From context collapse to content collapse - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/?p=8724 <comment><USER2> Great article. The author concludes with the following points on what is happening to information as all information is increasingly "flattened" to fit the new, single content stream of the social media feeds on our smartphones:

1\. Everything is trivialized: major public policy changes arrive in the same package and placed next to trivial pop culture.

2\. We respond to information using the same low-bandwidth tools (like, heart, retweet, etc.) that limit the expressiveness of response.

3\. All information is in direct competition, playing the algorithms to gain attention.

4\. Power over information is consolidated to a very small number of gatekeepers, and mainly Facebook.

This is an interesting way to look at things, and it resonates with me. I think the author described the problems with what I think of as the "hypermedia" era very well. But the author doesn't offer suggestions for what, if anything we should do about it.

As for myself, a couple years ago I read Cal Newport's Deep Work and then Digital Minimalism, and found their ideas compelling enough that I deleted Facebook and disabled web browsing and email on my phone (although I later put web and email back).

However, #deletefacebook seems to have about a snowballs chance of happening at large.

What countering forces could or should break the deathgrip that Facebook and Google in particular hold over communication and information publication today?

<comment><USER3> He missed an important piece - it all functions because the Reward circuitry in peoples brains are feeding off of Likes/Clicks/View/Upvote counts etc etc.

Take the dumb counts away. Hide them. Delay them etc etc and all of a sudden pavlovs dog or skinners rat starts behaving differently.

People act as if this dumb half baked reward system solely existing to increase "engagement" underlying everything is now unchangeable and baked into the fabric of everything for ever and always.

They are wrong.

<comment><USER4> There are quite possibly better ways to run reactions than the way current social media does it.

However, I think it's easy to miss the important role/use that these devices play. The article "the silence is deafening" just the other day noted how non- verbal cues in conversation and I'd add that social media reactions and similar devices allows people to be "loosely engaged" with each other in the way that who attend the same event without exchanging words are loosely connected.

And these kinds of perfunctory attachments are important (as COVID also shows). These kinds of attachment were also manipulated even before the Internet, with store clerks instructed to say "have a nice day" and such even in the 1970s.

Which is to say, likes, memes and emoticons may seem kinda silly and annoying from one perspective but they're a way to emulate "the stuff of life" and we need to think about how to do that better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a musician, I'm sad to see that social media are almost exclusively visual. Very few browse their feeds with sound on, videos have subtitles, and any audio content needs a big "SOUND ON" banner to even have a chance of being heard. Music streaming services have all but sunsetted their (admittedly lame) social features and focus on their "1-click mood/activity-based background music" experience. Music fans are relegated to toxic echo chambers like reddit.

I recently heard someone say "music was central to youth culture from 1965 to 2005, but that is no longer the case". I can't help but think it has to do with the 'social media on smartphones' experience, the medium is the message and so forth.

<comment><USER6> The music industry have undoubtedly contributed to that. You can't put music in video content without risking takedowns. Or have it in a stream. You're not _allowed_ to have a music culture in fixed recordings.

(I'm a long way from youth culture myself, but I get the impression that what we have now is not "culture" but "cultures"; rather than a single convenient for historians "scene" per time period, all sorts of scenes exist at once. You can't tell me that kpop stans aren't a global youth culture, posting their fancams all over the place. Now wondering if that contradicts what I said above..)

<comment><USER7> The music industry's culpability in this is even greater than their absurdly litigious approach to intellectual property.

Consider how music videos came to be, in a world where the music industry was struggling to stay relevant in an era of CGI-laden PG-13 Hollywood cinema, arcades, home video, and cable television. Music videos were a way for the music industry to get in on the advertisement and product placement action, from which all the other forms of media were able to profit.

Now that most valuable music today has a very strong brand identity, targeted demographics, a tried-and-true promotional formula, and many times even a full-on music video to go with it, the industry perceives it as a true risk for someone to hear a song and not see the "approved" visuals to go along with that song.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A serious thesis, but I feel one that reflects on a transitional mode.

Just as the all-in-one context collapse spurred a revival of context (unified FB -> Snapchat/finstas et al), the earlier primitive TV news of the 60s and 70s and RSS feeds of late 99/early 00s rapidly broke into more structured channels, today using filtering and aggregation — my RSS feed is broken into synthetic "channels" specifically for this reason. People settle into a mode they like; "all-in" providers of content become context as well; Fox has an older demographic reflecting not only comfort with a familiar delivery mode but also a context.

And the medium-type segregation that Carr describes (newspaper vs magazine vs LP records) certainly remains: FB is no threat to Netflix or Prime video, much less vice versa (and see the fox reference above). FB and Twitter May have killed the short blog post but hardly the long ones.

This is straight McLuhan.

</comment><comment><USER9> A subset of the authors point is the "truth collapse".

It's increasingly difficult to differentiate truth from falsehood. Also increasingly difficult to differentiate between truth and 'almost' truth.

A further problem, likely in the future will be 'source collapse'.

It will be increasingly difficult to determine the actual source of news, with unlimited sharing and distribution. Add in to this mix of chaos AI generated news articles, it may well be possible that people will shun internet news altogether.

<comment><USER10> You could simply use cryptography to sign all messages sent by sources. Problem solved.

<comment><USER9> That will not solve the problem to the average user.

Also, even if all sources are verified, it is already very trivial to create a new publication or a "news" source and make it look legitimate in a few months.

It's a very messed up situation.

<comment><USER11> Agreed on the modal user, but two quibbles: (a) how often does anyone follow secondary sources that are only a few months old? (b) it is less trivial to create new primary sources. (not that publishers are in the habit of giving easily followed references)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness: > "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity."

What a twisted view of humanity. No wonder people joke the guy is a robot.

<comment><USER13> Zuckerberg's approach might actually work if people were universally accepting, but it does not match up with reality as it is, where behaviour that is acceptable in one culture/subculture might get you ostracised, shunned or even killed in another.

I have read posts on Facebook help pages from people who have had to deal with the consequences of Facebook forcibly breaking down the walls between a person's mutually exclusive cliques, e.g. a girl complaining that hijab-less photos of her posted and tagged by her friends were appearing on the Facebook feed of her conservative Islamic family members (the pre-approval option for tagging only controls whether it appears on your Wall; posts you are tagged in can still appear on your friends' feed even they are not directly friends with the poster).

I have always wondered why Facebook designed it this way, or why they did not fix it, since they already know all about your cliques. Zuckerberg's comment suggests that they had almost an ideological reason for it.

<comment><USER14> The other example that comes up a lot is people who are gay and haven't come out to their families/hometowns yet.

But look, I don't have a complicated social life, and I still can't fathom this idea that you share the exact same same stuff with all friends/co- workers/family/acquaintances.

There are some people I talk about politics to and some I don't, some people I talk to about music or books and some I don't, some people I talk to about technology and MANY I never would.

So Facebook became the lowest common denominator of what I was willing to share: my dog. He's a good boy.

Anyway my feed withered down to everyone's lowest common denominator (pets, travel photos, some children, often just nothing) and a few vocal armchair activists do didn't get the memo. Which in some ways is great, it's so boring I can just deactivate my account on a whim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Now all information belongs to a single category, and it all pours through a > single channel.

It may not be relevant to the article but I think context collapse is a good way of describing the issues with online meetings. In a conference room you can sit next to people who share your interests or who you feel comfortable with. You may whisper in someone's ear about something that is relevant to the current discussion. You can direct your attention at someone by physically turning towards them and use the volume of your voice and body language to control who is consuming your vocal and physical channels of information.

That is just to say the problem that information channels are being condensed is not limited to social media. I think a lot of the points from the article about information competitiveness and trivialization can apply to other areas where information channels are collapsing. Also let me know if you can think of any other examples.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great essay. This guy nails it, although I think his scholarly approach misses some key ramifications. (I'm also not sure I like "content collapse", since there's nothing unusual happening here, just everything all at once, but that's a fight for another day)

I've been kicking around this problem since 2009 and I keep getting back to different physical devices for different social contexts. It's not just that the contexts are different; it's that we need to use our bodies to show ourselves and others that we are moving into some different context. Otherwise the "programming" doesn't work.

The fundamental error here is thinking that all human communication can collapse to data. That's wrong in a ton of ways, but the idea has a helluva powerful following among us nerd.

Cool stuff. Thanks.

