What kind of Web Components do we need? - <AUTHOR> https://hiddedevries.nl/en/blog/2015-07-02-what-kind-of-web-components-do-we-need <comment><USER2> It's funny that web components were already included in Internet Explorer 5 back in 1999! They were called "DHTML Behaviors", but the idea was the same.

Behavior components encapsulated HTML, CSS and script content, and had a .htc ("HTML component") file format so they could be loaded from separate assets:

[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb250408(v=vs.85).a...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/bb250408\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

I guess they didn't see much use in the real world, even though IE had a >90% marketshare for years. That might be a data point in support of the OP's concerns about the usefulness of components.

<comment><USER3> .htc files were a performance nightmare. They were (mis)used for pre IE8 polyfills - often delivered by ad-networks - and of course downloaded and executed in a synchronous blocking way. .htc maybe were a sane idea, but horribly executed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The author seems concerned about creating custom elements for everything a site might need but isn't that what we all want - composability? It's the reason why libraries like React.js and Riot.js are so popular. Breaking everything down into components is highly desirable, and if they're portable like web components are then it's even better.

<comment><USER5> I think the reason React is so popular is due to the developer experience. It's a simpler mental model where you no longer have to worry about your previous state and how to transition the view to the correct current state based on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "But aren't tools the problem?"

No, they aren't.

This entire article read like it was written by someone that has never in their life been involved in the development of a website / app.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this article is thinking too literally and specifically about WebComponents. WebComponents are just macros for HTML. It's neither good nor bad, in the sense that it can or cannot be abused. Of course it can be abused, just like functions or textual include can be abused.

But WebComponents aren't "new elements." They're just composition of XML data. It's more like being able to call a function and return an XML subtree. Composition is a good thing; indeed, greater abstractions for composition are probably the _only_ concern for programming language development. The lack of composition in HTML is _a serious problem_.

<comment><USER8> > _But WebComponents aren 't "new elements."_

How so? What's the difference?

Just like native elements, Custom Elements work with any modern framework. You can just add them to the DOM and they will work fine. They have their own attributes and methods. They also can fire events and react to attribute changes.

> _It 's more like being able to call a function and return an XML subtree._

It's not like that. You just use your Custom Element like any other element. If you want a "video" element, you add a "video" element. If you want a "my- video" element, you add a "my-video" element.

You'd interact with this "my-video" element the same way as you would with a "video" element. All the DOM/event stuff works exactly the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Couldn't this argument apply equally to the way we currently publish reusable components, especially with regards to QA?

The only difference I see with web components is that instead of implementing jquery-datepicker and ember-datepicker and angular-datepicker and react- datepicker, etc..., we can publish a single datepicker that operates underneath instead of within a js framework. Is that a correct assessment? I am not intimately familiar with web components.

Edited to correct some phone auto-correcting.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure this post makes a lot of sense. After using web components in several projects now I have a few gripes with them but nothing that is actually in this post (has the OP used web components in a project yet?).

The gold standard is a great checklist but there are two things to keep in mind about it. First, while it's verbose the vast majority of it are obvious things a web developer would have to do anyway even if it was an Angular directive, an OpenSocial widget, an Ember component, etc. Second, it's important to follow the checklist in its entirety when creating web components for public consumption. For instance if you're building a component for your own web application you may not really care about local effects or some of the other items.

Also the OP says it may not make sense for small sites to use web components but that also doesn't make sense. Here's the quote: "I'm not convinced either, that every company should come up with custom elements for all the things, just because they can. Most elements can be built very well with existing HTML, without costing as much design and development time. I feel many web projects will hardly have a use case for utilising custom elements, or the budget for creating them. They would overcomplicate things. It still feels like eating a 5 course dinner when all you wanted was a salad."

The problem here is that most web components are just composites of plain old HTML and some styling and JavaScript to create a re-usable piece of a layout; this means they can be done "without costing as much design and development time" but the OP purports the exact opposite. I'm not sure why (perhaps the OP equates custom component to replacing a browser native component like a drop down? Though if so that's a very specific and specialized, custom component and doesn't really fit the wording used).

There are plenty of issues with web components. Speed and the insane amount of additional connections they require are the big ones in my opinion (yeah you can combine them but there isn't very good tooling around that; even if you're using Polymer vulcanizing requires specific pathing and doesn't always work even on Google's own components) but this article really only raises valid concerns if you're going to be publishing generic components for public consumption but even think I think it far overstates the issues in that area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply, BinaryIdiot.

The gold standard also ensures accessibility (the responsibility for accessibility is transferred from browser maker to developer). I suspect many developers, even Google in some of their examples, will forget to add it or think it doesn't apply to them/their app, I find this a huge concern (the web until now embraced accessibility as a universal value).

Web Components are not 'just' composites of plain old HTML, some styling and JavaScript, they require tooling and polyfilling (and some polyfilling will make apps slow for users that don't have the latest tech). This is potentially bad for new people in the industry (have to learn many tools before they can get started), and bad for users (as their device might be toos low).

<comment><USER10> Hmm it seems HN lost my reply. Odd. Anyway...

> The gold standard also ensures accessibility (the responsibility for > accessibility is transferred from browser maker to developer). I suspect > many developers, even Google in some of their examples, will forget to add > it or think it doesn't apply to them/their app, I find this a huge concern > (the web until now embraced accessibility as a universal value).

So there are a few things to keep in mind about the gold standard. First, it's not entirely accessibility related and I would argue it's mostly a best- practices check-list. When you look through the gold standard I would say a large majority of the items are things you need to take care of regardless if you're creating a web component, a simple composite of HTML tags, an angular directive, ember component, jQuery plug-in or even an opensocial widget. For instances you always need to be mindful of your dependencies, load order and local side affects when giving anything to the general public that you hope to be used.

Yes there are a handful of things that you need to do to make web components behave a little nicer in web browsers as far as accessibility goes but the majority of those items need to be applied regardless of how you break up your code so this argument isn't very interesting or useful, in my opinion.

Second, depending on your use case you may not even care about many of those items. Sure in an ideal world we would all care about every item no matter what but the truth is if you're developing components to simply organize your code in a small web app or just for your organization you may not care at all about side affects or dependencies and I think that's fair; not everything needs to stand up to the rigor of something being related for the general populous to use.

I will agree that Google does not always follow their own guidelines with this type of thing, however.

> Web Components are not 'just' composites of plain old HTML, some styling and > JavaScript, they require tooling and polyfilling (and some polyfilling will > make apps slow for users that don't have the latest tech). This is > potentially bad for new people in the industry (have to learn many tools > before they can get started), and bad for users (as their device might be > toos low).

Actually web components are just composites of plain old HTML, styling and JavaScript. They do not require any specific tooling (in fact the only tooling I've seen or used for web components is Polymer's vulcanize and it's absolutely terrible; I've never seen it work correctly on the first shot) and they only require polyfills if you want to use them in non-evergreen browsers (Firefox and Chrome mostly support what you need today). Regardless of the technicalities I do agree that web components can be slow and it's one of my gripes about them though I really don't know what tools you're talking about being required to start.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Being able to play video inside an SVG, then clipping the video by an arbitrary path, etc.

<comment><USER12> Web Components are not needed for that. SVG2 will include the video element [1], just like html, and it should be possible to clip, mask, filter etc. it.

It may take several years before that happens, but it should be coming.

[1] [http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/embedded.html#VideoElement](http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG2/embedded.html#VideoElement)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So we've come full circle back to XML? (And that was a good thing.)</comment>


Sails.js: A new realtime, Express based MVC framework for Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GK-tFvpIR7c

<comment><USER2> The realtime MVC space has been exciting to watch develop.</comment>


Ask HN: How would you host a static site in 2020? - <AUTHOR> Yesterday I submitted a post I'd written about moving from Google Kubernetes Engine to Netlify (see HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21872910). In the comments, many people suggested alternatives they thought would've been better for my situation that I'd either never heard of or didn't realize were good options for my use case - Google's Cloud Run and App Engine, Firebase, AWS Lambda + S3 + Cloudfront CDN to name a few.<p>So I'm curious - if you were going to host your static site in 2020, how would you do it? <comment><USER2> If it's actually just static, S3 + cloudfront unless there's any reason to do anything more. It's a bit of "nobody's been fired for ..." and a bit of "cheap enough to not think about".

</comment><comment><USER3> I work for ZEIT ([https://zeit.co/home](https://zeit.co/home)) the creators of next js and the best place to host your static content. It'd be awesome if you give our platform a try and help you out to host your content the best way possible. You shouldn't have to run containers or anything complex nowadays just to host a single static website.

</comment><comment><USER4> S3, cloudfront, route53 for the hosting. Your text editor of choice for generating. Git for version control :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Rather depends how big and busy it is?

earth.org.uk is script/make generated, pregenerates Gzipped and other low- bandwidth versions of objects, and runs on plain old Apache on a Raspberry Pi. Response time is typically very good.</comment>


Hubl.in, free and open source videoconference - <AUTHOR> https://hubl.in

<comment><USER2> So pleasant, it's working on my smartphone without having to create any account nor install plugins! sweet service!

</comment><comment><USER3> Simple and so efficient at the same time. I really enjoy using it !

</comment><comment><USER4> Simple, fast, modern; i will reuse my webcam now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Easy to use and efficient.

