Inequality worse now than on 'Downton Abbey' - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/welcome-to-downton-abbey-america-2014-02-24 <comment><USER2> Strange how articles like this aren't taken as an argument against the utility of "inequality". Does anyone think that the poor of today would be better off in Czarist Russia? [1]

I also find it interesting that "inequality" is based solely on "share of national income", as if there is just this big pile of _ex nihilo_ money being apportioned out unfairly.

[1] [http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/~/media/Annual%20Let...](http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/~/media/Annual%20Letter%202014/Myth%201/Myth1Info1_Curves_Final_EN_0122.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Just because the situation has improved with respect to _absolute_ poverty doesn't mean that _relative_ poverty isn't a problem, too. It's just a different kind of problem.

First, rising income inequality/relative poverty is economically harmful. It's simply not sustainable forever, especially in the consumer economy that the US has. Capital gains in particular cannot continue to exceed general economic growth without something eventually giving.

Second, relative poverty creates social exclusion, leading to social stratification, low social mobility, and a whole host of related problems. This is probably best seen in the rising cost of college tuition in the US, creating an ever higher barrier for access to the middle class (admittedly, exacerbated by the fact that the US has no VET system worth speaking of). Perversely, where the affluent European countries invest in the education of their citizens, some US states seem to try and position themselves as low-wage alternatives to Mexico and China. Especially considering the ever-increasing levels of automation, this is all kinds of crazy.

Also, with respect to absolute poverty, while the American poor have it generally better than serfs in Czarist Russia or most of the people in your average third world country (not a very high bar, of course), there's still plenty of hunger and homelessness in the US.

<comment><USER4> _Second, relative poverty creates social exclusion, leading to social stratification, low social mobility, and a whole host of related problems. This is probably best seen in the rising cost of college tuition in the US, creating an ever higher barrier for access to the middle class..._

If I gave you data showing that college consumption is at an all time high and mobility remains unchanged, in spite of a large increase in inequality, would that convince you your beliefs are incorrect?

If not, what data (if any) would cause you to change your beliefs?

[http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf](http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Maybe you want to reconsider yours? I'm contrasting the US with comparatively affluent European countries; US social mobility has been comparatively low for quite some time, but inequality (as measured by the after-tax Gini) hasn't risen all that much over the past two decades, either; it's gotten slightly worse, but not massively. I'm talking about college tuition as a symptom here, not the primary cause (there are obviously many drivers of inequality and lack of social mobility).

So it isn't surprising that social mobility is actually experiencing a slight downward trend [1].

But to elaborate: A college degree has become more crucial than ever for the chance at a middle class life in America, yet real wages have stagnated, despite higher college attendance, and a college degree isn't worth what it used to be, either [2], while student debt has exploded [3]. In fact, even life expectancy is correlated with education and has even fallen for the least educated [4].

As a result, colleges have a seller's market available to them (in part propped up by the student loan scheme, though it likely wouldn't be all that much different without). Conversely, people are willing to sacrifice current and future income to essentially tread water economically (=> stagnant real wages).

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/the-american-dream-is-now- a-m...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-american-dream-is-now-a- myth-2012-6)

[2] [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/27/why-a-ba- is...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/27/why-a-ba-is-now-a- ticket-to-a-job-in-a-coffee-shop.html)

[3] [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/chart- of...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/chart-of-the-day- student-loans-have-grown-511-since-1999/243821/)

[4] [http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/not- everyone-l...](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/01/not-everyone- living-longer)

<comment><USER4> _inequality (as measured by the after-tax Gini) hasn 't risen all that much over the past two decades_

Over the relevant time period of comparison (70's to today), GINI has increased from about 40% to 47%.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/The_US_Gi...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/The_US_Gini_Coefficient_for_Household_Income_\(1967_-_2007_\).png)

Mobility has remained flat over this time period. Over the same time period, college enrollment has gone from about 45% to 70%.

[http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2010/ted_20100428.htm](http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2010/ted_20100428.htm)

Based on the historical data, it looks as if inequality _increases_ college enrollment and does not alter mobility. (Assuming of course, as most inequality mongers tend to do, that correlation == causality. Which is silly but whateve.r)

Your two predictions have not passed the real world test. Again: what data would convince you that your theory is wrong?

To convince me I'm incorrect, it's very simple. I'd want to see an exogenous change in inequality result in some measurable effect. For example, suppose for some reason a hord of rich people to move into some locale - I'd want to see something bad happen to the non-rich people who remain there above and beyond regional trends.

<comment><USER3> _Over the relevant time period of comparison (70 's to today), GINI has increased from about 40% to 47%._

You're confusing the Gini before taxes and transfers with the Gini after taxes and transfers (which is the one relevant for inequality). Also, the past two decades started in the 90s, not the 70s.

 _Based on the historical data, it looks as if inequality increases college enrollment and does not alter mobility._

There's been a lot else going on since the 1970s (end of the Cold War, the internet, increasing acceptance of women going to college, just to name a few factors). I really don't know how you get the idea that there's just one single factor affecting college enrollment (see also the Flynn effect, which is likely a pretty huge factor). If you want to claim that increasing inequality increases college enrollment, you'll have to provide better support for such a claim.

More importantly, while college _enrollment_ rates have increased, college _graduation_ rates (relative to enrollment) have decreased [1], and overall college degree _attainment_ has shown relatively little change [2]. This is consistent with the general experience that, while tuition does not necessarily form an obstacle to initial enrollment, the additional financial pressure often makes it hard to actually maintain a course of study (especially if that requires you to work more while studying full time).

For all practical purposes, higher tuition fees _do_ create a barrier to enrollment. That there have historically been countervailing factors does not mean that more expensive college tuition does not functionally retard enrollment relative to what it would be otherwise. Also, what increase there is in college enrollment comes at the cost of an explosion in student loan debt, where families saddle themselves with long term financial liabilities, more and more often without a degree to show for it.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decreasing_graduation_completio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decreasing_graduation_completion_rates_in_the_United_States)

[2] [https://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/histo...](https://www.census.gov/hhes/socdemo/education/data/cps/historical/fig4.jpg)

<comment><USER4> If you have data on GINI after taxes/transfers, I'd love to see it.

But please recognize that you are in a minority here - most left wing sorts don't look at data after taxes and transfers. For example, anyone who talks about poverty is talking about pre-tax/transfer data (after taxes and transfers, poverty is almost nonexistent).

 _I really don 't know how you get the idea that there's just one single factor..._

I don't really get why you completely ignored the sentence right after the one you quoted, which explicitly says I don't think correlation is causality.

You still have not clearly stated what data would falsify your theory. Should I conclude that your claims are unfalsifiable, and therefore closer to a religious claim than a scientific one?

<comment><USER3> _If you have data on GINI after taxes /transfers, I'd love to see it._

Umm, Google, Wikipedia? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GiniPlots_USA.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GiniPlots_USA.png)

See also [1] for a list of countries by Gini both before and after taxes/transfers.

 _But please recognize that you are in a minority here - most left wing sorts don 't look at data after taxes and transfers. For example, anyone who talks about poverty is talking about pre-tax/transfer data (after taxes and transfers, poverty is almost nonexistent)._

Say what? For example, Germany actually has higher inequality than the US before taxes and transfers, but significantly lower inequality after taxes and transfers [1]. And even egalitarian Finland's pre-tax Gini isn't much different from that of the US (taxes and transfers cut it almost in half). Inequality before taxes and transfers is practically unavoidable in a developed countries; taxes and transfers are the difference between the European social democracies and the US.

And no, poverty is not non-existent after taxes and transfers; about one in six Americans lives in a food-insecure household [2]. Ever been to Gary, IN [3], East St. Louis, or Chicago's South Side? America has not only a high relative poverty rate, but also a high absolute poverty rate (compared to the rest of the developed world).

Also, why do you seem to assume that I'm a "left wing sort" (other than by tea party standards where Rockefeller Republicans are proto-communists)?

 _You still have not clearly stated what data would falsify your theory. Should I conclude that your claims are unfalsifiable, and therefore closer to a religious claim than a scientific one?_

Huh? Just because a random variable that is the aggregate of many other random variables (college enrollment) is not sufficient to make statements about one of the component random variables (college tuition) does not mean that it's unfalsifiable. You do have to control for the other variables, though. But there's nothing inherently unfalsifiable about a relation between tuition and college enrollment/completion. Just because you can't find it easily on Google doesn't mean that you couldn't design a study to examine that relation minus confounding factors. And the evidence is strong that there is such a relation (it's also common sense - if a good becomes more expensive, fewer people will purchase this good, unless there are countervailing effects).