<comment><USER17> I think you are right about distinct devices. I use a phone and computers owned by my employer for professional activities, and a different phone and personally owned computers for my private interests. There is, of course, uncomfortable bleeding between the two, e.g., health insurance e-mails going to my empolyee account that gets forwarded to my private e-mail account. Just part of the insanity of employer based health care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In discussing the appeal of the News Feed in that same interview with > Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg observed, "A squirrel dying in front of your house > may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in > Africa." The statement is grotesque not because it's false — it's completely > true — but because it's a category error. It yokes together in an obscene > comparison two events of radically different scale and import. And yet, in > his tone-deaf way, Zuckerberg managed to express the reality of content > collapse. When it comes to information, social media renders category errors > obsolete.

I find the criticism of Zuckerberg here to completely unwarranted. Zuckerberg is completely correct, and he is not making a category _error_. In fact "yoking together in an obscene comparison two events of radically different scale and import" is precisely what allows Zuckerberg's point to be so salient. I'm unsure how the author could come to the conclusion that Z, the one who originally clearly demonstrated this point, somehow did not understand it as he was making it.

</comment><comment><USER19> So the context collapse of early social media ultimately led to context restoration. Why does the author never propose that content collapse might lead to content restoration? After all, I'm choosing to consume this content through the lens of hacker news for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER20> Great article.

Infinite content being firehosed to a content consumption bandwidth constrained population (still 24 hours in a day).

The whole consumption model changes - most folks end up drinking from the firehose by very lightly skimming an incredible width of content (even those it is narrow in sense that it is within the confines of the social network algorithms), while never deeply engaging, and rarely going outside their sweet spot.

Then the consumption model changes the supply side. And we loop. What breaks this loop?

<comment><USER21> Finite nature of VC investments! Twitter used to have UserStream, basically free Firehose, but the water level hit the floor and they shut it down.

<comment><USER20> Good point. And $ focused on exponential growth communities consuming content paid for by the attention of the content consumers. Rather than $ focused on long tail communities and deeper, more expensive, more difficult to monetize (per unit cost) content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Interestingly, content collapse was one of the most salient ideas I took away from reading Fahrenheit 451. Of course, the book took it to an extreme that will never become a reality.. Social media may be incentivized to keep their users within the system and feed them short headlines that satisfy their question of "what's going on in the world today" via content collapse. But I don't see this spreading to all forms of content on the internet/devices. Online publishers, digital advertisers, brands, and even Google rely on medium to longform content for their business models. Caveats abound, but from my perspective, the internet runs on articles.

"Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbords."

\- Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451

</comment><comment><USER23> Superb piece. The ideas are pretty great but what really stands out is that the guy can write, beautifully. So often people have great ideas but little ability to express them, so it's nice when both happen at once..

</comment><comment><USER24> To an extent I think the web provides separate contexts for information. I go to certain websites to find news and others to find entertainment. I'm intentional about it. For aggregator sites like Reddit, separate feeds (multireddits) are possible if you spend an extra 10 minutes to configure them.

Most social media makes it easy for people to land in one place and use that as a funnel for consuming all of their information, and provides no tools for curation. True as ever, the majority of people find the lowest friction way forward. We have the tools to empower people to be careful and intentional, but only a small subset of the population actually use them. That's a behavioral issue amplified by technology, and well beyond my ability to diagnose.

I wonder about the desire to consume information wrapped up in a social context. How much of sharing an article is actually about sharing information, and how much is about presenting an identity associated with that content? When everything is your social media feed, everything is on some level about building your identity.

I want there to be technological answers to these problems, but the older I get and the longer I work with technology, the less answers I find.

</comment><comment><USER25> well this is one amazing article. The author just earned my mad respect. Just bumped up his book on my read list. I find it interesting to find out how the entire system is shaping up.

</comment><comment><USER26> > "When social media was taking shape fifteen-odd years ago..."

Maybe 5-10 years before that, if you didn't get your news from a newspaper, radio or television, then you could blissfully ignore the news. Now, because the mobile phone is small, convenient, and fun to swipe (now with more yummy haptic goodness), you can get "your news" between the alarm clock and breakfast while on the toilet.

This article disturbs me. If there is a crisis here it's growing up thinking what comes packaged with your friends birthday pics, selfies of your new do and cat picture of the day is a platform for news. [1]

Why is 'content collapse' not just post-hoc rationalization of the evolution of social media as a toy experience for connecting with friends to media outlet? Because the latter makes the former into a great place for businesses to place targeted ads within a local community [2].

Besides, I just plunked down >$500 for my new phone, and I have a >1hr commute to work--Oh wait! That was before The Thing. Now I'm baking bread, trying to keep from getting distracted working from home, and spending time with my family. hehe

[1]: In a recent interview with John Stewart about his new film on politics, David Green asks, "I look back to "The Daily Show." And I, as a journalist, just remember being like, this is someone showing that people can get their news in an entertaining way."

Stewart. "I'm not sure. I mean, I never thought that we were delivering the news, I guess. So maybe I'm not quite - I think we were delivering criticism of it. [...] The thing that we were doing has generally been around forever, which is making fun of the powers that be and the news of the day in a satirical fashion."

[https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883233441/jon-stewarts-new- fi...](https://www.npr.org/2020/06/25/883233441/jon-stewarts-new-film-is- about-whats-gone-wrong-with-american-politics)

[2]: As recent FB ad boycott makes clear, Who can afford TV ads?

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a great perspective. I wonder if the news orgs contributed to their own collapse by pushing too many obtrusive ads. Did people start to prefer FB where they figured out how to places ads with higher returns? They might be better at it simple because they can target better too. News as example, content collapse generally.

</comment><comment><USER28> This gets served from a self-signed certificate and returns a 404 site not found.

Given that there's other comments about the blog post ... what happened here?

<comment><USER21> Use plain HTTP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> At least for the first part, article mentions an Instagram feature to separate contexts without splitting accounts but do people not do that all the time anywhere, feature exists or allowed or not?

I don't know how many such Facebook accounts exist but I've heard about dummy public facing accounts to play a boring person.

</comment><comment><USER29> I get the desire to convey the significance and nuance of the issues described, but the usage of collapse felt out-of-place. Something like fold, reduction, consolidation, or even condensation would have been more communicative as a takeaway from the spirit of the article.

</comment><comment><USER30> The last two params are why I like the proposal of Twitter becoming a "dumb" protocol leaving all filtering to the client.

</comment><comment><USER31> I see the "content collapse" as a reversion to the historical norm - for most of human history, the majority of people were illiterate and uneducated, and understood little about global affairs. There was a "thinking class" which included the religious, political, and artistic elite, while everybody else was part of the "working class" \- effectively peasants who knew little about the world.

The content collapse threatens to destroy the very foundation of Western democratic society - an intelligent, educated public that understands nuance and participates in civic discussion. Instead, it is creating a situation where the masses are subject to the whims of social media, much like the peasants of former times, who were often caught up in religious trends and various mob-like witch hunts.

What is new about our time, is that in democratic societies, the political elite are no longer part of the "thinking class", by necessity, because they have to win votes. Only in autocratic societies like China and Russia do the political elite tend to still speak like an educated elite. It is striking to note that Vladimir Putin spends a lot of his public time talking about detailed points in history like specific events of WWII or even medieval history (see his recent essay on WWII published in the National Interest). Regardless of whether you agree with his interpretation of history, he often talks like a professor, not a politician. Politicians in democratic countries, by contrast, rarely talk about history in nuanced terms because the public is not interested in "boring" details. The inevitable result is the massive "dumbing down" of politics that we see in our time, as the political elite becomes merged with the masses while tech and corporate elites wield the most power.

<comment><USER11> Putin's law school thesis was "The Most Favored Nation Trading Principle in International Law." Xi's was "Tentative Study of Agricultural Marketization."

(I haven't been able to quickly find Johnson's, but then again the dynamic in the 1980's _Yes, Minister_ was of LSE-educated politicians seconded by Oxbridge civil servants. Given a capable cabinet, one might hope a democracy could elect[1] one of their number with a median formation and still get a functional[2] government.)

That having been said, the demagogue[3] was a thing even in the ancient world.

[1] on the other hand, what might assigning executive positions at random do in terms of incentivising education? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition)

[2] as opposed to the conservative view of de Maistre: "Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite." (all countries get the government they deserve)

[3] as one might expect from _δημαγωγός_.

<comment><USER31> Thank you. I tend to agree with de Maistre. What is striking about Russia (and Ukraine) is that the general public is far more intellectual than the American public. Two real stories to illustrate my point: If I walk into a random bar it's not uncommon for me to hear people talking about Crime and Punishment, philosophy and history. Even your local fishmonger from Murmansk might strike up a conversation about events in the Bering Strait in WWII.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's a good thing. As disgusting as Zuckerberg acts, he happens to be aligned with the truth here. Presenting different faces for different audiences is unhealthy for personal growth and self-reflection.