</comment><comment><USER6> Works fine, and simple to use</comment>


Show HN: Which stores are open near you? - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whats-open-nearby/id492301344

<comment><USER2> How did you collect all the data you needed for this?

<comment><AUTHOR> To explain the tech behind this: What we do is a little different than most other services.

While Yelp, Google and others provide business hours, they're mostly user- submitted which means that somebody has to report an error before the hours can be updated - it also means that people can report anything as store hours even though they might be wrong.

We are getting almost all our business hours directly from the stores and sync with them weekly, which (hopefully) increases the quality of the data quite a bit.</comment></comment>


Notes on Data Structures and Programming Techniques - <AUTHOR> http://cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/223/notes.html <comment><USER2> Is teaching people data structures and programming techniques in C really useful today? Yes I know C is used in many things still and in Linux. But there is far more variety in what people are paying programmers to use these days, most of them OO or Functional in nature, neither of which C is. Maybe there is no other common denominator language one could use that is more generally applicable? If you ignore Objective-C I haven't used plain C for anything at all since 1999 even though I used it for more than a decade from the mid 80's on as my only language.

<comment><USER3> I don't know of a better way to teach people how pointers work, and all the other low-level details that higher-level languages gloss over. Day to day, I agree, you're probably not going to want to be fiddling raw pointers unless you have to, but for pedadogic purposes, it's worth knowing. Particularly with so many languages building on C and C-isms.

<comment><USER4> > "I don't know of a better way to teach people how pointers work, and all the > other low-level details that higher-level languages gloss over"

I definitely agree, but I'm not sure that a data structures/algorithms course is the best place to be teaching that. I don't know anything about Yale's CS curriculum, but I'd hope there's at least one systems programming course in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> DSA problem set: [http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of- problems/](http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of-problems/)

</comment><comment><USER6> UC Berkeley's class: [http://datastructur.es/sp17/](http://datastructur.es/sp17/)

<comment><USER7> This semester's: [http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/fa17/](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61b/fa17/)

Like to mention this is with Java, and not C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been pure C developer for 5+ years (worked with codebase of ~2.5 million lines of code) and I took a quick look (just out of curiosity) at the content and one thing immediately strikes me:

[http://cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/223/notes.html#What....](http://cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/223/notes.html#What.27s_wrong_with_C)

 _7.1 What 's wrong with C_

a) _C doesn 't have a garbage collector_

Disagree that's it's wrong. If you code is well structured, then it's no big problem to avoid memory leaks. On top of that, you can use RAII if you are willing to use C-extensions like this one:

[https://lwn.net/Articles/589433/](https://lwn.net/Articles/589433/)

Garbage collector just helps you to write _semi-workable_ messy code (a dream of industrial developers).

b) _C doesn 't support any kind of polymorphism_

If you use type cast in well structured code, it's no big problem.

c) _C doesn 't have exceptions_

This may be a bit tricky but you still can use exceptions in C using _longjmp /setjmp_:

[http://www.di.unipi.it/~nids/docs/longjump_try_trow_catch.ht...](http://www.di.unipi.it/~nids/docs/longjump_try_trow_catch.html)

Although ___cleanup___ extension doesn't work in this case.

It's worth to take a look at this stack unwinding library:

[http://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/](http://www.nongnu.org/libunwind/)

Quote:

 _With libunwind, it is possible to implement an extremely efficient version of setjmp(). Effectively, the only context that needs to be saved consists of the stack-pointer(s)._

In general, if you look at _C as a high level assembler_ and willing to write or use existing low-level framework for "meta-language" primitives (like pointer virtualization), then you can write nice programs in your "meta- language".

For example, I wrote some project for fun using pure C with bare minimum libraries. And I needed to make sure that I could detect the following bug as soon as possible:

1\. Object _X_ is created and owned by some code _OWNER_X_ ;

2\. Pointer to this object _X_ is passed to some code _USER_OF_X_ ;

3\. Object _X_ is freed in _OWNER_X_ ;

4\. New object _Y_ is created in _OWNER_X_ which happens to have the same address as recently freed object _X_ ;

5\. Because of some bug _USER_OF_X_ still uses pointer to object _X_ ;

I wanted _USER_OF_X_ to fail on asserts as soon as possible if this happens. It would be hasty bug and hard to detect in unprepared code if _X_ and _Y_ happens to be the same type. When people are saying that it's nearly impossible to detect such bugs in C, they just don't consider using framework which cleverly detects this issue.

By the way, this is my implementation pointer virtualization which helps to detect this sorts of bugs:

[https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/main.h](https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/main.h)

Look at _PTRID_.

[https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/linked_...](https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/linked_list.h)

Look at usage of _PTRID_ in _LL_CHECK_

This is how I use them together:

[https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/network...](https://github.com/hal9000xp/euclid/blob/master/core/network.c)

<comment><USER9> When do these frameworks become language extensions? There are always caveats to assertions about language features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read the Dynamic Programming section & I must say that it is very well explained.

Found a small issue. In Binary search section, it says ```{.c include=examples/binarySearch/binarySearch.h}```

Instead of the original code. I guess the page generator messed up a little.

<comment><USER11> Its messed up in a few places; the vim command descriptions for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone know about a similar tutorial that's based around Rust?

</comment><comment><USER13> good grief can we not have even a rudimentary CSS file to make this look at least a little bit readable?

<comment><USER14> I prefer this. It's perfectly readable, scalable, and in the worst case I can apply my own styling.

I'm on an iPad, fwiw. Ironically one that usually gets some of the worst styling due to someone else's opinion of readable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks like the class I was hoping to get when I took algorithms and data structures, rather than a semester of CLRS being scrawled on the blackboard every lecture, mountains of proofs, and 0 lines of code.

<comment><USER15> Not that you are wrong for you opinion, but I feel differently. My data structures class was all programming, essentially just the professor writing code on the board for a linked list / trie / etc. after briefly describing it conceptually, and then having to implement the data structure and perhaps solve a problem with it for homework. My algorithms classes were all proof based / theoretical (the most applied problems asking you to come up with a "novel" algorithm to solve something, but still written). I felt cheated out of an actual class once I realized my data structures class could have been designed the same way. Coding the algorithms is usually the trivially boring or frustrating part to me; it's the actual design or concepts that I enjoyed.

<comment><USER16> Couldn't agree more. The data structures class I'm taking currently (which is unfortunately a prerequisite for most other CS classes) is simply a bunch of trivial programming exercises that take almost no effort to do. While I understand that everyone has different preferences and is at different levels of comfort with the concepts, I feel that a proof-based class would be much more fun.

<comment><USER17> Sounds like universities would benefit from having separate "learning tracks" for students of varying ability like in many high schools.

Or more realistically, taking a more layered approach to each course. So you could have the basic "code algorithm X to pass the tests" level (the kind of work most people will be doing later anyway), and then the "let's prove properties of X / come up with an alternative with the same properties" for people who can pass the first part in their sleep.

The best courses I've taken work like that already, plenty of extra challenges if you finish early. But it takes a dedicated instructor to make it work, and most of them unfortunately seem dedicated to getting by with minimum effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What software did they use to generate this page? My first guess was org-mode, but it doesn't look like that. Maybe markdown + pandoc?

<comment><USER18> Ooop yep, pandoc. Don't know what the source format was yet though.

        <meta name="generator" content="pandoc" /></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you get started in freelancing? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to get into freelancing, but google is not being very helpful. I understand all the stuff about how to work with a client and what to charge and all that sort of stuff. The thing I can't figure out is how do you get the first job and the one after that? Where do you look to find these things? Do you approach potential clients? Or do you hang out your shingle and wait for them to come to you? <comment><USER2> There is no magic answer to this. You are just like 1000s of others who are trying to get a piece of the freelance pie. So you need to differentiate yourself.

Summary

You need to know how to sell and market yourself.

Some steps:

1\. Build an online presence. Start a blog, a simple website whatever. Write about topics you want to focus on to get clients. For example, lets say you want to find clients in a specific domain say online learning. Write blog posts on that topic, If you cannot do it yourself, try to find someone who can write for you (not ideal but better than nothing)

2\. Inbound marketing (related to Step 1 above). It is a lot better if clients can find you than you finding them. Take this free course from hubspot (no affiliation, just a happy student)

[https://academy.hubspot.com/certification](https://academy.hubspot.com/certification)

3\. Share code with public. Get a public github profile and do stuff there (build projects. Anything. small or large)

4\. Build an audience. Start a youtube channel. Record screencasts of what you know. Anything. E.g. How to install WordPress on your computer ? Plenty of videos out there but people always like quality stuff

5\. Join existing open source projects. Become a contributor. Fix some bugs. Send a pull request.

6\. Create an online course and offer for free on udemy. Join freenode and offer help on topics you are good at

There are many more but this is to give you an idea. Rinse and repeat. Unfortunately in 2016, you cannot just get freelance jobs by posting a profile unless you want to compete on the low end sites like upwork etc for $10/Hour.

</comment><comment><USER3> What not to do: \- Hang a shingle and wait for them to come to you.

What to do: \- Approach potential clients \- Reach out to people, start getting used to it. Even if it doesn't go anywhere, get in the habit.

\- Reach out to old colleagues for no reason than catching up. \- End goal: Build relationships. Build Trust.