If you look at it more closely, for example, you will learn that income affects college graduation rates and college degree attainment rates (and, conversely, having a college degree affects income and social mobility) [4]. Higher tuition both negatively affects graduation rates and also segregates low-income students into lower quality colleges (or kept out of college entirely). The underlying paper by Bailey and Dynarski [5] documents pretty clearly that income inequality translates into inequality in educational attainment and that low-income students dropping out disproportionately often is a major driver of this effect.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality)

[2] [http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger- facts/hun...](http://feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/hunger-facts/hunger- and-poverty-statistics.aspx)

[3] [http://www.businessinsider.com/gary-indiana- photos-2012-7](http://www.businessinsider.com/gary-indiana-photos-2012-7)

[4] [http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/](http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/21/news/economy/income_college/)

[5] [http://users.nber.org/~dynarski/Bailey_Dynarski.pdf](http://users.nber.org/~dynarski/Bailey_Dynarski.pdf)

<comment><USER4> According to your graph, GINI went up (from 34 to 38%) after taxes and transfers as well.

 _Just because a random variable that is the aggregate of many other random variables (college enrollment) is not sufficient to make statements about one of the component random variables (college tuition) does not mean that it 's unfalsifiable._

So how do you falsify it?

Also, I didn't ask about a relation between tuition and graduation. I asked about a relation between _inequality_ and _enrollment_.

 _The underlying paper by Bailey and Dynarski [5] documents pretty clearly that income inequality translates into inequality in educational attainment...

Looking at educational _attainment* as opposed to _enrollment_ is a bit, um, confusing. Is it your assertion that a higher GINI somehow makes the poor (specifically poor women, if we go by that paper) less willing to study than their richer counterparts?

Not that it matters, since the paper doesn't look at inequality at all. All it shows is that higher quintiles have higher graduation rates - this is _completely unrelated_ to the question of whether increasing the size of quintiles effects graduation rates.

Also, if you read your source [5] (the middle, not the conclusions), you'd discover that the strongest explanation they have of their results is that _children of poorer parents are not as smart as children of rich parents_ , which explains half the gap. So unless your claim is that higher GINI makes poor kids stupid, it's nonsensical to claim inequality has anything to do with graduation rates.

I give up. You have unfalsifiable beliefs which are somehow supported by academic papers on completely unrelated topics. Not anything for me to learn here.

<comment><USER3> _According to your graph, GINI went up (from 34 to 38%) after taxes and transfers as well._

I didn't say that it didn't change; I said it didn't change much.

 _So how do you falsify it?_

As with any other such case, by controlling for those variables you want to eliminate.

 _Is it your assertion that a higher GINI somehow makes the poor (specifically poor women, if we go by that paper) less willing to study than their richer counterparts?_

 _Looking at educational attainment as opposed to enrollment is a bit, um, confusing._

It was you who brought up enrollment, not I. I was speaking in general terms about tuition as a barrier to access to postsecondary education. Enrollment is a very poor proximate variable for success at college due to increasingly high dropout rates.

 _Not that it matters, since the paper doesn 't look at inequality at all._

From the paper: "In this paper we document changes over time in inequality in educational attainment by family income [...]". Differences in family income, of course, mean income inequality.

 _So unless your claim is that higher GINI makes poor kids stupid_

As it so happens, precisely that may be the case (we'd need further corroboration to be fully certain, but it'd hardly be surprising - stress of all kinds is known to have a deleterious effect on IQ, so stress from poverty shouldn't be any different): [http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect- on-intelligenc...](http://www.businessinsider.com/poverty-effect-on- intelligence-2013-8)

It's not something I had talked about in this thread, so this is not "my claim" in that sense, but it is another example of the pernicious effects of inequality.

 _I give up. You have unfalsifiable beliefs which are somehow supported by academic papers on completely unrelated topics._

I think you simply do not understand what "unfalsifiable" means. Practically any statement that relies on observations of natural phenomena is in principle falsifiable by making observations counter to that statement; it may just be difficult to do that. Statistical phenomena also slightly complicate the situation, though the principle remains the same.

That you have a different opinion or disagree is fine - the data is hardly conclusive either way, though your interpretation does make some very counterintuitive assumptions (in particular, that people are more likely to pay for a good or service - namely, college – the less they can afford it); that you try to give this disagreement a veneer of objectivity by misusing terminology isn't so cool. Especially when you handwave away anything that doesn't fit your preconceptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's important to remember that those numbers only count taxable income, and don't include welfare and other government services. If the world today seems and indeed is meaningfully less unequal than the world of Downton Abbey its partly because of those things.

And also because more of the income of the super rich these days goes into bidding up the price of positional goods[1] rather than having the biggest possible house or the most possible servants.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good)

<comment><USER6> I think income of the super rich may go into positional goods, but their wealth goes into commodities which does raise prices across the board. And that percentage may be greater than it was in the past.

<comment><USER7> Pfft. No it doesn't. Does Bill Gates have a billion dollars' worth of soybeans sitting around in silos somewhere? Did Steve Jobs buy up $50 million worth of crude oil at some point and no one told me? Does Warren Buffett have a freezer with $333,000,000 worth of pork bellies hanging in it? No. Even an ETF like PHCU has ~$15.24 million worth of copper - a drop in the ocean next to the wealth of a single billionaire.

The only commodity the rich put anything approaching a substantial amount of money into... is gold. _(Oooh, no, the price of gold is too high! think of the children!)_

No no. The super-rich put their wealth into BUSINESSES, which is why they remain super-wealthy. Also, they put it into: taxes (incl. the estate tax), charities, their heirs, corporate bonds, government bonds, _and_ positional goods like fine art or NYC penthouses.

<comment><USER6> A lot of money is in hedge funds through which it goes into businesses and commodities. So you have to see where the hedge funds have their money. I would guess that the wealthy have more money in hedge funds than positional goods like fine art. But this is speculation on both our parts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The #1 plot point that comes up again and again on Downton Abbey is that the 'rich' aristocrat family can't even afford to keep up the cost of their day to day lifestyle, and they only manage to fund it by marrying into money from America, miraculous unexpected wills, etc etc.

It's a show about the end of the period of great inequality, where rising incomes made it far more expensive to employ a team of servants.

So while this article is trying to make it sound like we should all be worried about how inequality is rising, being more unequal than 'Downton Abbey' is a pretty meaningless criterion.

As to the substance of the article, it's using a very arbitrary definition of inequality, looking at the % of total wealth controlled by the richest 0.01%. That is one in ten thousand rich.

It's also meaningless to talk about what share of the total wealth the bottom 90% of people had when comparing time periods so far from each other.

A single person today in the US who is considered below the poverty line makes around $11,000/yr before taxes. In 1911, to be in the same percentile of income that person would have been working 11 hours per day with one 30 minute break, 7 days per week, often in completely unregulated and dangerous conditions. There was no Social Security or unemployment insurance any other kind of safety net, which meant if you were injured during your mandatory 77 hour work week, which was incredibly likely sooner or later, or even if you were just sick or unable to work for any reason, you would have had no income. Having become sick or injured, you certainly would not be able to afford even the rudimentary and almost completely ineffective medical care which existed at that time.

To put it in perspective, someone working the same hours as their doppelgänger from 1911 (77 hours per week, 51 weeks per year), that hard worker living today, earning only minimum wage, would make around $29,000/yr. Whether they work 77 hours or 4 hours per week, today they also have automatic insurance should they become disabled (SSI), automatic medical coverage if they are injured on the job (everyone has workeman's comp insurance whether or not they have healthcare), and on and on.

I'm not trying to paint some picture of perfection, but if you look at the realities of life then and now, it's completely absurd to try to make it seem like one % being lower than another % means life in 2014 has somehow regressed. The trend is clearly to more access to healthcare, better and safer work environments, far less hours spent working despite an improving standard of living, higher quality food, better access to education, less violence and crime, less hunger. In fact, the condition of humans in the world today is better than the in 1911 using literally any measure whatsoever.

So while if you could hop in a time machine, if you are in the Nth percentile today, and you went back to be in the the same Nth percentile in 1911, in 1911 you would own a larger share of the total wealth of the entire country. I don't think that would really make a bit of difference to you, since you would have to work twice as many hours, face a constant threat of complete ruin from common illnesses and likely injuries, and most almost certainly die at a far younger age.

So that's why these types of comparisons are meaningless.

</comment><comment><USER9> don't forget poverty in the 1920s is way different than poverty in 2014.

getting the basic needs like shelter, food, water, heat are a lot easier to come by these days (many government services). And many of the poor have TVs (cable even), cell phones, cars, etc.

my point isn't that being poor is no big deal... my point is the rich AND poor both have it better off than they a hundred years ago.

As I (vaguely) recall, PG made a similar point in Hackers and Painters.</comment>


Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/amazon-recognition-shareholders-jeff-bezos-letter-privacy-surveillance-facial-recognition-a8405221.html <comment><USER4> After Facebook, Amazon is the other company I wouldn't trust to _not do_ evil. Even if many more shareholders join in on this, I don't see Jess Bezos caring about these things. The Amazon stock won't suffer even if he publicly says he won't listen to such shareholders. On the contrary, the stock may just shoot up.

