The man who lives without money - <AUTHOR> http://worldobserveronline.com/2013/10/04/man-lives-without-money/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that he's able to do it, but as he states in the last paragraph, this isn't something everybody could do, and I think that is a good thing.

For the most part, it seems in the current state, Mr. Boyle is actually living off the goodwill of others while actually giving very little back to society. He has a caravan, a bike, was given a place park and is off the grid for electricty. He barters (which is as good as using money, but let's ignore that for now).

He talks about being happier and healthier than he had ever been before, which is important. But think about what would happen if everybody did as he does. We'd use up all our waste, which would be great, but I'm sure it wouldn't be too long before we would run out. We wouldn't have the things he relies on others giving away, like his bicycle and caravan. He's been healthier over the past year, but what about when he does get sick? He may be able to rely on the kindness of others to care for him, but what if he needs drugs or surgery?

What initially struck me was that he is able to live off the land, but being a non-practicing member of society, he isn't helping to take care of those who are less fortunate in other parts of the world. His taxes aren't paying for food-aid, or medical research.

I'm surprised how strongly I feel about this, why should I care what this guy does, but as this is being promoted as a positive thing, I'm concerned that more and more people might take up the practice, and the long-term implications for those who live in less fortunate environments.

<comment><USER3> Most taxes do not go to food-aid or medical research. And by not contributing to or directly enabling so many of society's ills he is indeed giving back far more than most others ever will.

<comment><USER4> Complacency and apathy are not a form of protest.

<comment><USER5> Are you suggesting that what this guy's doing is "complacency and apathy"?

<comment><USER4> Not at all. I'm suggesting that arguing that doing nothing is better than doing something is something people do to promote complacency, and has no place in the world.

<comment><USER3> I don't see how depriving the machine of a cog can be construed as complacency. I've had several windows of unemployment and homelessness, sometimes by fate and sometimes by choice, and it is never an easy route. Like the saying goes, "If you are not an active part of the solution then you are just another part of the problem". In that respect, re-tweeting insolence and signing e-petitions and the like is closer to complacency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> His cure is worse than the disease.

If everyone did as he did we would cause MUCH more environmental damage to the world.

Wood fire? There is nothing worse for the environment except maybe coal, and even that (in the US) is not necessarily worse. Wood smoke is a very serious pollutant, which in quantity would blacken the sky.

A rocket stove is pretty good - but it doesn't come close to the efficiency of a natural gas one. So he's using a worse fuel, and being less efficient at it.

Beeswax candles? Is he trying to find the most wasteful and most inefficient way to light something? And candles make smoke too.

<comment><USER7> What would create more pollutant... a wood fire for a single person or a 45 minute, each way, driving commute? Do areas in which wood fires are the norm have blackened skies?

<comment><USER8> They are different types of pollutants. Wood fire creates a lot of carcinogens while (carburated) exhaust fumes are basically safe to inhale, although they do contribute to global warming it seems.

<comment><USER9> And yet people commit suicide by deliberately inhaling those "safe" exhaust fumes.

Carbon monoxide, man. It's damaging stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To survive without money means do many things yourself. Do many things yourself means a broad knowledge of many things. A broad knowledge of many things means that the knowledge in any particular thing is shallow and primitive, only sufficient for the basic tasks. Therefore the life becomes a continuous sequence of primitive activities.

Human civilization does not gain anything from it. We must specialize more and more if we want to push everything further. By numbing out our skills we won't achieve anything but unnecessary independence from others, which would only be beneficial if you were physically isolated from other people.

<comment><USER11> The only reason you see that human civilization doesn't gain anything from this is because you use knowledge/science to define progress.

What if you tie progress to overall happiness? Living a simpler life, without the stress of i.e. too much choice or needing to have at least the same material wealth as your neighbour will be way more fulfilling than working your assoff all day, doing a job you don't like to be able to pay the loans with which you have acquired things you don't need :)

We have nothing to gain from more knowledge, it only gives us more questions, more possibilities, and with that more areas to specialize in, so more jobs, to just keep us all working on finding more questions and creating more of those jobs. Endless cycle that will make life more complex every day, adding up to more stress every day and slowly making us drift away from ourselves and each other.

Nice example: nowadays, in my country smart phones are used by all ages, even young children. Everywhere they are, and mostly in the train, people are not talking to each other anymore, instead they are all looking at their phones. Need to wait on something for 5 minutes? There comes the phone again. Result: nobody takes time to reflect anymore, patience is getting scarce, people are bored quickly, while the occasional case of boredom is very important.

Not that I'm against scientific progress, we invented some really cool stuff, but I don't agree that numbing out our skills would achieve unnecessary independence. In a society/community where everyone is able to take care of themselves, everybody knows how tough it can be and everybody will be willing to help one another out when something goes wrong. That's not independence, that is cooperation.

<comment><USER12> > Nice example...

That is very popular but false example.

1) In my country when there were no much phones around children played tamagochies and tetrisis. Teens used to listen to their CD and before that cassette players. Is was relatively popular among youth to read fiction books in the trains. It's a popular mantra today: "phones are evil, but book is good!". But what about cassette players - were they evil too? What if I read a book from my phone - is it evil or good?

2) It's quite popular today to stare in phones but guess what.. I used to do weekly 2.5 hours commutes between cities in public transport - and most people just stared.. in the window.. and still nobody was talking with strangers. The same situation applies to the trains. Of course people get acquainted if you are in the same compartments, but they don't otherwise (generally). So it's more a culture thing (maybe like in city - rural etc) then the curse of the phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For people who like to know more about (almost) moneyless living:

\- [http://moneyless.info](http://moneyless.info)

\- This interview: [http://vimeo.com/65171169](http://vimeo.com/65171169)

Inspired by these things but not ready to go totally without, I'm moving to the first "live-in hackerspace", based on Lanzarote, where life is cheap and the weather is good. CyberHippieTotalism ( [http://totalism.org](http://totalism.org) ). Feel free to come by and check it out some time!

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh dear.

> my final year of a business and economics degree [ ... ] capitalism is > fundamentally flawed, requiring infinite growth on a finite planet

I'd ask for a refund on that degree if you never learned that growth requires no resources.

Economic growth is simply a measure of human work and promises of future work – the former can grow indefinitely while the sun shines and the latter is entirely abstract.

<comment><USER14> > the former can grow indefinitely

Explain, because for all I know that isn't true and it looks like you need to get an economics degree to believe otherwise. Physicists disagree and guess whose word I trust more.

<comment><USER13> Note that I didn't say "grow infinitely", I said "grow indefinitely" – as in continuous, steady growth (historically, about 2-5% per annum). Basically, if you can keep working productively while the sun shines, this _is_ growth.

Physicists deal with real objects (virtual particles and string theorists notwithstanding). Wealth isn't real – it's abstract.

As for abstract wealth... here, I'll give you an "I owe you" for $5. You now have an asset. You can trade that asset with other people since I'm a respected individual that others trust. I'll fulfil the value in future (maybe) but for now – the value came from absolutely nothing. It's entirely abstract.

You want an infinite amount of them? Here you go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> His solution though admirable needs improvements. He's not living ecologically but without money which is admirable but completely ignores the effects living like our ancestors had on nature.

If he were more open to using modern technology he would be able to live in more balance with nature.

Solar panels for instance although causing harm to the environment when produced help you generate some energy which is a great return on investment by my book.