As far as where to get your first clients, I've had real world success with the following methods:

\- Mailing lists A lot of times people ask on mailing lists when they need help with something. Every once in a while, you'll get an email from someone with some work they need done. If you've been part of the mailing list a long time, you can approach them as: Hey, I'm xyz. I've been part of mailing-A for long time. I am (insert why you're suited to help) Ask to move the discussion offline to a phone call.

\- Meetups Meeting someone here already shows you care/know the topic at hand. You can see them face to face. Socialize without agenda. Towards the end and beginning, listen for announcements for work/jobs. Approach them after the meeting.

\- Recruitment agencies. Yes, I know you said freelancing but these agencies are hubs of work to be done. It's just a matter of how you position your relationship with client and recruitment agency. It's a good way to expand your network circle. Best time to make a sale is when you don't need to make a sale.

      It will be easier to approach potential clients in similar industries with
      "Hey I work for client-a in your industry. I see you do great at X. I'd like to
       reach out and pick your brain if possible."

      This will open the conversation.

I'd approach freelancing with the mindset of: "Hey I'm good at ABC. I can help you with XYZ. Are we a fit? Is it worth us having a conversation to find out?"

My background/experience: I have more work than I can handle at the moment. (that's with only a handful of clients as I'm a 1man band.) Had to figure out the business parts myself through trial and error.

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/category/start- freelancing...](https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/category/start-freelancing/) is a good place to start. No affiliation, though have purchased some of his products in the past and they were superb.

Specifically to your question regarding first client -> [https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/3-easy-steps-to-finding- yo...](https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/3-easy-steps-to-finding-your-first- client/)

<comment><USER5> +1 All the material I've seen from Brennan was excellent. And there's a lot of good free advice on his blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This will basically be a custom job. Every freelancer does it differently.

It would help to start by putting together a portfolio and then putting the word out that you are available. This can be started with just putting a blurb in your HN profile and on social media, where it seems appropriate.

That will not likely magically solve your problem. But it starts the ball rolling.

You can also participate in HN's monthly "Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?" post on the first of every month. Keep your eye out for the next one.

<comment><USER3> I'm interested to find out if anyone has actually gotten work through HN's posts of "freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?"

I see a lot of "I'm looking for work" in these type of posts.

<comment><USER7> I got a quick and simple job from one posted by Whoishiring. It was "looking for work" or something similar. It was a fun and easy task, I'd definetly do it again if the price was right.

(one sad thing is they paid me in CAD not USD.)

<comment><USER3> To clarify: Did you put that you were looking for work? And someone contacted you off it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently made the switch to being a freelancer. However, I was a bit forced into it as the company I worked for split and we got acquired. I was technically a contractor there but there were some differences and it was not the best place for me. But, I digress.

First off, I had to be convinced. Having people who believed in me was a huge help. Granted, the people who were encouraging me to do this were also looking to work with me, they had some incentive to do this.

Second, I had some great relationships established. People that knew me and wanted to work with me specifically. It took a long time to get into positions to create those relationships and a bit longer for them to turn into something positive, but building (and maintaining relationships) is key.

Third, the thing that sealed the deal for me was going to a local 2-day conference where a lot of people were looking for work. I spent about $300 in travel and expenses for that conference (and I had a session there too). It generated some significant business for me and I'm still working with and talking to people I met there every couple of weeks.

Lastly, I had faith. Yes, I mean in the religious sense. At the end of the day, I believe that God provides for me and my family and that I am ultimately a steward of the people and projects that come to me. Where some might attribute things to "fate" or "happenstance"—I've gone from "don't know what I'm doing in 2 weeks" to "booked out for the next 2-3 months" in a matter of days. Plan and consider the future but also realize that you are only in control of what you do and how you treat the projects and clients you have.

</comment><comment><USER9> Back in a day when I was freelancing, I joined local Chamber of Commerce. That brought me more business than anything else. It was mostly simple WordPress/informational websites for local businesses.

</comment><comment><USER10> Everything I know about business could fit in a thimble, but I do know this: don't wait for anyone to come to you.

</comment><comment><USER11> You need to be proactive, contact first, offer your services, explain how you can help with their tasks, cold emails, etc...

Do not get into trap of freelancing sites such as oDesk, toptal, .... they are the middle-man, you should eliminate the middle-man. Always contact potential clients directly.

<comment><USER12> I've heard Toptal isn't as bad as oDesk/Elance/Upwork. Why do you think it's bad? I'm trying to avoid the same bad experience I had with Upwork.</comment></comment>


Give Your Intellect a Boost — Just Say Yes to Doing the Right Drugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/gs_05drugs

<comment><USER2> Finally, Wired Magazine lives up to its name!

</comment><comment><USER3> I have always been fascinated by the laundry list of side effects for prescription drugs in commercials, but this one clearly takes the cake ... Angina, nausea, wheezing, belching, coma

</comment><comment><USER4> In summation: "What about all the _good_ things Meth has done?"

<comment><USER5> well... off the top of my head, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Mathematical_wo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s#Mathematical_work)

<comment><USER6> Did he take meth or just amphetamines (Benzedrine or whatever)? Meth is pretty nasty:

[http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=meth+bugs](http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=meth+bugs)

I'm surprised they didn't list Heroin or LSD or pot, which seemed to help artists. Seemed, anyway.

<comment><USER7> Some people will claim that psychedelics improve creativity. I am one of them. But psychedelics improve creativity by giving people synesthesia, providing years worth of very clear detached associative thinking in hours, and by cleaning out the crud in your psychology so psychological defense mechanisms don't stop you from seeing clearly. I think psilocybin is a better choice for using psychedelics for creativity than LSD, because psilocybin lasts half as long, and so the experience is less likely to be stressful.

Pot changes the perception of time and space, which changes the perception of music, for the better. As Bill Hicks says, if you don't think drugs have done good things, take all your CD's and burn them.

With heroin and successful artists, I think a different type of thing is going on. I think people who are highly sensitive are both better artists, and also more likely to carry around pain and to be aware of the pain around them. They are drawn to heroin because they carry more of the pain around them, and they are good artists because they are highly sensitive. Some people experience vivid musical hallucinations while on opiates, but one has to be predisposed to it. The composer Berlioz used a lot of opium remedies for tooth pain, for example, and much of his music is influenced by musical hallucinations while on opiates. Or, the seventies.

Lest I sound too much like some Timothy Leary hack, let me also say drugs can only enhance your creativity if they do not become such a big part of your life that you act on the ideas you have. Let me also say that creativity requires no drugs. It's perfectly doable to be maximally creative and not use any drugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> DMT, the guys who won the nobel for discovering the DNA molecule admitted to using it and said it's not that uncommon in the scientific community.</comment>


Device Nags You to Sit Up Straight - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323585604579010720828024230.html

<comment><USER2> $150 is a bit pricey. Have you tried it?</comment>


The Search for Neutrons That Leak into Our World from Other Universes - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-search-for-neutrons-that-leak-into-our-world-from-other-universes-318bfff97f0f <comment><USER2> This is pretty close to the premise of the Isaac Asimov novel _The Gods Themselves_. In that story, humans create an infinite source of energy by trading material with a parallel universe in which the nuclear strong force is slightly stronger than ours. (Or is it infinite...)

<comment><USER3> i read it in the way that another universe is the ultimate "landfill" to export your entropy.

Which actually brings up the dark matter/energy - can't it be just the stuff leaking (or being "dumped/exported") from a nearby brane?

<comment><USER4> In string theory isn't Gravity the only force that can go across branes? I thought that might explain:

-why gravity's relatively weak (distributed) compared to the other three forces, as well as

-dark matter that we have an otherwise hard time observing apart from gravity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No mention was made specifically of how to rule out spontaneous pair production, although I'm guessing it would be the same answer as how they rule out cosmic sources? Would spontaneous pair production be dependent on anything external at all?

<comment><USER6> Getting rid of cosmic ray neutrons is a ridiculously hard problem that they are going to deal with mostly by looking at how the neutron detection rate varies as they change the distance between the detector and the reactor core.

The most pernicious source for experiments like this are "fireball neutrons" that are generated from a high-energy muon producing an event that blows up a nucleus in the surrounding rock (via an intermediate pion shower IIRC). This gives you a source of neutrons with energies well up into the 100's of MeV, which will merrily pass through metres of shielding, and a few of them are bound to thermalize in the detector, although most will pass right through.

They've obviously run the numbers on all this (these are very well-known problems for detector design) and decided they can discriminate against backgrounds of this type sufficiently well to make the experiment worthwhile, which all else being equal it certainly is: the possibility of putting brane- world theories to the test is simply too delightful to pass up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are they talking about Superstring Theory branes?

Also, this: "So any change in this gravitational field should influence the rate at which the neutrons leak in and out of our brane."

How can this happen in a unverse that obeys both the relativisc principle and the gravity acceleration equivalence? Will different observers see a different number of particles written at the detector display?

</comment><comment><USER8> Dumb question: how do they distinguish between neutrons tunneling to another brane and back, and 'quantum tunneling'?

<comment><USER6> Quantum tunneling can only happen over a very short range, on the order of the de Broglie wavelength for the particle, which will be a subatomic distance for interesting neutron energies. They are measuring neutrons that pass through/around metres of material, so tunneling is unimportant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always find it funny how news articles are able to take the most basic (but interesting) type of work in physics and turn into the craziest headlines.

I don't really fancy their usage of "universe" though, since it's normally defined to be all that exists.

