British hackers: stop voting for lizards; start voting for people today - <AUTHOR> http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/stop-voting-for-lizards-start-voting-for-people/ <comment><USER2> Recommended online reading:

Some high-quality discussion of this from Tim Gowers (mathematician, Fields Medal winner, very smart chap): [http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/is-av- better-than-fpt...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/is-av-better-than- fptp/) [http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/av-vs-fptp-a- suppleme...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/av-vs-fptp-a- supplementary-post/) [http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/av-vs-fptp-the- shorte...](http://gowers.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/av-vs-fptp-the-shorter- version/) (if you're only going to read one -- and I wouldn't blame you, because they're very long -- read the last one).

Some nice graphics illustrating some pathologies with AV: <http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/> (note: <http://zesty.ca/> is full of interesting things).

Anti-AV material by an advocate of range voting (note: he dislikes plurality voting, aka first-past-the-post, even more): <http://rangevoting.org/IrvPathologySurvey.html>

<comment><USER3> Lots of assumtions I didn't quite grasp. What is the distribution of voters? Some uniform space? The voters are rarely distributed that way. So I don't know what I learn from those graphics.

<comment><USER4> _Each point in the image corresponds to an election with the center of opinion located at that point. For every point, we simulate an entire election by scattering 200000 voters in a normal distribution around that point and collecting ballots from all of the voters; then we colour the point to indicate the winner._

<comment><USER3> So, still confused. How is the voter ballot simulated? From a point on a normal distribution? How does that translate to their vote? Especially with some of the esoteric schemes - is their any attempt to distribute the voters' comprehension of the candidate position? Or is that folded into the voter position in the distribution? What is the width of the distribution?

<comment><USER4> Each point in the 2D space represents a person's position on two issues, one for each axis. The only independent inputs are the candidates' positions. Different voting methods have different ballots, but the idea is pretty much the same: the voters rank the candidates by proximity. So the voter would say "My first choice is the candidate closest to me, my second favorite is the next-closest, and the last one is my least favorite." So the various algorithms take those votes and choose a winner for the election.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (I voted "Yes" at 8am.)

If I didn't have any views on which system is better, I would have been pursuaded to vote Yes by the "Vote No" adverts, such as <http://i.imgur.com/yCyLv.jpg>

Admitedly, the campaign for "Vote Yes" has frankly been terrible as well, but in a way that makes you think they don't have a clue about marketing, rather than a way that makes you want to strangle whoever came up with the adverts.

<comment><USER6> I think the yes campaign must go down as one of the worst I've ever seen. The big budget media campaign was based around the 'Make Your MP Work Harder' campaign.

That's such a vague idea to base a campaign around, especially in light of the attack tactics the No campaign were using.

<comment><USER7> This is typical of Yes campaigns for vote reform in Canada as well (at the provincial level). They tend to be poorly funded, and afraid to tackle it head on out of fear of scaring people away (might be true). And the No campaigns tend to be pure fearmongering and misdirection, but well funded. There are sometimes allegations that the Yes campaigns are sabotaged by No supporters working for the Yes campaign (rumour level allegation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't stand the Yes campaign. I really, really can't. The smug superiority of it all, the assumption that if you vote no you must be mentally ill and the inability to even debate. To be fair I've had a lot of exposure to people involved in the Yes campaign. I'm not someone who likes being patronised by a hive mind and that's exactly how the Yes campaign comes across.

On the logic of the campaign, giving the options available one should vote Yes, weighing everything up. However it will make no difference to me as my constituency is a safe tory seat, even with all the simulations.

Bear in mind that Nick Clegg opposed AV in the run up to the elections and was pushing for PR and you begin to see what this is. This isn't genuine electoral reform, this is tinkering around the edges. Whatever you vote for this is all you get. You're not pushing further towards a fairer system, you're choosing between two options laid out for you by people who've run the numbers and decided for you. Regardless of the outcome, all the politicians will say, "Well it's settled, the people have spoken", pat each other on the back and go back to their day jobs.

We haven't had a referendum since 1975. We won't get another one on voting for a long time. I'll vote Yes, but only because I know I won't see another chance to change things in my lifetime.

<comment><AUTHOR> iuguy, a few things. Most important I really don't believe that "it will make no difference to me as my constituency is a safe tory seat, even with all the simulations." Even if it doesn't change who actually wins, implementing AV can send a clear message to your incumbent by (for example) showing that 25% of the constituents actually want the Green candidate to win (rather than just the 5% who actually voted for her under FPTP, knowing their vote would be wasted). That seems important to me -- it changes the slope of the playing field.

For the same reason, I am not skeptical enough to accept that "this isn't genuine electoral reform, this is tinkering around the edges". AV would make a HUGE difference to me, for the simple reason that it would relieve me of the responsibility to lie when I vote (i.e. claiming that I want the winner to be someone who is actually my second or third choice).

And for those who actually want PR: we are MUCH more likely to get it in our lifetimes if AV wins this referendum than if it loses; in the latter case, the incumbents really will all say "so that's all right then -- everyone likes how we do it now". Which is so very not true that it makes my guts hurt just to type it.

So even if you think AV is only a small step (and for the record I think it's a big one), please vote for it. It is (among other things) a stepping stone to a more comprehensive referendum on voting systems, similar to the one they had in New Zealand -- see [http://www.fastchicken.co.nz/2011/05/05/the-uk-gets-to- decid...](http://www.fastchicken.co.nz/2011/05/05/the-uk-gets-to-decide-how- to-vote-and-how-we-did-it-in-nz/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> AV, or IRV (Instant Runoff Voting), is arguably the worst form of preferential voting in existence. Take this example of IRV totals for four candidates ordered by preference:

30% a; b; c; d

35% c; b; d; a

20% d; b; a; c

15% b; d; c; a

Given the voting breakdown, most people would agree that candidate b should win, because no candidate got a majority of first preference votes and b got a sweeping majority of second preference votes. However, under IRV, b is eliminated immediately, because b received the fewest first preference votes.

tr;dr: IRV is terrible, and has a history of being adopted in states and cities in the US only to be abolished not long after, because of the bad electoral outcomes it produces. If you're going to pick a preferential voting system, it ought to be one that at the very least preserves the Condorcet winner; IRV is not that system.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately we haven't been offered a suggestion box, just a choice between AV and FPTP - personally, AV seems like an improvement on FPTP, even if it's not the best possible system overall.

<comment><USER11> Why are those the only choices?

Why not switch to proportional representation instead, using D'Hondt or Saint- Laguë? Or is there such strong support for the current single-winner system in the UK that noone wants to change the base idea?

<comment><USER12> Neither of the main political parties (Labour, Conservatives) want to support STV because it will greatly diminish their power in Parliament, therefore there will be no possibility of it being on the agenda either in this Parliament or at any other time in the next twenty years.

As it stands, the "No" campaign merely for AV has, for a number of reasons, managed to convince more than enough people that this is a hatefully undemocratic change to our electoral system - regardless of how tiny an effect it will have on anything - that I can't see STV having a chance for many decades yet.

<comment><USER7> "It's undemocratic", the rallying cry of anti-progressives in these sorts of situations. The Conservative Party of Canada was calling coalitions undemocratic. (But suspending parliament when coalitions against them are being discussed... apparently not undemocratic.) Conservative supporters were calling voting strategically (voting for whoever had the likeliest chance of lowering the odds of a Conservative majority) "undemocratic".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All shortcomings of AV aside, as a Canadian who just watched a majority get in thanks to a combined 6,021 votes in some dozen marginal ridings, let me just say that I'm jealous of this referendum and I wish you the best.

</comment><comment><USER14> Speaking as an Australian (we have preferential voting): Almost _anything_ is better than first past the post.

<comment><USER15> I am dual Oz / British. I grew up under AV in NSW, with Senate being full PR.

I voted NO because FPTP seems good enough. I don't miss Australia's monster ballot papers. Most of the theoretical advantages of AV , PR dont happen in practice.

I was in Wentworth an unshakeably Liberal seat, whatever your preference. down the road was Maroubra, unshakeable for Labor.

Who can forget the nightmare concessions all the time that Brian Harradine from TAS used to get because he had Balance of Power in the Senate under PR??

<comment><USER14> Yes, there will always be safe seats - I think any system where Wentworth _wasn't_ liberal would be suspect.

Your vote is still important in the Senate (as Harradine showed). I'm from South Australia, and we have a independent senator and it's worked out much better than just having senators from the major parties. It means they end up representing the state instead of just voting on party lines.

