Death of an Engineer: Attention-Seeking has Killed Invention - <AUTHOR> http://michaelohene.blogspot.com/2012/01/death-of-engineer-attention-seeking-has.html <comment><USER2>
       > Making quality products for consumers [..] is dying.

This is a tired old line. The art and craft movement rose a century ago on the same ideas.

But the examples he gives are bizarre - Fender?? Fender is a text-book example of the strength of engineering things to be mass-produced.

Fender guitars were conceived to be mass-produced. Where Gibson makes a big deal about the supposed tone benefit of a guitar with a continuous neck to the base of the noise-box, the Stratocaster has always had a bolt-on-neck. The paint is Dupont car paint. Yet Clapton prefers it to the hand-built stuff. Better yet, if you break one you can just go and buy another off-the-shelf that matches it.

 _Some_ people pay a lot of money for old fenders, but people make strange purchase decisions when it comes to music and art.

I think people want to believe that hand-made things are better (particularly when they are committed to hobbies to build things that have no market), but I rarely see an example of it.

<comment><USER3> _I think people want to believe that hand-made things are better (particularly when they are committed to hobbies to build things that have no market), but I rarely see an example of it._

Food, clothes and jewels are the first things that come to my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's wrong with cheap things? Is there really something so terribly wrong with the ability of everyone to acquire basic, somewhat decent functional furniture, clothing, entertainment electronics, household appliances, and automobiles cheaply? Would it be better if only more expensive, long-lasting, luxury goods that most people couldn't afford existed?

We've lived in that world before, it wasn't a better world for anyone. Since the same people who could have afforded expensive, high quality goods back then can today (a tiny subset of the population).

I may not like the style of most of the furniture at IKEA, but I am glad that it exists so that people of modest means can outfit their homes and spend the rest of their money on items that have a greater impact on their quality of life.

I would address the other points in the piece, but I thought this point was worth making on its own.

<comment><AUTHOR> InclindedPlane, When I thought about this a few years back I bought a Zeno- Basel watch from Switzerland, Late last year I saw the price of my watch shoot up 50% in month due to the Swiss Franc/US Dollar exchange rate.

I don't want to tell anyone what to do, but it is important to say that quality products have a history holding their value.

The statement about the same rich people can purchase the high quality items. This is wrong. People today have more purchasing power and buy more cheaply made expensive things things. People have more money today in the US, but we also spend more with 4 cars, running shoes, $3000 TVs

Will the things you buy have any value in years to come? Does this entire situation of demanding cheaper products decrease the value of an engineer.

There is nothing wrong with the consumer demanding sustaining value. And price is not necessarily a cost, it can be an investment.

<comment><USER5> _> And price is not necessarily a cost, it can be an investment_

not in consumer electronics its not. Quality products continue to exist, but availability of cheaper, but functional lower quality goods has its place too. Just an example: I'm a graduate student, so I greatly benefit from this, since I can buy a cheap product, use it for a few years and then throw it away without feeling too bad when I move out of the University town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The old days of having artisans build guitars for Fender or build bicycles for Schwinn was the old model; i.e. giving a niche market high quality products. These quality products have usually gained value (a Fender Stratocaster in 1964 sold for $289, today it sells for +$23000; a Schwinn Paramount in 1966 sold for $245, today sells for $2500). Inflation from 1963 to 2011 is about 600%. Money spent on products was money invested."

Having ridden Schwinn bikes as a kid, I must say they were a good example of mid-century American engineering. They were simple, strong, and hard to break. On the flat ground of northern Ohio, I didn't miss gears. But would you want to pedal a heavy, one-speed bike up the hills of Washington, San Francisco, or Seattle? And to the best of my knowledge, they were produced by men who would not have described themselves as artisans.

Consider an automotive equivalent, say a 1966 Ford Falcon. It got decent gas mileage for its day, and it was apt to last and last. It was handsome, and it had a distinctive look, something missing in lots of more recent cars. But who but a hobbyist would want to drive on now? In every way a 2012 car is better, whether made in Stuttgart or Detroit--the engines and transmissions are incomparably better. The safety systems are incomparably better.

That is also an odd notion of investment. Putting $200 into GE shares in 1966 is one thing--presumably the investment goes toward paying for new factories, new equipment, etc. to build products and make money. Putting the same money into a Schwinn bike invests in private transportation. That the bike gains in value results not from all the potential passenger miles one can rack up, but from the disappearance of all the thousands of identical bikes over the years.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article is a little ridiculous. It assumes that marketing/sales generates no value, that engineering/making things is the sole value creator.

Anyone who's ever tried selling something knows that building something is not even half the battle. Putting engineering on a pedestal above all others serves no useful purpose (I say that as an engineer myself).

<comment><AUTHOR> I stated in my "Sources of the Economy" that marketing is essential to the economy. I partially agree, marketing _can_ generate wealth indirectly by creating demand, but marketing only creates wealth when the end product is used for something functional.

If I market a music band, I create no wealth, I facilitate the exchange of wealth. I am not saying that this is bad, but I am saying that the creator is the basis on which everyone else operates.

I agree value can technically be created at the base level by controlling production of crops and things. You are right, but still this is dependent on the producer.

@bwarp you are right, engineers usually have clients and contracts for which they build.

<comment><USER7> I've actually got a blog post in the works about this whole idea of value, and who "creates" value as opposed to "facilitating the exchange of value" (that's often regarded as inferior, but I would suggest that it's not). The line between the two is harder to draw than you'd think, anyway. Is art really creating value, or is it just facilitating things? Is building a physical product really creating value? From an environmental point of view, every physical product creating is destroying value, or at best turning one type of value into another. Is writing software creating value?

When you really dig into it, this idea of "creating value" is pretty damn complicated...

<comment><AUTHOR> Send me the blog post when you get around to it. I considered writing software the same as creating a machine. It allows us to access/construct the things we need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While the author's examples are horrible (German bread? Iranian baklava?), he has an important point.

When you have an expanding economy, such as the US has had for the last 60 years, marketing trumps manufacturing. People don't want any shoe, they want a Nike. But we've changed to a contracting economy now, where manufacturing trumps marketing. People care less about the label and more about having a decent shoe. (Note, I'm not talking year-by-year ups and downs, but 'bigger picture' movement.)

During the expanding economy, America outsourced manufacturing to focus on marketing, since it was what was important. And now that things have reversed, it's in a bad spot.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this is unique to the US, and not unique to the last 10 years either.

Consider this: Of all the products made a 100 years ago, only 1% was made to last for a long time. Right now the other 99% is broken and thrown away and the 1% is still being used.

We only SEE old products which are well built. That doesn't mean all old products are that way.

There are still products being build which we can use for a long time, but they don't stand out and will only be noticed after a tens of years.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think you're just not looking hard enough to find the quality you're looking for. While there are certainly mass produced bicycles, guitar amps, motorcycles and other things that cater to the need of the masses, there are also craftsman made examples of all of those. Any decent sized city is likely to have a bicycle shop that custom makes frames to order. They're much more expensive, but I imagine they provide plenty of value to the customer who orders it.

In respect to the idea that there are no uniquely American souvenirs I also think you're being a little too quick to jump to judgement. Along with cowboy boots, as was mentioned, a possibility is a hat, or a big metal belt buckle like cowboys like to wear. An American football jersy, perhaps. Military surplus items, especially if branded with a 'US Army' or similar could work for some people's tastes. If the friend a skateboarder or snowboarder there are plenty of companies that have locally well known surf and skate shops with branded shirts (think RonJon) or skate decks.

</comment><comment><USER11> The article says: "Shouldn't we all be paid proportionally to the value we produce and our time."

If your work is directly contributing to that value, then sure. But in the example given (a machine that prints $100 vs $1 bills), the work is exactly the same. If you expect to be paid more to work on the more expensive machine, another worker would surely undercut you.

I don't think it is "bogus" to be paid for work and not take a share of the profits. I have specifically requested this arrangement at various startups, even when offered stock. If you want to be compensated with some sort of stock or royalties, you are making a bet on the future success of the business.

Apple has become one of the most successful companies ever, while building quality products. Their products are thoughtfully designed by obsessive designers and engineers, the best of the best. Apple products would make a great "USA souvenir" if not for the fact that they are already available worldwide.

<comment><USER12> > Apple has become one of the most successful companies ever, while building > quality products. Their products are thoughtfully designed by obsessive > designers and engineers, the best of the best.

Sure Apple's may look like "quality products" if you compare them to current products offered by competitors. But the article goes beyond that scope.

We are evolving into a a consumerist society where we don't expect our products to last more than a couple of years. Take the Apple TV for instance. As soon as you buy it, its value decreases and never gains value back. There is very little chance that its value ever goes back up (except maybe if some hobbyists in 2075 will be interested in collecting them). Compare that to the Fender guitar or the Schwinn bycicle mentionned in the article.

I agree with the author that we should demand higher quality from our products and not go for the shiny thing at a (barely) affordabel price all the time.

<comment><USER13> In the case of technological products, make no mistake: the consumer _does not want_ products to last 10 years.

You can surely run a 10 year old computer, but what are you going to do with it? Does anyone want a 5 year old cell phone?

So long as we continue to make advancements at the pace we're moving, there is no demand for consumer electronics that last that long. So long as each generation gets cheaper or better (which for the most part is true) and we figure out a decent recycling process (and I think we have) let's just keep moving.