<comment><USER10> > _defined to be all that exists_

"universe" may be as shortsighted as our ancestors calling our favorite space- faring rock "uniearth". Such a sibylline definition falls on its head as soon as one tries to define "existence" and finds it ultimately bound to lowly concepts of space or time. What to say of a "uni"-verse that is a constant collapse of probabilistic functions, where every possible permutation simultaneously exists until observed? Let's be humble, and cut some slack at putting words on what we're looking at, because we're really not quite so sure.

<comment><USER11> Or naming the atom "atom".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And right now, Philipp Pullman is feeling happy and doesn't know why.

</comment><comment><USER13> What would be the ramifications of a positive result?</comment>


LG G Watch - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=lg_g_watch_black <comment><USER2> Unfortunately this is exactly what I feared smart watches would look like. It looks like a house arrest ankle monitor more than a watch. If they can get cut the thickness by a factor of 3 and the width/height by about half, I would be interested, but as it stands there is no way I'm walking around with a chunky box strapped to my wrist.

<comment><USER3> You've seen this, right? [https://moto360.motorola.com/](https://moto360.motorola.com/) Although not that that thin, it does look like an actual watch and not a house arrest ankle monitor, IMO.

<comment><USER2> I'm male and not particularly small, 6'2" 195lb. The moto360 is specced at 1.8" diameter (unclear if that is the screen or the entire device). Either way, the top of wrist is 2" across, so yea, it's better, but your still talking about a device that is huge in comparison to my wrist. I can't imagine how any of the current generation of devices are even thinking about the smaller end of the male population let alone the average wrist of the female population.

<comment><USER4> I agree that this generation of watches is a little too big for me to want to wear one. But there are plenty of men who wear non-electronic watches _much_ bigger than these for the sake of fashion and status. Check out this NYTimes article which discusses a U-Boat watch that is 2.5 inches in diameter: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/fashion/mens-watches- keep-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/fashion/mens-watches-keep-getting- bigger.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER5> To me, that looks extremely ridiculous, including on Tom Cruise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing them swipe through the interface in the demos makes me think this is another pre-iPad time (where everyone knew it was coming and competitors rushed their products to market). If the only value-add is having a wearable notification viewer (plus some other features that are a subset of smartphones), it's not going to be successful.

It just feels like anything Google had an existing service/product for, like Google Now, got juryrigged on to the wrist. Rather than actually figuring out the jobs-to-be-done that a wearable can uniquely solve.

<comment><USER7> It just seems like a second screen for your phone. I can't imagine anyone, Apple included, making something that isn't just that, a second phone screen/interface. Maybe my imagination isn't big enough, maybe the actual tech isn't there yet. This segment, touch-screen wearables, doesn't excite me yet.

<comment><USER8> I hope it goes the other direction - your phone, tablet, tv etc evolve into dumb screens for your watch, which will quickly if not already be powerful enough to output movies, books, apps, work etc onto your preferred display.

<comment><USER9> Watches have tiny batteries, or they are huge.

<comment><USER8> That's true right now but massive improvements will be made in the near future, on top of that when you look at screens being independent of the device you're eliminating the biggest power drain from the watch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks interesting, but for me personally, I prefer mechanical watches. Watches are jewellery (since clocks and screens are all around us, at every minute of the day), we already carry smartphones, a smartwatch seems superfluous...

Not to mention, even if I did want a smartwatch, this one is too ugly to wear. And not ugly in a cool way either...

</comment><comment><USER11> No pictures? A page entirely filled with renders doesn't instill confidence. This is something I'd expect from a kickstarter campaign, not a big manu.

</comment><comment><USER12> > Sorry! Devices on Google Play is not available in your country yet.

Bummer. Can't see anything.

<comment><USER13> Sorry this is not expertly done, I took screenshots and stuck it together in mspaint but it should give you a pretty good idea :)

[http://imgur.com/947pJlM](http://imgur.com/947pJlM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fellow I/O attendees, do you plan on choosing the LG G or the Samsung Galaxy Gear as your take home device? I already use an S4 for my phone so I'm inclined to go with the Galaxy Gear. But I think the LG G is a little more aesthetically pleasing. Thoughts/opinions?

<comment><USER15> Note that the Gear has a heart rate monitor, while the G does not. I think I will choose the LG for the aesthetics, though.

<comment><USER16> LG, looks better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I know this is completely unfounded, but the tagline "Always with you, always- on." is a little unnerving in this context.

But this is coming from a guy with a bit of Post-it on all the front-facing cameras he owns.

</comment><comment><USER18> The price tag seems a bit steep but this is the sort of device I would like to have when riding my bicycle or running in the city. Something light, that has Google now so I can send a text to my friends without taking my phone out of my bag.

This said, I share a criticism with some in this thread: The watch is not exactly appealing to my eye.

<comment><USER19> It'd be nice if they added a way to spawn Android Auto on your device's display. Then, you could mount it to your handlebars and have a glanceable voice-activated UI while riding as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ordered one. Supposedly ships next week though I'll probably not get it before the 4th.

I decided to embrace the rectangle. Round UI is going to be tough to do right, except for UI built for roundness. Text is too rectilinear for roundness. Charging two things on the nightstand isn't going to be more onerous than charging one thing.

<comment><USER19> Cables and outlet splitters everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great looking design, just not interested in ANOTHER gadget that needs to be recharged daily.

<comment><USER22> I was curious too about the battery life and then pleasantly surprised.

"When asked about battery life, reps told me that it should last 36 hours in always-on state, and even longer if you opt to turn the screen off -- there's a companion app that you can download onto your Android device, and it gives you a few settings."

From [http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/25/lg-g-watch-hands- on/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/25/lg-g-watch-hands-on/)

<comment><USER23> My Citizen Eco-Drive gets charged through solar power in daily use. It is one less think I need to charge on a daily basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm mostly just disappointed that this tiny peripheral costs more than the last few phones I've purchased. Nexus 4 and Moto G have destroyed my expectations. For that price I'd expect it to be a fully-functional phone.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'd probably add it to my basket if it were under $120-150 and looked really nice. For $230 I can deal with the minor inconvenience of taking my phone out of my pocket.

</comment><comment><USER26> Meh.

[http://www.iconbit.com/products/108011/](http://www.iconbit.com/products/108011/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Just my 2 cents. The carousel presentation for both smart watches are really disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you have to turn it on to see time or does it wake up on certain hand movement?

<comment><USER3> From the article: "The G Watch never sleeps. Its Always-on display allows you to check the time and see new information at a glance without touching it."</comment></comment>


How Dwarf Mongooses Respond to New Group Members - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/science/mongooses-immigration-communication.html <comment><USER2> > Stop right there. Repeat after me: Dwarf mongooses are not people.

They say this several times while continuing with their inappropriate immigration allegory.

<comment><USER3> Actually, after that sentence they do a completely straight explanation of an interesting research project, and don't mention the potential analogy until the end, where they again go out of their way to say that isn't the point.</comment></comment>


2017 Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real-world-cryptography-max-levchin <comment><USER2> Not OP, but I sense perhaps a limitation of HN; articles with comments where the _comment_ is the submission get conflated with submissions about the article itself.

(EDIT: the submission's URL has now been changed from a particular reddit comment at [https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY) to a different announcement about the prize. The rest of my post as it originally stood follows.)

Reproducing the subject matter of the submission for discussion's sake:

 _dionyziz says:_

 _I think Moxie decided not to be recorded for his acceptance speech. He said something very nice during his speech however, and I 'll try to phrase it like he did:

If you watch videos of politicians giving speeches in the 1930's, you observe the fascist leaders who gladly accept an applause from the audience because they have earned it. They feel they are responsible for it, that they are the creators of history. On the contrary, if you observe a communist leader, they will applaud with the audience in every chance. This is because they have a different belief system, that of historical materialism, that history is a force of its own, unstoppable and inevitable, that drives what is happening in the world equipped with the momentum of what has happened in the past. These leaders feel they are simply the bearer of history, the tool that history chose to run its course, so they applaud together with the audience for history.

Similarly, today, we have a similar force, and that is technology. I once had the chance to meet Mark Zuckerberg. When I met him, a thought occurred to me: I could, right there... kill him. [audience laughs] I never thought I would get so close. But would that really change anything? Us technologists are the bearers of technological momentum. We make things happen, because the time has come for them to happen. And now is the time for strong encryption and crypto.

[audience applauds together with Moxie]_

<comment><USER3> I shouldn't judge based on a remembered, secondhand, out of context quote, but this sounds kind of... pretentious.

<comment><USER4> You might have read it backwards: the message was very humble. Moxie was saying that he didn't deserve credit for what he had built, because if he had not built it someone else would have. So his work was best thought of as a product of history, rather than a product of Moxie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin. Most of the novel cryptography in Signal Protocol is Trevor's; it's good for people to know who he is.

Reprising a previous thread:

The prizes went to Joan Daemen, for AES and SHA-3 (on stage, Levchin pointed out that his interest in cryptography had been piqued by a xeroxed copy of DES when he was in school, and that it was an honor to present an award to one of the people who replaced the DES), and --- more notably, I think --- to Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin for their work on Signal.

Last year's winners were Phil Rogaway (a cryptographer of repute comparable to that of Daemen) and the miTLS team (of Triple Handshake, SMACK, FREAK, Logjam, and SLOTH fame).

