There are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with PhDs - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634 <comment><USER2> This data is pretty useless without data from other time periods.

And it seems like bashing high education is the cool thing to do nowadays. We use stories of the "I'm $200,000 in debt from my Ivy league B.A. in English and no one wants to hire me!" nature to justify that higher education is becoming irrelevant.

But I think we're all missing several pieces of the puzzle. One piece is that forget that what we're trying to optimize is happiness, and if those 13.4% of waiters are happy, then who cares if they have a BA or MA? OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years.

I do agree that higher education is broken. But higher education is broken in every single freaking country. The French spend less time in college, but they have a higher unemployment rate than us. Kenya's universities are based on entrance exams that encourages memorization and discourages critical thinking and imagination. Asia's universities are based on elite entrance exams where students to spend up to a year studying for.

Yes, higher education is broken. But so is everything else in this world.

<comment><USER3> _OK, maybe we've wasted government money on their education, but can we call it a waste just because they didn't use that BA in English to do Englishy stuff? No. They're probably a more refined person because of those four years._

Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some Proust after partying for 4 years?

If not, then we can call it a waste.

Wasting "government money" isn't a tiny drop in some gigantic abstract pool of thousand dollar bills. It's hard earned money taken by force from ordinary Americans. It's not government money, it's your money.

<comment><USER4> > Are you willing to go up to 40 middle class families and demand that each of > them pay $1000 to have a more refined waiter who vaguely remembers some > Proust after partying for 4 years?

This is a foolish comment, even beyond your arbitrary splitting up the cost of a degree between 40 "middle class families", or the insinuation that one can actually earn a degree by simply "partying for 4 years."

The value of education goes beyond landing one a job. Simply having well- educated citizens is of value to society -- especially in a representative democracy, where our level of education has a direct impact on how wisely we choose our own leaders. In fact, that education for its own sake is of great value to society is the core assumption behind public education.

Besides which, how exactly would you propose to "fix" the "problem" of well- educated people choosing overqualified jobs? With a state-controlled labor market, dictating what kind of people are allowed to work what kind of jobs?

<comment><USER3> Any particular way of bringing aggregate costs down to the individual level is arbitrary. I chose a method which illustrates the cost in simple human terms. The fact is, a $10k/year subsidy for college (note: this is roughly the subsidy for Rutgers, which I chose since I attended) is expensive. To give that subsidy to one person, a median worker must work 2500 hours.

As for earning a degree by partying for 4 years, I stand by that claim. College isn't that hard and plenty of idiots pass while learning very little. Believe me, I passed quite a few.

The fix: end subsidies for college. I don't care if you waste _your_ money on a worthless degree, I only care if you waste _mine_.

<comment><USER5> Are you saying that you consider the subsidy for your attendance at Rutgers was a waste of taxpayer's money as well? Also, I'm not sure whether you passed out idiot students who attended Rutgers by being smarter/working harder, or that you have given idiots who learned very little a passing grade in the classes you teach.

I don't necessarily disagree with you about ending subsidies, but it seems as if you are trying to have your cake and eat it. Maybe I've misunderstood your position. If they were abolished, would you expect college to get cheaper and academics to tolerate a pay cut, or students to make up the shortfall by borrowing higher sums?

<comment><USER3> _Are you saying that you consider the subsidy for your attendance at Rutgers was a waste of taxpayer's money as well?_

It probably was. It's not as clear cut as the case of the waiter, but I don't think my current work creates a benefit for the taxpayer as large as the subsidy I received. When I was still an academic, I created a larger external benefit [1], but it's far from clear that it was positive.

If subsidies were abolished, I expect college would become cheaper and more efficient, most academics would find new employment, and most marginal students would not attend college.

[1] Currently I work as a trader, and most of the benefits I provide are captured by myself and my company. None of my academic research projects have resulted in anything useful yet, though admittedly the jury is still out (people are still exploring some of the lines of inquiry I created).

<comment><USER6> What about your next job? As long as education is done at the start of one's life, we can't look at its manifested usefulness for "young" people. You can maybe make preliminary tallies at 45-50, at which point I would expect the course of their life is better defined and the contribution of various periods can start being evaluated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is horribly confusing "current job" with "lifetime earnings".

I took 2 months off last year to go skiing in Colorado with some of my friends who were ski bums. One in particular was about 26, was a web developer with a CS degree, and had been a ski bum for 3 years.

During that time he had been a janitor/house cleaner. Was that using his degree? Obvously not. Did it pay the bills and allow him to ski every single day while working in the late afternoon/evening? It sure did.

This year he moved back and is going to graduate school and consulting on the side (why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me). He is back on his "real" career after taking that time to do what he wanted to do with his life.

Honestly, I don't think it is a bad thing.

<comment><USER8> "why he cleaned toilets instead of consulting the whole time still escapes me" -- either you've never done consulting, or never cleaned a toilet.

From experience, I can tell you I rather clean a toilet. =)

But alas, cleaning toilets can't pay my mortgage. =(

<comment><USER7> Ha true. There were some perks of it, since he worked for the mountain he got a free season pass which was about $500, and when your monthly expenses are barely $500 that is signficant.

<comment><USER9> If it was anything like the menial jobs I've taken, he was also part of a fantastic culture of camaraderie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "I have long been a proponent of Charles Murray's thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning"

I'm not sure how that follows from the data. I'd be more likely to conclude that the job market doesn't support the levels of college graduates being produced.

<comment><USER11> Or that people don't get graduate degrees with the intent of maximizing their earnings potential.

I've often heard it said that the fundamental problem with economics is that it assumes people are rational and have good information. I'd say it goes deeper than that: it assumes that money is the rational thing for a person to maximize. In reality, money is something that bears some maximization, but it's hardly the primary consideration.

<comment><USER12> Economics doesn't assume everyone wants to maximize money. It assumes everyone wants to maximize _utility_ , and then uses money as a (poor) proxy for utility. It's a subtle, important difference.

<comment><USER13> Serious question: what's utility?

<comment><USER12> Wikipedia calls it "relative satisfaction." I'd call it "personal benefit or gain."

Considering that, it's clear why we'd use money as a proxy. Not a perfect one, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [citation needed]

Seriously, is there a central index of janitors somewhere listing their highest level of educational achievement from which a precise number like 5057 can be read out? Did they interview twenty janitors, find one who claimed to have a PhD, and extrapolate? Did they derive the number completely _ex anum_? Because I'm finding it difficult to believe.

<comment><USER15> I haven't read the methodology for how the bureau of labor statistics gets its data, but I'd be very surprised if it were significantly flawed. The federal government is generally extremely competent at collecting social sciences data like this. I'd actually say that it's one of the few things the government does really well.

The big thing you need to watch out for is the media and other government agencies spinning it. For example I always see MSM articles saying that 41% of Americans have tried weed, despite the fact that it's closer to 85% of Americans under age 55.[1] (And above that we don't have as good data.)

[1] [http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_ar...](http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/statistics/statistics_article1.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article, and many (not all) of the comments here, are really missing an important point: that if you don't view a bachelor's degree as vocational training, but rather as the education proper to any free person---i.e. the liberal arts ideal---then you would expect a lot of people with at least bachelor's degrees working in fields that don't, on surface, "require" them.

The idea of college (=university) students having a specialisation (a "major" area of study) is not by any means a new one, but the idea that this tightly corresponds to one's career and serves as a sort of vocational training program, that's pretty new. Schooling of that nature used to be found primarily in apprenticeships and vocational schools.

<comment><USER17> The problem many people have here is that college is heavily subsidized, and those subsidies pretty much require us to get something for our money. I would be very surprised if the government's policy was "we will lend up to $200K to people with no assets and no prospects, which they can use to purchase art." And yet when those people borrow similar sums of money to purchase, say, a BA and MA in art history, it's fine.

That's a bad policy. If the university system didn't exist, and you tried to pitch the current version to Congress, you'd be ridiculed.

<comment><USER18> Can you clarify the 'heavily subsidized' part? I don't know a whole lot about this area, but I was under the impression that relatively speaking, the US higher education system was significantly _less_ subsidized than in many comparably developed countries. And anecdotally, I'm sure we all know students and families that struggle with tuition costs. Are the subsidies you're talking about Pell grants? or tax breaks for funding education? People in this conversation make is sound like getting a full ride from public funds is the norm, but that seems really off.

<comment><USER19> Public Universities (which usually have names like "University of Florida" or "Idaho State University" are heavily subsidized by direct money from (primarily) state governments. Many "private" universities also get significant direct money from government. In addition, there are federally (and state) funded scholarship programs that give money for school directly to students, and student loans have their interest paid while the student is in school by the federal government.