I think it's a very fair point in other, slower-innovating industries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Value is all about perception. Something valuable to one man might be junk to another. Being a good engineer is about creating things that your target market will value.

The author seemed to like one off artistic creations over mass produced goods. if it wasn't for mass production, there is no way we will have the quality of life we have today.

<comment><AUTHOR> ricksta, I couldn't fit the definition of value into my post but I mention it in my previous post.

Mass production is something I didn't clearly define. You are right. The point I made was that increasing the "quality" in quality of life has meant a decrease in value to the consumer with increasing profits for the heads of companies who convince consumers they are saving money by buying poor-quality.

I answer this by my question "If you believe you have a high quality of life, how many things around you will be worth something in 30 years?" If nothing, it is an illusion.

I value quality, quality defined as something that will remain functional. If we no longer have to design for longevity and function engineering will wither, because consumers won't be willing to pay for the value engineers invest in making things beautiful (long-lasting).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> After making reference to artisan bread from Germany and baklava from Iran, the author asks, "How many items in our homes today will gain value over the next 30 years?"

I don't want to know what that bread or baklava is going to look like in 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER16> Suppose I am an oil engineer, and I develop some highly technical breakthrough in oil extraction. Is this good, because I am an artisan, and am deeply invested in a very challenging problem? Or is it bad because this invention essentially earns me an infinitesimal fraction on each gallon of gas sold, e.g. "siphoning a little amount of money from a lot of people"?

I am not really sure I understand the distinction that the author is trying to draw.

<comment><AUTHOR> Siphoning is to extract something with out giving back. An ideal economy is exchanging wealth for wealth. Selling oil/gas to someone is not siphoning, because they receive value (the ability to transport themselves, make goods) in exchange for their money. My earlier post explains some of these concepts

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The end goal of work isn't money, it's to produce something of value. Money is just a technology for trading things of value.

</comment><comment><USER18> Five minutes and google with give you more independent US guitar and amplifier manufacturers than you would know what to do with. I can't imagine that the same can't be said for bicycles.

Of course, few among us are going to be able to throw down $5-6k for a souvenir - either now or back when the equivalent of todays's $5-6k was a hundred odd dollars.

</comment><comment><USER19> Article in a similar vein: <http://nat.org/blog/2009/07/nerds-and-jocks/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Bookmarked it, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Henry Ford's book "My live and my work" is all about it.

</comment><comment><USER21> > I admit there is no product from the US that is worth much and is unique

A few things wrong with this statement:

1) The US is large. New York City and San Francisco have very different cultural identities. They also span a distance roughly 1000 miles longer than London to Moscow. What is something that is worth much and uniquely European?

2) The US is an amalgam of many other cultures. There are very few things that are both culturally unique to America and tangible. Here is a man who makes hand-made custom knives [1] in Brooklyn. What about knives are uniquely American? What tangible products are uniquely American? The only thing I can really think of are Winchester rifles.

3) And for that matter, what is uniquely German about artisan bread? What is uniquely Iranian about baklava?

[1] <http://thisismadebyhand.com/film/the_knife_maker>

<comment><AUTHOR> Not to make a joke, but after asking me for a souvenir idea my roommate's German boyfriend said "...a gun?" 1)Germany is large too with different dialects. The point was that the US once produced these things (guitars, bicycles, etc) now we don't. And the younger people who can produce them are wising up and taking jobs in finance. The BBC made a documentary about this just this year.

Fender Guitars was sold to CBS Corporation and quickly mass produced with cheaper woods.

European: Tag-Heuer, Zeno Basel Watches, smaller watch makers, furniture, there are still towns with thriving silverware companies in Southwest Germany 2)Every country is an amalgam of cultures, Yes Winchester rifles of Jonathan Browning are definitely American

3)They use different, more expensive grains (rye, whole wheat) and sourdoughs which do exist in the US but only in a few locations. Baklava is hard to find outside college towns and metro areas in the US, this makes it unique

<comment><USER21> > 1)Germany is large too with different dialects.

The US is 27 times the size of Germany.

> Every country is an amalgam of cultures,

No European country is even remotely close to the US in terms of diversity. The US is a nation _of_ immigrants. There is no American 'people' in the same way there is a German people. America is not a nation-state. Germany has many different areas with different dialects but these are indigenous to Germany.

> the point was that the US once produced these things (guitars, bicycles, > etc) now we don't.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bicycle_brands_and_manu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bicycle_brands_and_manufacturing_companies)

Ctrl + f 'USA', many are defunct yes, but many are not. You are factually incorrect.

> They use different, more expensive grains (rye, whole wheat) and sourdoughs > which do exist in the US but only in a few locations.

Not only do bakeries exist in the US that use locally grown whole wheat and rye, bakeries also have the option of importing these ingredients from areas that do have whole wheat and rye. Have you never had a New York sourdough bagel?

> Baklava is hard to find outside college towns and metro areas in the US, > this makes it unique

Baklava is hardly unique to Iran unless you expressly call it 'Iranian baklava'. And if you do that, why not call American-made baklava, 'American baklava'?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1,2) Your point was "large" in terms of distinct regions, I think implying that the US has a harder time to have our products accepted as opposed to a more homogeneous society. I think diversity and culture is a separate issue.

I dont have experience marketing products in Germany, but like I said almost every country has unique

3) The bicycle companies you listed, most USA brands have shipped production overseas do to labor prices. Off the top of my head, I can think of Trek and Cannondale as the only true mass produced bicycle manufacturers left in the United States. I am not saying there is something not good about the US. I am saying that the lack in quality demanded has left us wish cheaper products that can't demand the prices that will employ engineers. In turn, young engineers are leaving to the finance sector. Here's an excerpt from the BBC documentary.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4081937.stm>

4\. "Bakery" in the US means cakes, brownies, and cookies not artisan breads which requires fairly skilled workers to make. Only in Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, San Fran, Boston, St. Louis, and New York can you really find artisan bakeries in the US.

But this point was made to establish the uniqueness and quality demanded by the consumer. German Bread as Cultural Heritage: <http://www.goethe.de/ges/mol/typ/en8187653.htm>

5) You are right baklava is not unique to Iran, but the Iranian spices used were unique to this Baklava. The point is that the consumer demanded/expected a level of quality which is unique to their culture.

<comment><USER22> > Cannondale

In 2009 there were reports Cannondale is going to move production to Asia ([http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/cannondale-closing- us-...](http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/cannondale-closing-us- production-facilities-21101)). Did they decide against it? Wikipedia says the production sites are in Vietnam and Taiwan ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannondale_Bicycle_Corporation#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannondale_Bicycle_Corporation#Bicycle_Frames) \- second paragraph)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > _What souvenirs can I bring back from the United States to Germany, I had > nothing to say._

The joke is on him: pretty much ALL typical American exports and products are extremely common parts of daily life over here in Euroland... we have your music, movies, tv shows, video games, fast food restaurants, soda pop, clothes, cigarettes, etc. So, yes, considering this it might really be hard finding something to bring home he really cannot buy here anyway.

> _The old days of having artisans build guitars for Fender or build bicycles > for Schwinn was the old model; i.e. giving a niche market high quality > products. These quality products have usually gained value_

This is an extremely bad example and a wrong conclusion.

First, there still are a TON of very high quality "artisans" building guitars, guitar amps and effects for the "boutique" niche market and most of them come from the USA and they pride themselves on their products, the quality and that it is done by hand, in the USA. I am sure you will find the same is true for other industries and markets. Just because you don't know them doesn't mean they aren't there.

Second, the craze over Fender and Gibson vintage guitars has MUCH less to do with real, actual quality and I say this as a guitarist. Be realistic. This is a vintage collectors craze over very iconic products which have become extremely rare because before the vintage craze, they were a dime a dozen - see Clapton's legendary "Blackie" was bolted together from parts of 3 guitars he paid a 100 bucks for, total. Most people didn't store them or consider them valuable at all, they just played them and modded them and when they broke they were thrown away, nothing special about them. They were mass products, FAR from what those USA boutique luthiers do today. But it is EXTREMELY rare to find a mint condition guitar from that era. Actual production quality, quality assurance and longevity of guitars made by USA Fender today are arguably WAY better with WAY less variance but everybody wants a 60's Strat... for a fraction of the cost of a vintage one, I can get one of those boutique luthiers to build me a more reliable, more durable and better made perfect replica. Sentimental values aside, there is a thorough understanding what made a 50s or 60s Strat and you can get virtually in-distinguishably close, including a used look as if it was 50 years old. So, this is just like saying a mint-condition vintage Mustang was a WAY better car than the ones they build nowadays.

The value those items have NOW does not come from superior engineering or production. They have sentimental and iconic value and they are rare.

While we are at it: where did the internet and PCs come from? What about 90% of all programming languages and operating systems used nowadays? Who brought us our beloved iPods, iPhones, iPads and apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay, you have a very good point about the guitars and the inflated values. a $32000 guitar must play itself. This is something I call "apparent value"

>While we are at it: where did the internet and PCs come from? What about 90% of all programming languages and operating systems used nowadays?

Good question. They came from people at Microsoft, Mathematica, Xerox (former MIT researchers), Bell Labs, and ITT. You are right. But in the article I wrote specifically that software engineers have kept their ranks and continue to prosper.</comment></comment>


Free Sex Pot Bust Rap – Introduction to Noun Talk - <AUTHOR> https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/free-sex-pot-bust-rap/ <comment><USER2> This reminded me the superb short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges:

> There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" > languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified > by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: > there is no word corresponding to the word "moon,", but there is a verb > which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above > the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the > onstreaming it mooned."