Yeah, some of the concessions are annoying (especially with Harradine), but in a way that is more democratic than the normal vote-down-party-lines system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I still don't understand why the referendum is on AV and not PR. Most votes get _thrown away_ because of this silly county-based system. If you live in a county which is heavily weighted towards a particular party, you _do not have a meaningful vote_.

<comment><AUTHOR> udp, some people prefer PR over AV (for the record, I prefer AV because it keeps the one-representative-per-constituency link), but since PR is not on the table, voting for AV is the way to go. (Or voting to keep British politics the way it is, of course.)

<comment><USER17> Just for the record, it is possible to force one-or-more-representatives-per- constituency on PR.

Germany, for example, has a (pretty complicated) voting system that insures that every constituency has one representative (that's half of the parliament, the other half has, technically speaking, no constituency but they are obviously still from somewhere).

Everyone gets two votes, one for a representative from the constituency (whoever gets the most votes wins and will definitely be in parliament), and, more importantly, a second vote which determines the proportions of the parties in parliament. (Seats that parties cannot fill with directly elected representatives are filled from the party list.)

That second vote decides about the government (proportionally!), the first makes sure that every constituency has someone in parliament they can write letters.

This voting system is called mixed member proportional representation and here is the link to its Wikipedia article: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_member_proportional_repre...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_member_proportional_representation)

<comment><AUTHOR> The German system sounds good. But the UK Conservative Party's argument against simple AV has been "it's too complicated for people to understand". Trying to get people to vote for something that genuinely IS a bit complicated would be a complete non-starter at this point.

Anyway, right now it's AV or Continue As You Were. That's the choice we Brits have to make TODAY, and I do hope that any of you reading this will make sure that you do vote.

<comment><USER18> The Tory stance seems ridiculous to me (as an outsider) considering that the UK's devolved assembly elections use PR-STV or other similarly "complicated" systems. FWIW we use PR-STV in Ireland and are currently going through a debate about conceivably switching to a "list" system, or possibly a hybrid list system tempered as they do in Germany.

<comment><AUTHOR> It IS ridiculous. But people have been TOLD that AV is too complicated for their simple little minds, and too many of them seem to have accepted this statement uncritically. It breaks my heart.

<comment><USER19> Unless it's something they care about (and not everyone cares about voting reform!), being told "Don't worry about it, it's too hard to explain" is often met with "Oh, okay."

The trick is to get people to care about it so they become curious and reject the assertions of "it's too hard". The Yes campaign attempted this initially but did a poor job, in this case it turns out much easier to explain the thing than to pose half-truth arguments why people should care!

<comment><USER20> Ultimately I suspect everyone knows that "it's too complicated" is a fake argument. The _real_ reason that Tories don't want PR is that it will spell an end to proper Tory governments. Meanwhile, the real reason that Labour doesn't want PR is that it will spell an end to proper Labour governments. The only folks who are _really_ keen on PR are the Lib Dems, whose power it would massively increase.

And ultimately, the population follows the parties -- unless you are a LibDem supporter you probably don't especially want to see the LibDems holding the balance of power in every parliament for the next fifty years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The local office of the Yes campaign is just across the corridor from us. Bigup.

Vote, people. Doesn't matter who/what it's for. Spoil your ballot if you have to. Just make your voice heard.

<comment><USER22> No. To paraphrase Dijkstra, voting is to democracy as telescopes are to astronomy.

It DOES matter who/what you vote for. And if you don't believe that, why would you believe that doing anything at all with your ballot counts as making your voice heard?

Democracy is about participation. Not campaigning, participation. You need to make your voice heard at all times, not just at elections (frankly, elections are probably the least effective time to make your voice heard). Be informed about the issues, challenge your assumptions and debate your opinions (preferably with people you disagree with). If you can't or won't do those things, you don't live in a democracy, you live in an oligarchy that happens to mutate roughly every decade.

<comment><USER21> Obviously I don't believe that it doesnt matter who you vote for, what I was trying to say was that I'd rather have someone vote in a way that I disagree with, than not vote at all.

It matters who you vote for, but it doesn't matter _to me._

I'm trying to make it clear that I'm not advocating voting in an attempt to advance my own agenda, but rather out of a simple desire for people to make use of their rights as citizens of a democracy.

Notice that I also advocated ballot spoiling as an alternative to casting a vote for any of the choices presented. If you really can't bring yourself to vote for any of the parties, and I certainly wouldn't blame you there, at least go down to the polling station and write "YOU ARE ALL BASTARDS" across the ballot in your own blood or something. That way, you still show up in the turnout figures, avoiding the false impression of voter apathy.

And yes, I definitely agree that voting is probably the least important part of democratic participation, although a lot of the other parts are becoming increasingly frustrated around here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm slightly disappointed that the title isn't a reference to the theories of David Icke.

</comment><comment><USER24> Voted. It only took 5 minutes; there's no excuse not to.

<comment><USER25> There is. If you can't decide one way or the other. Which is why I've not voted on the issue today. (Though if there were an "abstain" or "unsure" box, I'd have voted for that.)

<comment><USER26> A spoiled vote is the traditional way of expressing that.

<comment><USER25> I used to do that, but the problem is spoiled votes are lumped together for reporting purposes, so there's no real way to judge whether people are protesting, finding the ballot form confusing, or whatever.

<comment><USER27> The ballot form has a 'yes' and a 'no' box on it...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hi Mike. For once some politics on hacker news that has some relevance to me. I'm still flagging.

Voting systems are interesting algorithms to discuss, but politics is not. Please keep political stuff off hn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, cturner. The HD guidelines say "Off-Topic: MOST stories about politics" (emphasis added). Votes say that this is one of the ones that is not MOST. Anyway, it'll all be over in less than nine hours, and I'll go back to reviewing programming books from the 1970s and 80s.

<comment><USER5> Actually the AV result isn't due until 8pm _tomorrow_ , so more than thirty hours away. Even the first results from AV aren't expected until after 5pm tomorrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> corin_, the RESULT isn't due until tomorrow, but the polls close tonight. So nothing I say or do after 10pm will make any difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _if you care about democracy at all — then get out and vote YES TO AV._

Get a grip. If one cares about democracy "at all" then they need to go out and vote Yes to one extremely narrow option that's only, arguably, mildly better than the status quo? This is nothing more than an appeal to emotion.

<comment><AUTHOR> You misrepresented the call to vote here by trimming the quote down too far. What the original article says is:

"Please: if you've ever complained about how our politicians don't represent us and the people who do represent us can't get elected; if you're sick of having to choose between two lizards; if you care about democracy at all — then get out and vote YES TO AV."

So I did make an actual case, rather than just appealing to emotion.

<comment><USER25> You made a case but wrapped it up with an appeal to _which way_ someone should vote.

Sheepishly voting Yes because someone suggested they might not care about democracy otherwise is not very democratic. If someone cares about democracy, all they need to do is _vote_ full-stop.</comment></comment></comment>


Have You Seen Any Nazi Uranium? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/08/31/755478866/have-you-seen-any-nazi-uranium-these-researchers-want-to-know <comment><USER2> Physics Today has an article about this

[https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.420...](https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.4202)</comment>


Developer of X-Plane builds autopilot to land plane during engine failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.x-plane.com/x-world/hardware/seeker-avionics/ <comment><USER2> Given the low level of software quality and the abundance of software defects in the X-Plane product,no one should ever use this Autopilot in the absence of an FAA / EASA certification approval. A Certification process which is first and foremost based on the establishment of a safety culture of "life critical" product development which Laminar Research does not currently practice, and which is currently "ad-hock". Safety critical systems must never be developed with the "worse is better" mentality.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." Richard Feynman

</comment><comment><USER2> This product is also not "revolutionary" in any way, as Austin Meyer hypes. NASA developed this technology over a decade ago during both the AGATE and SATS research programs.

<http://cafefoundation.org/v2/tech_enablingtech_eCFI.php>

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is a video of it in actual use [1] mounted on Austin Meyer's custom built Evo [2]

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl_Vmypg76k>

[2] <http://www.x-plane.com/hardware/evo/evo.html></comment>


Ask HN: "Social Class" or "Purchasing Power" criteria for target ads? - <AUTHOR>

Any ideas why FB, Google and Twitter don't target ads using the "social class" or "purchasing power" criteria? Anyone knows if they have tried something similar?
Since the early theories of marketing, we know that the "social class" of a person is an important type of market segmentation. In practice, by knowing how much money a person can spend, companies can target specific products or services to increase the possibilities of conversion. The theory seems easy, but I don't see companies using it online.
By the way, I don't think that the usage of the term "social class" sounds good. Despite being very popular, researchers and theorists do not come into consensus on its definition. I prefer "Purchasing Power". <comment><USER2> I`ve been thinking a lot about it.. It`s clear that purchasing power is an important info when targeting and creating a more personalized shopping experience.