I don't know how it compares to other countries, but there is a lot of government subsidization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's a ton of jobs that society deems as bad that are in fact not bad at all. "Garbage men" in certain cities, for example, make quite a nice living.

I just think that sometimes we see "Janitor" and think that it's automatically bad. Too often, we don't even scratch the surface or know the whole story.

And (honestly not joking), Good Will Hunting is a great movie.

<comment><USER21> The dig at parking attendants is off the mark, I think Parking attendant is a great job (if you angle it right and get a quiet parking lot, say, long term by the airport).

You are free to read to your hearts content, and get paid to do so.

<comment><USER22> I was an overnight security guard for 3 years at a Christian college. Honestly, it was the easiest job I've ever had because there was never any crime, the students were serious about school and very studious, and it was a dry campus. It was easy for me to get overtime, which made the pay tolerable.

The first thing I did was make a reading list. I re-read most of the Western Canon and a lot of other non-fiction books I wanted to read. The school also had a computer lab with Macs and even a few Linux boxen, and during the winter when I was snowed in I spent many nights learning PHP, Python, and MySQL. It ended up being one of the most productive _learning_ periods of my life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What percentage of those janitors earned their degrees in the US? Are many of them immigrants?

If you are calling out the US education system, the questions above have to be answered.

</comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of the Garbage Man in the Dilbert comics for some reason.

<comment><USER25> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_smartest_garbageman>

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> As someone who switched from the "low educated" level to the "higher" one (and I did that myself, not from Uni. or anything else, but just reading on the web and opening my mind), I do value a lot Higher Education.

It improves quality. Wouldn't it be better if a waiter in Tunisia speaks English well to improve the tourists experience.

The problem is that there is no university for waiters. It seems stupid, but just think twice of it. If you provide them higher language education (how they speak to customers, answer their questions) and formal practice (how they should put the food, ask for payments...). This won't take 3 year, may be only one, but would probably rise their salaries.

And so, the waiter, carpenter, bartender... salary increase. This follow up with a high purchase power, more sales, better companies, higher salaries for Engineers, doctors...

May be I'm wrong? I'm open for discussion about that.

</comment><comment><USER27> "[T]here are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.'s, other doctorates, or professional degrees."

Not clear what "professional" degrees they're referring to here, so doesn't sound like it's just Ph.D.'s. (MBAs, JDs, MFAs, MPHs?)

<comment><USER28> Professional degrees are degrees that are designed to prepare you for a specific profession. Those professions typically involve government regulation, with said regulation commonly requiring the degree in question. It's often used to indicate M.D. and J.D. degrees, although it also includes a slew of others, e.g., nursing, accounting, education.

<comment><USER27> I'm aware of what they are (and in fact have one myself), but my point was that they're distinct from Ph.D.'s (so the title is misleading), and they can span across a broad spectrum of fields.

<comment><USER28> Sorry about the misunderstanding. At a guess, I'd say they mostly just mean J.D. and M.D. degrees. Those are the ones most commonly lumped in with Ph.D.s, probably due to the amount of time you need to spend getting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> His argument is a fallacy.

A parking lot attendant or janitor does not require even a high school education. So does that mean we should stop investing in high school education too?

There are always exceptional people outside the normal parameters.

But the higher the level of education in any social group the better off the entire group will be in the long term, whatever the individual variations.

</comment><comment><USER30> "there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.'s, other doctorates, or professional degrees."

So, the titles wrong. Professional degree != Ph.D. right?

</comment><comment><USER31> I think there is a net positive effect on society of more people having decent educations and committing to learn past the compulsory levels, even if these skills aren't put to good use in a direct way with a job.

What would be their solution, you can't retroactively decide that certain people shouldn't have attended college when down the track they either can't or decide not to take up a job in their field.

</comment><comment><USER32> This argument is circular, at least with respect to the Ph.Ds. The primary field of employment for those with Ph.Ds is higher education. The deal is they are paid by universities to teach students and do research. When there is less funding for the university and less students to teach, there is also less funding for research. And less money to hire Professors.

The fact that so many with Ph.Ds are underemployed is symptomatic of a lack of funding for these institutions. Using that data to claim that it reveals that these institutions are over funded reveals a lack of understanding of the field in question.

Furthermore, the rest of the posted argument takes the data out of context. The context is one of the worst economic downturns of the last hundred years. With the highest unemployment and underemployment rates we've seen in a long time.

Of course there are tons of people with college degrees working shit jobs. We knew that already.

Finally, those who the author calls "higher education apologists" want higher education to be a general thing not simply because it leads to more productive citizens, but rather because of the value society as a whole receives when the standard of education is higher. Especially with respect to our citizen's duties toward our Democratic society.

"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." --Thomas Jefferson

</comment><comment><USER33> > my feeling that diminishing returns have set in to investments in higher > education

That's seeing people only as a black box slave-like "workforce", giving them "education" as well as food to sustain your busyness

> Now it is true that college has a consumption as well as investment > function. People often enjoy going to classes [...]

It has many other functions too, for the human beeings beiing "educated". If done well, it can even give them critical thought process, and knowledge about certain topics of their environement. In eastern europe countries, the aboundance of educated people in a beauraucratic regime which did not propose so much interesting life openings contributed to its fall.

> [...] increasingly costly and unproductive forms of special pleading by a > sector that abhors transparency and performance measures.

Just like the banking sector, the pharmaceutical sector, etc... Performance is a word people often use meaning fittness to a metrics relevant to their particular interests.

> Higher education is on the brink of big change, like it or not.

Which only means the balance of powers is changing. Care to ellaborate about why and how ? Otherwise it is just saying : specialized labour is less needed by US industry, so less people have to be trained. Ok, agreed (or not), so let's give them education instead.

</comment><comment><USER34> Higher education is useless without the job market to sustain it. Most people don't spend 50k+ on a college degree to be better "educated". They do so in anticipation of improving their lives, not making them worse. I have a BS in Mathematics and Chemistry and neither of those degrees has improved my life, only limited my jobs to those that require someone to have a degree and of those, the pay is less than most waiters/waitresses make. The more you push for everyone to attend higher education and the less jobs are created, then you have a debt ridden "educated" soceity that can't afford to pay for their student loans. Which then the government has to do something about, which means all the tax payers have to pay for. So now we're all smart and poor. Sounds like a bad plan to me.

</comment><comment><USER35> The problem is that for a lot of the jobs listed as "underemployment" the nash equilibrium is that a significant percentage of these jobs will always have bachelors degrees. If you can get a receptionist with a bachelors degree, would you hire one that is right out of high-school?

<comment><USER7> Yes, becuase the person with the bachelors degree is obviously going to leave at the first oppurtunity and be unhappy about their salary and responsiblity the entire time. Filling a position costs money so best to do it less often.

<comment><USER36> what if their bachelors is in fine art? My assistant has one of those, and I'm a lot less worried about her leaving than my support guy who has no degree but quite a lot of *NIX experience.

My point is that a degree does not necessarily impart more upwards mobility than other kinds of less formal training.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> The well-known but thoroughly ignored issue in this article: college has become all-but-a-necessity to get a decent job in the US because having only a high school diploma doesn't even guarantee to an employer that one has basic literacy or math skills.

</comment><comment><USER38> It would be more useful to know how many people with a bachelor's degree are under-employed against their will. A computer science graduate working as a janitor because he can't find a job is a problem. If after his course work he decides he wants to be a janitor, that's a different story.

What their majors were, and what college they were from would also be informative as other replies noted.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if these janitors are American-born or rather are immigrants without work authorization or adequate language skills.

<comment><USER40> Me too. I know a lot of people with degrees in Law, Linguistics, Literature (in their respective languages) and so on who moved to the US and now have regular jobs because their degrees lose any meaning when changing the country.

You go to college to have options later, not to pursue a career, you know little about at the age of 18, due to some misguided sense of loyalty to the taxpayer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Doesn't that 5,057 include "other professional degrees"? Further, are these only from accredited schools? Both could greatly reduce the effect of this particular statistic. That said, it is always disheartening to be reminded of the poor folks who likely shelled out tons of money only to find there were no jobs on the other end.

</comment><comment><USER42> This analysis would be much more useful if (a) lifetime earnings were factored in as a data point, and (b) schools were reported separately (a PhD from MIT is a lot different from one from University of Phoenix, but the referenced study seems to treat them as equal).

</comment><comment><USER43> This is surprising but the study quoted says it explicitly:

* In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same...