You can read the original for free here: [https://ciudadseva.com/texto/tlon- uqbar-orbis-](https://ciudadseva.com/texto/tlon-uqbar-orbis-)

And in english here: [http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf](http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf)

Highly recommended. 17 pages.

<comment><USER3> Wikipedia says: " _Almost_ all languages have the word classes noun and verb."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my work on grammatically sophisticated natural language parsing, I thought about this pattern extensively. The basic observation is true: English allows you to stack nouns on top of one another, apparently without limit.

However, you're not really allowed to do this in any way you please. The almost-required interpretation is type specification: when you refer to N1 N2, you almost always means an N2 of type N1. So a "police officer" is an officer of type "police". An "oak tree" is a tree of type "oak".

I disagree with the grammaticality of some of the author's examples, and also some of his claims about the flexibility of the pattern. The type specification is almost always singular, and I've never seen punctuation included in the pattern. So "thrones game" should really be "throne game", and "night darkness, storminess" is not grammatical to me.

Interestingly, other languages do not permit this pattern, and so objects that can be expressed succinctly using the pattern in English become unwieldy in translation. In subways you sometimes a sign for "Passenger Emergency Intercom System" which is translated as something like "Sistema de comunicación para pasajeros en caso de emergencia" in Spanish.

<comment><USER5> Why isn't the police office a police of type officer? When he gets promoted to police seargant or police commissioner, he changes what type of police he is.

<comment><USER6> Because adjectives come before nouns. The first word is almost always is a descriptor of the second word. A "pig flier" is clearly something that flies pigs, not a type of pig that flies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The bag-of-nouns headline is a particular staple of regional British journalism. While bags of nouns are frequently used in both local and national headlines to describe the subjects of stories - CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR is a succinct way of clarifying, our of all the death vicars, which death vicar this particular story relates to - but it tends to fall to local news to report on the various events which befall each death vicar - the APOLOGY, the ENQUIRY, the TRIBUTES, the COURT APPEARANCE, etc. as the story runs its course. National news tends only to run such stories when there is action, or closure, or a comment from a celebrity - CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR FINALLY CAPTURED, or JUSTICE FOR CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR, or CAR PARK PLUNGE DEATH VICAR 'MISUNDERSTOOD' CLAIMS BIG BROTHER CONTESTANT.

As a result they tend to resort to the occasional verb or adjective, while local press sticks to just the nouns.

On the other hand, US journalism tends to use prepositional phrases for their identifying markers - PRIEST IN PARKING LOT DEATH - which leads to 'crash blossoms' when they put verbs on the end: PRIEST IN PARKING LOT DEATH PROTESTS.

<comment><USER8> "The bag-of-nouns headline is a particular staple of regional British journalism"

Strikes me as more tabloid that regional? Maybe not in my region, regional??

Although I'm sure the Sun would have gone with

CAR PARK DEATH PLUNGE PRIEST. The readership loves a good old death plunge.

<comment><USER9> My dad's old tabloid-satire favourite, which does admittedly contain a few non-nouns: MAD GAY PRIEST IN SEX CHANGE MERCY DASH TO PALACE

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reading this reminds of some of the crazy Sovereign Citizen and redemptionist movement ideas about "Correct Language" or "Quantum Language". For some reason they believe that by eschewing verbs and using punctuation creatively, they can somehow compel the state to excuse them from taxes, debt, the need for a driving license etc etc.

It's sort of a semantic magical thinking and I find it fascinating.

The inventor seems to have been this guy - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wynn_Miller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wynn_Miller)

<comment><USER11> Holy shit, this guy is having a legit schizophrenic episode and everyone around him thinks "I don't understand this, it must be brilliant".

From his site: [http://dwmlc.com/dwm/pages/page.php?page=10](http://dwmlc.com/dwm/pages/page.php?page=10)

> FOR THE COURT OF THE WRITTEN-MOTION IS WITH THE FICTION BY THE MODIFICATION > OF THE WRITTEN-WORD. FOR THE AFFIRMATION(OUTSIDE OF THE NOW-TIME-QUANTUM) OF > THE PERJURY(FICTION OF THE LANGUAGE-CLAIMS) OF THIS > PARLIAMENTARY(KINGS)-MOTION-PLEADINGS AGAINST THE PARTY.

Compare to the example in the wiki article on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad)

<comment><USER10> Welp ... that's what happens when you think verbs are a conspiracy and try to base a legal theory on it.

To me the most bizarre aspect is the central one - you think that the government is a conspiracy, that sometime in the past, more than a century ago, the whole thing was usurped by this massive conspiracy who are systematically keeping down the common man, and controlling everything.

And you think if you say the magic combination of word-salad they're going to be forced somehow to stop it and recognise you? Like "Uh, yeah, this guy knows the magic words, guess we don't get to oppress him now, you're free to go sir" instead of "What? we took over the whole government, back in your box, slave"

Because that totally makes sense.

\--edit-- Oh wow, yeah that word salad page really does look like this stuff!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's like you're trying to program in the kingdom of nouns, but somehow end up doing point-free functional programming.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another baffling invention is the current trend towards verbs as nouns, unchanged. Namely, 'compute' and something else technicky.

You know, I think I'm gonna leave the browse for a while, sit in the eat- prepare and make me some eat to relaxed sound-play. To avoid my blood press go too high. Maybe take a walk on the walk or even down to the green-grow.

I guess people felt about the same way when nouns were taking off as verbs and adjectives. Anyway, soon all the parts of speech will change places and everything will be fine again.

\----

Also, get a load of "China Ferrari sex orgy death crash": [https://i.imgur.com/of9ZaGN.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/of9ZaGN.jpg)

<comment><USER13> It's not limited to technology: your observation hit me right in the feels.

<comment><USER14> I don't have trypophobia, but I imagine it's similar to the cringy sensation I get when I hear phrases like "hit me in the feels", and "he's good people".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A similar idea is explored in the novel 'The Tin Men' by Michael Frayn ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Men)).

One of the characters invents 'Unit Headline Language' (UHL) with constructs like 'Strike Threat Probe Row'. A key feature of the language is that you can arrange the units in many different ways and it makes as much - indeed as little - sense.

"UHL, Goldwasser quickly realised, was an ideal answer to the problem of making a story run from day to day in an automated paper. Say, for example, that the randomiser turned up

* STRIKE THREAT

By adding one unit at random to the formula each day the story could go:

* STRIKE THREAT BID * STRIKE THREAT PROBE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA

And so on. Or the units could be added cumulatively:

* STRIKE THREAT PLEA * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE STORM

Or the units could be used entirely at random:

* LEAK ROW LOOMS * TEST ROW LEAK ..."

<comment><USER16> This is actually referenced in the article if you read down a bit.

<comment><USER15> Sigh, thanks. Should have read it all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe unrelated, but reminds be Alexander Block[1]:

        Night, streets, the lantern, the drugstore,
        The meaningless and dusky light.
        A quarter of the century more --
        All fall the same into your sight!

        You died – as it was before –
        You have the former way to start:
        The streets, the lantern, the drugstore,
        Swell of the canal in the night.

The first and the last sentencies have no verbs at all.

[1] [https://lyricstranslate.com/en/noch-ulica-fonar- apteka-%D0%B...](https://lyricstranslate.com/en/noch-ulica-fonar- apteka-%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%87%D1%8C-%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0-%D1%84%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C-%D0%B0%D0%BF%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0-night- street.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Buffalo_buffalo_B...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > The title of this post is a real headline from the Berkeley Barb (many years > ago).

He's right about that: [https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/lot-12-underground- ne...](https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/lot-12-underground- newspapers-1816140204).

</comment><comment><USER8> I was under the impression that Americans pronounced Berkeley to rhyme with berk, rather than bark? But then Berkeley Barb would suggest the latter pronunciation?

<comment><USER19> Your impression is correct. There's also an interest for anything sharing the same first letter as meaningful. Which is why that Berkeley Barbs thing makes sense. Even willing to substitute so long as the phonetics are there (ie Kids Korner)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlinese)

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-L9uhsBLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-L9uhsBLM)</comment>


Ask HN: PHP vs Rails vs obj C vs scala - <AUTHOR>

So I am fairly well versed in Javascript, DHTML, CSS et al and have done a good amount of C/C++ in the past.
I'm looking for the next thing to add to my skill set and there are a bunch of things I am considering and I am thoroughly confused. The case for each of the above is here :
- PHP : Huge installed base. backed and used by Y! so a safe choice and not going away anytime soon. Not a steep learning curve. Hard to find something new / something that hasn't been done before.
- Rails : The new 'cool' framework everybody is talking about since it makes front-end dev really easy. Steeper learning curve.
- objC : helpful when developing for mobile devices. Fun programming environment.
- scala : A brand new way of thinking about things. Arguably more scalable ?
Thoughts, suggestions, comments, expriences (good/bad) ? <comment><USER2> Hey, if you think Objective C is fun, go for Objective C. If you're not enjoying learning a new language and adding it to your skillset, you're doing it wrong. Do you want do pursue jobs in a language you don't enjoy coding?

Scala / Ruby are viewed as "fun" languages as well. You might as well try everything... you might find a groove quickly in one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> For your consideration: Django / Python.

Not sure why they're not on your list, but I was pretty much in your shoes a few months ago and am having a lot of fun with these at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want to add to your skill set, I would think you have a couple possible motivations...

motivation a- expand the mind.

