companies based on homepage traffic stats = fail.

<comment><USER6> More examples:

<http://www.csc.com/> Alexa 30,000 - Market Cap $7.1 Billion

<https://www.saic.com/> Alexa 43,000 - Market Cap $5 Billion

And just a random one I've used that I knew would have a high Alexa given how their service works:

<http://unbounce.com/> Alexa 6,000 - Total employees 20, total funding $850k (per crunchbase)

If you were to rank these three companies, unbounce would be on top and you'd be telling the CEO's of two companies worth a combined $12 Billion+ to stop whining and be more like unbounce.

<comment><USER7> It. is. not. ranked. by. web. traffic.

Web traffic is one of several signals used to produce the ranking.

<comment><USER6> Then maybe you shouldn't say things like this?

"Think your B2B startup shouldn't be expected to ever have meaningful web traffic? Twilio is #13,158 in global web traffic and Zendesk is #650, so don't even try that line on me."

P.S. I remain a big fan of what you're doing here - was just trying to help.

Looking forward to the next post.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Two musings on the design of compiler warnings - <AUTHOR> https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2020/09/02/wparentheses/ <comment><USER2> There is a set of concerns in this article that are universal, and then there are the specifics of C, which generally leave me horrified that because some rando is free to write

      if((this=that)) {
        ...
      }

some hackers can crash the power grid, blow up a chemical plant, etc. Using the double paren to suppress warnings is frankly terrifying to me because the double paren is the kind of thing that comes out of the ten thousand monkeys that almost understand Noam Chomsky that are trying to 'help' me in my IDE or when I type with a touchscreen -- the same accidents that might result in "this=that" could just as well leave double parens...

OTOH in more civilized languages the question of error messages is fascinating to me but insufficiently documented, in fact it is part of the "parser generators haven't improved since yacc" syndrome. "Little languages" like the ones yacc was invented to make easy haven't taken off in the way that yacc's siblings did because of a handful of problems that haven't been addressed in one tool -- and the error handling is the worst of them.

I told the Jena people that I thought error handling with their RETE engine was great -- I could look at the error and look at the Jena source code and understand what was wrong with my source code. That was just not the case with Drools.

<comment><USER3> See, I think your problem is specifically with the fact that C provides the same operator for "assignment" and "assignment and I get a value back". The issue is that the latter is useful but generally not what you want, so this is why we warn about it but I don't think it's justified to be horrified about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> unused variable is the warning that causes me the most pain

it happens so often that I want to test or debug something, disable some code, or replace some value by "5" or what not as a placeholder, and then get the unused variable warning

sure, it can be fixed with (void) casts, but sometimes there are multiple unused variables due to commenting out part of code, then you have to hunt all of them

and sure it can be fixed with a flag to disable this warning, but that may require a recompile of everything if the build system considers this a change of compiler flags

and sure you could disable it always, or only for certain modes, but the warning also has its merits

<comment><USER5> Or just ignore warnings if you know they're from a temporary change that wont ever be committed?

<comment><USER6> Some teams turn on the switch in their compiler or linter that turns warnings into errors. Not many people invoke their compilers directly anymore, so disabling this requires digging into the build system configuration, which is not always simple (and as the OP mentioned, can require a full rebuild).

Sometimes this is even baked into the language itself. For example Go can be strict about unused imports and variables. Python is strict about having correct indentation.

<comment><USER7> > Some teams turn on the switch in their compiler or linter that turns > warnings into errors.

That's completely self-inflicted. I really don't get why people do that instead of just fixing the warnings... except if one is in some position of power over environment configuration, but not over work results. Even then, why does that person care about work results?

<comment><USER8> In large bodies of code, you might not notice the warnings if they weren't errors.

<comment><USER9> Code size can have something to do with it, but less than you think.

Basically, you don't notice warnings because you choose not to look.

Firstly, no matter how large the program is, if it builds without warnings and then a change is introduced which triggers a warning, it will be noticed. You only don't notice a new, potentially important warning when it is drowned out by "nuisance" warnings that you stopped caring about months or years ago. This tends to be a problem in larger programs worked on by many people, but it could easily affect a small, solo-effort program as well.

You perhaps don't notice warnings because the build log is too long to read, and you haven't put in CI process which scans logs for warnings and produces feedback. When you build locally, you don't bother using an IDE which picks up all the errors and warnings out of the build output an lets you navigate through them. This can be a problem when people don't build locally; they just throw the code into some remote build system and if it goes "green", they "ship it".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember very old versions of lint had hints you could add, like:

       /*NOTREACHED*/

that would suppress warnings. I kind of liked that method.</comment>


Isolation tips from a nuclear submarine captain - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08837f6/isolation-tips-from-a-nuclear-submarine-captain <comment><USER2> "with 130 people." "isolated." Not really helpful, but I appreciate it, Captain.</comment>


Cadillac To Build Stunning Volt-based Coupe - <AUTHOR> http://www.conceivablytech.com/8920/products/cadillac-to-build-stunning-volt-based-coupe

<comment><USER2> How about building a minivan or something else that will actually sell en masse?