<comment><USER6> Trevor Perrin also went on and created the Noise protocol framework (of which some protocols are quite similar to Signal).

<comment><USER7> Interesting, didn't know he was also involved with that one.

Has anyone seen a table comparing Noise, Axoltl & OTRv4?

<comment><USER5> Those aren't comparable.

Noise is a metaprotocol, a framework of patterns for building secure transports.

Axolotl is a cryptographic ratchet construction, for continuously modifying encryption keys as messages are transmitted.

OTRv4 is a complete message cryptosystem, like Signal Protocol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Always wondered how Trevor Perrin looks like:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A9Eto9iqww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A9Eto9iqww)

</comment><comment><USER5> Mods: a more appropriate title is "Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin win 2017 RWC Levchin Prize for Signal", and a more appropriate link would be to pretty much anything but an individual Reddit comment; how about this one?

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real- world...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/2017-levchin-prize-real-world- cryptography-max-levchin)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! We've updated the link from [https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5m0zpo/moxie_marlinspike_receives_rwc_levchin_price_2017/dc11s2h/?sh=c7c0de08&st=IXZ2E3ZY) and the title from "Moxie Marlinspike Receives RWC Levchin Prize 2017 for Signal Protocol Invention".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> should be "RWC Levchin Prize" (the reddit article is also incorrect).

</comment><comment><USER11> While applauding the stated mission of Open Whisper Systems to make cryptography usable by large numbers of people I think it is fair to hold Moxie & Co. to the same high standards to which they held PGP: [https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/](https://moxie.org/blog/gpg-and-me/)

        The journalists who depend on it struggle with it
        and often mess up ("I send you the private key to
        communicate privately, right?"), the activists who
        use it do so relatively sparingly ("wait, this thing
        wants my finger print?"), and no other sane person
        is willing to use it by default. Even the projects
       that attempt to use it as a dependency struggle.

Breaking this up into constituent parts and trying to guess whether those standards are met seems to leave us somewhere in this territory:

1) Journalists communicating with WhatsApp struggle with it and mess up.

Given the confusion around under what circumstances one can communicate securely with WhatsApp ("Is it OK if I have two checkmarks? Is it OK because Facebook would never let a government have access to the RedPhone part?")

2) Activists who use WhatsApp do so relatively sparingly. I have no idea on this one. I hope they're using Signal and/or GPG with all their attendant bother, complexity and confusion though.

3) No other sane person is willing to use WhatsApp by default. Hmmm.. more confusing value judgements. Is someone that uses a communication method open to abuse by corporations and governments "sane"?

4) Dependency struggle. AFAICS no other projects can piggy-back off WhatsApp because it's proprietary and closed. So the user base can't scratch their own itches. OK, so what about Signal? Sounds like the dependency on Google Cloud Messages and Play Services can be hacked around with great difficulty.

I dunno. Fair play to Moxie and Perrin for what they've done, but so far GPG looks like a better bet for actual secure end-to-end communication, using an already existing, widespread distribution mechanism which is widespread and redundant: email.

Reports of GPG's death may have been grossly exaggerated.

<comment><USER5> Can you find a single practicing cryptographic engineer who will go on the record as saying that PGP (in any of its incarnations) and email is better than Signal Protocol for message encryption?

<comment><USER12> If one is going to be paranoid, then one should at least be consistently paranoid.

v1 of the internet as used now seems wildly naive of state surveillance.

v2 may be better, but if most traffic goes encrypted, then there are going to be a lot more attacks (both legal and extra-legal) against the nuances of implementations.

v2 is certainly an improvement on v1. But one of the reasons v1 was deployed is because we believed things like "The US government would never tap traffic at the backbone" or "The US government would never tap private links between data centers."

Valuing both, I think it's important to keep eyes on the future so in 10 years we don't look back on statements like "The US government would never compell Google / Microsoft / Facebook / Whisper to distribute a poisoned version of their application" with the same amount of surprise.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand what this has to do with whether we should use risky, leaky cryptosystems like PGP over things like Signal that were designed specifically to deal with these threats.

<comment><USER12> I'd agree with the top of Unman's comment about striving for more, while disagreeing with the bottom.

Signal is better than PGP.

Running crypto without PFS in this threat environment is an irresponsible bet to make with data.

My point was that failing to continue to maintain vigilance, even if it sounds paranoid, is also irresponsible. Unless one is willing to be that we have a perfect crypto system, some amount of humility (as evidenced by Moxie's speech) is warranted. Else we'll be talking about Signal in 20 years in the same way we're talking about PGP.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Html5sql.js - Makes using SQL on the client side easy - <AUTHOR> http://html5sql.com/index.html <comment><USER2> I wanted to contact the author, but there is no contact info on the website. I guess I could use WhoIS to find out..</comment>


Hugo Chavez Dead: Venezuela's President Dies At 58 - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/hugo-chavez-dead_n_2296423.html

<comment><USER2> I'm in Venezuela if anyone has any questions. I'm gonna be up for a while as you can imagine...

<comment><USER3> What part of Venezuela are you in? What's the general feeling where you are at? Any unrest? Unrelated: are you an Amigos Invisibles fan?

<comment><USER2> I'm from Caracas, but I am in the eastern part of the country right now at a job site. Everything is calm where I am, in Caracas and Barquisimeto, where my family and wife are. Chavez simpathizers are gathering in the central squares of every town and listening to music and mourning.

There are lots of rumors of looting but I think it's mostly just rumors because there are no pics or any other kind of confirmation.

As for Amigos Invisibles, I'm not a huge fan but I like some of their music. I actually saw them live 2 days ago. Great show, I had a good time.</comment></comment></comment>


In Berlin, refugees become friends–through board games - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/cardboard-connection-board-games-that-tell-refugees-stories/ <comment><USER2> They're also inventing new games, like truck bowling...</comment>


Scott Adams Shadowbanned from Twitter for Supporting Trump - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dilbert.com/post/151301555066/the-week-i-became-a-target <comment><USER2> This is a poster child of the case when you can completely disagree with opinion but should be really worried about the possibility of silencing it.

Wonder if Scott Adams can satisfy the search for intelligent Trump supporters - [http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-quest-for- int...](http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-quest-for-intelligent- trump.html) .

<comment><USER3> The slatestarcodex blog linked to above, and it's follow up are good reads:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton- jo...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/09/28/ssc-endorses-clinton-johnson-or- stein/)

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/01/he-kept-us-out-of- war/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/01/he-kept-us-out-of-war/)

Intelligent conservatives' comments on Trump fascinate me. I like reading between the lines as they realise they have to explain things very slowly for a big portion of their audience, who they thought were appreciating their intellectual arguments, but it turns out they just thought they were in the same tribe.

For more from this genre, see also Sam Harris podcasts available on Youtube, where he goes into great detail about why Trump would be a disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> He claims that the backlash against his support of Trump cost him $1M in speaker fees in the coming year. That is 20 years of the median wage for full time work in the US.

I respect Adams' creativity and he's made a significant cultural contribution, but the late-stage Adams career of self-proclaimed genius too smart to be fooled by political correctness is unpleasant. It's very easy to be a libertarian when you won everything.

<comment><USER5> Record numbers of ordinary people are voting for Trump.

[http://img.ccrd.clearchannel.com/media/mlib/15172/2016/06/de...](http://img.ccrd.clearchannel.com/media/mlib/15172/2016/06/default/gop_primary_popular_vote_0_1465386905.jpg)

[https://i.sli.mg/erfcMO.jpg](https://i.sli.mg/erfcMO.jpg)

<comment><USER4> Those links show 13 million people voted for Trump in the Republican primary. In a voting population of 241 million, that's 5.39% of eligible voters. More people voted for Clinton, and very nearly as many voted for Sanders (Trump/Sanders = 1.0071).

Official popular vote count in 2016 primaries, in numerical order:

Clinton 16,914,722

Trump 13,300,472

Sanders 13,206,428

Cruz 7,637,262

Poll-based predictions for the general election currently:

[http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election- forecast/?...](http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election- forecast/?ex_cid=rrpromo)

<comment><USER5> 2012: Barack Hussein Obama II 65,918,507 Willard Mitt Romney 60,934,407

<comment><USER4> Are you proposing those GA results for comparison with the primary results?

The 2012 primary results were:

Obama: 6,158,064

Romney: 10,031,336

The Dems' nomination of the sitting president was a foregone conclusion so no need to get out the vote.

<comment><USER5> The point is the GE was delta 5M. That's almost down in the noise. Small changes in turnout (or huge changes this case) matter.... and that's ignoring the significant crossover vote in the Rustbelt.

<comment><USER4> It looks like a wash in delta-primary-turnout nationally. The link posted above showed Dems down a lot in primary turnout in a short list of states. Nationally turnout was high on both sides, but a record for neither. That list of states was carefully chosen to make a certain impression, I guess.

[http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/10/turnout- was-...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/10/turnout-was-high-in- the-2016-primary-season-but-just-short-of-2008-record/)

It'd be interesting to look at relative delta-turnout in swing states only.

<comment><USER5> "but a record for neither". Incorrect. Trump got more primary votes than any Republican in history.

[http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/1/donald- trump-...](http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/1/donald-trump-drives- republican-turnout-to-record-d/)

<comment><USER4> Turnout is the number of votes cast, not the number cast for a single person. Rep turnout was not a record. Trump's votes received were indeed a Rep record.