If that is the case and you know c/c++, I would say, go with scala as it is the farthest afield from what you already know.

motivation b- develop a marketable skill.

If that is the case, then I've always been of the opinion that it is better to develop skills that others don't have. If you learn PHP, you've learned a commodity skill. If you learn scala, you are in a select few for the time being and although their might be fewer jobs, there will also be less competition for them and you can probably charge more. I don't know what the going rate for Rails developers is now but a couple years ago, it was crazy high because the demand outstripped the supply.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you've done a good amount of C/C++ in the past, you'll find very little trouble picking up objC and PHP if you need them for a particular project. If you want to expand your skills, I would learn scala. MAYBE Rails.

</comment><comment><USER6> PHP is easy to pick up but will likely teach you bad programming habits. This is coming from someone who got their start with PHP. :-)

If you want to do web stuff I think Ruby and Python would be better choices. If you want to avoid the learning curve of Rails, you can start off doing stuff with Sinatra instead, and mostly just tackle the Ruby learning curve first.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The other thing was availability of good projects to work on for the languages.

For objC, I can think of a few iPhone apps I could work on to learn the platform. For things like PHP, Rails, Scala (where you'll need a good amount of traffic to really excel at them and get real world experience beyond some small hello-world-like web-apps), how does one get involved with the complicated/ involved stuff ?

</comment><comment><USER7> PHP + CakePHP framework

as one of the commenter pointed out about bad programming habits with PHP, a framework will give you guidelines on good coding practices. It'll also help you develop faster and it's also quite easy to integrate with the front-end. CakePHP is like Rails framework but for PHP

</comment><comment><USER8> What are your goals?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanna start my own thing in a couple of years. I am doing a bunch of Javascript/HTML/CSS at work.

<comment><USER9> It sounds like you are "fit" on the client side. If you want to start programming the part on the server side, I would propose to study "data modeling" first. If you do not even know what "entity" means, your backend is probably going to a permanent construction site. If you are not able to "design" a good fundament it doesn't really matter what programming language you are going to use. Choosing/switching the programming language is the easy part - in my opinion.</comment></comment></comment>


A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell - <AUTHOR> https://williamyaoh.com/posts/2019-11-16-a-dead-simple-web-stack.html <comment><USER2> I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago:

1) Create a directory "foo" on your server

2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory

3) Write "Hello World!" in the file

4) Open [http://localhost/foo/bar.php](http://localhost/foo/bar.php) in the browser and see "Hello World!"

Lines of code or configuration so far: _zero_.

5) Add some actual code to bar.php

6) Reload the page and see the result

Number of steps to rebuild or restart: _zero_.

Then you can add templating, routing, logging, testing, anything. I'm not married to the PHP language, it's a mess. But the idea of keeping simple things simple is very important, and from what I see of today's developers, that idea has been _utterly forgotten_. Memory-holed. It's astonishing, I can barely believe that it happened.

EDIT: Sorry, I just said this offhand and didn't mean to hijack the discussion. Feel free to downvote, so something more on-topic gets on top.

<comment><USER3> 1) Install node js 2) npm install express 4) Define handler

Seems simple enough ?

<comment><USER4> I disagree with the others, and think this is indeed simple enough without caveats about setting it up (setting up WAMP is honestly just as much effort — not much), and what I've used to teach friends who wanted to learn some web programming with zero initial understanding.

Explaining routes and handlers was a bit hard, compared to files. I wonder if there's a "file based" version for Node that'd work like and express handler for the files route?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love this.

I'm a Haskell newbie, I only do Haskell in my spare time, only sometimes, so I don't have time to hunt around for recipes. Kudos to the author, I'll surely borrow from this.

\---

I also built a simple web server in Haskell for triggering commands via GitHub's Webhooks [1].

So if you're interested in a very simple, yet useful web app to analyze, see:

[https://github.com/alexandru/github-webhook- listener](https://github.com/alexandru/github-webhook-listener)

My use-case is to serve a static website using my own VPS, but have Travis build the website (via a static generator) for me. After Travis builds the website via Jekyll, it pushes it to the gh-pages branch, then GitHub pings my server via the installed webhook, which triggers a refresh with the latest build.

[1] [https://developer.github.com/webhooks/](https://developer.github.com/webhooks/)

<comment><USER6> Migrate your static site to Hakyll [https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/](https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/) from Jekyll, and use git subtree ([http://brittanderson.github.io/posts/2018-01-17-hakyll- and-g...](http://brittanderson.github.io/posts/2018-01-17-hakyll-and-github- with-subtrees.html)) to publish on GitHub Pages without Travis :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure what's meant by "simple" here, but it looks quite complicated to me. Even though I use something similar at work (with Servant), but much simpler (FSVO "simple") approaches as a hobby:

\- Those frameworks relying on built-in servers, including all their dependencies, are huge. If a program is linked statically (the default for GHC/cabal), that's also a very large codebase that doesn't get updated on system updates. Plain CGI (or FastCGI, if needed) is much more lightweight, and an external web server usually provides generic logging.

\- postgresql-simple provides more than just protection against SQL injection; that is implemented in the C libpq, and usable with postgresql-libpq bindings (which are used by postgresql-simple) too.

\- Database connection information, in case of PostgreSQL, doesn't require a fancy configuration: libpq reads it from environment variables. In many cases even those don't have to be set: by default it would try to connect to a local database, under current user, and to the database matching user name.

\- PostgreSQL itself can compose XML (XHTML/HTML 5), which then can also be processed with XSLT, cutting out the blaze-html dependency.

\- Custom logging facilities tend to be a pain to work with, and not necessary either; there are syslog and journald.

Using all that (and even more) instead of more lightweight/low-level/low- dependency alternatives seems like a sensible compromise in some situations, and I don't mean to say that it's somehow bad, but not seeing how it's "dead- simple". Maybe it's one of those "simple versus easy" cases, or just about different kinds of simplicity.

<comment><USER8> This reminds me of this commit in Redux: [https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/commit/9276ff0af6400633d673...](https://github.com/reduxjs/redux/commit/9276ff0af6400633d6731b15fed6e70c3561887e).

"Simple" is always a relative term. I agree, if "simple" looks like the complication in the post, then I'm turned off from the language because I don't really want to see what "complex" can become.

I have no doubt if I had context of Haskell, I would be able to read that with no trouble - even without Haskell context I think I can grok it pretty well. But imagine a newbie to the industry as a whole? It stops being simple at various stages, very quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is exactly the stack I used when I started building a webapp in Haskell, it was nice. I never finished my webapp though (but that wasn't Haskell's fault).

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a great tutorial for getting up and running fast. I started off with Spock too but grew out of it pretty quickly.

It's painful in Haskell you're learning it but feel you're not able to generate anything real for the first month(s) with it. Unfortunately, there's not many up-to-date tutorials like these available for beginners.

<comment><USER11> Do you have any recommendations for next steps beyond Spock?

I learned Haskell at uni and am interested in going back to it for web work (instead of Erlang). Any insights you might be able to share would be really helpful!

<comment><USER10> Servant. It takes a while to pick it up but it's well worth the effort. You end up with an automatically documented type safe API and you can even generate client functions for other languages using Swagger based on the spec. It has excellent documentation too, the only hard part really is figuring out the handler pattern.

As for the SQL story, that's more fragmented. I'm still trying to figure out the best next step myself. I started off with Persistent & Esqueleto but now looking at BEAM, Selda and Squeal for more control over the queries.

If you use Persistent as the persistence layer, check out Matt Parsons' blog for a nice intro: [https://www.parsonsmatt.org/2016/07/08/servant- persistent_up...](https://www.parsonsmatt.org/2016/07/08/servant- persistent_updated.html)

I'm actually coming from Elixir myself. I have to admit Haskell feels funny at times but admittedly a lot more robust.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My take on the whole "complex versus non complex" debate raging below.

If there were _nothing_ to the exorbitant complexity, there would be no complaints about modern stacks. It would be sort of, invisible? Like an OS is mostly invisible these days - that problem space is mature to the point that its, for most people, an afterthought.

So modern web dev does suck, yes. I am 100% of this opinion.

But the simple solution was re-invented into the 'mess' we have today. It doesn't scale (well), and although yes it wasn't complex it was a hell of a lot more complex to add features to, at least ones which weren't simple "hey change the look and feel of some widget" or "hey do some flashy UI thing".

I think that's probably a generally true statement, when a lot of work is needed to develop something (physical or otherwise), it will suck, because it still needs to be worked on? So anything being used by the industry and "modern" will have pain points, period.

Once its actually good, it tends to be simplified to the point that it becomes invisible. OFC, you can still use WAMP or whatever, or weebly, but nobody cares about WAMP or weebly anymore, outside of whatever small pet project or blog you run.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let's walk through my thoughts.

Hmm, okay so Spock looks nice. Neat! The routing code looks very easy to read:

      main = do
        spockCfg <- defaultSpockCfg () PCNoDatabase ()
        runSpock 3000 $ spock spockCfg $ do
          get root $ do
            Spock.html "
Hello world!
"
          get "users" $ do
            Spock.json (A.object [ "users" .= users ])
          get ("users" <//> var <//> "friends") $ \userID -> do
            Spock.json (A.object [ "userID" .= (userID :: Int), "friends" .= A.Null ])

Alright, let's figure out how this works.

      runSpock :: Port -> IO Middleware -> IO ()

Okay that makes sense. Takes in a port, some middleware and spits out IO. Not crazy. Hmm, okay these dollar signs are making things a little confusing, but I can figure out that spock returns an IO Middleware and therefore we can see that spock takes the output of the right do block along with spockCfg. Not the easiest to scan at first glance because of the right to left reading but okay.

