Thomas Sowell interview - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/thomas-sowell-race-poverty-culture <comment><USER2> Thomas Sowell has had a huge impact on me and my views on economics. I'm from a poor working-class background and am often irritated by the needless language barriers of academics.

> "Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity," > Sowell once said, "and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional > infringement of their freedom of speech."

Sowell is unique in this respect. He's book, "Basic Economics" is full of extremely relatable examples of economics in practice. It's one of the few books on economics that's a great read regardless of your background or level of academic achievement.

<comment><USER3> I wish other writers would take this to heart. Reading The New Yorker it's as if their language is a shibboleth and if they didn't use it, it would alienate their audience for using average language, yet they are the same people who pontificate and pretend they advocate for the lower classes.

<comment><USER4> Let them. If you have the psychological need to constantly show how smart you are, your life will be very stressful indeed.

You will want to manipulate others to get confirmation of your acrobatics and always be on the lookout for disproof. This will lead to you limiting your life severely for fear of actually finding it.

-former smartness showoff who now acts betterer

<comment><USER5> > Years ago my mother used to say to me, "In this world, you must be oh so > smart, or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend > pleasant.

<comment><USER6> Great line. For those who do not recognize the source, it's from "Harvey".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One important impact he had on my thinking is that he rejects groupings of people based on snapshots in time.

For instance, it is very common to use income as a proxy for your economic success, and then to group people into quintiles, calling the bottom quintile "the poor". It seems reasonable, but it's wrong enough to lead to very wrong conclusions. A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor household", even though many are likely to be in the top quintile later on in their life. These scenarios seem like exceptions, but when you add them up (as Dr. Sowell does), they show a very different picture.

Following people (statistically) through their lives, and across generations, is a common theme in his work. It's harder to get good data than the snapshot- in-time approach, but he does the work, and it's so much more informative.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. And when you try and track people across decades, things start to look different.

[https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all- the-...](https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-gains- from-economic-growth-c96d93101f9c)

<comment><USER9> Interesting read, but supposedly when we're talking about changes in social mobility we really care about the _change_ in the percentage of people that are richer than their parents? Indeed towards the end of the article the author says:

> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children > that is gloomy and that is "The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute > Mobility Since 1940" by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel > Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you > were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. > But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al > control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. > This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half > of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting > no progress over time.

The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non- standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure "richer than their parents" alone, is a fair metric for social mobility. If you're born in the top 20% and stay in the top 20% (not advancing higher), is that really a social concern? I mean, Bill Gates kids are unlikely to do better than their parents, but that's ok.

From what I've read, most social mobility metrics are from low quintiles to higher quintiles.

So if in 1984, 50% of children do better than their parents, and _that 50% is mostly the bottom half_ (I have no idea if it is), then you're doing pretty good in terms of social mobility, no? People making below the median are doing better.

And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.

<comment><USER9> > And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy > "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then > you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.

They address that in the paper:

> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children > who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a > small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is > insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, > consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in > GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute > mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility > when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher > living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader > distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: > Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is > spread broadly across the distribution.

[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398.full](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398.full)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've read six Thomas Sowell books in the past few years. His book Basic Economics is a classic, but my favorite of his is _Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One_. It covers the things that the former does but, as the title suggests, applies it to a real-life scenario. He then walks through the scenario as it plays out to demonstrate his point to the reader. For example, when a city artificially lowers the rent, it makes apartments more affordable, but what happens afterwards? he would then play the scenario out as it affects tenants, landlords, and the rental market. I highly recommend it!

<comment><USER11> I like the book 'Economics in one lesson' by Henry Hazlitt which does something similar.

<comment><USER12> IMO this book should be required required reading for college students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been reading a lot of his books lately, I cannot recommend enough. He does take a conservative approach to a lot of topics but the way he breaks things down helps you understand why.

His book Basic Economics taught me more than any economics classes did in school.

<comment><USER14> > He does take a conservative approach to a lot of topics...

Sowell's book _A Conflict of Visions: Idealogical Origins of Political Struggles_ [1] is, ironically, a very good starting point in understanding what makes Sowell "conservative" (the Constrained Vision) vs "progressive" (the Unconstrained Vision). I think this is the work that impressed Steven Pinker.

The categories get really messy, for example when he describes Marxism as a hybrid ideology, but the core idea is that people tend to believe either: 1. we are made of crooked timber and are made better by social structure, or 2. our potential is being held back by selfish oppressors/exploiters.

Regardless of which vision drives you, I imagine Thomas Sowell would do very well in Bryan Caplan's _Ideological Turing Test_ [2].

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

[2] [https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html)

<comment><USER15> Just about every Marxist on the planet believes that we are "made better by social structure", so I think that characterization of what Marxists vs. non- Marxists believe is unhelpful.

<comment><USER16> I haven't read Sowell but is this what he means by a 'hybrid ideology'? My impression of Marxists is that they view the world through both lenses and believe #1 can be achieved when #2 is solved through revolution or other means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I strongly disagree with Sowell on almost every topic one can think of, either in terms of philosophy, society, or economics, but I admire his outspokenness and plain speaking, as the article notes he is known for, and it's a shame to read ad-hominem style attacks have been made against him. From what I can gather, however, the academic literature engages better with his arguments than journalists do.

<comment><USER18> Be interesting to see where you think he's wrong especially where his arguments are based on some uncompromising statistical facts.

<comment><USER19> His argument that Donald Trump would be a better choice for President than Hillary Clinton because the former would be easier to remove from office than the latter, arguing specifically that "congressional Republicans would [not] automatically spring to his defense, if he overstepped the line". Doesn't seem like a great example of keen political judgment in hindsight.

<comment><USER20> I've seen numerous examples of congressional Republicans not automatically springing to his defense

<comment><USER19> "Numerous examples" is fantastic but what he said was a generalization and as a generalization it holds up. What % of congressional Republicans would you estimate "did not automatically spring to his defense"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> His economics are sound, but I often find that his takes on social issues are extremely reductionist. His social views a lot of the time are just standard conservative views (and wrong IMO), I wish he wasn't being praised for that.

One example being his view on systemic racism, which he described as:

"It does remind me of the propaganda tactics of Joseph Goebbels in the age of the Nazis, in which he was supposed to have said that people will believe any lie if it's repeated long enough and loud enough. And that's what we're getting."

I just can't take this sort of person seriously in regards to social issues. I just can't do it. And he does this _all the time_ , all of his social views are just ultra-reductionist conservatives views that are identical to the things my hardcore mask-refusing conservative relatives post on facebook.

<comment><USER22> It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those.

What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US? That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.

<comment><USER23> If it were immeasurable and undefinable, then we wouldn't have studies showing disproportionate sentencing of Black people [1] or the persistent negative effects of redlining [2]. And if it were unchangeable, we wouldn't be able to construct studies to show the specific choke-points of racial inequality, nor suggest policy solutions to remedy them.

> What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US?

I don't understand this. Why do you want to measure against other countries, and why phrase it like you just want _one_ number? Is it not enough to claim that certain inequalities appear in certain aspects of our society?

It would be like asking for a measure of our foreign policy. Sure, we could probably make one, but that seems like an entirely inadequate means of actually assessing what's happening in a complex sociological ecosystem. Our assessments have to be more individualized.

> That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you > want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it > and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.

You can do that with anything though. I've heard all the same language used in Climate Change discourse: "well, if you don't think humans caused climate change, they'll just label you anti-science and beat you out of the discussion." This is just a blatant rhetorical tactic to shift discussion from about the actual problem—and indeed all the evidence that this problem has—to nebulous Twitter mobs.

[1] [https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...](https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2413&context=articles)

[2] [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2852856](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2852856)

<comment><USER24> When it comes to redlining, sowell directly addresses it in in Vision of the Anointed. He points out that the kinds of houses blacks tend to purchase tends to be ignored in studies that find widespread discrimination.

For example blacks are much more likely to want to buy multi family homes. The income and other requirements for these are much stricter which is why they are denied loans more often.

Moreover, he points out that if blacks were being subject to stricter requirements then one would expect that they were less likely to default since the requirements are notionally to calculate default risk.

He points out that before the redlining legislation black and white default rates were broadly the same indicating that whatever criteria the banks used it fulfilled its main purpose of estimating default likelihood.

He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.

Before you make blanket statements on the man you should be familiar with his stance on things. Your comment lacks the nuance that one is apt to find in any sowell book.

<comment><USER21> >He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.

Sowell talked about the CRA and was proven wrong by multiple studies, like this one, which has a section dedicated to how the CRA wasn't a problem: [https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage- lending/research...](https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage- lending/research-analysis/foreclosures-by-race-and-ethnicity.pdf)

Stop the Sowell worship. Please, internet, for the love of god. He will always talk about how everything that democrats do is bad and everything conservatives do is good. He isn't right on everything all the time.