<comment><USER5> As a share of eligible voters, Rep turnout does appear to be a record.

14.8%(2016) vs 11.8%(1980)

[http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/12/20...](http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp- content/uploads/sites/12/2016/06/FT_16.06.08_primaryTurnout.png)

<comment><USER6> National primary turnout (as a whole or for any one party) is neither really meaningfully comparable across elections (because of changes in methodology of particular primaries, changes in timing between primaries, differences in the course of elections which change the perceived value of voting in later primaries, etc.) nor predictive of general election turnout (so pointing to primary turnout as evidence of a party's or its nominee's strength in the general election is meaningless.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why would twitter ban Adams and not any of the thousands of other jerks on there?

<comment><USER8> His theory:

> All things considered, I had a great week. I didn't realize I was having > enough impact to get on the Clinton enemies list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Predating Trump support, Scott Adams is and was a nut-bag misogynist, so my hanky is pretty dry right now.

<comment><USER10> Cite? Because I only know him from his comic that is about as funny as Garfield.

<comment><USER9> Feel free to find other sources but this goes way back, he's got a blog where he says lots of crazy shit about women.

This is one of the better non-blog sources I found, google will find you plenty more:

[http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/whats-with-dilberts- cr...](http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/whats-with-dilberts-creator/)

He also mansplains harassment: [http://freethoughtblogs.com/indelible/2014/11/10/scott- adams...](http://freethoughtblogs.com/indelible/2014/11/10/scott-adams- mansplains-why-feminists-are-wrong-about-street-harassment-or-something/)

You can also search for the fun stuff he said about rape and salary inequality.

Here's one of the rape ones: [http://jezebel.com/5813290/dilbert-creator- scott-adams-weigh...](http://jezebel.com/5813290/dilbert-creator-scott-adams- weighs-in-on-rape-now)

He's since deleted the original post.

<comment><USER11> >mansplain

Please don't use sexist language on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can't he just use his powers of persuasion and hypnosis to make twitter do what he wants? More seriously, I am curious what he actually did. Is he constantly an asshole or threatening people or something? Twitter is not the same thing as free speech, but I know a lot of conservatives get their panties in a bunch, being so afraid of being oppressed by the (wo)man.

The article doesn't really say what he posted.

<comment><USER13> > The article doesn't really say what he posted.

> Why did I get shadowbanned?

> Beats me.

> But it was probably because I asked people to tweet me examples of Clinton > supporters being violent against peaceful Trump supporters in public. I got > a lot of them. It was chilling.

It was literally the second paragraph of the article...

<comment><USER3> He's also been saying recently that he supports Clinton, because if he didn't then he'd be assassinated.

So it's quite possible that he's actually mentally ill. On the other hand, it could just be a schtick, as I saw him bring interviewed recently on a right wing video blog and he was much more subdued than his written 'character'.

<comment><USER13> Why make the assumption that he is mentally ill? As I see it it is just a reference to the very popular conspiracy (theories?) that several of Hillarys problematic staff and opponents has died under wierd circumstances, like shot in the back of the head during a robbery with nothing stolen from the victim, shotgun suicides, guccifer hung in his cell in Russia and much more.

Furthermore Hillary has suggested that Julian Assange should be dronestriked: [http://www.snopes.com/julian-assange-drone- strike/](http://www.snopes.com/julian-assange-drone-strike/)

<comment><USER7> Dude, your snopes link has a big red "UNPROVEN" right up there at the top.

<comment><USER13> Unproven != Disproved

<comment><USER6> Yeah, unproven is different than disproved, but a source noting that a claim is unproven is hardly support for the claim being true, which is how you offered it.

<comment><USER13> How did I offer this as truth when I mentioned that it could very well be conspiracy theories?

$0.10 was deposited to your CTR account.

<comment><USER12> It was just unsubstantiated. If you want to suggest something might have happened, linking to a debunker website that says its unproven makes your claim less likely, right?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.nsa.gov/research/_files/publications/inevitability.pdf <comment><USER2> A classic. Bell's Looking Back Addendum [1] also traces the beginning of high assurance security market (their solution) and how DOD/NSA totally killed it. I specialized in extending such high assurance systems or approaches to handle modern problems. That market is gone, though, thanks to DOD/NSA policies to use low assurance systems and even pushing them. Post-Snowden, it's fair to wonder if it was mismanagement or intentional that they marketed low assurance alternatives (eg DTW, MDDS) to the kinds of OS's and guards they couldn't beat with 2-5 years of pentesting (esp Boeing SNS Server).

Yet, I think I can say we all focused too much on the OS and software security side of things despite what we accomplished. As Brian Snow noted, we're really just trying to implement forms of isolation on machines designed for pervasive sharing (read: insecurity). It's why I counterpointed Geer here [2] saying our software security crisis isn't inevitable: we just need to use hardware and tools that make secure software easier to write. I gave examples from the past of many security-improving features systems had, including immunity to code injection via app attack. Fortunately, at least a few groups (esp DARPA/NSF sponsored) took notice and are working on such architectures today.

[1] [http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell- Looking-B...](http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-Back- Addendum.pdf)

[2] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_h...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_hea.html#c5598568)

<comment><USER3> I used to work in that area back in the 1980s, and worked on one of the early high-security operating systems (KSOS for the PDP-11, written in Modula I. It was really slow; trying to cram it in 64K 16 words of code just didn't work.)

NSA has an attack side and a defense side. The defense side builds the US military's security systems. The attack side has more prestige within NSA. The defense side does things like evaluate filing cabinet locks.

The NSA Orange Book criteria for OS evaluation (which was actually Grace Nibaldi's master's thesis) set out tough criteria. NSA set up an evaluation operation at NSA's Friendship Annex (named for Friendship Airport, which is now Baltimore Washington International).

There was heavy industry opposition to NSA's secure OS efforts. The evaluation procedure was borrowed from the safe and lock evaluation operation - a vendor could submit a product for evaluation, and if it failed, they'd get a report on the flaws found. They could then resubmit the product one more time. If it failed on the second try, the product was rejected, just like they did with padlocks. Acceptance and rejection were public. So an OS could be officially be stamped insecure.

A few OSs passed those tests. Most of them are forgotten. Wang, the word processor company, had a secure OS. Multics is at least remembered. There was a secure version of IBM VM. But most commercial OSs could not pass.

The industry fought those tough standards, resulting in the "Common Criteria" for security evaluation. The Common Criteria were much weaker. Instead of NSA doing the evaluations, they were done by private testing labs paid by the OS vendor. Vendors could try over and over again to pass. Failures were not publicized. Microsoft was able to meet those new lower hurdles, as were other vendors.

This was all pre mass market Internet (the academic and DoD communities had Internet connections from about 1983, but the Internet world wasn't that big.) and the security criteria were very single-system oriented. Also, the internal use of cryptography within computer systems was very rare, and not trusted within DoD. NSA took the position that crypto could only be done by special- purpose secured boxes. (For high security, they're right.)

<comment><USER2> You're one of only two people I've met that worked on one of the exemplar systems. I appreciate you sharing a few pieces of the puzzle. For instance, I have KSOS's architecture but didn't know it was written in Modula. I have papers on most of the others (incl little known ASOS). Also, confirming that NSA preferred crypto on dedicated boxes (eg LOCK's SIDEARM). Two issues, though.

One, the NSA rarely builds any secure product: they contract them out instead while providing security engineering assistance. That includes most Type 1 products, guards, and even most components of EKMS. There's very few things in high security market that they built themselves. Worse, many like "High Assurance" Platform aren't high assurance by a long shot.

This brings me to two. Bell pointed out that what made high assurance market successful was a clear set of standards plus an expected return on investment. Companies lined up to build secure versions of everything. He claimed that changed when NSA started competing with vendors directly under MISSI on top of export issues. An already risky market turned into almost total risk and no reward. So, it imploded with the entrenched defense contractors and their few products being all that's left. So NSA and DOD policy are as much to blame as the market given they (a) are only one with power to force market to build secure stuff and (b) made sure it went away.

I think the biggest failure, though, was not focusing on hardware. DARPA is focusing on it this time. I think the best thing we can do is find, like with CHERI or hardware Control-flow Integrity, a technology that stops most critical attacks with low overhead and compatibility with legacy software. The government can give taxpayer grants to hardware companies like Intel/AMD, legacy software vendors such as Microsoft/Oracle, and mainframe builders (esp IBM & Unisys) to incorporate the stuff into their hardware and software. If done right, most of the software just needs a recompile with only the assembler or lowest level things needing to be changed by hand. This seems to be the most promising approach given the market will not spontaneously do high security or give up backward compatibility.

In parallel, we do clean-slate architectures like SAFE that inherently and efficiently enforce arbitrary security policies at the word level. Like old LISP or Burroughs machines, might target a language like Java or C# to them where all software can be written in same high-level language executed natively. New deployments and security appliances build on these types of systems. Careful interfaces between the legacy-supporting and clean-slate systems make up the overall IT infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> KSOS-11 was done at Ford Aerospace in Palo Alto, CA, from 1978-1982. It wasn't that big a job; it was about 5-8 people. I wrote the file system and all the drivers. We had a PDP 11/45 for debugging and a PDP 11/70 for development. Supervision came from DARPA; they sent out an evaluation team every 6 weeks to review progress. Some NSA people would show up on their team. The project was unclassified but most of the people on it had SECRET clearances. KSOS was only used for one special-purpose secure system; the PDP-11 era was over by the time it was done.