I believe we should also ask if they were able to find a proper way measure this power..

<comment><USER3> someone with a little more time than me can probably find a full .pdf I don't have one handy but [http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status- System/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status- System/dp/0671792253)

data gathering is largely the problem there--so we address it through round about means.</comment></comment>


Vcpkg: a tool to acquire and build C++ open source libraries on Windows - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/09/19/vcpkg-a-tool-to-acquire-and-build-c-open-source-libraries-on-windows/ <comment><USER2> That's very interesting, and frankly very brave. Library and dependency management is pure hell on every level with C/C++, either due to runtime library and linking issues or just header nightmares.

I still can't get over how windows.h by default redefines "min" and "max". And it's just plain impossible without the experimental modules support to safely wrap that. This is really one of the big day to day annoyances, and now they've pushed modules back...</comment>


BlackBerry To Cut Up To 40% Of Staff By Year's End - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/18/blackberry-to-cut-up-to-40-of-staff-by-years-end/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but the article cited in the wall street journal has absolutely no journalistic integrity whatsoever:

'\--preparing for deep staff cuts—up to 40% of its employees—by the end of the year, people familiar with the matter said.'

People "familiar with the matter"? REALLY?!?

I hate to say this, but this is fear mongering at its finest. Someone is trying to profit off this misinformation, and by the looks of it everybody's gallantly going along with it.

Plus, look at the timing! Blackberry just announced the Z30 BB10 today. Yet all the wall street journal manages to toss together is some fictitious story about their public image?

I'm really never going to read anything they write anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a Canadian I'm sad to hear. As a user it makes complete sense, they pure and simple drop the ball.

<comment><USER4> I still remember when they had _all_ the market.</comment></comment>


Who owns your files on Google Drive? - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57420551-93/who-owns-your-files-on-google-drive/

<comment><USER2> When you upload a file, you just licensed Google to go whatever they want that they think is going to promote or improve their service for unlimited time.

IMO, the first sentence "You retain ownership" actually means nothing to them.

</comment><comment><USER3> Completely predictable. Both Google's PoS ToS and the articles in the tech press.</comment>


Huge trash-collecting boom in Pacific Ocean breaks apart - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/huge-trash-collecting-boom-in-pacific-ocean-breaks-apart-20190107-p50px3.html <comment><USER2> Interesting idea, hadn't heard of this project before. The update on their site has more details [https://www.theoceancleanup.com/updates/wilson-to- return-to-...](https://www.theoceancleanup.com/updates/wilson-to-return-to- port-for-repair-and-upgrade/)</comment>


They Will Not Come – Taking Kifu Offline - <AUTHOR> http://hiltmon.com/blog/2014/06/28/they-will-not-come/

<comment><USER2> I saw this phenomenon myself years ago in a completely different domain: machine learning. There are indeed many cases where people will rave about your demos, tell you what you made is awesome, but... they will not come. They'll give you great feedback and stroke your ego and tell you how amazing it is... but they still will not come.

It's really a mind screw.

I wish I had some pithy answer or magic formula, but alas I'm not sure that such a thing exists. You'll find many people who will say otherwise and will try to convince you that this or that methodology or marketing principle is the sure fire One True Way. I don't buy it-- I've seen every approach to figuring out business fail in some cases. If there were some 100% effective formula for doing market research or finding product/market fit ahead of actually _making the product_ , you'd have a significantly higher success rate for new startups. Actually, I bet if such a thing existed you wouldn't need startups. Companies and venture investors could just run that formula and cook up endless successful new ventures without all the gambling on the crazies called "founders" and their unproven plans. In reality most ventures cooked up by "professionals" under such circumstances fail quite spectacularly.

Good luck with all the things you do next!</comment>


Show HN: Pixaven – modern GPU-powered image processing API - <AUTHOR> https://www.pixaven.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! My name is Przemek Matylla and today I am launching Pixaven - <USER2> GPU-powered image processing platform [1]. This product represents almost two years of work and countless hours spent in the datacenter.

Pixaven is an image processing API that runs entirely on Mac Pros (cylindrical, 2nd gen) that we host ourselves in a Tier-3 data center in Frankfurt, Germany. The goal was to build a service that would enable developers to process huge amounts of images at blazing speed with a simple to use API. Since pixels nowadays belong to graphic cards all heavy processing takes place on the GPUs [1].

We wrote our image rendering engine from scratch and can rapidly deploy custom solutions that revolve around pixel manipulation, computer vision and machine learning.

Pixaven API currently supports:

\- Resizing and scaling (with multiple modes) \- Cropping (with multiple modes) \- Face detection \- Watermarking \- Masking \- Filtering (such as blurring, colour isolation, duotone, etc.) \- Manual adjustments (such as brightness, contrast, exposure, etc.) \- Automatic enhancements \- External storage to AWS, GCP, Azure, IBM, DO and Rackspace

While Pixaven works like a standard API and can push processed images to object storage of choice, we also offer Storage and Delivery addon and can distribute visual content over a global 65+ Tbps content delivery network.

Developers can integrate the API right away with production-ready integration libraries for Node, Go, PHP, Java, Ruby and Python.

We also implemented some additional features around the Pixaven Account such as 2FA and SSO, team management, access control and detailed activity logs.

We'd love to get some feedback and I'm here to answer any questions

[1]: [https://www.pixaven.com/about](https://www.pixaven.com/about)

<comment><USER3> Congrats on launching! The landing page is very impressive (only found a small typo on a testimonial: 'VP Enginnering at Clue')

Here's what I don't quite get: why does the GPU differentiation matter to me as a user of your API? I get that you're faster than doing it myself using something like ImageMagick, but are you faster than the other image processing APIs out there because of this? If so, that's what I think you should be touting. If not, whether the images are being processed by GPUs or trained giraffes is not that important to me as a consumer of the API, but I could be way off-base.

<comment><USER4> Came here to say this. I would care if it's GPU-based if it were an open- source library. Not caring about how the other end of a paid API does their thing is the whole point of using a paid API.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, you could use a solution that simply wraps ImageMagick with a Ruby API and call is a day. The whole point of having a GPU-powered platform is processing speed. On average, it takes us 60ms to perform any stack of image transforming operations. That also benefits our users (who likes slows APIs?).

With Metal Performance Shaders we have absolute control over pixels and direct access to the underlying hardware. For us that means we can rapidly test and deploy new CoreML models and also the ability to quickly respond to any feature-request.

<comment><USER3> > On average, it takes us 60ms to perform any stack of image transforming > operations. That also benefits our users (who likes slows APIs?).

So this was my point in bringing it up: "We're faster than the other APIs out there" is a much more direct benefit to communicate to me as an API user than "We use GPUs, which makes us fast, faster than the competition, who don't use GPUs". The latter version has me making assumptions and eventually getting to a conclusion that matters to me; why not take me there immediately?

The thing is, as a non-expert in this area, I don't even fully understand whether the real performance bottleneck in such an API is the latency of uploading the image and downloading the result, or the computational processing of the image. So if using GPUs cuts the overall request time by 70%, that's great! If it only affects the round-trip time by 5%, then it's not a huge deal to me. As the domain expert, I'm relying on Pixaven's marketing to educate me on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Now that is a perfectly valid point, thank you for this. I guess we have to simplify the contents of our marketing materials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm curious as to what the use cases are for services like this. When we build a site, we know what sizes our images are going to be needed at and we create those at the point of upload and stick them behind a CDN. What kind of sites would need this kind of on-the-fly processing?

<comment><USER6> UCG (User-Generated Content).

Also, even for your embedded 1st-party images, even if you really know every variation you want to deliver (putting you in a small minority), and you already have an asset pipeline you're happy with (a smaller minority), there are still potential use cases (test automation, R&D, prototyping, DX shortcuts...) I can think of off the top of my head.

No affiliation (I haven't even tried Pixaven), just replying to your question per se. :)

Edit: also, some of the listed features (eg face detection and blurring) might not be part of your extant pipeline's capabilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, exactly that.

Pixaven is a service meant (ideally) for businesses running at scale. If you're a large e-commerce platform with literally millions of new images (and their variants) created per day you would be looking for a solid platform to process this visual content for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. I really love to have a dedicated image manipulation API which is not tied to a (headless) CMS.