<comment><USER25> This seems more to say that the 2008 housing crisis was not caused by the CRA, which no one said it did.

<comment><USER21> It's actually an extremely common argument that conservatives make to this day. Thomas Sowell blamed the CRA himself, so I'm not sure what your point is.

<comment><USER25> >>He then shows data that the anti discrimination legislation increased black default rates and questions whether you encouraging minorities to declare bankruptcy and enter financial ruin is really something to be desired.

>Sowell talked about the CRA and was proven wrong by multiple studies, like this one, which has a section dedicated to how the CRA wasn't a problem: [https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage- lending/research...](https://www.responsiblelending.org/mortgage- lending/research..).

So you agree the document you linked doesn't disprove what the other poster said? No one has brought up the 2018 housing crisis.

<comment><USER21> He brought up anti discrimination legislation causing defaulting and bankruptcy, which the 2008 crash literally caused. I brought up a specific example of how Sowell is wrong. Sowell has directly commented on this matter. It is obviously relevant and doesn't require me to explain any further.

<comment><USER25> >He brought up anti discrimination legislation causing defaulting and bankruptcy, which the 2008 crash literally caused.

No he didn't, what are you talking about? Just because he mentioned foreclosures means he meant the CRA caused the 2008 housing crisis? No one was talking about it, you just brought it up out of no where.

His statement had NOTHING to do with the housing crisis, the only link between them seems to be "both involve foreclosures, so if I prove CRA did not cause the crisis I will prove his other statement is also incorrect... Because they both have the word 'foreclose' in them"

<comment><USER21> OH MY GOD...

The OP brought up that Sowell said that anti discrimination legislation increased defaulting and bankruptcy. Thomas Sowell literally wrote an entire article blaming CRA about 10 years ago. I brought up how Sowell is wrong because studies show that he is wrong.

<comment><USER25> So even though you quoted one argument, you posted a document to prove a whole other argument wrong, never bothering to bring up that the other argument you just proved wrong. I still don't know what other argument you proved wrong, did Sowell go on record saying the CRA caused the 2008 housing crisis?

<comment><USER21> Yes, as I said he literally wrote an article about it. I literally cannot understand how you can't connect Sowell's claim that anti-discrimination legislation (like CRA) is bad to my argument.

<comment><USER25> Can you post a link? I'm honestly under the suspicious you just posted a PDF you did not read, or knowingly knew did not back up your arguments but hoped no one would read the 25 pages to find out.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/02/09/upside- dow...](https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/02/09/upside-down- economics)

He was wrong and/or misleading about everything he said in this article. Maybe you should apply the same suspicion to someone like Sowell instead.

<comment><USER25> Damn, guess I was wrong. Still nothing to do with the parents argument though, you should at edit your comment to include that link so people understand what you're taking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> His writings do exactly what he states: Sowell insists that his work "stands or falls on its own merits or applicability" and is not "enhanced or reduced by [his] personal life.".

And they will continue to stand, objectively, for a long time to come.

But his life and character are inspirational examples of self-determination and leadership that we need far more of. It is a shame he is not more often cited as an example that others can learn from in their personal lives.

<comment><USER27> "Even if 90 percent of all Muslims are fine people, and we admit 10,000 refugees from the Middle East, does that mean that we need not be concerned about adding a thousand potential terrorists — even after we have seen in San Bernardino what just two terrorists can do?*"

Thomas Sowell, ladies and gentlemen. ([https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/12/1...](https://www.desertsun.com/story/opinion/columnists/2015/12/12/sowell- obama-rhetoric-san-bernardino/77169902/))

<comment><USER28> The all too common argument that there's no problem since it's only a minute minority that is problematic is in contradiction with a huge chunk of human history.

On this particular topic, we in Europe are increasingly frequently getting a painful refresher.

Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Basic Economics is a very good book. Even if you taken University economics you will learn something and you will definitely learn how to explain things to those who did not.

His debates are also great to watch highly recommended.

<comment><USER29> I very much prefer his older TV appearances to his more recent ones as he used to elaborate and present you with evidence on the spot. Nowadays, he keeps his input to a minimum on a given interview which is often unconvincing and borderline dismissive. I should keep in mind that he's 90 of age, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've read a number of his books, and I reflect on them regularly. They stand the test of time.

More important than the specific facts and arguments in his books is that he checks up on the results of theories and policies. That's not common enough among social scientists and certainly not among politicians.

Does "the peace process" produce peace? Do anti-poverty programs raise people out of poverty? Surely some do, and surely some don't. Figuring out which is which is critical to success -- preferably by learning from others' mistakes, but if not, at least learning from your own mistakes.

It's too easy to get a sense of moral superiority just by supporting a policy with a noble _intent_ , and then move on before the consequences arrive.

</comment><comment><USER30> His book "Intellectuals and Society" helped me better understand the difference of visions between the "right" and the left. Highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in politics.

</comment><comment><USER31> Am I the only one here who thinks that "Basic Economics" is overrated? I loved the first chapters but I didn't finish it because of his obvious bias against regulations. While I enjoyed his analyses of failed regulations, the book makes it seem like there're no successful market regulation laws in place and every attempt is doomed to be short-sighted like all his examples. This [1] review on Amazon from someone else expresses my concerns in more detail.

Can someone recommend me an alternative book, that at least tries to be a little bit more well-balanced? I'll probably finish this book for the conservative perspective anyway but it doesn't seem like a good starting point despite its name.

[1] [https://www.amazon.de/gp/customer- reviews/RTG2TIDQB6AJI/ref=...](https://www.amazon.de/gp/customer- reviews/RTG2TIDQB6AJI/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_btm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00PKS5ZR0#wasThisHelpful)

<comment><USER32> I didn't finish it either, but mostly because of lack of time. However, I was also having an almost visceral reaction to his aversion to regulation, because I was comparing it to the situation that I know in some European countries and his claims seemed to clash with what I knew.

I wouldn't dismiss the book just because of that, but it did make the lecture rather difficult because it was challenging my assumptions and knowledge quite strongly. I guess that's good :-)

I like Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics: The User's Guide" as an introduction to economics. It's understandable, it has plenty of references and is written in a pleasant tone.

<comment><USER31> _> I know in some European countries and his claims seemed to clash with what I knew._

To be precisely, I would say his conclusions and the lack of other perspectives clashes with what I know about economy in European countries because I see how his reasoning makes sense in a vacuum.

 _> I wouldn't dismiss the book just because of that, but it did make the lecture rather difficult because it was challenging my assumptions and knowledge quite strongly. I guess that's good :-)_

Exactly. I want to finish it someday for that exact reason.

 _> I like Ha-Joon Chang's "Economics: The User's Guide" as an introduction to economics. It's understandable, it has plenty of references and is written in a pleasant tone._

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Has he changed his mind about marriage equality in the twenty years since he published this?

[https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2000/04-01/0001_thoma...](https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2000/04-01/0001_thomas_sowell__fuzzy_thinking_in_.html)

Edit: maybe in the two decades that followed he learned that same-sex couples often raise children.

<comment><USER34> wow, for someone who has gotten pretty much nothing but praise for his supposed amazing writing ability and though process - this article is a complete steaming dumpster fire

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've read a few Sowell books and I don't always agree with his conclusions but I do always enjoy the historical context he puts behind his arguments. I find most political pundits, journalists, etc to lack a grounding in history when they take opinions on various things. Sowell's books are usually give you a historical context and then the argument. It makes his books a good read even if you don't agree with them.

</comment><comment><USER36> Love Thomas Sowell. Basic Economics is a must read.

An extremely intelligent man, and an inspiration to many all over the world.

</comment><comment><USER37> Someone should create a list of books that comprise a beginners manual of living in a modern society, and "Basic Economics" would fit perfectly in this list.

<comment><USER38> I think a lot about this. Modern society is very different from what our ancestors grew up with.

Any other recommendations on how to do well?

<comment><USER39> I usually think this, but then I'll see some random piece of advice from thousands of years ago, e.g. Seneca, Sun Tzu, Jesus, Plato and it seems very relevant.

We've got a lot more bells and whistles these days, but maybe the absence of reddit, imgur, youtube and the general dopamine hamster-wheel allowed them to have a better understanding of human nature.

Counter-point is that we are more likely to live longer and have to fight fewer threats of disease, famine, predators and war, so maybe we have more time to contemplate higher thoughts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thomas Sowell is a critic of the climate change/environmental science initiatives, and it's one of the reasons I heavily question his other views. Here's a 3 min video of him talking about it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweblFwt- BM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rweblFwt-BM)

The points he makes are quite fair. The science isn't perfect, yes. Often, people try to hide that the science isn't perfect, too. But the impact is roughly the product of the magnitude of the impact and the probability of the event. In this case, the magnitude is enormous and the probability is less than 100% but seemingly quite large. Dr. Sowell seems to simply argue that climate reports suggest that the probability is higher than it truly is. But if a report suggest 95%, and Dr. Sowell thinks it's more like 40%, the core issue is still enormous. I would want him to talk about why he thinks the huge effects of anthropogenic climate change are such a vanishingly small probability to the point that we shouldn't do anything about it.