And leave the "Zoot suite shoulders" off of it, while you're at it. (Regarding the recent "brickification" of U.S. auto designs. Together with shrinking windows, some of them look like rolling pill boxes.)</comment>


SirixDB – An Evolutionary, Temporal NoSQL Storage System - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to hear about the use-cases that prompted the creation of Sirix. For example, we were inspired to build Crux[0], another bitemporal document database (although we opted for Datalog rather that XQuery), following our experiences of integrating timestamped data from multiple upstream systems, whilst coping with delays and ad-hoc corrections, and also maintaining efficient time-travel auditability.

[0] [https://juxt.pro/crux](https://juxt.pro/crux)

<comment><USER3> Some of the use cases can be found here:

[https://sirix.io/documentation.html](https://sirix.io/documentation.html)

The main distinctive features are our main document store index, features inherited by ZFS (checksums in parent pointers, the main index, a trie, compression and hopefully soon encryption of page-fragments, always consistent on-disk, log-structured without the need of a WAL...), versioned user-defined indexes, highly concurrent data structures (every transaction has access to one snapshot and we only allow one read/write transaction, parallelization has to be done by the client code) and record-level versioning (also a novel sliding window algorithm -- whereas a slightly other implementation is patented by the founder Marc Kramis).

I might implement pointer swizzling for the upcoming 1.0.0 release, should speedup Sirix considerably :-)

[https://sirix.io/features.html](https://sirix.io/features.html)

I think XQuery is great for querying JSON data. That said in the future I'd also implement something based on Spark to distribute queries...

<comment><USER2> Cool, thanks for the summary! The user-defined indexes sound particularly intriguing.

The documentation page alludes to payroll, audit and decision support applications -- have you implemented one or more of those already? I have been compiling a list of known uses for bitemporality in the Crux docs which you are more than welcome to borrow from:

[https://juxt.pro/crux/docs/bitemp.html#_known_uses](https://juxt.pro/crux/docs/bitemp.html#_known_uses)

It is great to see all this new enthusiasm for temporal databases now that they are finally viable, decades after all the major research happened :)

<comment><USER3> Will have to sleep now... but yes, the ideas and the first prototype emerged already in I think 2006 from Marc Kramis (back then it internally was named Idefix, then Treetank... but I think Treetank is pretty strange ;-))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has bracket work moved over to StrixDB? I've been looking at bracket but don't see any commits to the bracket repo in over a year. I'm looking forward to checking out StrixDB

<comment><USER3> No, I had to "fork" it, when it still was on Google Code, because of temporal extensions and lately JSON stuff. Sebastian sadly doesn't seem to be on Github a lot. Would love to contribute my changes, but I also have to have the ability to change/fix stuff on my own. That said I really love the whole idea of Brackit, a flexible query compiler framework with proven rules, to rewrite the AST usable by any data store... and I want to plugin rewrite rules for index accesses as well as operators in the first place and so on (the indexes can be manually created and queried as of now). Sirix basically as of now has to use raw document scans, but I'd love to work on rewrite rules and then on a cost based optimizer (that said it would be great to find someone who is experienced and can help a bit). His Ph.D. thesis can be found here: [http://wwwlgis.informatik.uni- kl.de/cms/fileadmin/publicatio...](http://wwwlgis.informatik.uni- kl.de/cms/fileadmin/publications/2013/Dissertation-Baechle.pdf)

And Sebastian worked under supervision from Dr. Theo Härder :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> so anyway -

Names beginning with the string "xml", or with any string which would match (('X'|'x') ('M'|'m') ('L'|'l')), are reserved for standardization in this or future versions of this specification.

from here [https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-common- syn](https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#sec-common-syn)

so I think the following

<rest:sequence xmlns:rest="[https://sirix.io/rest">](https://sirix.io/rest">) <rest:item> <xml rest:id="1"> foo <bar rest:id="3"> <test rest:id="4"> yikes <bar rest:id="6"/> </test> </bar> </xml> </rest:item> </rest:sequence>

is not well-formed, or has there been some change I've missed?