The key is not living like our ancestors the key is using modern technology in an attempt to live in harmony with nature. Grow your own foods make you're house as self sufficient as possible.

</comment><comment><USER16> Everytime I read one of these stories, it's always someone without kids. This guy has an economics degree. He has the luxury of going back. If he had children, and they had to live like this, could he still do it, and would it be good for the children?(honest question) It's also always someone not in their 60s, when they start needing more medical attention, more access to medicine, etc.

<comment><USER17> No junk food, no television, no Facebook, opportunity to learn practical skills, exposure to mild pathogens in the first five years of life to help the immune system develop properly; most aspects of the lifestyle would be good for children.

Of course, you would still want to make an exception to the lifestyle to get the children the usual set of vaccines; nothing puts a damper on a healthy childhood like dying of whooping cough. All things in moderation, including moderation.

<comment><USER16> Maybe. But like I said, I never read about someone with kids doing this. What you describe can be found in very rural areas, but it's still different from what this guy is doing.

<comment><USER17> Strikes me as fairly similar to the Amish? I get the impression they avail themselves of a few benefits of modern civilization like that subset of medicine that actually saves significant numbers of lives, while eschewing most of the glitter; are there significant differences that I'm missing?

<comment><USER16> I think there are. This guy, and the people on the similar stories that are sometimes poste here on HN, are going it alone, or as a very small group of people, in the single digits at most. He's not joining a large, homogeneous, stable, long standing community. It's very different. Being born in an Amish community would be very different from being born as this guy's baby.

<comment><USER17> True. It wasn't clear to me from the article just how much community support this guy has, but if the answer is almost none, that would certainly be a problem, and not only for raising children. If you're going it alone in that sort of environment, imagine the consequences of something as simple as coming down with the flu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That close/like button on the site seems fairly unethical. It's very easy to accidentally click like if you want to click the x.

<comment><USER19> You ought to see what it looks like on an iPhone!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> money is important! I hope that when he gets sick he will not think of using traditional medicine (like the way the Chinese are killing rare animals, in the name of "medicine" amongst other funny and weird things). What he is doing is quite inspirational and admirable tho!

<comment><USER11> A lot of modern medicine are based on traditional medicine. In a lot of cases working substances in the plant are isolated and then synthesized to minimize side effects caused by other substances in the plant.

Don't forget that a lot of traditional medicine have been around for thousands of years and kept us alive and growing in population ever since.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> So basically, he's living like people did in the middle ages. Good luck with that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Balance.

</comment><comment><USER23> _The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that it now means we're completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the 'stuff' we buy._

I'm convinced this is why animal-testing and factory farming even exist, because we don't see it. Out of sight, out of mind. We see the marketing campaigns with ads of radiant beautiful people using consumer products, but the much uglier side of product research is kept from the public's view.

If the public could see what is happening to our animal friends, it wouldn't tolerated. We would find another way.

<comment><USER24> I disagree; I'm pretty sure most people would tolerate it just fine after a period of habituation.

You say that it's because we don't see it that we can tolerate what happens to animals; I say it's because we don't see it that we feel horrified whenever we happen to catch a glimpse of it. Light is only painful when you're used to living in the dark.

<comment><USER23> I'm talking about empathy. You're talking about desensitization. Of course we disagree.

<comment><USER24> Neither can be ignored if you're predicting an outcome on this issue.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Offline Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://jsomers.net/blog/offline-wikipedia

<comment><USER2> Wikipedia should really release a mini-portable hard drive or USB stick that contains the majority of Wikipedia and is capable of auto-update.

I believe it would be a great source of revenue for them and enable them to run a better encyclopaedia with less hits on their website, especially for frequently accessed sites. I believe full integration of the offline and online would be required.

Example: Open the Dilbert wikipedia page, you can browse through to what you want to see. If you have an internet connection you can hit the refresh button (or an update button) and it'll quickly check and load an updated page and update the offline.

<comment><USER3> _I believe it would be a great source of revenue for them and enable them to run a better encyclopaedia with less hits on their website, especially for frequently accessed sites_

How many people are really likely to buy this, though? With wireless internet from your phone from damn near any populated point on the planet becoming more and more widespread, I can't imagine too many circumstances where this would be useful enough to pay money for.

<comment><USER2> 3G phones only have ~14% market integration, cell phones aren't universally owned, actually some countries have ridiculously low adoption rates for their internet infrastructure. 3G infrastructure is severely lacking compared to 2G infrastructure.

There's plenty of cities here in Canada without any 3G access and have over 100,000 people and no current plans for 3G. Even areas with 3G, rarely have usable 3G everywhere, especially around cottage country here in Ontario. The valleys seriously hamper even 2G access, especially anywhere near the water.

The majority of people _don't_ live in metropolitan areas, so I believe this would sell hugely. I also believe most people don't want to pay for internet _twice_.

Edit: <http://www.coveragemaps.com/gsmposter_world.htm> Yellow is 3G. It certainly isn't expansive access in NA and considering offline access would likely only be required outside of major populated areas, this generally means outside of 3G areas. _Offline_ is kind of the point of an _offline_ wikipedia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The iPhone app Encyclopedia downloads a Wikipedia dump to the phone and works offline. It manages to strip it all down to about 3GB

<http://www.steamheavyindustries.com>

<comment><USER5> I wonder if there's a market for a usb drive that contains webkit, wikipedia, and the ability to transparently download deltas when connected. 4GB USB is <$10, sell for $20, viola!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Like every other nixy package, type sudo ./configure, sudo make, and sudo > make install to get it cooking._

Arg. You don't need root/sudo to run './configure' or 'make.' You _just_ need it for 'make install' so that you can install it to /usr/ or /usr/local. And you don't even _need_ it for 'make install' if you are installing to a directory that you have rights to (e.g. PREFIX=~ or PREFIX=~/local). Copious usage of sudo seems to abound nowadays.

[Note: disregard this if you do something like wget/unpack all your sources files into someplace like /usr/src]

</comment><comment><USER7> Would a site specific browser with some clever caching not be a good compromise?

A SSB could start out as an offline Wikipedia reader with no offline content. As and when online content is retrieved it is cached locally forever.

When an article is to be viewed the local copy is displayed. If there is an Internet connection the Wikipedia reader can utilise various HTTP mechanisms to determine if the local copy is stale, updating the local copy as required.

As a basic MVP that could work, albeit with an initial heavy reliance on an Internet connection. As and when problems with this model are identified they can be addressed and solved. For example, it may be beneficial for the reader, when online, to retrieve not only the currently-requested article but also linked articles up to X links deep. Furthermore, it may be feasible to intelligently analyse a user's usage history and retrieve further articles, whilst online, such that relevant content is more likely to be available to the user when next offline.

To begin with, using such an application would be little different from using the online Wikipedia. Over time the local cache would grow and the application's reliance on an Internet connection would decrease.

Could this be a viable opensource project?

<comment><USER8> You can start with a seed of popular pages instead of completely blank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's another offline Wikipedia solution: <http://aarddict.org>

</comment><comment><USER10> This article might just save me. I agree decompressing Wikipedia takes a long time. On my machine, it took almost 24 hours. More time to decompress than actually downloading it!</comment>


House Introduces Bill to Repeal the Patriot Act - <AUTHOR> http://www.freedomworks.org/content/house-introduces-bill-repeal-patriot-act <comment><USER2> I really want to believe this could become reality. But the past surrounding this issue, as well as seemingly widespread apathy about our loss of civil liberties, leaves me cynical.