Here's another article by him: [https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2002/06-08/0002_thoma...](https://products.kitsapsun.com/archive/2002/06-08/0002_thomas_sowell__global_warming_bui.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> In this time of ultra conformism and cancel culture. It is refreshing to read an articulate alternative view points.

Sowell has an experience of with sides of the debate and brings that experience to his writing.

I can't recommend him enough

<comment><USER42> What do you mean by "Cancel culture" here and what specifically do you think might apply to Sowell?

<comment><USER43> Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that were fired for questioning the Iraq war. Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing after targeting by the president.

<comment><USER44> > Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing > after targeting by the president.

Kaepernick was "fired" because he was poor at his job. Defenses started to understand his 1-dimensional attack and then shut it down. He was cut after the 2016 season, but had been benched in 2015 because the 49ers offense was struggling.[1] This was nine months before he ever took a knee before a game.[2] Did the 49ers look into a crystal ball and decide to bench him in favor of a demonstrably mediocre quarterback because of something that wouldn't happen for nine months? If he didn't show actual improvement on the field, were the 49ers obligated to keep him? Is an employer obligated to keep any employee who says something controversial regardless of performance?

> Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that > were fired for questioning the Iraq war.

Which anchors lost their jobs for questioning Iraq? Dan Rather stepped down for his role in publishing a hoax memo about George W. Bush's National Guard duty.[3] Brian Williams was quasi-fired for embellishing a story about his time as an embedded journalist in Iraq.[4]

The Dixie Chicks were actually blacklisted by country music radio stations, so we'll give you that one.

Still, .333 isn't great unless you're playing baseball.

[1] [https://www.nfl.com/news/niners-bench-colin-kaepernick- blain...](https://www.nfl.com/news/niners-bench-colin-kaepernick-blaine- gabbert-to-start-0ap3000000572076)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/01/colin- kaepe...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/01/colin-kaepernick- kneeling-history/)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/business/media/analysis-p...](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/11/business/media/analysis- postmortemof-cbss-flawed-broadcast.html)

[4] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/brian- william...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/brian-williams- admits-that-his-story-of-coming-under-fire-while-in-iraq-was- false/2015/02/04/d7fe32d0-acc0-11e4-9c91-e9d2f9fde644_story.html)

<comment><USER45> Kaepernick was blackballed by the league, full stop. Find me another instance of an uninjured QB under the age of 35 who led a team to a Super Bowl 3 years prior who was not only cut by his current team but not signed for even a backup role by another club.

There's a reason that Cam Newton has a job today and Kaepernick doesn't, and it's because Newton didn't get cancelled.

<comment><USER44> Both players debuted in the NFL in 2011. In 2015, Kaepernick led the 49ers to a 2-6 start, while Newton led the Panthers 8-0 (and to a Super Bowl berth). Sure, the QB isn't the only player responsible, but he is the single point of failure. Isn't it possible that Cam Newton is just a much better player than Kaepernick, all else being equal? If Kaepernick were so good and such a talent that teams should have been picking him, why wasn't he winning?

<comment><USER45> In 2013, Kapernick lead his team to the Super Bowl. By the end of 2016, he was completely out of the league after being blackballed. He hasn't played for a team in any capacity since. While one can argue whether his stats were great or not, he certainly was not anywhere near the worst STARTING quarterback in football.

From 2012 to 2016, Newton's Adjusted Net Yards per Play were .04 higher than Kaepernick's, a virtually statistical dead heat. After the 2015 season, Newton got a shiny new $100M contract for those efforts, and Kaepernick was shown the door after 2016.

In Kaepernick's 11 starts during the 2016 season, his team gave up more than 30 points 9 times. He had a new head coach that had just gotten run out of Philly for having no chemistry with his team, and he had one of the worst receiving corps in NFL history. He still managed 16 TDs to just 4 INTs.

So, for having one of the worst defenses in the league, coached by one of the worst coaches in the league, and throwing to easily the worst group of receivers in the league, his team didn't do so hot. But there's no reason why he shouldn't have immediately found another competition elsewhere, because he WAS a starting-caliber QB, and unlike Newton who was a similar player, Kaepernick had no outstanding injury issues. He wasn't coming off of foot surgery and shoulder surgery like Newton is today.

Except that he spoke up.

And that was the end of his career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Circa 2014, my economics mentor, who also mentored me in reading/trading free markets recommended reading Sowell.

We discussed Sowell at length, and my primary take away was that Sowell's world view was that the individual is much better at improving their own lives than any intervening external factors. All in all, an ardent believer in individual capitalism. That is a high level assessment.

A more nuanced assessment is Sowell (like his mentor, Milton Friedman), is a true to earth anti-Keynesian. Fun fact, he considered himself a Marxist in his 20's IIRC.

There are lots of anti-Keynesian economists. Though I think what sets Sowell apart is the way he uses widely accessible data to justify every single view on public policy he has, and to make it easy to digest for someone without an economics background (no easy task).

You can find a nice collection of his ideas online [1].

[1] [http://www.tsowell.com/](http://www.tsowell.com/)

<comment><USER47> Can you point us to some of his criticism of Keynes' views?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> 2 things that I liked him for (after reading/hearing just cursorily -- I would like to read more):

1) His perspectives on how the unfairnesses that life throws at you are part of, and incentivize you towards making your life better and not something that you should simply seek to eliminate without knowing what the unintended consequences are. See his essay on "Cosmic Justice": [https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html](https://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html)

2) That if we seek to have a sustainable approach to how society is managed, maybe we need to set up the reasonable rules and structures of how we want outcomes to be guided by, and not change them willy-nilly because of who happens to benefit at the time. There will be winners and losers no matter what. It's tiring to switch your rules every time you don't like who came out ahead.

</comment><comment><USER49> I agree that his Basic Economic book is very easy to read. It completely opened my eyes as to how to think about economics in high school when I first read. I recently watched an interview about his latest book, which he just published at 90 years of age, on charter schools. It was fascinating when he goes through the data showing that when charter schools were used in New York, the race gap disappeared. All the special interests involved in schooling as well as lack of accountability is quite depressing. Here is a transcript: [https://www.hoover.org/research/economist-looks-90-tom- sowel...](https://www.hoover.org/research/economist-looks-90-tom-sowell- charter-schools-and-their-enemies-1)

</comment><comment><USER50> It's difficult for me to come up with a charitable reason why Sowell, an arch- conservative, is somehow interesting to HN (and, to be fair, I'd say the same thing about a sudden surge in interest in Brad DeLong or Matt Bruenig), or why we'd vote City-Journal, the house organ of the Manhattan Institute, to the front page. I think it's especially dicey given the climate.

If you're curious about Sowell, some policy positions worth noting: opposition to marriage equality on the basis of heterosexual marriage protecting women from the impact of their declining physical appearance as they age, full- throated support for the Iraq war, repeated comparisons of Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler, a spicy " _Brown v. Board of Education_ was decided wrongly" take, opposition to criminal justice reform and particularly decarceration, support for Donald Trump in 2016 (and after), and opposition to the building of mosques.

It's not that these positions are beyond the pale (well: the mosque thing is), but rather that they're cut directly out of the coupon book of 1990s conservative think-tankism. Many dozens of public intellectuals held (and still hold) this same revanchist culture war portfolio of positions. Why is Sowell, long retired, so enthusiastically trotted out?

<comment><USER51> > It's difficult for me to come up with a charitable reason why Sowell, an > arch-conservative, is somehow interesting to HN

That's pretty easy. It's because tech has a vocal arch-conservative contingent.

Why are there so many arch-conservatives in tech? I don't really have an answer to that.

<comment><USER52> > Why are there so many arch-conservatives in tech? I don't really have an > answer to that.

This might be of interest: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology)

Tech has a lot of libertarians, which vaguely attribute to a couple of things: the appeal of simplistic but clean-seeming free market economic models to kinds of people who are drawn to computers and (to a lesser extent) the influence of startup culture. People in tech are also typically pretty economically secure, which gives them the luxury of a certain amount of aloofness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It is such a travesty that Thomas Sowell is completely absent from the mainstream conversation about race. I also can't recommend Coleman Hughes enough, as someone who has in many ways taken the torch from Sowell.

There are so many black Americans that have never heard a perspective on their standing aside from those presented within the context of critical race theory; a set of conclusions which are completely obliterated by people like Sowell, Hughes, Jason Riley, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, Desi-Rae Campbell, Josephine Mathias, Shelby Steele, Kmele Foster, Glenn Loury, Jonathan McWhorter, among many others in this realm, all of whom have largely differing opinions.