* Some marginal expansions of schooling produce gains that are well below average returns, in general agreement with the analysis of Charles Murray

</comment><comment><USER44> I agree that higher education is on the brink of major change, but the author presents that data in a vacuum.

How about:

\- What is the historical data set for higher-ed graduates aggregate? During recession?

\- What fields of study are represented here? I would bet the data skews hard to BAs vs. BS.

</comment><comment><USER45> Another aspect we have to consider is title inflation. It's no problem nowadays to buy a BA, MA or even doctoral degrees - it dont know how and if those fake degrees have been counted in the statistics.

</comment><comment><USER46> Are these all graduates of US colleges? I can't find confirmation either way, but it's worth keeping in mind that college degrees from many countries are not comparable to US.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'd love to see this broken down by major, GPA, toughness-of-curriculum and prestige-of-university. Assuming the claim isn't extrapolated from a single janitor.

Not all degrees are equal.

</comment><comment><USER48> America has better <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility> then rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER49> A parking lot attendant is more likely to have a college degree than an electrician? As if I needed more cynicism about my life.

<comment><USER14> Makes sense. Electrician is a skilled job which requires a lot of training. It's not the kind of thing you just fall into as a temporary stopgap when you can't get real work with your B.A. in Medieval Basket-weaving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wow, being a janitor sure has high education requirements in the US!

</comment><comment><USER51> Please present proof of future employment with your application.</comment>


Bailing out of the mainframe industry (1984) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/05/business/bailing-out-of-the-mainframe-industry.html <comment><USER7> This sounds like a classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma. The ascendance of the personal computer in the 1980s upset many large companies. I was surprised how old some of them were:

1879 - <USER2>

1886 - <USER3>

1906 - <USER4>

1910 - <USER5>

1911 - <USER6>

<comment><USER8> Not mainframes I know, but I saw this happening to Prime Computer back in the early 90s. We had a Prime at Wolverhampton Poly (UK) when I was a student, and my first job was at a Forestry Commission Research Station down in Surrey and they had a Prime as well. I used to come in early to change the 1/2" backup tape spools.

That company did everything they could to stay relevant. I went on a training course on their new x86 Unix boxes, but we ended up buying from SUN. The late 80s/90s saw a lot of odd computing architectures and ideosyncratic systems. I worked on a Pick system once, with a dictionary based file system. PCs and Unix paved over everything between them by the end of the 90s though. Sorry, rambling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> And now we're back to building stuff from a fixed set of blessed components from a couple of giant vendors :)

<comment><USER10> Cloud computing with the browser as thin terminal, and around the circle they go.

The irony is getting one of those rich clients for microservices hosted on IBM and Unisys mainframes, written in Cobol, NEWP, RPG.

<comment><USER11> The "wheel of reincarnation" is a thing in multiple sub-fields of computing: where there are two approaches to an architectural solution, an arms race between competing models often develops. (In the 1960s-2000s in computer graphics it was a competition between dedicated GPU hardware -- e.g. Evans and Sutherland, Silicon Graphics -- and throw lots of CPUs at the problem and solve it in code. _That_ race was ultimately run by the masses of GPUs thanks to Moore's Law, but for a while there was a competing model where commodity CPUs and software could undercut on price. Similarly: departmental minicomputers, corporate-wide mainframe, and feral PCs roaming the desktop is a similar story of competing models.)</comment></comment></comment>


Dear RadioShack, This Is Why We Adored You. Love, WIRED - X-combinator http://www.wired.com/2015/02/dear-radioshack-adored-love-wired/

<comment> X-combinator A Radio Shack employee set me on my path in life.

I remember this specifically because at 10 years old it was soooo cool!!... at the time. My uncle had given me this old AM/FM radio. He said it had a bad volume control on it and was not putting out the sound that he wanted. It still tuned in stations, but with the volume cranked you had to hold the radio next to your ear to hear what was on the station. There was a Radio Shack in town. It was next to the grocery store in this strip mall (this facility is no longer in existence). Even though I was 10, while getting groceries she let me wander into the Radio Shack where I used to look at all the gadgets they had on display. It was her way of knowing where to find me when she was ready to leave. The attendants in the store usually had no problem with me wandering around because I generally kept my hands to myself and just gawked at the gadgets. One day I brought the old radio into the store with me and asked the attendant if he knew of a trick to how to fix it. The guy was an older gentleman. Older than my Mom if that is any measure. He smiled and looked at the radio briefly. He asked if it was my radio and I told him how it was given to me. He then asked where my Mom was. Timing was such that my Mom just walked in the store to fetch me. My Mom apologized for me interrupting him with the old radio, but he said that was not any problem. He wanted to help me fix the volume control on the radio. While we stood there, he broke out a small screwdriver and opened the case. After some inspection he pointed out to me how the volume control rheostat (potentiometer) was worn out and what it would take to fix it. He said he could order a replacement part, but that I would need to learn how to do some minor soldering to replace it. I had seen my Grandfather do soldering, and I knew what that was enough to say that I was willing to try. In my mind, the worst that could happen was the radio would end up still useless. A few weeks later, he had the new part in for me. I took it home, and with a little help from my Grandfather we had the new volume control soldered into the radio circuit board. My first personal AM/FM radio. That radio went with me everywhere for years. I sometimes wonder how many pounds of batteries I went through with that thing. For years afterward, when I was in town I would hang out at the Radio Shack and learn about the different electronics parts and bits that they had on the walls. Along the way I learned about how electricity works and what problems can occur with electrical devices. I also learned about logic controls and programming, and eventually I learned about computers. All in that tiny little store that hired geeks out of necessity before IT was a buzzword. That Radio Shack was an informal school in my life. I miss that old store. Good people willing to help others with their gadgets. So long Radio Shack. Thanks for the kick start to my interests that have brought me to my career. The first store I can recall that validated my geekiness as a good thing.

             https://disqus.com/by/allansitte/</comment>


Source code escrow - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of a cheap web based source code escrow service? We currently pay an exorbitant amount and I seem to remember a startup being mentioned here that does exactly this, but no amount of searchyc'ing has helped. <comment><USER2> In which part of the world are you based? i may be able to help. email me for more firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> What is a "source code escrow service" exactly?

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does instagress get permission - <AUTHOR> Instagram requires users to have a proper business case in order to use their API to like/follow people.  Instagram says you shouldn't use this to automate likes and follows.  However, instagress seems to sell automated likes and follows - how does this happen? Is instagress secretly a facebook company? <comment><USER2> Very unlikely that it's a facebook company, the money they're making is nothing at the scale of facebook. It's more likely they don't have access to the official API, they've just reverse engineered the instagram iphone/android/web app and are using that to like/follow people.</comment>


London Taxi Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://graphics.wsj.com/london-taxi-challenge/

<comment><USER2> "The driver wasn't familiar with the shard" bloody hell, you can see it from most of London (in fact, it is the tallest building in Europe).

If I wanted to do that journey in a hurry, that is a terrible route, you could probably cycle the route the other taxi's took more quickly.

Disclaimer: I walk the same journey mentioned every day, working on off fleet street and living in Bermondsey.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't often use taxis and I've never used Uber so I'm not specifically cheering for one side or the other. I know this isn't presented as an exhaustive study but basing the "results" on a single trip by each service doesn't prove much.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another instance of "anecdata."</comment>


A chef with cancer fights to save his tongue - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_max?mbid=msnbc <comment><USER2> Another good article about Grant Achatz and Alinea:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.asp...](http://www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.aspx?id=18046)

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this a hacker news?

I'm not trying to flame here, I think there should be a common theme to posts. If HN turns into another "everything and a kitchen skink news" web site it will lose all of its appeal.

<comment><USER4> <http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html>

>The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

>It may be easier to say what that doesn't include. It doesn't include most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. It doesn't include videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. Basically, if they'd cover it on TV news, it's off-topic.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Working in Canada? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am in the process of shutting down my failed startup in India and am thinking of applying for developer jobs (preferably in Rails) in Canada. I do not have a Visa and was wondering if Canadian startups/ product development companies are open to sponsoring visas for the right candidate. I have a fair bit of development experience and come from a really good college here.
I read through the immigration websites and did not find anything that stood out to be such a massive hurdle. Now, given the realities of the US H1B visa lottery, doing something similar in the US is practically impossible right now.
So people who have gone through this, can you give me some idea of how feasible this is? Should I bother applying at all or is it too impractical for a company to go through the visa hassle? Anything else that I should know/ consider before I start applying for jobs in Canada?
Thanks a ton for your time. <comment><USER2> In my experience, most Canadian businesses won't consider you without the correct visa. I haven't really heard of too many companies sponsoring someone.