The gatekeeper is not an issue: modulate your social media.

<comment><USER33> A friend of mine spent a week in jail because her friend posted a picture of her holding hands with her girlfriend. She had gone home to Saudi Arabia to visit a dying grandparent, and ended up saying goodbye to her whole family because it's too unsafe to return.</comment></comment>


Neural network will enable successive Alexa queries without repeating "Alexa" - <AUTHOR> https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/60438cf4-f163-4a26-995c-b855dd9cc419/alexa-do-i-need-to-use-your-wake-word-how-about-now <comment><USER2> In other words it's always listening.

The goal is clearly to get a listening device in every home to harvest ambient conversation for marketing purposes. At first we were told the device does not actually pay attention unless you say "Alexa." Now you don't have to say Alexa. How long before the whole charade is dropped?</comment>


ACH payments cost less. Will online shoppers ever switch? - <AUTHOR> https://fin.plaid.com/articles/will-online-shoppers-ever-switch-to-ach/ <comment><USER2> No. There is zero benefit to the shopper and extreme fraud risk.

Also, plaid apparently is in the process of being acquired by Visa, so an article advocating against credit cards is an interesting career choice.

<comment><USER3> They're not.

Read the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As long as the upfront costs for ACH remain as high as they are (I'm looking at you, Plaid), no, people will not switch.

Consumers definitely don't give a crap. Until people offer cash vs credit discounts, no one will move away from credit cards.

Just like Visa/MC/Amex planned.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'll stick to cash. The result of not using is the loss of the ability to have 2 party direct money transfers.</comment>


NULL Confusion - <AUTHOR> http://slott-softwarearchitect.blogspot.com/2010/04/null-confusion.html

<comment><USER2> In C.J. Dates' book "Database in Depth", there is a wonderful example with a simple database that allows NULL, and something like half a dozen different straightforward ways one might write a query to answer a specific question-- and each query gives a different answer.

It makes a powerful argument in favor of Dates' argument that NULL should not be allowed.</comment>


The Null Ritual (2004) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Null_2004.pdf <comment><USER2> Medical science sometimes escapes the wrong approach by actually providing odds ratios (conditional probability estimate between events or phones) or effect sizes including confidence bounds on these. That is already useful information about the hypothesis being tested, as opposed to significance which is information about validity of data.

However, an explicit estimate of predictive power (sensitivity) would be very useful too - confidence intervals do not provide information on the model used to derive them which may or may not fit. Instead one has to use proxies like experimental design descriptions and N.

<comment><USER3> > "That is already useful information about the hypothesis being tested"

The important part is to choose the correct hypothesis to test. However, there is no requirement to use the effect size to test any hypothesis, although eventually someone should come up with a model that explains why it has the value it does.

> "as opposed to significance which is information about validity of data."

Huh?

<comment><USER2> I meant the p-value comparison to cutoff there. It is the test on probability of data being observed given that null hypothesis is true and error model matches your assumption, typically assumed normal or studentized.

Such as by chance or because the alternate hypothesis is bunkum or because your experiment lacks power. (It does not distinguish between these, and middle item is only minimally handled by most waste of obtaining it, esp. not by Fischer's or ANOVA which are facts about data only, using error in measurement model.)

Thus p-value is a statement about validity of data (type 1 error, false positive) and maybe about the null hypothesis as a secondary notion.

(E.g. about the control group of you use that as reference group for null.)</comment></comment></comment>


How bullying may shape adolescent brains - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1714475/how-bullying-may-shape-adolescent-brains/ <comment><USER3> Here's my take:

For most people, success in life, is tied up with your self-confidence.

If you think you're gonna fail, you probably are - unless you happen to be wildly talented at something, and can stumble your way to success. In fact, many people will not even try, because they lacked the confidence.

It could be academia, work, relationships, hobbies,

If you've been conditioned to believe that you: suck, have no talent, are ugly, and a loser, then that's something which probably follow you into adulthood. I know I've seen it many times, with kids from my jr. HS - <USER2> still struggle today, as adults in their 30s.

Low confidence and poor self-esteem / self-worth is a vicious cycle, and will/can affect all parts of your life down the road.

<comment><USER4> For me it started with bullying from my mom and continued with bullying in school. The only thing that pulled me out of it was time and MDMA. I don't think I got my shit together until my mid 30s. Now I've got a family and a successful career. But I could have very easily have ended up drunk in a gutter somewhere.

<comment><USER5> Your Mom?! Holy crap, that's a source that hadn't occurred to me.

Good job getting it together - that must have been a tough row to hoe.

<comment><USER6> Parents are the absolute worst bullies. I'm not saying every parent bullies their children, I'm saying the ones who do the bullying is much worse than anything peers can dish out. And it's more persistent and impossible to escape. Then they turn around and act normal in front of other people so the fucked up kid looks like the bad guy to outsiders.

From as far back as I can remember until I left for college my mom berated me day in and day out about how my of a piece of garbage I am, how I ruined her life, how literally everything I did was wrong, and how I'm the reason my dad is an alcoholic. Despite me being a good kid who never got into any trouble.

I was bullied in elementary school, middle school, and summer camp for being a runt (literally off the growth charts) but it didn't actually bother me, I already learned that I was garbage from my mom.

Been through years of therapy... I don't think I'll ever be able to really recover, the best I can do is move forward.

<comment><USER7> So sorry you didn't have it better. Parents should be the absolute opposite of a bully.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sharing my experience for sympathy, I'm sharing it to challenge the "parents are basically Jesus" narrative of society. If an adult child doesn't provide care for their parents (or even limits contact with them) then society thinks the child is the asshole. Yet it's been my observation that 9 times out of 10 the asshole is the parents, not the broken and innocent child. We have to navigate both the severe emotional turmoil the parents caused and the (sometimes severe) societal disapproval of distancing ourselves from the toxic relationship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 50-something here. I was bullied a lot in elementary, jr. high and high school probably because I was the nerdy kid who was into science. We also moved a lot so I was always the outsider. While my home life was fine (my parents were great) I do suffer from anxiety and difficulty staying in a job for more than a year or two. I've only recently started to make the connection with the bullying I received. Back in the 70s & 80s when I was in school the attitude was that bullying made the bullied stronger so adults rarely intervened (as they thought that conversely, doing so would make the bullied kid "weaker"). Even the response of my parents was to put me into Karate classes - I think that did help some as I did gain more confidence, but I think the policy now to stop bullying in the schools is much better.

<comment><USER9> Anxiety as an emotion is _very_ similar to excitement. Sam Harris discusses this a lot. I never got from him what exactly the difference is, but the other day in the car, I felt excited and started really analyzing why.

What I _believe_ now is that the difference between anxiety and excitement is: perception of outcome.

If you have a _positive_ expected outcome, you are _excited_. If you have a _negative_ expected outcome you are _anxious_.

The next step, is to convert anxiety _into_ excitement. I'm still working on this part. I think this is where "little victories" come into play. If you have a series of successes that can change your perception of outcome from negative to positive it might work over the long term.

In the short term, "happy thoughts" might work. "You can do it!!" Encouragement. Confidence.

Of course all of this is very new to me, so these are mostly just my hypotheses, but I plan to examine the ideas in more detail and see what I can do with it...

<comment><USER10> Anxiety, at least medically speaking, seems to be a loaded word. I've been told I had "anxiety" for some health related symptoms I had experienced, though I feel nothing like excitement nor dread. It's a very strange thought...almost what I might call 'subconscious anxiety'. As in, I don't mind people and am not anti social. But sometimes, in large noisy crowds, would feel lightheaded as if were going to pass out. Never really figured that one out - just wanted to point out that anxiety isn't always just a person thinking negatively.

<comment><USER8> Anxiety can definitely be triggered at a subconscious level. I get the dizzy, lightheaded thing as well and and I usually am not initially aware of why. But often, if I can take a step back and mentally assess the situation I can become aware of what the trigger was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've never understood why schools seem so reticent to enforce zero-tolerance policies against bullying. In my experience at least, every time bullying seems to be a problem at a school, it's because the environment allows it to occur.

Schools will eagerly put in place various other zero-tolerance policies, like no fighting. So if you dare defend yourself against such a social predator, you are taught a lesson by such a policy that you've done a bad thing.