</comment><comment><USER54> If I understand the article correctly, Sowell thinks that blacks have a highly inferior status today because they have a culture that is not suited to succeeding in modern society.

If we assume Sowell is correct about that, then my reply is that culture is not fixed. For instance, Western European culture is vastly different than it was 500 years ago.

So the question is why blacks have the particular culture they do at present. Does Sowell address this?

<comment><USER55> He's written a lot of books, and I'd say these are some that dive into this topic:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36222735-discrimination-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36222735-discrimination- and-disparities)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3040.Black_Rednecks_and_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3040.Black_Rednecks_and_White_Liberals)

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50623786-charter- schools...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50623786-charter-schools-and- their-enemies)

<comment><USER54> I have far too many books to read. Could you perhaps give me a summary of his views?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > The prevailing notion today is that your skin color, your chromosomes, your > sexual orientation, and other markers of identity determine how you think. > And it is generally those who see themselves as the most > freethinking—"woke," while the rest of us are asleep—who apply the strictest > and most backward formulas.

Beautifully said.

</comment><comment><USER57> > As Kevin Williamson observed, Sowell is "that rarest of things among serious > academics: plainspoken."

So rare, and so precious.

</comment><comment><USER58> Is there anything new in Sowell? I thought he was a popularizer of traditional free-market economics.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm going to be a nonconformist myself and oppose the near-univeral approval of Sowell in this discussion. His book Basic Economics was the first book on econ that I read, and I was very impressed by it. It reaffirmed the rather right-wing political views that I'd inherited from my parents. However, after taking a few introductory econ classes at university and doing further reading on my own, Sowell starts to appear very ideologically driven.

Sowell is a free-market fundamentalist, in that he opposes most government intervention in markets, and universally trusts laissez-faire capitalism to provide the optimal social & economic good for practically any situation.

The problem with this position is that there's simply a ton of evidence that targeted government intervention provides far better outcomes in many situations.

Another classic example is environmental pollution, a classic case of tragedy of the commons. On the topic of global warming, Sowell doesn't even try to address the issue. He belives climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Democrats.

[https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/27/sowell-the- catchwords...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/27/sowell-the-catchwords- climate-change-deniers-reveals-political-crusade/)

Sowell writes in a conversational style, which is great for accessibility for non-economics. However, he is rightly criticized as failing to cite rigorous studies to back up his opinions.

For a more balanced view of basic economics, I'd highly recommend Principles of Economics by Greg Mankiw.

<comment><USER60> > I'm going to be a nonconformist myself and oppose the near-univeral approval > of Sowell in this discussion.

> It reaffirmed the rather right-wing political views that I'd inherited from > my parents.

I really did not know HN was _this_ conservative. I am very surprised at all this unanimous approval of Sowell.

<comment><USER59> Same here - it's really quite baffling.

Sowell even thinks that racial discrimination in hiring doesn't require government intervention. He constructs an argument in Basic Economics that market forces will rectify this kind of social ill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> MLK was non-conformist. Aligning oneself with the hegemonic theories of the wealthy and powerful however, is not.

<comment><USER62> There are righteous forms of hierarchy and tyrannical forms of hierarchy.

What your argument boils down to is an attack on hierarchy qua hierarchy. Very common to see these days as it is a classic revolutionary/Marxist ideal but it's also entirely inconsistent with natural law. Even within the revolutionary ideal, every revolution has its leaders and its strongmen because that's just how people organize themselves and those at the top live better off than those at the bottom (think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses).

<comment><USER61> > it's also entirely inconsistent with natural law

You're equating your subjective ideas with natural law? Seem a bit over- confident to say the least.

> There are righteous forms of hierarchy

Yes, a parent towards a their child. What other forms of righteous hierarchies are you thinking about?

> think Lenin and Stalin vs the starving masses

That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.

<comment><USER62> > What other forms of righteous hierarchies are you thinking about?

Head surgeon and other surgeons. CTO and other engineers. VP of sales and sales people, etc.

Other forms of hierarchy would be upper and lower courts.

Whether or not these are righteous is dependent on if, for example, the head surgeon is actually experienced and talented and a good leader. If he's just some shmuck they pulled off the street or if he's only in that position because he's friends with the hospital president then that would be a tyrannical or dysfunctional hierarchy.

>That would be the tyrannical form and completely illegitimate.

That's my point. But hierarchy itself is not illegitimate. That hierarchy itself is legitimate is a reflection of natural law. That was my assertion.

<comment><USER61> There seem to be some mixing of hierarchies and authority here, but even anarchists aren't as dogmatically opposed to all kinds of authority that you seem to imply?

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult the architect or the engineer For such special knowledge I apply to such a "savant." But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the "savant" to impose his authority on me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure."

Mikhail Bakunin

<comment><USER62> I was talking about Marxism and other revolutionary movements that spring from the French Revolution.

VP and CTO are actual titles that confer authority. What Bakunin is describing are hierarchies of competence in a particular art ( _techne_ ) but what would he say about parent-child relationships?

I had never heard of Bakunin until now. I'm not an expert on the schools of anarchist thought by any measure so I won't pretend to really be able to hold a discussion you want to get into analysis of various schools of anarchist thought.

<comment><USER61> > VP and CTO are actual titles that confer authority.

Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic. A top-down vanguard too.

> but what would he say about parent-child relationships?

The same competence argument applies to child rearing.

<comment><USER62> > Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic.

But these are voluntary structures? That's kind of the beauty of the free market. You have these little monarchal structures that go out and create something in the world. If people want to join they can. If and when these structures become too dysfunctional they go away due to market forces.

<comment><USER61> > But these are voluntary structures?

They're not. No free person would voluntary accept all kinds of shit jobs that's out there unless indirectly coerced.

<comment><USER62> By "indirectly coerced" you mean that they need food and shelter and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for them?

<comment><USER61> > By "indirectly coerced" you mean that they need food and shelter

Yes, and more.

> and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for > them?

Is this the level you sink to as soon as Capitalist dogma is questioned? It's not the poor and workers that have servants in modern society.

<comment><USER62> It's not dogma to suggest that people want to be compensated for building houses and growing food and won't do that for free unless a gun is put to their head.

<comment><USER61> Of course it is. Assuming that the only other option to Capitalism is slavery is dogma.

<comment><USER62> You're using the word Capitalism as though it's representative of an ideology. "Capitalism" is a term created by Marxists to describe a system that allows people to freely exchange with one another without force. No one is going to grow your food or build you a house without compensation. That's why Marxism requires slavery (public slavery).

<comment><USER61> You're clearly ignorant of left-wing theory. You actually think that the huge sympathy that socialism had and still have is based on people not understanding that it's actually slavery? A no compensation society? Come on.

<comment><USER62> I mean there's a reason these sorts of programs always end with mass murder and suffering. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't make it legitimate. Lots of people followed the Soviet and Nazi programs and it created human suffering on a level never seen before in human history.

You really should read _Human Action_ by Mises. It lays out on a philosophical level why all this stuff is fundamentally irrational and necessarily leads to mass human suffering.

<comment><USER61> Sigh. 99% of socialist want to expand democracy, not establish another dictatorship. Yet, people like yourself dogmatically focus on that other 1% that are authoritarian and paint every socialist as such.

71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare. You need to open both eyes.

I should read a book by the some libertarian god that unsurprisingly dismisses socialism, while your own knowledge about socialism is obviously paperthin? If it's so clear and obvious then you should be able to explain it in a paragraph or two?

<comment><USER62> > 99% of socialist want to expand democracy

Yes I know they do. This is a bad thing. The Founding Fathers were famously skeptical of democracy as were many, many thinkers and societies before them.

And yes it's always democratic in the beginning but democracy is not a panacea (as the Founding Fathers understood) and quickly things devolve into despotism. Just because someone exists doesn't mean they should have a say in how a society is run. Existence is a pretty low bar compared to how developed and complex the structures of a well organized society are.

> 71k people die every year in the US due to lack of healthcare.

Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a functioning market clearing mechanism (price).

Again I think you should read Human Action, even so you can just understand your 'enemy'.

<comment><USER61> > This is a bad thing.

It's refreshing to see that this anti-democratic sentiment is said so bluntly, usually it's covered up in weasel words.

> And yes it's always democratic in the beginning

Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that started out democratic.

> Millions are born each year due to abundance and millions more don't die for > want of food and other essential services and that is because there's a > functioning market clearing mechanism (price).

That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.

<comment><USER62> > It's refreshing to see that this anti-democratic sentiment is said so > bluntly, usually it's covered up in weasel words.

This sentiment is at the core of America. It's not a secret at all.

Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights. We have a Constitution because individuals have human rights that cannot be violated no matter how many people vote on it.

Pure democracy is evil.

> Please let me know which of the communist regimes of the 20th century that > started out democratic.

What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?

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

> That's a sociopathic response to why on earth 71k people should die every > year in a country of abundance simply because they don't have any money.

This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.