Nearly every time I fly, I hear someone in the security line (which to me resembles a cattle chute) remarking that they're in fact glad for the inconvenience, as they somehow feel safer. Nearly every family member or friend with whom I discuss Edward Snowden's revelations and the vast injustice of what the NSA is doing couldn't care less.

I really don't have much hope for this bill. But I really wish I could believe in it as much as my younger self would have.

<comment><USER3> People value 'feeling safer' far more than 'being safer' or 'having rights'. This is the classical problem of not appreciating what you have until it's gone.

<comment><USER4> For an example of this, in GA last year a bill was passed that allowed people with weapons carry licenses (who have to be fingerprinted, background checked, etc.) to carry weapons into unsecured government buildings. Immediately local governments began complaining about now having to install metal detectors and have police officers to screen people for weapons before entering their buildings.

Local government officials said they didn't "feel safe" with the new law, even though by virtue of being an unsecured building, nothing prevented a person with illegal intentions from entering with a weapon before or after the law. The law just exposed the faulty thinking that a "no guns" sticker on the front door would keep bad guys out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full text of bill: [https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/1466...](https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house- bill/1466/text)

<comment><USER6> And here's a couple of other articles with additional context and quotes

\- [http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/civil- rights/236641-l...](http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/civil- rights/236641-legislate-against-big-brother)

\- [http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/03/24/3638234/house-m...](http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/03/24/3638234/house- members-move-repeal-patriot-act-strongest-anti-surveillance-bill-date/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Since it's HN, I'll note that one of the cosponsors, Thomas Massie, is both a Mechanical Engineer and an entrepreneur. In the mid-90s, he and his wife (also an MIT engineer) started SensAble Technologies, a company which develops haptic feedback hardware and software. He has also built his own off the grid house, and even appeared on Junkyard Wars.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone who is informed on this shed some light on its shortcomings? I know this is new, but the article on the bill is a bit too supportive that it feels highly biased. I can't help but feel that the line about collection on foreign enemies for WMD's is some sort of loophole. I agree with bkurtz--its surprising how few people care about Snowden's revelations.

<comment><USER9> >the line about collection on foreign enemies for WMD's is some sort of loophole

The view that the NSA should do no spying at all is a minority absurdist viewpoint that is easily discarded.

<comment><USER10> No it isn't. The NSA doesn't have to exist at all. It didn't used to. Its questionable that they do anything positive. The discussion is very much worthwhile.

<comment><USER11> The US has been spying on communications since it's inception. It may not have been called the "NSA", but the activities have always happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://whoismyrepresentative.com/](http://whoismyrepresentative.com/)

Go ahead and give them a call to voice you opinion on how you want them to vote. Democracy only works if you participate in it. Remember that phone calls and actual letters are worth a lot to a Rep. Go ahead and give your senators a call too. Make sure to save all 3 numbers in your phone for easy access, that way anytime you want to participate in democracy, it is easier to do so.

</comment><comment><USER13> Careful what you wish for. Instead of one big target bill with a set of laws allowing unconstitutional activity by the government, they will replace it with a ton of tiny laws buried in other bills that are impossible to target as a group.

Actually now that I think about it, Congress barely passes any bills anyway anymore so that would be tricky for them, but since many of them are there for decades, they have plenty of time.

Term limits really would make sense.

<comment><USER14> > Term limits really would make sense.

Three terms in the House, two in the Senate. Eighteen years is more than enough time for anyone to hold that much power.

A nice side effect would be more people working hard at the state level rather than seeing the state legislature as just a stepping stone to national office.

<comment><USER15> Two terms in the Senate is 12 years, two in the house is 4.

So I don't know where you got 18 from!

<comment><USER16> Assuming one person would hit both term limits: 2 6-year terms in the Senate plus 3 2-year terms in the house would be 18.

<comment><USER15> I saw two and two. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "A Republic, if you can keep it." [1]

This is a positive step. It will be interesting to watch who opposes it, and how, in the various branches of government.

[1] [http://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational- resources/hi...](http://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational- resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if- you-can-keep-it)

</comment><comment><USER18> The disconnect between the legislature and the population is too wide now to expect this to come to fruition. But one can hope.

</comment><comment><USER19> Passing this bill would be the first step in restoring the rule of law and hope for the survival of democracy in the U.S. Too good to be true.

</comment><comment><USER20> yeah. nice try. won't happen.

the entirety of domestic and foreign politics of the national security state, that is the United States today, is based on the policies introduced or made possible by this very act. you, the people, and your electorate won't just undo 15 years of tyranny without spilling blood.

hard words, i know. but that's how i, as a foreigner, see it, see your country. you won't take anything back by making a check on a piece of paper or signing online petitions. that's gone, now.

</comment><comment><USER21> How ironic that FreedomWorks ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomWorks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomWorks)) is the source for this reporting.

<comment><USER22> What's the irony?

Here's their motto from the Wiki link of yours:

"Lower Taxes. Less Government. More Freedom."

Ending the Patriot Act would accomplish two of those.

They're apparently in part a libertarian leaning group; libertarians are usually against the Patriot Act.

<comment><USER21> The same money that brought about the Bush government, which instituted most of this junk in the first place, is behind FreedomWorks.

"Freedom" for billionaires means something different than for you and me.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review/Seed My First Web App - <AUTHOR> http://www.codekettl.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a simple app I built to help me prepare for programming interviews. This is a very early version but if people like the idea, I'll continue to develop it.

<comment><USER2> I didn't spend too much time there but it seems like a neat idea.

I do however suggest not riding the "Flickr" naming convention as its played out and immediately tells everyone you don't think originally. Just my $0.02

The polynomial question is pretty tricky!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I didn't want to use the Kettl but CodeKettle seems to be taken

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> down site is down :[

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? Seems to still work for me. Anyone else have it down?

<comment> s-phi-nl It's up for me. In the future, take a look at <http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/>.

<comment><USER4> "It's not just you! <http://codekettl.com> looks down from here."</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finding out if 2 people are chatting to each other on WhatsApp - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Jamie_Farrelly/finding-out-if-2-people-are-chatting-to-each-other-on-whatsapp-7f13448be665 <comment><AUTHOR> After seeing the thread on here about how you can collect huge amounts of data using WhatsApp a few days ago I had to have a mess about with this.</comment>


The feminist argument for a universal basic income - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/payback-time-for-women.html?ref=opinion&_r=0 <comment><USER2> I am actually convinced that men (especially a specific class of men, defined by a certain level of income and education) will be more likely than women to need assistance from a UBI program, as their jobs will be replaced by technology at a higher pace.

In addition, women (at least heterosexual women) are likely to have the significant advantage of having more choice when selecting a partner, because of the global imbalance in the male/female ratio; this gives them a stronger position than their male counterparts within their relationships.

References

[http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21652323-blue- collar-m...](http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21652323-blue-collar-men- rich-countries-are-trouble-they-must-learn-adapt-weaker-sex)

[http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys- ar...](http://www.economist.com/news/international/21645759-boys-are-being- outclassed-girls-both-school-and-university-and-gap)

[http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2015/03/24-gender-...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2015/03/24-gender- gap-loveless)

[http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility- memos/posts/2...](http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility- memos/posts/2014/10/08-marriageability-employment-childbearing-sawhill)

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2015/04/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2015/04/economist-explains-23)

<comment><USER3> What do you mean more likely? Like two men for every one woman who needs assistance?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have very serious reservations about the UBI. (I have blogged about that a bit.) I keep reading these articles that give glowing reports about how it fixes things for women or whatever, and I am incredibly skeptical of that fact. Historically, when you infuse a system with more cash without that cash being connected to increased productivity, the result is inflation. In fact, that is basically the definition of inflation: Needing more money to pay for the same goods and services.