The larger question on this topic is, "If the big technology companies do not sell the technology to the governments, won't somebody else do?" Of course, the governments would find some domestic or foreign companies to buy such technology from (or even spend money on developing it). I think that's inevitable over the course of time. But such pressure on companies _could possibly help_ shape policy too (added several adjectives to indicate how difficult this would be).

<comment><USER5> The problem comes down to the engineers and researchers involved.

As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be used for?"

Yes, everyone has their price, but the fact remains that the tools are nigh useless without the expertise of the knowledgeable people to integrate and fine tune the final product. If there is enough ethical backlash by we tech people, the progress any government makes can be set back decades.

It can't be stopped at this point most likely, as the data and initial research is out of the bag as it were, but it does"t have to be carried one inch further.

Personally, I won"t touch it. No benefit is worth the risk of this type of system being leveraged against a population. I've fully thought through the security, search and rescue, administrative, etc... applications, and as cold as it may sound, it is not worth it. The invasion of privacy, the chilling effects put on public discourse, the enabling of active population social engineering through ubiquitous surveillance and negation of dissidents is not a legacy worth having anything to do with.

<comment><USER6> In a lot of these scientific do or don't debates - people tend to disqualify that there's a consequence to not building the technology.

In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn't help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today.

China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part of. However that doesn't stop the technology from being developed - and in some dire cases - not making the technology domestically puts us at a disadvantage.

This isn't me saying that Amazon should continue providing Facial Recognition software to the Government. This is just saying never doing evil isn't always the best solution - on a global scale.

<comment><USER7> Developing an offensive weapon is different than working on domestic surveillance technology.

Personally, I prefer a world where China has big-brother technology that the US does not.

<comment><USER8> Facial recognition isn't exclusively a domestic surveillance technology. For example, it could be deployed at national borders, with satellite imagery captured in combat zones, and so on.

<comment><USER9> Nuclear weapons have minimal potential for domestic use, short of a geographically partisan civil war. Facial recognition conversely has huge potential for domestic use, and arguably little potential for foreign use in a major conflict. If anything, I would say it's only potential for use in conflict would be to improve the ability to quash resistance in an occupation, which is more destabilising to global security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A much more accurate title would be "19 Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments." They even wrote a sternly worded letter!

<comment><USER11> A much more accurate title than that would be "Shareholders representing X% of Amazon demand it to stop selling facial recognition". I mean Jeff Bezos and myself are both shareholders, but his stake is worth mentioning.

Activist funds are able to shake things up with a lot less than 19 shareholders, so the count isn't important at all unless it's giant.

<comment><USER12> Yeah but 19 is a much larger number, visually, than 0.25% or whatever

<comment><USER13> I don't care about larger which is a relative scale vs percentage which is absolute scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems like it is approaching the problem from the wrong angle. This should be addressed at the government law level.

The problem is where do you draw the line? Any technology can be used for evil. Do you next ask companies that sell cameras not to sell to the government? Then ban computers?

Laws that concern themselves with targeting and surveilling people encompass any technology.

Facial recognition is not a hard problem and this is just a matter of convenience. Government can just go around and implement it themselves if nobody provides it to them. At least through Amazon there is some level of non-government control to shut it off if they end up doing anything nefarious.

<comment><USER15> I agree with this in principle, but in the US the intelligence/police don't really seem to be accountable to the people.

They regularly conduct surveillance on huge scales and no one even knows about it until we get lucky with a leak like Snowden. Who knows how many dozens of other secrets like that they still have. The CIA/FBI etc. have a history of doing this kind of thing for decades, at least since WW2. Then it gets declassified 50 years later when no one cares.

Surveillance is a case where its good for the government, but bad for the people the government is meant to represent. Bottom line is they will never police themselves on this issue. So going after the people making it like Amazon may be a better idea.

<comment><USER16> The intelligence and police apparatus _are_ the people. They are not some alien overlords, you can meet these employees and see what they do, and alter their course of actions by shaping the government through direct voting.

Trying to change it via corporate proxy is not going to really work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's growing number of investors who are looking also at the non-financial side of business (social responsibility, environmental issues etc). Companies who ignore these things exclude themselves from the portfolios of these investors.

Some banks and investors are saying the don't want to be involved with certain types of legitimate activities. Here's one example: "Deutsche Bank avoids entering into, or continuing, any kind of business relationship with entities with clear, direct links to the following types of Controversial Weapons business [...]" [1]

I'm not saying face recognition is same thing as antipersonnel mines, but things can change over the years, especially under pressure from public.

[1] [https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2018/deutsche-bank- upgrades...](https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2018/deutsche-bank-upgrades-its- policy-on-controversial-weapons-en-11582.htm)

<comment><USER18> >Companies who ignore these things exclude themselves from the portfolios of these investors.

Sounds good to me. It seems very unwise to run your business based whatever pet project "socially conscious" investors are supporting this week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I get that people are upset with government abuses (I am too!), but stepping back for a minute, I think it is much more concerning that we're building a world where a few tech companies get to decide what computing may or may not be used for.

The fact that even the government is hitting headwinds gives me an extremely negative outlook for where the cloud is headed with respect for individual rights.

</comment><comment><USER20> While I applaud this effort, this will not stop the use of the technology. It will simply steer them to another provider or a custom implementation (on top of AWS if they so choose to) of this now well-understood technology.

<comment><USER21> Sure. But let's be clear - it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work.

<comment><USER22> "it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work."

Is it unethical to track down violent activists?

Is it unethical to check for people crossing the border illegally?

And this thing about the tech being used to single out 'people of colour' I think we can dismiss that out of hand - the tech won't be used for that ... though the application of the tech may disproportionately affect some groups (say the cops create a 'watch zone in S. Chicago' but not elsewhere).

But at least in the former scenarios, it's fairly grey thing.

At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable.

Walking down the street in 'wherever USA' tagged for something I can see ethical problems.

It depends on how it's used ... we need some new laws ...

<comment><USER23> > At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable.

Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents.

Like you say it's the "walking down the street" problem - for me at least perhaps more accurately described as the "done at many orders of magnitude more scale, in circumstances where you have no option to opt out". If I don't like border control practices, I have the option of not crossing a border (at whatever cost to me that implies, but I have _some_ agency there). When this is deployed on streets, shopping centers, trainstations, and other similar places - I've lost any agency in being able to choose not to be involved/identified.

(Note too, that the USA defines "border areas" where I'm legally able to be stopped and fingerprinted/retina scanned as "anywhere within 100 miles of a border" which includes pretty much all of California and New York, and anywhere within 100 miles of each coast or the north/south borders.)

<comment><USER18> >Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings.

Says you. It could replace the fingerprint and retinal scan for all we know, plus you don't have to actually physically interact with the person crossing. I don't think it will, but it seems perfectly reasonable to deploy this technology at the border. I see no issue with the definition of "border areas" either. Seems reasonable to assume that if someone has recently crossed illegally, that, assuming they haven't gotten picked up by vehicle yet, they are likely to be found within less than 100 miles.

<comment><USER23> Sure, I'm speculating out my ass here (it's what everyone does on The Internet, right?)

Seems to me though, the most recent numbers I've heard for commercial state- of-the-art facial recognition are barely capable of 99% accuracy. I don't know the error rates of fingerprint and retinal scans, but I'd put good money of the combination of passport and fingerprint or passport and retinal scan being several orders of magnitude more accurate that face recognition we have available right now.

(And I probably should have left out the "border areas"comment as part of a different argument - my beef with that is not "how many illegal crossers might you find within 100 miles of a border", but "is it worth reducing the rights of everybody, legal as well as illegal, just because they live/work/travel within 100 miles of a border?" that includes everybody in CA west of a line thru Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield.)

<comment><USER18> Why is the accuracy of the technology relevant at all? I think you're assuming that we already have fingerprint and retinal scans of everyone entering, which is quite obviously not true. We might, however, have a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor. I'm fine with this technology being employed in such a manner.

<comment><USER23> The accuracy matters (at least it seems to be so to me) because if all you have is "a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor" and you use a technology with a 1% error rate - given that there's probably something like several hundred million airport border crossings a year in the US - <USER2> is going to have to deal with a million false positives a day, which doesn't seem like a win given I suspect the number of bad actors for which facial features are know but cannot be detected with the in-place passport/fingerprint/retinal crossing system is probably in the single digits per year...

The aggregated individual cost to the 1% false positives - when deployed against a population of several hundred million travellers a year - <USER3> outrageously high to me.

<comment><USER18> Easily solved by simply fingerprinting and retinal scanning the positives and the "unknowns", which is essentially the status quo. Nothing changes except our confidence level that we are actually engaging the right people. The cost, to me, is simply in terms of how expensive implementation would be in terms of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think this kind of "don't sell technology x to governments" is kind of misguided for the following reasons.

1) You are saying that you are from be with private entities having access to this technology, but not public entities? Private individuals and companies should be able to use facial recognition, but not governments? Throughout history, governments have typically been the first ones to acquire tech. Of note is that the major Airplane companies (Boeing and Airbus) have very large military units.