"There are three questions which will destroy most of the arguments on the left: 1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. What hard evidence do you have?" – Thomas Sowell

<comment><USER61> > This sentiment is at the core of America. It's not a secret at all.

It's not a secret no, but it's certainly not part of the propaganda.

> Pure democracy is necessarily predicated on a rejection of human rights.

Why is that? Maybe you should be blunt here too and just say private-property enforcement instead of human rights?

> What do you think the word "soviet" means in Soviet Union?

Are you really going argue that it was a democracy because of the name? Why are you doubling down on your own ignorance? Even the link you yourself posted contains this:

"After Lenin's party, the Bolsheviks, only got a minority of the votes in the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly, he disbanded it by force after its first meeting".

The Bolsheviks took power in a coup for themselves and never let go of it.

> This is a utopian response which is actually indicative of sociopathy.

What? There's nothing utopian about universal healthcare and that's firmly established by now. That also sounds like a means to an end argument which is sociopathic if anything is.

<comment><USER62> > There's nothing utopian about universal healthcare and that's firmly > established by now

Universal healthcare necessarily means rationing of healthcare resources. Universal healthcare does not mean that every person who has an ailment gets treated. A market naturally matches supply (healthcare infrastructure) and demand (sick people). When you remove the market it's up to government to do this matching process which means rationing.

<comment><USER63> > A market naturally matches supply (healthcare infrastructure) and demand > (sick people).

Even ignoring that healthcare lacks the factors that approximate the rational choice model's information requirements well enough for it decisions in that space in a market to even reflect average net utility well, a market matches supply with money; it matches to _need_ only to the extent that willingness to pay is driven only by expected personal utility, which it's not (because money also experiences declining marginal utility) when financial resources of each potential customer vary wildly.

<comment><USER62> > it matches to need only to the extent that willingness to pay is driven only > by expected personal utility

How else would you define need? The alternative involves some third party that determines need aka rationing.

<comment><USER63> > > it matches to need only to the extent that willingness to pay is driven > only by expected personal utility

> How else would you define need?

The question seems odd and seems to likely to be driven by a misunderstanding of the quoted material, so I'll try to reexplain what I intended in a way which I hope resolves the question.

Expected net utility given complete information of the consequences of a decision is the only plausible definition of need.

It doesn't, however correspond in any particular way (even ignoring the information problems that are enormous in healthcare) to the number of tokens one is willing to exchange for a thing in the market compared to other participants unless the quantity of tokens available to each participant is the same.

When the tokens are money and the context is a real capitalist society, that's decidedly far from the case.

<comment><USER64> This rests on an assumption that utility is comparable between individuals, which isn't present in all theories.

"How much would you pay for it" clearly _is_ comparable between individuals, but (IMO) declaring that doing so defines the proper outcome is circular and/or verges on the naturalistic fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I have read more books by Thomas Sowell than by any other author, by a very wide margin. The one which has influenced me the most is the one which best captures the fundamental principles underlying his view of the world: _A Conflict of Visions_. I'd suggest it as required reading for anyone who wants to fully appreciate Sowell's work, as it provides insight into how he makes normative judgments about the merits of economic policy choices.

In general Sowell does an excellent job of demonstrating through data that the outcomes of economic policies are often directly at odds with their stated objectives, but to really take a principled stand on what the proper objectives are in the first place you need a set of coherent first principles. _A Conflict of Visions_ provides this backdrop, and once you understand that Sowell clearly adheres to the "constrained" vision of humankind then his other works fall into their proper context.

It's a great book, but not above criticism, so in the interest of thoughtful inquiry I'd encourage anyone to read the book as well as this review by Bryan Caplan, economics professor at George Mason University who is also an economic libertarian: [http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell](http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/sowell)

</comment><comment><USER66> He repeats conservative propaganda so that conservatives can quote him and pretend they aren't racist because they have one black friend.

For example there was a recent twitter flap because he repeated an old invalidated conservative talking point about reproductive rights and tons of white clconservatives jumped on board saying "see! The black community agrees!"

This is all a strategy to manufacture consent.</comment>


Hygiene hypothesis: difference in autoimmune diseases in Russia, Finland (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23127244

<comment><USER2> I read the previously submitted comments here in this thread before reviewing the link kindly submitted here. (I remember this report from the year it was first published.) The paper compares the country Finland to the region Karelia conquered from Finland by Russia and now part of Russia. Life expectancy in Finland[1] is much better than that in Russia,[2] so if the trade-off of growing up in a clean environment is that I don't die of something else but life into healthy old age with some annoying allergies (I do have allergies, so I am well aware of how annoying they can be), I'll take that trade-off. The last time we had an active thread about the hygiene hypothesis here on HN, there were all kinds of n=1 anecdotes from various participants here about refraining from using soap and other socially silly practices. There is a big attitude here on HN that modern life is bad for us somehow. That attitude is mistaken.

The article "The Biodemography of Human Ageing" by James Vaupel,[3] originally published in the journal Nature in 2010, is a good current reference on the subject of how much life expectancy has improved at ALL ages in the developed world. Vaupel is one of the leading scholars on the demography of aging and how to adjust for time trends in life expectancy. His striking finding is "Humans are living longer than ever before. In fact, newborn children in high- income countries can expect to live to more than 100 years. Starting in the mid-1800s, human longevity has increased dramatically and life expectancy is increasing by an average of six hours a day."[4] An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here's why"[5] Provides some of the background. Yep, perhaps in the clean modern world, our immune systems aren't challenged as much as they used to be, but we also get sick less often and live to much older ages with good health. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.[6] That's a trade-off I will happily accept. My mom (who also has allergies) is eighty-one years old and still living independently and enjoying her favorite activities, and she has sisters and brothers older than she is who are still in good health. Girls born since 2000 in the developed world are more likely than not to reach the age of 100, with boys likely to enjoy lifespans almost as long. If that's what I have to put up with after living in a clean environment in my youth, I can deal with that.

[1] [https://www.google.com/search?q=Finland+life+expectancy](https://www.google.com/search?q=Finland+life+expectancy)

[2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=Russia+life+expectancy](https://www.google.com/search?q=Russia+life+expectancy)

[3] [http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2...](http://www.demographic- challenge.com/files/downloads/2eb51e2860ef54d218ce5ce19abe6a59/dc_biodemography_of_human_ageing_nature_2010_vaupel.pdf)

[4] [http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity....](http://www.prb.org/Journalists/Webcasts/2010/humanlongevity.aspx)

[5] [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

[6] [http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

<comment><USER3> Stories like this have a certain nostalgic appeal to some people. Yeah, let's go back to the good ol' days when kids would play in dirt, swim in raw sewage, and eat random bugs they found in the bushes. Death to soap, death to the hand sanitizer, death to every artificial environment... except virtual ones! Yeah, caveman with an iPad!

The problem with such nostalgic appeals is that they grossly underestimate modern science's ability to fix its own problems given enough time and resources. Immune system needs germs to practice on? What about a pill/lotion/inhaler/whatever that contains a variety of carefully selected and relatively harmless germs to give your immune system plenty of practice without risk of any life-threatening infection? You know, like a vaccine.

If the hygiene hypothesis becomes well-established, every pharmaceutical company will jump into the market with "germ pills". They could become as commonplace as multivitamins (though I hope they're more effective than today's multivitamins). Sooner or later, even FDA might begin to recommend a daily dose of mild pathogens for children. Problem solved, until we cause the next problem, wash, rinse, repeat.

Usually, the solution to science is more science.

<comment><USER4> _If the hygiene hypothesis becomes well-established, every pharmaceutical company will jump into the market with "germ pills"._

They've already tried! Coronado Biosciences was testing a drug comprised of pig whipworm eggs for the treatment of Crohn's disease. Unfortunately it didn't work.

[http://www.coronadobiosciences.com/research- development/hygi...](http://www.coronadobiosciences.com/research- development/hygiene-hypothesis.cfm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> George Carlin "...immune system is to kill germs. It needs germs to practice on ... When i was a little boy in 1949 we swam in Hudson river. The Hudson River was loaded with raw sewage. That's right, we swam in raw sewage. You know, to cool off. ...":

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnmMNdiCz_s&list=PL4DDBE51446...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnmMNdiCz_s&list=PL4DDBE51446AC5A45)

Edit: imagine, theoretically, if there is no germs and no need for immune system, would it mean additional biological resources available inside the human body for something else, like for bigger/better brain, etc...?

<comment><USER6> Tragically, it would - and in the non-hypothetical world, probably does. There is a fair amount of research showing significant cognitive development improvements when replacing dirt floors with concrete ones.