<comment><USER3> Okay thanks, would need to change the example and add it to the token checker before inserting elements/attributes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My latest article released a few days ago can be found here:

[https://hackernoon.com/asynchronous-temporal-rest-with- vert-...](https://hackernoon.com/asynchronous-temporal-rest-with-vert-x- keycloak-and-kotlin- coroutines-217b25756314?source=friends_link&sk=5eabb36b2984cf61a2dff3f9fe45addc)

</comment><comment><USER6> What's the use-case for time-travel queries vs. just using time series databases? (ie. influx, timescale, kdb etc.)

<comment><USER3> Hey, I think best explanation is this:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51533143/temporal-vs- tim...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51533143/temporal-vs-time-series- database)

:-)

<comment><USER6> The use-case listed there (the change of address) can be implemented perfectly fine with any rational or non-rational database. I personally would not switch to a completely new database and new paradigm just because of the requirement to show user's address based on the date. And for data that changes a lot - time series db still seems like a better choice.

So what's the real use-case?

<comment><USER3> You can reconstruct a revision in O(n), you can search for a specific revision in O(log n) and the transaction time is stored in a revision root page (time the transaction commits). Thus, you do not have to store the time for each node (even start- and end-time).

Furthermore Sirix does not have to copy whole record pages which have changed, it depends on the chosen versioning algorithm. The whole structure is highly concurrent and allows client side parallelism. We also do not have to write in a WAL first, but the structure is always consistent (if no hardware failure occurs...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the way, if you check it out and find bugs, please let me know :-) It's still at an early stage and for sure has some rough edges.

Thanks and have a great day :)

Oh and maybe another interesting article: [https://hackernoon.com/sirix-io- why-copy-on-write-semantics-...](https://hackernoon.com/sirix-io-why-copy-on- write-semantics-and-node-level-versioning-are-key-to-efficient- snapshots-754ba834d3bb)

<comment><USER3> By the way, would it make sense to work on these visualizations again for comparing revisions?

[https://youtu.be/l9CXXBkl5vI](https://youtu.be/l9CXXBkl5vI)

Or would anyone be interested to port the processing.org stuff to the web? Sadly I'm a backend developer and feel a bit overwhelmed by all the front-end frameworks JavaScript stuff), but I think the visualizations for comparing revisions are really helpful.

More information: [https://github.com/JohannesLichtenberger/master- thesis/raw/m...](https://github.com/JohannesLichtenberger/master- thesis/raw/master/Master/Thesis/thesis.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Oh and I think with pointer swizzling (Java object references instead of references to the page-IDs in the buffer manager) we can gain quiet some speed :-)

And maybe adding memory mapped files in the future.

<comment><USER3> And I also have an idea how to save up even more space on disk/on the flash drive :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh BTW: I'm also no native english speaker, so, any hint on stuff, which is wrong is also greatly appreciated :-) just got my first spelling error correction pull request. You guys are really awesome, thanks :)

<comment><USER3> (first since a few years ago), but thanks so much :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> By the way I've added some documentation lately on [https://sirix.io](https://sirix.io) :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, thank you so much for posting/mentioning :-)

Have a great evening Johannes</comment>


Getting acquainted with Rust's mio - <AUTHOR> http://www.hoverbear.org/2015/03/04/getting-acquainted-with-mio/ <comment><USER2> Great post. I didn't check mio before but after reading the post I can probably jump start.

</comment><comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, Rust was first built on libuv, then libuv was removed, now mio looks like an API very similar to libuv, but not using libuv. What were the decisions behind this and why is it better than not using an existing lib that should be easy to plug into Rust via FFI since it is small and in C?

<comment><USER4> There's a long history here. An abridged and slightly biased / not complete story follows.

In the beginning, Rust had only green threads. This was because concurrency was deemed important, and everybody knows green threads are where it's at. (totally not sarcasm. Totally.)

Eventually, it was decided that a systems language without systems threads is... strange. So we needed to add them. Why not add choice? Since the interfaces could be the same, why not abstract over them, and you could just choose which one you wanted?

At the same time, the problems with green threads by default were becoming issues. Segmented stacks cause slow C interop. You need a runtime to manage them, etc.

Furthermore, the overall abstraction was causing an unacceptable cost. The green threads weren't very green. Plus, with the need to actually release someday looming, decisions needed to be made regarding tradeoffs. And since Rust is supposed to be a systems language, having 1:1 threads and basically no runtime makes more sense than N:M threads and a runtime. So libgreen was removed, the interface was re-done to be 1:1 thread centric, and Servo got mad. That's another story.

That doesn't mean that green threads are evil. Remember, I/O isn't a language thing, really, it's a library thing, in a language as low-level as Rust. In fact, that's one of the reasons green threads could be removed: libraries like mio could provide the benefits, without the problems that were being caused. Servo might also write a green threading library, with a different set of tradeoffs from mio's implementation.

