New Findings from War on Poverty: Just Give Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-09/new-findings-from-war-on-poverty-just-give-cash <comment><USER2> Did anybody actually read the story?

The key observation is that a study published in Nature _" found a correlation between child brain structure and family income. Simply put, family income is correlated with children's brain surface area, especially among poor children. More money, bigger-brained kids."_

This is supported by the Cherokee study: when the families became a bit better off ($4,000 a year) the kids did better when they grew up.

So it's missing the point to argue about how grown-ups might (or might not) "waste" money and whether cash is better than other forms of welfare. The point is that bringing up children in poverty creates a worse outcome for society as a whole.

The fact is that $4,000 a year for 20 years is a very small amount compared with the cost of US police, courts, and prisons. If a poor kid grows up, gets a job and pays taxes, that's a massive win _for society_ compared with the same kid growing up in the sort of deprivation that leads to a life of crime and jail.

<comment><USER3> Will the _average_ Cherokee child consume $80k of police/court/prison services during their lifetime? That's breakeven. Assuming "massive win" means another $80k of cost savings, that means that absent this intervention, the average Cherokee will cost society $160k over their lifetime.

Is this really true? Is the average Cherokee a criminal who spends 3 years in prison (google suggests prison costs a bit under $50k/year)?

<comment><USER4> Agreed that it seems unlikely an average child would grow up to use $80k less in police/court/prison services, but much more persuasive to me would be a case that they produce $80k more value to the rest of society, from less use of such services to paying more taxes, to being better neighbors, employees, employers, and citizens.

<comment><USER2> 80k is roughly the cost of jailing one US adult for two years.

"In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the U.S. resident population."

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's more depth here than "just give cash".

What we've seen in study after study is that if you take low-income people who are struggling and give them more money, they use it in ways that improve their lives, they become more productive, and this has profound long-term impact.

At the same time, I don't think anybody really disputes that giving moderate amounts of extra cash to a heroin addict is unlikely to improve their lives. They need medical treatment before anything else.

I've never seen a study which looked at extra cash injections for long-term unemployed. That would be an interesting one. I would be unsurprised to find that cash alone was insufficient to solve their problems; the most obvious thing they need is education.

My point here is that cash clearly helps in some - probably most - circumstances. But "just give cash" is insufficient; we still need to work on all the other things as well.

<comment><USER6> "just give cash" is sufficient, because the other things are just as likely to be fall-out from the bad choices that may have been the best of a bad situation (heroin usage, dealing, theft, etc, etc...).

There is another comment below about giving in-kind stuff instead of the more fungible cash, but the problems with that (and with your example) boil down to that being moralizing. People want to moralize rather than enable. If a person has the means and doesn't use them, then and only then, can we claim some other problems remain to be fixed, but we cannot even logically conclude that the problems are blocking something debatably-desirable at this point. We can't have a non-armchair/inherently-smug-and-preachy discussion until everyone has a basic income.

This problem isn't going away, and is only for lack of numbers. Even someone who wants to die by heroin would be better off being allowed to, than forcing them to harm others (or themselves differently) in order to get there.

<comment><USER7> Just who is 'moralizing','smug and preachy' here? 'People want to moralize rather than enable'. Gosh! That's the debate over isn't it? Don't review current and awaited evidence just 'enable'.

Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only anecdotal but completely irrelevant.

<comment><USER8> > _Purely anecdotal but please <enable me> and I'll quit economic activity to > devote myself to life-improving activities (and a big thank you to whoever > is continuing them for my sake). Fortunately I'm an odd-ball and no one else > anywhere would even think to behave as I would. So, my story is not only > anecdotal but completely irrelevant._

You'll get bored shitless after a week of doing nothing with your life improvements to make a point, and suddenly you'll be back here having a productive input in the society, be it arts or engineering, services or thinking. But maybe you _do_ really want to make a point and decide to just drink and be merry. That would still be a significant improvement for the society over having you perform "economic activity" in advertising or other bullshit industry we keep because we're too big on puritan values to even consider that slaving away your life for food and shelter isn't the optimal way of living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Many of these studies appear to be variations on the form "We selected some people, gave them some money and told them we'd be back to check up on how they were doing." I wonder if there's a significant effect from the expectation that being part of the study will improve one's life. Perhaps receiving attention from authority figures (PhD or MD), and potentially their judgement, might alter behaviour in similar ways to the "honesty box" experiment [1].

It seems like there might also be some bias in selection - presumably one has to consent (in writing) to be part of a long-term study. Perhaps this encourages participants to think of the future and might influences decision- making away from short-term goals and towards "investment" uses of the money rather than ephemeral ones.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of their differential experiment, and whether there's as much difference between the $333 and $20 groups as there is between the $20 group and the "$0 group" of the general population.

[1] [http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412](http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412)

</comment><comment><USER3> There is unfortunately a large political danger with giving cash. If you give cash, then it becomes possible for pundits to agitate for more assistance on the theory that "you can't live on $X". When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats, it's pretty hard to argue that they are somehow lacking anything necessary to live.

Based on this article, there is also no reason to believe that cash assistance rather than in-kind assistance is necessary. The proposed mechanism is "Parents are happier because they have more money, leading to less fighting within the family. This lowers stress on kids..." But in-kind assistance would also lower stress since parents wouldn't _need_ money.

In-kind assistance has the added benefit that parents can't divert public assistance intended for children's welfare into other goods (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, drugs, junk food).

<comment><USER10> I don't understand the conservative desire to centrally manage the lives of the poor, taking away choice and freedom in favor of centralized bureaucracy.

<comment><USER11> What? I assure you that the the meddling, micromanaging social services bureaucracies are not run by "conservatives". Far from it.

A conservative or libertarian model would tend more toward a negative income tax or guaranteed basic income than what we have now. In fact, Milton Friedman was a big advocate of the NIT.

<comment><USER12> Neither of which are examples of centralised bureaucracy?

That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money.

The current British conservative government seems intent - quite literally - on starving the poor to death. That seems to be more usual for conservatives than aggressive agitation for a guaranteed basic income.

<comment><USER11> "That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money."

Milton Friedman is just about the most famous conservative/libertarian economist there is. Nobel Prize, even.

<comment><USER13> Arguably not a politician, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Money is a mechanism that, in a way, insulates us from a variety of problems that, when reduced, allows us to focus on other things. For instance, when you're not worried about where your next pay check is coming from, you can invest that energy elsewhere. Reading, continued education, practicing your craft, etc. When one is no longer burdened by the hunt, he's available to venture into other activities.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "We examine how a positive change in unearned household income affects children's emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Our results indicate that there are large beneficial effects of improved household financial wellbeing on children's emotional and behavioral health and positive personality trait development...Parenting and relationships within the family appear to be an important mechanism. We also find evidence that a sub-sample of the population moves to census tracts with better income levels and educational attainment."

Signs and wonders....

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this exactly what Milton Friedman advocated for some 40 years ago? Why is this just being "discovered" now?

<comment><USER16> Basic income guarantees have been advocated by many people in many centuries. One issue is that we don't know how they would work out in practice in modern societies, and the question is very controversial, which makes it hard to get good information on. This is some information that tells us that they might work out pretty well.

<comment><USER17> Err... There are plenty modern countries with basic income guarantees already.

<comment><USER16> Could you name one, then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems that we can give money to those in need, and see a "return" on that money in terms of increased employment and generation of value. Sounds like an investment to me.

The government is the unique position; they are able to realize a gain on this via income tax revenue. Maybe this can be done via basic income? Could we pass a basic income bill as an "investment in America" and is there a model where the government actually makes a return on this investment?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm also curious if we could reduce the number of children born into poverty by offering to pay men $2,500 plus medical costs to get a vascectomy.

<comment><USER20> While avoiding the "should this idea be implemented" question for a second, I'm wondering about the engineering issues here: is it more efficient to pay men for vasectomies or women for tied tubes.

Women are subject to meaningful rate limits. Ultimately the number of women determine the rate at which a population can reproduce.

A man can mate with many women, so eliminating a single man from the reproductive pool might have a significant impact. However, the women that man could impregnate might simply end up impregnated by someone else.

Not entirely sure how to model this.