Let's look at get.

      get :: HasRep xs => RouteSpec xs ps ctx conn sess st

Ah, okay, so uh...this doesn't appear to be a function. Oh, I see, here it is:

      type RouteSpec xs ps ctx conn sess st = Path xs ps -> HVectElim xs (SpockActionCtx ctx conn sess st ()) -> SpockCtxM ctx conn sess st ()

Well I'm not really sure what xs, ps or st are. And HVectElim doesn't tell me anything. Path is pretty clear and SpockCtxM is a monad of sorts. But what the hell is HVectElim? Alright whatever, let's just figure it out via the signatures of Spock.html/Spock.json. Which are...nowhere to be found in the documentation. I looked them up in the index and nope, no entries. I'm very confused about what HVectElim is and why that would be a fine name.

I can continue past this point, but you get my gist.

This is actually way better than my other experiences with Haskell and web dev, but it's by no means an easy or fun experience reading this code. Variable names like xs, ps, etc. are great when you're dealing with a generic list but they get old when that's the only documentation (because "type signatures are documentation" is _totally_ infallible). And a name like HVectElim is just baffling. What, did they charge you per letter? Did half your keys fall out? Why is that a good name?

I really want to use Haskell for something useful. But I'm running into pain points trying to understand a glorified Hello World. Now granted I'm by no means a great Haskell programmer. But that's kind of the point. I understand monads. I get functors and applicatives. I should be able to write a dumb Hello World app dammit.

<comment><USER7> That documentation indeed could be improved, but I guess the intention here is that basic usage is learned from the tutorials. Though it's possible to figure from that documentation alone as well (I'm reading it for the first time too, but using Haskell often): Path construction collects types of arguments into xs, then HVectElim (heterogeneous vector eliminator, or maybe "elimination") unwraps it into an appropriate function type. xs are those types, ps is PathState, st usually stands for "state".

A dumb web "Hello, world!" can be written with just putStr though, using CGI (along the lines of what I've mentioned in another comment here). Or perhaps with Network.CGI ("cgi" package), which is quite a bit more straightforward than that RouteSpec, especially if one wants to quickly understand how it works.

I had a similar experience (wanting to use a language for something useful, but mostly failing to) with Rust, and maybe Python (just s/wanting/having/ in that case), but I guess the problem with that was primarily in trying to find out what's the "right"/idiomatic way to do something while there's none, or to apply practices from other languages. And maybe in not having a suitable project idea at the time. Most likely there can be more reasons of that, but they seem to go away with practice, clear goals, and/or motivation.

<comment><USER13> Basic is the key issue here. Sure I can type this out and get a simple program working (although if I make a transcription error, I'm not super sure I can reason through the code). But if I want to build anything beyond the basic, I can't rely on the three whole tutorials on Spock^[1]. I need to start understanding the library.

But at that point reading the docs is pretty frustrating. Even with your explanations, I can't see how HVectElim or xs, ps, st are okay names. Sure, it's idiomatic. But that doesn't mean its good. What was wrong with types, pathStates and state? Sure it's less terse, but in this case that's fine. Or if they wanted to keep the same naming, at least explain it in the docs!

Having built a web app in Rust, I've certainly run into pain points, but nothing at this level. A library like Rocket has so much more documentation and careful examples^[2]. But also, the interfaces in Rocket are fairly simple. You write a function that returns a type that can be converted into a response. Anything you can serialize with serde can be converted into a response. With Haskell, the interfaces are that my route defining functions return a

      SpockCtxM ctx conn sess st ()

which is actually a

      SpockCtxT ctx (WebStateM conn sess st)

With WebStateM being

      WebStateT conn sess st (ResourceT IO)

Yeah...I can kinda infer that these are chained monads but I have no clue what bind or return does. I assume SpockCtxM is a reader monad and WebStateM is a state monad? But that should really be described in the documentation.

I see that the other libraries in the tutorial are better documented than Spock, so hopefully the Haskell ecosystem is getting better at this. But I'm still not sure I'd want to build a web app in Haskell (how's package management? Did you guys ever resolve cabal vs stack?)

[1]: [https://www.spock.li/tutorials/](https://www.spock.li/tutorials/)

[2]: [https://api.rocket.rs/v0.4/rocket/](https://api.rocket.rs/v0.4/rocket/)

<comment><USER7> Longer names can be seen as unnecessary and duplicating information. One has to balance between being verbose and laconic when it comes to naming in general, but judging by the lack of annotations in this case, not much care was put into it being easily readable. It may be useful to report it, once that's an issue: chances are it just seemed obvious to the author, as it also often happens to code in general, and acceptable to users.

If you see an insufficiently documented and/or straightforward API, and there's no good reason to use that one in particular, I think it may also be a good idea to look for alternatives, in any language.

> how's package management?

I think it's fine, but there are different opinions on how it should be. I prefer a better system integration and shared libraries coming from system repositories (which is usable with Debian), Cabal works fine, Stack seems to be popular, some seem to use Nix.

> Did you guys ever resolve cabal vs stack?

"Resolve" as in choosing a one true way to build/install things? I don't think so, but there is this annual "state of Haskell" survey that includes build tools, which was closed just a few days ago this year (but no results available yet, afaik), though there are the results from last year [1]. "State of the Haskell ecosystem" [2] may be of interest too.

There certainly are imperfections/drawbacks (and/or varying approaches/opinions/preferences), and it may not be a good choice for you for making a dynamic website (I think in many cases the overall best choice is the language one is most fluent in at the time), but my replies were mostly with the "I really want to use Haskell for something useful" sentence in mind: being exposed to worse (or at least less suitable) bits and running into a dead end can be unfortunate in that case.

[1] [https://taylor.fausak.me/2018/11/18/2018-state-of-haskell- su...](https://taylor.fausak.me/2018/11/18/2018-state-of-haskell-survey- results/)

[2] [https://github.com/Gabriel439/post- rfc/blob/master/sotu.md](https://github.com/Gabriel439/post- rfc/blob/master/sotu.md)

<comment><USER13> The reason I ask about package management is because when I do my annual try- to-use-Haskell-for-real event, I pick either Stack or Cabal, inevitably run into issues with one and have to switch to the other. Plus I've had situations where I tried to install packages and the manager gave me the computer equivalent of a shrug. Contrast that to Cargo which works beautifully and seamlessly out of the box.

However I hold out hope that Haskell is getting better and easier to use. Legitimately, this tutorial's code looks a lot better than what I've seen before. But I'm still dissatisfied with the level of naming and documentation. I get it that the names may have been obvious to the author, but it's a little worrying to me that the author didn't think about this fact when writing the documentation. Plus Spock isn't a young framework. It's my belief that anybody writing a package should know that interface names are designed to be readable and understandable. And these names aren't subtly hard to read. HVectElim just isn't a great name.

That being said, I don't want to just hate on the Haskell ecosystem. I do really find the language fascinating. I just want some better documentation, more tutorials and nicer, unified tooling.

<comment><USER10> Stack uses cabal underneath though. What kind of issues are you running into?

Personally I love the language but struggle with all the (necessary) stuff around it. Configs, deployment, dependency management, editor setup, lint, auto-formatting... Everything feels unnecessarily painful.

<comment><USER13> Generally issues where package management just fails. Also it's just overall not ergonomic. I end up installing yet another version of GHC a lot (I believe that GHC version should be handed separately from package versions like rustup/cargo, nvm/npm, rbenv/bundler). But this info could definitely be out of date. I might be due for another try at Haskell

<comment><USER7> Not sure if it became much better in the past few years; I seem to run into issues less and less often (and all were solvable rather quickly), but it may be simply because of the avoidance of problematic packages and approaches. Here is a bit more of information though:

\- Cabal 2 supports Nix-style local builds [1].

\- Stack seems to aim very smooth and easy workflow. Though it didn't work well for me when I tried it (I think I had a version that was too old, and was rather appalled by the way they suggest to install a new one, with `curl ... | sh`). And as mentioned above, I prefer the opposite of adding even more layers on top of cabal and using multiple package managers, in part because it introduces more ways for things to go wrong. Likewise with Nix outside of NixOS.

\- I used to find Cabal sandboxes helpful, but not using them these days. Different versions of the same package can be installed simultaneously, if it becomes tricky to stick to a single version while using Cabal. And as the last resort one can wipe out the local package database.

\- Careful versioning could solve some of the package management and dependency resolution issues, and there is a common package versioning policy [2] (similar to, but not exactly the same as semver), but not everybody follows it (in versioning their packages or in pinning dependencies); one should be careful with packages that don't.

\- Minimizing dependencies can be useful for this, among other things. Without keeping an eye on it, one can easily find themselves in a dependency graph with hundreds of packages, often coming pretty much directly from developers (without additional package maintainers keeping an eye on them following any standards or being compatible, though it's supposed to be better with Stack), some of which may misbehave at some point.

\- On some systems it is viable to use a system package manager for Haskell package management.

But possibly my experiences are not representative either: as mentioned before, opinions and approaches around it tend to vary.