I was fortunate never to be a victim of bullying, but many of my friends were (we were a bunch of nerds after all). The difference was I had support at home for fighting back because my parents knew the administration wasn't watching out for students well being. The lesson I learned is that fighting back is the single most effective strategy for stopping bullies, and that parents have to ensure that their child is shielded from ineffective school behavioral policies.

My friends didn't have such support and suffered from it, and couldn't ever learn that lesson. Some of them couldn't have fought back even if it was okay for them to do so for various reasons. The ones I still have contact with today have lingering social problems from the childhood bullying and this has fully reinforced on me that bullying is a social plague that needs to be aggressively stamped out.

There is the other side that bullies themselves are suffering in turn. Many come from shattered home lives or abusive parentage. Those children should be identified and put into some kind of counseling program as early and as intensively as possible. They will also grow up to be damaged in some way because of it and in their lives, perhaps _only_ the school has an opportunity to tamper down their violent instincts.

However, the physical and emotional violence that bullies subject others to is absolutely not to be tolerated in any way. And it seems the best way for other children to handle it is to simply do their best to fight back.

<comment><USER12> > I've never understood why schools seem so reticent to enforce zero-tolerance > policies against bullying.

It's pretty simple, this has a political answer: people believe that life is hard and that "it's tough out there", hence it's important for school to "toughen up" kids. It's as simple as that. Social darwinism is a creeping ideology that nobody really questions or talk about, but it's there, despite the presence of social programs.

If you ask people "should we protect the weak?", at the end of the day, people will answer "no, it's too difficult to protect the weak, if they can't survive or toughen up, they deserve to die or suffer, they cannot pull other people down".

Everybody knows that sending their kids to school generates a lot of anxiety for parents, because parents cannot protect their kids anymore, since bullying and "justice in the classroom" are difficult to do, but also hard for kids to talk about.

School is an excellent description of its society. Kids never lie, and their behavior naively precedes and envision the real spine of society. It's also where values and beliefs are taught.

Bullying exists because society not only tolerates it, but doesn't want to fight it. The "school of hard knocks" meme proves this perfectly.

<comment><USER13> > It's pretty simple, this has a political answer: people believe that life is > hard and that "it's tough out there", hence it's important for school to > "toughen up" kids.

I wouldn't necessarily put it that way; but there is 1) a sense from adults that kids should learn to "sort out their own problems", 2) a sense from kids that you shouldn't "tell" ("snitches get stitches").

But the question is, how would you "sort out" a similar situation as an adult? Well if you were regularly physically threatened by someone as an adult _you would call the police_ , and or _you would stop going there_. And if someone was an emotional bully at your workplace, _they would be fired_ or _you would find another job_.

But most of these options aren't really there for kids. Nobody is kicked out of school or demoted for being jerks, and often they're not kicked out of school even for regular physical intimidation. Kids have very little opportunity to change their environment. And often the authorities who are supposed to be protecting them look the other way.

I don't have kids yet, but if my kid experienced physical intimidation, and the principal / teachers in the school had the "kids need to sort it out" attitude, I would be severely tempted to say in response: "From now on, everything that is done by bullies to my child, I will do to you. If my child finds bullies waiting for him as he leaves the school, you will find me waiting by your car. If my child has their head put in a toilet, I will put your head in the toilet. We'll see how you manage to 'sort it out for yourself'." (Obviously that may not actually turn out to be practical -- the point is to highlight what we expect kids to put up with vs what we expect adults to put up with.)

<comment><USER14> >I would be severely tempted to say in response: "From now on, everything that is done by bullies to my child, I will do to you.

>Obviously that may not actually turn out to be practical

I like this idea. For it to work, you probably need an accomplice, and to make sure there's no witnesses. Have an accomplice provide an alibi ("no, he was at home with me at that time"), and make sure there's no witnesses when you beat the crap out of the principal late at night.

Honestly, since schools are simply not willing to do anything about the problem, I don't see how this is a bad solution at all.

<comment><USER15> It wouldn't work - you would just get arrested. I think that's part of the point - there are consequences for adults exhibiting this sort of behavior where there are arguably very few/none for children.

As much as I love watching the "Ray Velcoro Beats Up Bully's Dad" bit, it's just Hollywood. If someone pulled a stunt like beating up a principal, or an abuser's father, you would immediately be a criminal and you'd be legally destroyed to the full extent of the law. You'd likely lose your job, etc etc. These same legal consequences just don't exist bullies - and I think they should (with obvious due process and clear evidence).

<comment><USER16> Well keep in mind that Ray got a way with it because he was a detective. It isn't like he was just some guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was bullied badly as a child and am permanently suicidal, with no trusting relationships and failed life: homeless, mentally ruined, no career, assets, accomplishment, etc. It's to the point where, decades after having said to self "people are shit and I don't want to be alive anymore" as a child, I turned down a million dollar inheritance to keep close to a permanently suicidal self-imposed destiny. It's difficult to say how much was due to the bullying, but I do think of these horrible memories daily and have done so for a long time.

Perhaps my life would have turned out similarly even without such traumatic childhood events. Then again, I'm a pretty cynical person who simply doesn't give a shit about being alive, due to believing people are consistently low quality in seemingly all walks of life. The bullies from my childhood, on the other hand, have successful, normal lives. As I recall, the bullying occurred at school as a child, at university, at work, and in public by strangers has occurred consistently in any walk of life

Bullying seems to be a valid filtering process, as I was the weaker genetic offspring who correspondingly didn't procreate. Meanwhile, I've spent decades immersed in disdain for my own species and self.

<comment><USER18> I think it's incredibly mature of you to realize this and accept it without the anger towards women that is so common among young men these days.

<comment><USER19> It's not mature of him. Bullying is not a valid filtering process; it's childish violence. He's clearly still dealing with the lies he was told by the people around him. If you have this sort of self-hating perspective, you should seek therapy, because you don't have to live that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if the people with these brain differences were more susceptible to bullying because of the social cues they express. So it's not bullying shaping brains, it's different types of brains get bullied more.

Perhaps they should look at the brains of bullies, too.

<comment><USER21> Naah, I was bullied heavily in school and have keenly observed those who get bullied. It is the one form the 'out group'.

I was bullied because I was the only kid in the group from a 'rival colony' and had 'helicopter-ish' parents. Every bullied kid since was either: fat, ugly, new kid in town, disabled or something like that.

<comment><USER22> Can confirm about it being the odd one out. As one of maybe 5 white kids in my very poor school, I was bullied relentlessly from 6 to 12 years old. I was quite an effeminate kid too with long blonde hair. Soft, quiet and not nearly as athletic as the other kids. They were ruthless both verbally and physically. I'm now 29 years old, 6'4", 90kg and I lift 4x a week and _still_ have gddmn self confidence issues.

I am considering taking up martial arts in an attempt to break this subconscious mindset which I am almost positive was caused by years of bullying as a child.

<comment><USER20> I own a gym, and it's always interesting listening to what the trainers, all nice looking fit guys, worry about, and their own self-confidence issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I literally just told a security guard at the PyCon in Berlin to go f __* themselves as a direct result of bullying I experienced at boarding school in the '70s.

It took 2 years of therapy to make that connection, though.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was bullied in school, and jiu jitsu feels like it's re-wiring my brain and erasing much of the damage (fear of conflict, especially with males).

</comment><comment><USER25> Can confirm. I was bullied by my verbally abusive brother for almost 35 years. I have diagnosed PTSD now.

</comment><comment><USER26> Seems to me a large part of growing up is keeping up with the herd. Like a pack of zebras in the savannah. If you stray too far behind or show weakness, you get picked off by the roving lions.

Now I can see utility in behavior divergent from the norm being encouraged. But at the same time, peer pressure to keep moving and keeping pace is a great motivator for growth.

So, I would say the issue needs to be studied with greater depth than it sucks for the guy being bullied. What is the greater effect on the entire population? If you ensure no one gets bullied there is a non zero possibility that it results in a negative effect for the entire population in the long run.

<comment><USER14> >Seems to me a large part of growing up is keeping up with the herd. Like a pack of zebras in the savannah. If you stray too far behind or show weakness, you get picked off by the roving lions.

Yeah, but you don't see the zebras beating the crap out of each other for being too slow. They just let the lions do it.

With us humans, we don't just leave others to their own devices; instead, we take on the role of the predator for no good reason. Basically, humans (some of them) are evil, and get enjoyment from doing evil things to others. Animals just don't have this problem for the most part.