<comment><USER21> When you get around to building a statistical model, make sure you take into account that vasecotomies cost about 1/4 as much to perform (e.g. $700 vs $2800, in the US), and have are something like 20x less likely to have complications (although complication rates are low for both).

source: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19041435)

<comment><USER19> It would be cheaper to do IUDs than tubal ligation for women. There was a bill that proposed this in Arkansas, but it was shot down for being coercive.

I think that the argument from "avoiding coercion" is silly. First, because that isn't what literal coercion means. But moreover, At federal minimum wage, that money only takes 350 hours to earn. Over 18 years, thats 20 hours a year. If someone doesn't value being a parent enough to work an extra 23 minutes a week, then it doesn't seem like that is a right they value particularly highly. Also, there are laws that, taken together, coerce parents into working more than 23 minutes a week to support and care for their children. If we aren't willing to get rid of laws against child neglect, why are we worried about coercion in this case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Parents stimulating their children does probably more to the brain structure than a check in the mail. And educated parents tend to better stimulate their kids. I remember a French statistics from the 90s showing that about 25-30% of the kids going to the Ecole Polytechnique (top engineering school in the country) come from families which do not own a television. Not sure there is a direct effect between watching TV and success but there is a direct effect between good parenting and success. This is why a good education system is fundamental to make up for what sometimes the parenting does not provide.

The other possibility, though not a politically correct one is genes. Rationally I find it hard to believe that genes play no role in our intellectual capacity, and they would mechanically self perpetuate poverty.

Without any hard science to back it, my intuition is that a brain is like a muscle, people are born with different muscle structure, largely driven by genes (but with a certain degree of randomness). So not everyone can make it to the olympics. But going to the olympics also requires hard work and training. If all one does is eat burgers and watch TV, the only outcome is to become obese irrespective of the muscle structure.

<comment><USER23> >Without any hard science to back it

I think this is the problem. Here's research that's trying to find some quantitative data about this issue, trying to cut through our received wisdom and intuition. And the response is... rooted in received wisdom and intuition.

(I don't mean to dispute your proposed model -- merely to suggest that us sitting here and speculating about models is precisely the wrong way to understand these issues.)

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed with the tenor of the discussion on this site; it seems the collective will to libertarianism is stronger than the belief in empiricism. I'm happy to be proven wrong, though.

<comment><USER22> Only science can really close this debate, but we don't really understand how the brain works, what drives intellectual capacity, character, sexual preferences, etc. So I don't see how we can do anything else than invoke what each of us think is our common sense to form an opinion until science tells us what really happens.

<comment><USER24> You have far too much faith in "science". Academics are human, and subject to human frailties. Studies are often sponsored or otherwise "encouraged" by outside parties with a certain interest. Academics often modify their reports until they get a result that "demonstrates" their desired outcome. Conventional wisdom, supported by the day's best "science", is regularly disproved.

Consider that every side in every political debate believes the evidence supports their opinion, and that the evidence the other guys are using is a sham. Although academics have a bias in aggregate, which should _not_ automatically be mistaken as valid consensus, you can usually find at least a few outlying reports to support any desired political position.

What it boils down to is that people believe whatever they want, probably for emotional reasons, and they can't really be convinced otherwise. They're only ready to come to the table when those emotional links have been severed by something in their life experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _giving poor families money, on top of the benefits they already receive, > improves their children's behavior_

I don't think anyone questions that _extra_ money does good. The big question in the fight against poverty is: given X available welfare dollars per family, what is the optimum allocation between giving them as benefits or giving them as hard cash?

<comment><USER26> Well theres also reason to question the size of x. If substantial amounts of money are wasted in the effort of allocating x, might it be better to just use that money to increase x and go for a simpler allocation model. For example equal amounts to everyone.

After that you must consider the systematic effects. If you do manage to increase x and allocate it to the poor. What will it do to the economy? There is a chance that it will feedback into increased tax revenue, which again raises x. More money allocated to the poor means more money spent on things needed by the poor, which means increased demand for certain goods and so forth. It's also possible that the same poor, now equipped with secure funding, starts new business to fill that demand which creates jobs and more taxable incomes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A related view expressed by India's central bank governor

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-11/rajan- urge...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-11/rajan-urges-cash- transfers-to-dilute-power-of-indian-oligarchs)

"Cash would empower the poor to choose where to buy goods, providing an alternative to government-run monopolies and creating competition in the private sector"

</comment><comment><USER28> These studies seem to crop up now and again.

What's funny is that we have devised this completely contrived way of divvying up the world's resources, including this notion of private ownership over key natural resources. But, in truth, no one needs to go hungry, without shelter, water, etc. There is enough.

But, then, we step back and say, "what if we give these people, who currently cannot subsist under this scheme, some marginal share of the resources we've convinced them by fiat are someone else's to give them in the first place?"

Then, of course, we measure their outcomes within the context of the same scheme, and ponder other ways to help them.

Yet, the scheme itself is much more seldom questioned. That one person can earn bilions from what's pulled from the earth we all inhabit, while others die from lack of access to the same should be expected to create irreparable distortions in outcomes. But, it's somehow accepted as an unchangeable, almost natural premise, even as we search for solutions.

</comment><comment><USER29> Did the "better outcomes" actually result in a _net_ increase in tax revenues / reduction in welfare spending (ie, more than the 4k)?

</comment><comment><USER30> Poor people are ALREADY given cash. Its called EBT and you see them squandering it on junk food and trading it for cigarettes.

<comment><USER31> You don't actually know any poor people, do you.</comment></comment>


SimCity, Part 1: Will Wright's City in a Box - <AUTHOR> http://www.filfre.net/2016/06/simcity-part-1-will-wrights-city-in-a-box/ <comment><USER2> Actually most of your article links seem interesting. Maybe you are not posting at the right time or the other link posters have a list of upvoters they can call in after posting to reach the front page. I like your articles and like to see more. Don't get discouraged!</comment>


Purpose of proof: semi-formal methods - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ezyang.com/2010/10/purpose-of-proof-sem-formal-methods/

<comment><USER2> OK - I hereby declare a bias. I'm a PhD in mathematics, and I program soft- real-time semi-safety-critical systems.

Most people don't know what a proof in advance math is like. They seem to think it's all miniscule steps, starting from blindingly obvious miniscule statements, and build as a tedious, laborious, verging on infinitely long sequence of quantum-sized deductions.

It's not.

It's a way of imparting an understand of "what's really going on" and communicating that effectively.

Here's the proof that sqrt(2) is irrational as most people have seen it:

        suppose sqrt(2) = a/b
        then 2 = a^2/b^2
        hence 2 b^2 = a^2
        that means a^2 is even
        from that we know that a is even.

            we need to show that.
            suppose a is odd
            then a = 2k+1
            hence a^2 = (2k+1)^2
                      = 4k^2 + 4k + 1
            so if a is odd, a^2 is odd
            but a^2 is even
            hence a cannot be odd
            so a is even
            (end proof of mini-lemma)

        therefore we can write a=2k
        so 2 b^2 = (2k)^2
        so b^2 = 2k^2
        That means b^2 is even
        Using our mini-lemma, b is even
        so b = 2n
        Thus sqrt(2) = a/b = (2k)/(2n) = k/n
        But k and n are smaller than a and b.
        Repeating the above process gives an
            infinte descending sequence of
            positive whole numbers
        That's a contradiction.
        Therefore sqrt(2) cannot be a/b

        But the choice of a and b was arbitrary,
        hence sqrt(2) is never a/b for any a or b

        Hence sqrt(2) is irrational.

That's what computer proofs of correctness are like.

Here's what a modern mathematician does:

        suppose sqrt(2) = a/b
        then 2 b^2 = a^2
        but the LHS has an odd number of factors of 2,
        and the RHS has an even number of factors of 2.
        That can't work, so sqrt(2) is irrational.

Reasoning clearly, carefully and completely about code need not be the infinite suop of minutia people think it is, especially if you write the proof with the code. It's also important to write your code so that only small sections need truly detailed proofs. Error-robust code is a real winner.

The purpose of the code, the comments and the proof is to impart understanding to the reader. Yes, people will make mistakes in writing the proof, just as they make mistakes in writing the code, but having them both makes mistakes much less likely. Explaining both code and proof to colleagues reduces further the chances of error. Running tests to support the understanding does even more.

It will never be perfect, because the specification may have bugs, the compiler, the hardware, there may be cosmic rays that cause bit-flips. But having proofs, proper, human-style proofs, makes it much easier to have confidence.