2) It is likely to be ineffective. All you need is a third company that serves as the bridge that buys facial recognition from Amazon and resells to the government.

3) International relationships really are a competition. I am sure Chinese AI companies are working hand in glove with the government to make sure their government is able to deploy the latest AI tech. If AI is the gamechanger people say it is, you have given an incredible leg up to China vs the West.

4) If employees at companies keep on pushing this anti-government, anti- military thing with AI, there is a good chance that it will get reclassified as a sensitive technology and heavily regulated.

<comment><USER25> > 3) International relationships really are a competition. I am sure Chinese > AI companies are working hand in glove with the government to make sure > their government is able to deploy the latest AI tech. If AI is the > gamechanger people say it is, you have given an incredible leg up to China > vs the West.

I think this is a really important point, here.

I think the paranoid line of thinking is helpful in this instance:

Who benefits from the US government not having access to AI technologies?

\- The argument on the face of it seems to be that we, the people of this world and in the US, benefit thanks to keeping these tools out of our government's hands

\- The unmentioned argument is benefits go to China, Russia, and other countries whose tech sectors cooperate with the government

I am not suggesting that the article was written by China or Russia to hurt our government - that certainly sounds like "conspiracy theory"; however, I am suggesting that it is a valid concern that the US as a country may want to "keep up".

<comment><USER26> Your analysis ignores an important point: the only thing that the US government would need to gain such access, would be to stop doing the things it is being called out for. It's not that government having such tools that's inherently the problem, but the way they're going to be used here and now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Governments are just people, led by politicians.

It would be far better if efforts were spent on recognizing and electing qualified and capable people to run the government as wanted instead of this silly run-around with commercial companies.

<comment><USER27> > Governments are just people, led by politicians

... empowered to do things we lock up, tase, beat, sick dogs on, and/or kill other people for doing. Kind of an important distinction to make.

If you have reason to think exhorting your peer-proles to 'pick qualified and capable people' will lead to better outcomes now than it has in the past, certainly, please continue. Some of us, however, don't see that happening and prefer to explore other approaches, even if you happen to find our pessimism 'silly'.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's called authority. The point of the comment is that we should pick the proper people to give that authority to, instead of fighting against them through some strange corporate proxy.

If you want an alternative, why don't you become the qualified and capable person to join the government to shape it the way you want?

<comment><USER26> And we're working on that, too. But it's a slow process, and meanwhile there's damage to mitigate.

<comment><USER16> Slow doesn't matter if it's effective.

This current approach is rarely that, and usually amounts to nothing more than noise. The government is not deterred by a single corporation, no matter how big.

<comment><USER26> The goal is not to deter them. The goal is to make it more difficult for them to do what they're doing, and thereby ruin fewer people's lives.

And yes, slow absolutely does matter, if you're one of the people caught up in the grinder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I understand this is a practical reaction to what most of us would agree is an egregious use of the tech, but wouldn't it make more sense to stop the problem at its root? I'm talking about surveillance. Why aren't we complaining about camera companies selling surveillance equipment?

The gov't already has the data and Amazon's APIs just make this a little bit easier. But they can go direct to EC2 and get a couple hundred GPU-optimized instances and do it themselves.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't think it matters. Third parties are going to be in this space anyway (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the foreign defense contractors) so it doesn't make a lot of sense to shut off a profitable segment.

I was just thinking how much I would like an facial recognition API for my home security system. That way I can give someone's name to the police to make it easier to track someone down.

<comment><USER27> Me, I've been thinking about ALRs. If this stuff is going to be available, I think everyone should have it. So this is one of those projects I am just never going to get around to, but someone else, please do it - it shouldn't be that tough to build a cheap Raspberry-Pi-ish automatic plate reader anyone can point out their window to capture every plate going by. With a network of them, everyone can know this stuff, all the time, for free.

I find that to be a frightening outcome, but I think it is a less frightening one than only certain people having access. We have to learn how to live with this tech; far better to not allow it to be a tool of selective control while we're adapting. And it can be a more honest resource - police and other official vehicles' movements will be visible to those paying for those cars, whereas anything official will have official holes.

<comment><USER29> Well, I think the hard part is done here:

[http://www.openalpr.com/cloud-api.html](http://www.openalpr.com/cloud- api.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is interesting. The marketing has certainly been disturbing, reinforcing the worst uses for this sort of tech and overstating its usefulness for those cases. But ... unlike Google's contract work with the Defense Department, I'm not sure Amazon could legally get away with refusing to sell an on-demand product to a government agency. This service is nowhere close to the worst thing that's running on Amazon's servers on behalf of governments. The software exists and could easily be set up to run directly by governments or their contractors on Amazon's infrastructure (I guarantee that is already going on far more extensively than Amazon's own specific service will ever grow to). Ditto for GCP and Azure and everything else.

I sympathize with these investors, truly, but the only solution here would be to get out of the cloud computing business altogether.

</comment><comment><USER31> I work in a department at Microsoft that does a lot of Machine Learning and AI work for MS customers. I'm proud that our organization regularly turns down opportunities because of ethical considerations. We have a concrete set of ethical standards, and if a project makes it past that review and into your hands, and you still feel uncomfortable, you are strongly encouraged to flag it for second review in committee. The whole system is called AETHER, for your googling - er, Binging - pleasure.

The ground rule that would apply here is, we don't do anything that makes choices about restricting or injuring humans. So no perp detection systems, no autonomous weapons of any kind... Not even a camera to disable the ignition if you're detected as drunk.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a perfect example of social governance: stockholders feeling empowered to control how a company operates. We need to see more of this type of governance. Ultimately, shareholders should just vote with their dollars. Sell a stock you dont like or dont invest in the first place.

<comment><USER33> I agree with you, but I think we disagree. What I mean is that this article specifies 19 share holders, without mentioning their share. It's a very safe bet to assume that it's not even a significant fraction of a percent. In other words, in 'voting with their dollar' these individuals would have a literally unnoticeable impact.

When a substantial chunk of society feels something ought be changed, then I certainly agree they have the right to make such change happen. But we live in a time where headlines, such as this, are constantly driven by irrelevantly small numbers. For instance traditional fear mongering was stuff along the lines of 'video games are driving kids to kill.' What that really translates to is 'one mentally unstable kid who happened to play a lot of video games killed another kid, primarily because he was mentally unstable'.

The conflation between the views/actions of society and the views/action of the individual is counterproductive. If you polled people, proportional to share of amazon, what percent would agree with the statement 'I demand Amazon stop selling facial recognition to governments'? On that we can only speculate, but I imagine it would probably be quite small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm starting to think we have the need of something like the ICAN for facial recognition (FR), promoting the regulation of FR worldwide. There a little valid systems where FR is truly helpful. Most of todays applications are around things like "access control" and "tag your friends here", i.e. banalities which are either unnecessary or can be solved with simpler tech.

On the other hand the risks are incredible, FR in combination with AR systems could completely eradicate privacy. Autocratic governments could use it for a new levels of surveillance. Military usage could perfect the use of autonomous weapons etc.

It's just not worth it and should be internationally outlawed. Just like A-bombs and chemical warfare.

</comment><comment><USER35> Preventing facial recognition techniques from spreading would seemingly require some attempt at keeping them secret. But aren't AI techniques often openly published in scientific papers? And it seems likely that there is also open source software available?

</comment><comment><USER36> In the past 24 hour cycle of news I have seen:

\- Microsoft catching heat for their deal to allow ICE to use their capabilities

\- Amazon catching heat for their deal to allow government to use facial recognition

\- A photo of Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos and Trump sitting next to each other and shaking hands

What's the play here?

<comment><USER33> Money.

\- Companies making money by developing and licensing software.

\- Media making money by creating sensationalistic headlines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Time for Amazon to divest this division into a wholly owned subsidiary!

<comment><USER38> Yeah, but Facebook's software could contain tagged data of actual people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> What percentage is a group of share holders?

</comment><comment><USER40> It's weird that we have so many people directing their protests towards the tech companies, and not the government itself. The whole premise of capitalism is that profit-motivated-corporations will inevitably succumb to evil temptations. That it's the government's job to regulate corporations, and police their moral behavior.

Instead, we have the complete opposite. Americans _expect_ the government/military to engage in morally unacceptable behavior, and are looking to corporations to "enforce" morality instead, by denying the government specific services.

Not that there is anything wrong with tech companies and workers doing their part. But when we see corporations as the best catalyst for pro-social outcomes, and not the government itself, there's something very wrong with our political system.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't find the actual letter. Anyone have a link?

</comment><comment><USER41> Too. Late.

</comment><comment><USER42> The only effective way to achieve this is getting a majority of the board to vote for this. Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect.