Anyway, this is my pre-coffee explanation of the history. I'm being a bit silly, so please don't read into any particular bit of language here, that's just the high-level story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure event loops have their uses in all languages, but I'm not sure why the author rubbishes Python and JS, citing callback hell, and then writes an example that uses callbacks.

Anyway, the article's introduced me to consensus algorithms, so thanks for that.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the example uses callbacks, sure, but the point was intended to be that not __everything __is callback based, like in Node, you can use it where it 's appropriate.

<comment><USER5> You sure it wasn't just an excuse to bash dynamically typed languages? ;)

In any case, I'll be interested in seeing how it ends up getting used. It's nice to have it available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You lost me there. What's this about?

<comment><USER8> An IO abstraction in Rust.</comment></comment>


Senator: Firm that vetted Snowden under criminal investigation - <AUTHOR> http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/20/senator-firm-that-vetted-snowden-under-criminal-investigation/?hpt=hp_t2

<comment><USER2> I seriously doubt that even assuming that the company did all their diligence (I'm not saying that they did not) that their success rate would be 100%.

</comment><comment><USER3> Talk about trying to create a distraction from the real issue here...

<comment><USER4> I love that this is what they are investigating.

<comment><USER5> Hiring contractors to screen contractors...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The government outsources background checks for top-secret jobs? Why, so they can shift the blame for their 10%-rated efforts to private firmst?

Makes you wonder: who was responsible for picking USIS to do the job?

<comment><USER7> They had to!

Not too long ago, there would be a 8-10 month wait just to get an interview with someone to just kick of the individual investigation. The investigations themselves can can many, many more months after that. By allowing contracting firms and outsourcing, they've significantly lessened the wait. Unfortunately, it's coming with the cost of rampant fraud, waste and abuse (at least form what the article is asserting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Maybe I haven't read every single article but is there anything we know about Mr. Snowden that would have flagged him during this process?

<comment><USER9> Maybe he would have failed the "commie traitor" check /s

<comment><USER10> I'm legitimately concerned that anyone who's ever donated to Ron Paul, etc., will never find their way into a position to leak, ever again. And we know they have a _lot_ of data to scrape in filtering out candidates with strong opinions on human rights, rule of law, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would anyone like a dollar?

<comment><USER12> Sure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A wild scape-goat appears!

Good ol' distractionary (although OSX thinks I mean "discrattionary" for reasons I can't fathom) tactics.</comment>


The Laconic Keys- a Booking PM Shares the Inner Game of Product Management - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-laconic-keys/the-laconic-keys-short-lessons-in-the-art-and-science-of-product-management-f649b2125366 <comment><AUTHOR> "You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city." The Spartan leadership replied with just one word, "if."</comment>


Pyramid Pitching - <AUTHOR> http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2012/09/pyramid-pitching

<comment><AUTHOR> I think here Dan gives a good example of how one's pitch should be logically structured to progress from dead simple overview to details, enticing the receiver to either listen or to move on. We all know this, but I bet most of us (myself definitely included) fail miserably at executing properly.</comment>


XSS in Gmail through Rapportive  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kotowicz.net/2013/12/rapportive-xsses-gmail-or-have-yourself.html <comment><USER2> This type of thing is all too common. We wrote about a worse case last year where an extension XSS'd quite literally the entire internet: [https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/building-a-browser- exte...](https://www.tinfoilsecurity.com/blog/building-a-browser-extension-be- careful-not-t-17787)

The scariest thing here is that you have arbitrary code execution, so your options are limitless. Check out XSS Harvest: [https://github.com/Miserlou/XSS-Harvest](https://github.com/Miserlou/XSS- Harvest)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah so I'm uninstalling every plugin/extension I have that I don't absolutely trust. I'd recommend you do the same.

<comment><USER4> It's not a question of trust but competence, and that's practically impossible to evaluate as an end user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that's scary stuff.

I guess the lesson here is to only use extensions from vendors where you have absolute confidence in their capabilities or from popular open source projects (Basically the same thing).

<comment><USER6> Honestly, I'd rather just not use extensions at all. They've proven insecure in the past and will probably be insecure in the future. Even if they come from a trusted vendor, that won't mean that it won't be compromised.

Are all these extensions that "prettify" our browsing experience all this necessary? Some, maybe (HTTPS everywhere, Ghostery, NoScript, etc etc), but most of them aren't. I personally prefer to keep my browser clean, it's even more responsive this way.

<comment><USER7> What i'd like to see, and as far as i know it doesn't exist in any browser, is a way to prevent any extensions from running on certain sites. I want some things like adblock installed for general browsing, but there's no reason i need it running on my email, my banking, my employer's control panel. I can white-list sites inside of extensions, but that still leaves me trusting the extension to properly implement their white-listing feature. I'd much rather have chrome managing a list of sites where the extension doesn't get to run at all.