[1] [https://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/nix-local-build- ov...](https://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/nix-local-build- overview.html)

[2] [https://pvp.haskell.org/](https://pvp.haskell.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Really happy to read this - I'm using Spock and postgresql-simple, but found Lucid for generating HTML instead of blaze.

I never got around to wrapping my head around handling configuration, so I will definitely take a look at configurator.

I also like the suggestions for what libraries to look at next, sometimes choosing what libraries to go for feels like a jungle for a newcomer.

</comment><comment><USER15> Haskell is extremely complex, and that's the point: to isolate complexity at the language level, where safe patterns can be researched, developed, and then scaled out to arbitrary applications.

Please call this "Towards a simple Haskell web stack" or something else less oxymoronic.

<comment><USER16> > _Haskell is extremely complex_

I extremely disagree. I think C++ is extremely complex. Haskell is simple by comparison [0].

Once you understand enough Haskell to write basic programs in it this stack is roughly similar in scope to a Ruby + Sinatra or Python + Flask web application.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNRju6_yn3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNRju6_yn3o)

<comment><USER17> It depends on what we mean by Haskell.

If we mean "Haskell the latest specification" that's Haskell 2010. I suppose we could think of it as pretty simple, though lazy evaluation means that any implementation of it is going to be complicated.

However I don't know of a single company that uses plain Haskell 2010. They all use GHC (or more complex tools like GHCJS!) and GHC Haskell is a beast: [https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_gu...](https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/glasgow_exts.html)

<comment><USER18> And how many companies use a C++ standard? GCC and Clang both provide a large number of extensions.

[https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/C-Extensions.ht...](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/C-Extensions.html#C-Extensions) [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/C_002b_002b-Ext...](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.5/gcc/C_002b_002b-Extensions.html#C_002b_002b-Extensions)

<comment><USER17> OP: haskell is extremely complex.

Responder: not it's not (eg C++ is more complex)

Me: actually haskell is a complex, beastly language, eg check out the language extensions

You: but C++ is more complex!

Me: i agree

EDIT: Didn't mean to sound snarky, the discussion has just gotten really layered and I wanted to explain my position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> To comment on the choice you have when building your frontend, Reflex/Reflex- Dom also comes to mind.</comment>


Show HN: The missing schedule view for Google Calendar - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamcalapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Outlook 2013 & 2016 provide a very useful "Schedule View" to display multiple calendars at once. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent for Google Calendar so I created TeamCal. Additionally, to the schedule view, it's also possible to use drag & drop to move an event from one person's calendar to another - super useful for managing team rotations or doing vacation planning. Would appreciate any feedback on how to improve the website & app!</comment>


Context Require - Load JS assets based on page content - <AUTHOR> http://benjaminbenben.com/2013/10/01/context-require/

<comment><USER2> I think the benefits of this approach are outweighed by the number of HTTP requests you have to send for individual JS files. In the majority of cases you'll find that all of your JS, bundled up and minified, loads faster than getting each file as it is required.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, there is a bit of an overhead with that. Module server - [https://github.com/google/module-server](https://github.com/google/module- server) seems like quite a good solution. Though I'd agree, for a large number of sites it's far better to bundle them up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We do a similar thing at Last.fm. We bundle our most commonly used modules in a single file. The rest all pulled in at runtime.

Paul wrote about it here: [http://www.paulrhayes.com/2013-09/a-light- progressive-framew...](http://www.paulrhayes.com/2013-09/a-light-progressive- framework/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this post - feels like quite a simple approach. Would love to hear if anyone has done anything similar.

<comment><USER4> We're doing something similar with YepNope that is included in Modernizr but it's not as simple as yours. We ran into problems where if there were multiple elements on the page with that dependency (usually a jquery plugin), only one would end up getting initialized. We ended up coming up with a complicated queuing system that queues up all of the initialization requests when it detects that it is in the process of being loaded, and fires for each in the queue after the dependency is loaded. I'm definitely curious to look into your method in terms of multiple items that need to each be initialized and how this is handled with your context require method or require in general.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, I've not had to deal with sharing between multiple elements yet - I'm kind of hoping that when I do require.js would give quite a solid base for it. YepNope seems like a good choice for this kind of thing, especially that it can bring in css assets too. Would be awesome to bring in all related assets for a element</comment></comment></comment>


Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer - <AUTHOR> http://thoughtinfection.com/2014/04/19/capitalism-is-a-paperclip-maximizer/ <comment><USER3> Capital is not what most people conceive of it to be. Capital is commonly (and correctly) viewed as a "store of wealth", or as "the crystallisation of labour-time" \- but capital comes in different flavours, and when you deal with capital in the form of goods which provide an incremental benefit to the user, what you have is indeed capital, but when you deal with money... it's up to you whether it's capital or not.

Often, people confuse _money_ with _capital_. Money is an exchange mechanism which facilitates the transfer of value between parties through a common unit of exchange. Money can be viewed as a subset of capital (i.e. as a sedentary store of value), or it can be viewed _as the destruction of the benefits of labour_ , as it converts an active instrument (i.e. the work I am doing, or the goods I have produced) into a sedentary instrument which provides no incremental benefit, _unless it is spent_.

So - how this relates to the article - capitalism is a system which currently optimises for money. When you take a step back and consider that by converting labour and value into money, you are effectively freezing the benefit of that labour away, accruing money as an end of its own ceases to make sense, as much of this value ends up lying in the ledgers of corporates, governments, or wealthy individuals, doing nothing for anybody other than perhaps dealing with some of the more fragile elements of human psychology (security).

We have let a means become the end, and have forgotten that the Purpose of all of this is to promote human happiness - I mean, what other possible Purpose _can_ there be?

<comment><USER4> Some would disagree that the purpose of existence is to promote happiness.

Robert Nozick offered this thought experiment to which I would not opt to maximize happiness:

> Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us whatever desirable or > pleasurable experiences we could want. Psychologists have figured out a way > to stimulate a person's brain to induce pleasurable experiences that the > subject could not distinguish from those he would have apart from the > machine. He then asks, if given the choice, would we prefer the machine to > real life? [0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine)

<comment><USER5> Why wouldn't you?

<comment><USER6> Replace drugs with machine and we already have such a thing. However the pleasure from drugs is stigmatized and prohibited, and the addiction to the pleasure machine is seen as life destroying.

<comment><USER7> IMO - it's not the pleasure itself that is stigmatized, but the side-effects. Side effects including deteriorating health of the user, as well as the occasional resorting to immoral or even criminal means to feed the habit.

There's also a whole dog-whistle aspect to the 'war on drugs' (e.g. massive differences in sentences on crack vs. cocaine offences)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a faulty analogy. In fact, a paperclip maximizer goes against every single principle of capitalism out there.

The paperclip maximizer is bad exactly because it isn't based on capitalism; it will maximize paperclips regardless of whether someone values them or not! At _any cost_, it will maximize paperclips.

Markets, on the other hand, have the goal of providing products/services that people are willing to pay for. It adapts. The more people value it, the more capital it will attract, and the more resources will be allocated to it.

<comment><USER9> You've identified one of the key defects in capitalism today...the disconnect of a "true" market where value is measured by folk's willingness to pay for things.

<comment><USER8> So, the problem is not enough capitalism? ;)

<comment><USER9> Not more capitalism :), just determining a better way to manage the money supply then a few folks on the board of central banks. If we could somehow connect an increase or decrease of the money supply to a classic market definition (e.g. people buying and selling) I think it would make a very positive impact to everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article irrationally assumes the best effort maximizer has no competition and long life, which we have not seen in endless lower powered implementations, and there seems to be no trend so unless it starts going exponential...

There might be a barrier here, like speed of light or various mathematical limits that formalize the old saying of too many cooks spoil the broth. The required complexity of a uber-maximizer to handle the complex universe means its unprovably complicated and unreliable. Or you'd need a bigger computer than the universe to answer the halting question for a universe controlling control loop, or even something much smaller like a mere multinational corporation. Or another way to put it is a predatory competitor maximizer would inevitably be better at predation than its victim that focuses more on some arbitrary goal than on avoid becoming a meal, so in a hyper optimized playing field all you'd get is ever better predators eating each other and eating weaker non-predation focused orgs, or basically the modern business/finance system.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wait, what?

Capitalism maximizes "giving people what they want". This is much closer to the benevolent AI models than to paperclip maxizers.

<comment><USER12> Implicit in the statement "giving people what they want" is a set of assumptions about what "want" means. Do I want life-saving medicine? Do I want a soul-sucking job that pays the bills? Do I want to be de-facto-required to participate in Facebook in order to socialize? I may voluntarily choose all of these things, and while that is unambiguously better than being forced to do them by violence, that's subtly distinct from "wanting" them.

There are also varied spectra of wants: on some level, I want to pursue self- actualization goals that are years away. On another level, I want to step out of the rat race and read a good book. On yet another level, I want to watch TV, eat candy, and click a button that delivers a dopamine reward directly to my brain. These wants are frequently in conflict, and capitalism is more incentivized (or capable) to satisfy some of those than others. (I remember a good PG essay about the phenomenon of short wants vs. long wants, but I can't find it; neighboring ideas are found in [http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html](http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html) and [http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html](http://paulgraham.com/distraction.html))

I don't think markets are a bad technology, any more than any other technology. But the paperclip analogy fits: people do want paperclips, but they also want a variety of other things that aren't paperclips. If we create social machines that optimize some wants over others, a plethora of human needs and desires may be drastically under-supplied as an unintended side effect.