Have you considered doing some contract work through oDesk or similar? If you establish some contacts with American / Canadian companies and prove your value, they may be more inclined to help you come over.

</comment><comment><USER3> There you go: Start-up visa

[http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start- up/ind...](http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start-up/index.asp)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. I don't want to start a company there, at least not yet. I want to work for someone there; something along the lines of a temporary worker ([http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/work/apply- who.asp](http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/work/apply-who.asp)) or even a federal skilled worker([http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/index.asp](http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/skilled/index.asp)). The processing time for an FSW is about 19 months, too long for a typical employer to wait.</comment></comment>


The Engineer/Manager pendulum (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/ <comment><USER2> Engineering Manager (or Director/VP) is about building a "machine that builds product". Engineer (or Architect/CTO) is about "building the product". Switching between the two as described in the article is perfectly OK and a good career path - but if you really want to be good at one you'll have to give up the other. Management (or building the machine that builds the product) is a skill that requires a lot of experimentation, studying, mistakes - just like any new programming language or stack. If you want to become good at it, you'll need to focus on it full-time for several years.

<comment><USER3> You would think you could become good at eng. mgmt., but reality says otherwise.

Most of the VP Eng's I've met are washed-up ex-engineers with no mgmt. ability either. They're just cogs in a machine or the apex of an org chart.

And why do we expect them to be good at something they never studied? Like doctors, they can bury their mistakes (ie. fire malcontents.)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How did you manage to teach your spouse/partner/half Programming? - <AUTHOR> How do you get her/him interested?
I've been trying for years to get my girlfriend interested in programming, because she is a logical person and I am absolutely convinced she would enjoy commanding the computer billions of times a sec (after all she does enjoy doing that to me, so... haha). But so far no success. :(
Please share a story and some advice. <comment><USER3> Why try to get her into it? If she wanted to get into it she would have. It sounds like you are trying to force her into something that she isn't interested in. My fiancee is an incredibly intelligent person who I believe would be an amazing programmer, but her passion is history. I wouldn't all of a sudden try to "get her into" programming. Your passions do not have to be her passions.

<comment><USER4> I believe the question was poised to people who's spouses/partners wanted to learn programming so I'm not sure why this reply even exists except to make people feel bad.

<comment><USER3> I didn't say it to make anyone feel bad. It was just the opposite point of what the OP had asked. Beside the fact, the question is clearly not directed in the assumption that their spouse wants to learn programming. It was directed that OP thinks they would like it so they tried to get them into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He liked 3D modelling and creating games, so I taught him C# coding in unity so that he could do things like trigger animations, light flickering, play sounds, things like that.

You can code in Javascript or C# in unity, but I chose to teach C# because the Intellisense/Code Completion in the editor is better.

Also having short concrete goals sped up the effort -> reward cycle, with thing he actually wanted to do in his games

</comment><comment><USER6> I got a tester/analyst at work interested in programming and she is now learning Python. I showed how how to set up test cases, parse files, connect to the DB, etc to make her job easier. So I think if you can show someone how it would make their regular job easier, it is more likely to take hold.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried a variation of the same approach - thought my girlfriend how to use MS Excel formulas and she became better than I am at it in no time, because she managed to apply it in her job. But how to get her to code still eludes me...

<comment><USER7> Excel is programming. Congratulations!

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I tried to teach an ex how to use Excel effectively. I made a few spreadsheets to help her with grading and such. But it never stuck (she is mathphobic).

My current girlfriend already understands Excel pretty well, I've helped her use some more advanced features from it for work tasks. I've asked if she wanted to learn how to program, she said no. I'm a nerd, programming and math are a too large percentage of my thoughts most days so she hears me talking about it anyways. She's picked up on some things, but she'll probably never be a programmer (which is fine, she's better off in her current career from a personal-satisfaction perspective).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Excel was what I thought would be the foothold. I imagined it will be like a gateway grug, haha. She picked it so quick. But nothing past that, unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My wife had completed a computer science degree before we ever met - <USER2> she changed career entirely and is now a (medical) doctor.

I don't try to teach her anything, nor have I tried to teach any previous partner. If people are interested they'll ask, if not I thinking trying to force knowledge upon them would be misplaced and unwelcome.

Reading the replies here I can see that it doesn't seem to end well most of the time. People are different, have different interests, and different tastes.

(Now I wonder what partners have tried to teach you, that you've rejected?)

</comment><comment><USER10> My husband is also very smart and logical, likes math, builds computers for gaming, but he has absolutely no interest in programming at all. We've been together for 6 years, I've brought it up a few times, showed him some things, but he's like "Okay, that's nice. Sorry, just not my thing" And that's fine.

He's a social worker who runs a group home for intellectually disabled adults, and he's been in this career for 15 years now, and he loves it. There's absolutely no reason for him to get into programming, and he's had enough opportunities over the years that if he were drawn to it he would have already done it.

He's certainly supportive of my work, he brags to his friends about cool things I've done, he knows enough to talk about what I do, but as far as actually doing it himself, he just doesn't care. I think you need to be okay with your girlfriend not being a programmer. I mean, do you feel a drive to pick up _her_ career as a hobby? :-p

</comment><comment><USER11> First, make it fun. Teach through examples and explain stuff later. As interest grows, the desire to figure out the "why" also increases.

For most people, "fun" is building something you can play with. Web development falls nicely into this category - even now I'd still recommend learning Ruby and then Ruby on Rails for a first language/framework. Ruby is a beautiful language and RoR lets a beginner make working prototypes without overwhelming them.

Others might enjoy parsing large sets of data, making games, or other things. Figure out what they enjoy and the rest will follow.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does she play video games? Download a copy of Human Resource Machine and have her play it. It's basically assembly programming on a Harvard Architecture computer with Single Accumulator.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I tryed...but...I failed :-)

<comment><USER14> I catched your joke :)</comment></comment>


Stop building stuff on sand – The Internet's DNS and Linux - <AUTHOR> http://codin.ro/stop-building-stuff-on-sand-the-internet-linux/ <comment><USER2> first of all DNS has stood up pretty fantastically to the massive increase of scope since its initial conception. So, congratulations and thanks to PVM and Paul Vixie and all the other countless people who contributed.

So, you're right to point fingers at all the companies with multi-billion dollar caps built on top of BGP, and DNS, and all the clearly inadequate infrastructure.

I think you're falling short by suggesting that companies should have technical specialists.

Ok so we admit that DNS is inadequate for the task. People are dumping a whole lot of policy in there that doesn't make sense. DNS security seems to continue to have limited uptake. Despite any cast the DNS infrastructure is both vulnerable to attack and more importantly able to be used as a amplifier for other attacks.

So sure, insufficient investment by either neutral research funders or commercial entities. But can you imagine what would happen if we tried to get together interested parties and develop a replacement? Even if the end product were technically flawless can you imagine the difficulties in spurring adoption? PVM wrote some RFCs and said 'what do you guys think', and the 50 people around the table said 'seems ok', and some people wrote some code, and everyone else who trusted them installed it because it was better than ftp-ing host.txt files and merging them by hand every month.

can you imagine that happening today? I don't disagree with what you've said, and I'm fundamentally frustrated by this ossification myself. I can't see any answers.

<comment><USER3> A "technically perfect" solution in this context would have to include a practical migration path.

<comment><USER2> i guess i don't know how to engineer for that without some sort of overwhelming economic incentive. just curious, how would you rate the effort spent trying to make the v6 transition painless. clearly it wasn't perfect, but they tried pretty hard.

<comment><USER3> Various things can make migration easier. Backwards compatibility being a big one, particularly if it can be phased out gradually by either party.

I don't know enough about IPv6 migration to comment there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a lot of bitching and complaining in this post. Unfortunately, I seem to have missed the part where the author offered up his solution and explained how he was getting started on it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm stating the issue first, solutions come afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > How about stopping for a bit and challenging the IESG (Internet Engineering > Steering Group) and IETF(Internet Engineering Task Force) to actually assess > the situation at hand, and decide upon actual improvements, creating proper > documentation and generally creating a proper professional environment > regarding the technology so that you don't have to open 40 tabs and read > documentation that you may or may not need. Making the information more > easily accessible and readable means more people will actually go through it > and that means more security.

I agree with the author, RFCs are awful to work with. For example, DHCP (because I'm familiar with it). So let's look at the RFC [0], which "Obsoletes: 1541" and is "Updated by: 3396, 4361, 5494, 6842". It turns out, there's about 60 (!) RFCs relevant for DHCP [1], and probably more references in those. What the hell.