I realize that people are arguing that machines and the like are producing labor, thereby infusing the system with productivity, and the problem we have is redistributing the wealth it produces. But I am very skeptical that a UBI is a good solution to that problem.

I have a lot of half formed thoughts in reaction to reading this piece. I don't know how to begin to back up my opinions when they are based on decades of reading books and articles that, in many cases, I no longer recall the titles of. It is not like I kept a written list of everything I ever read. I was reading these things for personal reasons. But I really am not comfortable with some of the premises of the arguments being made, such as "Basic income helps undermine sexism." I see no reason to believe that. They did away with slavery in the American South and, from what I have read, blacks had it worse in the years after slavery was abolished. They couldn't get jobs, laws were written to deny them the right to vote, etc. We are still, to this day, trying to redress the matter. Blacks in America still, overall, make less money, get arrested more, etc.

I have also known women who had jobs who struck me as more enslaved than I felt as a homemaker. Their jobs did not significantly relieve them of the "women's work" at home, so their jobs were often more relief for their husband, who no longer felt 100% responsible for paying the bills, yet did not see any real reason to buck up and do housework.

I have seen many stories over the years where people thought that giving money would right some social ill, only to see it not work. Money seems to never be able to really fix social ills. Those battles are fought in the hearts and minds of the people, in the establishment of new cultural norms, and in the courts where we determine rights.

Everything I have ever seen suggests to me that financial security or wealth grow out of rights/privilege, not the other way around.

<comment><USER5> UBI proposals typically do not print new cash for distribution, but rather pay for it with taxes. I actually _do_ expect some inflationary pressure from a BI, but not because there is more money.

<comment><USER6> It's revenue neutral, if used as a replacement of existing benefits when the recipient doesn't work (e.g. child benefit, unemployment benefit, and old-age pensions), and paid for by raising taxes by the same amount as the basic income when the recipient does work.

<comment><USER5> I don't think I follow. I've read over your comment a few times, and come away either with a statement that seems incorrect or a proposal that isn't UBI... The failure may well be mine, but could you clarify?

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming the existence of some kind of welfare state. I'm also assuming, at least initially, basic income is the same as existing benefits.

Everyone gets basic income: children, to replace child benefit; people in work, paid for by increasing the tax they pay by exactly the same amount as their basic income; unemployed people, to replace their unemployment benefit; and those above retirement age, to replace their non-contributory pensions. I should also have included dependent spouses and full-time students. Their BI can be paid for by further increases in taxation, as well as by administrative savings, rather than by printing money.

<comment><USER5> If all you're saying is that tax increases will be less than they might be, if we repurpose money currently spent on other programs, I certainly agree. The repurposed money is still presumably funded through taxation, though, so this doesn't conflict at all with what I'd said.

If you were saying more, then I'm still not clear on what it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot of work that I do free of charge. Wash my car. Go grocery shopping. Do my laundry. I walk my dog out of a sense of love and duty. Shouldn't I be paid for this? Why isn't the government paying me for this invisible labor that I chose to do?

I cut back my hours and quit my job because I have so much to do so, what the hell society, where's my compensation?

<comment><USER8> All the things you named are things you are doing for yourself in order to have a clean car, to have something to eat, to have clean cloths, to have a dog. Having children is certainly to some extend also something you do for yourself because you enjoy raising children but beyond that it is also a service to the society because this is what keeps it running in the long term. In the past having children was probably more driven by selfish motives, e.g. having someone to care for you when you are old and the like, but nowadays this is no longer true and you can quite easily forgo the costs associated with having children. Therefore it seems not unreasonable to me that a society supports the part of it that takes the burden to sustain it.

<comment><USER4> In the past, having children was probably more driven by _lack of birth control_.

<comment><USER8> I won't argue against that, it is certainly true, but I think my point still stands that it was beneficial to have more children even if it was not always a concessions decision because of the lack of birth control.

<comment><USER4> Everything I have ever read suggests that birth control and limiting the number of children you have improves quality of life. Having scads of kids is generally the mark of a culture that a) either has no means to prevent conception (and people are screwing anyway) or b) has very high child mortality rates because the culture as a whole is poor, uneducated, lacks infrastructure, etc. Across the globe, as child mortality rates go down, birth rates fall _following_ the fall of death rates. From what I have read, this is statistically consistent.

If there is anything "selfish" going on, it is "sex feels good, so I am going to get laid, and the consequences be damned." I have met damn few people who were able to have exactly as many kids as they wanted, exactly when they wanted them. The vast majority of the time, kids seem to fall into one of two categories: 1) "Oops" or 2) "We tried for this one forever."

<comment><USER8> What time frame are we talking about? The last hundred or three hundred years? The last two thousand years? The last million years?

<comment><USER4> What part of my comment are you asking about?

The falling birth rates following falling death rates is a global trend in my lifetime. Limiting kids to keep you out of poverty and keep you middle class is an observation that goes back at least a few hundred years in Europe. The "most kids are a case of Oops or We tried forever" is personal observation of discussions I have had with people: Any time you get the back story, it is typically one of those situations (tbf, my second child was a case of "we skipped birth control 2 or 3 times" \-- which almost felt like an Oops because I was surrounded by people talking about how very long it took them to get child 2 or their latest).

Does that help clarify any?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm pretty much for universal basic income, but in light of how our society functions it won't fix anything structurally.

People will realize that the potential for demand is greater, they will rise their prices and then the cost of live will raise accordingly. Then the rich will get richer quickly and the poor will stagnate, all proportions maintained.

If you want to diminish the gap, you would also need to regulate how people determine prices in order to maintain a reasonable cost of living, I'm not sure that hard capitalists will enjoy this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Essentially this argument equates women to being disabled and deserving of payment due to their gender.

Problems with this argument:

1\. They assume that women don't choose to do this work and are forced to.

2\. Women should have no reason to work (As that they should be paid without any outcome expected)

3\. Women are always honest and productive workers. (Thus deserving of the money)

This isn't equality. That's blatant sexism.

<comment><USER11> I don't see how you get all that at all. How are they suggesting women are disabled? They suggest women do a lot of work valuable to society but not historically paid and not only paying women but both sexes would help breaking out of traditional work roles.

"The feminist argument for a U.B.I. is that it's a way to reimburse mothers and other caregivers for the heavy lifting they now do free of charge. "

Also why isn't the post the title of the article? So clickbaity now.

<comment><USER10> They are suggesting that women should receive funds on the condition that they are women. (I did not intend to infer that women are disabled, but for the argument that they're trying to justify is that the person should recieve money because they have a condition, not because they did something).

\----

"Breaking out of traditional work roles" So that means that you're asking a handout to change social roles in a society?

<comment><USER11> I suggesting we give funds to people who raise children, who are traditionally women, because they preform a very important role in society without any financial compensation. And the article suggests this can (or has) lead to worse gender imbalances. It is certainly a job and rewarding it wouldn't be a "handout".