2\. I don't care about speed. Image manipulation can never be instant, and while the operation may be super fast on your end, the image data still needs to travel the wire, and be rendered on the UI. Your performance argument therefore is mute for me.

3\. I do care _a lot_ about having smart features like face detection, auto rotation, optimization (e.g. optipng), this should be on your start page.

<comment><USER7> 4\. I'm unable to find the address of your company on the homepage. This is a no go, especially when dealing with images which are potentially sensitive user content, I need to know exactly who is responsible for operating the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It appears well done, congratulations on the launch. Are you targeting services like Cloudinary?

I'm curious, what's the connection between [https://kraken.io/](https://kraken.io/) and this; they seem to be connected, and similar?

I was also taken aback the 3.9bn images processed on your homepage. Then I looked at Kraken's, and its 3.5bn processed, but it launched in 2013? Is it the same image-processing engine, with GPU's?

</comment><comment> w-m How did you decide on using Mac Pros for batch GPU processing in a data center? After a little deliberation I could come up only with downsides of using these machines, which are quite expensive and have GPUs from 2013.

<comment><USER9> For image processing them being from 2013 doesn't matter all that much: they're more than sufficient. As to why Mac, let me try to offer a guess: Apple ships Core Image, and they've sunk close to 2 decades of hard work into it by now. This is why there are two dozen "photoshop alternative" image editors on the Mac and a lot fewer (and poorer quality) on Windows.

So the benefit is, you can just use the API and get state of the art quality without spending three person-months tuning and debugging each and every op.

<comment><AUTHOR> Core Image by itself is worth investing in a proper (Apple) hardware. Now that we can write custom Metal kernels and plug them straight into Core Image is even more beneficial. We can come up with any pixel modifications that will be executed within the GPU context. Precompiled kernels anyone? :)

The foundation of any image processing pipeline on MacOS/iOS is Image IO that offers crazy fast codecs for over a dozen different image formats. Even though I had to write extra integrations for WebP and animated GIFs it was really worth the effort. Native HEIC/HEIF support (reading and writing) is also neat.

Apple's CoreML is another piece of software I am using more and more at Pixaven. The ease of testing and deployment of new ML models is just amazing (and yes, I am learning _a lot_ along the way).

<comment><USER9> What baffles me is why doesn't NVIDIA offer a cross platform CoreImage counterpart. They do have nvjpeg for decoding, they have video codecs built in (so presumably HEIF should be doable also), but there isn't much available, as far as I can tell, if you want very high quality image manipulation with NVIDIA GPUs. I get that they're focused on 3D and deep learning now, but this is even useful for deep learning: I'd love to have hardware image decode and my entire image augmentation pipeline on the GPU and only do IO and perhaps some gnarly loss and metric computations on the CPU. Some of this is doable with NVIDIA DALI, but it doesn't seem to offer enough of a perf advantage to bother with it so far.

What would be great is if they offered similar capabilities to CoreImage (that is, quality-focused, flexible image processing) that I could use everywhere I can use CUDA.

<comment><AUTHOR> I second that. High performance image processing with NVIDIA means writing low level CUDA, something I am not willing to invest my time in (at least for now). Translating all the code and custom kernels I wrote for Core Image would be quite a hassle to put it mildly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congrats on the launch! I briefly skimmed through the docs and the product (at least from the outside) looks very polished. I'm curious if you guys are using any other hardware except of Macs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes sure, we are also running an array of Supermicro machines for load- balancing, DBs and storage pods. It was a huge upfront investment but now we keep the costs of running Pixaven very low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The two years of work is quite evident. Powerful product and beautiful site! I can't wait to test it out. Congrats on the launch.</comment>


Doxa: incentivized social media devoted to the highest quality - <AUTHOR> https://doxa.network <comment><USER2> Your website is beautiful, in near of perfection! I have one question: how does one get paid exactly? Is it with ethereum itself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, with ether itself.

Contributors will have the option of either being paid directly in ether, or being paid in "community tokens" which can be immediately or later exchanged for ether according to a bancor-style exchange protocol.

And thanks! Glad you like it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, I'm Travis Hairfield, founder of Doxa. I'll be here to answer any questions you have, or just to take feedback.

Thanks for your time!

</comment><comment><USER3> I really like the vision. When do you plan to have Doxa itself up an running?

<comment><AUTHOR> The alpha is in development and should be ready in Q4 2018

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another social media platform on Ethereum...how many of these do we need?

Read your blog, but I fail to see how you'd be able to attract enough of a following to make this worth the effort for users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honestly, a lot more, at least until we get them right.

I think we are going to see a cambrian explosion of crypto social media platforms as people experiment with different incentive structures, and learn what kind of content is created by particular structures.

And building the initial momentum is definitely going to be a big challenge, but one that will be mitigated by the reward system of a community-owned platform. The value of a social media platform is not in the software, but in the social network. With cryptocurrrency-based networks, it will be easier than ever for users to share in the fruits of creating that network.</comment></comment>


Stop Saying "No" to Your Designers - <AUTHOR> http://ashfurrow.com/2012/05/stop-saying-no-to-your-designer/

<comment><USER2> While this article makes a good point (don't say no just because you're lazy) I think it misses a more important one.

Time is incredibly important for projects operating with a schedule, especially if there's a fixed amount of development time (maybe the company runs out of money in six months).

As the implementor, it's up to you to judge how long something is going to take. Any time spent doing feature X, takes time away from tasks Y and Z. If the schedule is full(ish) then you need to have a discussion about tradeoffs. And quite often, even though X would be awesome, Y and Z are vital.

</comment><comment><USER3> UX Designer, here. I think the key point in this post is to discuss the merits of any design suggestion. Designers aren't often aware of the effort it would take to implement a seemingly "tiny" enhancement. A lot of little tweaks add up to a lot of time, and designers need to be cognizant of that fact.

I always ask developers to tell me how much effort a change will take, and use those figures to temper my recommendations. If a tweak is really important, I'll push for it. If it's a "nice to have" we'll put it into the backlog, or push to the next version roadmap.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kind of useless advice. What about when it doesn't take four minutes to code, and the designer is super-sure it is a good idea but then doesn't like the result, or wants you to endlessly tweak it? Should you just say "yes" then? That would be a good blog post.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea isn't to always do what the designer suggests, but to not dismiss suggestions out of hand because of laziness.

I know HN isn't crazy over the whole "design is important" idea, but I think not being lazy for the sake of good products is something we can all get behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> edit suggestion to title: Step = Stop

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry about that! I can't copy/paste from the blog title because the CSS makes it all lower case.</comment></comment>


America's 'quiet catastrophe': Millions of idle men - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-quiet-catastrophe-millions-of-idle-men/2016/10/05/cd01b750-8a57-11e6-bff0-d53f592f176e_story.html <comment><USER3> I think it has to do with the sudden rise of cheap pornography, cheap computer games, social media, and the lack of women who need a provider due to societal pressures and government safety nets.

Before, if you wanted a girlfriend/wife, you had to get a decent job. That way the lady in your wife knew that she'd be reasonably taken care of. Now, the money you make is somewhat superflous - there are ways to get cash from the government/family members/divorce, making the man's income less important than the way you feel about the man at any particular point in time.

These days, with cheap pornography and entertainment and social media, you can (somewhat) satisfy your sexual desires, your need for entertainment, and your need for social interactions with porn, video games, and social media without much monetary cost.

Plus, if you missed out on the education train fairly early on, the way the job market is structured, you get fairly low wage jobs that are not intellectually fulfilling.

Looking at the cost benefit analysis, if you don't have in-demand or highly paid job skills, you chocies are to sit on your butt and mooch off your parents (which is increasingly possible and fulfilling and socially acceptable), or take a low-paying boring job for 40 hours a week that will only incrementally raise your happiness level.

The math seems easy to me.

<comment><USER4> There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.

I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a negative thing. If men's income is less important this means men can invest in careers or outlets that they didn't have the freedom to pursue before due to familial obligations. It does not mean that men must be idle.

<comment><USER3> > There is a high cost to feeling like you're falling behind your peers or not > contributing to the world. The math may seem easy but I think too much > idleness is costly to one's sense of worth and place in the world.

The whole point is that cost is getting lower and lower.

> I refuse to believe that enabling women to be financially independent is a > negative thing

That sounds like an ideological argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness.