An example of reference overload and horribleness through backwards compatibility is the second field in a DHCP header, `htype` or hardware type requires you to look at RFC 1700. It has 230 pages, and some of the hardware types are: Ethernet, Experimental Ethernet, Amateur Radio AX.25, Proteon ProNET Token Ring, etc. Almost all but Ethernet are completely useless today.

Except, oh shit, RFC 1700 is obsoleted by RFC 3232. Which says everything has been moved into a database, but _HAS NO LINK_ to where you might find that database. Now, in this database there are values which require two bytes, but `htype` is only a byte long! Brilliant.

One solution would be to mandate passed RFCs have behavioural tests. In effect, you'd be encoding the standards in a way that computers can understand, and not having the potential error of `human -> computer (txt/html) -> human -> computer (programming)` conversion.

\---

[0] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2131](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2131) [1] [http://www.zytrax.com/books/dhcp/apc/](http://www.zytrax.com/books/dhcp/apc/)</comment>


Self-Enforcing Protocols - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/self-enforcing.html <comment><USER2> _Here's a self-enforcing protocol for determining property tax: the homeowner decides the value of the property and calculates the resultant tax, and the government can either accept the tax or buy the home for that price. Sounds unrealistic, but the Greek government implemented exactly that system for the taxation of antiquities. It was the easiest way to motivate people to accurately report the value of antiquities._

I had an idea a while ago about stopping domain name squatters by using a similar protocol to price and tax domain names. You'd be required to report the "fair value" of each domain you owned. All your domains (maybe there could be exceptions for trademarks) would be implicitly for sale at that fair price. To keep the reported price from being too high, you'd have to pay some fraction of that price as a yearly domain name tax. That way, if anyone has a better use for your domain than you do, they can just buy it from you. Of course, if you build a brand and a trademark, you should have some protection from competitors just buying your domain. Maybe only other similar trademark holders could compete for your domain (eg, Apple Computers and Apple Music could fight it out to see who gets more value out of apple.com).

<comment><USER3> I think this really perverts the concept of private property, though. In order to thwart domain squatters, you'd eliminate property rights and create a fluid pool of domain names that could be forcibly purchased by anyone else at any time. Domains would become like oiled pool balls so slick and slippery that no one would be able to keep ahold of them long enough to do anything useful with them. That is, without massively overpaying taxes on them to insure they couldn't be taken at any time.

I think one of the most important things about private property is not necessarily that you can demand its fair value when you sell it, but rather that you alone can decide whether it is for sale in the first place.

From my way of thinking, domain squatting certainly isn't a dignified way to make a living or something to be proud of, and it's certainly a pain in the ass to everyone else, but I think it certainly is within the rights of those who choose to do it. Who cares if someone has a better use for a domain name? If you bought it, it's yours whether anyone else like it or not.

You might argue that squatting is not within the rights of those who do it — according to ICANN regulations — but then I would say that there's already process in place to resolve those sort of disagreements. Whether there are issues with that process is another question. That process may be imperfect, but I think what you are proposing introduces many more problems than it solves.

<comment><USER2> Nonsense. Private property already has all kinds of restrictions. Try this: First, buy prime commercial real estate in a bustling pedestrian downtown area. Second, make sure to leave it abandoned, ugly, in a state of general decay, and plastered with ads just to make sure you make a little money off it it. (Assume no property taxes.) Third, watch the city council ordinance you into fixing up the place or leaving it altogether (under threat of fines).

The whole point of community rules on private property is that an ugly or rundown property will drive down the value of the properties around it. The same happens with domain names. The reason we have startups with ridiculous names like Meebo, Loopt, Reddit and Xobni are because all the reasonable names are taken by squatters who just plaster the domain with ads and make a tidy profit while they wait for a sucker to hand them over thousands of dollars.

I agree that people legitimately doing business on the web shouldn't face a constant, ominous threat of seizure. At the same time though, the web could use some communal standards to make the community better for everyone.

<comment><USER3> Your argument is that because there are already restrictions on private property, that there should therefore be more. I respectfully but completely disagree.

I also don't think your analogy is very applicable, since domain names are just floating in the ether, not sitting in physical proximity of one another. Ads plastered on one will not drive down the values of the others — the complete opposite, in fact. Furthermore, no one would buy prime commercial real estate, do nothing with it, and then be able to cover their costs with some ads on it — whoever bought it would go bankrupt. Ignoring all that, however, I really feel that if someone wanted to do so, the city council should not be able to levy fines on them for letting their property go into disrepair. Would I want to live next to such a property? No, definitely not. But it's their property and I respect their rights to do as they wish with it. I don't feel the ends justify the means in this case.

<comment><USER2> No, my argument is that your purist notion of private property doesn't match reality and isn't a good idea anyway.

You're right that no one would buy prime commercial real estate and do nothing with it. That's because prime commercial real estate is expensive. But the prime real estate of the web wasn't expensive. In fact, all of it sold for just a few bucks back in the 1990s.

Imagine that there was a time when the prime commercial real estate of today was cheap and squattable in perpetuity. Imagine that a handful of people back in the 1600s "claimed" the majority of land in the US simply by having seen it (or, even more aptly in this comparison, by having thought of it). Imagine that all this land is their "property", regardless of whether they live on it, work on it, improve it, or even care about it. Under such a system, the descendants of these handful of people would today be collecting rent from everyone in the country, whether on prime commercial real estate or otherwise. Rather than a nation of rugged individuals (think Homestead Act), it'd be a nation of landed gentry (think British aristocracy).

When it comes absentee landlords, the notion of "property" is rather flimsy. What right does an absentee landlord have to an abandoned property? The only thing that maintains an absentee landlord as the "owner" of a property is the government's willingness to use force against anyone who claims otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can you not like an article that involves cake, pirates, and property taxes?

One thing that I wonder is how is a self reinforcing transaction affected when the third parties that used to mediate it are shut out. For example, certificate authority companies that are no longer needed.

Furthermore, the "all hands" in the room as opposed to secret ballot voting - while on the surface it is self reinforcing from a social perspective it wouldn't really work (i.e. the coercion he mentioned and also the lemming effect where someone votes with their crowd delaying raising their hand just enough to see what the consensus is).

Finally, the collusion and breakage of a self-reinforcing system like the pirate example shows that a self-reinforcing protocol is situationally dependent. What are the chances that at least one pirate will collude with the captain? (I bet the chance is quite high considering the nature of pirates) As opposed to the property tax example which seems to be a very good use of such a protocol.

<comment><USER5> Instead of giving the amount to the captain, they could throw it away to the sea. Nobody would cheat then.

In real life situations, you may want to replace the _sea_ by the government or some kind of common fund in the domain.

<comment><USER6> > Nobody would cheat then.

Depends. Perhaps somebody would try to bully (i.e. play a game of chicken <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)>): "Either you lower your share in my favour, or I will claim too much and you get nothing."

<comment><USER7> It wouldn't work if it was explicitly known. The others could just as easily decide to cut him out of the distribution entirely.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Or if the victim could commit to not yielding to threats like this beforehand. Being able to commit oneself is of huge importance in games like chicken (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game)>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Cut-and-choose is known as the "pie rule" in the abstract gaming world.

For games with a clear first move advantage the pie rule is sometimes applied to balance the game. The first player moves, and the second player then has a choice of continuing the game or switching sides. It is therefore in the best interests of the first player to choose a fair move.

Naturally, this only works if the first move possibilities include moves that range from good to bad.

Still, it's a nice example of a meta rule that can be applied to most games.

<comment><USER9> It's often cited in political philosophy as an example of a fair procedure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the comments: [http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/self- enforcing...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/self- enforcing.html#c387837)

someone brings up the situation where there is only one item (Grandma's antique mirror) and how you can use the shotgun clause to determine who gets the item.

I'm reminded of the chapter (70) in Cryptonomicon where they were dividing the assets of an estate. All of the children got to rank items on 2 scales, emotional attachment and dollar value. The choices on both axes were scaled to between 0 and 1. Then they were going to use software to determine an equal split on both scales amongst all recipients.

<comment><USER11> > _The choices on both axes were scaled to between 0 and 1._

 _That_ I don't remember, but I do remember that they had sex on one of the furniture items in question :)

<comment><USER10> different chapter (41) and it was Tom Howard, not Randy who had sex on a Gomer Bolstrood dresser.