The quote I even referenced included "and other caregivers". This isn't "let's just pay women cause they're women" even if people want to get all up in arms about that and make a strawman. I'm thinking you didn't even bother to read the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A core issue behind ubi is that fear of "future shock" may make the population ungovernable and it will be a small price to pay for continued public support of social, business and technological innovation.</comment>


Telegram told to give encryption keys to Russian authorities - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/telegram-forced-to-give-encryption-keys-to-russian-authorities/ <comment><USER2> Well, if Telegram had end-to-end encryption enabled by default, this wouldn't even be technically possible.

<comment><USER3> It also would have had much worse usability in the most common case: when government agencies aren't a real risk factor, but you want conversations synced between different apps.

Seriously, disregarding trade-off between security and usability is exactly how we ended up with very secure, 20-digit passwords, containing every possible unicode symbol, updated every Monday, written on post-it notes hanging on the wall.

<comment><USER4> Ugh, this keeps on coming up.

Wire [1] already has both end-to-end encryption _and_ cross device sync. It's not the only one to do that either.

It's _not_ a tradeoff.

[1]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_(software)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_\(software\))

<comment><USER5> It also has a better user experience. And encryption enabled by default.

<comment><USER6> +1 for Wire from me, have been using it for about a year and a half now.

I only wish it had a better desktop client, the current one is a little laggy especially when scrolling up chat history.

<comment><USER7> I use the web client and it works fibe. I suspect the desktop clients are Electron based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not 100% relevant to the article, but if anyone hasn't already given it a try - Signal is a great cross-platform messaging service. I don't understand why more people aren't using it

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately Signal doesn't have a desktop client (and no, Chrome apps don't count. They will be retired and unsupported too in the near future)

<comment><USER10> Signal deprecated their Chrome App client months ago. The desktop client they have right now is not a Chrome app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like that the article ends with the author's PGP fingerprint... and is served over plain HTTP. Bold move.

<comment><USER12> The personal intellectual highlight of my life was when I published my PGP fingerprint on my Wikipedia userpage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This highlights the problem. Why should they have any keys? It should be end to end encryption, where users have the keys. Otherwise it's already insecure and no one should be using it. Government demanding something is just a symptom.

<comment><USER14> This has been the chief complaint about Telegram, and the entire reason I've never even tried using it. As long as you're trusting the corp with your keys, you're just as secure as any other site that provides chat over HTTPS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Telegram has publicly stated that they refuse to hand over their keys (though whether or not they will, time will tell). This is in contrast to FB, Google, and Twitter who have not released a statement about whether or not they will comply: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-twitter-google- censors...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-twitter-google-censorship- ban-russia-tech-dark-ages/)

<comment><USER16> Remember in 2013 when Lavabit said their email was so secure that even their sysadmins can't read it? And then, after the secret US government subpoena was made public it turned out that Lavabit's claim of "can't" was more like "won't".

Better to not have to trust the intentions (or ability to resist torture, etc) of Telegram, Pavel Durov, et al. Better to have end-to-end encryption by default, like in Signal.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131002/17443624734/lavab...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131002/17443624734/lavabit- tried-giving-feds-its-ssl-key-11-pages-4-point-type-feds-complained-that-it- was-illegible.shtml)

<comment><USER17> Signal and Telegram are in different categories.

Signal is more secure in general due to end-to-end encryption but user experience is bad. I would use Signal when I really have something to fear very seriously, in this case personal security more important than usability.

Telegram is much better made UX-wise. It's a more decent product for average user. It's a Facebook Messenger alternative which is secure enough and doesn't sell your data to anyone.

If you are not security expert or journalist and black helicopters are not chaising you, you don't need Signal, Telegram is much better messenger with great clients on different platforms.

<comment><USER18> I don't see what's bad about signal UX honestly. I have a few private 1on1 conversations in it and it feels like any other text messaging client. However, the only place I use it is on my Android phone, and there may be features others are missing that just never interested me personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There has never been such a thing as end to end encryption on a cell phone. Carrier "debugging" tools such as CarierIQ hook at a lower level and can intercept and log everything that any application can see. CarrierIQ was acquired by AT&T and doesn't even officially have a name any more. They would tell you it only runs if the phone is in debug mode, but the dial home to the carrier can enable it via a simple header.

Perhaps the difference here is that Russia does not have access to this data?

<comment><USER20> Could you please provide some home-reading material on the topic? I understand that the notion of "secure messenger" linked to your phone number and running on a phone is laughable, but it's the first time I hear accusations that my mobile operator can retrieve basically any info from my phone, like actually right now, without breaking a sweat.

Does it apply to all mobile operators or only to american ones?

<comment><USER19> There used to be a really good walk through and demo of the software on youtube, but it was pulled down. Perhaps someone has uploaded it again. I will see if I can find it.

IIRC, these debugging tools exist on all carriers and each have their own custom implementations.

<comment><USER21> Is it this one? [https://youtube.com/watch?v=T17XQI_AYNo](https://youtube.com/watch?v=T17XQI_AYNo)

<comment><USER19> That looks like part of it. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If FSB really wants access - and sooner or later they will, as Telegram keeps growing... As long as Telegram founders still have family inside Russia, they are vulnerable

<comment><USER23> Do the founders have family in Russia? I'm not really up to date with Telegram as a company or the people behind it.

<comment><USER24> [http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/27/meet-telegram-a-secure- mess...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/27/meet-telegram-a-secure-messaging- app-from-the-founders-of-vk-russias-largest-social-network/)

> Meet Telegram, A Secure Messaging App From The Founders Of VK, Russia's > Largest Social Network

<comment><USER25> Does no one care that Digital Ocean is owned and created by Russia? You're all worried about apps, what about the hosts they use?

<comment><USER26> I care, but had no idea. Any more info? Search not showing up much.

<comment><USER27> It's not true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> BTW does anyone know how Viber and WhatsApp (both are very popular there) operating in Russia?

Do they cooperate?

<comment><USER29> WhatsApp cant cooperate by design they don't have the keys although they do have some metadata, not sure about Viber.

<comment><USER30> How do we know WhatsApp doesn't cooperate? It's closed source, and owned by Facebook no less, so how can we know there's no backdoor?

<comment><USER29> You can analyse the traffic data being sent by the App, also there are third party Apps that work on the WhatsApp network.

<comment><USER30> You can maybe verify that the app doesn't currently send messages anywhere, but what if there's a way for Facebook to send a request to WhatsApp for a dump of all messages within a date range?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> More interestingly perhaps:

Telegram _as usually_ refuses to give encryption keys to anyone.

While there seems to be a lot to say about Telegram crypto at least their priorities seems to be aligned with mine unlike WhatsApp that is owned by Facebook.

<comment><USER32> Why use Telegram over something _actually secure_ like Signal?

<comment><USER20> Skipping discussion about "actual security": vendor lock-in & network effects. _None_ of my peers uses Signal for everyday communication. Quite a few use Telegram, +Telegram channels & conferences, bots, and, well, honestly, it's really quite nice app to use. So, yeah. It's sad.

<comment><USER33> But in fairness, you cannot really claim that Signal is actually secure just because it has a better encryption.

<comment><USER34> True. Then again, Telegram really has no encryption at all, since no one uses the secret chats. So he probably meant something like "why not use an app that actually tries to do what it claims to?".

<comment><USER31> It actually has encryption. Just not end-to-end by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Let's be fair.