<comment><USER43> > _Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect._

By that definition, isn't almost every form of non-decisive influence "virtue signaling"? Virtue itself? Marching against a war? Voting for a candidate you like the policies of, but who doesn't have good media coverage? Declining to purchase unethical goods?

<comment><USER44> Yes. That's the objective behind the term "virtue signaling" - to call into question the motives of anyone and everyone who claims to care about something so that it becomes deeply uncool to care about things so that they'll stop trying to make the world a better place.

Even if you presented a 100-step well funded plan for changing the status quo, prepare to have it leveled by the sneer of "you're just virtue signaling." You can never prove your sincerity to anyone who uses this term, because it will never be enough.

<comment><USER42> How's legitimacy relevant here? I'm not trying to place doubt, trying to make an honest observation that a result needs the majority of the board to vote for the measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Good. "We don't want you doing shady things that damage the brand's reputation in order to make a buck" is the kind of message shareholders should be sending to all companies.

Edit: Apparently I'm wrong and shareholders should be pushing for profits regardless of means?

I know Amazon isn't exactly known for treating people well but they're no Monsanto or Blackwater either. Amazon sells to consumers and is therefore dependent on public opinion to make sales. With the increasing public awareness of just how pervasive consumer tracking is it's becoming a touchy subject. If Amazon wants to keep expanding its market share for home goods then anything that risks associating its brand with government tracking is a very high risk. That would make me uncomfortable if I had Amazon shares.

<comment><USER46> The US government is a huge customer of AWS, and AWS has deliberately built entire regions to cater to them: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the- new...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new-aws- secret-region/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/](https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/)</comment></comment>


5 annoying things in VS Code you can fix right now - <AUTHOR> https://calebporzio.com/6-annoying-things-in-vs-code-you-can-fix-right-now <comment><USER2> We'd love to hear what your opinion on [https://marquee.activecove.com/](https://marquee.activecove.com/) is!

</comment><comment><USER3> Only a few of these i found annoying, but its good to get a fix for the Previews and GitHub-Style Inline Diffs</comment>


Using advisors as your co-founders - <AUTHOR> http://robbieallen.com/2010/07/single-founder-startup-using-advisors-as-your-co-founders

<comment><USER2> Even though the thought expressed in the post is interesting and makes sense, but calling advisors as co-founders is stretching it. Co-founder, if any, will have more executive responsibilities than just making connections which is not the case with advisors. Whether involved more than once a month or not, advisors, in strict definition of advisor, do not provide any execution support.

<comment><USER3> That's just your limited view of an advisor and one reason I suggest we call them something else. Why can't they provide "execution support". I've had several advisors work in that capacity.

<comment><USER2> I will prefer having co-founders instead of advisors in that case. I have advisers only because I need some one to always think about what we are doing and how we are doing it in a very objective and third-party sense. Once some one gets their hand dirty in doing it, it becomes very difficult to remain objective about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Using you advisors as consultants who are paid with options sounds more like what he is suggesting. Might be a good idea for some businesses.</comment>


React Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> https://www.werkema.com/2020/05/18/react-considered-harmful/ <comment><USER2> This is somewhat disingenuous. They give the simple example below:

      $(".fooButton").click(function() {
          $.ajax("/update-foos", { method: "POST" });
      });

and then give the "same" example the React treatment, which not only includes third party libraries for fetching, but also managing fetch state, storing data, and connecting to the store, which none of the above does.

A better version of React doing the above would be:

      export function FetchDataButton ({ ...buttonProps }) {
        const fetchData = useCallback(() => fetch('/update-foos', {method: 'POST'}), [])
        // prop drilling for this example only. don't do this normally.
        return <button {...buttonProps} onClick={fetchData} />
      }

which does exactly what the initial example does, additionally rendering the actual button, built-in DOM reconciliation, a declarative API, built-in reactivity (meaning you don't have to handle figuring out what gets updated in response to new data), etc etc.

Yes, React introduces boilerplate but not as much as this post makes out, and certainly not enough to warrant the "considered harmful" label.

> We — all of us — are not mature enough yet for abstractions like React.

Not quite. _You_ aren't ready because you haven't learned the basic concepts enough to understand the problems that React is solving.</comment>


Show HN: JHP, make sites in JavaScript like it's PHP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/brundonsmith/jhp <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, this was an easy project that was heavily inspired by the way I implemented my personal website. The rendering-via-template-strings experience has been really fantastic, and I just wanted to take the extra step of bringing it into the realm of sheer delightfulness and allow people to use it without even bootstrapping an Express server. The entire thing is one 50-line JS file so it should be easy to follow if you feel like seeing how it works.

I'm happy to take suggestions or PRs regarding bugs, additional features, or things that PHP does and this doesn't do. I want to keep it narrowly focused on providing the simple user experience it provides, but outside of that I'm happy to make it more capable for people who want to use it to build real sites.

Edit: I also just realized I forgot to publish it on NPM! So I guess for now the instructions don't work as-is (you can still clone it and run it locally). I'll publish it tonight after work.

<comment><USER2> It should be very appealing concept to some devs. You made valid point.

Lovely tagline of yours: This project aims to recreate that PHP experience, in JavaScript.

Congrats on launch</comment></comment>


New AWS Memory Optimized R3 Instances - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2014/04/new-memory-optimized-ec2-instances.html

<comment><USER2> Looks like somebody made a mistake with the pricing and made r3 instances the same price in all regions. This makes them a lot cheaper in regions where prices of other instances are higher:

Eg Pricing in US.East:

      r3.xlarge 4 Cores 30.5G RAM  $0.350/h
      m3.xlarge 4 cores 15G RAM    $0.280/h

Pricing in Tokyo:

      r3.xlarge 4 Cores 30.5G RAM  $0.350/h
      m3.xlarge 4 cores 15G RAM    $0.405/h

It'll probably be fixed soon though..

</comment><comment><USER3> What makes these instances "Memory Optimised"?

<comment><USER4> Properly just referring to large amount of Memory. It should be Large Memory instance.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What things which don't scale have you been doing to get customers? - <AUTHOR>

Doing things which don't scale (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) is a hot topic again. And rightly so. I think technical founders (speaking as one myself) often learn this lesson the hard way. I was wondering if people would be willing to share the things which don't scale they've been doing to get customers for their startups.
Some ideas to help make this more useful
1. Lead with what you're working on plus a overview of it so we can better understand the techniques you're using.
2. Try to give specifics where possible. "Emailing people signing up to my pre-launch list" is interesting but adding that you do it within X minutes of them signing up, and ask question Y makes it more actionable for others. Do you try to organise skype meetings with them? Are there tools you're using to help with that? etc. etc. etc.
3. Some idea of how successful these techniques have been for you and things you are going to change in future would be good as well. <comment><USER2> Our startup is in the ed-tech space so we obtain customers by meeting with Principals and Superintendents. A task we have found difficult since they are very busy and constantly solicited. We try to get meetings with email but that is not as effective as showing up at the schools and catching them with some free time.

We are using a product created by another startup called SnowShoe. You may have seen them recently featured on Product Hunt. Fans say SnowShoe dabbles in "black magic" by making 3d printed stamps that have unique digital identities, which touch screen devices can detect. The SnowShoe Stamps are just black pieces of plastic so the appearance is not as unique or magic as their abilities.

I am lucky to have been born into an artistically gifted family. My Mom and sister have started hand painting the SnowShoe Stamps, making them even more unique. The painted stamps are much better than a business card and are also a cool way to acknowledge the teachers that use our system the most.

When a principal or superintendent expresses interest in conducting a one month trial we let them pick out a painted SnowShoe Stamp to keep at their desk as a reminder of our awesomeness!

This unscalable gesture has increased the number of referrals we receive from every principal. Being able to start an email with "principal X said you might be interested in our product" has made getting the initial meeting with new principals/superintendents much easier.

</comment><comment><USER3> I came across this the other day which was a great read:

[http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237922](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237922)

My friends and I have a catalog of android jigsaw puzzles, when we started we were manually optimizing the keywords on each individual game to attract people searching anything related to that theme - one about England we went after England-related keywords we could think of rather than the competitive 'puzzle' ones: travel, vacation, england, uk, london, big ben, all that kind of stuff which got us our initial traction. We kept that up for about our first 50 puzzles coming up with all these unique keywords which was incredibly tedious.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not for our customers, but I buy cupcakes for people who go the extra mile to help me out. Will probably do this for our Beta testers as well once that kicks off in the spring.

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.groovehq.com/blog/non-scaleable-growth- tactics](http://www.groovehq.com/blog/non-scaleable-growth-tactics)</comment>


The Far Side could be back from extinction, and the timing's so right - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/the-far-side-could-be-back-from-extinction-and-the-timings-so-right/# <comment><USER2> When I was accepted to my school's gifted student program, my dad printed out that comic and taped it to my bedroom door.