This is a part of my theory as well. There are several groups of Americans who have had a bad time of it over the last 10-15 years. Many of them/us fall into more than one group, whether its chronically unemployed, or paying more than $20,000/yr. for health insurance, or staring at a $160,000 tuition bill per child. Many voters feel neglected by policy makers and point the finger at lobbyists and elected officials becoming too, say, symbiotic in Washington. Trump calls them out, and his outlandish proclamations of wrongdoing and wrongheadedness resonate. When you add these groups up, it turns out to be a _lot of Americans_ because, in my view at least, this has been going on for a long time.

<comment><USER6> >$160,000 tuition bill per child

This is the approximate tuition for 4 years at Harvard (@ $40k/year), and not at all representative of the the real cost of university degrees in the US. Tuition at state schools, which are often quite good, is much less. CSU schools, where I went to school, estimate total cost of attendance at about $25k/year [0] split roughly evenly between school costs and living costs... on the high end (less if you live with family, or in a lower cost area of California). Anecdotally, I can verify these numbers.

Unless you are a very high net worth family, $160k for college tuition is overpriced.

[0] [http://www.calstate.edu/sas/costofattendance/](http://www.calstate.edu/sas/costofattendance/)

<comment><USER5> I wrote 'tuition' but was talking about 'total cost', which is what matters. Harvard is $65,000 | $260,000 [0]

I'm paying for UC Davis, $35,000 | $140,000 [1]

My next kid wants to go to Loyola Marymount, $63,000 | $252,000 [2]

Average student loan debt in 2005 was $15,600

Average student loan dept in 2016 was $37,000 [3]

[0] [https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid- works/cost...](https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid/how-aid-works/cost- attendance)

[1] [https://www.ucdavis.edu/admissions/cost/](https://www.ucdavis.edu/admissions/cost/)

[2] [http://financialaid.lmu.edu/generalinformation/costofattenda...](http://financialaid.lmu.edu/generalinformation/costofattendance/)

[3] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congrats-class-of-2016-youre- the...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/congrats-class-of-2016-youre-the-most- indebted-yet/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As the value of employment declines, it is unsurprising that fewer people choose to work. I would recharactetize the 'crisis' (why it is a crisis was never articulated in anything but thinly puritanical moral terms) as the natural consequence of increased elasticity in the demand for employment (caused by improved benefits, shifting social norms) combined with reduced payoffs for employment (stagnant wages).

I think that's overly reductive, but I'm having trouble pinning down why (in the terms laid out by the article) there is a crisis rather than a shifting market.

<comment><USER8> People need to be occupied and have purpose. Many people on HN don't grok this, which illustrates the gap.

<comment><USER9> It's easier to have purpose when the market doesn't have to decide if that purpose has value. Want to stay at home and take care of a child or aging parent? Ain't going to happen without budgeting or basic income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me prose is a really hard medium for parsing trends like the ones Will is describing here, so I made a scraper that turns the Bureau of Labor Statistics API into live D3 charts that refresh themselves every day and stay current. I've found it really useful.

For instance, here's manufacturing jobs per capita -- you can see that the bump during the Obama administration, while real, is truly nothing to get excited about.

[https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing- emplo...](https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-employees- per- capita?from=2009-11-30T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&to=2016-09-26T00%3A00%3A00.000Z&y_scale=from_zero)

Conversely it becomes clear that manufacturing jobs have been pretty much smoothly and steadily disappearing since World War II, and it seems (to me) highly unlikely that any kind of immediate policy solution is going to reverse that.

And here's the civilian labor force participation rate that Will is talking about in the article:

[https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor- forc...](https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-force- participation-rate)

You can see clearly how much lower the value is now than it was at the turn of the millennium -- this is Will's point at the start of the piece -- but you can also see that we're still above the entire 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s.

Although the difference there is that the people not participating in the labor force were, I'd have to guess, women. Interesting that Will focuses specifically on men. It doesn't look like the BLS breaks labor participation out by gender, which would be interesting.

If there are other BLS stats of interest to HN readers, I haven't finished making a way for other users to add their own scrapers, but I'm more than happy to add figures for other BLS data. Just let me know.

<comment><USER11> I posted separately, but your graph is for everyone while the article is about idle men, which is on clear downward trend over decades.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001) (Men)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002) (Women)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025) (Men, 20+)

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026) (Women, 20+)

<comment><USER10> Oh I stand corrected that the BLS doesn't break that out!

Here's a comparison of men (in black) vs. women (in blue). Very interesting.

[https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force- partici...](https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force- participation-rate-men-20-years-and-over?y_scale=from_zero)

<comment><USER12> Is there any special function your website can do that FRED can't? I'm pretty sure all BLS data ends up in FRED.

<comment><USER10> If you're trying to make a point about a change over a specific period, you can select a range and the selection gets appended by JS to the URL, such that if you send someone else the link they'll see exactly the selection you made. It's also possible to follow figures and be updated when they change. But also interesting things become possible across datasets. For instance, it becomes possible to mash up absolute job numbers from the BLS with population estimates from the Census and get accurate per-capita figures, that stay current when either the BLS or the Census publish new numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like this article muddies so much of what is cause and what is effect. It pushes the idea that there is an "age-old male quest for a paying job", whereas I don't think men or women or animals or anything has ever had that as their primary objective. The pressure has been to meet basic needs, meet societal obligations and expectations, meet peer pressure and similar outside forces that lead someone to take up a 9-to-5 job.

I think it's natural as those forces have weakened for this to be the consequence. It's become easier to meet basic needs, gender roles have become less rigid and there's not the same expectation of a male breadwinner, and society no longer demands everyone has children.

"One manifestation of regression, Donald Trump, is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness."

Maybe they are, but just taking up a "pointless" job isn't going to change that. Without the sense that there's something bigger that they're working towards, being a Gap Factory Store employee in itself (as per the header image) isn't going to give any kind of meaning. People don't work bad jobs for themselves, they work it for something bigger. Family, society, some kind of grand purpose. Can just look at that Congo cobalt mining piece by the WaPo to see what motivates people to endure horrific work.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/batteries/congo- cobalt-mining-for-lithium-ion-battery/)

<comment><USER14> Well labour participation is down across the board, regardless of gender roles.

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force- pa...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force- participation-rate)

It's down for men:

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.MA.ZS?locati...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.MA.ZS?locations=US)

It's down for women:

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locati...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?locations=US)

White/Black/Chinese/Hispanic ... all down.

There are racial/gender differences, for instance, men and blacks seem to be worse off than the other groups, women and Chinese people are better off (as are immigrants in general), but still down. Of course you only get to be an immigrant if you have a job, so not much of a surprise there. It's down across the board. The only exception I could find is people who should be pensioners (men 55+), or at least near pension, but clearly people are hesitant to start their pension.

Which brings the real question. How can it be in the US that unemployment is essentially fixed while the number of people with actual jobs varies so wildly ? The only explanation I can find is that the government must be actively denying unemployment benefits to people who are in fact unemployed, or otherwise fail to count them. I am curious to understand what the actual mechanism is here. I have heard that the US essentially fails to count long- term unemployed people as unemployed, but I haven't put enough effort into verifying this. If this is true, maybe we should assess what the real US unemployment rate is. It's the reported unemployment rate, plus let's say 80% of the jobs lost since 2001, which comes to about 8.9%. Add another percent to account for people who study in order to avoid looking for a job, or who've otherwise resumed study because of getting laid off, and we're close to 10%.

That would mean that what the Fed says is nonsense, and the reason there is considerable slack in the labor market (no wage growth) is simply that at this rate, the US labor market will only have recovered from the 2008 losses around 2022, nor was it recovered from the 2000-2001 job losses in 2008. The odds of a recession between now and then making the problem worse, however, seems to me to be essentially a certainty.

The story here is wrong to focus on men. Men have it slightly worse than women, but not much. The problem is widespread and has little or nothing to do with gender.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have a master's degree and 20 years if experience in engineering and design but my income and work are always under threat. I doubt these men who are not working wouldn't like to have income if we are honest we can admit that just because you're willing and able to work does not mean you get to have a job. Plus once you hit 40 they are always dumping you for juniors or interns for cheap.

<comment><USER16> When the pace of change accelerates the value of experience drops an equivalent amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A large portion of these idle men are ex felons. Very few employers will hire felons, is it any surprise that get discouraged and stop trying?

Yet another reason to end the war on drugs.

<comment><USER18> The article lacked empathy to the point of myopia, and misused a number of statistics - most blatantly, the government's job seeking numbers, that is heavily massaged to keep the unemployment figures appearing as low as possible.

It was just above the level of a hit piece.

<comment><USER19> The Washington Post is currently an arm of the DNC, to the point where they run their articles past the DNC prior to publication and where they hold clandestine fundraisers together that the DNC's own lawyers forbade.