<comment><USER13> "Implicit in the statement "giving people what they want" is a set of assumptions about what "want" means."

And while that's all very interesting and important in the abstract, it's worth double-checking that you don't get yourself lost in the weeds... which I think you did... and forget that the paperclip maximizer is scary precisely because it has _no_ concept of wants in it. With capitalism, wants can be changed in real time, and the system reacts. The paperclip maximizer does not. They are fundamentally different.

There is a memeset that strongly encourages you to fling up whatever word smokescreen is necessary to ensure that nothing positive is said about Emmanual Goldstein, today played by Capitalism, but it's still just a word smokescreen. There is a fundamental different between a paperclip maximizer and capitalism, and you should not throw yourself into a word tizzy until you've confused your rational brain enough that you can fall back on the comfortable emotional judgments about capitalism. Not every bad thing that can be said about capitalism is true simply because it's a bad thing said about capitalism.

<comment><USER12> You are right that the analogy breaks down at the assumption that humans would allow the paperclip machine to run amok; human wants do powerfully change and influence the market machine. At the same time, the abyss gazes into us, and human wants change in response to the machine as well.

I'll give an example that intersects the Pavlovian scare words of both "capitalism" and "government": the Prison-Industrial Complex. It's reasonable to want to remove members of society who are dangerously violent, or "cheaters" of sufficient scope. Yet iterate this desire over enough time, and it takes on a life of its own: politicians who want to look tough on crime, parents who want their fears assuaged, private companies who want to profit from correctional tax dollars, and most insidiously, the swaths of police, prison guards, and support staff who want paychecks, benefits and job security.

The final product is something we don't actually want: the most populous prison system in the world, which is massively expensive, socioeconomically predatory, and fails to rehabilitate most of its inmates. Yet there are enough stakeholders who _do_ want the institution to persist for reasons of personal benefit (and enough taxpayers who want to imagine a cute moralistic story and are willing to pay for the luxury of ignorance), that a massive machine of oppression is created and sustained out of a simple, reasonable human want.

I'm not intrinsically anti-capitalist; I'm in the camp of Jaron Lanier, in that money, markets, and corporations are all technologies, and neither good nor evil. But technology should serve humans, and not the other way around; that means paying attention to the power of unchecked, autonomous feedback loops and their power to influence human behavior and our various social ecosystems.

<comment><USER14> >It's reasonable to want to remove members of society who are dangerously violent, or "cheaters" of sufficient scope. Yet iterate this desire over enough time, and it takes on a life of its own: politicians who want to look tough on crime, parents who want their fears assuaged, private companies who want to profit from correctional tax dollars, and most insidiously, the swaths of police, prison guards, and support staff who want paychecks, benefits and job security.

Of course, this assumes all the actors were initially well-intentioned, which they weren't. Plenty of people supported harsh policies of criminalization and "justice" because they wanted to come down hard on the dark-skinned and the poor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Economic systems are optimizers (each with slightly different objective functions).

One of the first things we learn about optimizers is that they are rarely globally suited to solving problems, and that the best technique is to identify and apply the locally optimal solution over the range of input.

TLDR: We need to admit that there is not a globally applicable economic system, and learn to apply different models where they are most efficient/least disastrous.

</comment><comment><USER16> Capital doesn't maximize capital; it maximizes productivity. In absence of controls, capital naturally flows to productivity in order to be maximized by the holders of capital; but only because productivity creates wealth, not the capital itself.

<comment><USER17> Capital only maximises productivity if it gains an advantage by doing so. In other words, productivity is a means for Capital to maximise itself, not an end. There are infinite examples of this: shrimp peeling machines have existed for ages, but shrimp is still mostly manually peeled in Thailand because it has a cheap workforce.

<comment><USER18> The workforce in Thailand is cheap because there is not enough capital. The answer will never be less capital.

<comment><USER19> He's not making an argument for less capital. I think he needs to clarify his definition of productivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People fantasize too much about capitalism. The definition of capitalism is: capital and income are expressed under the same monetary unit (like mass and energy could be):

income = capital x interest rate

The former alternatives was to put capital in a separate "namespace". In Middle Ages, only nobles could have land and land was the only capital that could exist ("usury" was forbidden, you know). Then came mercantilism, that defined wealth as a quantity of gold that one had; and so on.

Capitalism will certainly pass, but hopefully not going back to restricting access to capital. I imagined something like a "complex" interest rate, with the imaginary part representing natural resources, while the real part is the human effort that is the only think currently measured by monetary unit. But bimetalism failed everywhere it has been adopted, I think that the imaginary part of a price would become dominant since natural resources are becoming the limit of economic output.

</comment><comment><USER21> What we really want is a happiness maximizer but no one knows how to make one of those which leverages the innate characteristics of people. Capitalism seems like a pretty good system to pragmatically approximate this happiness maximizer.

Yes, there are negative externalities to capitalism including possibly maximizing short term happiness at the expense of long term. Is there something better?

Framing this in terms of the paperclip maximizer made this idea appear more interesting than it turned out to be.

</comment><comment><USER22> War can only destroy capital, perhaps the most breathtaking destruction of capital in history was WWII. So War would be antithetical to this hypothetical capital maximizer and it would be it's among its top priorities to avoid it. Similarly, the market system based on human rationality is far too volatile for our capital maximizer, it would look to replace that ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER22> Thinking about this some more, it would seem that if we really have a Capital Maximizer then the system's process toward its objective (creating capital) is highly inefficient. If your goal is to create capital in the world you need better infrastructure, after all what capital is more useful than that which can be easily used to create more capital? Long term, if you're a Capital Maximizer trapped on this planet, you only have a small finite amount of resources than can be converted to capital, you would want to spread out to other planets very soon. These are obvious things we aren't doing very well.

<comment><USER14> There are currently a few rules crippling the Capital Maximizer:

1) Don't think in a longer term than five years. That's _risky_.

2) Labor is the worst expense to have, so minimize the amount of expensively useful work that has to be done.

3) Collude with others when it's gainful, but don't _coordinate_ with others to get around rules (1) and (2). Coordination is _for commies_.

"It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination." \-- David Graeber

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The root problem here is not economics, it is basic human nature. Humans have forever been seeking to increase their power base at the expense of others, and been corruptible by greed. This is not new, and it is not limited to capitalism. It's basic human nature, and it's one of our key weaknesses.

<comment><USER24> I'm not seeking to increase my power base at the expense of others. If I would get less money doing something that would make the world a better place, I would happily choose this. Am I not human?

I see this kind of answer as a kind of explanation widely disseminated to justify our economic system as inevitable, but which have very little scientific basis. For me it's wishful thinking.

The kind of economic growth observed in capitalism and some of its characteristics like the cyclic crisis not related with natural changes like climate is something unique to our civilization. And it's a very new thing at the human history (less than 300 years). What will be the effects of these things at long scale is something still to be comprehended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Capitalism depends on price theory, which predicts that making too many paperclips will cause them to be in glut and the price will drop. So a paperclip-maximizing AI might oughta be built to take that into account.

<comment><USER26> Point missed.

It's not that any one product is being produced. "Capital" (or profit or wealth) here is the combined market aggregate of _all_ production. The problem is that this too, as with any single optima process, leads to madness.

In the case of capitalism, ecternalities, equity/equality, sustainability, and systemic global risk are all undervalued, and simple short-term profit maximisation tends strongly to "underproduce" these.

<comment><USER25> I get the point - it's necessary to reanimate the mouldering bones of Malthus now and again. I just disagree with that because the emiprics of the case are pretty lopsided against him. He could not have known about engines. Which now appear to cause one whale of an externality.

The only thing Capitalism did was replace Mercantilism at scale. You had production before.

What's weird is that economists talk about ways to actually price things like externalities, equality, sustainability and/or risk. That might be madness or it might be reason.

If we can't price them, then are we not dropping the checkbook and reaching for the sword?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _Corporations_ can be usefully described as 'profit-maximizers', but capitalism itself doesn't have a coherent behavior - you can't describe it as any kind of AI.

<comment><USER19> AI is just a subset of intelligence. You absolutely can describe capitalism as an intelligent system since it is primarily made up of units (people) which are intelligent.

If capitalism didn't have a coherent behavior, then how could we ever rely upon it as a primary driver of our economy? It must be coherent and on some level understandable for us to make predictions around it.

<comment><USER27> You can call an ecosystem 'intelligent' if you want to, I suppose, but there's not really any way to discuss it as a 'maximizer' when it has no goals and no intentional behavior. You could as easily describe water as a 'gravitational potential' minimizer - it has a collective aggregate behavior that you can characterize, but that doesn't make it intelligent by most definitions of the word.

>If capitalism didn't have a coherent behavior, then how could we ever rely upon it as a primary driver of our economy?

It _is not_ a 'primary driver' of our economy, it is a _description_ of our economy. The primary driver of our economy is corporations - entities obeying a profit motive. They have behaviors, intentions, and goals - they attempt maximize shareholder profits. "Capitalism" doesn't intend anything, have any goals; it doesn't even have any non-emergent behaviors.

<comment><USER19> Every time I start writing a response to this, I can't help but feel it will simply be misinterpreted. I thought my original response was pretty succinct and clear. If you'd like to continue, please select one discrepancy and I'll be happy to discuss it further with you.

<comment><USER27> Our disagreement may be definitional - your original response was succinct and clear, but did not make an argument, merely an assertion.

A) I see no reason that 'being made up of units which are intelligent' ought to classify a system as intelligent.