<comment><USER27> Are most people are evil in this way? Most laugh and exhibit schadenfreude. Most of my friends who I played Simcity or GTA with were maniacal murderers in these games.

<comment><USER14> Most? I don't think so. But some small but significant fraction, perhaps 5% really are, and then they're able to get a good chunk of the rest of the herd to follow along with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One of the mindsets of the bully is assuming that the victim has something that the bully doesn't. This leads to envy, feeling of self-doubt .... which leads the bully to find the weakness of the victim and punish them for it. After punishing the bully feels "good". The goal behind their bullying behaviour is to eliminate the competition.

Apart from this imitation of other bullies and impressing their peers are major factors.

Ex) A jock might envy the smartness of a nerd. A conservative might envy the freedom of a liberal.

<comment><USER29> Yup, that's exactly what narcissism is. "I _can 't_ possibly deal with being made to feel like a loser, so I will _hurt_ those who might otherwise threaten my exaggerated ego". It's not a healthy mindset at all, it's a sign of serious pathology.

<comment><USER27> Aren't most people like this, though?

<comment><USER19> Nobody likes being made to feel like a loser, but not everybody feels some sort of entitlement to hurt others as a way of coping.

<comment><USER27> Are you sure? Have you read human history? Or read about corruption in finance, healthcare, education, etc?

<comment><USER28> Narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths make up 10-15% of the population. It's normal for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bullies themselves need counselling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment. We focus so much on the victims, we also need to focus on the perpetrators and see them as victims as well if not of anything else than their own psychology.

<comment><USER31> > Bullies themselves need counselling on managing their own needs and emotions > rather than punishment

So, criminals also, by that logic, themselves need counseling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment ?

<comment><USER32> Actually, yes, they do.

You want this, especially when you know they will one day get out of jail.

<comment><USER30> Not only that, they will have wives, girlfriends, and children; they may eventually have employees. You can not stop them period. They are a part of the human population. They can not be weeded out.

<comment><USER31> Bullies bully when they know they can get away with it (so does criminals). I just fail to follow your narrative.

I would alternatively suggest to make the punishment severe and make sure bullies can't get away with it.

<comment><USER33> The question you're not asking is "why are people engaging in these behaviours?"

You don't have to deter people from engaging in bad behaviour if those people don't feel motivated to engage in those behaviours in the first place.

<comment><USER34> They get motivated when their peers condone it. You and I are the bully. We just need the "right" environment.

<comment><USER29> Peers who condone bullying are probably being manipulated into doing so, by someone with narcissistic traits who is skilled at whipping up hate towards the intended victims. It's not a normal attitude at all, it's very much a red flag that something quite nasty is going on.

<comment><USER34> It's very common and very natural. We all try to find our in- and by extension, out-group.

Narcissists just make the problem much, much worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The only way to overcome your bully is to face him, leave him or cope (learned the hard way)

<comment><USER36> And if the bully is your parents, which of these do you recommend?

Edit: sorry, that was an unnecessary response by me. Clearly you weren't thinking in those terms. Apologies.

<comment><USER37> Until you can separate yourself, learn to cope. Start with "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents".

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Adult-Children-Emotionally- Immature-P...](https://www.amazon.com/Adult-Children-Emotionally-Immature- Parents/dp/1626251703/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1570725592&sr=8-1-spons)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I used to worry about this kind of thing, but after a while obverving the primate social behaviours on display on journalist/pundit/etc. Twitter I'm starting to be more worried about the damaging psychological effects of not being bullied enough at school. (Just half-joking.)</comment>


Ask YC: Code Digesting - <AUTHOR>

In a 1986 Bill Gates interview linked to by an earlier YC post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=194844) was the quote:<p>"I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it."<p>Do you agree this was true in 1986? Is it still true now? If your two answers disagree, whence the difference? <comment><USER2> In any non-trivial project there comes a time when code becomes... complicated.

No matter how well designed the code and no matter how often the code is refactored, reality imposes on that neatly designed little world and makes the code sub-optimal.

This is when being able to understand code becomes important. To get inside the head of the author is an invaluable skill (even if the reader and the author are the same person separated in time). To understand why they did what they did (the answer is not always "they were morons"). To understand how to change the code and still guarantee the underlying assumptions.

Also, I would say that being able to read and understand code is even more important when your co-workers are equal to or above your skill level. To try to puzzle out why they did something can lead to an "aha!" type moment which are invaluable in learning new ways of solving problems.

So I would say that being able to read code is important. Maybe not "one of the finest tests" but an important test nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER3>
      I still think that *one* of the finest tests ...

I agree it is one of the most important trait of a good programmer to understand other people's code. One can only be good at programming by writing code and reading other people's (good) code to keep on improving and acquiring knowledge.

If a person is good (and quick) at understanding someone else's code, it is a good indication of him/her being blessed with a good analytical mind, and experience/habit of delving in to code.

Of course, this ability helps when working in a team, but more importantly it is required to understand the existing solutions and their drawbacks/advantages. e.g. If one intends to write a web server or a new VM for a language, it would be helpful to refer and understand the existing open solutions, before starting out.

In short, the ability to understand someone else's code quickly is a definite pointer of a good _potential_ programming ability. Getting a person to write code is the best test most times, but the ability to adapt and learn new language/technology faster is governed highly by ability to read code.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you work at Microsoft (or somewhere else with teams and long-lived products), you have to read a lot of other people's code, so its true.

If not, maybe not so much.

</comment><comment><USER5> Makes no sense to me. Never did. The speed which the code can be understood says much more about the writer than the reader. I have business analysts, project managers, and users that can read and understand my code. Do you really think that's a valid test of "programming ability"?

Also, consider:

1\. 30 pages of well written code != 30 pages of poorly written code

2\. 30 pages of well documented code != 30 pages of poorly documented code

3\. 30 pages of high level code != 30 pages of low level code

4\. 30 pages of COBOL != 30 pages of BASIC != 30 pages or Java != 30 pages of Python

5, 30 pages of Microsoft code = 1 page of mortal code

The finest test of programming ability is what you can build that satisfies requirements and works perfectly. I'm not sure Bill Gates ever understood that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if that is true, it can _still_ be true that a good way to judge between two coders is to look at how fast they can understand a piece of test code (they look at the same one, of course). If true, it could be a faster test than having them both write an application, no?

<comment><USER5> Interesting point. You'd have a control, but a control that I place little value on.

In your example, I'd still have them both code _something_. That's almost always a half hour well spent.</comment></comment></comment>


An incomplete history of the QED Text Editor (2004) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/qed.html <comment><USER2> _vi keeps a current view of a piece of a document on the screen, while commands are typed on the bottom line. Keeping a constantly updated window on a part of the text being edited is now, of course, completely standard and accepted._

Was screen editing ever not completely accepted? What were some contemporary arguments against it, other than resource usage?

<comment><USER3> Updating the screen has been accepted now for at least 40 years. Before then, there were computers without screens. People connected typewriters to them to get interactive input/output [1]. Before then, there were even trickier solutions.

Sometimes, remote terminals have broken layout, and people use the old editors again.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter#Use_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter#Use_as_a_computer_terminal)

<comment><USER2> I understand that. The article assumes the reader understands that.

I wonder if there were contemporary arguments against screen editing, 40 years ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Beyond the Bitcoin bubble - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/magazine/beyond-the-bitcoin-bubble.html <comment><USER2> It's strange to me how there are many among the Hacker News crowd who can read an article like this and have doubts about its thesis. You lived through the 80s and 90s right? I can't count how many times in my life I was told no one would ever need a computer in their house, we've gotten along for decades just fine without them. No one will ever buy books online, that's ridiculous, you can go to the store and have one right now. The internet is just a niche chat program that will never have any use in business, etc.

Our uses of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology now are similar to how we once used the power of the web to create Geocities pages with nothing more than MIDIs, scrolling text, and under construction gifs, because we didn't know what we were doing yet. But the early computer and internet pioneers were able to see past the proofs of concept and build on those ideas, to create the modern internet we have today.

Bitcoin may cease to exist as a software product, but I think the innovations that it has spurred on will be with us for some time. This technology has the possibility of making business much more efficient by reducing costs that are associated with distrustful parties having to rely on (and pay money to) third party escrow/auditing services. If I want to send a large sum of money to someone else now, I have to rely on third party services such as banks or Western Union to facilitate that transfer.