While this is readily apparent from reading the DNC email leaks, I've seen very little discussion of it.

EDIT: Might as well cite sources.

Here's the original email from the Wikileaks DB with the mangled formatting: [https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699](https://wikileaks.org/dnc- emails/emailid/2699)

Here's a copy of it properly formatted on some news site I've never heard of before: [http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton- berni...](http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-bernie-list- directory-photos-most-damaging-worst-rhode-island-delegate-fec-jvf/3/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The author is very blase about describing these men as having "chosen to not seek work". Discouraged workers are a well-known phenomenon in labour economics - people who have given up looking for work because they believe that they have no realistic chance of finding it.

America might have plenty of job vacancies, but it has very few vacancies for unskilled men living in rustbelt towns. For these men, the obstacles to finding work are often overwhelming. When graduates are struggling to find work, the prospects for socially disadvantaged people are very bleak. If someone has limited literacy, mental health problems or a felony conviction, I can't really blame them for giving up on the prospect of finding work.

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

</comment><comment><USER11> This chart of men's civilian labor participation rate by decade roughly describes what the article is talking about.

Fewer men are working, and it's been a long term trend. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300025)

Women's participation increased dramatically but has come down in recent years. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300026)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but it would be nice if the non-working time were allocated better. Instead of XX million people not working, get everybody working, but only 3 or 4 days a week.

It's kind of sad that we're more efficient than ever before, but instead of using that efficiency to give everybody more leisure and improve their lives we're forcing people to work crappy, low paying service jobs where they're struggling to survive.

<comment><USER22> Why are you talking about crappy, low paying service jobs? This article is about people not working at all.

And why is XX million people not working a bad thing? This crappy article doesn't for a second question, much less investigate, what these "idle" people are doing with their time or how happy they are compared to those of us who are working for a living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> this is at a time when Obama is bragging about our low unemployment rate (as it is an Election year)...

[http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000](http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

often we can construct the narrative first and find supporting data later. what cross section does he use here in the Washington Post?

</comment><comment><USER24> It seems to me that so-called "herbivorism" is spreading from Japan into all of Western civilization, a result of commodities like video games, pornography and social networks sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male labor force.

<comment><USER22> Is it just me, or does your comment not parse?

 _commodities... sufficiently simulating the context in which rewards are pursued by the sort of employment that is strangely absent in the current male labor force_

What? What does it mean for commodities to stimulate a context?

<comment><USER25> He's saying that working men are so looked down upon that the unemployed consider themselves a step above them. A bit like a perverse parody of aristocrats refusing to work.

This is not theoretical, I've seen it, I believe it. It is typical for the middle classes, especially the younger ones and what I can only really call kept women to look down on working class men as being one step removed from the prison population. Possibly feral. Never enlightened.

I think the primary cause is an education system that strongly gave the impression to young people that it was 'Yale or Jail'.

Basically the universities have created a class system by creating a new social class. Unemployment is less egregious than picking up a hammer or spade.

Otherwise you might be one of those ditchdiggers, you know, in "the world needs ditchdiggers too" quote.

<comment><USER26> I think it's going to get sorted eventually as most other work automates away. Watch for men taking ditch digging jobs ironically. I give it 5, maybe 10 years.

<comment><USER24> Was it Keynes who suggested that governments bury money underground for workers to excavate in the case of chronic mass unemployment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why is this a bad thing? Aren't we looking to institute an universal basic income?

<comment><USER26> > Why is this a bad thing? Aren't we looking to institute an universal basic > income?

UBI is incompatible with open borders. Neo-liberalism doesn't know how to square that circle.

<comment><USER17> There's an easy solution: only give UBI to full citizens. Since you usually need to live in and pay taxes in a country for ~10 years to get full citizenship, this is an easy solution.

Like most easy solutions, it's probably too extreme, some permanent residents definitely deserve UBI too. But it doesn't seem difficult to imagine an appropriate test based on years of residency, et cetera. It's certainly an easier problem than some others, like how to pay for UBI.

<comment><USER27> Does one also get to double/triple/quadruple their UBI by producing more US citizens with a willing lady?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I seem to recall that unemployment pays better than minimum wage in many cases. If you qualify for unemployment or disability, why would you give up that benefit and at the same time lower your income?

<comment><USER29> From Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

      Mac: Unemployment runs out, what are you gonna do then?
      Dennis: Well then we'll just go on welfare.
      Mac: Welfare is for people who need it, like drug addicts
      and single mothers. It's not for over-privileged pieces of
      shit who want to waste millions in taxpayer dollars...

Basically, 1) unemployment runs out; 2) it's difficult to get welfare unless you have children or have a disability, and being classified as disabled is more difficult than commonly believed, especially for younger people, even though it sometimes seems like every idle soul is drawing a disability check; and 3) since the Clinton-era reforms many welfare programs have a lifetime cap.

FWIW, unemployment can pay better than minimum wage because unemployment is usually paid as a percentage of your earnings. But you'd need to have been making substantially more than minimum wage.

Also, a lot of social programs are pretty good about proportionally cutting back on benefits as income grows. It's still a real problem with some programs (there are many, and they're byzantine), but I think it's exaggerated somewhat. It's like "write-offs" for taxes--most people have no understanding of them, and believe they function far differently than they do in reality. To quote another one of my favorite shows:

      Kramer: "It's a write-off for them."
      Jerry: "How is it a write-off?"
      Kramer: "They just write it off."
      Jerry: "Write it off what?"
      Kramer: "Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything."
      Jerry: "You don't even know what a write-off is, do you?"
      Kramer: "No, I don't. But they do. And they're the ones writing it off."

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The timeline of "88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009" conveniently leaves out quite a few years of the building boom, when hordes of capable males were employed in construction and ancillary industries.

Which is also why every high-level politician in every economic speech circa 2008 and on has been harping about the need to generate more construction jobs.

</comment><comment><USER26> If only there was some sort of large public works program. Maybe some large construction project that took years to finish.

<comment><USER21> If a person is choosing not to work, why would they change their mind to work on public works projects that tend to be manual labor?

<comment><USER30> When there are 90 jobs, and 100 people looking for work, are then ten who end up unemployed choosing to not work?

I suppose they could offer to work more hours, and accept lower wages. Would that mean that the 10 people that they replace are now choosing not to work?

The structurally unemployed don't _choose_ to be idle - or more specifically, some amount of the population will always be idle, regardless of whether or not it does so by choice, or not.

The only countries that have full employment are war economies, and communist states.

<comment><USER21> RTFA. It is specifically talking about people who are choosing not to work.

<comment><USER30> So what? Every person has a price point at which they will choose not to work. Especially when there _isn 't_ work for them.

There isn't a labour shortage. In fact, there is quite the opposite.

Or, more specifically, there is a labour shortage, but in fields that our economy does not seem to care to pay for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any relationship with what in .jp is called hikikomori ? (Just viewed through a different lens?)

</comment><comment><USER32> _> infantilism_

So if a male chooses another path outside of employment he is to be compared to an infant?

This post should be flagged. That is definitely not okay.

<comment><USER33> Flag because you disagree with the validity of the analogy? Or because it's offensive to you?

Should we flag invalid arguments? Potentially offensive material? Since you didn't elaborate, other than the 'definitely' qualifier, it's unknown what your beef or overall goal is, here.

<comment><USER32> Because it's an inflammatory insult. Calling a group of the population a bunch of babies isn't really appropriate intellectual conversation for a site like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> He keeps harping on government benefits but besides Social Security and Medicare there's not really any welfare to speak of in this country. So I don't know what these men are supposed to be living off of.

<comment><USER35> The number of people on disability has skyrocketed starting in the 90's.

[http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/)

<comment><USER20> Britain did something very similar after the deindustrialisation of the 1970s. The number of Incapacity Benefit claimants more than trebled between 1980 and 1995. As a welfare adviser, I personally witnessed claimants being coached to apply for incapacity benefit. There was a clear quid-pro-quo - <USER2> people disappeared from the statistics in exchange for a bit more money.

Millions of unemployed men in former industrial towns were effectively consigned to the scrapheap, with no real effort made to create new jobs or provide retraining. Both major parties maintained the ruse for decades. The current Tory government has attempted to reform the system, but in the most brutal and cack-handed way imaginable; they have simultaneously forced long- term claimants off benefits while cutting programmes that could help them into work. It's a shite state of affairs.