In our experience it makes the code-production cycle faster and more predictable too, not to mention reducing the unpredictable bug-finding process.

Semi-formal proofs are a win all round, but in our experience most programmers can't do them. That's the problem we face.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't have said it any better. Thanks for the perspective!</comment></comment>


India's Supreme court rules Aadhaar ID program doesn't violate privacy rights - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/in/2018/09/26/indias-top-courts-says-aadhaar-id-doesnt-breach-privacy/ <comment><AUTHOR> The verdict was delivered by a 4:1 majority. The supporting judges stated that 97% cannot be denied the benefits of Aadhaar for the exclusion of a "minimal" 3%. The dissenting judge termed Aadhaar as unconstitutional.</comment>


Coronavirus Conspiracy:How It Will Destroy Our Economy – David Icke - <AUTHOR> https://londonreal.tv/the-coronavirus-conspiracy-how-covid-19-will-seize-your-rights-destroy-our-economy-david-icke/ <comment><USER2> David Icke! I don't want to subscribe to this, so I'm just going to guess that Reptilians from the planet Nibiru are involved somehow, and leave it at that.</comment>


Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have seen - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@filip_struharik/biggest-drop-in-organic-reach-weve-ever-seen-b2239323413 <comment><USER2> As a former active user on Facebook, this sort of change may succeed in bringing people like me back to the site. The minimal effort required in hitting that "share" button means that every page that organically reached my friends would end up polluting my news feed as well with crap that I wasn't interested in and got in the way of what I had originally joined FB for. If my friends aren't seeing these posts, they won't be clicking "share" on them either.

I've had my account on Facebook since 2004 when it first became available at my university. Since the very beginning it's first usefulness was as a Rolodex, basically. I recently stopped using the site (without deactivating my account, because it still serves that digital Rolodex function) because >75% of the posts on my newsfeed were either "organic" ads or propaganda. Most of the offending posts were things that had been "shared" by my friends and not necessarily even posted by pages I had "liked" or "followed"

A principle I've been using recently to help me understand the world around me is that I am not special or unique, and when I do something, a lot of other people who are broadly similar to me are doing the same thing. So, I assume that there are others like me who have recently been deleting the FB app and avoiding the website, if not deleting their accounts entirely. Facebook is almost certainly aware of it, and while publishers are always going to see stuff like this as a money grab, it may be necessary for the health of the platform for FB to clamp down on publisher patterns that are driving users away.

<comment><USER3> Agreed here. I feel like I am constantly fighting to filter out all this "content" from external sites. I feel like I can't even see the stuff I joined FB for- to see pictures/updates to see what my friends are up to. Instagram is much better for this these days, the signal/noise ratio is getting so low on FB that I find myself going on just out of habit, not because of the information I get from there. It has shades of slashdot, which for awhile was just in my daily list of sites to visit because it always had been, eventually though it dropped off.

Note that you can eliminate a lot of this crap by changing your news feed from "top stories" to "most recent." This change will not persist, can not be changed on the app, and you will have to manually change this every time you log on- you can't even save the url as a bookmark. Still, its waaay closer to the FB I used to really like.

<comment><USER4> You can view "Most Recent" in the app, just have to grab it from your feeds tab.

<comment><USER3> Is this new-ish? I remember looking for this awhile back and not being able to find it.

Thank you though!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook pulling a bait and switch for newspapers that forces them to pay to reach an audience they used to reach for free (organic reach)? This has only happened repeatedly in the history of facebook.

Facebook is like a game where the difficulty rises after you've had a taste of success. And by difficulty I mean you have to pay to reach your previous levels of success.

Facebook did this for those first games (e.g. Farmville), then for pages (remember the idea of advertizing for likes to raise the visibility of your page in the news feed? [https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont- matter/](https://www.matthewbarby.com/facebook-likes-dont-matter/)), now for newspapers. All in the service of "keeping the news feed clean/relevant for users", but really it is just effective monetization of the attention of Facebook's users.

Never become dependent on Facebook's feebies in any way, because you will soon be paying for them. But I figure everyone already knew this strategy of Zuck's Facebook -- it is nothing new, it is "The Strategy" over there.

<comment><USER6> > But I figure everyone knew this about 5 years ago if not earlier.

This is something that keep surprising me. This year we had stories after stories against facebook. But nothing unexpected. Only about things we said again and again would happen, for years. We wrote about it. We discussed about it with friends.

But apparently, being loud and clear about something very obvious is not enough. When things are too good to be true, people will want to keep believing it is. All you have to do to keep the frogs in is to raise the temperature slowly enough so that there is no outrage.

<comment><USER7> I hate that frog analogy. People always use it as shorthand for "small changes over time go unnoticed" but in the actual experiment, the frogs were basically lobotomized.

So how are we lobotomized? One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not important. They are convinced of this while Google and Facebook mine it to no end and the NSA stores pretty much everything you do in Utah. So maybe you don't think it's important, but Some very big players who have a lot more money and knowledge sure do.

<comment><USER8> > One sort of answer would be how people are convinced that their data is not > important.

When I'm wandering through my yard watering plants, I like to imagine a world where our personal data, or more precisely access to it, is treated more like mineral rights today.

Companies would be required to pay a small micro-payment royalty anytime your data was used to make them money, and you would be able to transfer/split the rights just as you could mineral rights today. This micro-payment world would supplant the current "your data is the price of admission" world we live in.

<comment><USER7> We do not live in a "your data is the price of admission" world. We live in a "your data is extra gravy we monetize for free because in small quantities it is useless to you but in aggregate it has value so we will extract that value even if you've already paid for the product and legally own it"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The best part about Twitter is the simple timeline. Twitter doesn't care about what the account represents, so all accounts have the same priority.

Yes, Twitter has started to mess with its timeline, but that's besides the point.

Facebook's noise problem is one that they themselves created. Countless of times I found myself subscribed to some page only because I liked one of their posts. Which is bullshit, because in my vocabulary Follow != Like.

Then they tried fixing this by prioritizing posts based on a bullshit ranking system only they understand. That didn't work either.

Oh well, maybe we'll go back full circle after all.

<comment><USER10> Also, why is the second item in my newsfeed _always_ a "Sponsored Link"

<comment><USER11> I'm not using facebook (not since they had this anti-adblock stuff), but if it is always the second item for everyone, it should be quite easy to hide with a small greasemonkey script (that you don't even have to code yourself, someone probably already did).

<comment><USER12> Here's a chrome extension that works for me: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts- bl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsored-posts- blocker/cefgndhbngdogmalpnhnidnnlkmbicig?hl=en&authuser=3)

<comment><USER13> A chrome extension that uploads all my FB data to its servers? Neat!

<comment><USER14> That extension contains no code for uploading to any server and has no host permissions in its manifest to do so, its a cosmetic filter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The annoying thing here, as a Facebook user, is that if I've liked the "Cute Puppies" page it's because I want to see their cute puppies.

To then strip them entirely out of my Facebook feed unless they hand Facebook some cash feels like a step back in my usage of Facebook.

<comment><USER16> The annoying bit is that (with the current model), if my friend likes cute puppies, then I'm forever cursed with them too, at the expense of all the things I actually want to see.

<comment><USER15> That is absolutely annoying as well.

It's as if Facebook should show me the things I've asked it to, and show you the things you've asked it to, and not try and take mine away or give them to you.

<comment><USER17> Inferring that people that are "friends" may share the same interests doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.

<comment><USER18> It is very unreasonable for users who hundreds of friends to expect interests to he similiar. This could be excused for a smaller site but facebook has detailed metrics on what I liked where I visited outside of facebook and what purchases I made.

Using that targeting is much more effective compared to friend's interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That's what happens when we abandon protocols (RSS feeds) in favor of walled gardens.

<comment><USER20> It is kind of understandable that RSS feeds would fade in prominence as content creators, even of more casual blogs, increasingly sought to monetize. RSS feeds tended to present successively posted content without the ads that site owners were keen to confront users with. A person subscribing to feeds would often never need to visit the actual site and see those ads, not would they get tagged by lucrative tracking cookies. Rather they could read everything "for free" through an RSS reader. Yes, you could introduce ads into the RSS feed, but when the RSS channel is increasingly seen as something for only a tiny niche of anoraks (especially since the demise of Google Reader), no surprise that it was no longer seen as worth the trouble.