[http://web.stanford.edu/group/siepr/cgi- bin/siepr/?q=system/...](http://web.stanford.edu/group/siepr/cgi- bin/siepr/?q=system/files/shared/pubs/papers/pdf/SCID367.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> BBC Horizon just did a piece which talks about this topic [1]. The gist of it was that the hygiene hypothesis probably isn't correct, but it is close. Rather it is the diversity and makeup of the microbiome in our body that plays an important role in our immune system and hygiene, among other things, plays a role in shaping our microbiome. Pretty interesting I think. If it really is the microbiome, then maybe we can do something about it.

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4ofojAe-k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y4ofojAe-k)

</comment><comment><USER8> Article was behind a paywall, but they've been pointing these correlations for a long time, yet when they actually try to test the effect of benign pathogens (e.g. in Coronado's TRUST clinical trials) the results are disappointing. Also why don't routine vaccinations in rich countries have a similar beneficial effect?

<comment><USER9> > Also why don't routine vaccinations in rich countries have a similar > beneficial effect?

Presumably, it's an issue with quantity. The ~20 mandatory vaccinations in West are simply a drop in the bucket compared to the number of different organism/antigens you'd be exposed to without modern sanitation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> going to assume its along the lines of the old tale of, having pets is good for kids growing up. Responsibility and exposure to various organisms only have a pet will bring

Growing up on a farm probably gave us a bit more exposure, the only sicknesses I could recall really weren't, it was more like the breaking things as farms tend to be unforgiving

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is a pretty silly argument. We cannot even digest our food without gut flora. So I don't think we are as protected from microbes as ideas like this suggest.

What has changed in recent decades and can be proven and measured: We are exposed to all kinds of chemicals that are known to have harmful effects, many of which did not exist until they were recently invented.

It seems to me this is a much more likely explanation of the outbreak in chronic health conditions and so-called "autoimmune diseases" in the developed world.

<comment><USER12> Most of the nastiest chemicals were phased out or heavily regulated decades ago. Lead everywhere, asbestos, mercury, propellants, flame retardants, pesticides, etc...

We have nasty stuff around still today, of course, but if there was a "dark age" of nasty chemicals it was fifty years ago.

The point being that you would expect our immune systems to be on the _upswing_ if it was a chemicals problem.

<comment><USER11> It is my understanding that some of those phased out chemicals persist in the environment to this day and that you can take a blood sample from pretty much anyone and find unacceptable levels of toxic chemicals.

Also, we don't really know what happens when parents who are contaminated with such chemicals have babies. I have heard from people who believe that is a major connection there: That what is relatively small amounts for an adult nevertheless have toxic effects in utero.

Plus, we use chemical fertilizers and pesticides in recent decades on an unprecedented scale.

I just really don't see where your argument holds water. It simply fails to fit with my understanding of what is going on in the world today. Also, fails to fit with my firsthand personal experience.

But thank you for replying.

<comment><USER12> _some of those phased out chemicals persist in the environment to this day_

In ever decreasing levels. There aren't any that remain at the same levels as decades ago.

 _we don 't really know what happens when parents who are contaminated with such chemicals have babies_

Right. So we can hardly draw conclusions, now can we? "We don't know what happens" isn't an argument that proves something happens.

 _I have heard from people who believe that is a major connection there_

There are people out there who will tell you anything. "People" is not an authoritative source.

 _we use chemical fertilizers and pesticides in recent decades on an unprecedented scale._

Nope:

[http://www.panna.org/blog/long-last-epa-releases- pesticide-u...](http://www.panna.org/blog/long-last-epa-releases-pesticide- use-statistics)

Oh, and looping way back to your comment about how gut flora is required to digest food- the presence of bacteria in the belly does not confer resistance to viruses. Your exposure to viruses is all from the environment.

<comment><USER11> From the link you submitted:

 _Pesticide use in agriculture is down slightly, from 948 million pounds in 2000 to 877 million pounds in 2007. But that 's only about 1% per year, and still close to a billion pounds of toxic chemicals intentionally introduced into the environment and our food supply each year._

So, just because it is down compared to some earlier period within the last few decades does not mean it is not historically unprecedented. I am talking on the scale of human history and how what we are doing chemically in recent decades is different from what was done for many thousands of years before that.

Some of the people I have talked to about such subjects have phd's and are published authors. I really don't think you are making a good faith effort to engage me here. So I think I shall bow out of this conversation at this point.

<comment><USER12> You made up your mind before I even made my first post...

My point is that if "harmful chemical use" is _down_ (even if only a little) over the last 50-70 years, then it seems unlikely said chemicals are the cause of an epidemic that appeared only a few decades ago and has been growing ever since. If they were the cause, you would expect the epidemic to start even earlier, and you certainly wouldn't expect the epidemic to _grow_ as the chemical _decreases_.

A more dramatic example: imagine blaming the recent increase in autism diagnoses on alcohol. It's not entirely impossible, but it is suspicious. Alcohol has been around for millennium; if it is the cause, why is this only happening now?

I'm not saying this is proof of anything, but it calls your theory into question and I was curious if you had an explanation rather than simply saying "What you say doesn't agree with what I think so you must be wrong"

<comment><USER11> _You made up your mind before I even made my first post..._

Having an (informed) opinion about something I have wrestled with a long time somehow makes me automagically wrong or bad or something? Why is that?

 _My point is that if "harmful chemical use" is down (even if only a little) over the last 50-70 years, then it seems unlikely said chemicals are the cause of an epidemic that appeared only a few decades ago and has been growing ever since. If they were the cause, you would expect the epidemic to start even earlier, and you certainly wouldn't expect the epidemic to grow as the chemical decreases._

A great many chemicals do not simply get rapidly dumped by the body once you stop being exposed. For some things, once you are exposed, you are toxic for the rest of your life _unless something is done about it_ and doctors do not know a good way to fix it. So reducing exposure will not magically fix anything. Some things accumulate in the tissues over time. And some of those chemicals are out there in the general environment and people are still being exposed to them, even though they are no longer being used.

It is also well established fact that exposing a pregnant woman to certain things has a much bigger impact on the developing fetus than it would on an adult. That is hardly wild, random speculation on my part.

 _A more dramatic example: imagine blaming the recent increase in autism diagnoses on alcohol. It 's not entirely impossible, but it is suspicious. Alcohol has been around for millennium; if it is the cause, why is this only happening now?_

Yeah, that's really funny since both my sons are autistic. I participated for a time on a list where one of the things being done to help autistic kids was chelation – ie removal of metals from the body. According to a PHD chemist (and published author) who was an active participant on the list, about 75% of autistic kids benefit from chelation. Metals are one of those known toxic chemicals that, for thousands of years, most ordinary people had relatively little exposure to but which are simply everywhere now. They are, logically, possibly very much a part of the problem here.

Once metals get into the tissues, the body does not automatically dump them. They tend to stay there for life, having toxic impacts on the immune function and brain function unless you carefully follow some very specific protocols to try to effectively remove them. Most medical doctors don't know much about metals removal. It's the alternative med community, where a PHD chemist did the math to work out the half-life of various chelators and also work out which chelators work for which metals, which has reasonably reliable answers on this topic. Of course, saying that is something that opens one up to automatic dismissal by a lot of folks who think the answers they know from peer reviewed journals (or whatever) are the only ones with any validity.

 _I 'm not saying this is proof of anything, but it calls your theory into question and I was curious if you had an explanation rather than simply saying "What you say doesn't agree with what I think so you must be wrong"_

If you were genuinely curious as to what I think, you could have indicated that much, much earlier instead of positioning yourself as merely shooting me down.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


China set to pass U.S. as top oil importer - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/13/news/economy/china-oil-imports/index.html

<comment><USER2> Fun fact: until ~20 years ago, China was a net exporter of oil.</comment>


Ask HN: What technology is used to build the Y Pipes Canvas - <AUTHOR>

What technology is used to build the Yahoo! Pipes Canvas (editor) portion? What others can be used? -Thanks <comment><USER2> check out <http://javascript.neyric.com/wireit/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Javascript. Flash and Silverlight are alternatives.</comment>


User-Error Problems with Mobile App for Iowa Caucuses Prompt Online Confusion - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-app.html <comment><USER2> The current headline is out of date - The story has been updated since and now reads:

App Used to Tabulate Votes Is Said to Have Been Inadequately Tested

The app was quickly put together in the past two months and was not properly tested at a statewide scale, according to people briefed on the matter.</comment>


Show HN: A new spline - <AUTHOR> https://raphlinus.github.io/curves/2018/12/21/new-spline.html <comment><USER3> I'm up to page 9 on your thesis, and have already learned many things. Your "empirical testing of fairness" section is great.

From your thesis: > Intuitively, curvature is the position of the steering wheel when driving a car along the curve. Therefore, G2 continuity is equivalent to the lack of jerks of the steering wheel

I particularly like this analogy because I've worked simulating NPC cars in computer games and I found lack of G2 continuity of 3 Beziers annoying - <USER2> jerk of the steering wheel clearly put a sudden change of cornering forces through the suspension simulation which looked very unnatural.

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks really awesome.