Would have appreciated his support instead, but it is a funny comic.</comment>


Feedback requested: Literate programming in Java - <AUTHOR> In Python it is possible to have named arguments to functions. I have always appreciated this as this forces programmers to encode knowledge in source code at the function call, as opposed to either referring to the function declaration or getting that information supplied through the IDE.
One (very generic) example of this would be

    f(foo=bar)

 which I would expect to be easier to grok as soon as foo and bar is replaced by something of substance.
I have played with emulating this concept in Java, and have included a snippet which shows this concept alongside a more traditional Java-esque snippet of code.
The enum declaration MUL showcases the "new" approach and the more classical approach is demonstrated by SUB.
(continued in comments) <comment><AUTHOR> I think that while the code expressing MUL is harder to read, since there are a lot more characters strewn about in a small space, it would be more informative as to what all the parameters are and I would much more prefer to come back to it three months from now as opposed to the classical approach.

        MUL(opcode(0x1c), funct(2), mnemonicPattern("iname rd, rs, rt"),
                Example.theMnemonicRepresentation("mul $t1, $t0, $at")
                        .isRepresentedNumericallyAs(0x71014802),
                Example.theMnemonicRepresentation("mul $v0, $a0, $v0")
                        .isRepresentedNumericallyAs(0x70821002)),

        SUB(0x00, 0x22, "iname rd, rs, rt",
                Example.from("sub $a0, $zero, $at", 0x12022);

        private static String mnemonicPattern(String m) { return m; }
        private static int opcode(int opcode) { return opcode; }
        private static int funct(int funct) { return funct; }

Now, as you can see I did not have to wrangle Java much for the first three parameters.

The Example class is used so that I do not have to write separate test cases for my assertions nor store valuable information about truisms in different files regarding my objects. Using it I can (in both examples) loop over an Example set and checking that the assertions hold, viz. that my JUnit tests can check that by inputting "mul $t1, $t0, $at" at the appropriate place 0x71014802 comes out at the other end.

For the MUL example, I just had to create a private Stub class and employ a Builder-esque pattern to express what is shown in the example.

It has been awhile since I coded alongside other people, and would love to receive feedback on both the Python keyword emulation as well as your thoughts on the Example ploy.</comment>


Kona released: Open source K3.2 [screencast] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmiq47E5N-w

<comment><USER2> Now I'm waiting for screencast of sudoku:

[http://thesweeheng.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/more-sudoku- solv...](http://thesweeheng.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/more-sudoku-solvers-in-k- and-q/)

or game of life:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4>

</comment><comment><USER3> I use pari/gp to study number theory, and it seems like Kona could easily be used to do the kinds of statistical analysis I need quickly and easily. Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why bother? Kx give away their latest version. Don't you have any original ideas?

<comment><USER5> Ha! Tell that to the clang dudes too.

<comment><USER4> why?

<comment><USER5> Umm... because clang is being primed as a gcc/g++ replacement. Was that not obvious? Lol.

<comment><USER4> kona is going to replace k3.2? LMFAO. Everyone has moved on from then dude, like 2003. Was that not obvious? Lol.

<comment><USER5> Ha, tell that to the Fortran 77 dudes. There is a forest behind those trees.

<comment><USER4> that's just delusional! k was niche at best, took 10 years to get that far, and was then dropped for the next generation. How many k programmers are there worldwide? Big Dave said less than 10

<comment><USER5> Ha, like there are zillions of Fortran 77 programmers now. They still make compilers that support it though. Go figure.

<comment><USER4> zillions - does that mean like 10? jobserve shows 4 jobs for fortran. A rude awakening waits you my friend. God help anyone who trusts your business acumen. Carnap was a great success too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice! anyone who's worked on wall street has seen how much people pay for K

<comment><AUTHOR> K is a great opportunity for anyone looking to work in finance and technology. The programmers are in exceptionally high demand. This project will make it easier to become proficient in K. Anyone looking to branch into this area now has an interpreter and the corresponding source, which wasn't available before.

<comment><USER7> Looks clean and succinct. Is there a forum/google-group that one can join to learn more about Kona?

<comment><USER2> The company that originally made the "k" language (Kx Systems) has a Google group:

<http://groups.google.com/group/personal-kdbplus>

That one is mostly for "q", a proprietary follow-up language.

There's also the "k idioms", which are always educational:

<http://kx.com/technical/contribs/eugene/kidioms.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool. This seems like quite a project.</comment>


12 Killer API Resources Every Smart Developer Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://nordicapis.com/?p=2268

<comment><USER2> Wow! Epic post. I wished I would have found some of these earlier. I've subscribed to your blog, and looking forward to the next post.</comment>


Urban activists set out to sue San Francisco's suburbs - <AUTHOR> http://grist.org/cities/urban-activists-set-out-to-sue-san-franciscos-suburbs/ <comment><USER2> Love this quote:

"Most people would be very uncomfortable tearing down 315 houses. But they don't have a similar objection to never building them in the first place, even though I feel they're morally equivalent. Those people show up anyway. They get born anyway. They get a job in the area anyway. What do they do? They live in an overcrowded situation, they pay too much rent, they have a commute that's too long. Or maybe they outbid someone else, and someone else is displaced."

"It's easy to see the problem when you're tearing down someone's home. But when you're not building, it's hard to see whose home it is."

<comment><USER3> I was coming to say the same thing. I think this is a good question to ask of the folks who object to building homes, "What if the people who lived in this town before you moved here had blocked the building of the home you are living in?" You wouldn't have had that wonderful experience you are trying to preserve because you would never have lived here."

It is very sobering.

<comment><USER4> I live in an sf suburb. I talk to local homeowners in the dog park at night and they're all wildly opposed to density, often with a nice core of racism too (I'm white so white people say some wild shit to me; you hear references to "those people" and it's not that deeply coded.) The only thing that cheers me about all the nimbys where I live is all their kids are getting kicked out. Seriously. In 20 years when their kids want a house, it will cost $2.5mm on the low end to own a home here. There will be a tiny handful of careers that pay the necessary wages.

<comment><USER5> it's not irrational to be opposed to density. Racism aside, density changes the character of the neighborhood and potentially lowers property values of existing homeowners. So, it's not surprising people are apprehensive

<comment><USER6> 'character' is just code for 'I don't want to share' or even worse 'I bought in and if we make more housing, my price won't go up as much'

<comment><USER7> > 'character' is just code for 'I don't want to share'

Nonsense. I don't live in San Fran, I do live in a city whose character has changed. I don't mind that people saw the cool inner city and wanted to share. I _do_ mind that developer put up cheap high-rises with shit sound insulation, and then waged war on music venues, getting most of them shut down. I _do_ mind that rents escalate massively year-on-year so that the hitherto broad range of inhabitants have steadily whittled down to a richer and richer (and frankly less interesting) rump. I do mind that many landlords would apparently rather see an empty shopfront than an interesting store that's no longer viable because apparently the thing to do is year-on-year 30% rent rises.

<comment><USER8> Rents escalating massively is usually a case of supply controls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope she wins. I hope other people see her insight. I have not seen this kind of attitude against development in other countries. Sure, some speculators will make out on some locations near transit,and some will lose out a bit. Who cares, what we need are more units, in SF, down the Camino corridor from SF to san Jose. Build up, have BART go all the way down the el cam, and have local Surface-bahns. I'm tired of the homeowning middle class as well as the poor (or more accurately, those advocating in the name of the poor) for being so utterly against development.

It's time for change. I'd welcome a housing glut, it'll benefit most, but those who see real estate as investment for retirement.

In the end, I think people will discover that mid density isn't so bad after all. You get convenience, but you lose some of your feeling of living in an enclave.

From communist china to capitalist Korea, when housing is in short supply, buildings go up.

<comment><USER10> What you don't see to realize is that what you describe will be only a momentary and fleeing improvement. The problem is the irrational and unnecessary concentration of opportunities in that area.

So you build more buildings, create a housing glut even ... so now even more people move to the area because it's the only place where opportunities exist because it's where the wealthy sprinkle crumbs to their pest scurrying underfoot. All the sudden housing doubles from what it was before the glut and maybe you make 80% more, but all the asset owners are really the only ones who benefit and the wealth concentration cycle simply continues to distort.

What really needs to happen is that the whole area and other urban areas with similar concentrations need to be cut off from things like government funding, any tax advantages, etc. and put those and additional support into areas all around the country. That's really the only way that the cycle is broken, because what you are experiencing is a systemic cycle that no remedial action will have any kid of even mid term impact on without changing the system.

<comment><USER11> > The problem is the irrational and unnecessary concentration of opportunities > in that area.

The concentration is not irrational. _That 's_ the problem.

The concentration is driven by the fact that you _will_ , not might, get laid off at some point if your job is in the tech sector. So, what happens is that everybody thinks about where their _next_ job is going to be while getting hired for their current job.

If I somehow manage to land, say, a VLSI layout job in Pittsburgh, PA, there is no point in going there as when I get laid off, there is no _other_ VLSI layout job. So, I'll have to go back to Silicon Valley. So, why should I leave Silicon Valley in the first place?