<comment><USER21> Or you could simply take the route that most monetized sites with RSS did, and only include the first few paragraphs of your content in the feed.

Ars Technica still does this, and it strikes a good balance between letting the user see what content is available in the tool of their choice (and whether they'd be interested in reading more), and the site/publisher having control over how the complete articles are presented.

Of course, this requires the site to actually have more than a paragraph worth of actual content for any given article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think this is a great turning point for Facebook and might even bring Facebook back on the map SOCIAL media wise. Since almost all people I know barely use Facebook anymore for communication, because you just don't see any posts by your friends no more.

<comment><USER23> Actually, they're just forcing businesses that have pages to pay for ads. Like if you have a well known page that has grown through shares and likes, you'll be needing to pay money to reach the people that have liked your page.

<comment><USER24> I don't have a problem with Facebook asking people to pay for the value provided, especially if it actually increases my utility of it as a user. (Which, admittedly, I'm not anymore - partially due to this problem.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _In main newsfeed are now just friend and sponsored posts._

Haven't seen many posts by my friends this year, only people commenting or liking stuff on various pages. Not sure if it is because my friends (including me) have stopped posting, or if it just drowns in everything else.

<comment><USER26> Can confirm. In my friends list only activity is tagging on memes and posting life events. All personal sharing has moved to Instagram and "stories" on Facebook/WhatsApp/Messenger.

<comment><USER25> I've only once seen someone use the stories feature of Messenger/facebook, and he is a Facebook employee. All my friends use snapchat to share our days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is wishful thinking, but maybe this move will push content creators back to providing RSS feeds so their audience can follow them without needing to use Facebook.

<comment><USER28> More than wishful thinking, and no offence, but it's simply disconnected with reality.

RSS is not dead, it was never alive to begin with.

<comment><USER29> It's the other way round for me. I read feeds but no Facebook. Works fine. Which content producers are missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> While this is a good move for Facebook's users, who will get a less cluttered feed, it's a disaster for publishers who use Facebook for content distribution. For example, over the past year my company has been supplying news to a network of two million MMA fans on Facebook. With this change it's very difficult to make enough revenue to continue: less reach = less clickthrough to our site = less revenue. The silver lining is that if publishers write off Facebook as a distribution method then perhaps they can work more on other distribution methods, generating some innovation.

<insert reply about platform dependency here>

<comment><USER31> Yes, dependency is bad, but you target platform where your customers are.

We operate small indoor playground for kids. Sure, I wanted to have website, but since almost all moms with small kids are on FB 24/7, Facebook Page was obvious choice. Yes, it makes us platform dependent, but I won't expect our target audience to play with RSS... Now this step bite us in the backside a bit. It really sucks to be in the bad part of A/B test :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you are a small business owner and want to do paid promotion.Please not spend on likes, and boosting posts also doesn't help much. Create ads with very specific targeting and take users to your landing page and try to catch them again with retargeting. This will help you reach better audience and let you calculate definitive ROIs.

</comment><comment><USER33> Big difference between what the article says:

 _" The idea behind the Explore Feed is to help Facebook users discover more content across the social network, beyond posts from friends and Pages you already follow. Instead, this feed surfaces recommended content it thinks you might find interesting."_

And what the author of the Medium post says: _" All posts by pages are moved from News Feed to Explore Feed. In main News Feed are now just friend and sponsored posts."_

If the first is true, then eh. Another useless tab I won't ever use. If the latter is true, then this is a gamechanger. Facebook has turned into the literal feed of news for many people for many years at this point.

If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.

<comment><USER34> > If it's reduced back down into what it was in 2010, it's going to outrage a > lot of older people who use it for more than a friend feed.

And some people (like me) would be really happy.

For me at least, the facebook feed at this point is just pure SPAM and garbage.

<comment><USER19> They could have let it to the users to decide if they want news or family posts. Then there is no conflict between them any more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> j-c-hewitt Frankly the only stuff that is not completely brain-melting on Facebook can be found in groups, which mostly doesn't do a lot of moving posts around based on what the system thinks you'll engage with. I only use Facebook to advertise to people, having long grown disgusted and bored by the main timeline as a user.

</comment><comment><USER35> What are even facebook "pages you follow"? Is it anything that isn't a personal fb account in the friend list?

Do groups count in this category, or are groups a third category?

I don't think I follow any "pages" such as those created by companies or artists (apart from personal accounts).

If "pages" were basically fb's equivalent of corporate accounts, why would you want to follow them? Isn't that like signing up for commercials in your feed?

<comment><USER36> To give you a counter example, I follow nothing except pages most of the time. My real account sticks around in case I want to contact friends, and because some people insist on communicating via FB messages. But all my browsers are logged into a second account, which has no friends,and follows a non-profit, a news site from my hometown, and a few think tanks. It only exists because one or two of those don't put out their feeds anywhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If I see how many companies don't create a homepage but rely on Facebook entirely. Or have a very stale homepage while they keep posting news on Facebook and Instagram. And I don't get it, if you use a free Wordpress setup with a few simple plug-ins you can already post all of your content immediately to all social media channels together with an update on your homepage.

<comment><USER38> IG engagement is so much higher for many categories, people just don't interact with websites like they do with social media

<comment><USER37> I see bars and restaurants always post stuff happy Friday pictures with food photos all of the time yet information about what beer or food they actually serve remains a mystery on their social media channels. If they didn't bother with a website I'm basically just guessing based on what they took pictures of.

<comment><USER38> In that case they're probably just looking to grow their following by having a high enough engagement to appear in the featured page of IG, and remind their existing followers that they exist. Here it's less about promoting the food and more about promoting the image of the food, so it gets shared more widely.

<comment><USER37> Very paradoxical as social media should give companies the opportunity to engage more directly with their customers. It's like meeting a very interesting Hacker News poster IRL and the only thing that person can talk about is some kind of sports team you don't give a shit about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> To an outside observer (I do not have a FB account), this looks like a good plan from the FB side. Kind of like GMail inbox categories/tabs. All about reducing the signal (friends) to noise (something you may have liked 3 years ago) ratio. You will still see as many ads, but the content between those will be more relevant.

Too bad FB does not offer ad-free account as an option.

<comment><USER15> How is it more relevant to remove content that I've deliberately chosen to see from my feed?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly what annoys me about it.

I liked those pages, so I choose to see the content.

Their solution to put it into the "Explore"-Tab, mixed with content of Pages I didn't even like makes it worthless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It is their platform, right? I'd assume they are within their rights to determine how Information flows within it. Obviously they'd want it to be in a way that positively impacts their bottom line. If the ability to reach people on their platform through pages is valuable, then i should not be surprised if they want those who use it to pay for it.

<comment><USER41> That's going to become increasingly the debate, as with Google.

You're starting to see more and more arguments in the media, in Washington DC, among anti-trust and anti-corporate power groups, that these platforms should be treated more like utilities. Given the culture at the moment, I'd expect those arguments to get a lot louder yet.

The platforms are responding predictably:

"Tech Pours Millions Into Lobbying While Pressure Mounts in Washington"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech- pour...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-20/tech-pours- millions-into-lobbying-as-washington-pressure-mounts)

<comment><USER17> Is there a proposal of what "like a utility" would look like for social media platforms?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Looked at this "Explore feed" today. Only "viral videos", "funny animals" videos, listicles about casual topics. Recently I started to see the same content in Instagram Explore tab too. This is how their super-targeted AI trained on terabytes of behavioral data works? The same quality of targeting as on TV. Why they gather data on users at all?

</comment><comment><USER43> "Captain, it looks like we have reached a MySpace singularity!"

</comment><comment><USER44> Won't someone please think of those poor, helpless brands?

</comment><comment><USER45> Rats in a cage.</comment>


Why Handwriting Must Die - <AUTHOR> http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/handwriting-is-history-6540/

<comment><USER2> This is blogspam. Link to the source: [http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture- society/handwriting-is-...](http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture- society/handwriting-is-history-6540/)

<comment><USER3> Blogspam and flamebait. I generally have to chuckle whenever anyone calls for the "death" of whatever (e.g. handwriting, shaking hands, installed operating systems, programming languages). If said item is so supposedly offensive or heinous, but managed to help us be productive in some fashion for a reasonable amount of time, declaring it needs to go reeks of insecurity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If writing words by hand is too slow for your mind, you're not thinking hard enough. The speed of touch-typing approaches the speed of cognition, but deep analytical and creative thought is much slower than even the slowest forms of committing information to a medium (eg. engraving a stone tablet).