(The reason I can quote chapters is that I have an OCR'ed scan of the book that I found on the internet. a quick search on the word 'stockings' found the right chapter.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> _Here's a self-enforcing protocol for determining property tax: the homeowner decides the value of the property and calculates the resultant tax, and the government can either accept the tax or buy the home for that price. Sounds unrealistic, but the Greek government implemented exactly that system for the taxation of antiquities. It was the easiest way to motivate people to accurately report the value of antiquities._

Yeah, it does sound unrealistic. What if the homeowner truthfully and in good faith reports an accurate value for their home, and the government decides to purchase it anyways? I would not like the government to have the ability to instantly render me homeless.

<comment><USER12> _What if the homeowner truthfully and in good faith reports an accurate value for their home, and the government decides to purchase it anyways?_

That assumes that the government can't already do this. They most certainly can. Even better, they can do stupid things like build High-tension powerlines the next lot over, rezone your lot into industrial, etc, etc.

This doesn't really give the government any more power, but it removes a lot of red tape, plus it ensures you get fair market for your home.

Assuming you over-report the value, you'd be making a profit on the sale - enough that moving wouldn't be much of a issue for you.

It's actually quite brilliant as it has the effect of raising taxes! If my home is market valued at $500K, I'd probably suggest I pay taxes on $550K, just so that I'd have that extra $50K in pocket if I'm inconvieneced.

<comment><USER3> Sure, the government can already do this, but certainly not so easily. Things like building high-tension powerlines or rezoning require many steps involving proposals, reviews, environmental impact studies, community input, etc. before final approval. There's also eminent domain, which I didn't mention, but again even that requires lots of review, justification, general consensus, and approval.

There is definitely a difference between those things and the government being able to arbitrarily seize your property with no justification at all, other than that you've arguably undervalued it, regardless of whether they pay you what you valued it at.

So, while this may not really give the government power that it doesn't already have per se, what it's doing is removing a ton of barriers.

 _Assuming you over-report the value, you'd be making a profit on the sale - enough that moving wouldn't be much of a issue for you._

This is assuming that all you care about is money. What if you don't want to give up your home regardless of how much they pay you for it? There are some things people are not willing to sell for any price. And being forced to relocate would be far more than an inconvenience to some people. In these cases, how much should you be forced to overvalue your home by as insurance that the government won't arbitrarily seize it if you get on someone's bad side? 25%? 50%? 200%?

<comment><USER12> Again, this doesn't give the government any more power than it already has. If they want your home, they will seize it.

Arguing that the government needs to jump through hoops is some sort of defence to you isn't relevant. They can and do jump through those hoops all the time, and home-owners are left with assessed values that certainly don't reflect the value of the home _to them_.

In the Greek system, the home-owner can arbitrarily decide what their home means to them, by assigning a value to it themselves. I'm not sure how you take this to mean that the government will suddenly decide to buy up undervalued homes throughout the city. That doesn't make any sense. The government is not a real estate firm, and there is no benefit to them or the taxpayers to saddle themselves with property instead of taking a short of a few hundred dollars, which they will more than make up from people who _do_ value their homes. They'll continue to act as they always have, Rezoning and developing as they see fit. In this case however, people will be offered fair value for their homes - fair, because they've priced the house themselves.

So to answer you question, if your house is truly worth so much to you that you would be crushed if the government decided to build a highway where you live, yes, you do price it a 200% (and pay the taxes as such). The Greek system gives you this choice. Under current North American systems, you'll get the assessed value and be told to bugger off. If you're really lucky this will happen during a recession when your assessed value is lower and most construction projects occur. If you're really, really lucky they'll build something next to your lot, force you to take them to court, then offer to settle at the _new, post development_ assessed price.

The Greek system wins in my mind in all cases where a government would look to seize property from an owner.

<comment><USER13> _Arguing that the government needs to jump through hoops is some sort of defence to you isn't relevant. They can and do jump through those hoops all the time, and home-owners are left with assessed values that certainly don't reflect the value of the home to them._

Of course it's relevant. The easier it is for the government to snap up any property it feels like on a whim, the more frequently this will happen. The fact that it is sometimes useful and necessary for the government to exercise eminent domain doesn't mean there shouldn't be restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love to hear an idea for how this could be used in an online gaming situation.

1\. Imagine a simple turn based rpg combat system where each side rolls a hit die and the other side a block die and then they compare. given this premise, what needs to be modified to prevent cheating?

2\. Once 1 is solved, how much does a fps situation where network lag effects player's perception of each others location complicate the procedure?

<comment><USER15> You might want to check out Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier. It explains how to dice as well as cards over a network without being able to cheat. It also goes into many other areas in great detail.

<comment><USER14> I just checked the book using Amazon's "look inside" feature. It appears that his example is how to use cryptography to hide what cards you have from the other player until it is time to reveal them. I am more interested in how to apply the ideas from this article to involve an open, self enforcing protocol rather than data hiding.

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_flipping>

See the section "Coin flipping in telecommunications" for a cryptographic scheme for verifiable coin flipping across the internet. This is a specific example from the category of commitment schemes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone remember the protocols for 3+ people dividing the cake? I cant find the article I saw.

Edit: Still can't find the article, but wikipedia mentions the relevant research papers. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_cutting>

<comment><USER18> IIRC the protocol for a three-way split is: One party gradually moves the knife, pointing downward and poised to slice, over the surface of the cake, until either of the other two says "cut". The person who calls "cut" gets that slice. The remainder of the cake is divided according to the cut-and-choose protocol.

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't the two people not cutting wait 'til the knife was in the middle, and then try to yell 'cut!' as fast as they could? First person to yell "cut" would get half of the cake, and the other two would get a quarter apiece...

<comment><USER20> All parties can say cut, including the cutter. If he calls it, he gets the part behind the knife, just like any of the others.

In the above scenario, the cutter has an incentive to yell cut as soon as the knife passes the 1/3 point, then each of the remaining people has an incentive to yell cut when it's passed half of the remainder (or 1/3 of the total).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "an open show of hands in a room -- one that everyone in the room can count for himself -- is self-enforcing"

This is his second example (where you can complain to someone else if it's unfair) which he just got done saying _wasn't_ self-enforcing. Sure I can count for myself, but if the official number is not my own, I need a third party.

<comment><USER22> Plus you can vote for more than one candidate. This is a _good_ thing, I think -- approval voting is a very well-behaved voting system -- but perhaps not what people were trying to do.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _Self-enforcing protocols are safer than other types because participants don't gain an advantage from cheating._

 _Barter is a self-enforcing protocol: nobody needs to facilitate the transaction or resolve disputes. It just works._

Except when bartering, participants _do_ gain an advantage from cheating.

<comment><USER24> And it's easy to cheat in bartering -- just don't tell the other party that your goods have some hidden flaw.

If I barter you my old laptop that crashes when you leave it on more than an hour, you're going to be mad later when you find out I didn't tell you, and you'll have to appeal to a third party for justice if I'm bigger or stronger than you.

<comment><USER7> Bigger or stronger won't stop a bullet. Anyone who cheats in a way that seriously damages the other, in a world that has guns in it, is a f*cking idiot.

EDIT: This is known as "deterrence" if the potential malefactor is fairly bright and "evolution in action" if not.</comment></comment></comment>


AT&T is launching the US' first 5G mobile network this Friday - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/att-launching-us-first-5g-mobile-network-2018-12 <comment><USER2> Meanwhile the healthrisks are being overlooked:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUa_XbgZgq8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUa_XbgZgq8)

[https://www.projectcensored.org/4-how-big-wireless- convinced...](https://www.projectcensored.org/4-how-big-wireless-convinced-us- cell-phones-and-wi-fi-are-safe/)

[https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/2/15/17008482/ce...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/2/15/17008482/cellphones-cancer-miscarriage-health)

<comment><USER3> I did not watch the video, but those last two links reference the same Kaiser Permanente study which is thoroughly rebutted here: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40218/do- wifi-a...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40218/do-wifi-and- cellphones-increase-the-risk-of-miscarriage)

The main thrust of it is that the particular study the media twisted into "cell phones cause miscarriages" looked at radiation only in the 40–1000Hz range which has nothing to do with WiFi or cell phones. Furthermore, the study itself made no claims at all of a physical mechanism causing the effect that was observed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious if anyone in the ATT orbit cares to weigh in on what the employees think about this.

Example: ATT got iPhone exclusivity, an iPhone launch was treated like a sort of 'dangerous Christmas' that was high risk if things went wrong (stock problems) but high rewards if things went right (iPhone was exclusive to ATT).