I'm curious, because I haven't seen much work built on top of Knuth and Hobby's "Most Pleasing Curve" as defined by Mathematical Typography [0] and Hobby's follow-up papers [1] [2] [3]. Has anybody investigated these? As far as I know they're just not very convenient to rasterize.

[0] [http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~millerpd/docs/501_Winter13/Kn...](http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~millerpd/docs/501_Winter13/Knuth79.pdf) [1] [http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1047/CS- TR-8...](http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1047/CS- TR-85-1047.pdf) [2] [http://ect.bell- labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf](http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf) [3] [http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/87_2-04.pdf](http://ect.bell- labs.com/who/hobby/87_2-04.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, there's my thesis :)

There has been some work on this. Apple's Pages uses an implementation of the Hobby spline, demonstrating that it can be used in real consumer products. I think if you put these two side-by-side though, mine comes out quite a bit better; when you push the Hobby spline you get curvature extrema quite a distance from the control points, and mine doesn't do that.

Hobby's work has of course been an inspiration for mine for a long time, and it holds up academically quite well too - it has just the right blend of practical and aesthetic considerations and theoretical analysis; his solver runs in linear time and there's a proof it always converges (as long as tension values are within a reasonable range).

And of course there's the k-Curve work from Adobe. I think it is a step forward from Hobby in some ways (more robust) but a step back in others (it's not as smooth and most especially doesn't form true inflections).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be great to be able to compare this with Béziers of arbitrary degree. Some people get frustrated with degree 3 Béziers, but you can do great things with degree 5, 6, 7, or even higher - and they're C^infinity internally. If you could add curvature combs to your demo it would help in evaluating what it can do. I can see from the curve itself that I can get pretty nice results, but occasionally I notice small wobbles that would be more obvious with a curvature plot. Is it possible with this type of curve to vary the weights of the tangent vectors?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll add curvature combs in a future revision. I'll also point out that you can see a curvature plot of the underlying 2-parameter curve family by playing with beztoy.html in the linked github repo, which is one of the main ways I evaluated this.

Higher degree Béziers illustrate the "curse of too many parameters." Yes, they're very expressive, and yes you can have very high degrees of continuity, but it's also easy to make very wiggly or lumpy curves. I don't know of anyone who uses them, certainly not for font design.

<comment><USER5> Class-A automotive surfacing (using Alias, ICEM, Catia, NX) is all done with higher degree Béziers. I use them all the time in SolidWorks for consumer and medical product design engineering.

It's certainly tricky to figure out how to manage Béziers, but with the right tools and some knowledge of the math, you can do amazing things. Using the sketcher constraint tools in the SolidWorks it's possible to join higher degree Béziers with G3 tangency (or even higher). I also build approximate offset curves of the same degree using a modified version of Tiller and Hansen's method (I keep the control polygon legs parallel, but I add constraints to control the offset distance of the curve at n-2 places along the curve).

If I was doing font design, I'd love to have higher degree Béziers. Being able to make a sans-serif 'S' with single span curves would be great. Or lining up 3 control points on either end of the top of a lower case 'n' with vertical straight lines to have it be G3 would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Speaking as someone who's never touched splines before, this looks pretty nice. I was able to very quickly reproduce the "a" from your screenshot using your demo.

<comment><USER7> Also as someone who's never touched splines before, I found it pretty difficult to replicate. The "a" from the screenshot looks fairly smooth everywhere (except possibly the upper-right outside curve), but I found that unless I got the positioning just right, I could run into some degree of "bumpiness". This may, of course, say more about me than about Raph's new splines :P.

If I wanted to try Raph's prior work on spiro splines for comparison, is there some way to do that that's easier than learning to use Fontforge? (When I last tried Fontforge, it didn't seem to handle hi-DPI screens well...)

<comment><USER8> There's a downloadable demo here: [https://levien.com/spiro/](https://levien.com/spiro/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _For the impatient, click on the screenshot below to try the demo yourself._

You should add a link to the demo in the word "demo" for the people like me that can't follow instructions :). I tried to drag the points in the screenshot instead of clicking it.

<comment><USER5> You might want to add some basic instructions somewhere too. I had to dig through the source to figure out what some of the keyboard and tool tricks are. Perhaps they are standard in Illustrator or some other tool, but double clicking, shift-clicking, option/alt-clicking, nudging etc... I only figured out by poking around the .js.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just reading your thesis: Very interesting stuff! Thanks for sharing it.

Thinking about "fairness" of a spline: Intuitively I'd say a curve is "most fair" as compared to other curves when it minimizes the sum of squared centrifugal forces of a body moving along the path. In other words: The faster I can drive a car along the path the fairer the path :)

Would such a definition make any sense?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is very similar to the "Minimum Energy Curve" fairness metric, which minimizes sum of of bending energy, which in turn is proportional to curvature squared. And, thanks to basic physics, curvature is proportional to the centripetal force given a constant velocity.

The problem with MEC is that it tends to optimize for low tension; for inputs that are not well behaved, it sometimes optimizes for infinitely low tension, ie an infinitely long road. So there are other metrics, like Minimum Variation of Curvature, that work better for actual spline use, even though they have an energy metric that's "worse."

These curves are absolutely useful for path planning. A lot of the literature on "clothoids" from a hundred years or so ago is on transition curves for railroads. The G2 continuity condition basically means that you never have to suddenly turn the steering wheel to follow the curve, it's always moving continuously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice! I've used a spline tool in SolidWorks that I found useful and was hoping to find something outside of solid modeling that was similar and this seems to be it, super intuitive and clean!

Probably not the use it was intended for, but I wonder if this could be used to improve imagemap polylines. I use Wikipedia's imagemap tool [0] and I wish the interface was like this (actually, I use a separate site [1] to generate the polyline values).

[0] [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageMap](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageMap)

[1] [http://maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap/](http://maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is very interesting!

I'm mostly familiar with b-splines and NURBS and such, and there's some behaviour in this demo that I don't understand. If I create a round control point, and spin that point's handles around, sometimes the curve coming in and out of the point is a beautifully smooth tangent, coming in one side and out the other, and sometimes it forms a spike, doubling back on itself. Is there a term for that? Why does it happen? I find it fascinating and would like to learn more.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's likely it could be reworked to not make those spikes. The reason it happens is tricky. The basic curve family (what you get when you don't add explicit tangents) has a π-periodicity in the angles. Essentially it cares about the slope of the tangent but not the signed direction, and reverses the sign as needed. The curvature blending uses the same family but the sign reversals don't always "make sense" in terms of producing a smooth result. It's not obvious it would be better, as what you'd get would be more "twisty," and it's also possible the twistiness would snap as you rotated the handles. So making a direction reversal might be one of the less visually objectionable ways to handle the problem.

This is one of those "deep UX" questions I find fascinating.

<comment><USER13> When the bar is turned through 360 degrees its adjustment effect seems to go through 2 complete cycles. A single ended adjustment line which begins perpendicular in a default orientation and goes through just 1 complete adjustment cycle when turned 360 might be easier to control and understand, even though it would be less like the familiar bezier tweak lines.

<comment><USER14> This spline only depends on the orientation of the tangent line, not on the direction of the tangent ray. i.e. it is periodic every half turn, as you found.

That's actually the whole point of this type of curve (and also Adobe's recent "k-curve" tool) – knots are more or less at the curvature extremes; pulling a knot outward will make first a ruffle shape, then a sharp cusp, then a loop; the curve in general doesn't extend far outside the rough shape of a polygon through the knots; and the solver is robust.

There exist plenty of curve primitives more like what you are suggesting here (see Raph's PhD thesis), with a full-turn periodicity. But they end up creating shapes which loop out past the knots, and they also tend to not have unique solutions all the time, with the result that they sometimes will discretely jump from one local minimum to another as you make slight changes in the inputs.

<comment><USER13> > There exist plenty of curve primitives more like what you are suggesting > here.

The only thing difference I suggest is the control. Its the difference between:

effect = control_angle mod PI ,or

effect = control_angle / 2

When a full turn of the control produces a full cycle of effect a better ergonomic relationship might result.

<comment><USER14> Yes, but the generated shapes are based on the curve primitives used. The whole point of this particular curve primitive is that the "default" shape of the spline (if you don't try to set the tangents explicitly) doesn't extend much past the knots, because of the half-turn periodicity. As you drag a knot away from the spline, you will get a cusp shape with the knot at the cusp, and if you drag further it will turn into a loop with the knot at the peak of the loop.

If you instead had a full-turn periodicity, you would have substantially different properties for the curve shape. Several such curve primitives exist, you can use one of those if you want. This is one of the trade-offs involved in the choice of tool.

With this particular type of curve primitive, the primary way to change the spline is by adding and moving control points, not by trying to manually specify tangents. The latter should not be used for general shape design but should be seen as a specialty tool to support niche technical requirements (such as straight segment to curve interfaces), and tangent adjustments should be sparing because large tangent adjustments will create lumpy shapes.