You might think that, okay, Pittsburgh is a problem, but what about Austin? Oddly, same issue. A hardware company wiped out most of its Austin site, set off a big scramble and those people couldn't land jobs because there are no other ones there (people think of Austin as tech--but it's not really hardware tech). I know lots of people who got hired in the "Big Data Analytics" startup fad who are now figuring out that they basically signed onto "Actuarial Science"\--but, if they have a family, they really have nowhere else to go. The single ones are either changing fields (becoming a chef seems to be popular--go figure) or going to Silicon Valley.

Whereas, in Silicon Valley, you turn right at the last light instead of left, and you're at your new job.

<comment><USER12> Trouble is that San Francisco is a terrible place, geographically, for a large and ever-expanding industry. It's a tiny sliver of land on the end of a peninsula. There's only three roads out of town and no room to expand. Austin is much more suitable, it's surrounded by nothing on all sides.

Sooner or later the global hub of the computer industry has to shift away from San Francisco to somewhere there's actually some goddamn space. That time is now, as evidenced by the ridiculous prices, which are pushing people out. This is a good and natural stage of the process.

The only question is whether we destroy one of the few genuinely pleasant cities in North America trying to hold on for another decade.

Sigh. It seems that every time I say something counter-circlejerklical, I take a karma hit which prevents me from posting for hours. "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down."

<comment><USER13> > _Trouble is that San Francisco is a terrible place, geographically, for a > large and ever-expanding industry._

So a bit like Hong Kong, Singapore, or Manhattan?

<comment><USER14> I like to link to this photo [0] when this discussion comes up. I don't think SF will ever look like this, unfortunately.

[0] [http://7-themes.com/data_images/out/69/7008405-hong-kong- sky...](http://7-themes.com/data_images/out/69/7008405-hong-kong-skyline- view.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Here's Scott Wiener's post about meeting 2040 housing growth plans: [https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/want-to-know-why-the-bay- ar...](https://medium.com/@Scott_Wiener/want-to-know-why-the-bay-area-has-a- housing-crisis-read-this-map-b4d7a56d12f1)

Looks like East bay is falling behind schedule.

Here's housing prices since crash peek:[http://west.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/hugolefebvre- ch...](http://west.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/hugolefebvre- changeinhousingprice.jpg)

I live several doors down from the old KFC. I miss the old Sugoi Sushi that was there - but am fine with the new construction. Am lucky to have rent control. Right now, if I move away, I wouldn't be able to afford moving back.

<comment><USER16> "Am lucky to have rent control."

You are (party to) using the state to withhold justly earned economic value from your landlord.

<comment><USER17> > You are (party to) using the state to withhold justly earned economic value > from your landlord.

The state is what allows a landlord to be a landlord in the first place, by making a society stable enough that property ownership is a matter of laws and contracts as opposed to guns and groups with guns.

<comment><USER12> Sure, the state is what allows you to be alive at all, because without it you'd probably have been killed by or enslaved by roving Mad Max style marauders.

Therefore you owe your life to the State and they can demand anything at all from you and you shouldn't complain. Right?

<comment><USER18> Welcome to the social contract

<comment><USER19> You (and others on this thread, on both sides) are pretending that there's no gradation between "roving bands of cannibal looters" (the "Mad Max" scenario) and "Tyrannical government controls every single aspect of your daily life" (the "1984" scenario), when in fact there is a _very large_ amount of space between those two scenarios.

That is a fundamentally dishonest argument.

There are honest discussions of exactly where the boundaries on government power should lie, but this isn't one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sonia's AMA on reddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/34urng/im_son...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/34urng/im_sonja_trauss_founder_of_sfbarf_i_fight_for_the/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ha, the first SFBARF meeting was actually held in my apartment, when Sonja was still not sure if it was something people were interested in. Crazy to see how much it grew.

<comment><USER22> Cool! When was that?

<comment><USER21> I think around last August : )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Guess what - suethesuburbs is applying for Y Combinator for non-profits. Sooo....... get ready

<comment><USER23> Who down voted this? Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good luck to her. Although unless you also fix the Bay Area transport infrastructure then building more housing in the suburbs isn't going to solve anything. BART is already at capacity, Buses are constrained by the lack of bus lanes on the major freeway interchanges leading to the bridges. Congestion inside the city is choking things.

So yes we need more housing, but that is merely the first step.

<comment><USER25> I think that those that are proposing more development would heartily welcome simultaneously expanding the infrastructure.

Those who oppose such infrastructure improvements typically oppose them because they want to stop growth entirely.

<comment><USER26> > I think that those that are proposing more development would heartily > welcome simultaneously expanding the infrastructure.

Hear, hear!

I would _heartily_ welcome infrastructure improvement programs that brought the state of the SFBA's public transit within shooting distance of the quality of public transit in and around NYC.

I would _happily_ have my personal not-really-that-much-higher-than-Alabama tax burden increased to help pay for such a program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is she suggesting that land be taken through eminent domain? Or is she merely suggesting that developers who own land should be allowed to build on it?

Their DSP proposal is so clouded by the political language that it is difficult to determine their true intentions.

Also, I'm quite troubled by their suggestion that tearing down homes is morally equivalent to not building them in the first place. Tearing down homes immediately destroys value; hundreds of thousands of dollars are put into a home with the expectation that at least part of it can be recovered after a sale. A government that destroys homes without taking into account this investment destroys the value that the developers put into it. On the other hand, having the homes not be built in the first place does no such thing.

<comment><USER28> Tearing down homes doesn't necessarily destroy value. It increases the value of other properties, because you have less supply and more demand. This is exactly the equivalent of not building while demand goes balistic. The price of homes has gone crazy in the Bay Area as a result of not allowing enough building.

You don't need eminent domain, and SFBARF is not advocating for it. The project they are suing the City of Lafayette for was entirely private: willing landowner, willing developer, and most likely a lot of potential buyers or renters in a tense market. But no, the City of Lafayette decided to approve on condition of a drastically reduced number of housing.

She is advocating that landowners and developers be allowed to build to meet market demand, without obstruction from nimby neighbors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> On "why can't those people move to___?" [https://medium.com/b-copy-com- longform-content/why-can-t-tho...](https://medium.com/b-copy-com-longform- content/why-can-t-those-people-move-to-be7f70e8ff91)

</comment><comment><USER30> In my opinion this is one of the worst aspects of the bay area and california in general. It is my understanding that it is very easy to get land set aside for environmental reason in california and that is used to stop development. Then I read about minimum lot sizes in places like San Jose and locals getting together to block new construction. I think that San Francisco should look like Tokyo at this point with high density sprawl that takes an hour to cross on a bullet train. Keep in mind they get earthquakes over there as well. I know it is unlikely but this is the kind of thing that I could see causing a "Detroit Type" situation to emerge with US tech. Other countries figure out the software thing and we get hit with global competition that we can not respond to quickly enough. Rather than pointing our fingers at the autoworker unions we will point it at the nimby types that kept San Fran from reaching its full potential.

</comment><comment><USER31> I really support the ideals of this group, but I can't help but think they're politically doomed. They'll have 'progressive', borderline socialist politicians fighting them on one side and then they'll have elitist, wealthy homeowners fighting them on the other side. Both those groups have the same goal: don't build anything OR if you're going to build something, it will be low density, low income housing purposely planned to make sure there is no new housing supply for market-rate home owners.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a former resident of Lafayette, I'm glad that someone is taking action against the NIMBYs but BARF is out of line here.

The picture BARF paints of what happened is not entirely accurate. The city did not deny the developer from developing the land. After years of public planning meetings the owner of the land decided to work with the city after overwhelming public opposition against the development.

<comment><USER23> The argument is that the city "approved the project conditional on lower density." Which is in violation of the HAA. Here's more info about it: [http://www.trauss.com/HAA_Lafayette.pdf](http://www.trauss.com/HAA_Lafayette.pdf) pg 6 is where the Lafayette thing starts.

What do you think would have happened if instead of relenting, the developer had gone forward with the 315 unit version? Do you think it would have been approved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's disappointing that this type of activism is only gaining traction in places like the Bay Area. For years, I pushed for more affordable housing in Aspen, but nobody listened even though I was willing to walk 1.7 miles to get to the nearest lift.

<comment><USER12> I've been pushing for more affordable housing at Buckingham Palace. It sucks that there's only one house there and the Queen isn't selling.

And what's with the lack of affordable housing in Yellowstone National Park? There's loads of room for condos!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just too many burnt out brainless hippies/commies in California.

</comment><comment><USER12> Handy hint for people who want to live in the Bay Area and can't afford to: tough cookies. Have you considered living somewhere else?

I'd like to live on a private island in the Whitsundays, but there aren't enough to go around. It has never occurred to me to whine about this fact.

<comment><USER33> We have a meetup group that gets together at 6:00 pm on the second Tuesday of every month at The Creamery in which members lament their inability to afford private islands, jets, etc. You're welcome to join us on the 13th and vent over a latte.