Parts of it were specified in SPECIAL, SRI's language for formal specification. That was mostly an API spec, written at SRI. SRI had designed KSOS at an abstract level. We were just implementing it. This didn't work well.

The most complex thing we were able to do in SPECIAL was to specify what validity meant for the file system. A "weak invariant" was true at the end of each write, and a "strong invariant" was true when the file system was unmounted. File systems were not well understood back then, and UNIX file systems tended to degenerate into garbage after crashes. We were able to avoid that.

We didn't have much in the way of machine proofs, although we tried. We used the Boyer-Moore theorem prover and the Stanford Pascal Verifier, but the tools were not there yet. I later headed the Pascal-F effort, Ford Motor's in-house code verifier for engine control programs. That turned out not to be useful because the Pascal-F compiler team at Ford couldn't get their compiler to generate usable code. We could write small programs and verify them, but could only run them in a slow byte code interpreter.

DARPA was trying to get a secure OS. They really wanted a secure microkernel. They pulled the plug on Berkeley BSD because it was too bloated, and put money into Mach at CMU instead. It was a surprise to DARPA when BSD didn't die, but went commercial (with Sun) instead.

<comment><USER2> Appreciate the details. I knew it was a demo but not that it was that budget. The use was a guard for communications or mail, wasn't it?

re abstract vs implementation

More evidence for the claim by many lesson learned papers in formal methods: people doing specs/proofs should work closely with implementers and in parallel where possible. That way issues spotted one place get to the other quickly. Better compromises, too. Neat that it helped with the file system, too.

re verification tools

Yeah, that sounds as painful as I expected. The only one I read on in that time was Gypsy and attempts to convert it to Ada. The proofs were done by hand in most. Every paper had researchers griping about the tools. Main benefit those tools gave, per users, was making verification easier just because the prover's needs (and weaknesses) forced simplification of specs. Did your projects see at least that benefit?

re DARPA

That's my impression. The consensus at the time was on a security kernel approach. It's what all the A1 and B3 systems used. They learned a lot from their endless Mach-related projects but the drawbacks (esp performance) were too great. Personally, I think it was the hardware context-switch performance & message passing overhead holding them back. Users wanted power, performance, and price without much worry for security. Naturally, they built on BSD.

And now one of DARPA's best, CheriBSD, is a port of FreeBSD to the capability- secure CHERI processor. They finally learned to be practical, eh? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The youngest references are from 1998, so I'm guessing this was written by 2000, before the Very Bad Indeed 9/11 incidents. Also, it doesn't mention terrorism at all.

I suppose this just represents that the NSA at least in the past had various factions inside it, one of which lead to SELinux.

<comment><USER5> NSA have been divided from the word go.

One the one hand they are to spy on the communications of "enemies", on the other they are to defend the nation against such spying.

Problem is that you basically can't do one without compromising the other.

<comment><USER2> That they have to defend the nation is a common misconception. They were only legally required to protect the COMSEC of military. This was extended to protect defense contractors as well. They don't have to protect the rest of us and have a conflict of interest against doing it. They'll provide some support (e.g. SELinux, "secure" configs) but ensure they can bypass it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just downloaded and opened a .pdf from nsa.gov.

Oops.

<comment><USER2> Compile your PDF viewer with Softbound [1], load a stripped Linux LiveCD containing it on disposable machine, download PDF with sandboxed browser to RAMdisk, and load with that viewer in a sandbox. Only so much they can do at that point. Use a non-Intel, non-ARM processor to throw them off further. Hand-type into trusted computer any insights you glean from the PDF.

A lot of work just to safely read a PDF from the enemy, eh?

[1] [http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~santosh.nagarakatte/softbound/](http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~santosh.nagarakatte/softbound/)

<comment><USER7> Or open pdf on computer at public library and print a hard copy.

<comment><USER2> The old school methods are often easier. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Even if an operating system were provably secure in the software layer, it might still be vulnerable to hardware backdoors:

[http://www.eteknix.com/expert-says-nsa-have-backdoors- built-...](http://www.eteknix.com/expert-says-nsa-have-backdoors-built-into- intel-and-amd-processors/)

<comment><USER9> What if you use multiple computers for the hardware and manually control communication between machines. Basically use hardware only for pure functions and store state out of band... Project output to a shared screen. Similar to how manufacturing of parts is split to different untrusted factories. Do the merging step on a breadboard or $10 commodity circuit that you fully control.

<comment><USER2> Clive Robinson and I came up with the same solution to this problem: running same software on several different hardware with voting protocol. This is used in safety-critical market where you need redundancy. I modified the scheme so that different teams implemented the same spec in a compatible way on hardware that came from different countries. My model is mutually suspicious countries that work against each other too much to cooperate on a backdoor. Secrets might leak to any of them but integrity can at least be protected.

Far as plugging leaks, air gap strategies plus high assurance guards built on cheap boards they probably didn't backdoor. Especially old microcontrollers, UNIX servers, gaming systems with Linux ports, and so on. Keep using different stuff with simple, protected interfaces. They can't hit what they can't see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It should be relatively easy to develop an automated tool to reformat LaTEX papers to a single column format more suitable for web distribution. Actually, LaTEX itself should be able provide all of the infrastructure for this. Given this, isn't it odd that papers get published to the web as 2 column PDFs? I know how/why it happens, but still.

<comment><USER11> This sounds like an impossible task to me. The advantage of Latex over HTML/Markdown is that you get very precise control over the placement of things like figures. Even something as minor as changing paper sizes from US Letter -> A4 completely messes this up and requires lots of manual adjustment. That's the price of using Latex, and in exchange we get documents that look much nicer than HTML/Markdown.

<comment><USER12> It is possible to achieve that in SVG more precisely (than HTML).

<comment><USER11> I don't understand. Does SVG = scalable vector graphics? Is so, how is that related to positioning text on a page?

<comment><USER12> CSS layout properties apply to SVG. It is possible to manage the flow of the text ([http://blog.scottlogic.com/2015/02/02/svg-layout- flexbox.htm...](http://blog.scottlogic.com/2015/02/02/svg-layout- flexbox.html)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have a fix for the missing ligatures problem this PDF exhibits? "fl", "fi", and "ff" are blank as viewed under evince and xpdf

<comment><USER13> Sigh: [http://pastebin.com/88VknLVZ](http://pastebin.com/88VknLVZ)</comment></comment>


Apple vs. Android: The view from Google - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/31/apple-vs-android-the-view-from-google/

<comment><USER2> Did I miss the point of the article? Seems to be a rehash of of most sentiments behind the arguments of choosing between the two platforms except now its by the two big names at google.</comment>


Is the Era of Great Famines Over? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/09/opinion/is-the-era-of-great-famines-over.html <comment><USER2> It is amazing to see this on the top of HN right after I get off a call with my mother about sending more emergency remittances to my uncle's family in remote east Ethiopia/Ogaden. The situation there is very dire with all the livestock (all their wealth) perished, no rains from this year's Deyr rainy season that just ended and no working wells for groundwater.

If anyone is reading this and wants to help with the crisis situation there, please donate to The Denan Project[1] which is basically the only aid group on the ground. All the majors (Oxfam, ICRC, etc) have been awol during this year's extreme drought (worst in more than 30 years). 100% of donations go to directly supporting people with food and water aid, medical aid (we built the only clinic for hundreds of miles) and other direct support. All overhead costs are already covered by the very generous, selfless folks behind The Denan Project.

Dick Young, founder of The Denan Project wrote a letter to the editor response to this same article by Alex de Waal in the NYT: [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and- the-e...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/ethiopia-and-the-end-of- famine.html?_r=0)

[1]: [http://www.thedenanproject.org/](http://www.thedenanproject.org/)

<comment><USER3> It's rather disturbing to see such a disconnect between reality and the perception of it among the western elite, specifically concerning the general living conditions most of the world lives in. This article seems to be nothing more than the same old post-scarcity rhetoric that certain groups push for political gain every couple of years.

The world is as it has always been; some things are getting better in some places, other things getting worse elsewhere, and in many places the status quo is largely continued. Making such sweeping declarations like the article does merely serves to turn extremely nuanced and interconnected systems into black and white judgement calls. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to why that is, and why it's being printed in the NYT.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps the article linked is wrong about the conditions in Ethiopia. However, aside from this particular instance, I think it should be mentioned that the world is not as it always has been. Tremendous progress is being made at reducing global poverty and global undernourishment. You can see evidence and data here:

[https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and- undernourishment/#ref-...](https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and- undernourishment/#ref-8)

I think it is important to acknowledge successes so that we don't falsely believe we are failing and as a result, reject systems that are working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Across the world we really need to start providing free food at a national level-

1\. Many large nations already heavily subsidise food for food security as it stands. We need to avoid butter mountains and milk lakes because it's wasteful.

2\. Many first world countries already feed their population to high school level anyway.

2\. A national plan for good, healthy, free food will prompt people to eat properly, on average it would encourage responsible eating (you can only get so big eating potatoes, broccoli and meat, it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous).

3\. Job Automation is going to change our work situations anyway, within 5 years alone we'll have taxi drivers and hauliers without jobs. Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.