<comment><USER5> The "speed of cognition" I'd imagine is mainly limited by the fact that most people say (in their mind) what they read/write as they go along and we can only speak so fast. With writing we are also limited by our fingers but reading can go much faster if one learns to get rid of the inner voice (speed reading).

And even though I agree with you that touch-typing isn't that much of a limiting factor when compared to the time required to come up with something sensible but unfortunately, at least for me, those deep analytical and creative thoughts doesn't produce a steady stream of characters but rather bursts of sentences and paragraphs and taking the time to writing them out obstructs the thought process (depending on what I'm doing (most of what I do isn't that challenging)). So I'd say that the speed improvements of touch- typing compared to handwriting can be quite useful (and being able to get rid of it entirely by taking 'snapshots' of a current thought process, continue, and then later go back and summarize and formulate all snapshots would be awesome).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I disagree with this statement: "Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it." Handwriting evolved out of pictograms, which evolved from doing artwork. So writing is very natural because it's really a form of drawing if you think about it.

</comment><comment><USER7> handwriting cannot be beaten when your cell has no battery and you need to pick-up the number of that foxy lady, bonus (or not) you will look like a vintage hipster...</comment>


Show HN: Crowbar, a tool to proxy TCP over plain HTTP - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/q3k/crowbar

<comment><USER2> Years ago, I used something like this to access my home computer from behind an http-only proxy: [http://http-tunnel.sourceforge.net/](http://http- tunnel.sourceforge.net/)

Is crowbar intended for the same purpose?

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~alig/papers/http.pdf](https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~alig/papers/http.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> Can it get through the Great Firewall of China?

</comment><comment><USER5> _Features:

Will probably get you fired if you use this in an office setting_

sounds good to me</comment>


Archaeologists stumble on Neolithic ritual site in Suffolk (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/28/archaeologists-stumble-on-neolithic-ritual-site-in-suffolk <comment><AUTHOR> "The archaeologists first thought the timbers must be medieval or even Victorian, and were puzzled to find them so deeply buried. But as 30 metres of timber track were exposed, alongside other unexpected objects too, such as the massive horns and skull of an aurochs, an extinct breed of giant cattle, they realised they were dealing with something far more ancient. The timbers were 4,300 years old, according to the first carbon-14 tests, and underlying ones may be much older."

</comment><comment><USER2> If I squint I can just see where this is when I look out of the window. The happy thing is that the powercable works (like the A14 improvement in Cambridge) have revealed all sorts of things about the landscape here. The sad thing is that it's such a mess; I really hope they put it back together as promised. The big impact on the landscape won't be from this though, it'll be from Sizewell C being built, which will take 12 years and involve moving a truly vast amount of kit and people on the roads.

</comment><comment><USER3> If anyone reading this lives in the UK, Digging for Britain (can't remember which episode) did an interesting bit on this digside and should still be on iPlayer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Available for a few more hours there's about 10 minutes on it, 15 minutes in:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0001jg7/digging- for-b...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0001jg7/digging-for-britain- series-7-3-east)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Archaeologists are nervous of using the word "ritual""

Because it's archaeological code for "We don't know what it's for" LOL.

Although I do wish they'd just say "We don't know", instead of using code words........... It's not required that we know everything.

<comment><USER5> Could you please not post unsubstantive comments, and especially not shallow dismissals, to Hacker News?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER4> It's really not dang, see the other replies in this thread, and search google as well, it's not a shallow dismissal, it's an insight into how archaeological results are reported.

<comment><USER5> OK, point taken.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pattern Matching Custom Data Types in TypeScript - <AUTHOR> https://blog.parametricstudios.com/posts/pattern-matching-custom-data-types/ <comment><USER2> It's a neat trick and I've used similar patterns in some of our projects, but in the end it doesn't buy you much over a `switch (x.kind) { ... }`. (Except your matcher can be used as a proper expression which is nice obviously)

But you don't have proper pattern nesting, fall-through semantics and it's not clear (to me yet) how to extend to matching on multiple values. Try implementing an equality function on a sum-type using pattern matching.

Having actual proper pattern matching added to TS would be such a great addition. Especially with full support of the control flow analysis.

<comment><USER3> This might be our best hope right now: [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- pattern-matching](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pattern-matching)

<comment><USER4> I see a lot of people asking for this in TS, but i'd much rather it be in plain JS and let TS add anything on top of it that is needed.

Pattern matching would work SO WELL in javascript, especially considering how frequently switch is currently poorly used as a replacement in things like Redux.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think the code is way too verbose. One supposed advantage of FP languages is that they are more concise. If I have to build a ton of boilerplate I might just as well go to some OOP pattern with interfaces and so on.

<comment><USER3> Remember that the point of the article is not what language does it best, but rather how to use typescript to add patterns from other languages.

<comment><USER5> True. I just think it's a mistake to force a pattern into a language that doesn't support it well. In the end you get sort of pattern matching but you have also to write a lot of code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i did an article about quite a similar solution approach some time ago: [https://pattern-matching-with-typescript.alabor.me/](https://pattern- matching-with-typescript.alabor.me/)

having real pattern matching built in to TS would be awesome. nice write up though!

<comment><USER3> This article is totally on the same wavelength. I might have to link it as further reading on the subject. Any objections?

<comment><USER6> sure! go ahead. thanks :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since typescript is compiled anyway it feels somewhat silly not to have the compiler do this work. I wonder how hard it would be to make the desugaring extensible, maybe with a rewrite engine like what Hermit does in haskell.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm disappointed in TypeScript not having pattern matching, multiple classes inheritance, and operator overloading (a MUST for game development)

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand the sentiment, but really you should be disappointed in the ECMA standard, typescript only implements stage 3 and hire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't think the "never" default arm is necessary. If the return type is set and you miss a case TS should complain.

</comment><comment><USER10> You could use a typescript decorator to make it less verbose to setup I suppose. I would rather have a more native approach.</comment>


What Happens In Your Body When You Eat Ramen And Gatorade  - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/ramen-digestion_n_1263825.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Long live Whole Foods, Trader's Joe, Sprouts...and a wife who knows how to cook!</comment>


The DNC's voter registration app is now free and open-source software - <AUTHOR> http://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2013/01/dnc_voter_reg_foss.html

<comment><USER2> I'm not going to register with my information, and here's why:

1) I don't know what this website is, and why it's collecting my information. Where's the credibility? Now people can use this "open source software" and can modify the where the endpoints are. I'm a little bit worried than anyone who has malicious intent can alter the code.

2) Why isn't it even requiring HTTPS/SSL? I don't want anyone to intercept my sensitive information, especially with someone that can just dump the code anywhere and pretend to be an "official" voter registration. Take that demo app for example.

I know this post was meant for something good, but I feel security measurements are not its strongest points. And I must petition for more security when the app involves with sensitive information that can be collected by any 3rd party website. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

<comment><USER3> I think your concern is legitimate. I imagine that organizations wishing to make use of the app or modify it will imbue it with trust by associating themselves with it - ie a League of Women Voters logo somewhere on the page. As the article points out though, there are a lot of regulations in this space so I'm not sure if that is allowed.

As far as SSL goes yes I think at the very least the production.rb file should declare `config.force_ssl = true`.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The post includes this statement:

> I want to acknowledge the hard work across the organization, from software > engineers to lawyers, to find a way to give back to the open source > community and satisfy the concerns of both.

So it seems that this decision was done after careful legal advice was sought. I'd love to hear what the lawyers actually said about this "advisory." Does including an advisory remove liability on the code's creators, much like the "Contents may be hot" advisory removes liability on McDonalds should a customer burn themselves?

I asked a similar question in a comment on another link: if a coder were to open-source an app that could _easily_ be repurposed as, say, a search engine for pirated videos, but they included an "advisory" saying exactly what a derivative work's creator should do to obey the law, is the original coder liable? It would seem that the DNC would say "no," but maybe voting law is different from copyright/piracy law when it comes to liability? But if anything, I'd expect voting law to be even stricter...