WhatsApp is NOT any different. They may have Signal's encryption algo, but they still store effectively unencrypted messages in their servers. Because that is the only way to sync between devices when adding a new device. And also the only way for FB to data mine.

So... Yeah bad reporting.

<comment><USER36> That is not correct. WhatsApp syncs messages between devices (mobile client must be connected to the internet to use WhatsApp web on the desktop).

They store undelivered, encrypted messages on the server.

<comment><USER35> If you are in private chat mode, this works well, because all devices have an encryption key.

But if you are doing regular messages between people, those messages are certainly readable by the server and because adding a new device decrypts all previous messages, the server has decryption knowledge.

Note: At each point in their sesame algorithm the user has a non-empty set of devices. So if you want to sync another device acts as a p2p syncer.

What happens when you remove your last device and add another new one. Hence why whatsapp has a non-privacy mode. Or am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER36> WhatsApp has no private chat mode. Every message is e2e encrypted.

If you switch devices, other clients will use the old keys until they have received the new one (and then they will silently re-encrypt and resend undelivered messages, something WhatsApp was heavily criticized for).

<comment><USER35> Gotcha!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Blueprint for New User Onboarding on the Web - <AUTHOR> http://www.klaviyo.com/blog/2012/08/17/a-blueprint-new-user-onboarding-web/

<comment><USER2> Although, not particularly about onboarding, I'd mention that at the 6 and 12 month marks (timing varies), I'd send another email as well. One regarding new updates/feature enhancements, and one about a potential discount on a new add- on or for a first sign-up.</comment>


Mindset micro; pushing the envelope, or whatever happened to innovation? (1985) - <AUTHOR> https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n2/50_Mindset_micro_pushing_th.php <comment><USER2> _> I must add my now-standard disclaimer, which has evolved over the series of so-called "compatible" reviews I have amassed recently. I have yet to see a compatible that was truly 100% compatible._

And this is why the Mindset (and many other almost-but-not-quite-100% IBM compatible products like it) failed: because they didn't realize that 100% compatibility with the IBM PC actually was possible. Compaq had proven that all the way back in 1982, three years before this article was written, with the release of the Compaq Portable ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable)).

Compaq had realized that the only truly proprietary component in the IBM PC was its BIOS; to speed development and keep costs down, IBM had chosen to use off-the-shelf components for everything else. So Compaq launched a clean-room reverse-engineering project to clone the IBM BIOS. That cost them a pretty penny, but once it was done they had the key to a truly IBM-compatible machine.

By 1984 -- again, a year before this article -- chipmaker Phoenix Technologies had also reverse-engineered the BIOS, and unlike Compaq they were willing to license their design out (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_the_IBM_PC_BIOS)). So making a "100% compatible" PC clone became something _anyone_ could do, just by cutting a check to Phoenix.

So for companies like Mindset, coming to market in 1985 with a kinda-sorta- IBM-compatible machine meant coming to market too late. With multiple companies already selling 100% compatible machines and lots more on the way, kinda-sorta compatibility was no longer good enough.

<comment><USER3> Also noteworthy on Compaq compatibility with PC... Compaq came out with an 80386 PC-compatible before IBM did. As did at least one other company around the same time, IIRC (ALR?).

I don't know the reason IBM was beat to the punch on 386, and maybe HN knows. My first guess is that they were working on all the changes for launching the PS/2 series (e.g., different bus). There was also IBM's PC/RT (before the RS/6000), and I guess maybe they thought they'd move away from x86 and all the clones.

<comment><USER2> IBM had made big commitments to enterprise customers to get them to adopt the PC's successor, the PC/AT ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer/AT)), which used the older, transitional 80286 processor. These commitments created a big drag on lots of other IBM projects, as they couldn't do anything that would be perceived by those enterprise customers as devaluing their investment in the AT. So not only was IBM slow to adopt the vastly superior 386, it also insisted on things like OS/2 having to be compatible with the 286, where Microsoft was free to let their competing product, Windows NT, abandon the 286 and all its baggage completely.

This is a great illustration of the idea of the "strategy tax" (see [http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html](http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/04/30/strategyTax.html)), where various parts of a business that are deemed non-strategic have to give up things that would make them more competitive to prop up another part of the business that is deemed strategic. IBM's bet on the 286 was so big that they were still pushing 286 machines well into the PS/2 era, by which time the clone makers had long since flocked to to the much more capable 386. Those commitments to enterprise customers meant that the 286 became an anchor tied around the waist of IBM's PC business.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, the enterprise commitments explanation makes a lot of sense. Did that enterprise bet make business sense at the time, or were decisions biased by the traditional businesses and leadership (despite IBM having already shaken up industry with the PC)?

<comment><USER4> IBM coasted on the mainframe customers it kept for some 20 years from then... So yes it did make sense. Except just a short to mid term sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah, the Mindset -- basically an x86 Amiga released a full year before the actual Amiga -- about which I'd heard some but have never seen (and YouTube has but a single video showing its capabilities). Strange how these old obscure computers get lost to time.</comment>


NASA Data Reveals Mega-Canyon under Greenland Ice Sheet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-data-reveals-mega-canyon-under-greenland-ice/#.Uh_YCWSe_Iw

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much this new map will effect model predictions of ice velocity and dynamic mass balance. Ice thickness measurements are important for calculating the stresses required to model ice velocity, and these are in turn relevant to predictions for the ice sheet's future because they affect how the ice might respond, for example, to increased melting at either the surface or coastal margins.

I would also be interested in seeing simple calcs of hydraulic potential with the new bed geometry. I wonder if water is still routed along this canyon?

<comment><USER3> Almost certainly. They even say so in the article. Most glacial melt flow is subsurface - disappears down a moulin and flows out under the overhanging shelf, accelerating melt. Feedbacktastic.

<comment><USER2> This is true.

Ah ha! Much more detail here: [http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/997.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/997.full)

Seems that in some parts of the upper canyon, the ice configuration likely leads water away, but in the lower part, it controls the direction of water flow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It blew my mind to learn a couple weeks ago that many scientists believe that Greenland is actually three separate major islands that together hold up the icecap. [http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19511024&id=pW...](http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19511024&id=pWwKAAAAIBAJ&sjid=xEoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5335,4712968)

</comment><comment><USER5> Says at the end that "it may play a major role in transporting melt water...into the Arctic Ocean"

Seems to me, we just need to dynamite it shut and _Presto_ world saved from eventual catastrophic flooding.

Don't everyone thank me at once.

<comment><USER6> No, we must _nuke it_.

<comment><USER7> Somebody call Bruce Willis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just think, within our lifetimes we'll be able to explore this canyon by foot.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps with some deep sea diving gear. The surface of Greenland's bedrock is close to sea level in the interior and the discovered canyon appears to in the area that is below sea level.[1]

In addition, it's estimated that a complete melting of the ice sheet would increase sea levels by ~24ft[2] and that's not taking into account the larger impact of the rest of the world melting (Antarctic ice sheet is much larger).

[1] [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Topographic_map_of_Gr...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Topographic_map_of_Greenland_bedrock.jpg)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet)

<comment><USER10> You're not accounting for rebound: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post- glacial_rebound](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound).

<comment><USER9> True, but that would need to be some kind of rebound ;).

Even ignoring sea level rises due to ice loss elsewhere and the fact that the area we're discussing already appears well below sea level, the average ratio of bedrock rise to decrease in ice shelf thickness has been running at about 1:10 in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I read that as "huge crayon", and for a moment thought all my long held suspicions had proven true.