If you still continue to think "well that can be done with a SQL database now", you're completely missing the point. There's nothing wrong with relying on third parties, but now we have technology that allows us to choose not to if there's a need for it. In that regard, cryptography shares many of the same characteristics. We could communicate securely before public key cryptography was invented, but it broadened the scope and security of such operations, to the point where we espouse using https for all websites, not just ones requiring security. When the time comes, why would you trust a third party if you didn't have to?

<comment><USER3> Not sure the parallels are as strong as you're making them out to be; there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the energy consumed.

There will probably be a better end state for distributed trust, but we're legitimately not there yet.

<comment><USER2> > there are deep, deep flaws with proof of work as a concept because of the > energy consumed

What is the energy consumption of all the bank offices and computer systems in the world? Even without this comparison, I think the amount of energy required is not a flaw in itself, but rather an aspect of the technology we should seek to improve upon (for instance, proof of stake is an attempt at this). I don't think it's sustainable long term (2400 baud internet wasn't sustainable long term either), but that doesn't mean we don't have the kernel of a great idea today. I agree with you 100% that we're not there yet, but I disagree with those who say this road leads to nowhere.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin mining (not even counting other cryptocurrencies) uses more electricity than most countries in the world. If you look at transactions per Watt, I would guess that the banks are doing better by multiple orders of magnitude

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand the transit example presented in this article. I feel like I am missing something fundamental about the utility of any of these distributed services backed by their own type of coin.

For the transit example you have some people who want to request rides, and some people who want to provide rides. OK. Someone develops an application to process these requests, in some kind of bidding system...

How are the rider and driver matched up? I assume there needs to be some publicly accessible list of all open queries. Is that list what would be stored on the TransitCoin blockchain, and would that imply that all records of requested and completed rides are public, such that someone who knows your TransitCoin address can read all your previous trips, which are stored in this immutable chain until the end of time?

Would the TransitCoins be 'mined' by people running a 'node' that does the ride matching? Then in order to pay for a ride you send a TransitCoin to the driver? The driver would then have to sell his earned TransitCoins on an exchange for USD (or GroceryCoins) at the end of the day?

In the end I don't see why a new currency needs to be included in every proposed use of a blockchain, if the people who want to participate as a consumer and as a service provider are the ones running the nodes of the blockchain.

<comment><USER6> This - all things that can by done by SomethingSpecificCoin can be equally well done on smart contract platform ala Ethereum.

There is no reason (except for rewarding founders and early investors) someone who want to provide taxi rides own specialized mining equipment for maintaining blockchain of a proprietary coin.

I rode a taxi few months ago, and I don't remember having to change my currency for a TaxiCoin which would be the only token the taxi driver accepts. In fact, it is illegal for him not to accept the national currency.

<comment><USER7> _it is illegal for him not to accept the national currency_

According to the United States Department of the Treasury's site[1], there is no federal law requiring that businesses accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services.

[1][https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/faqs/Currency/Pages...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource- center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx)

<comment><USER8> Yes but not accepting currency[0] or coins is different from not accepting USD. In the United States a creditor may choose to only accept certain forms of USD (ie. no $100 bills at some stores) but they still must accept USD in some form.

[0] It is obvious from your link that the Treasury intends "currency" to be interpreted as paper money, see this:

 _There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and /or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise._

<comment><USER7> I'd be interested in your reference. I think it's obvious that businesses aren't required to accept credit cards, checks, ACH transfers, whatever else. If they also aren't required to accept bills or coins, it would seem as though they don't need to accept payment in USD in any form.

This creates a problem for them, but why do you think they must accept USD in some form?

<comment><USER9> The policy is stated on every bill: "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"

You can put your question in a search engine and find many references. Businesses in the US must accept dollars, but can choose what form they come in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope the technology matures beyond 'blockchain' and marketing drops the 'coin' moniker and the gold rush dies down.

Cryptographically verified distributed log files should have negligible hype value and be hidden part of the infrastructure. I predict that 10 years from now normal relational databases have infrastructure for shared, authenticated and verified rows and columns and we laugh at the ICO era.

<comment><USER11> You are not seeing the whole picture and don't understand the goal of the "coin" in a "blockchain". I would strongly urge you to do some research so that you can make up your mind from a place of knowledge instead.

[http://github.com/jpantunes/awesome- cryptoeconomics](http://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics)

<comment><USER12> I tried some of the introductory stuff and even that is difficult for me. How about an ELIF of the goals of the coin?

<comment><USER13> There's two separate things that get conflated in these discussions.

The first is the blockchain, which is a technical innovation that allows a client to decide which version of a shared event log to trust, even if it doesn't trust any of the servers attempting to perform the update. The ELI5 version is that the record that took the most total work to generate is correct. Since generating a fraudulent record requires doing more total work than was done to generate the correct one from the point of the fraudulent change forward, creating a fraudulent record quickly becomes computationally infeasable as changes get older.

The second are cryptocurrencies, which are an attempt to mint a currency (a literal, if not physical, coin) independent of any government by, essentially, reintroducing the gold standard. Except instead of gold we're using blockchains, which it turns out can be engineered to behave economically like precious metals do under the right circumstances.

Separating the two concepts, and specifically avoiding putting on your engineer hat when you're thinking about the half that's more political manifesto than anything else, will go a long way in helping you get a toehold on what's going on.

<comment><USER14> The problem with the 'blockchain without a coin' idea is the incentive. Why would people spend money to mine a blockchain which provides nothing to pay them back for it? Without the incentive, why would you care who is mining the blocks, and why would care about mining blocks faster then other people? You wouldn't.

But at the same time, without having that race to have the most mining power, the argument that it is computationally infeasible to change the blockchain becomes incorrect. There is now no guarantee that the amount of 'work' currently keeping the network going is actually enough to be computationally infeasible to change if someone buys enough computers.

Bitcoin technically doesn't guarantee the last detail either, but by paying miners it becomes worth it to them to keep buying the fastest hardware and most hardware they can.

<comment><USER13> It's true miners have to have _some_ incentive, and Bitcoin chooses to make that incentive a financial reward, but it's not the only possible incentive structure.

For example, imagine banks wanted to replace their clunky old ACH system with a blockchain. They could design their protocol such that it refuses to process transactions from or to an address that hasn't contributed a block to the chain in, say, the last 24 hours.. That requires each bank to contribute some minimum amount of computing power to maintaining the chain, even though it doesn't directly reward them for it.

(I've spent literally 2 minutes thinking through this example. I'm sure it has some glaring holes in it. Still, I hope it illustrates the point.)

<comment><USER14> > For example, imagine banks wanted to replace their clunky old ACH system > with a blockchain. They could design their protocol such that it refuses to > process transactions from or to an address that hasn't contributed a block > to the chain in, say, the last 24 hours.. That requires each bank to > contribute some minimum amount of computing power to maintaining the chain, > even though it doesn't directly reward them for it.

But that is pretty much exactly my point. All that does is encourage people to mine _just enough_ to keep the chain going, which does not ensure the security of the chain. There is no incentive to mine more blocks then anybody else.

With that said, I think the exercise is a bit futile to begin with - if banks have a serious dispute between them, they're going to handle it in the courts, so at the end of the day the existence of the blockchain only serves the purpose of holding the transactions and hopefully allowing then to be done faster and more efficiently. Which, a regular database could do just the same - you could even use Merkle tree to hold the data to ensure you could verify that older data has not been changed (By having banks keep their own synced copy of the database). Basically a blockchain without the mining. It requires a certain amount of centralization, but since the only parties are banks it wouldn't be extremely hard to handle that part. Which, you could technically still call this a blockchain, but without the mining and a decentralized way of deciding which chain is correct I think that's a stretch for what _most_ people think when they're talking about blockchain. Specifically, per your definition, the blockchain requires some type of PoW/proof-of-whatever and a decentralized consensus, which this doesn't have.

And the above isn't actually all that theoretical. Ripple is a blockchain without a coin, but they fix the mining problem by not having any mining at all and instead having a central blockchain that they control. It's basically just an immutable database. So again, per your definition, they aren't really using a blockchain at all. And I'm not saying I disagree with your definition, but currently there are no examples of a decentralized blockchain using PoW that doesn't use a coin, even though there's basically everything else in- between.

I'm honestly not convinced that that there are really any situations that don't involve a coin where the blockchain with mining is a viable option, and where there aren't any better alternatives that would make more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This was a necessary phase. Mass adoption couldn't have been achieved without the exponential price rise of various cryptocurrency tokens. There would not have been media coverage of this proportion, had it not been for the gains.

People now talk cryptocurrency, read more about the underlying technology and accept that it will positively affect the industry in the upcoming future. I hope the market stabilizes and some of the tokens actually become useful.