I'd hate to see a civil rights lawyer suing the DNC and invoking [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM_Studios,_Inc._v._Grokster,_Ltd). as a precedent. "This technology was primarily used for <strikeout>infringing</strikeout> disenfranchising uses."

o_o

(IANAL)

<comment><USER5> I can't speak for this specific case, but when releasing software to others (open sourcing, licensing, etc) it's common to run the codebase through something like Black Duck. Everything that comes up as a false positive needs to be checked into and cleared. Everything that's a true positive must have its license read to ensure that any terms of its release are being met.

For software that's been released but doesn't have a clear license (e.g. some "Pull to refresh" implementation on Github) it's often necessary to ask the author to sign some form of "no, I really won't sue you" release.

If it's discovered that some license was inadvertently violated (e.g. attribution) then it can be necessary to send a mea culpa to the licensor so they're not incensed if someone points the violation out to them later.

(IANAL, but I have done this dance before).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The demo: <http://voter-registration.herokuapp.com/>

</comment><comment><USER7> The code looks very clean and simple. Only 15 methods and 9 specs. No logic in the models. Nice sweet spot for Rails.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any thoughts on what could be built out/on top of this application?

<comment><USER8> Maybe the RNC could repurpose it as a voter suppression app?

<comment><USER9> While this is a partisan comment, it highlights the political reason why the DNC pursues registration drives. It stands to benefit from doing so. Voters in demographics more likely to support the Democrats are less likely to register and less likely to be engaged.

<comment><USER10> It should be pointed out that the various organs of both the Democratic and Republican party both run voter registration drives, as do a number of other groups (with varying degrees of affiliation with official parties).

It's not surprising that each group targets demographics which seek to further their aims.

Despite that, registering more voters is categorically a good thing. We as a society require an informed and engaged electorate. Registering to vote is part of that engagement.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What We Just Did to Make SSL Even Faster - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudflare.com/what-we-just-did-to-make-ssl-even-faster

<comment><USER2> I'm even more impressed by their willingness to make this a feature available to everyone, both through their github cert repo and their rebundling service.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cloudflare is awesome. I remember them from Disrupt what seems like eons ago. Always been impressed by the company and the quality of their content.

</comment><comment><USER4> Somehow, I thought this was going to be a discussion about SPDY</comment>


Dear Mick Mulvaney: Don't Let Equifax Off Easy - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/02/28/dear-mick-mulvaney-dont-let-equifax-off-easy/ <comment><USER2> Dear American registered voters: Mulvaney won't investigate Equifax. He's too busy gutting the CFPB. The end of the linked article below has a choice quote at the end:

 _As Mulvaney said after his first day as acting director: "Elections have consequences at every agency."_

And in 2020, we have the opportunity to prove that by dumping the current administration. However, real oversight of what's happening at every level of our government is a crucial first step, and that can be accomplished this November. So go vote. This is the most consequential midterm election in at least a generation.

[https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/18/mulvaney- funding-c...](https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/18/mulvaney-funding- consumer-bureau-cordray-345495)</comment>


Ask HN: Will YC ever fund another YC? - <AUTHOR>

What if a startup with the same nature business as YC itself applies to YC? <comment><USER2> I think it's possible that they could fund an innovative, perhaps decentralized, somewhat crowdfunded, YC-like DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).

</comment><comment><USER3> Can a University fund another university, I doubt YC funding another YC. However, can PG fund/enable another YC? Maybe :).

</comment><comment><USER4> Why do startups in general apply to YC? For expert mentorin from people who have done it 700 times before, for a fantastic Rolodex and a badge that will at least get you a coffee from most VCs and CTOs.

If you were just copying YC, I doubt they would add much value. If you were doing YC-for-a-niche then maybe. I suspect YC for Africa would get some interest, YC-for-biotech maybe less.</comment>


Vooza says no to remote workers and non-handcuffed workers - <AUTHOR> http://vooza.com/handcuffs/ <comment><USER2> vooza is a one joke pony. it's boring after the first act.</comment>


14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5511619/14-year-old-hit-by-30000-mph-space-meteorite.html <comment><USER2> > A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and > causing a foot wide crater in the ground.< ... Really?</comment>


Ask HN: A more open-minded and less judgmental community? - <AUTHOR>

I like the level of detail with HN discussions, but I find that there are many people who act in judgmental & close minded ways.
This includes:
* ego driven discussions
* witch hunts on everyone who makes a public mistake
* downvoting opinions that are different from theirs, even when well expressed
Are there any technical/business/culture forums out there that have people with open minds & relatively free of judgement? If yes, are there cultural and/or technological safeguards to keep that vibe?
---
Edit: I'd like the opposite of homogeneity. Rather, novel perspectives should be more visible.
I'm thinking along the terms to respect for all opinions and highlighting all of the different perspectives on the topics. It would be great to see all of the perspectives & related concepts laid out somehow, to increase conceptual awareness. <comment><USER2> I believe it is impossible to engineer civility. You can, to a degree, force a bias to express itself through the use of filters, swift moderation, and selective invitation, but even relatively homogeneous and technical communities can find themselves subject to infighting, politics, ego-driven discussion and elitism.

As these things go, however, I find Hacker News to be far more civil than one would expect for an internet forum with no real barrier to entry. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like the opposite of homogeneity. Rather, novel perspectives should be more visible.

I'm thinking along the terms to respect for all opinions and highlighting all of the different perspectives on the topics. It would be great to see all of the perspectives & related concepts laid out somehow, to increase conceptual awareness.

I would think that grouping similar perspectives together would give novel perspectives more attention. I'd also like to embrace divergent thinking. It leads to more information.

Of course, disrespectful discourse should be tagged and grouped together somehow. Such discourse would still valuable insight into the perspectives of some of the participants.

<comment><USER2> However, novelty and disrespect can be moving targets, and if it is subjective, then the solution would need to be user-driven and not site driven.

I have thought that Hacker News could use more personal filters, or tags, or things to let users customize the content they see. While this wouldn't increase civility per se, it might give users with less tolerance for certain topics or certain points of view the ability to create bubbles around themselves if they want.

I agree with you though - I've read some very interesting and thought provoking content here, particularly from people whose views I would personally vehemently disagree with, because this community values articulating a point of view more than most.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are times when having an open mind is bad. In the technical realm, some things are just facts and their opposite is just wrong. Haskell has strong static typing, Java is garbage collected. There is nothing to keep an open mind about except the possibility of fallibility and then only always for edge cases.

There are times when being judgemental is absolutely right - there aren't two sides to genocide or sex slavery. Likewise, downvoting nonsense is perfectly fine regardless of the form in which it is presented. Indeed it is one of the cornerstones of Western moral traditions [see Plato's _Giorgias_ and consider in light of Socrates crimes and trial]. [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1672](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1672)

How we disagree matters, but it also matters what we disagree over. Sure HN could be better. But it pretending that all opinions merit equal consideration is horseshit. One If the biggest problems with the internet is contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism.

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem with questions like this is that, if you actually _did_ get people sharing quality responses of where to go (and there are good alternatives), there's no way to filter who sees those links. In other words, the people who you consider "undesirable" will most certainly see those links, follow them, and some will create accounts at those new places thus bringing the same "problem" to the new site. Are there boards/communities that do what you want? Absolutely! But the members who are cognizant of how "special" that community is will protect it. A lot of people learned how to do this after what happened to the various sites that became popular (like HN). Were things different five years ago? Damn straight. But it happens - sites become popular, people move on, and the cycle either starts over or people lose interest.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, actually. It's called Hacker News. You may have heard of it.

Could it be better? Yes, certainly. But it's much better than Slashdot or (so I hear) Reddit. It's even better than The Economist, which until recently was my gold standard for a mature, non-judgmental board.

<comment><USER4> _Yeah, actually. It 's called Hacker News. You may have heard of it._

What an absolute snot-nose way to talk to people, not just as an opening sentence but in general. There's no need for that here or elsewhere.</comment></comment>


Governments turn tables by suing public records requesters - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/7f6ed0b1bda047339f22789a10f64ac4 <comment><USER2> Many of us love to pat ourselves on the back for all the "free" knowledge and information available thanks to the internet, ignoring that most of what is available is merely entertainment and opinion.

Stories like this are a good reminder that the most valuable information is still being concealed by those with the power. They use their position, money, and authority to protect it at all costs.

We still have a long way to go.