[http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/c...](http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmselect/cmpubacc/404/40405.htm)</comment></comment></comment>


How Apple's Obsession with Google Is Hurting Apple - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/192350/how-apples-obsession-with-google-is-hurting-apple/ <comment><USER2> First, to get it out of the way: People are very right in mocking Apple. They deserve every bit of that. What they delivered with their Maps app is embarrassing. I do not want to defend that.

The problem, however, is that this article assumes something to be unequivocally true even though we do not know whether it is: That Apple decided to build their own maps in order to hurt Google.

It takes two to play. Both Apple _and_ Google have to agree that Apple gets to use Google's data – and on the conditions. That we know nothing about. We do know, however, that the old Maps app was perpetually stuck in 2007 while Android phones gained 3D views and (much more important) vector maps and turn by turn navigation. If Google refused to give that to Apple it's perfectly understandable that Apple goes looking for alternatives.

I'm not saying that's the case. It could really be that Apple's intention here was to hurt Google – but we cannot, as this article does, just assume that to be true. (To quote: "We all know the reason why Apple is doing these things. They're more focused now on hurting Google than thrilling users, just like they were with Microsoft in the 90s." – no, we do most certainly _not_ all know that that's the case.)

<comment><USER3> _the old Maps app was perpetually stuck in 2007 while Android phones gained 3D views and (much more important) vector maps and turn by turn navigation_

I don't need or care about 3D view or vector maps or turn-by-turn navigation (although I see how the last one could be useful for a lot of users). I, like most city dwellers, need directions that take public transit into account. I can't believe Apple released an "upgrade" which downgrades such critical functionality.

<comment><USER4> A couple of points spring to mind: 1) public transit is not a very big advantage. It is useful only in the handful of US cities that have decent public transport. In Paris, one of the great public transport cities in the world, google still doesn't provide public transport information. In 2012. Apple's solution, to rely on 3rd party devs for this has every chance if providing a solution to iPhone users before Google.

2) But even assuming you're one if the lucky few for whom Google provided public transport information, you can still use Google maps from the browser. You can even add an icon in Springboard for it, giving you full access to google itineraries. The only thing that has really been lost is street view.

<comment><USER5> In my experience, Google Maps' Transit coverage is far far greater than "a handful of U.S. cities". It's worked everywhere I've been in Japan, in Singapore, Hong Kong, Sweden, London, Athens...

The beauty of Google's Transit compared to apps maintained by the transit companies themselves is that it supports cross-company travel.

<comment><USER6> Not Paris, not Rome.

<comment><USER5> Found the list of cities. It's massive. It's true no Paris or Rome, but many other cities in France and Italy. <http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/transit/text.html#eu>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The historical revisionism among the Appleistas is a bit disconcerting. This is not a matter of the "suits" overruling Jobs' "pirates". Apple's current anti-Google jihad is Jobs' baby. This is what he wanted. Now, it's entirely possible that he would never have authorized iOS shipping with a broken maps application, but to suggest that Apple's current direction is anything other than his idea and his impetus is naive in the extreme.

<comment><USER8> Maps-gate, antenna-gate, BS-gate. Every time Apple ships an iDevice, the internet and tech press spin some yarn about a defect in the device, how it isn't a big enough improvement, how it's only smaller and thinner, how it's copying Android.

And what happens... every, single, time? The public buys them in droves, and adores them to the last man.

Apple Maps is both a strong technical flourish, and it's a bold strategy for overtaking the leaders by bolstering OpenStreetMap, and I think that end game is going to work.

<comment><USER9> Note that Apple Maps isn't using OpenStreetMap. It's using a combination of a few different sources, mostly TomTom maps.

<comment><USER10> They are using a combination of different sources, but OpenStreetMap is on of those sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm afraid the obsession is not on Apple over Google but on the media and blogs over Apple and every single thing they do. Of course Apple will watch its competitor closely, especially since both are now headed in same direction. And of course they need competing services.

Likewise, I'm sure that Google is watching closely every move Apple makes. But nobody in their right mind would say Google has an "obsession" with Apple.

This map thing is a fun anecdote, but I'm not sure how big of a deal it really is. And yes, the maps are worse than the ones Google has develop for the past 7 years -it was to be expected- but Apple didn't have much room for movement here. If you cannot go forward on the current path, and standing still is not an option, the only possible move is take a step back and find a new route. Simple as that. Painful, sure, but it had to be done sooner or later.

<comment><USER12> Google maps sucked when it first came out. It will be fixed and both applications will improve. I think this is will only turn out two awesome map applications rather than just relying on google for everything.

<comment><USER13> Really? I remember when I first used Google Maps coming from being a Map Quest user, I was blown away that I could scroll without having to refresh the page.

<comment><USER14> Google's interface was revolutionary, but MapQuest had deeper and more accurate data for years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The argument that Apple needs their own map for strategic reasons is fine, but it doesn't explain why they needed to ship it before it was any good. I can imagine three explanations:

(1) They think they need to start gathering user-generated map content. "Add your business to Apple Maps if you want iPhone users to find it."

(2) An internal struggle at Apple. If the supporters of the maps project thought it was at risk of getting dropped, they might have pushed it out the door to make it harder for the company to back down.

(3) They didn't realize quite how bad it was. Just because customers started finding hilarious problems on days one doesn't mean they're trivially easy to find. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.

<comment><USER3> I think "why did they ship the new maps app before it was ready?" is the most interesting question about this whole debacle.

I don't think they actually gather user-generated map content via iOS maps, so (1) doesn't make much sense to me.

(2) strikes me as weird reasoning. If there's a good argument that Apple needs their own maps, enough to justify the acquisitions, it doesn't seem likely that the project would get dropped.

I don't think (3) makes sense: they cut out critical functionality like public transit in directions. I don't see a reason to ship something which reduces useful features unless there was a very compelling reason.

I think the most likely reason was actually pressure of some kind from Google's side.

<comment><USER16> > I don't think they actually gather user-generated map content via iOS maps

I've noticed my search suggestions changing from one day to another (including misspellings), so apparently Maps does have some form of crowd-sourcing built in.

<comment><USER17> There's a place to report errors in address information, pin placement, etc. in the maps app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> How do we know this is Apple trying to hurt Google? How do we know this isn't Google trying to hurt Apple?

The fact that this sucks so bad for Apple's users and seems to be a net positive for Google would seem to indicate it is likely to be otherwise. The fact that Apple extolled the virtues of its map is immaterial. _Of course_ they are going to do that.

<comment><USER19> How does google force Apple to ship broken software again? I've forgotten....

<comment><USER17> By refusing to grant them a license to their map data in iOS 6? or placing such demands and restrictions on the license that it's preferable to Apple to just go with what they have?

<comment><USER19> Apple had the choice of shipping nothing at all, or licencing map data from someone else.

<comment><USER18> The "license other" has been covered elsewhere, but do you really believe the current solution is more of a problem for Apple than no maps would have been?

<comment><USER19> No, but they still had a choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To be fair though: we could just as well be seeing the results of a contract expiring which to renew Google might have asked for unreasonable terms.

Think of it: the iPhone came out 5 years ago and 5 years is a conceivable contract term, just as it was 5 years for the YouTube app.

When the maps app was initially put on the phone, Google maps was more or less free. Nowadays it is very expensive (a bit better now, but still too expensive for many services out there). Surely not too expensive for Apple, but still.

The best way for apple would probably have been to extend the contract for another year or two to improve their maps service which they are clearly working on for two to three years already.

But maybe it is Google that didn't want that. Maybe they outright refused, wanted to only do it at 10 times the original price for another 5 years or longer, or they might have wanted a patent agreement to stop the witch hunt against android. We just don't know, but the reason for crappy maps could just as well have been Google.

Or as I use to say: why can't they just get along? It would be so much better for the consumer they both seem to put first in their pitches.

<comment><USER21> This is already becoming a new stab-in-the-back legend: it's not Apple's fault, it is Google's fault. That seems very unlikely to me, but I guess it will just end how it always ends. Apple fans will keep believing it was Google's fault, Google fans will keep believing it was Apple's fault. (Disclaimer: I am a Google fan).

Also, I wonder if Google really was the only player who could provide a maps app? What about Microsoft/Bing, or Nokia? Nobody wanted to play nice with Apple? And why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This article makes a legitimate point about the maps application. But I don't get the strange tangent on Google+ — why would anyone expect Apple to anoint the social network of a competitor which isn't even that popular?

<comment><USER23> It should be noted that Mike Elgan is a prolific user and advocate of G+ with a big following.