4\. If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves maybe we could concentrate on what's more important, like getting to mars or something.

<comment><USER6> Basic income is better because you provide people with the money to feed themselves while preserving the free market and all its benefits (efficiency, choice, etc).

We see over and over that cash assistance is preferable to providing goods (like food or housing) directly.

<comment><USER7> The "free" market with companies under heavy competition looking to make consumers into fatty addicts obvious fails in many ways. The choice which is available is often extremely unhealthy and dominated by a few conglomerates. So though the argument for the free market works for many things, I think there is ample proof that it does not produce good outcomes for food.

It's optimized to produce cheap, addictive food because that's what the people crave. Much like Brawndo.

<comment><USER8> It's dubious to blame obesity on the free market. At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal responsibility. In most cities and towns there are just as many healthy options available as there are unhealthy options, and most of the time it's no more expensive (or even cheaper) to eat well than it is to buy junk. Fact of the matter is, a lot of people _choose_ to eat poorly.

I strongly disagree with the concept that another person knows better than I do which food I should eat or how I should otherwise live my life.

That said, there should be more education around nutrition. Even free healthy food doesn't help anything if people are too dumb to choose it over junk.

<comment><USER7> > At the end of the day eating well and staying healthy is a personal > responsibility.

A significant portion of human beings are wired for addiction. It's a fiction to claim that people are all free and are responsible for every choice that they make. We for instance control market on all drugs that have any potential for addiction, food has a potential for addiction for lots of people. If people are so free to choose to stay healthy and eat well, then why are all drugs not freely available to anyone who wants them. Opiates, benzos, etc.

No one is saying that anyone else should tell you what to eat. I am simply saying that free food that is healthy should be freely available. No friction and no excuses to not eat healthy. And economically there is a huge incentive to eat that free food as it's free.

<comment><USER8> Drugs are kind of a straw man, but FWIW, I think those should be legal too. I'd rather my tax money not be spent baby sitting people.

But they are a great example of just how useless it is trying to control people. Heroin is illegal, yet overdoses are at an all time high. A lot of people only end up on heroin because it's so difficult to get less powerful opiate pain killers. Prohibition doesn't work. People are going to do what they want to do anyway.

Some portion of the population are going to make really stupid decisions no matter what. The rest of us need to get over it and stop trying to "help" them if they don't want it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No.

[http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/31/north-korea-warns- ne...](http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/31/north-korea-warns-new-famine- as-kims-weight-belligerence-balloon.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/north-korea- fe...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/north-korea-fears-famine- as-drought-halves-food-production-says-un)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs- hunger...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/pyongyangs-hunger- games.html)

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

<comment><USER10> Lets rephrase it to include only people not run by batshit crazy clones of Stalin.

<comment><USER11> "Let's do what North Korea does, that seems to be working out really well," said nobody.

<comment><USER12> The situation in North Korea actually works out quite well for a very small number of people which is one of the main reasons why it endures.

<comment><USER11> But not even _that_ well by global standards of autocrats! I mean, that small group could be like the wealthy, globe-trotting Communist Party of China apparatchiks, or the gilded, pampered princes of the Middle East. But instead they get to sit around their grey concrete bunkers, watch irritating propaganda TV, and drink overpriced imported cognac. Whoopee.

I mean, you have to be truly incompetent to be next door to China for the last thirty years and think "nah, we shouldn't do reforms - wouldn't want to lose our luxuries as members of the political class!"

<comment><USER12> They have different goals such as enjoying power and raping young girls. Do you really think that other autocrats and oligarchs get to do things like rape with impunity? Maybe some of them. You are projecting your own tastes and ideas onto people with orders of magnitude more power and money than you will ever have.

<comment><USER11> I guess so. But they're not even actually that good at being dictators. Even a solely power-maximizing autocrat should realize what does and does not work economically. It's like Venezuela - their incompetence means that their influence is limited and their eventual downfall made more likely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's easy to not realize that without major single headline grabbing breakthroughs, progress on ending these injustices is still ongoing. So it's a refreshing reminder to see articles like this one every now and then, specially after such a hard year.

<comment><USER14> In France evryone is convinced that "The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer". This proverb/pseudo-analysis is a huge emotional trigger for a leftish vote, and is liberally repeated by many newspapers. I systematically try to counter this proverb, because every available evidence points at the opposite:

\- The poor are getting less poor. Famine is less harsh and UN reports lower poverty levels for the bottom 10%. There are severaly explanation, basically the poorer benefit from the globla growth and global scientific advance. Of course it's limited because of patents and other hindrance, but we should not deny the globlal trend.

\- The rich are getting richer, that's exact, but it's also because the population is increasing and the top people today serve bigger economic interests than 50 years ago (whether it be Snapchat for beginner CEOs or Tesla for traditional CEOs).

Hence, maybe the spread between the rich and the poor widens, but that's not what the proverb denounces, and the proverb is wrong. The proverb specifically says the poor are getting poorer, which is widely false. Moreover the variation of gap is not demonstratedly unfair.

<comment><USER15> >"The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer"

I think typically when people say that they mean within their own country, not globally. And in some Western countries if we look at the very recent trend (last 10-20 years) I think they have somewhat of a point. The poor are mostly stagnant while the rich are getting much richer and those in the middle are generally getting poorer. The proverb may be technically incorrect, but the sentiment behind it may not be all that far off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the headline only: no.

Why? Because we still have political strife in the world, and political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years.

If anything our political systems are gearing us up for even more devastating famines, as countries turn inward and more oppressive.

<comment><USER11> Well, a modern economy is pretty thoroughly different from the premodern one. When it took 90% of the population working in agriculture to feed the whole population (nonfarmer/farmer ratio of 1:9), and food transportation costs were extremely high, then even a minor shortfall in food production could induce famine conditions in short order. Now that the nonfarmer/farmer ratio in an industrialized economy is more like 97:3 (and moving toward that figure elsewhere) famine is decreasingly caused by shortfalls only, and increasingly by other factors. Fundamentally, though, it's about productivity.

And there's no obvious reason why productivity will be going down in most places in the world, nor why transportation should be getting more expensive. I think short-term oscillations in political fortunes are not a very good marker of these things.

<comment><USER16> That was my point. We have produced enough food to feed the world for centuries now, and we have had the means to transport it, but choose not to for political reasons. North Korea is a prime example, there's no reason anybody in the country should be hungry, except that their government is both highly isolationist and likes to meddle with the internal food supply.

<comment><USER11> No, you said that "political strife has been the root cause of famine for over a thousand years." Which is not true - in a low-productivity, pre-industrial economy, inherently near the subsistence baseline, food shortfalls (and consequent famines) are frequently caused by weather, pestilence and other non-political-strife events. When it takes 8 or 9 farmers to feed themselves and one non-farmer (and year-to-year food storage capability is very poor) then even a 10% food production decline is a crisis.

We absolutely have not had "enough food to feed the world for centuries", nor the means to transport it. In 1800, worldwide GDP per capita was barely above $1000 USD (current, PPP), and by 1900, just over $2000. The supposed surpluses simply did not exist. Ship transport was still relatively inefficient, and overland transport was extremely expensive in a world where ~80% of people lived in small rural communities with no paved roads between them, and even where roads did exist, they were of poor quality. The food surpluses and easy transport we see today are really quite a recent development, well within the 20th century.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _" Some 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy active life. That's about one in nine people on earth."_ [0]

that's more people than were alive globally in 1700 [1]. looks like the last 300 years have been a complete catastrophe with respect to hunger.

[0] [https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats](https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)

[1] [https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpo...](https://www.census.gov/population/international/data/worldpop/table_history.php)

<comment><USER11> But that's a smaller _proportion_ of people than ever before. So not only are we capable of supporting more people total, but a far smaller percentage of those are hungry.

<comment><USER17> do you believe one persons happiness redeems another persons suffering?

<comment><USER11> ...what?

No, what I'm saying is, if you're trying to figure out "how well we're doing" at solving some particular problem, then you have to look at proportions. Any group of humans will suffer various things, the point is to decrease the likelihood that they do. If there's a group of ten people, and five are hungry, then they're doing worse on that metric than a group of a _hundred_ people where five are hungry. This doesn't change when the groups you're looking at are "humans in past" and "humans presently".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Headline says world hunger, article is about Ethiopia. This is good news but does the article support the headline?

<comment><USER19> We reverted the title to the article's original. (Submitted title was 'World hunger reached its lowest point in 25 years'.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There shouldn't be any hunger. We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. There are only 8 billion people. Yet 20'000 die everyday of (capitalism) hunger.

<comment><USER21> Capitalism? Did you read the article?

> In 1987, .... We reached a simple conclusion: When farmers could bring > foodstuffs to points of sale — when the roads were clear of army > checkpoints, when markets were held at night to reduce the risk of being > bombed — the local economy worked efficiently enough. With markets in > operation, the production of local crops increased, and food prices fell to > levels people could afford.

> Ending famine required ending fighting.

Seems capitalism improved things once the government got around to providing basic security.

<comment><USER22> markets != capitalism

<comment><USER23> Could you explain what you mean here?

<comment><USER24> A communist society where the government owns all the means of production and everyone gets a $60,000 UBI can still use markets to allocate resources for production.

<comment><USER23> _Can_ , in theory. But in practice, it's much more likely to use politics and bureaucracy. (Source: The last two hundred years of government behavior.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>