<comment><USER3> That's true, but there's still a ton of useful information freely available out there that gets ignored. For the vast majority of people the problem isn't lack of access to information that the government is concealing, but rather lack of interest in useful information they can access in seconds.

That's not to say that lack of access isn't a major problem - it is - but even when you solve that, you're going to be left with the much bigger lack of interest problem.

<comment><USER4> i don't think the problem is really lack of interest, but form in what is information delivered. if you give me 200 pages text document ful of numbers, nobody will bother to read it, if you make simple infographic based on this document you will see people are interested

<comment><USER5> In other words, if you do the analysis and the work, and provide the opinion and results for free?

<comment><USER6> What you said is technically true, but it is literally impossible for someone to be up to date on every piece of information that affects them. Even just limiting the domain to legal terms, the US government doesn't know how many laws it has. How is someone supposed to "do the analysis and work" on all of that, on all of the terms of services for every single product that exists, all the information pertinent to their health, for companies they never even consented to work with ala Facebook and Equifax data tracking, etc?

It's extremely disingenuous to call people lazy for not analyzing all of that when there is not a single person on the planet who has done so

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lawyer here, but not your lawyer.

Anti-SLAPP laws are pretty limited, but a peer over in /r/law had a phenomenal idea for addressing this, which I'm copying over here. There's a little something called a

"'Motion to dismiss for failure to exhaust administrative remedies.'

The fun part is that this is normally used by government entities against citizens. I just don't see any obvious reason it couldn't be used by a citizen against a government agency that has filed a lawsuit the entire point of which is to thwart the exhaustion of an administrative process.

After all, citizens aren't allowed to sue for open records until the open records process is completed, one way or the other. Why should a government entity be permitted to sue before then?"

</comment><comment><USER8> Misleading title. While technically lawsuit names the requesters as defendants, what is implied - that they are under threat of civil or criminal penalties as retaliation for requesting the info - is not what in fact happens. What in fact happens is that the agencies ask the court to keep the records unpublished. Which sucks, but it's not an action against the requesters - it's just an attempt to keep the records from being disclosed, and in no way threatens people personally.

It indeed sucks that you have to go to court, at your own expense, to defend your lawful right to see information that has to be public. But that has been the case for years, nonprofits like EFF or Judicial Watch has been doing this for years, supported by donations. There's nothing new in this.

<comment><USER9> The article strongly implies that this _is_ a new development. What it talks about is government agencies who start a lawsuit instead of granting or denying a FOIA request.

> State freedom-of-information laws generally allow requesters who believe > they are wrongly denied records to file lawsuits seeking to force their > release. If they succeed, government agencies can be ordered to pay their > legal fees and court costs. Suing the requesters flips the script: Even if > agencies are ultimately required to make the records public, they typically > will not have to pay the other side's legal bills.

<comment><USER8> OK, so that indeed is a new thing - they found a way to deny requests while not getting legal fees shifted on them if they lose eventually. This is indeed tricky and new. I just wish the article made it clearer that this is the reportable bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is plenty of precedence for this in the United States and elsewhere. There are even laws against it in a number of states and countries but it is very difficult to write legislation for and enforce.

This category of abuse of our legal system is called "Strategic lawsuit against public participation" or SLAPP.

More information can be found on the Wikipedia page:

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

I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned in the article. I am not a lawyer, but it would seem that these types of suits would fall squarely in the SLAPP definition.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Secrecy breeds incompetence because where there is failure, failure is kept secret" \- Julian Assange

<comment><USER12> Said to apply also to how Assange runs his own operations internally, according to a variety of accounts.

Ironically enough.

<comment><USER13> We need a Wikileaks for Wikileaks.

<comment><USER14> metaleaks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do > not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not > seek damage awards.

Weird. Don't you at least have to allege that the defendants did something wrong to start a lawsuit? Even if the requested documents don't have to be released, the requesters didn't do anything wrong. I feel like these lawsuits should be dismissed.

<comment><USER16> Probably using the same law to weed out "troublemakers" that ask for a bazillion records simply because they can. A nation of laws and all :) The judges will sort it out and no one can (really) complain.

<comment><USER17> Yeah I've seen this first hand when I was a government contractor. A guy would come into the public information office once a week and request all the data for a thing be printed for him. From 1973-present, every week. It was reams and reams of paper and he could have just asked for the historical data once and the previous week's data each week if he was really interested in anything besides being wasteful. Afaik it was within his right to ask for it and the office had to comply.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't the FOIA allow the government to charge a "reasonable" amount for labor?

<comment><USER17> I'm not really well versed in the legal side. This also was a regular, well used public info resource, not a singular FOIA request. It just happened to be abused by an individual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think there are two cases that are brought up in this article. The first is that some agencies file suit to stop or delay giving out the records that will make them look bad. The second is that the agency has a legitimate concern that if they disclose the info, then they will violate privacy rights and get in big trouble.

Does anyone have suggestions on how to keep the first case from happening while making sure privacy rights are respected?

</comment><comment><USER20> > State freedom-of-information laws generally allow requesters who believe > they are wrongly denied records to file lawsuits seeking to force their > release. If they succeed, government agencies can be ordered to pay their > legal fees and court costs. Suing the requesters flips the script: Even if > agencies are ultimately required to make the records public, they typically > will not have to pay the other side's legal bills.

IANAL, but this seems to me to be a perversion of the intent of the laws. I would assume there are pretty clear statutes that indicate when one party can be forced to pay the legal fees of the other (and that those statutes vary from state to state), but aside from the labels of "Plaintiff" and "Defendant", the roles of "Government" and "Citizen requesting records" seem more natural, and should be what's relevant to the outcome of a contested FOIA request.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is what we did in California

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation#California)

<comment><USER8> Anti-SLAPP is great, but the kind of lawsuit described in the article has nothing to do with it, since the suits do not attack the speech rights but seek to prevent disclosure. That's a completely different (and sort of opposite, since they don't seek to prevent speech but to prevent them from being compelled to speak - or, disclose documents) thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps the solution is for the new policy to be that these datasets be kept online (e.g. gcloud) with public, anonymous read-only users.

Then the entire problem is solved.

This is already done with a number of data-sets and should be the gold- standard.

<comment><USER23> The problem is that at least some of the freedom of information requests conflicted with privacy rights.

<comment><USER24> The solution is called automated anonymisation of data.

<comment><USER25> Oh, in that case.. sounds so simple! Nothing could go wrong here.

<comment><USER24> Definitely complicated, but that should be the gold standard to aim for in the future. A lot is possible that hasn't even been tried yet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can these agencies be counter sued for using tax payer money to sue tax payers seeking "their own" data?

</comment><comment><USER27> This is especially good for those who think government exists to 'serve' them and is their 'servant.' Maybe this will make them wake up to the reality of who is actually the servant (slave). ;)

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh how the turn tables...

</comment><comment><USER29> gotta use the lawyer to file on your behalf, but in any case a more streamlined process could be codified. all persons, natural or artificial, will always have the courts as a remedy.</comment>


World IPv6 Day: Solving the IP Address Chicken-and-Egg Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=484445583919 <comment><USER2> This seems very cool, neat that these companies are taking this upon themselves.

That said, does anyone know the potential risks to these companies for this? I personally tried the facebook IPv6 site and it doesn't work. Are there going to be users who are unable to use these sites on this day?

<comment><USER3> The risk is that ~0.001% of computers won't be able to access Facebook or Google for one day because they think they have working IPv6 but they actually don't.

<comment><USER2> Since I can't access the v6 version of facebook, does that mean that I'm in the 0.001%?

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily; if your computer doesn't have IPv6 _and knows that it doesn't have IPv6_ then you're going to be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's wonderful to see some leadership here. Don't miss the IPv6 address they have... 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Funny (though predictable) that they didn't explicitly state the number 1 downside of large scale NAT: the inability to have a server at home.</comment>


How do we test MVP demand for integrated product? - <AUTHOR>

Some fields such as Human Resource is moving towards integration and value added features on top of it. <comment><USER2> You could try sending an email (requires an active base) proposing the new features/product of your MVP & see who replies.