<comment><USER13> Sorry I dont share your idea of correctness between this control parameter and its formulaic effect. We might say the formula naturally wraps this angle, but the formula doesn't mind what space we prefer to map from.

> If you instead had a full-turn periodicity, you would have substantially > different properties for the curve shape

We would have precisely the same effect on curve shape from a 360 degree control than with a wrapped 180 degree control, but have twice as much travel to adjust the outcome more finely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow Raph is pretty busy/productive: xi, druid, a his company and this.

<comment><USER16> What is his company doing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really a company, just me, but I'm making a music video game. And yes, the last few months have been a burst of creativity, after something of a slump the first half of the year. Leaving Google and going out on my own has been good for me. Now, if only I had a source of income...

<comment><USER16> Did you ever think about doing a Kickstarter project?

For example, the guy who is writing Prosemirror (an editor), started such a project, and was able to secure a source of income.

[https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prosemirror#/)

You could start a bunch of these projects, see which one is funded first, and then focus all your energy on that project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Having written the TCB spline (Kochanek–Bartels spline) implementation for a few animation pipelines, I am curious what you see as the problems with the TCB spline? Having explicit controls for tension, continuity and bias feels pretty comprehensive and I'm not aware of animators unhappy with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very good, but I think the problem is "too many parameters." In some contexts that's fine (animators are used to it) but in others it might not be ideal. People don't use that spline for font design work; why? The Hobby spline has a tension parameter, which is said to be "very useful" in the paper, but when Apple adapted it for Pages, they left it out of the UI. Was that a mistake, or did they make an informed user experience tradeoff? (Incidentally, I believe tension is in there, as part of the illusion of extensibility, but deeply hidden)

So whether this spline is better for, say, animation, is what I consider a fascinating research question. Hopefully putting it out there will start to get answers.

<comment><USER17> I can't tell from your online demo if there is any control over the trade off between only dropping curve points where tangentially required verses even distances between curve points. (I'm sure there is some shorter term for that.) I remember a talented animator remarking to me how he had acceleration control with TCB Splines that allowed him to achieve the same curve shapes but with control where curve points are emitted, giving him timing controls for objects in motion. He liked using TCBs for everything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting to me, to think about how curves like this can be useful in robotic path planning.

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks great. I appreciate the article as an example of how the specifics of an algorithm impacts user experience. Far too often we think of user experience as being independent of the implementation, like it's just a layer on top.

</comment><comment><USER20> "I intend to port to at least C++ so that it can be more easily integrated into real systems" \- disregarding the implication that C++ is a more "real" system than Javascript what steps are necessary to make the numerical methods that are not perfect and if pushed hard will sometimes get a slightly wrong answer along with addressing not being able to make multiple subpaths required to draw font shapes?

<comment><AUTHOR> I tweaked the language, thanks for pointing that out. Obviously JavaScript is capable of very real systems and many of the potential applications of this work. Regarding the timeline, I'm hoping soon, but it's going to depend on where I want to take this codebase; I still haven't really decided, and it will depend in large part on what kind of interest I see. The multiple subpaths question is of course not a problem with the spline itself but whether the test app has a sophisticated enough document model to manage multiple path objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This will be amazing for shape optimization. As it seems one can describe various shapes with very little control points and parameters. Furthermore the relation between the control points and the final spline is very well behaved and thus great for use in an optimization. Great work!

<comment><USER14> What do you mean by "shape optimization"?

<comment><USER21> It's a field in engineering where optimization is used to optimize a engineering design for a certain purpose (e.g. a beam for stiffness).

Topology optimization is the broader field that allows topological changes to the design (e.g. the addition or removal of nodes). These optimization's often have a solution that first have to be interpreted by an engineer to turn it into a manufacturable design.

A shape optimization performs optimization only of certain variables of a predefined design. The splines as described here seems to fit well for describing for instance sheet metal parts or cross-sections of beams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I must say, that "a" looks good given the number of control points.

</comment><comment><USER23> _The code is in a research repo... with a GPL license_

This seems like the sort of thing that LGPL is really well-suited for. Any reason for going with GPL? Not many people are going to want to GPL-infect an entire project just to adopt a new spline solver.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand how is this different to somethigng in Inkscape?

</comment><comment><USER25> > and solves most of the problems that held that back from wider popularity.

> …

> and is in JavaScript with a GPL license.

If you want them to be widely adopted outside of research circles, you should avoid the GPL. Many companies would be interested in a curve like this but would avoid GPL just avoid any possible litigation. It's not great, and it's probably not a popular opinion I have but it's what I've seen from experience.

<comment><USER26> This comment kinda rubs me the wrong way, especially since the author notes that _I also want to preserve full ownership of the code so that I can do commercial licensing of code derived from it_. If there are many companies that want a curve like this (which means it presumably took non-trivial time and skills to develop), maybe they should come to a commercial agreement with the author?

What is it with pushing people to unpaid labour to make megacorps happy with some fuzzy notion of potential "wide adoption" as the only reward?

<comment><USER27> The intent of making something open source is usually for others to use it. The parent is remarking that by choosing GPL the code would probably never be used. Which, in theory, would defeat the reason for making it open source in the first place.

I'm assuming the idea behind making such a comment is the realization that many people, especially in academia, do not realize how unusable GPL is.

<comment><USER28> > The intent of making something open source is usually for others to use it.

The intent of releasing something under a MIT or BSD license, maybe.

<comment><USER27> You can release the source code without any license. Adding a license means you want other people to "license" it from you - I.E. using your code.

The GP actually quoted the article "and solves most of the problems that held that back from wider popularity."

Which imply the author wanted people to adopt it. I'm assuming it wasn't about other academics adoptions but of hobbyists and commercial ventures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Hello Ralph.

It looks great but you should add some basic usage howto. It is obvious that you know how to use it, you created it, but other people do not.

The first time I used it it was very frustrating because I only created circle handlers, and said: This is sh*t!! Then I close the window and looked back at the sample image and saw square pointers, so I said: There must be some key that creates square pointers. After trying again I discover it creates square handlers by default.

This is the typical engineer mindset, after having spent years doing something they consider obvious what it is not.

Read "The Design of everyday things" for more design concepts if you are interested.

<comment><AUTHOR> "The Design of Everyday Things" is a great book, I enjoyed it.

Part of why I put it up with no instructions is to get feedback on how intuitive it is to use without any explicit instruction. I've gotten mixed response; some people seem to get it, others don't. So thanks for this bit of feedback. There's a basic help panel now.

<comment><USER30> There is an odd mishap, when you are dragging one of the circle handlers, and drag outside of the gridded area, then through the center of the circle. It flips into a corner</comment></comment></comment>


WhatsApp founder says Facebook used him to get its acquisition past EU regulator - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/whatsapp-founder-brian-acton-says-facebook-used-him-to-get-its-acquisition-past-eu-regulators/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18074690](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18074690).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is blogspam from the Forbes article, posted here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18076090)</comment>


Why Rich Levandov Invested in Zynga—Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Consider - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2010/11/03/why-rich-levandov-invested-early-in-zynga-and-why-it-took-off-things-every-entrepreneur-should-consider/

<comment><USER2> The article talks about "reach, engagement, and monetization" as essential properties.

What's interesting in Zynga's case, I think, is how it conflates reach and engagement. The techniques it uses for engagement and the techniques for reach are very similar - social connection</comment>


Epic Games won a temporary restraining order against Apple - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/25/21400240/epic-apple-ruling-unreal-engine-fortnite-temporary-restraining-order <comment><USER2> What happened to the simple ability for a given company to not do business with another? I'm struggling to understand why Epic can take Apple to court simply because they no longer have a developer agreement.</comment>


Outgrowing Apache Storm: why we built in-house distributed stream processing - <AUTHOR> http://libra.to/1L8WTjv <comment><USER2> I'm on the data team at Librato, happy to answer any questions. Some of the Librato team will also be at ReInvent next week, can discuss more in person for others attending.

<comment><USER3> Any consideration given to Scala or Clojure, or did raw performance (via Java 8) win over greater abstraction capabilities from the start?

IIRC, Twitter's Storm replacement, Heron, is written in C++ -- i.e. they didn't go with Spark/Scala, which, given that Twitter is probably the largest Scala shop in the world, speaks volumes about the volume of data these sytems need handle (read: Spark is far from slow).

<comment><USER4> If I remember right, the team that wrote Heron was most comfortable with C++, and that was a major reason in choosing it.

<comment><USER5> Heron is half Java and half c++ and could have been written on top of finagle had a different team inside Twitter had implemented it

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also, this book is a great read: [https://www.manning.com/books/big- data](https://www.manning.com/books/big-data)

</comment><comment><USER7> Have you considered mongodb?

<comment><USER8> MongoDB is web scale.</comment></comment>