<comment><USER16> > People now talk cryptocurrency, read more about the underlying technology > and accept that it will positively affect the industry in the upcoming > future.

Do they really though? I don't hear anyone outside of people who have actively bought into the cryptocurrency hype saying that it is going to have a positive affect on the industry. I hear a lot of people saying things like "it's a bubble" or that "the rules these currencies are designed to circumvent are there for a reason", etc.

<comment><USER13> Right, this.

I think cryptocurrencies are here to stay. I'm not convinced that's actually going to "positively affect the industry in the upcoming future".

I don't think cryptocurrencies are going to remove the need for some big middleman like Visa to sit between individual consumers and their partners. Things like reversible transactions and on-demand small loans are too attractive to the median consumer, so someone's going to be layering them on top of the underlying currency, whatever it may be.

I don't think they're going to have a big impact on the financial sector. They can trade and leverage and loan with cryptos just as easily as they can with fiats, just with a lot of the safety rails like bankruptcy pulled off.

I don't think they're going to impact most governments' ability to levy taxes and to borrow. There are dozens of governments that don't mint their own currencies, and by and large they still maintain taxing authority about as easily as they maintain the rest of their infrastructure and bureaucracy.

I do think it's going to prevent central banks from doing their thing, but I'm not convinced that's a good thing. Central banks have their issues, to be sure, but I'm pretty sure they're better than the huge boom & bust cycles they replaced.

Cryptocurrencies will certainly make the world _different_ in meaningful ways. Different doesn't necessarily mean better.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >Central banks have their issues, to be sure, but I'm pretty sure they're better than the huge boom & bust cycles they replaced.

Are you implying central banks are not cyclically prone to "booms and busts"?

<comment><USER17> Not in the "all the depositors discover all of their money is worthless because it actually can't be redeemed for gold like the bank note said" sense, no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love Stephen Johnson, the author. His show on Prime/PBS "How we got to now" was an incredible series about how small innovations with glass, sound, and light made the modern world possible, and he does it with a lot of charm. Highly recommended for the HN audience!

<comment><USER19> I read his book with the very same title. The history of glass, hygiene, etc. especially in the context of civilization is definitely eye opening!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am personally hoping we can survive the speculation craze and reach a point where we can use the block chain technology in revolutionary (or even evolutionary) ways.

Since it's tax time I can't help but feel that the true long term danger to block chain technology isn't draconian government regulation, it's the IRS.

For example I have a transaction earlier this year where I purchased some software for $15 BTC equivalent. Transaction fees back then weren't as brutal so I will ignore that issue as I believe it is 100% solvable. What was truly brutal is that using standard FIFO accounting practices I owe an additional 30% tax on the "money" I spent. My cost basis for that particular coin amount was 10% of what the current price of BTC was when I made the transaction.

A new user will have no idea that they even need to worry about this. Worse, Coinbase is fucking awful when it comes to transparent tax information. So as soon as the IRS starts publicly punishing intentional (or worse, unintentional) tax evaders it is a very real possibility that the interest from the broad public will wane.

Now if prices stabilize this problem starts to recede. But even if it does and prices only fluctuate 1-2%, I STILL need to worry come tax time.

Edit: I understood and knew I would owe capital gains when I purchased the software. I am not complaining about having to pay it personally, I am pointing out that this is a pretty significant problem for widespread usage and that the average user of Bitcoin right now probably has very little idea of the consequences of actually using a crypto currency for any kind of transaction that is considered a taxable event by the IRS.

<comment><USER21> > Since it's tax time I can't help but feel that the true long term danger to > block chain technology isn't draconian government regulation, it's the IRS.

Sorry but no, one country's tax authority is not a long term danger to block chain.

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately this one country is a leader in tech and has millions of people with the disposable income to actually use the block chain. I am not myopically focused on the US, but to say that it won't hurt block chain adoption is willful ignorance.

<comment><USER22> Might hurt blockchain adoption in the US, but there is much more than BTC out there. There are specific chains that many Asian companies are adopting for use that will proliferate and generally stay out of American news. There's a lot happening in the crypto space beyond BTC/ETH/LTC.

Adoption may still not take off, but it won't be because of the IRS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Isnt the author, well, supposed to keep his private key private? It was quite easy to create a text file with that 1b0be2162cedb2744d016943bb14e71de6af95a63af3790d6b41b1e719dc5c66 key and "geth account import key.txt" into a ethereum wallet to get a seemingly valid account. Please tell me that i am missing something very important here.

<comment><USER24> Uh, do you expect there to be any money in there?

<comment><USER25> There is also 1 LUN = 30$ in that account.

[https://etherscan.io/token/Lunyr?a=0x6c2ecd6388c550e8d99ada3...](https://etherscan.io/token/Lunyr?a=0x6c2ecd6388c550e8d99ada34a1cd55bedd052ad9)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I think there is a glaring omission in the structure of the internet as dicusssed in this piece: the underlying hardware and supply chains that physically construct the internet, which I will term InternetZero.

InternetZero relies on humongous-scale manufacturing with minuscule margins, which in turn relies on massive natural resource extraction, transportation, and refinement. Even the integrated circuit - ubiquitous in contemporary computing - could have taken many more years than it did to hit the scene if not for NASA's shoveling piles of money into ICs for the Apollo 11 lunar lander.

The "new code" that the article calls for at the end is a start, but is still just one small facet of a very centralized, controlled, and arguably corrupted system.

</comment><comment><USER26> What happens if we end up using bitcoin (or any coin) for currency and then for some reason (like earthquake) we lose electricity for 24h or more... how we would be paying for things?

</comment><comment><USER27> can I buy Kraken shares? could perform better than JPMorgan.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful.

Please, let's move past the name calling. Calling something a bubble does not make it so.

<comment><USER29> We had the dot-com bubble, but it didn't stop the internet from changing everything in fundamental way. Google, Facebook and Amazon are in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world - all completely dependant on the internet for the business model. Granted webvan and pets.com didn't make it, but it didn't mean the internet had failed as an idea.

<comment><USER30> That's a common marketing claim but the comparison has problems: Bitcoin is turning 10 without a single application where it has a significant advantage over the status quo unless you count ransomware. In contrast, as soon as the internet became available to normal people they had immediate new or improved options for a bunch of different activities.

Yes, speculators backed a lot of bad business ideas but that was because people were getting online in droves because there were so many uses. Those companies failing didn't change that, especially since there were so many examples showing that concepts were solid: e.g. a dotcom losing money on each sale didn't mean online stores were doomed since Sears had proven the model many decades earlier.

<comment><USER31> > Bitcoin is turning 10.

It all depends on where you start counting. In 2008 it was just Satoshi and a few cypherpunks. I would argue it looked a lot like Arpanet [0]. So Fast forward 10 years from 1973 ... and was the internet really useful in 1983?

On January 1st 1983, "every machine connected to ARPANET had to use TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP entirely." [1] ... hardly a huge commercial success at that point.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET) [1] [https://www.davesite.com/webstation/net- history2.shtml](https://www.davesite.com/webstation/net-history2.shtml)

<comment><USER30> I don't think that comparison holds so tightly, but if it did it seems to make it worse: ARPANET had significant dependency delays in availability since computers cost a fortune, modems were slow, and you had to pay by the minute for phone calls. In contrast, despite Bitcoin being available to everyone on the first day most people have never had a reason to use it other than speculation.

That said, there were still plenty of ARPANET users in the early days if you look at the subset of people for whom network access was an option. The benefits of email were obvious and group forums like Usenet (1980[1]) had similar quick adoption, at least in technical or academic fields where communicating with people outside of your location was important. Similarly, FTP (1980[2]) had clear value and the pricing made sense more often than it might have seemed since all of the other alternatives cost money, too.

The other thing to remember is that this wasn't happening in a vacuum — while the internet was emerging, there was popular mainstream usage for companies like The Source, CompuServ, etc. starting in the late 1970s[3] and so again there was clearly a business opportunity if you could bring the access costs down. The number of people willing to pay by the minute to chat, shop, etc. suggested that an even large number of people would be interested as that per- minute rate dropped.