<comment><USER8> You always can use the incognito window to do that, but I agree it is really annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Looks like the most potentially dangerous extensions are the ones pulling stuff from other websites to inject into the current site, and ones doing text processing/conversion on document contents. I don't have any extensions that do that, so hopefully I'm safe...

</comment><comment><USER10> Security problems like this are so common in 3rd party extensions / plugins / add-ons. While the most widely used open source ones tend to have less bugs many of the less popular ones are full of problems. Take a look at WordPress plugins to see what I mean.

</comment><comment><USER11> rapportive is a quite versatile tool... [http://jordan- wright.github.io/blog/2013/10/14/automated-soc...](http://jordan- wright.github.io/blog/2013/10/14/automated-social-engineering-recon-using- rapportive/)

</comment><comment><USER12> See this talk: [https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/evaluatio...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/evaluation- google-chrome-extension-security-architecture)

</comment><comment><USER13> great find :)</comment>


Ask HN Spreadsheet Contractors: How do you feel about being undercut? - <AUTHOR>

I've been looking through the contractors spreadsheet and I notice that there are many people with similar skills with large discrepancies in rates. How do those on the West Coast, for example, feel about seeing others from the Midwest, South or another country charging a fraction of what you do?<p>I know it's known that developers from the West Coast are generally more expensive than other places in the country (and, of course, throughout the world) but, it seems more stark when scrolling through the spreadsheet. <comment><USER2> I'm actually half inclined to pay more for the West Coaster. Why? _He's got better friends._

Sure its an intangible, and I might indeed be crazy (or have a bad case of selction bias from previous contacts) but I imagine a guy in an office in Palo Alto swirling around in his aeron and asking the guy behind him about how to X and getting an answer in 30 seconds. I imagine the mid-westerner embarking on a 20 minute google session to find out the same. They both had equal skill when they started, but the mid-westerner ended up costing more at a lower rate.

</comment><comment><USER3> A lot of that has to do with cost of living, and cost of living is quite variable with geographic location. For example a developer in my state, SC can easily break even on his time/effort with lower rates than a developer in New York or LA.

I assume that developers in larger cities understand that developers in towns no one has ever heard of have lower rates.</comment>


Category Theory for the Working Hacker - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/category-theory-propositions-principle <comment><USER2> Interesting talk from an academic point of view but still left me confused as to how we should 'think in functional terms.</comment>


Coming Soon – AWS SDK for Go - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-aws-sdk-for-go/

<comment><USER2> It's awesome that they reached out to the authors of a promising community project[1] and adopted that, rather than building their own project from scratch. AWS' first-party client libraries are generally awful, but I think this one stands a chance to be very good.

Also, the current situation with goamz is truly horrific. There are multiple independent forks of the original Canonical Launchpad-hosted version, each with their own subtle differences in usage, interfaces and feature support. None of them feel like idiomatic Go.

It really would be unlikely for this now AWS-supported project to end up doing worse than the status quo.

[1] mainly Coda Hale from Stripe, where the project originated: [https://github.com/stripe/aws-go](https://github.com/stripe/aws-go)

<comment><USER3> > AWS' first-party client libraries are generally awful

Do you have some feedback that I can pass along to the AWS SDK team?

<comment><USER2> Sure, but going from memory on this :) As far as the Ruby SDK, my opinions are mostly based on how things were 2-3 years ago, when I wrote it off entirely after inheriting several large projects that made heavy use of it.

In the past, it was difficult (impossible?) to figure out how it worked by reading the code. That's highly unusual for a Ruby library. It felt like a generated library, not like Ruby. When something wasn't working as expected (which happened often), it was difficult to figure out what was going wrong and why.

As a heavy AWS user, I've felt much more comfortable using Fog, even though I only really use its AWS provider. That's true even though I didn't even get to take advantage of Fog's multi-provider abstractions (basically just using it to make raw AWS API calls). Hopefully that's all in the past and I should give it another look the next time I'm doing that stuff in Ruby. Fog also gave _much_ better control over a lot of the details that are important when doing stuff in production, like timeouts and keep-alive settings.