<comment><USER12> I read it as both "NSA" instead of "NASA" AND "crayon" instead of "canyon".

<comment><USER13> I did too and after all the recent NSA articles I thought it was just par for the course.</comment></comment></comment>


A Thought for Your Pennies: Micropayment and the Liberation of Content (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://transcopyright.org/hcoinRemarks-D28.html <comment> jonah-archive Ted's sitting across from me right now! He says this article is old, and wanted to link to a video he recently made talking about his life and work, if anyone's interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM- SGlGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmfjM-SGlGs)

We're also hosting an ongoing archival project of his junk mail that he's saved over the years: [https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail](https://archive.org/details/tednelsonjunkmail) (more details on the project: [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5206](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5206) )

<comment><USER2> What does he have to say about cryptocurrencies, and the impending possibility that they might make micropayments a reality?

<comment><USER3> In fairness, cryptocurrencies have become more like gold than pennies. I recently proposed someone pay me in Bitcoin for services rendered, and it immediately seemed like a bad idea. PayPal or Venmo is still where it's at, for better or worse.

As far as "impending," well... Maybe if the lightning network proposal happens. Maybe.

The other currencies do matter, but Bitcoin remains the granddaddy and has immense inertia. It's hard enough for normal people to acquire Bitcoin, let alone any of the others.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, lightning is what I had in mind. Next year is my guess, with SegWit now in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend this 1995 Wired article about Ted Nelson and the history of hypertext: [https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/](https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/)

<comment><USER5> so good, just recently found it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The thought of some kind of micro-payment has crossed my mind more than once as a potential alternative to increasingly invasive and annoying advertisements when it comes to funding content creators.

There was a time when I didn't mind ads. Hell, I've discovered some of the Internet content I now enjoy through ads. But now ads have become creepy, following me around the Internet, slowing down and breaking the rendering of sites, and acting as an avenue for the distribution of malware. I'd love to support the various webcomics, music streams, blogs, and other things on the Internet I enjoy without having to open my browser up to unscrupulous ad networks. Yes, now there's sites like Patreon, but that's still opt-in (though admittedly better than the fanclubs of the early 00s, with membership contingent on remembering to send a PayPal again this month). I'd imagined something automagic that Just Worked. You view a website, your viewing of that site shows up on your ISP bill.

A hypothetical example I came up with went something like this: After doing an archive binge of some new-to-me webcomic, there was a slight increase of my ISP bill that month. This reflected the additional load I put on the author's over-worked webserver while voraciously consuming in 6 hours the story this artist had spent 6 years producing. His hosting provider billed my ISP and then my ISP billed me.

But then I realized, for that to be practically implementable, my ISP would have to know who's looking at what on the Internet at what times. How else would Comcast know the bill they got from Joe Webcomic c/o Bluehost should be billed to me, and not someone else? Such a system could be abused to be an invasive privacy nightmare just as advertisements have become. To say nothing of how governments would love to abuse such. If my ISP knows I visit nifty- webcomic.com and can send me the creator's bill, then so could authorities in Egypt know who to arrest for visiting gay-rights.com.

I have yet to come up with a solution for this :/

<comment><USER7> As a theoretical solution to what you are saying, you could implement this in aggregate -- the ISP accepts a flat "content" payment from all its subscribers, sums the time spent on each site from each user, and then pays out micropayments to each content provider as a percentage of the total content payments received from all subscribers. Sort of analogous to how the Tor network prevents deanonymization. You could even implement it as an open- source browser extension in the same fashion as Tor.

Ultimately however, this solution has two major flaws that I can think of up front -- first, it is too susceptible to botting, and second, it relies on a steadfastly privacy conscious central party (the ISP in this example) that never accidentally hires an Eric Schmidt-type who gives in to the monetary value of data. Having just read Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" I don't have a lot of hope for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Brilliant idea from 1960.

Immediately I thought of Safecoin/SAFE Network[0] and Mercury Protocol[1]/Cyber Dust[2].

[0] [https://safenetwork.wiki/en/FAQ](https://safenetwork.wiki/en/FAQ) [1] [https://www.mercuryprotocol.com/](https://www.mercuryprotocol.com/) [2] [https://interestingengineering.com/billionaire-mark- cubans-n...](https://interestingengineering.com/billionaire-mark-cubans-new- project-making-new-imprints-on-social-media)

</comment><comment><USER9> Consider the success of Spotify over iTunes. People will always prefer an "all you can eat" approach, even if they don't end up consuming any more or spending more than if they bought individual units. You have the decision fatigue every time you buy content vs once when you subscribe.

The exception to this rule is obviously for a platform like Patreon, where it is about the relationship.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think saying that people might trade arbitrary portions of data instead of some specified standard is missing the point. People already can trade arbitrary portions of data in the absence of previously agreed standards. The real issue, specially for curation, is how to choose standards for what qualifies as "content" within a certain medium in order to maximize the likelihood of meaningful communication occurring within that medium.

Which doesn't seem easy.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is what we're building at Stream!

streamtoken.net</comment>


Rat Park Experiment: A New Theory of Addiction - <AUTHOR> http://sub.garrytan.com/its-not-the-morphine-its-the-size-of-the-cage-rat-park-experiment-upturns-conventional-wisdom-about-addiction

<comment><USER3> This doesn't seem to add anything new to the article about drug addiction and "Rat Park" that was posted and extensively discussed two days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6379522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6379522)

 _" So, if Rat Park is to be believed, drug addiction is a situation that arises from poor socioeconomic conditions. From literally being a rat in a cage. If you're a rat in a park, you'd rather hang out with your friends and explore the world around you."_

It's a pretty big leap to extrapolate from research on rats in cages to socioeconomic conditions in human societies. For one thing, poor humans don't live in cages, and thus have a lot more freedom and much richer environments than rats in a lab. Also, poverty doesn't seem to lead to drug addiction across all human societies and cultures, so there are probably other factors involved.

<comment><USER4> Source: My brother died of chronic alcoholism at 42, and [http://www.drugscience.org/dl/dl_comparison.html](http://www.drugscience.org/dl/dl_comparison.html)

Addiction rates: Marijuana 9-10%, Alcohol 15%, Cocaine 15-20%, Tobacco 20-30%, Heroin 23-25%

Dependence (ordered higher to lower): Nicotine, Heroin, Cocaine, Alcohol, Caffeine, Marijuana

When first seeing these stats, I was surprised how low the additication rates were for heroin and cocaine. Growing up in the DARE era, I thought simple consumption was enough for everyone become an addict. Instead it appears a game of roulette based in genetic makeup.

The more one researches, the more one realizes the the legal drugs of nicotine and alcohol are more dangerous than those targeted by the "war on drugs".

<comment><USER5> Yet, nicotine don't destroy families and make people lose their jobs (unless they smoke it for many years), so there is a real difference in the consequences for the people who do get addicted to alcohol or the harder drugs. So grading drugs on a simple "danger scale" isn't very helpful.

<comment><USER6> > Yet, nicotine don't destroy families and make people lose their jobs (unless > they smoke it for many years)

That's a pretty big "unless". As for the immediate effects, nicotine is easier to come by - you don't have to go to a sketchy dealer in an alley to pay an outrageous markup to get your cigarette fix.