It's not all sadness though. I believe a representative from the local Maserati dealership will be there this week to tell us about a special lease deal available to well-qualified lessees.</comment></comment>


Defining a Distinguished Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://community.anaxi.com/post/defining-a-distinguished-engineer-1553904263353x262149341198417920 <comment><USER2> URL for full article: [https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/defining-a- distinguished-engi...](https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/defining-a- distinguished-engineer/)</comment>


Lover of the Strange, Barbarianologist of the Farthest Peripheries - <AUTHOR> https://publicdomainreview.org/conjectures/lover-of-the-strange-sympathizer-of-the-rude-barbarianologist-of-the-farthest-peripheries/ <comment><USER2> This was brilliant. You rarely read anything (in English at least) from the Chinese view of Western civilization during the age of empire. Great writing, very cool.</comment>


Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release - <AUTHOR> http://www.neowin.net/news/ubuntu-implements-units-policy-will-switch-to-base-10-units-in-future-release

<comment><USER2> Snow Leopard uses base-10 units in some places, base-2 units in other places.

It isn't really confusing because when I go check how much free space I have on my hard-drive I'm just looking for a rough value, it can be base-10, base-2 or just "lots", "enough" or "almost out". The same happens to files and directories, I just want to know if they are "huge", "big" or "reasonable".

The problem is that the "old way" of reporting units in base-2 served the same purpose in exactly the same way. But this gratuitous change brings an heterogenous environment that causes problems when I want do do scripts or somesuch technical stuff where the exact amounts _do_ matter, and now have to worry in which base they are (and often this isn't obvious).

Consistency was dropped for nothing.

As for Ubuntu, I think this is a "me too" move that serves no purpose. But hey, I don't use Ubuntu, so I couldn't care less.

<comment><USER3> Surely this won't actually effect you when you want to do a script. If you want the size of a file, 'ls' (and most commands I think) gives you it in bytes, not KiB or KB or whatever...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like the half metrication of the UK. You end up with 2 systems, and twice as much confusion.

Base 2 is far more logical and useful IMHO :/

Wouldn't it be so much simpler if humans had evolved to have 16 fingers instead of 10...

<comment><USER5> We should use imperial units since they're more natural/intuitive/(insert rationalization here):

1 InchByte = 2.54 bytes = approximately pi bits (Edit: oops, it's about 20 bits. I divided where I should have multiplied.)

1 FootByte = 30.5 bytes

1 YardByte = 91.4 bytes

1 RodByte = 503 bytes

1 MileByte = 160,934 bytes

1 AUByte = 14.7 terabytes

1 LightYearByte = 841 petabytes

So 1 megabyte is almost exactly 2^15 footbytes. (1MB = 6.2 milebytes = 10,941 yardbytes = 32,786 footbytes)

Fun fact I learned while doing these calculations: There are 63,239 AUs in one light-year and 63,360 inches in one mile. So if you want to get a better idea of interstellar distances, imagine everything scaled down. E.G. if Earth was 1 inch from the Sun then Alpha Centauri would be 4 miles away.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't make any sense. You need to be using imperial _volumes_.

1 tablespoonbyte is approximately 36 bits (I just counted, with couscous, the universal measure), which makes a pintbyte is 1152 bytes- about a kilobyte, but also the number of pixels across on my screen.

It also gives us a gallonbyte - just shy of 10 kilobytes at 9216 bytes. That's even _more_ convenient, because it's square root is 96.

Of course, having a hogsheadbyte at 442368- well, I think even _you_ will find it difficult to argue the usefulness of finally being able to use a multiple of 442368.

Finally, we've got the tunbyte: 2322432. _Nobody_ will ever need more than about 28% of a tunbyte of memory, so you see it scales out at just the most convenient point for us here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is interesting, as we are finally moving away from storage that uses base-10 measurement (rotating disks). SSDs and flash drives are mostly base-2 devices.

<comment><USER8> Where did you get that from? Both Intel and OCZ, probably the most popular makers of SSD's, use base-10 in their product advertising. HDD or SSD doesn't matter from a consumer perspective.

[http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/32229...](http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/322296.pdf)

[http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz...](http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/solid_state_drives/ocz_vertex_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd)

<comment><USER7> The physical hardware involved, rather. You can write whatever you want on the box, and you can disable as many sectors in firmware as you want. Doesn't mean that NAND flash doesn't come in power-of-two units.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't really care whether base-10 or base-2 is used to measure data as long as it's standard for all hardware and software.

<comment><USER10> It's way too late for that. Networks and hard disks have been using base 10 and software has been using base 2 for decades. IMO Ubuntu has magnified the confusion now that some software uses base 2 and some uses base 10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can use whatever base you want. Realistically, end users don't even know when they're low on space anyway. Even if they do, it's a system of "deleting unused files" not finding the closest file size you can.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think 90% of users no longer need to know how large their files are, and the other 10% are not far off. (For that matter, I think 90% of users don't need to know that "files" exist.)

</comment><comment><USER13> KB does exist, it's a Kelvin-byte.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think that will pretty much mean that I'll be a Fedora user in the future. I understand that many people prefer base 10 file sizes for various reasons, I don't however so that change would drive me mad really quickly.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm amazed at the depth Canonical are going into in order to make the user experience for Ubuntu as simple and stunning as possible. It's this kind of attention to detail is making Ubuntu the number one OS out there.

<comment><USER5> Compared to OS X or Windows, I'd say Ubuntu gets a lot of details wrong. The window button positioning was a recent example, but it's by no means the first. Below are some bugs that I have experienced while using 9.10 or 10.04 beta. I also noted the year they were filed.

Lots of redundant fonts: <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/18666> (2005)

Copy-pasting text is broken in some apps. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/11334> (late 2004)

No way to auto-arrange desktop icons. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/nautilus/+bug/20284> (2005, [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1260...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/12608) is related)

No ability to change individual screensaver settings. [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome- screensaver/...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome- screensaver/+bug/22007) (2005)

Can't read some DVDs without using sudo/root. [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util- linux/+bug/10...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util- linux/+bug/10550) (late 2004)

Setting volume to 0 doesn't mute speakers. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/16454> (2005)

Ubuntu is improving (9.10 finally fixed a bunch of problems with Intel graphics), but the user experience details are definitely a weak spot. Considering how old these bugs are, I don't expect the situation to improve any time soon.

<comment><USER16> Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with you there. The user experience in Ubuntu is strong and consistent. Their philosophy makes sense even for power users. Users can find the all the options they normally need and power users can dig into things to customise further.

I've never hit any of these bugs (and have been using Ubuntu full time since defecting from Fedora in '05) and most of them have very good reasons for not being fixed or are a work in progress and none of them are a user experience nightmare.

<comment><USER5> _I've never hit any of these bugs_

Lucky for you. Unfortunately, I and many others have.

 _most of them have very good reasons for not being fixed_

Some of them have inane reasons for not being fixed. From <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316654>

Resolution: WONTFIX "I don't have any plans to support this. My view is that any screensaver theme that requires configuration is inherently broken."

 _or are a work in progress_

In progress for five years?

 _and none of them are a user experience nightmare._

I wasn't talking about nightmares, just minor things that are broken. You want nightmares? Try:

2.6.28-11 causes massive data corruption on 64 bit installations <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/346691> (March 2009) This one is particularly bad because they went ahead and released Jaunty with this bug. Then, the fixed kernel introduced a new bug that caused FS corruption on systems with Intel disk controllers.

ehci_hcd module causes I/O errors in USB 2.0 devices <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/88746> (2007)

ath5k driver connection and performance issues <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/461419> (2009)

[karmic regression] all network apps / browsers suffer from multi-second delays by default due to IPv6 DNS lookups <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eglibc/+bug/417757>

I've been hit by all of these except the first one, and I was only saved from that because I stumbled on the bug report before upgrading to Jaunty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yes, yes, YES! I loathe the 1024-byte kilobyte.

<comment><USER18> Why?

<comment><USER17> Because I sometimes want to do math. Lets say I want to put 6h33m of video on a 4.7 GB DVD. What bitrate do I choose? Ah, 4.7e9*8 bit / 23580 s = 1.59 Mbit/s. Now what happens if we use powers of two? I have to type a lot more into my calculator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How will this affect upstream compatibility with Debian?

<comment><USER20> Shouldn't be a problem, as the internal representation of size is still bytes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is There a Doctor in the House? - conrad-mac How big does a crowd of people need to be for you to be more sure than not that one of them is a (medical) doctor or other health professional?<p>Obviously there are many factors that go in to this. Just a thought I had on my way in to work this morning. <comment><AUTHOR> Depends where you are in the world. A restaurant in Jericho NY or Atherton CA most likely will have a higher concentration of certified medical professionals than a restaurant in maybe Canarsie or Oakland.

I would imagine that a room with 30 people probably has at least one EMT, PA, RN, Doctor, etc :)</comment>