The 2nd example that comes to mind is the AWS Flow framework for Ruby: [https://github.com/aws/aws-flow-ruby](https://github.com/aws/aws-flow-ruby)

Flow does things like create global methods ( [https://github.com/aws/aws- flow-ruby/blob/master/aws-flow/li...](https://github.com/aws/aws-flow- ruby/blob/master/aws-flow/lib/aws/decider.rb#L60) ) and its DSL abstraction just doesn't feel right. It tries too hard to make it feel like you're just running Ruby code, and it's tough to determine how it uses SWF under the hood. It's such a large abstraction on top of SWF that it basically means you can't write parts of your app in anything other than the Flow frameworks for Java or Ruby. But then, the other major SWF framework I've seen ([https://github.com/sclasen/swf4go](https://github.com/sclasen/swf4go)) also locks you in. So maybe it's just a shortcoming of SWF that it's not usable without a big abstraction layered on top of it?

From what others are saying, it sounds like the newer stuff is in much better shape. That's very encouraging!

Regardless, I think you've made a great decision in taking over aws-go. I have very high hopes for its future :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, this is incredibly helpful. I will pass it along to the team in the next 45 seconds.

<comment><USER2> How well do you know the SNS team? :) [https://twitter.com/blakegentry/status/539873715446878209](https://twitter.com/blakegentry/status/539873715446878209)

<comment><USER4> I believe you need to enable "Raw Message Delivery" in the subscription attributes for that subscription for it to deliver raw JSON content instead of wrapping your message in an envelope like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There exists a third party library called goamz which has been forked all over the place when people have needed to add random features not found in the original version. It works well but hopefully you don't need a set of features that require you to import multiple versions.

Hopefully Amazon's version will be comprehensive and idiomatic.

<comment><USER6> True. The "big" players that forked it couldn't be _explicatived_ to work together so the project became seriously fractured. I'm hoping this will move swiftly through experimental to release, and that the generated nature doesn't produce yucky to use implementations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If this has better coverage of AWS features than their goamz fork, I hope Hashicorp will switch to it in Terraform. I'd love to use Terraform but too much of what I use Cloudformation for isn't there.

[https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/28](https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/28)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd love to see their CLI tool converted to Go - not because I have anything against Python, but because installing Go binaries is so easy.

(Would there need to be any dependencies to install?)

<comment><USER9> Good point, I look forward to seeing how this fits together. It would definitely add to the value of AWS for me.

</comment></comment><comment> enahs-sf This is great! I can now unify a lot of my workflow and not have to use ruby as a glue layer between applications and operations. It's great to see the Go ecosystem improving! I think in a few years, it may become the defacto tool of systems programmers.

<comment><USER10> Frankly go isn't my favorite glue language (and I'm one of the relatively few people who's been doing go full time for a couple years). I currently prefer python for that kind of stuff, or sometimes bash.

However it's certainly possible to use as a glue language. I've talked to some folks at DO who just install go on machines and `go run` scripts.

<comment> enahs-sf For small internal projects, I typically find that I end up writing the program and compiling it; It just builds up my developer toolchain from the command line to do my bidding. Also, these are all managed under source control, so my co-workers can also take advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow that moved quick, I remember reading about this library a month or so back.

Glad to hear Amazon have formally adopted it as canonical!

</comment><comment><USER12> I maintain [https://github.com/AdRoll/goamz](https://github.com/AdRoll/goamz) FKA [https://github.com/crowdmob/goamz](https://github.com/crowdmob/goamz) , if anyone has any questions.

</comment><comment><USER13> aws golang sdk's have been around for a while and I've found several other which are well tested and maintained such as [https://github.com/goamz/goamz](https://github.com/goamz/goamz). It's awesome that aws finally decide which library they're officially adopting but I found frustrating that the library is poorly tested and it will take while until it becomes the official. It'd be great if all the other sdk's contributors start working on the same project.

<comment><USER11> The goamz project is an embarrassing mess, so many forks.

<comment><USER14> But anyone can fork any project on github willy-nilly, for whatever reason they want, it's not something that's really under the control of original project.

<comment><USER11> True but they're all diverging away from one another, all under the "goamz" name

<comment><USER14> like a great many projects on github. Popular/mainstream projects on github have thousands of forks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great news indeed. Why could this not have come 8 months ago? Back then, it was quite disheartening to see the replies from AWS team about Go support.

</comment><comment><USER16> Recently I have heard so many good stories about Go although my impression of Go gradually decreases due to unstable development tools and unfriendly debugging tools. FYI, I use IntelliJ to write Go.

<comment><USER17> Sublime Text + GoSublime plugin is my favorite setup.

<comment><USER16> Sublime Text + GoSublime was my first try but then I kept getting //GsDoc: no docs found. At that time, my solution was using Sublime Text + GoSublime + Godef. I still could not find a good debugging tool though.