Also, heroin doesn't have this effect either, contrary to popular belief. Look up the success rates of diacetylmorphine maintenance programs - programs in which chronic drug users are given a steady supply pure, uncut heroin (ie, no fiberglass/etc.).

These people are able to hold steady jobs while using heroin only at night, the same way a habitual drinker might have a shot of whiskey every night.

The incidence rate of negative social externalities (such as crime) has actually _dropped_ for people who are enrolled in such programs.

<comment><USER7> Ever since I was 8 I've seen both of these camps every now and then. One side claiming drugs are extremely evil and you can never touch them even once. Other side claiming that any kind of addiction is perfectly fine to indulge in, some of them even if it hurts others to varying degrees.

These were long stupid discussions, and like every 8 year old, I was on the side of "why not ?". And then, you know, you start studying, never giving it a second thought.

And then I visited a "home" (a prison, really) for the mentally ill (where they keep addicts here, perhaps that should be mentally ill and criminal), and had a few (mandatory - grmbl) talks with them to see and analyse their reaction patterns (lots of paper writing after the visit). They had an addict that had only arived the day before, which we had to talk to.

There was no more doubt after that in my mind. Cocaine heroin and other opiate addictions are indeed evil itself. You get addicted and overdose, or you lose interest. If you get addicted. Either that kills you, or it leaves you addicted, attempting to cure yourself. Even if you manage to "cure" yourself (not really possible, but yes you can learn not to touch the drug, you can't learn not to crave it), you will leave with a seriously handicapped brain, and nowhere near the emotional control you had before you started on the drug. The fresh arrivals in the clinic, fresh off the drug, are ready to kill, or rape themselves, and worse just for one more ml of the drug (a fact they claim is frequently exploited by prostitution and crime).

Yes alcohol addiction is bad. Especially the medical effects are not fun. Psychologically they're not much fun either. However to claim that an alcohol addict is anywhere near the same level of addiction/danger as an opiate addict is insanity, and only illustrates your complete lack of experience on the subject. And nicotine addicts detoxing are downright pleasant people, in firm control of their emotions, nothing at all like recovering opiate addicts.

And these numbers ... they're not going to convince anyone who's ever worked with these people. If they claim any opiate is harmless, or even on par with alcoholism, then there's quite simply something very wrong with your measurements.

<comment><USER8> I have met quite a few addicts and I would describe very few of them as immoral, violent, or emotional cripples. I would strongly recommend not saying these things until you've talked to these people.... Anyone can rustle up an addict to scare an 8 year old. This is pure misinformation.

<comment><USER7> The comment did mention that a majority of people can take heroin and lead stable lives while enjoying that drug. It is, however, not reasonable or moral to simply ignore what happens to the ones who can't and are destroyed by it. I have met plenty of drug addicts, from all 3 cases. Those who can simply live with and without the drug, those who can as long as the supply is stable (this group, not the first, is the majority) and those who get destroyed by it in a matter of weeks no matter what.

<comment><USER8> Well said. I would never encourage the use of addictive drugs and didn't intend to come across as such—of course it also ruins many lives, a fact that I find so obvious it seems absurd to me to refute. All I mean to say is that drugs and addiction are complicated and can virtually every effect imaginable on people, including very positive ones (though for "hard", physically wasting drugs I struggle with this idea).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has anyone ever tried to repeat the Rat Park study except for Bruce Alexander? Since the study only involved 16 - 20 rats, there surely could have been something in their genetic markup that made them more resistant to addiction than average rats. Also, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis that flew in the face of common sense and set up a study that validated his hypothesis. Even assuming absolutely no foul play the result could be tainted by the researchers hopes.

<comment><USER10> I doubt after week 1 that there were only 16-20 rats.

Those things reproduce _exponentially_ if left with space/food/mates.

<comment> loup-vaillant If it's because of some genetic immunity to drug addiction, the children are likely to benefit as well.

<comment><USER11> The rats that were made addicted to the heroin did experience minor withdrawl symptoms so they are able to get addicted.

<comment><USER8> Withdrawal is a symptom of physical dependence, not addiction (which is harder to define/identify).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _There have been criticisms of the study's design and the few attempts that have been made to replicate the results have been mixed._

It's tempting to read too much into these types of results when they are not reproducible.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to keep in mind that tons of behavioural science is tainted by doing research on broken great apes in boxes.

</comment><comment><USER10> So, it is not that middle aged woman like farmville games... it is because their house/apartments are small?

<comment><USER14> The women that I met that expended too much time (as in: it bothers other people) in slot machine style games ( ie: farmville is, candy crush not) had some really bad aspects on their life, usually severe relationship issues, unemployment, or having a job that has bad environment, like working 70 hours, or working in a prison.

<comment><USER10> wow. never thought about adding slot machine to that abhoral genre of game... but actually, no, slot machine has /some/ good outcome at least. even if infinitesimal...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So does this also give credence to the idea there would be less suicide bombers if they had access to more/better sex? [1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maher-burka-suicide- bomb...](http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-maher-burka-suicide-bomber- video-2011-4)

<comment><USER16> The problem with suicide bombers is that they are already "addicted" (in some sense), to a toxic, and extreme, strain of their religion. It's possible that they could be weaned from their fanaticism and ideology via a substitute like sex.

On the other hand, many of them already have access to plenty of sex - <USER2> example, UBL had four wives, and the 9/11 terrorists are known to have patronized prostitutes and strip clubs in the days prior to their suicide hijackings. So it may not be a perfect substitution for someone who is that dedicated to the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> IME, The mental impressions of an addiction override a lot of the other factors including socio-economy, social interaction/integration

</comment><comment><USER18> Why didn't the original experiment notice this? Didn't they use a control group like a proper scientific study should do?

<comment><USER19> You can't control for something you don't realize is a variable.

<comment><USER18> The whole point of a control group is ensure that unknown variables don't interfere. If they had designed the original experiment so that one group of rats get a placebo and the other group drug water, but with all other factors being exactly equal, then they should have noticed something.

<comment><USER19> My point is that you have to take positive action to control for a factor. Since there's a practically infinite number of factors that could have an effect, you can't assume that only the experiment variable is changing, because that would require first enumerating an infinitude of factors. You can list the things that you think are most likely to be confounding and make sure that they're either controlled for or randomized, but eventually you have to make a judgment call of when the groups are similar enough.

Here's a couple more silly but vaguely possible examples: what if one cage was nearer the window, and UV exposure had a significant effect? Or what if the big-pen rats were in the corner where the air was more stagnant, and rats don't like to get high when it's humid? Nobody would have predicted those as a possible hypothesis, so there would be no effort taken to account for them. That's not poor science, it's a necessary part of the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think there are to many variables to know for sure what the reason is people get addicted.

<comment><USER21> There are too many variables to know anything at all. Let's just give up and go back to the caves, then, right?</comment></comment>


Bento – A New English-Based Automation Language for Non-Technical People - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/swlh/bento-a-new-english-based-automation-language-for-non-technical-people-c2cd07774b3b <comment><USER2> Run into a medium pay wall when trying to look at this.</comment>


As long as poverty and maritime trade exist, so will piracy - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/as-long-as-poverty-and-maritime-trade-exist-so-will-piracy/ <comment><USER2> Even if we were to abolish poverty somehow, piracy would still exist.

<comment> toper-centage The falacy is that only poor people want more money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> if it was so, drug dealers would retire after eliminating their families poverty. (Granted, retiring from that line of biz has its complications but it can be done)</comment>