</comment><comment><USER5> As expected, even if speeds are high, the data is still incredibly expensive. $70 for 15GB... why care about super fast speeds if you can barely use them.</comment>


HN Parents Google Group - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/hn-parents Inspired by the Ask HN thread "How does having a baby change your life".  User grandalf brought up the idea of having a Google Group for parents on HN, so I pulled the trigger. <comment><USER2> I'm a father of three but I have no desire to join a parenting discussion group. I will pass on all my worldly wisdom here:

      * A thin coat of diaper ointment works better than a thick coat.
      * Breast feeding and early potty training combined will save you hundreds of dollars.
      * Never force pants onto a fussy, kicking child. Have them kick into the pant leg.
      * Never buy onesies or pants with inner-leg snaps - unless you like spending forever re-snapping them after each diaper change.
      * Lay out the supplies for diaper changes before removing the diaper. (Think of racing pit crews)
      * If your baby pees while changing a diaper, don't freak out. Just put your hand over it to block the stream. (and wash your hands afterward)
      * Placing scotch tape over the speakers of noisy electronic toys will save your sanity.
      * Most of the advice you hear will work for everyone else's kids, but not yours.

<comment><USER3> Curating HN content regarding parenting would be a worthwhile effort because of posts like this. I've been pleasantly surprised with HN's willingness to share thoughts on the subject. Here is a good start: [http://www.google.com/search?q=parenting%20site:news.ycombin...](http://www.google.com/search?q=parenting%20site:news.ycombinator.com&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a second there, I thought this was a Google Group for parents whose kids are or have participated in Y Combinator (replaced HN with YC in my head). That would be an interesting group.

<comment><USER5> I had a similar thought: "woah a support group for people whose kids we corrupted!". So I clicked expecting to see posts like:

 _Hi I'm Gary, my son reads HN. On day my son mentioned he wanted to start a business. I was skeptical, but proud. I mean he's young, why not start a business -- it's the American Dream right? So I asked him about it a bit, and he started talking some website mumbo-jumbo... you know widget scripts and railmarks and all that. It was also the first time I heard the term "Hacker News". Now I know (_ wipes eye _) it was a turning point. If only I could go back (_ sob _)._

 _Anyway, he goes off to SF to do his biz thing. He worked alot, but times are tough, and I was just happy to know he was independent. So we didn't talk much, but when we did it was tech stuff I didn't understand, or HN. He would babble incessantly about startup this, or founder that. Then one day he mentions money, and that he is selling his company. He wants me to come out and meet some people, and pay off my mortgage._

 _At this point, I felt I was losing my son. I mean, he was all valley all the time. It went from healthy interest to 100 hour weeks, and I didn't like what it was doing to him. I didn't care about the money, I just wanted my kid to be OK. So I hopped a flight to the bay area. Palo Alto is cool, those stanford women are something else... but tommy had none of it. His room in a house was all coke cans and monitors. Half of them had browsers with the damned orange bar on the top. So I tried to talk to him, but he just said "you don't 'get it'"._

 _We went to a party and he introduced me to Paul Graham, as PG. There was this obvious case of hero worship happening. I mean, all night it was "pg says this" or "pg wrote that" or "pg...". And not just tommy, but all the other kids with companies too. So now I got it. It's a cult._

 _I still haven't gotten my tommy out of there yet, and I still hear about how he got x karma for y post, or how he just doesn't like the reddity directions the site is headed. Sometimes, even tho I've forbidden it, he slips and drops a "did you hear about pg's latest...". I don't know if I'll ever get him back, but you people sure have helped me deal with it._

Followed by a bunch of "Hi Gary, thanks for sharing. It's tough, but we'll get through" type responses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, YES! This was exactly what I needed. I won't join another group, but knowing that I'm not the only one on HN who's trying to juggle a kid (and even one is handful) and his entrepreneurial urges is great.

I know, statistically there is no chance that I could be the only one, but after reading the cool posts here about how people worked for N days straight to develop their ideas, how they meet in bars to discuss their ideas, etc., I was beginning to really lower my priors.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's times like this when I wish Hacker News had something like subreddits (subhackers?).

</comment><comment><USER8> That's pure genius. Not yet ready for that but cool to know it's there.</comment>


Google Experimental - A cool way to see what your users like - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.ca/experimental/ PG always talks about getting your site up as soon as possible and then watching how your users use it. Today I noticed Google Experimental, which I think is a great idea for testing new functionality and looking at how users use it. <comment><USER2> keyboard shortcuts in search results!

[http://www.google.ca/search?q=rattlesnake&esrch=BetaShor...](http://www.google.ca/search?q=rattlesnake&esrch=BetaShortcuts)</comment>


PyCon US 2013 Accepted Talks - <AUTHOR> https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/talks/list/

<comment><USER2> If y'all have questions, I'm the program chair so fire away. I'm happy to answer 'em here.

<comment><USER3> Are all of these full-length (~30+ minutes) talks? If not, is there some way to see which ones are full-length talks?

<comment><USER2> Most talks will be 30 minutes, some will be 45. We don't know which are which yet; that'll come when we publish the actual schedule in the next couple weeks.

<comment><USER3> Excellent! Thank you very much, Jacob.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So excited about PyCon, last year was fantastic. I always make sure to mention it on these threads because you guys bust your ass to make it happen and I just want to thank you again. :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd love if the talks came with Lanyrd links so I can track them and check out the material, once it's up.

<comment><USER2> Great idea - I'll see what I can do!

<comment><USER6> They need a conference API. If only we knew someone over there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every year I submit a handful of proposals, every year they all get rejected :( Someday...

<comment><USER6> Jesse Noller and a crew of volunteers have just started this: <http://speakup.io/> Perhaps they could give feedback on proposals?

<comment><USER8> We can give feedback directly to PyCon proposers who weren't selected. We have logs of the discussions that have happened at each stage of review that a proposal goes through.

For future editions of PyCon, the SpeakUp! list would be a great place to get feedback on pre-deadline proposals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh wow, this looks amazing. I just ctrl+clicked 16 talks :-)

I'm a student, and your student pricing is great. If only air fare wasn't 4x the cost from where I am. I might still come, though! It's an investment in myself.

<comment><USER2> If cost is the only thing keeping you from coming to PyCon, please considering applying for financial aid. Each year we give out tens of thousands of dollars in free tickets and grants to help people get to PyCon. You could easily be one of them - please apply! See <https://us.pycon.org/2013/assistance/> for more details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any chance to see those talks online some day ?

<comment><USER11> I hope and think so. PyCon 2012 videos are available at: <http://pyvideo.org/category/17/pycon-us-2012>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great list of talks but with our lack of concurrency picking the right talk is going to difficult or I should say a GILemma :)

<comment><USER13> Just... wow.

100 internets to you, sir.</comment></comment>


A different cluetrain - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/02/a-different-cluetrain.html <comment><USER3> The extreme short-termism of capitalism that stifles innovation is missing from the analysis. Right now we are seeing an overinvestment in Sillicon Valley and an underinvestment in Biotech. The money is flowing to ad-selling services like Google and Facebook, and to intermediaries like Uber and friends, but biotech startups are funded below replacement rates. The development pipeline is drying up, it's not that the IP wasn't there, it's just not getting funded. Locust investors like Valeant don't help either. (Their business model is to buy up companies and then immediately divest of R&D.)

Any money in biotech goes to cancer instead of antibacterials, because the price points of cancer medicines are highest. The future was in the news last week: superbugs spread through colonoscopy procedures in LA. We'll see more of that in the coming years, but there is no alternative funding model within sight.

<comment><USER4> Investment in biotech is low because the returns are low, not because of a high discount rate.

It's getting harder to discover new drugs and get them through the FDA gauntlet. Most of the low hanging fruit has been found, and additional fruit won't necessarily pass comparative effectiveness without huge (and expensive) trials. After it makes it to market you are subject to political risks - <USER2> controls, lawsuits over side effects too small to find in clinical trials, etc.

It's hardly clear that the valley is even a good short term investment. Most tech companies focus heavily on growth, not profits.

Why do you believe that biotech has higher long term returns than the valley?

<comment><USER3> _Why do you believe that biotech has higher long term returns than the valley?_

That's precisely the problem. Within my lifetime the current antibiotics will become useless, we will be where we were before 1937 (discovery of sulfanilamide), physicians will be as good as they always were at prognosis, but helpless in the face of bacterial infections. The apocalypse is coming, and capitalism is no tool against it.

<comment><USER4> The issue of fewer drug targets than in the past is not something that any economic system can solve. That's just chemistry.

As for the rest of it, it's true that capitalism can't fix the FDA or foreign price controls. Lets hope Charlie Stross is right and the capitalists can take over the government and fix this.