Godef: [https://github.com/buaazp/Godef](https://github.com/buaazp/Godef)

Others also have this issue with GoSublime [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21832288/gosublime-go- to-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21832288/gosublime-go-to- definition)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is very promising for the Go future as more mature packages will be available from big companies

</comment><comment><USER19> How about a Rust SDK for AWS?</comment>


Bitcoin study: Period of exclusivity encourages early adopters - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2017/bitcoin-study-period-exclusivity-encourages-early-adopters-0713 <comment><USER2> I have a hard time reconciling the social justice goals of some cryptocurrencies with this initial period where people are basically creating wealth out of thin air by doing useless computations at the cost of enormous electricity.

How are we any better for it? A select group gets rich, there is rampant speculation and fraud... but we're fighting "the man" so it's all good?

I can't see how society is better for this (or ever will be).

I've mined some BTC and ETH while thinking about these issues and I can't see a future where anything is different so I've stopped. It seems we'll replace bankers and oil millionaires with miners and early adopters... and the average Joe is where it was always.

Sorry for thinking out loud all these disconnected thoughts. I really want to believe but I'm having a hard time.

Meanwhile, it seems I'm doing better for society if I donate my spare resources to some distributed computing project to research cancer, AIDS, etc.

Where do you see the future in 50-100 years if cryptocurrencies take off for good?

<comment><USER3> >where people are basically creating wealth out of thin air by doing useless computations at the cost of enormous electricity

The only way this statement is different than how the Federal Reserve works is that Bitcoin is voluntary (You only join the economic model that you desire to participate in) / non privileged (you don't have to be born into certain groups to participate in how the system works), the system parameters (inflation, etc) are not coercible (The US President can't nominate a Federal Reserve Chairperson to bitcoin to favor policy that favors one special interest group).

>creating wealth out of thin air

The Federal Reserve literally creates money out of nothing for the Treasury Department. Due to seigniorage, Fed banks make money on the inflated currency before the last man on the street can.

>doing useless computations at the cost of enormous electricity

The thousands of servers that run FedWire, ACH, VISA, MasterCard Paypal, Venmo, ApplePay and the Cash-transport Trucks, Physical banks, all waste energy preventing people from trying to steal money too.

How is the current monetary policy better?

Relevant reading: Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work 04 Aug 2015 [http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow- cheapest/](http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/)

<comment><USER4> > The Federal Reserve literally creates money out of nothing

I hear this often, but while it's a literal fact, maybe it's not that simple. Central banks create money out of the Trust that people put on them, and the trust has been built by the state for years or centuries.

<comment><USER5> The primary mechanism that "creates" money is ordinary banks loaning money in the fractional reserve system. The Federal Reserve does not have as much control as people think.

<comment><USER6> You are right. Central banks can only influence the process, but what really decide the creation or "extinction" of money is the demand of credit in commercial private banks.

In a way, the system is self-regulated.

In fact, all the "fractional-reserve" thing is a myth. Banks loan when they see the opportunity of profit, and then they search for reserves. Not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bitcoin has come a long way... 7 years ago I was writing perl scripts to cobble together a depth-of-market program that operated on the mtgox API. I would get excited scalping coins from $17-19 USD back then. No SEC/CFTC, no regulation, no anything, just good old fashioned auction market theory - combined with a sucker being born every moment and winding up on the other end of a mtgox trade. The sky was the limit, it was an exciting time if you were an oddball breed of programmer crossed with day trader.

Fast forward.... WTF is going on now? Regulated exchanges for bitcoin, dozens of btc clones, new exchanges being birthed/destroyed each month, and the dinosaurs of finance adopting it 10 years too late. It's a crazy mixed up world.

<comment><USER8> > the dinosaurs of finance adopting it 10 years too late

The monoliths of finance will set the legislation that will determine everything about crypto-currencies in all major economies. And if their extreme political power isn't enough, they already by far own the most patents relating to blockchain tech.

Bitcoin + Ethereum = $58 billion.

JP Morgan = $330 billion. That's one "dinosaur" with $25 billion per year in net income.

The notion that they're dinosaurs and they're ten years late, is laughable. Along with all the other banks and central banks, they'll dictate the terms by which crypto-currencies will exist (the only alternative to being controlled by the banksters that control everything related to finance, is to remain a niche that never goes big / mainstream).

<comment><USER9> Why do you say they will dictate the terms? They will own the mining? The whole point of bitcoin is decentralization (unless some large entity owns mining majority).

<comment><USER10> The cynical example:

\- People live in countries

\- countries levy taxes to be paid in "real money"

\- banks deal with the "real money"

\- BTC exchanges have to work with these banks + gov't

<comment><USER11> This assumes that future commerce will always revert back to 'real money'.

<comment><USER12> Commerce is irrelevant.

At the end of the day, you need to pay your taxes - presumably in your national currency.

Suppose you had a commerce that only accepted bitcoins. How will you pay your taxes ?