B) I see no way in which you can usefully talk about anything without intentional behavior as a 'maximizing intelligence'.

You can't call 'capitalism' the 'driver of our economy' for the same reason you can't call 'ecology' the 'driver of natural selection' or 'conflict' the 'driver of our military conquests'. You are conflating a system with the units in the system, and talking about an ecology of intelligent units as if it is satisfying some behavioral utility function.

'Capitalism' doesn't have a utility function, because it doesn't have _decision-making capacity_ , which is pretty much the only prerequisite for intelligent behavior. It doesn't _drive_ our economy, it _is_ our economy. The actors in the system are corporations and humans (and governments, unions, and a few other united organizational structures), therefore those are the things which can exhibit intelligence.

<comment><USER19> I hope you don't mind, but I'm only going to address one thing right now. If the conversation continues, I will continue to discuss more with you.

Lets start with (A). You are correct, the way I described it does not explicitly explain how it is intelligent. Lets adopt the strictest definition of intelligence which is the ability to predict.

When I refer to capitalism here, I'll be referring to capitalism implemented, not the theory. Capitalism is intelligent. It is made up of people which are intelligent. These components are at times working together, and at times working against each other. Much like your conscious mind and subconscious mind. Conflicts are resolved in the market or through the state via legislation and trials. The results of components working together and resolving their conflicts is how capitalism has decided to behave. Having behavior is not sufficient for intelligence. A virus has behavior but is not intelligent.

So does a capitalist system make predictions? One example should be sufficient to make the answer to this question yes. If I can show that a capitalist system makes predictions, then I will have proven that it is intelligent.

Lets use America for this example. One thing American Capitalism seeks is to mute the highs / lows of the inherit booms and busts in-order to increase the level of stability of the economy. The Fed watches the rates of lending / borrowing to predict bubbles and raises interest rates to slow / stop the growth of bubbles. Once it has popped, and lending/borrowing slows, the Fed then lowers interest rates to promote lending / borrowing. I know this is not new info for you. I just wanted to be thorough in my response.

So American Capitalism predicts bubbles and acts on those predictions. Thus, intelligent.

You might say the Fed isn't capitalism. Which would be true. But your brain isn't you yet it is the component which makes you intelligent. The Fed is part of America's capitalist system.

You might say that capitalism does not involve government. Which I would say, pure capitalism doesn't involve government, but the active capitalist systems we have today do.

<comment><USER27> >If I can show that a capitalist system makes predictions, then I will have proven that it is intelligent.

Your example applies perfectly well to a localized ecosystem. I can for example show that a surge in the population of rabbits on a small island 'predicts' a surge of the population of their main predator. That's the island ecosystem predicting a population bubble and then acts on those predictions. Intelligent?

That's beside the point though, because your example didn't show 'capitalism' making a prediction, it showed _the Fed_ making a prediction. The federal reserve is a functional organization, an entity with goals and intentional behavior. The Fed is a _perfect_ example of an entity that can demonstrate intelligent behavior

It is indeed 'part of America's capitalist system' \- again, you fall back on the assertion that a _system_ is intelligent if the actors in it are intelligent, the only obvious source of our disagreement. By your logic, you'd have to consider a baseball game a functional intelligence, a three-legged race a maximizing entity.

Systems of intelligences _are not automatically intelligent_. It is _possible_ for them to be so; corporations qualify, governments qualify, unions qualify. In order to have intentional behavior, an entity has to be self-coordinated; it has to be able to _decide_ to perform an action, and then perform that action. A market has no coordination, and has no decision-making power - markets are inherently decentralized in that way.

If you choose to define 'intelligence' such that a thing which cannot make decisions or choices, has no goals or intentions, and has no self-impelled behavior can qualify, then your definition of the word is fundamentally confusing to me, and I'm not really interested in trying to puzzle out what you mean by it.

<comment><USER19> Nice, you're back.

> I can for example show that a surge in the population of rabbits on a small > island 'predicts' a surge of the population of their main predator. That's > the island ecosystem predicting a population bubble and then acts on those > predictions. Intelligent?

So I am assuming you are claiming to be part of the ecosystem?

> That's beside the point though, because your example didn't show > 'capitalism' making a prediction, it showed the Fed making a prediction.

Not besides the point, it attacks a necessary part of my argument.

Anyways, you have made some good points. I'll give it some thought and get back to you.

<comment><USER27> >So I am assuming you are claiming to be part of the ecosystem?

In general, I am part of many systems (eco- and otherwise), but no; that section of reply was an argument against the idea that being able to 'predict' the future was a reasonable way to define intelligence. It doesn't really change the argument if you stick me on the island though - I behave intelligently, and that affects the behavior of the ecosystem, but that doesn't cause the ecosystem be 'intelligent'.

It's interesting to have a debate this slowly, I feel like it's unusually civil :-)

<comment><USER19> Ya, I've been enjoying it :) I was worried you hadn't based upon your previous comment. I'm sorry I haven't returned to this yet, but will soon I promise.

I think we should try to find out where we have agreement and where we begin to diverge. That should make the remainder of this discussion tighter.

<comment><USER27> I believe our divergence is somewhere under the definition of 'intelligence'. The word _is_ very ill-defined, to the point that we are reduced to describing it functionally in many cases, as with the Turing test.

>Human intelligence is the intellectual capacity of humans, which is characterized by perception, consciousness, self-awareness, and volition.

That's a very normal definition of intelligence. AI is defined (among many other way, naturally) as "the study of intelligent agents"; 'agency' is a requirement for an artificial intelligence.

Since we started with the context of 'paperclip maximizers', I've been talking about intelligence in that context - in order to be studied as an intelligence, a thing must have 'agency', the ability to intentionally act. A thing that doesn't have agency can still have behavior, and that behavior can still be studied, but the behavior is _emergent_ , not intentional - <USER2> system does not have agency unless it is capable of having goals, and of making decisions to achieve or progress toward them.

In particular, capitalism isn't 'trying to maximize capital' \- that's an effect it's (supposedly) having, but not an intentional one. It's a pretty clear emergent effect - if many of the actors in a system are trying to maximize their personal capital, then the system turning out to maximize net capital should surprise nobody. It's very equivalent to calling a diffusion chamber a 'maximizer' of entropy - a diffusion chamber _does_ maximize entropy, but by calling it a 'maximizer' (in the context of 'paperclip maximizer'), you would ascribe agency to the chamber - it's not _trying_ to maximize entropy, that's just something that it happens to _do_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I disagree with much of what was written, but I find it hard to address what seems, to me, more like a long analogy than anything else.

"Capitalism" doesn't maximize "capital", in any sense. The word "capital" generally refers either: to some asset that might be used in production, such as a piece of machinery; or structures that might render services over a time, like buildings; or to some sum which might be used in buying either of these, through financial services.

Now, "capital" wouldn't be maximized by "capitalist" firms. Why should they? Firms produce additional capital units so long as they can be sold above production cost, but they won't produce indefinitely. They are concerned with their profits, not with the amount of product. They aren't even concerned with the products' value, so long as it is above production costs. Hence, there's no incentive to inflate the capital good prices, which would be necessary to maximize the amount of money "capital".

Also, an it really be said that capitalism is an adaptive intelligence system? That, I'm not knowledgeable enough to tell. On the other hand, human interaction is unstructured enough that it seems unlikely that there's any goal to such supposed intelligence, or that it has capital-maximization as it's goal. Rather, I see a collection of different goals, each corresponding to different agents, and some of which might even be contradictory. The noisy neighbor, the ambitious monopolist, or the NIMBY all seek to maximize their private benefit, but often beyond social benefits. Hence I find it hard, whenever markets fail through the presence of either externalities, imperfect competition, or adverse incentives, that it ought nonetheless be the work of some powerful demiurge.

Yet, in so far as it puts into words an anxiety that so many feel, I can't say much else beyond that I don't believe it. The author certainly proceeds by analogy when he likens "capitalism" to an artificial intelligence whose goals themselves mean nothing to humanity at large; and mentions alienating "monuments" to capital, as if to liken it to a 20th century pharaoh, or to cruel tyrant. But since so many feel this is really the case, I have nothing else to say (other than that it's a very vivid picture). I disagree, for instance, that the majority of goods are worthless, as they ought to have some value in order to be sold. Even Marx reckoned this much, and thinking otherwise seems like relying too much in the stupidity of others (which should never be trivially admitted). That would be the case if capital were built beyond all possible utility (say, like a bridge between London and NY). And I don't think it is necessary to make analogies to speak of wealth and income distribution issues, which are real problems in themselves, and which the majority of people are already acquainted with. Rather, I think that such analogies make problems much larger than they ought to be, by giving some monstrous character. Would be it be easier to tackle inequality by conceiving it as a result of an incredibly power artificial intelligence? I don't think so (even if the system is rotten, we'd be waiting on a constructive proof of one that isn't).

</comment><comment><USER29> Nailed it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh good. The Americans are rediscovering _Das Kapital_.

Forgive the snark, but when I first heard about paperclip maximizers, I thought, "Oh, you mean like capitalism." That these two things have a likeness is the reemergence of an idea that had been buried in order to make capitalism look good.</comment>


Is Climate Change Responsible for This Season's Wildfires? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.thefactual.com/climate-change-wildfires-oregon-california <comment><AUTHOR> Re-posting as original post ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24520745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24520745)) was flagged because we accidentally posted from our newish company account. Sorry about that.</comment>