It's that last part which makes me question the current valuations: even if you assume that all of the operational problems were solved with Bitcoin, it's hard to see what value it has to the ordinary person beyond possibly reclaiming the ~3% overhead of a credit card transaction — and that's assuming that VISA, et al. wouldn't just lower their rates to beat whatever the operational cost + fraud insurance costs ended up being for Bitcoin.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#History)

2\. [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc765](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc765)

3\. There's a great series starting with [https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/a-net-before-the-web- part-1-t...](https://www.filfre.net/2017/10/a-net-before-the-web-part-1-the- establishment-man-and-the-magnificent-rogue/)

<comment><USER9> > and that's assuming that VISA, et al. wouldn't just lower their rates

They easily could, their current rates contribute a lot toward cashback and points rewards and other marketing programs. Australia regulated a cap on rates at 0.4% iirc, and Visa still covered its costs.

<comment><USER30> Their profit margins seem like a good estimate for how low they could go without much pain, and given the size of the revenue stream I'm sure they could go lower.

<comment><USER9> It's not just their profits because they spend a good portion of their revenue on customer acquisition and retention. We may have a more stable economy if there was less customer acquistiin in the consumer credit space.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Paywalled.

<comment><USER33> try pasting in the link to outline.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The answer to the fundamental ills of both Ethereum and Bitcoin is addressed in Cardano, which has been hard at work for 2+ years to create Ada and the first formally verified PoS type algorithm, Ouroboros.

I wish more people would wrap their heads around the rigid approach to developing Ada that Cardano's taken so the light will come on... sort of like seasoned imperative language programmers who get bitten by the FP bug, the same kind of cathartic effect is achieved once you begin to understand the fundamentals of what Cardano is doing.

Visit CardanoHub.org for more info and get ready to be processing new info for at least a week to begin to understand it.

<comment><USER35> Coin shilling has officially entered HN.

<comment><USER34> It's more like their tech I'm shilling. But hey, you're welcome to downvote me.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't video hosting sites provide ffmpeg settings? - <AUTHOR>

I've been struggling with Youtube re-encoding my videos, so why do they not provide ffmpeg settings for advanced users? Quality would increase a lot if I could encode the videos myself. <comment><USER2> They are in control of their storage space and streaming, and they've already found their spot in the trade off between disk/bandwidth and video quality. Providing extra options for "advanced users" would leave that open for abuse.</comment>


The Big Bang may be a black hole inside another universe - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe/the-big-bang-may-be-a-black-hole-inside-another-universe-79ce12613c60 <comment><AUTHOR> Have a serious question for passing cosmologists in light of this theory - what's the substantial difference between Big Bang singularity and one inside a black hole?

<comment><USER2> BB is the "beginning" and expands black hole singularity is a collapse.

i personally cant stomach the big bang singularity model, i prefer the idea of many small condensations of matter. a single big bang simplifies things. The problem is the origin of nonuniformity, the thing that makes a complex universe rather than a crystalline array that looks identical everywhere in every direction. yas random thermal flutuation leading to variences in fundamental geometry but this serious circular pondering.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Kotlin vs. Swift vs. Groovy vs. Scala - <AUTHOR> Links in comments.
I was reading this very interesting article about kotlin: https://medium.com/@magnus.chatt/why-you-should-totally-switch-to-kotlin-c7bbde9e10d5?source=linkShare-f672cb3447f3-1496065730
And I made this comment: https://medium.com/@perry.j.fraser/so-why-should-i-use-kotlin-instead-of-swift-groovy-or-scala-1d2e9e539f49?source=linkShare-f672cb3447f3-1496066029
I haven't gotten any response, and I still would like to answer this question. <comment><USER2> Maybe you haven't gotten any response because it's a leading question -- why did you choose those specific languages to compare Kotlin to? Anyway...

* Swift is for the iOS platform, which Kotlin doesn't target.

* Apache Groovy is primarily a dynamic language with static typing as an afterthought, and is really only relevant anymore for Grails development. Gradleware are no doubt busy writing a tool to automatically convert Groovy-based build files to Kotlin-based ones for the next big upgrade to Gradle.

* Scala is comparable to Kotlin, but Kotlin is officially supported, along with Java, by the Android team at Google. And Jetbrains make sure Kotlin and IntelliJ (and Android Studio) work seamlessly together.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes a lot of sense, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Article: [https://email@example.com/why-you-should-totally- swit...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/why-you-should-totally-switch-to- kotlin-c7bbde9e10d5?source=linkShare-f672cb3447f3-1496065730)

Comment: [https://email@example.com/so-why-should-i-use- kotli...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/so-why-should-i-use-kotlin- instead-of-swift-groovy-or- scala-1d2e9e539f49?source=linkShare-f672cb3447f3-1496066029)</comment>


Let's Call it a Draw(ing Surface) - <AUTHOR> http://oreilly.com/css-html/dive-into-html5/call-it-a-drawing-surface.html

<comment><USER2> OT:

The text formatting and layout of that page is just gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's what I recently did with a <canvas> element. Has 3D and all: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDRhyMLf4E8>

<comment><USER4> Love the bacon on the balance board idea. Nintendo should turn that idea into a hot dog eating contest and get Kobayashi to promote it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using GWTCanvas which comes with the gwt-incubator library and it works really well. I've seen it work on Chrome, IE7, FF, the Android browser, and the IPhone browser. I haven't played much with text, but arbitrary shapes and transparency works great.

</comment><comment><USER6> What do I do if you want to use Canvas if JS is enabled but degrade gracefully if it isn't? Use vector graphics? Generate images on the server?...

(I'm specifically _not_ interested in "everyone has JS enabled anyway" responses)

edit: I'm using Firefox 3.0.13 on Ubuntu Linux and the text doesn't render at all in canvas elements... what gives?

<comment><USER7> Scroll down to the "TEXT" section and note that "FF3.0" has an X under it.

<comment><USER6> I failed :(

What minimum Firefox version would I need for canvas text support?...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's working for me on FF3.5.2.

Incidentally, with FF3.5 you can right-click on the canvas and select "View Image". Pure win.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


3 Effective Ways to Maintain High Energy Levels at Work for Software Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/msscohen/3-effective-ways-to-maintain-high-energy-levels-at-work-for-software-engineers <comment><USER2> How did exercise and sleep not make an appearance? Should've been #1 and #2.</comment>


Ultrasound can cause anomalies in the Xiaomi MI5S Plus gyroscope - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@juliodellaflora/ultrassom-pode-causar-anomalias-no-girosc%C3%B3pio-do-xiaomi-mi5s-plus-4050d718bc7f <comment><USER2> This has the potential to be dangerous if it can interfere with the raft of self-balancing 'personal transporters'.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is exactly why we need to escape the mentality of sensor fusion and make our robots reliable just based on optical data. Then they would be susceptible to attacks that would affect humans too.

<comment><USER4> Humans with issues in their vestibular system located in the ear can't really use their optical data streams to compensate. When you loose your gyros time to get a walking stick or a beautiful nurse to lean on.

<comment><USER5> Can humans with issues in the optical stream use the gyros? I find it harder to balance with my eyes closed, though obviously not impossible.

<comment><USER6> Well, the blind and sight-impaired have been walking (and running) for years, so I'd vote "yes".

Even people with impressive visual hallucinations are still capable of walking.

That said, vertigo (where your eyes and your inner ear are in violent disagreement as to whether you are moving) can impair movement, though you can grow accustomed to the "disagreement".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Topic from a year ago - "WALNUT: Acoustic Attacks on MEMS Sensors": [https://spqr.eecs.umich.edu/walnut/](https://spqr.eecs.umich.edu/walnut/)

</comment><comment><USER8> So if you don't want your neighbour flying his drone over your property can you shoot it with ultrasound? What would the legalities of that I wonder?

<comment><USER9> _over your property_

How much airspace do you own over your own property?

<comment><USER10> IIRC it's all the airspace until the 'general aviation' zone starts, where the owner still has _some_ control but FAA or other local authority legally requires property owners to permit operation of planes and other properly licenced aircraft.

There's not much court precedent yet, and many places are passing specific laws to clarify this, but the general assumption should be that unless you're above 400-500 feet where national aviation regulations apply, you'd need a permission from the owner of the land.

<comment><USER9> Could I destroy an RC vehicle driven onto my _land_ property? The laws should be the same for both, although I'm not banking on it.

<comment><USER10> The general principle seems to be that things owned by others remain so even if they are on your property, and intentionally damaging them is vandalism. E.g. if you notice someone's car parked on your land and smash its windows, that'd be a crime even if that car "has no right to be there" \- you could require the car to leave in some legal manner, possibly have it towed or sue for damages caused by it being there; but breaking other people's stuff is one of the oldest things prohibited by law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whtas the need for an Ultrasound. Are we now going to test our own body with such a system?</comment>