<https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/posts>

<comment><USER24> The only people advocating G+ are tech journalists that have a strong following and like to market their websites on it. It just doesn't have a lot of utility for the average folk who primarily want to engage with their friends and family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ahh yes, so we are all really going to ditch Facebook and Twitter for Google+ soon? I kinda doubt it

"Although Google+ may have as little as 10% of the active users of Facebook, it's growing faster than Facebook ever did. And more importantly, Google+ has a vastly superior user experience to Facebook and has a much brighter longterm future, in my opinion."

<comment><USER26> I would agree with that statement. I look at Chrome for desktop and the almost linear month on month growth for 2 years to become the most used browser, IMO largely because they have placement on Youtube/Google/Gmail pages (and of course a decent product). This growth is incredible when they don't have significant pre-installation and unsurprisingly shows the power of having web presence.

Here is Chromes forward march: <http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww- monthly-201001-201208>

But back to G+, over the short term (1 year) I see G+ getting some traction in the professional environmental, much likes Facebook's college crowd. Longer term (3 years) Google will use their massive presence across the search home page, Youtube, Android, Maps, Gmail and probably books/movies/music to sign people up bit by bit until they reach a critical mass where you may as well use G+ rather than Facebook from a reach perspective. Then you have the tipping point where a few features make the choice difference. And I back Google to innovate killer features and build brand preference over Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article. My take on it is that Apple is, again, losing it's way and the article points out some specific examples. Things like maps and Facebook integration are just the icing on the cake. I just can't shake the feeling that Apple doesn't care about the customer anymore.

With every new OS release Apple has moved toward homogenization of their product line. Soon there will be no difference between what's on your desktop and in your pocket, and I think this is a bad thing. Apple's main strength has always been its ability to attract "makers", however with this new direction I see them turning their back on developers, artists, writers, etc. Maybe that's a valid market and a good long term vision and if so then good for them.

However, for the first time in years I am looking for other alternatives for my future computing devices. And that makes me sad. I've really, really enjoyed (most of) their products over the last 20 years, but I guess like any other company, Apple has run out of steam.

</comment><comment><USER28> Apple is no way positioned to harm Google in any way on the longer run. In many ways Apple's products are like what video games, music albums and stereos were in the past. They are products with massive hype, craze and cult following of some kind.

Google on the other hand is a massive Innovation factory, churning innovations by the years. No body really is close to them when it comes to search, on line advertising etc. On top of that they have some of the top most properties on the internet- Mail, News, G+ etc etc.

What you are seeing now is Google really flooding market with their other innovative stuff Google TV, Android, wearable computing, self driving cars, offering peta byte scale data analytic engines etc. Engineering innovation is awesome too.

Apple cannot compete with that sort of company. Their best bet is to assume that their cult following will remain and will go gaga every time they come with a new product.

<comment><USER29> Apple may not be positioned to harm Google massively but I don't see that is really their aim.

Google clearly has done and still does some real useful innovation but I think that you are massively overstating their effectiveness on that front.

What is innovative about Google TV? The first version was a shit concept implemented badly and advertised by lunatics. I understand the second version is better but I still don't think the concept is right (I've not used the second version so it may be quite good now).

Android? I'm not saying that it isn't good or doesn't have some innovations but it isn't in a different class to iOS or even probably WinPhone. Can you explain what is really innovative about it.

Wearable computing - toy so far. Do I think that it will be turned into a mass market product in the next 5 years. My bet is no. Also IF Apple was working on such a thing they wouldn't tell the world until it was consumer ready so there isn't necessarily a lead.

On line advertising, peta byte scale data analytics - these are tools used against me as a customer (or am I the product). They are the reasons that I don't use Gmail or want an Android phone. Do I trust Google more than FB - hell yes! But they know too much already from my search patterns, maps use etc. I don't want to give them any more.

I could go down the rest of your list but it would get tedious.

It also seems to me that cult going gaga these days isn't the Apple one but the Google one. There is far more vitriol, anger and negative comments about Apple products than raving praise for them. Your post is not in that category but it shows what I perceive as an unhealthy level of reverence to Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree that the obsession against Google is hurting Apple, but I also feel that Apple is not the only company with a vendetta against Google. Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Mozilla, and Dropbox are a few names that come to mind off of the top of my head. One thing that all of these companies have in common is that they had a product, and Google came though (or is coming) with its machine to copy/paste it as a Google product (Android, Buzz, Google+, Chrome, Google Drive).

Granted--That's what Google does; They take a product like search, mail, or maps and make it a lot better. Most of what Google creates up is top notch, but I think that Google may actually be the company isolating themselves from the rest of the software development community in the long run.

<comment><USER30> Isn't Mozilla funded by Google?

<comment><USER31> Yes but Mozilla would drop google if they wanted to, they could probably get a decent chunk from microsoft for making bing search the default(I think they use Yandex as the main search provider in russia for a while).

Chrome competes with firefox but mozilla has no beef with google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I stopped reading when it compared Google+ to Google Maps. Really? By the author's own measure, Google+ is the result of Google's obsession with Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER33> I hardly got to the article because I couldn't quit laughing at the image at the top! Apparently that was an old painting that an 80 year old woman "restored": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(El%C3%ADas_Garc%C3%A...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_\(El%C3%ADas_Garc%C3%ADa_Mart%C3%ADnez\))

It's a very interesting story in and of itself.

<comment><USER33> Seriously? I found the story to be intellectually stimulating. There's a lot in the news about how the new version can be an interpretation of both secular and sacred themes. I hardly consider my comment un-hacker-news worthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> From the last 10 years its very safe to assume that Apple would never ship anything like this if they are not forced to. I would bet that its Google that wanted to do this more than Apple. I do not doubt that Apple wanted to move away from Google maps but I highly doubt they wanted to do it with iOS6. This is article is ridiculous to assume that. Really bad.

</comment><comment><USER35> I agreed with everything up until the strange digression into Google+. I understand why he brought it up, but why go into irrelevant details about it?

While we're on the subject of G+...

>And more importantly, Google+ has a vastly superior user experience to Facebook

Really? Am I the only one who can't seem to figure out G+ at all? I use it almost daily for hangouts, but navigation is unbearable. The lack of labels and use of icons we're supposed to know is irritating. Good luck joining a hangout that's in progress unless you're invited.

G+ may appear to be more clean and chic on the surface, but when navigation and functionality are an issue none of that matters.

</comment><comment><USER36> _The company has also gotten into bed with both Twitter and Facebook on social networking, and doesn't offer any out-of-the-box integration with Google+.

Twitter integration makes sense for Apple. But Facebook integration does not, as I explained in June._

They are attacking Facebook too. The new social features for photos are a clear shot at Facebook as photo sharing drives much of Facebook's network effect. That's probably also why Facebook are getting in the phone business, as Apple are one of the biggest makers of cameras.

</comment><comment><USER37> Linking to cultofmac with this sensationalized headline? For a moment I thought I was on reddit instead of hn.

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/10/21/cult-of-mac>

</comment><comment><USER38> Sort of like how Google's obsession with Facebook is hurting Google?

</comment><comment><USER39> I cannot believe I hadn't heard or realised that the Youtube app had been removed! That's insane! Is this common knowledge or has it gone under the radar?

<comment><USER40> There's a Youtube app in the app store now, it's pretty good, check it out.

I like how you can read comments while watching the clip, you couldn't do that before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Upvoted, if only for the "infographic" on Google vs Apple Maps. LOL!</comment>


Introducing Pixel - <AUTHOR> https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/introducing-pixel/ <comment><USER2> "The first thing you'll notice on rebooting is that the trail of cryptic boot messages has (mostly) gone, replaced by a splash screen."

The boot messages were carefully crafted to be easy to read by children and evocative of the 8-bit computing days when we could see the computer actually working. I think they are part of the magic of the Pi that you could show kids, look the mouse is being connected now, and such. Booting an iPad is a black box, the Pi by comparison is there to pull back the veil and inclusion of a splash screen for aesthetics does the project a disservice.

TLDR; Splash screen is a step backwards, otherwise congrats for all your efforts.

</comment><comment><USER3> If the L stands for lightweight, why is the os over 4G?

</comment><comment><USER4> They could easily make it look 10x better by just using a more modern GTK theme.

</comment><comment><USER5> Replaced Epiphany with Chromium? Pi's struggle enough as-is with speed!

</comment><comment><USER6> I really like the look of those icons. Something about them reminds me of Haiku's</comment>


Scientists spin carbon nanotube threads on industrial scale - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/14/carbon_nanotube_threads_spun/ <comment><USER2> Thank you; had missed their article. Might be an important improvement for one of our instruments.</comment>