<comment><USER13> a good thought experiment. I think it's likely that the government forms a symbiotic relationship with Bitcoin if things get that far.

If the public does not want national currencies, then governments need to make them wanted. Physical force is an obvious approach, but probably impractical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm struggling with the findings here. From the article: all late adopters ("NLAs") and non-delayed early adopters ("NEAs") had a cash out (or abandonment) rate of ~10%. (Ironically, higher for NEAs at 11%, but likely not statistically significant.) But _delayed_ NEAs cashed out at 18%, and at even more significant rates where social ties were stronger (e.g., dorms). And these delayed NEAs can affect NLA adoption in the long term.

Separately, we could say that general exclusivity schemes (e.g., gmail, facebook) can accelerate _broader_ market demand. But, of course, it's not causation: plenty of "exclusive" products never gain traction.

So this suggests there's a certain class of people who care deeply, potentially more about "status" of being an early adopter than the underlying tech, and will be toxic if they don't get what they want. So... identify these people carefully?

<comment><USER15> > But delayed NEAs cashed out at 18%, and at even more significant rates where > social ties were stronger (e.g., dorms).

One possible explanation that immediately came to my mind was that these "delayed NEAs" were thinking something along the lines of "we were promised an instantaneous peer-to-peer payments system, but it was not instantaneous at all; screw this, it is obviously broken" and got out for this reason. There is no detail in the press release about what explanation for the delay was given. It's hard to judge people's motivation without that.

> exclusivity

The press release tries to make this about exclusivity, but I don't see how their far-reaching guesses follow from the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Paper from Science [1] (registration or scihub required). Not clear to me whether "cash out" means that they sent funds from a MIT-controlled wallet into any other wallet or if they took it to addresses known to be exchanges. If the former then another explanation is that they were just being prudent to truly control the money.

[1] [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/135](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6347/135)

<comment><USER17> My first thought as well. These NEAs probably already had a mechanism for managing their coin, and so wanted to consolidate, rather than have a separate "MIT wallet"

<comment><USER16> If a prerequisite for getting the funds from MIT was establishing your own wallet somewhere and providing a deposit addr, then perhaps they could designate "cash out" to mean "move from that initial deposit address to anywhere else". Aside from some bias caused by sweeping, it's a more reasonable way to draw these conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The value of money is the aggregate feeling of each person that a seller will agreeto accept it in exchange for something they need.

The more people do this, the more the network effect.

In a sense, money is like an app that spreads through a population. Just another app :)

It can be local currency in a community. So paying in this currency helps keep the community vibrant.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not a coder so my understanding of the technology is very limited, but couldn't we use the blockchain to P2P host something besides a crypto currency, something like a public discussion platform that's tamper/censorship proof? The crypto currency feature could still be kept in place as a payment for people doing the actual hosting, but it would only be there to help facilitate the platform itself and not it's sole purpose.

Is that idea even viable or am I vastly misunderstanding the technology behind BC?

<comment><USER20> That totally works today. Its one of the many applications of blockchain tech due to its "immutable ledger" property. Egs: ipfs.io Besides this there are even many cool applications such as "golem.network- airbnb for computing", "filecoin.io - airbnb for storage" ,"ethereum dapps" etc.

<comment><USER19> After a quick glance ipfs.io looks exactly what I've been thinking about but in a much more dry way.

As I see it, right now there is an opportunity window for a P2P hosted social discussion platform. That's because many big social media companies have been increasingly cracking down on user submitted content, leaving a lot of people to wonder where they could participate without having all their content at the whims of some commercial third party, which can be bullied to censor/delete by state actors at any point in the future.

One could argue Thor offers such a place, but imho in terms of usability Thor is far off from something everybody can use easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's only at MIT where an experiment like this can hand out effectively 400k in cash, just to see how participants react...

</comment><comment><USER22> Also known as the late gmail study

</comment><comment><USER23> like facebook only accepting university email addresses.

</comment><comment><USER24> "More than 50 percent held on to their bitcoins ... The $100 in Bitcoin they were given in 2014 is now worth more than $700"

HODL!!!</comment>


Show HN: A simple, easy on the ears, white noise app just in time for finals - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.davidcox.virtualearplugs

<comment><AUTHOR> All of the other white noise apps on the Play Store sound awful to me. Virtual Earplugs uses Brownian noise instead of regular white noise which makes it better at blocking out conversations and is more pleasant to listen to (in my opinion).

If you've got loud coworkers, roommates, or kids, give it a download! (It's free.)

This is my first published app so feedback is appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER2> I use chroma doze (net.pmarks.chromadoze), but I'll give yours a shot too! thanks.</comment>