<comment><USER5> " _Lets hope Charlie Stross is right and the capitalists can take over the government and fix this._ "

> ...but [capitalism does not require democracy] means that the interests of > the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital > (because of [automation privileges capital over labour]) unless there's a > threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil > unrest.

Let us hope, indeed. Sounds like fun.

<comment><USER6> In the Chinese curse sense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The "cluetrain" in the title refers to the Cluetrain Manifesto from 1999: [http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html](http://www.cluetrain.com/book/95-theses.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I mostly agree with the axioms as stated, but there's an obvious subtext that is more questionable and that carries a few unstated assumptions

\- Democracy, or more generally giving political power to the people is a good thing, maybe an end in itself.

\- Increases in inequalities between capital and labor are intrinsically a bad thing.

If your focus is on people being able to live happy, fulfilling lives, the whole Maslow hierarchy of need thing, it's not clear at all that these assumptions are warranted.

<comment><USER9> Those aren't assumptions. Axiom 18, the final conclusion, states, "we're on the receiving end of a war fought for control of our societies by opposing forces that are increasingly more powerful than we are." The reader is left to decide whether that is a good or bad thing.

Edit: And if you are labor, if you are the people of the democracy, of course these things are bad. It is self-evident. It is not a hidden assumption, but rather falls out of the conclusion. No one wants to be under the finger of another's control. These things are only good for capital.

<comment><USER8> You're right of course, these aren't stated assumptions which is why I mentioned the subtext.

I could of course be reading Stross's intentions wrong, but given what he's written before, and given how widespread those assumptions are, I tend to think they're taken as a given.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree with the other commenter that "capitalism does not require democracy" is interesting enough to kick around. The rest of it seems more and more tenuous the further you get down the list (and the more things that are combined in some sort of quasi-logic to reach a conclusion). I'm not saying the guy is wrong, just that there's a lot to digest there -- too much for a forum like this.

From what I've read, there are clear things that separate various civilizations. A quick list that I pulled out of the air might look like this:

\- Private property \- Rule of law (contracts) \- Freedom of political speech \- Consent of the governed \- Ability to freely associate into commercial units (corporations) \- Peaceful transfer of authority

Societies that have these things, on average, are able to solve more problems for more people over a longer period of time than those who do not. These problems are usually solved from the bottom-up; whether through innovation or grassroots political efforts, distributed, self-optimizing systems beat centralized ones.

The various forms of democracies that we see instantiated usually have more of these things than the other types of governments we've tried as a planet.

Capitalism refers to a very specific type of financial arrangement. It seems to map man's desire to trade with the above values -- at least as good as anything else.

To say "captialism does not require democracy", then, is true -- but it's woefully incomplete. The Chinese are getting away with rapid growth because they've met many but not all of the criteria, and that's only for the last decade or two. The problem with the statement is that it wants to form a broad conclusion about complex topics using simple language. If you do that, you miss out on the important parts. This is also the problem with the rest of the list. Do enough of this and string a thread through it, you can prove pretty much any dang thing you'd like.

</comment><comment><USER11> While I find the post a bit odd I value the 3rd bullet legitimate for debate:

 _Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy._

I am also quite impressed and wonder how China got there where it is today in the absence of democracy. But I am not sure if I would agree with the OP since there many examples where states economically failed/are failing and assumingly because of the absence of democracy.

<comment><USER12> Let us wait until Chinese per-capita PPP has equaled, never mind passed, the USA or other major Western countries before we start singing its hosannas about how wise and effective the Communist Party is at overseeing an advanced highly-efficient capitalist economy.

We've heard this story before, and it didn't work out well for the USSR.

<comment><USER13> The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

Also, you don't need to meet Western development to be a success. China has incredibly high growth rates and Deng Xiaoping's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" (i.e. the mixed economy) basically saved China.

<comment><USER12> > The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

The PRC isn't really capitalist either, consider how much of the economy is still state-owned enterprises. In any case, the reference class here is more 'fast-growing industrializing economies starting on a primitive agricultural basis', where regularly you see impressed people (and flacks) declaring that This Time Is Different and perhaps Western-liberal-democracy-plus-capitalism has been rendered obsolete. USSR, Japan - China?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's funny, I also have a CS degree from 1990 and I use it every day. Further, I've found it puts me rather significantly ahead of many of my programming coworkers. But I'm not a novelist.

On the other hand, I suspect that I'm in the "eye-wateringly rich" category (as is everyone reading this on HN).

</comment><comment><USER14> This is very insightful.

I wonder however if his partitioning of the economy into "labor" and "capital" isn't a bit too black and white, though.

In particular, it leaves out knowledge workers who are capable of implementing automation, inventing new products, performing new research. These activities can be fueled by capital but they are gated by a not-entirely-fungible resource; namely, skilled individuals, that I'm not sure it makes sense just to classify as "labor". Such individuals could wield considerable influence, aside from capital.

I can't help but wonder what kind of an effect (if any) this observation has on his analysis.

<comment><USER15> These knowledge workers will continue working automating jobs away until their own jobs are automated.

<comment><USER14> At that point you've reached a point where humans are no longer the dominant economic players at all, and this discussion is moot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> William Gibson got the essence and the aesthetic of it in Neuromancer in 1984.

</comment><comment><USER17> > I have a CS degree from 1990. It's about as much use as an aerospace > engineering degree from 1927

I'm not sure there was such a thing as an aerospace engineering degree in 1927, but if you think a CS degree from 1990 is worthless than you didn't learn much. That theory is still applicable today. Just because the shiny bits on the outside look all new and fancy does not change the underlying theory one bit.

<comment><USER18> The theory sure is applicable, but employers don't pay for theory. If you got a CS degree in 1990 and stopped learning the day you graduated, you'd surely have a hard to finding a job in 2014.

The CS field moves at an especially breakneck pace, though. The half-life of the knowledge learned in school is very short.

There are probably some other degrees out there where the knowledge stays relevant a bit longer. But I think it really comes down to the fact that you need at least some degree of continual learning to stay employable after graduation.

<comment><USER17> You are confusing computer science with software engineering/programming. They are not the same.

The CS field does not move at breakneck pace. The core classes taught in CS are the same now as they were then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So to stop this from becoming violent, we need a peaceful means of transfer of power that can keep up with "internet speed". Or the bureaucracy of government needs to absorb everyone who has political legitimacy and use them to continue expanding, which I think has been happening lately. Or we could find a way to "financialize" labor.

<comment><USER20> Would you prefer public policy that changes at the speed of high-frequency traders on the stock market, or at the speed of long-term investors that analyze at the level of Warren Buffett (true value-oriented investments) and storied venture capitalists (big-play game-changing startups)?

<comment><USER19> It's not that policy should change constantly, but that people who make policy tend to lose legitimacy in a very abrupt way. Transfer of power has to be very rapid, or people will rebel and stop following the leader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > ...most of their activity will be devoted to the perpetuation of the > organization, not to the pursuit of its ostensible objective.

aka, the tyranny of the bureaucratic overhead equation

        Δw = p ln (st / sg)

        w  := "useful work towards the objective"
        g  := "the group of people doing w"
        p  := "effective productivity of g"
        sg := "total size of the g"
        st := "total size of the organization (sg + bureaucracy)"

</comment><comment><USER22> >Since the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Tiananmen China it has become glaringly obvious that capitalism does not require democracy. Or even benefit from it. Capitalism as a system may well work best in the absence of democracy.

It's tough to respond to statements like this as written. 'Capitalism', 'democracy' and 'work well' are not precise terms, and the statement can be either true or false depending on the shade of meaning.

<comment><USER23> I think you're searching for reasons to disagree based on semantics and technicalities and evading the very cogent points made by the author. While there is room for disagreement about some of the nuances of what is meant by "Capitalism" or "democracy", do you think that there is really any comprehension problem w.r.t Stross' use of those terms? It seemed perfectly clear to me. His usage is quite conventional.

What about the quoted passage do you actually think is ambiguous?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'll just remind everyone this is the same Charles Stross that wants Bitcoin to 'die in a fire': [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why- i-wa...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/why-i-want- bitcoin-to-die-in-a.html). Beware taking advice from individuals in the throes of massive cognitive dissonance.

<comment><USER25> Not only does this sound like Ad Hominem, but I also think you are taking that statement too literally... the very sentence it's contained in should give a clue as to where his sentiment lies on alternative currencies(emphasis mine):

> I want Bitcoin to die in a fire: _this is a start, but it 's not > sufficient._

<comment><USER19> I think the part you have in italics was referring to BTC losing half its value.</comment></comment></comment>