It costs, but you could also set up a landing page & an Adwords campaign for relevant, but very targeted keywords, and see how it performs.</comment>


Is It Compromised - Instant Password Check - <AUTHOR> http://IsItCompromised.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Made this the other night. It hashes the password before it sends it off to the server, to check to see if it exists in any password lists. Made it for fun, I will open source it too.</comment>


Achieving 10Gbps Line-rate Key-value Stores with FPGAs [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://0b4af6cdc2f0c5998459-c0245c5c937c5dedcca3f1764ecc9b2f.r43.cf2.rackcdn.com/11566-hotcloud13-blott.pdf <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about something similar for most of the year, but not using custom hardware. With a zero-copy database like LMDB combined with userspace networking (e.g. netmap or PACKET_MMAP), it should already be possible to saturate 1Gbit with a single core even with just 100 byte values. With a little more effort, given that network cards commonly support scatter-gather IO, combined with a database (such as LMDB) that avoids copying or (mostly) touching record data, it's easy to imagine a design where most grunt work is kept away from the CPU entirely.

Given a 2x quad core box and a decent network card, I'm pretty sure you could approach or exceed 10Ge without requiring original research or an insane amount of code, especially as record size increases. Software could at least could compete on throughput, although the paper also indicates latency benefits using the FPGA design.

<comment><USER3> It's getting a little stale, but you may find this paper interesting: [http://simula.no/research/nd/publications/Simula.ND.8/simula...](http://simula.no/research/nd/publications/Simula.ND.8/simula_pdf_file)

With anything that provides stable pointers to values like LMDB it should be possible to output to the network extremely efficiently. One thing to keep in mind with LMDB is that it's performance isn't so great with purely random keys such as SHA hashes. I'm fooling around on something similar myself targeting this use, and so far critbit tries are looking good (though I have yet to implement benchmarks I'm confident of).

I haven't dug through the OP paper yet, but my guess is that while the performance numbers are interesting, the cost of the FGPA itself would make it less desirable unless you really did need the latency performance/predictability.

<comment><USER4> One thing to note is that if as the paper says:

"Many well-known web-sites deploy distributed in- memory caches, which are implemented with standard DRAM on a large array of x86 servers, to reduce access load on databases"

then a single server with an FPGA card on it is going to be a lot cheaper than an array of x86 servers. Plus I would imagine that real-estate in a data centre is another significant cost and having one server with an attached FPGA would also be an advantage in this situation

<comment><USER3> That may be true. I think you'd have to look at the numbers to see for sure. The paper uses a virtex 6 with 24GB of DDR on a PCIe card. The evaluation board for one of those is about $2k, though obviously the FGPA itself would hopefully be lower in price. I can't seem to find any open pricing for the virtex line. They say using a larger FGPA would allow addressing more DRAM, but of course, that raises your chip costs as well. You'll have to add to that small volume PCB costs, as well as the cost of the hosting server node.

Compare all that to a $2k 1U Xeon with 32GB of ram and dual 10GbE and the prices aren't that dissimilar. Also one is a research project while the other is a commodity a phone call and fedex away.

My guess would be you'd need the FPGA design in high volume for the costs to work out. So it'd be good as an appliance product for a vendor, but unless you're google/facebook huge trying to build this sort of thing yourself would likely be a boondoggle. The exception is the latency performance: you'd have trouble duplicating that with the commodity server design. So if you're doing HFT or somesuch maybe this is interesting again.

A middle road might be something like the Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes design but with a lot more dram and hacking up the kernel to get you true zero copy io with minimal syscall overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comparing to a TilePRO running memcached is disingenuous – the TilePRO running Linux doesn't have the zero-copy network I/O the GX does, and shuttling packets through Linux adds a ton of context switching overhead.

You could do this – heck, probably even twice this – easily on a processor with an integrated NIC like the TileGX or the Broadcom XLP. Is there a market for these things? Should I quit my job and make this product?

</comment><comment><USER6> "the chosen approach resolves collisions only up to a certain degree. If, however unlikely, a further key maps to the same hash index, then the request simply fails and an appropriate response is generated. We believe this to be an acceptable behaviour for what is essentially equiv-alent to a cache full/miss."

So it's more like a cache than a key/value store? Nothing wrong with that but to me a key/value store implies that data isn't lost in the case of a hash collision. Pretty cool stuff nonetheless.

<comment><USER7> Yes, more memcache like. Its a research project not a production system.

<comment><USER8> What I'm not getting from this is why it's any different from a properly implemented TCAM.

Key/value lookups are something that's done by existing networking hardware very well. There are existing merchant-silicon chipsets that do this on-die very well.

There was once an evolving market for "network processor units" but it looks like that all cooled down. IIRC, there was an effort to do something akin to a database lookup on an NPU, but the tradeoff between flexibility and what the NPUs could provide wasn't amenable to the kind of work required to bring those solutions to market.

<comment><USER9> TCAMs have three problems for such applications: 1) limited key length (usually less than 64 bytes) 2) power-hungry as you are comparing against every key 3) limited size -- try getting a 4GB TCAM!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Mmh, Amazon should offer "hardware accelerated KVS" along with its EC2 instances. Maybe even using ASICs?

It could act like a super super fast memcached.

<comment><USER11> AWS doesn't even offer great hardware-solutions for networking needs, such as there ELB and NAT/PAT offerings. It'd be brilliant if they'd start exposing ASIC-backed instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My only question is when can I use this myself?</comment>


Webinar: How a major AWS user with 1000s of EC2s reduced their bill by 50% - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone,
I'm hosting a webinar this Friday to explain how a major AWS user with 1000s of running EC2s found a 50% reduction in their AWS EC2 bill this year. I have a couple spots left open and wanted to share with the HN community in case anybody might be interested!
Link: https://www.usage.ai/blog#webinar
Direct link: https://forms.gle/Bc7SoqmhWAHx6xYf8 (takes less than 30 seconds)
Thanks! <comment><USER2> They switched to lambda and said "latency shmaytency!"

just kidding... good luck with your webinar :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Filled the form, looking forward to it</comment>


Ask HN: Is running your own code on your servers now "old-school"? - <AUTHOR> Hello,
I spent this last weekend building a little passion project and getting it up and running on a virtual server. I showed it to some people and they seemed to enjoy it, but everyone had a similar question: "Why did you build this yourself when you could have just done X?"
I'm a self-taught hobbyist so I admit my expertise is minimal, but it seems like so many people are turning to push-button "send this company your code and they'll run it for you" hosting solutions instead of just running things themselves. I don't want to badmouth this new practice (we're programmers, new practices are always worth investigating), but I'm just wondering if the classic "my code running on my server" methodology is now considered obsolete?
Thanks for your input. I'm really curious about this. <comment><USER2> I don't think that method is obsolete. If your're a self-taught hobbyist then it makes sense to try to gain experience with hosting a product. I have been doing things that way since I was in college.

However, I still love what the cloud offers and I think that's worth learning too. For your next hobby project you may see the server set up as mundane and time consuming. If so then you could use one of the PaaS/IaaS products that are out there.

Rolling your own is always fun. I have worked in places that have their own data centers or that couldn't go to the cloud for various reasons. These skills are good to know. Also as a dev I still set up my own local servers for development - so you still have chances to learn.

</comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like they didn't understand your goals.

If your goal was to write some software or to learn something, then your approach was sensible.

If your goal had been to use a tool to accomplish XYZ efficiently, then their approach was sensible.

Most people - even software developers - are perfectly happy using software other people wrote or hosted. This allows them to do other things with their time that they find more enjoyable or higher leverage.

There's nothing wrong with the choice you made as long as you're aware of the reasons you made it.

</comment><comment><USER4> New does not mean improved. Sometimes you have to stick to what works and you know.

The serverless hype, yes hype. Really means you are handing control of you application and it's infrastructure over to someone else.

There is no reason why you shouldn't self host. Also keep in mind running in a container on your server is still self hosting.

If you need a a full vm like container then use a vm, if your project can run in a docker container then use docker. However these are considerations for scaling your project not a prequsite how you host or develop your project.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's only obsolete if you are okay with giving up control in exchange for not wanting to master how to build the physical server, how to system engineer provisioning, and how to administer it in addition to developing software on it.

Most people nowadays take the opposite approach, but knowing more and having a deeper understanding of what's required end to end doesn't make your approach wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's by no means obsolete. You could think of it as a matter of constraints.

For the world cup I hosted a results feed in an nginx serving an static file and it worked great, my other option was using S3 which was much more expensive and as I had time and wanted to keep the project's budget low I ended up with a cheap VPS.</comment>